Temporarily overshooting 2°C would cause permanent damage to Earth’s species
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
One thing we know:
* carbon and methane that we release en masse in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise globally, it has been known for decades. It has a negative impact on the stability of climate and thus food/safety.
Things we don't know:
* exactly how big is the impact of temperature on the habitibility of earth.
* how many degrees of increase is needed to be a danger to mankind's existence? Or how many people (even give or take) will suffer or die?
* how fast will science find applicable solutions and what speed is necessary to keep the harmful effects limited?
So we can keep on repeating that we are not doing enough to mitigate, or even that it is already too late, but that speculating does not solve anything.
Bottom line, we should keep trying to keep temperature increase as low as possible, on multiple fronts: more efficient usage of resources, less inequality between poor and rich, investing in technology, persuade people not to waste resources, thinking about alternative types of economies,... Only future will tell if it were enough.
Thanks also for the gentle spelling correction.
Author is saying to not even think about all solutions? Unprompted, on a post ostensibly sharing research findings? Sounds a bit dogmatic and politically motivated. I don’t trust their results.
Another possible solution would be finding a process that will remove CO2 as a byproduct. If you have to put a lot of energy into it, at least get some part of it back.
The crushing rock works very slowly - that part of the carbon cycle takes ages. Any significant speedup of that would also be an environmental disaster - again too much rock crushing, and it would have to be spread over large areas.
Even worse, this will all need to be done in an already deteriorated planet, with almost assuredly worse political stability and real economic output than we have now.
What you are describing is how technological progress works usually. We first typically learn to do something at small scale, then learn to solve problems that are necessary to scale it up.
The problem isn't really whether we can do it but whether we can get people to be willing to do it.
> The crushing rock works very slowly
Yes, it does. But once you crush the rock the rest happens on its own while you are crushing even more of it. Which means after some time the removal will asymptotically reach the speed at which you are able to crush the rock (and supply the air).
Also, I think you are just flat wrong about how unprecedented this operation would be. Digging oil and coal from under the sea or thousands of meters below ground is certainly more difficult than crushing rock that is readily available on the surface basically everywhere.
I think the bigger issue is figuring out what to do with that crushed rock so that it has contact with air so that it can actually perform the reactions we want (this might not be solvable).
We can use crushed rock to some extent. For example, I use powdered basalt in my garden. It improves the soil and provides nutrients over long periods of time. But I think we would quickly run out of agricultural soil to fertilise this way.
Also, no, I'm not wrong about the scale. This solution would require orders of magnitude times more mass than the oil/coal extraction you're describing. Again, you still aren't grasping how big this would be. It would require giant open pit mines to take out literal cubic kilometers of rock, and keep doing this for ages.
You seem to be very sure about knowing what I can or cannot grasp. You wield this sentence as some kind of weapon against me but the fact is you are not presenting any arguments.
Humanity has shown that it can do a lot if it just wants.
Look at the scale of world wars where large part of world's output was converted to war effort because we just didn't like the idea of being conquered by Nazis.
The great pyramid of Giza is 0.2% of cubic kilometers and it was literally built with sticks and rope, for vanity, with relatively few people.
Your claim that humanity can't crush a bunch of cubic km of rock and spread over vast areas of land when faced with existential crisis is shortsighted.
I keep saying "you don't grasp" the scale here because really you don't. Myself and others have explained how enormous this undertaking would be, but you haven't given any kind of solution to the manifold problems we outlined.
BTW, I worked as mechanic on heavy equip, crushers, drills, and haulage at many mines.
Your low energy solution isn't.
Yes, we only need to produce more fertilizer than we ever have and keep doing that year on year forever.
>as silicate is weathering it will naturally extract CO2 and the question is how efficiently you can powder rock.
We only need to mine an Everest worth of stone each year for a millennium or so.
Yes. Such achievable goals.
The only ones that come close to being reasonable is dispersing aerosols in the upper atmosphere and reducing the sunlight that reaches the ground directly. That has the problem that we need sunlight for such pesky things like photosynthesis.
Even barring these severe problems, the precautionary principle is the right thing to apply here. If "negative emission" tech has even a 90% chance of working, we still should focus on reducing emissions, because that tail risk is bad.
It's like why people have fire insurance even though most people's houses never catch on fire.
but that's still the truth that someone highly knowledgable like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici would explain in more details, there are many aspects, not just carbon
It is literally not possible to get everyone to stop emissions. If reducing emissions by planting trees and building carbon banks isn’t enough, will anything be enough?
Seems kinda fatalist to just say “ah, we’re fucked”
1.5 is locked in. Nothing short of a nuclear war will stop 2-3.
Of course, you can't make money selling refugees (yet), so this remains a secondary consideration.
taking an honest look at my own life, I'm just a sophisticated robot that eats, poops and labors just so I can continue to eat, poop and labor yet another day...
Feel free to disagree.
Haven't made the calculations, but I'm quite sure we could keep the current technological pillars of well-being (food, health, heating) without much issue to the environment if we gave up all the other superfluous crap (private cars, gadgets, plastics toys, 3d videogames, etc). And we'd probably be much less depressed too.
Plenty of animals, plants, and humans will die. And they will be replaced with different animals, plants, and humans.
Of course, in 70 years, even if we fix climate change, we will be dead anyway.