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Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?
Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?
If the price wasn't an issue then there are simpler ways to deal with global warming without building anything - just consume less. But we're not doing that cause it's politically unpopular. So any solution that relies on majority of people making huge sacrifices probably won't fly either.
If the temperature drop becomes inevitable, I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to just colonize Antarctica to make up for the lost landmass elsewhere. Maybe it's time to have more than scientists living there.
Difficult to build housing. For example, Greenland housing shortage is severe: >> These staff residences are important for attracting employees, as the waiting time for a municipal rental property in Nuuk is between 10-12 years for a private individual. https://www.norden.org/en/info-norden/housing-greenland
Important point is that the amount of area covered by sea ice, which as can be seen in the graph has been relatively stable, is often used as a talking point when arguing that climate change has not been happening. However the total mass of ice has been in steady decline: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/265/video-antarct... In other words while the extent/area has been relatively stable, it has been gettin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scientists know this. Paleoclimatology is one big part of climatology. But the outcome is the opposite - you should be more scared, since it shows that climate can change massively. That affects things like agriculture or sea level. What would you assume the sea level was, when those plants were alive? For example, with very quick search: "In general, world oceans were about 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 feet) hi…
I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!! https://www.floodmap.net/
I am not a "denier", I can recognize that anthropomorphic activities are changing the climate over time and we're not prepared to deal with that. But this sort of article annoys me because "on record" represents a nanosecond of geologic time. There are mountains, and plant fossils [1] under the ice at Antartica, so at some point in the geologic record there was little to no ice at all! And no humans likely either, wh…
Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044972/carbon-r...
Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?
“carbon suckers”: perhaps the fact that we don’t even have a popular phrase for the technology, let alone having built anything practical, will answer your question sufficiently. That, and there are a lot of other inputs to that equation such that when I read what you typed, I kind of paraphrase it as, “why don’t we just wave a magic technology wand and make it go away?” :-)
Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?
Now replace 'you' and 'me' with competing nation states and super powers.
It's a kind of geopolitical prisoner's dilemma. We're all screwed to different degrees if we do nothing, but everyone has an incentive to be a parasite, letting 90% of the world use their energy working on this problem that distributes the rewards of success (averting global climate disaster) equally to all people, while you use your energy on something that gives you direct and exclusive benefit, not globally diffused benefit.
And even if you could somehow force everyone to participate, you run into the same problem that makes communism (in the "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" definition) not work well. When conscious beings don't get rewarded personally for working harder or smarter, and the fruits of their labor are always diffused equally across the population, everyone falls into a vicious downward spiral of trying to do the minimum work possible, therefore making everyone worse off in the long run.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!! https://www.floodmap.net/
Surprisingly if you put it to 20 meters the effect globally seem insignificant. Although 80% of my own country would be flooded, so that's not great.