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Global warming has accelerated significantly

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Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#451
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China creates about 30–35% of global emissions. India about 8% but it is climbing fast. What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.

CA buying gasoline from Bermuda, shipped via the Panama Canal, because it refuses to allow new refineries is the perfect demonstration of this.

That's also kind of a pigovian tax though, right? By making gasoline more expensive they discourage its use. I guess they're chicken to make it an actual tax

Also why wouldn't it come from other US states? Seems easier

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Albedo modification (stratospheric aerosols) seems much cheaper than direct air capture, as a stopgap.

That unfortunately doesn’t help with ocean acidification.

So what? You still save millions of lives.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#453
post #176
post #147

Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt. And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years. The pain will come slowly, people won't see it. It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it. And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.

Developed rich countries are hurting. See the wildfires across North America, massive amounts of flooding across Europe, etc. Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed. This doesn't change until nearly e…

Politicians, at least freely elected, are a symptom of given population at given time. Don't blame trump for trump, he made it painfully obvious to whole world who he is and who he certainly is not, sort of kudos to him for being consistent.

Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice. At least if you care about root of the problems and not just venting off. I am not offering a solution to educating half of US population which clearly doesn't care about facts, or lacks any basic moral compass... I don't have a practical solution.

US 'special' form of voted democracy failed and failed hard, lets see how far this gets in next 3 years and if any actual lessons learned happen afterwards (I don't hold my breath since reality doesn't behave just because it would be nice and viable time to act is gone I think).

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#454
we have had several manhattan project in the last 100 years, but they have all been for stuff like:

- creating a new addictive form of entertainment we can use to brainwash people

- Creating expensive data centers that MAY end up being extremely useful in the long run

and never for saving the lives of the people on our planet.

Humanity is doomed. We deserve it.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#455
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but internet opinions are a dime a dozen -- do you have some special experience / credentials in this area? The arguments you provide are all just the sort of thing that PhD students would study, and incorporate into their models. I'm inclined to believe the experts, but if you _are_ one, and are saying with authority that these effects are missed, that is a much more interesting story.

2 years ago this was hard won knowledge, searching for papers and then putting it all together in survey form for analysis. Today I can tell you: feel free to ask Deep Research or another LLM you trust to do that work for you, generating citations along the way. You can convince yourself vs me having to convince you. It will take about 15 minutes.

The people who say the Earth is flat have been "searching for papers" too.

No offense, but you sound like an oil shill.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re carbon capture -- we can cut trees and dump them in "carbon storage" places like the bottom of some water bodies where due to lack of oxygen no rotting happens, like peats and e.g. Black Sea. And grow new trees in their place of course.

It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.

Depending on the tree, freshly cut wood can have anywhere from 1:3 to 2:1 ratio of water to actual wood fiber.

So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).

There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#457
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is completely wrong. First, the West and particularly the US are still well ahead of China regarding both historical total emissions and per-capita annual emissions. And regardless of what China does in the future we still need to get our acts together domestically. Also, China is aggressively pushing low-carbon energy sources on all fronts. Where they are now is not necessarily an indication of where they will…

If the United States stopped polluting 100%, global pollution would decrease by only about 10%. Probably even less, because much of that pollution would simply be exported through outsourcing. So what happens next?

>If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect.

Consumption economies can incentivize production economies to emit less.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relying on DAC is putting our fate in the hands of a technology we've never deployed beyond some pitifully small pilot projects, and expecting that we're going to be able to deploy that at a larger scale than we've deployed any technology since electricity itself. We're going to have to resort to geoengineering alright, but it's gonna likely be stratospheric sulfate injection given how cheaply that can be done. Is it…

The prospect that the future we're headed for will be one where the survival of civilization (and much of humanity) depends on a massive, ongoing industrial process of upper atmosphere pollution, in order to counteract the massive, ongoing industrial process of CO2 pollution we can't be arsed to rein in, leaves me feeling relieved to be mortal.

I don't disagree. At this point, I'm thankful I never wanted kids.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#460
post #295

FWIW my personal assessment is that this acceleration is both real and largely out of our control. Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions, but as we experience further warming, most especially in the Arctic, feedback loops and tipping points mean that this (carbon emissions caused by “natural” processes) are becoming more evident. This is especially sensitive because a la…

Regarding carbon capture, it will take more energy to capture the carbon than we burned putting it up there in the first place. Alan Kay, who actually did some systems work on the environment, explained it to me that the climate system is like an upside down coke bottle. It doesn't take much energy to tip it over, but it takes a lot more to put it back up.

In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.

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