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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the forest for the trees. The primary factor influencing warming is CO2 emissions. The rate of emissions is expected to peak in 2024. That's much better than earlier worst case models that were based on continually increasing emissions.

So yes, the models miscalculated some secondary factors. But the primary factor is still primary.

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Why are emissions expected to peak in 2024? Are people going to fly or drive less miles? Are we going to live in smaller, more energy efficient houses? Are we going to consume less compute resources? I’m sure we will deploy more renewables; we have certainly seen impressive performance there, but it has supplemented rather than replaced carbon-based sources so far. I believe there are also a lot of new starts for natural gas power plants in the US to support power intensive AI needs. And coal use world wide is still quite high.

I do agree that it would be encouraging to see a decrease in emissions (though I suspect we may have already passed some points of no return), but we have not yet seen the peak and I do not understand why one would believe that next year will be better than this year. A solution will require actual collective action that has proven infeasible for my entire life.

Biggest impact is wind power replacing carbon sources. A close second is solar power. EV's are a distant but non negligible third.

https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...

It is certainly worth hoping for, but I will not believe it until I see it. Until now, we have remained on a dire course.

First time I hear that claim as well. The only "peak" I'm aware of is coal burning for electricity.

that is expected to go down going forward, but that's not peak CO2, as coal engines are just one source of CO2 and not even the biggest contributer.

Misinformation is big with everything related to climate change as usual, so I kinda doubt we're anything close to peak CO2, but I'll keep checking the global CO2 averages. Maybe it'll go down from 450 again. It'd be great if itc went back to 290 (thats what it was before the industrial revolution, supposedly)... But I'm not expecting to see any reduction within my lifetime

With China having brought 47.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power online in 2023, why is is expected to go down going forwards?

My understanding is that they may not exactly be baseload, but will run only some of the time. Not ideal, but better than the worst case.

To be clear, "peak" refers to the maximum output of CO2; it does not mean that CO2 levels will begin falling in the atmosphere, merely that the rate at which we add it to the atmosphere will begin to trend downwards instead of increasing (as it always has since the dawn of the industrial age). "Net zero" is when no more CO2 is added to the atmosphere and as far as I can tell is essentially science fiction at this point. Decreasing ppms of CO2 is beyond that even.

As I said, this is all rather hard to take when considered seriously which is probably one of the reasons for denial. Probably the only near-term effort that can buy time is increasing the reflectivity of the atmosphere to counteract the greenhouse effect; it does seem technically feasible and economical, but is pretty half-assed and has problems of its own - principally a termination shock if it is ever discontinued.

You can see it in the Mona Lea CO2 measurements. We've gone from steadily increasing increases to constant increases. Soon it will be increases that get smaller every year

While emissions are peaking, now we need enough clean energy to direct air capture all of the carbon released over the last 100+ years as well as that we continue to emit.

There is some hope, but success is not yet assured and there are lots of decisions and work remaining to succeed.

Exactly. There is lots of hard work remaining. Without hope nobody would be willing to put in the hard work.

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