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Europe's fires are just the start

economist.com

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Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#221

Post by patapong »

palata wrote: post #215
BurningFrog wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries. They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts: 1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphe…

> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale [...] The unsolved problem is extracting You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2. We cannot revert that with less energy than we extracted from doing it in the first place. > It sounds scary, but is actually safe Famous last word…

I agree that it's not easy, but we could in theory use solar energy, which is abundant and cheap. I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#222

Post by toasty228 »

downrightmike wrote: post #189
liendolucas wrote: post #132

I'm a firm believer that sooner or later we will be extinct by extreme heat and suffocation. Two weeks ago here in Umbria, Italy the heat was extreme. It was 40°C without a breeze of air, it literally felt like braathing hot air. One morning while I was walking I couldn't believe the amount of dry leaves on the street, by pictures people would have guessed that it was autumn. I have a really good tolerance to high te…

This has happened to the earth before, the earth will change, Northern Atlantic will freeze over, stopping the currents of the ocean, and raise water levels at least several meters, enough to flood most cities on the East Coast.

It never happened this fast, by a fat margin

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#223

Post by toasty228 »

0x_rs wrote: post #117

Europe (and the world at large, really) can either wait for its demise, through increasingly oppressive climate hostile to human occupation and de-industrialization while the rest of the world continues on the current trajectory, or start getting its shit together and immediately commence climate engineering on a continental scale. Start with stratospheric aerosol injection, and mandate it not unlike "sustainable" av…

We can't trust them for asbestos and leaded gas but we'll trust them with "stratospheric aerosol injection"...

God know what unknown complex system will fuck up and end up making things 10x worse. We'll do literally everything besides consuming and producing less

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#224

Post by toasty228 »

palata wrote: post #211
toasty228 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares enough, they all like the status quo, unless you want to vote for insane royalists &co

I said "people who care about the climate emergency", where did you see "royalists & co"?

Who are they? They all are for growth, increased productivity, increase standard of living, global commerce races to the bottom

They want to keep everything exactly the same but somehow stamp it "green"

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#225

Post by hamper653 »

OKRainbowKid wrote: post #19
cbmuser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.

This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclea…

> wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?

How about taking the money spent on fossil energies and invest it in both nuclear and renewables?

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#226

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

BurningFrog wrote: post #196
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stratospheric aerosol injection hasn't been tested at any kind of scale, so we do not know whether it would be harmful (e.g. acid rain) or not. It would also be very expensive, so it's not really a practical solution at the moment. It may pan out, but stating "actually safe" is not yet known.

The Mt Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991 actually did inject huge amounts of SO₂ to the stratosphere, and it disappeared over the next few years. While it remained, northern hemisphere temperatures lowered by ~0.5°C. USGS report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/ Since the stratosphere is far above the rain cycle, it's very hard to imagine a mechanism whereby this could produce acid rain, and even if it did, acid…

> acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming.

In fact it used to be a common occurence during the heavy industrial pollution in the 20th century. So much that after the pollution stopped, farmers had to start applying sulphur to their fields as nutrients for some crops (I learned about this after unsuccessfully trying to grow tomatoes in alkaline soil).

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#227

Post by throw-the-towel »

alephnerd wrote: post #52
toasty228 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be illegal in 2026 to have such a naive view. co2 per country or capita doesn't mean shit when the world uses China as a factory: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-embedded-in-...

The effects of climate change aren't felt on a per capita basis. Edit: can't reply > they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory If that was the case, then global CO2 emissions would have been stagnant for 30 years, not rising.

I don't see why CO2 emissions should be stagnant. There's now more people than ever, and everyone buys more shit per capita than ever, that's already a good reason for emissions to grow.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#228

Post by hamper653 »

card_zero wrote: post #202
throw310822 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account Obviously, each individual should have a right to emit a certain amount of GHGs independently from the size of the country he happens to be born in. So the correct list is this (2024 data [1]). Quite surprising in places (e.g. the position of the UK, Australians emitting GHGs at the level of a petro-state, and Canadians too,…

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#229

Post by belorn »

dolmen wrote: post #107
jrflo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be a need for on-demand power. Renewables are great, but cannot deal with peaks as easily and capacity is dependent on weather.

Hydro is renewable, can deal with peaks and not directly dependent on weather. Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.

Hydro is great, except for a few problems. The biggest is that they are causing extinction for several species. The second biggest in central and northern Europe is that hydro is already used in every place where its reasonable to build them, with practically no space to further expansion.

Right before the last rush to build nuclear, Europe went through an energy crisis where they did also use reverse hydro. In recent time there has been discussion to modernize and reuse those old installations, but the issue is costs. Buying energy to sell it later, while maintaining and operating the hydro power plants and pumps are not cheap (not to mention building out transmission). Even at current fossil fuel prices, natural gas and oil is cheaper and thus reverse hydro is not economical viable.

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