Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

No. You cannot. You see, you are not asking the right questions and are giving in to folklore.

This is a fair question, yes:

How were we able to screw this up so badly in just 150 years? How is that even possible when we've only been significant, at an industrial scale, for just a few centuries?

This is an excellent question and one that should lead to further inquiry rather than dismissal. Well, I asked myself this very question years ago, as I begun my attempt to understand what was real and what was not.

The answer first requires that we understand how it is that atmospheric CO2 fluctuated by about 100 ppm on a roughly 100K year cycle when humanity was virtually insignificant.

The answer to this question is brutally simple:

Massive continental scale fires burning without any artificial controls, well, forever.

Over somewhere in the range of 25,000 years they provided enough CO2 to increase atmospheric concentration by 100 ppm.

This is a reality today. For all the political bullshit floating around, nobody is talking about the elephant in the room, in the form of wildfires.

Globally, wildfires today consume about 450 millions hectares of forest and other plant life. This translates into about 13.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon.

The entire industrial base of the world today produces about 10 billion tonnes of carbon a year.

Keep in mind that this is with humanity actively fighting forest fires to contain them to the extent possible. Right this minute we have a massive fire in northern CA, where an army of firefighters is battling the flames to gain control.

Not too many centuries ago humanity lacked the capability to go up against forest fires at any significant scale. And so, they burned and burned and burned. And, over tens of thousands of years, they regularly produced a 100 ppm increase in CO2 concentration.

And yet, this does not answer the question. Right? How did we do it so quickly?

Again, simple: We burned entire forests (and more) at a rate never before seen in the history of this planet. Except, this time, the forests came in the form of highly dense oil, petroleum. Petroleum is the result of millions of years of brewing dead plants, dead animals and other chemicals with an unimaginable amount of energy. The same is true of coal, peat and natural gas.

When we burn a gallon of oil we are, in effect burning an end product that is the result of compacting millions of trees and other biomass into the thick black good.

We were able to do in a few hundred years what it would normally take nature a lot longer. In fact, without us burning "forests" this way, it would have taken nature about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

OK, then, why can't we reverse it just as fast then?

For one thing, Conservation of Energy and the realities of the task at hand.

Simple thought experiment:

You are on a spacecraft the size of a large modern warehouse, like a Home Depot. The idea is that there are no external inputs other than solar and other radiation. The air you have is it.

You make a pile of wood in the center of this space and light it up.

How much energy did it take you to start this fire? Very little. The energy it releases is in the wood. All you had to do is ignite it.

So now you have smoke, particulate matter and all kinds of gasses spreading all over your very large spacecraft. The particulate matter is coating everything. The gases are going everywhere.

You are now tasked with reversing your ecosystem to where it was before you burned the pile of wood.

Will it take more or less energy than that which the wood pile released when ignited?

More. A lot more. Ten times more. A hundred times more. A thousand times more. It is actually hard to even begin to calculate how much energy this cleansing this simple ecosystem would require. I can walk around your house spreading flour all over the place with very little effort. Removing that sugar requires far more energy and effort than what was expended causing the mess in the first place.

In super simple terms, that's the problem with CO2.

It is easy to create a mess by burning stuff. It takes no effort. If you light-up the entire Amazon forest and just let it burn you will generate more CO2 than likely generations of humans could possibly produce. Taking back that CO2, cleaning the mess, is a far more difficult, resource intensive task that requires an unimaginable amount of energy. To put it simply, it would likely be impossible.

So, no, my conclusion and the observations that led to this realization are not incongruent with how we contributed to the problem. It is really important to apply just a little bit of science to this before voicing opinion. If one is observant enough and understands natural processes, it really isn't that difficult to understand how we got here and the fact that we do not have the ability to get out. We have to live with it. Which is where we should be focusing, not on the "save the planet" bullshit that will lead to nothing good.

Please refer to my answer here, it addresses your question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28124035

I hope you understand that it is impossible to provide a full treatment of this subject in a single comment. The comment you replied to did not answer your question. Fair enough. Thanks for raising the question. I address it in the above-linked answer to someone else.

