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Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

nytimes.com

141–150 of 210 posts

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#141
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's faulty about his science?

There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions (literal plant fertilizer, the shit I brew and inject into my fish tank to grow plants). What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet. People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely no…

We've actually had more than 100 years of doomsday warnings, that doesn't mean "nothing happened" if each warning is for a specific set of dates. If I say, "There will be a fire in your house in one year" and then in six months I say, "There will be a fire in your house in half-a-year" that doesn't mean my prediction should be devalued.

Re: Alternative energy: It doesn't matter if fusion/nuclear/any renewable is "perfected" if Carbon Dioxide is at such high levels that every air conditioning unit needs a CO2 scrubber attached because outdoor the concentration reaches 1000ppm and people's brains literally start to get dumber.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want more than they already have.

This isn't actually true (although there are billions who do, understandably) - a lot of people would be fine with continuing with their level of energy usage. The problem is how to produce that much energy without releasing CO2.

Who said anything about energy usage. People don't care about their energy usage, they only care about what they get from it. Every time we make something more efficient we don't save energy, people just take more.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#143

Why isn't there a billion dollar reward to any person or company that comes up with a cost-effective way to capture carbon from the air and convert back to solid carbon? I'd love to understand the physics (or chemistry? maybe economy?) that prevents this from materialising.

I'm not a physicist, but isn't the second law of thermodynamics puts a limit on what we can do with the excess energy, most of which are being absorbed by the oceans. Besides most of the damage is already done. EPA: It’s as if you’re sitting in your car, in your garage, with the engine running and the door closed, and you’ve slipped into unconsciousness. And that’s it. McAvoy: What if someone comes and opens the door…

It's not really a thermodynamics problem. We're not trying to get rid of excess energy in a system, we're trying to get rid of carbon. We need to do something roughly equivalent to growing massive tropical rainforests and burying them over and over again.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have reason to believe it's happening now! Besides the AGW signal in the temperature spread, there's now a AGW signal in hurricane behavior and precipitation patterns. It's happening now! That's the point of the article! Did you even read it?

We have reason to believe that ice caps will melt and NYC will be underwater by 2012. - An Inconvenient Truth

There are two claims here (ice caps melt + NYC underwater).

I don't think either is even something claimed by the movie, which is a movie. And it's certainly not peer-reviewed science. (Reference for ice caps claim: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/, and note, "caps" as you wrote it would imply the entire Antarctic was melting by 2012, which is of course crazy.)

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#145
I feel like this article underestimates the difficulty of stopping climate change. Would China have remained poor, if in the 1980's a better anti-climate-change treaty had been signed? Would the world have discovered better clean technology? There is a tendency to assume that treaties just solve the problem. I suspect that a different treaty would have failed, just like current negotiations are failing, because of the immense cost of slowing climate change.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't actually true (although there are billions who do, understandably) - a lot of people would be fine with continuing with their level of energy usage. The problem is how to produce that much energy without releasing CO2.

Who said anything about energy usage. People don't care about their energy usage, they only care about what they get from it. Every time we make something more efficient we don't save energy, people just take more.

Maybe influence utility provider prices. Kinda like insurance. If you stay inside some range per month, you'll get bonuses. If you want more, you'll pay a single digit % premium ?

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#147
post #137

Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now? These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i…

There still are solutions. They, however, require that the environmental movement accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment. Which runs counter to their instincts. See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312505967_Olivine_W... for one approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization for another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering lists several more.

"accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment."

While these are interesting technologies, it's very difficult to see how they make sense economically. The cost/benefit ratio is invariably much worse than simply investing in emissions reductions.

If we have $X to invest in climate mitigation, it's always going to be better to spend it on technologies that reduce carbon emissions: replacing fossil-fuel power plants, electrification of transport, etc. To my knowledge there is no technology that removes a ton of carbon from the atmosphere that comes anywhere close to being competitive with what it costs to not emit that ton of carbon in the first place.

Of course, the day may come when all the easy carbon reductions have been made. If the climate is still not stabilising at that point, then we can start looking at all the climate engineering mega-projects.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#148
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because your concerns are exactly like that of Bush Sr's advisors in the article. He's also one of the villains.

If you want to believe in Inevitable Doom, go nuts. Possibly literally. But if that's how you want to play things, I probably can't stop you. But at least I tried. It's not a healthy way to live, and I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence. In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies" well over "envir…

In your original post you listed out a bunch of issues that never amounted to anything.

Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them? It wasn't the economy that stopped the Ozone hole from expanding. It wasn't technological innovation that brought down the Soviet Union and ended Red Scare.

Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?

It doesn't seem like you're as bad as a denialist, but you're worse than a geopolitical isolationist. You're an individual isolationist and your mantra seems to be, "Fuck you, I've got mine".

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#149

Why isn't there a billion dollar reward to any person or company that comes up with a cost-effective way to capture carbon from the air and convert back to solid carbon? I'd love to understand the physics (or chemistry? maybe economy?) that prevents this from materialising.

I did a back of the envelope calculation or maybe better a guesstimate on this awhile back. At perfect conversion efficiency you could turn emitted CO2 back to carbon using 15-20 average sized nuclear power plants. If you realistically get 10% overall efficiency then maybe you need 200 of them. All that assumes you can actually build chemical cells that don't need continuous replacement. It also just compensates for current emissions, and doesn't turn the clock back. My numbers could be very wrong in either direction.

My takeaway was just like losing weight. It's more effective to eat less than to exercise. Here, it's bound to be better to burn less.

This was an electrochemical approach however. It's possible some bio guy will figure it out using photosynthesis.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#150
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left." It is a grave life error to assign excessive likelihood to the doomsayers. I've been reading about inevitable doom for 25 years now. Some of what I read as a kid dated to the 60s and the guaranteed dates of inevitable doom had already passed by the time I read them in the early 90s. Even assuming they are completely 100…

It's tricky when a preponderance of evidence and theory tells us that the lag time on the signal is several decades but human generations are also measured in decades. It doesn't matter how strong your negative feedback is if the system it's controlling is in thermal runaway by the time you apply a corrective signal. Maybe we can bandaid or mitigate the worst effects for some people. Probably richer people. But just…

Harvey? The hurricane that was the first to make landfall after 12 years of no hurricanes? After we were repeatedly explicitly promised increased hurricanes because of global warming? The one that Wikipedia lists as merely a category 4 and looms large in your mind simply because of where it happened to hit?

Did anyone ever admit their predictions about increased hurricanes during those 12 years were wrong? I never saw it. You just remember the images, not the 12 years of no images.

And I remember wildfires in California when I was a kid, too. Except now probably about 10 million people live closer to them and like to build houses in the way of them. (Oh, and let's not forget how many of those fires turn out to be less about "global warming" and more about arson. After a certain point, dry is just dry.)

This is part of why I really can't get myself too worked up over Certain Environmental Doom... it's always people sharing emotionally vivid anecdotes instead of data. When I look at the statistical data, it isn't much to get worked up over. The IPCC warming estimates have already been revised down to the point that it's hardly worth worrying about; it's not as if "zero degrees of change in a century" was ever on the table.

It's the emotionally charged anecdotes that get you worked up and feeling doomed and hopeless. Again, who benefits? Sure isn't you.

I'm personally more interested in the ocean plastic problem than global warming at the moment. Global warming has really failed to pan out as a threat, in my opinion.

But then, bear in mind once again I'm brushing 40. If you're twenty-something and inclined to pull your hair out over what I'm saying here, think about where you would be with another 15 years of your current level of concern, but if you looked outside on the same world you do now. I see anecdotes and anecdotes and anecdotes about how horrible climate change is, but the data isn't anywhere near as scary as the news stories being written... in fact I see the news stories getting scarier even as the data gets less scary to me. In fact it's downright bizzare to compare the predictions made now nearly twenty years ago to what actually happened, and to read all these stories that are written as if the predictions made twenty years ago actually happened, or perhaps even happened worse than predicted, instead of being rather a ways off the mark.

Personally, I'd probably actually be more concerned if I read a story that basically said "Here's the predictions made 20 years ago. Here's why they didn't pan out. Here's the models that we made 10 years ago that fixed the problem and evidence that they've done a great job predicting the last ten. Here's why those models are showing problems 20 years down the road and why this time we actually know what we are talking about." But that's not what I read. What I see is just screeching panic, and most damningly, denial that any error was ever made when it is plainly obvious that errors were made, and that IPCC report estimates have in fact been trending down and not up. When no error can ever be admitted, it's clearly a political process, not a scientific one, because it's in politics you can't ever admit you were wrong, not even a little, with the only error you're allowed to admit to is that you didn't realize how right you were at the time. I don't recommend driving yourself into anxiety and insanity for a process so obviously filled with politics.

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