> Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.
While I appreciate your perspective, the hard and cold reality of the situation is that it is illusory to think we can affect something of this magnitude. Not only is it a planetary scale problem, it is also something that, just from the standpoint of conservation of energy, is impossible for us to address.
The principle is brutally simple. To state it in relevant terms: It cannot take LESS energy to solve a problem than that which went into creating it.
To further lend context, it is important to understand how the planet dealt with this when humanity was insignificant. We have this data going back 800,000 years. This comes from highly reliable ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
The charts:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
And this is my curve fit to try and measure the rate of change:
https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png
And so, in rough terms, it took about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and about 50,000 years for the same decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Any inquisitive mind would want to know how this happened. How did CO2 concentration increase and decrease? The answers are relatively simple. We were not around (or we were insignificant), so it wasn't humanity, not going back 800,000 years.
The increase, among other things, was caused by massive forest fires rolling through entire continent. Without modern fire fighting technology, these fires burned and rolled through the land constantly. The only thing that would stop them would be running out of fuel or heavy rains.
The decrease was mostly a combination of having burned off enough carbon stores that rains, hurricanes, cyclones --the weather-- over tens of thousands of years, precipitated CO2. Forests grew once more, capturing more carbon...only to burn again at some point and repeat the cycle.
How, then, were we able to influence this in a few centuries?
Again, simple: We burned the equivalent of unimaginably massive forests at a much faster rate than the natural order of things. We did this by burning oil. One gallon of petroleum is said to have required about 100 tons of plants and biomatter. Today we are burning oil at a rate of nearly 100 million barrels per day, or 35 billion barrels per year. One barrel is equivalent to just over 31 gallons. Which means that burning a barrel of oil is like burning 3,100 tons of plants and biomatter. This isn't an exact calculation, of course. It does serve to get a sense of proportion about what we are discussing. The scale is absolutely unimaginable.
And so, while the planet experienced these ~100K year cycles without us around, when we started to use oil we got to the point where we effectively burned the equivalent of entire forests in a single day...every day...every year...for decades, centuries. That's how we were able to change the upward rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Reversing it is a very different story. Making a mess is easy. Any fool can light up 30 gallons of gasoline and make an absolute mess. All it takes is a match. In sharp contrast to that --and going back to the concept of conservation of energy-- you simply cannot reverse the process by expending less energy than what it took to create it in the first place. Except that this energy isn't the energy of the match, but rather the energy stored in the 30 gallons of gasoline that went up in smoke. In reality, once dispersed, the byproducts of this combustion are nearly impossible to contain and revert. It would take an unimaginable amount of energy and resources to reverse the effects of 100 million barrels of oil used per day. And we do that each and every day and have been burning this stuff for centuries at an increasing rate.
This isn't to say we should do nothing at all. What I am saying is that we are having the wrong conversations because we have allowed politicians and various forces to make a cult out of this thing. Very little of what is being put out on this every day is true. We can't reverse this in 50 years. We can't do it in a century. This will take tens of thousands of years. In other words, it is likely outside a human time scale.
What to do then? Well, we need to start having the right conversations. We need to start figuring out how to live with this and survive. We are not going to fix it. We need to adapt to it. That's where our technological focus should be, not in magic pixie dust to "save the planet". If we persist, we will not only lose the opportunity to adapt, we will likely risk killing all life on earth through a hairbrained scheme to save a planetary scale ecosystem that we have the hubris of thinking we can control.
Every time I post about this I get eviscerated with downvotes and sometimes comments. And yet, not one person ever takes the time to read and review the sources I provide, go through some super simple math and come back with something like "Hey, I think you missed this point". I want to be wrong about this. Personal insults and downvotes don't serve any purpose at all other than to reveal the intense indoctrination people have been subjected to. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we made it worse. No, we can't fix it.
Think. Don't be drones.