The TLDR is simple:

We were able to do this in a few hundred years because we burned fuels (oil, coal, peat, natural gas) far more dense than the historically natural source of atmospheric CO2 increases: Forests.

The amount of biomatter that goes into making just one gallon of oil is hard to imagine. In fact, it is hard to imagine the time scale, pressure, heat and energy that goes into the process. Plants, animals, insects, all type of biomatter compressed and mutated into a black goo.

We came about and started to burn this black goo at a massive scale. Far more so than the other major CO2 producer, forest fires. And so, yes, in a few years we were able to pump an incredible amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, far more so than the natural order of things is able to deal with. And so CO2 ppm concentration increased rapidly.

On an annual basis, forest fires contribute over 13 billion tonnes of carbon, which is more our industrial processes produce. So, yes, burning stuff is what makes CO2. That's how the planet did it when we were insignificant and that's how we did it when we started to use incredibly dense fuels and burning it.

It is critically important to understand scale here. The world consumes somewhere in the order of 40 billion barrels of oil per year. If you were to translate that in to the equivalent biomass that went into creating it the number would be like fully burning every forest on the planet many once a day every day of the year, if not more.

Why is it that we cannot fix it in 150 years?

Because that process is massively more difficult.

First, it cannot be done with less energy than that which created the problem in the first place. It will be some fraction of the energy content of 40 billion barrels of oil per year.

Where is this energy going to come from? Not solar. Not wind. No way. This has already been proven. I am happy to provide you with a paper that discusses this fallacy if you are willing to read it.

Second, simple common sense. Grab several bags of flour, walk around Home Depot and fling flour everywhere. Now the manager demands to remove what you introduced into their building, shelves, products, etc. You would need a thousand people to accomplish that in anywhere near the time it took you to create the mess in the first place. You would need to expend far more energy doing so. You would also need far more resources (bags, shovels, vacuum cleaners, brushes, etc.) than the bags the flour came out of.

In other words, cleaning a mess is far more difficult than creating it.

We cannot clean this mess.

We have to talk about living with it.

To that point. Do you own a CO2 meter? You don't? Buy one and walk around with it. I have several. You are going to be surprised by what you learn.

We are being told that the sky will fall if we reach ppm. Your home and office environments are likely somewhere in the 650 ppm range and have been so for years, decades. Inside your car, 1,000 ppm isn't out of the question (no, not breathing into the meter). My point is that humanity has been living in >600ppm environments for decades, maybe even centuries (where old living and working conditions cleaner than today?). Guess what? We have not turned to mush. Not even close. This sky-is-falling thing, once you start to get analytical and step away from the sales pitches quickly starts to look like a huge red herring to benefit business or political objectives. Get a CO2 meter and tell me I am wrong. I am not.

To understand this subject you have to be willing to do some work. You can't just repeat what you are being told. You have to think and, yes, do a little bit of high school math. It really isn't that hard to get there. We are being manipulated and lied to. We need to focus on living with this, not be delusional and think we can save the planet, that's preposterous.

BTW, vertical farming is likely the future of mass food production. Do you know what they do in vertical farms to promote plant growth? They bring in canisters of compressed CO2 and release it into the farm environment. It turns out plants eat CO2 and make, well, plant matter out of it (again, high school science). One could very well argue that an increase in atmospheric CO2 might bring with it a boost in global plant-based food production and help end hunger world wide.

You see, these things are not single variable problems or solutions. That's the main thing to focus on. There's always more to the story. Think.

Just to be clear water vapor capacity increases due to temperature, for example, relative humidity measures how much water vapor is in the air for a given temperature. Any sort of increase in temperature will increase water vapor.

Yes, CO2 raises the temperature, you get a massive increase in water vapor, which again, is a more potent ghg. Reversing that same amount of CO2 does not magically reverse all of that water vapor. This is the crux of the problem, why water vapor is now also a problem that needs to be addressed.