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The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

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Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#161

Post by kawera »

davidw wrote: post #48
aleda145 wrote: post #9

Very alarming. I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right ( https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-f... ) I don't know what to do.

Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything: * Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it? * Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything? * Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Ge…

I would add:

* Plant more trees

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#162

Post by mapmeld »

aperrien wrote: post #7

Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?

I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I think there will be more support for changing reflectivity (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#163

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

swiftcoder wrote: post #37
aperrien wrote: post #7

Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?

So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well. That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration

> apart from growing forests and keeping them protected)

I’m in a loop. I must be.

How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices.

Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.

There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff.

It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#164

Post by davidw »

dbdr wrote: post #147
hackyhacky wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a) inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c) set them up for disappointment when climate change happens anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook. If you want to see real progress on th…

Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.

And almost all of them have plenty of other benefits too:

Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.

More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths.

Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.

Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city.

Come to think of it, less beef is probably better for your health, too.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#165

Post by Windchaser »

SoftTalker wrote: post #31
blueflow wrote: post #2

Its not a "risk". Water vapor (clouds) is a stonger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We already got measurably higher temperatures, so we also have higher water evaporation, and from the last 5 years it looks like it happens every year. So the runaway is already happening, until something stops it near hothouse conditions or hopefully earlier than that.

Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"

> Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"

Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to happen within a billion years.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#166

Post by filoeleven »

timschmidt wrote: post #145
rtpg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced! Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users. There are quantitative arguments against many silly co…

> it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha. Consumers are often presented the least expensive option with the worst outcomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

I remember when that switch at grocers from paper to plastic was taking hold, and you could choose. "Paper or plastic?" was the question asked. Some comedian (probably) had a good one liner: "That'll be 42.39. Kill a tree or choke a fish?"

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#167

Post by Moldoteck »

irishloop wrote: post #109
j0ba wrote: post #52

If only there was a clean, nearly limitless source of energy, where the waste for hundreds of years of energy could be stored in less than a square kilometer. If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.

Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?

i'm not sure there are, from a science point of view... From political point of view there are probably only 2 locations in one country... vs a gigantic energy output on planetary scale...

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#168

Post by akramachamarei »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #84
timmg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially? Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.) Electrifica…

> Is it the "far right"? Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us, and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle the government's legal rationale for regul…

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the "far-right", but you seem to be implying this 'every molecule' quote (or more charitably, the goal) is of the "far-right" in the U.S. In reality the quote is from Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. I mean, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Saudi Arabia is considered far-right governed but I doubt your wording is giving the correct impression to readers.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#169

Post by Lerc »

sho_hn wrote: post #112
smartmic wrote: post #18

It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful. And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution t…

Maybe we could ask AI! https://chatgpt.com/share/698ce97b-4d54-8000-aecb-542ceecb00...

But https://chatgpt.com/share/698cee2c-b8c4-800f-b3cb-fa8869f874...

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#170

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

schiffern wrote: post #73

>Despite decades of research and sophisticated computational climate modeling, the magnitude and pace of these events have surprised scientists, raising questions about how well current climate projections capture risk. "Yet again, worse than we predicted." When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with the electron charge, it was considered a priori "proof" that scientists were fudging their data…

What about the possibility that the models so far have always been wrong and if they wrong in the wrong direction you would never hear about them?
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