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Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

This is good news, somehow.

Here is how the earth 'greenhouse effect' really works: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8&pp=ygUlZ3JlZW5ob3V...

This is why Co2 do not have any effect until it reaches the high troposphere. That takes 20 years. The average climate we have right now is caused by emissions from 2003.

I'll repeat that in the comments of every climate article I read by the way, sorry for the repetition. M

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RCP 4.5 is still quite horrible in terms of consequences anyway

Which suggests to me that CO2 extraction from the air should be the next big target for innovation?

CO2-extraction takes energy though, quite a lot of it. Using energy from fossil fuel for CO2-extraction is worse than doing nothing, since you're never going to extract as much CO2 as is emitted by the power plant. That leaves using clean energy, but clean energy is a limited resource. Using clean energy to replace current uses of CO2-emitting energy is likely going to be more effective than using it to extract the emitted CO2 back out of the atmosphere.

Who's going to pay for it? At 400ppm, you need a million cubic feet of air to go through your system to get 400 cubic feet of CO2 out. That has an inherent cost.

Whether the CO2 is pulled from the air or from more concentrated industrial sources, the carbon sequestration industry would need to grow to the size of the fossil fuel industry (in terms of mass moved). But instead of extracting resources and selling them for financial gain, it will be a pure financial loss for an ecological gain. Under capitalism it's as impossible as water flowing uphill.

It’s not impossible if you can earn credits that can be sold. This is why the majority of the world needs to agree on a carbon tax system, yesterday.

> not impossible

> the majority of the world needs to agree

Mmmhhh, not sure if betting on a world economic agreement to protect our climate and biodiversity is a good idea.

Are you expecting the world to overthrow capitalism instead?

I dream about that but don’t expect it in any foreseeable future. Neither do I believe in a worldwide coordinated economic action when the goal is not money itself but common good.

That would be more reasonable. Carbon offsets turned out to be not reliable because companies are gaming the system and an international way of making sure this does not happen seems unrealistic.

But I personally expect things to just get worse and worse in the next few decades. Capitalism will not slow down and climate change effects will increase, driving migration into rich countries, causing societal uproar and reduced quality of life for everybody.

No need to overthrow it if capitalism collapses on itself. Green growth is a mirage if not a lie (see https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-what-is-esg-investin... for a primer)

What happens when people feel it's too expensive or disruptive and vote in somebody who undoes it?

Other countries are implementing carbon taxes on their imports from countries that don’t tax carbon so companies will end up paying it indirectly on import taxes if their own government doesn’t levy it.

Oh the anti tax country won't pull out of the treaty, they'll just undermine it with dubious accounting, waivers, etc.

why bother trying to achieve anything if someone might try to cheat.

We actually already have water flowing uphill, in the pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities. So who knows.

Next you'll be telling me that clouds are made of seawater!

> it will be a pure financial loss for an ecological gain

Not true, under the current EU emissions trading scheme you can actually earn money by selling the certificates for the CO2 you remove. If you check the price of it you can see that well defined markets can actually get the power of capitalism to work in your favour, with the price jumping from $30 to $90 within last year.

I'd like to see some proof that these trading scheme work. I know how it is gamed, and how much speculators like them though.

> I'll repeat that in the comments of every climate article I read by the way

Please don't do that. Thank you.

If it’s true then why not?

Because I will have already read it and we don't want to have the same discussions in every thread. To quote dang, it makes comments uninteresting and raises the signal to noise ratio.

Can you link something that is not a youtube video but a text?

I have slides? It's quite interesting because the first hypothesis "isothermal atmosphere at the same temperature as the ground" show exactly hw climate change doesn't work.

From pages 32 onwards: https://www.lmd.ens.fr/legras/Cours/L3-meteo/radiatifNN.pdf

I read somewhere that sulfur emissions from global shipping have been making the part of the world where such shipping is most active (i.e. around Europe, North America and China) cooler than it otherwise would be. But now we're using low-sulfur fuels, so things might rapidly get worse in these latitudes.

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