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Global warming has accelerated significantly

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Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#761

Post by mempko »

danny_codes wrote: post #733
mempko wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Physically that’s not the case. Scaled up nuclear power could be had for $3-4B a gigawatt/h. We waste say $1T a year on basic things, like not having universal healthcare. So a simple policy change would let us build about 300 reactors a years, after some scaling period. The excess energy can be used to turn C02 back into oil. It’s not technically that difficult, we just chose to waste money on stupid things and rich…

Since the industrial revolution we've emitted about 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2. Direct air capture requires roughly 1,500 kWh per tonne, so recapturing all of it would take around 2,250,000 TWh. Current global electricity production is about 30,000 TWh/year. That's 75 years of the entire world's electricity output just for capture, before you even convert it back to fuel, which costs even more energy. And thermodynamically you can never break even: we only extracted maybe 30-40% of fossil fuel energy as useful work, but reversing the dispersal of CO2 from 420ppm in the atmosphere fights entropy all the way back. It will always cost more energy to put back than we got taking it out. As for the nuclear numbers: Vogtle, the only recent US build, came in at ~$16B/GW, not $3-4B. The world started construction on 9 reactors total in 2024. The all time peak was ~30/year in the 1980s. 300/year has never been close to reality. Average build time is about 9 years per reactor. I'm not anti-nuclear but you can't hand-wave your way past thermodynamics and industrial scaling with "it's just a policy choice."

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#762

Post by cryptoegorophy »

kergonath wrote: post #308
cryptoegorophy wrote: post #214

If it is too late to do anything, why should we care? We can’t reverse it, so why should we care about slow down?

We must limit the problem, then adapt and mitigate. Some damage is irreversible, it does not mean that it’s a good idea to stop trying to understand what will happen. You don’t stop weather forecasts when a hurricane touches land just because it’s going to happen anyway. Reality is not binary. There’s a whole spectrum of situations between "everything gets back to normal and all is well" (which was never on the cards…

From what I understood we are closer to the “all humans will die within a century” and if this is the case then what’s the point of doing anything? Does it matter if our effort just delays the “all humans will die” by let say 50 years? Radical change we need to do if we are serious is going back to caves. 0 consumption. I highly doubt anyone will do that.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#763

Post by djoldman »

Basically this is the slowest train wreck in history that just won't be stopped. By 2050 (only 24 years away), these cities are projected to flood more than 1/3 of the days of every year:

  Galveston, Texas
  Morgan’s Point, Texas
  Annapolis, Maryland
  Norfolk, Virginia
  Rockport, Texas
  Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
Big cities close behind the above:

  Miami and Miami Beach, Florida
  Charleston, South Carolina
  Atlantic City, New Jersey

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#764

Post by apublicfrog »

sph wrote: post #756
nancyminusone wrote: post #458

Don't kid yourself - we closed this one with "Won't Fix" a while ago. "But what about ?" No. Full stop. We're not going to do it, and we're not even going to apologize for it either. All we can do now is prepare, not that I've seen a lot on this front either.

Worse, even if we’re going to do it, the next idiot in power is going to roll it back and declare to big fanfare and applause that coal is back. You can’t change the world with plans that last no longer than a presidential term.

Thankfully most of the world ignores America and does their own thing.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#765

Post by casey2 »

myrmidon wrote: post #573
bko wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt. Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries. There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented…

> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries. This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people. What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission lev…

You miss the fact that China's GDP per capita is 1/6th the US. So to produce 1/6th per person they emits 2/3rds the CO2. Which means in total, the thing that matters, is that china produces 4 times the CO2 with no end in sight. They are 99% to blame for the current situation.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#766

Post by giarc »

jokoon wrote: 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.

>people won't see it.

You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#767

Post by afandian »

dang wrote: post #644
afandian wrote: post #2

This is open access. No need to post a researchgate link. Here's the original: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6079807/v1

Ok, we've changed the URL from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389855619_Global_Wa... to what that doi.org link redirects to. Is it better now?

Cool, thanks. I approve!

In a pure world everyone would use DOIs to refer to published literature. This would give two benefits: first, always link to the current version. Second, be a persistent identifier for the content.

But HN isn't a specialist scholarly content platform, so it's practical to link to the landing page.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#768

Post by nomel »

Liftyee wrote: post #605
crystal_revenge wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change. By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground . People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change. Even though this would be painful, it is also by f…

The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult. It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term. Not sur…

> Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians

I don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper/keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#769

Post by DFHippie »

logicchains wrote: post #728
kibwen wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US refuses to participate in the energy revolution, then it'll be a Russia-tier power within a generation.

Empirically, Europe's embrace of the "energy revolution" has done far more to bring it closer to Russia, making energy 2-3x more expensive and gradually destroying Germany's industrial base. So much so that it can't even produce as many munitions as Russia, in spite of a GDP around ten times larger.

Give Germany time. The US and Russia have forced them to rearm.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#770

Post by casey2 »

tantaman wrote: post #536

How are people handling this... mentally? and preparedness wise? I can't imagine what the next generation may have to live through.

Most serious people realized decades ago that you just build a bunch of nuclear powered DAC and require oil companies sequester it. What occurred for last 30 years was a bunch of nonsense political BS and signaling that annoys effective people but they largely ignore.
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