It has been said that methane from decaying organic matter such as the bottom of reservoirs and melting methane permafrost are significant contributors to atmospheric presence of greenhouse gases.
Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
81–90 of 522 posts
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
4 degrees C is an absolute upper bound in the temperature predictions. The kind of thing you'd get if the world attempted to explicitly maximize CO2 output, instead of only pretending to minimize. And then imagine if they did that for the next 80 years. We are not going to climate change tomorrow, but I'd be awfully surprised if we haven't made some very good progress in the next 2 decades. Solar prices have somethin…
Why wait for the free market fairies to magically fix climate change decades from now, when we can tax and mitigate the pollution that's destroying other people's lives and property right now? That's a well understood solution within the scope of already known science, and economics can easily predict what happens when you tax something: use of it goes down.
The free market fairies can, and already ARE fixing the problem.
It is thanks to them that we got our 30X decrease in solar prices, and made it even plausible to run the world on renewables.
But sure, do a carbon tax and externalize the externalities. I am all in favor of making people pay for the damage that they cause, directly proportional to the cost of the damage.
That is the most free market solution there is.
But my original comment was not responding to someone who made a reasonable proposal for 50$ a ton tax on carbon or something.
I was responding to someone making an outlandishly, crazy proposal.
Climate change is a problem. But it is not a world ending problem. It is a reasonably sized problem that can be solved with reasonable solutions and we do not need to kill of half of the surplus population or ban all cars or go back to living on the land or anything.
All we got to do is maybe make owning a car 20% more expensive, and then the market will figure it out, as it has been figuring it out and making a whole lot of progress for the last 20 years
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#83[deleted]
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why bother? The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, says that over the next 200 years sea levels will rise by a meter or 2. Damaging, for sure. Trillions of dollars in costs. But not exactly world ending. Thats the scientific consensus. I look at the official statistics that the scientists provide, and I go "meh". If I had the choice between magically stopping climate change forever, and stopping…
Luckily, those aren't mutually exclusive choices. And climate change potentially causes wars as countries are strapped for resources, so acting to fix climate change is a twofer. Also: you are understating the cost of climate change. These estimates are tricky to get right, but the IPCC estimates a ballpark figure of 1-4% of GDP for a 4 degrees C increase in global mean temperature. That puts the cost on the order of…
Just for the sake of the argument: GW could be an financial and economic opportunity as well:
The planet is inundated by liquidities since the 90' (30 years ago!) as states are in a never ending money war. This have been dramatically furthered with quantitative easing and negative interests.
As inflation is something seen as dispectable as it lowers the values of shares, here is an opportunity to have money used for something useful, instead of being wasted.
Indeed I would prefer a new spatial program, but war for renewables will do the business.
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#85I generally get funny looks and the feeling that people are imagining me with a toothbrush mustache and a comb-over when I suggest this: Wouldn't population control to an extent help slow the rate of emissions? Caps on births or higher taxes on family sizes, etc. I know political/moral/ethical issues would make it impractical but I don't think any potential solution is worth ignoring.
When debugging performance problems you always search for the biggest bottlenecks not the minor ones, so what are the biggest contributors to CO2?
I don't think the problem is the number of people living on earth but how modern society is making people live, for example some big contributors are high meat consumption (cattle methane) inefficient transportation (big suvs with just the driver inside sitting in traffic jams) consumerism that drive all those factories to produce mostly useless products that break easily to be soon replaced etc.
We need to change or habits not our numbers, this is the source of the problem.
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#86It has been said that methane from decaying organic matter such as the bottom of reservoirs and melting methane permafrost are significant contributors to atmospheric presence of greenhouse gases.
That's true, but unlike atmospheric CO2, atmospheric methane is relatively short-lived. Not to diminish the effect of methane, which while short-lived, is a very potent greenhouse gas. And not to diminish the various feedback effects in the global circulation system that are likely to create a self-sustaining pattern that will long outlast the originating atmospheric gases.
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#87I generally get funny looks and the feeling that people are imagining me with a toothbrush mustache and a comb-over when I suggest this: Wouldn't population control to an extent help slow the rate of emissions? Caps on births or higher taxes on family sizes, etc. I know political/moral/ethical issues would make it impractical but I don't think any potential solution is worth ignoring.
No. China's one child policy only slowed growth.[0] Even if you halved the population immediately the co2 levels in the atmosphere would continue to increase despite outputting less.
[0] -https://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2015/oct/29/impac...
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#88I generally get funny looks and the feeling that people are imagining me with a toothbrush mustache and a comb-over when I suggest this: Wouldn't population control to an extent help slow the rate of emissions? Caps on births or higher taxes on family sizes, etc. I know political/moral/ethical issues would make it impractical but I don't think any potential solution is worth ignoring.
In 1950 global population was 2.5 billion people, now 7.5. That's 3x in 67 years. Technological advances can help us increase the amount of people we can sustain, but eventually there is going to be a limit.
The limit will not only be because of CO2. There are other situations that need to be managed.
Population is increasing, and the lifestyle of individuals is rising, making each person have a larger cost on the environment.
Topsoil, the soil we grow our food in, takes long to regenerate and we are depleting it faster than it regenerates.
Overfishing cannot be stopped. Fish will be gone soon, and we largely depend on it. Fish as food, fishmeal for animals and fish oil as fertilizer (fish emulsion).
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#89I generally get funny looks and the feeling that people are imagining me with a toothbrush mustache and a comb-over when I suggest this: Wouldn't population control to an extent help slow the rate of emissions? Caps on births or higher taxes on family sizes, etc. I know political/moral/ethical issues would make it impractical but I don't think any potential solution is worth ignoring.
Population control would have to begin with the US, which on a per-capita basis has more than double the emission than any other nation or region (China, European union, etc). More than 8 times the rate of populous nations like India and Indonesia.
How likely is that to happen, especially in Trump's America?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I vote we kill you first. You breathe out CO2, right? EDIT: Nice silent edit there. Let me just quote what you just deleted from your comment "Since they won't probably give in voluntarily and since many of them are already in power, this further implies a violent uprising."
"I vote we kill you first" If you're going to troll, at least get your science right. Breathing out CO2 adds zero net CO2 to the atmosphere, because it comes from food you ate, which itself came from CO2 in the atmosphere. The oil and gas that an individual uses to survive, on the other hand, is literally deadly. So you are at the verge of having a point: we could lower CO2 usage by killing people. However, a much mo…
> Breathing out CO2 adds zero net CO2 to the atmosphere, because it comes from food you ate, which itself came from CO2 in the atmosphere.
For most of us that food probably took a considerable amount of fossils food to grow, package and transport.