Re:Ask HN: How do you think mankind is going to 'solve' clim...
by hoodoof on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @08:24PM
(#14757841)
It won't.
Personal self interest, corporate self interest, arbitrary community group self interest, national self interest will never be able to put their self interest above that of the planet/civilization sufficiently to "fix" global warming, which BTW is probably too latee to fix anyway.
Re:Ask HN: How do you think mankind is going to 'solve' clim...
by abeTom on Thursday July 13, 2017 @02:34AM
(#14759187)
No chance whatsoever that the major industrial nations, developed and developing, will ever come to an agreement that they will actually implement. What ever they agree to will not be implemented. The problem is that it would destroy their economies and consequently, jobs.
Even if they would implement it, it is too far gone, I think. I'm sure that at some point clean energy tech will truly be viable but right now it is not capable of replacing fossil fuel in an economical manner. And I truly think that the damage(burning fossil fuel) already done up till now and the near future have hit the point at which its effects are not reversible as far as climate change is concerned.
At an intuitive or visceral level, people already know this is the case and they are just too afraid to admit it.
The only hope is to tackle the problem by removing carbon from the atmosphere by technological means.
Is technological development in the future capable of removing such an enormous volume of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? I hope so but really don't think so.
The problem is that millions of years of carbon being removed from the atmosphere and sequestered has been put back in the atmosphere in a hundred years. Only a process having exponentially greater impact than the one that put it in the ground would be able to stem the destructive changes we face. This technology would have to be developed in short order.
Personal self interest, corporate self interest, arbitrary community group self interest, national self interest will never be able to put their self interest above that of the planet/civilization sufficiently to "fix" global warming, which BTW is probably too latee to fix anyway.
It is a very grim future our children face.
Even if they would implement it, it is too far gone, I think. I'm sure that at some point clean energy tech will truly be viable but right now it is not capable of replacing fossil fuel in an economical manner. And I truly think that the damage(burning fossil fuel) already done up till now and the near future have hit the point at which its effects are not reversible as far as climate change is concerned.
At an intuitive or visceral level, people already know this is the case and they are just too afraid to admit it.
The only hope is to tackle the problem by removing carbon from the atmosphere by technological means. Is technological development in the future capable of removing such an enormous volume of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? I hope so but really don't think so.
The problem is that millions of years of carbon being removed from the atmosphere and sequestered has been put back in the atmosphere in a hundred years. Only a process having exponentially greater impact than the one that put it in the ground would be able to stem the destructive changes we face. This technology would have to be developed in short order.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rld0KDcan_w
A: Successfully.
B: Not.