Chloroquine, past and present

Re:Chloroquine, past and present by gpm on Friday March 20, 2020 @03:34PM (#22640801)

This isn't resetting the global warming clock. Atmospheric CO2 is still going up not down. It's a temporary and small reduction in CO2 output coupled with a much more severe and much longer term reduction in scientific output that might actually solve global warming, and a much longer term and much more severe economic recession that limits our options to (further) hurt the economy to switch to greener means of energy production.

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Re:Chloroquine, past and present by DataWorker on Friday March 20, 2020 @03:44PM (#22640919)

Agree. This will ultimately be horrible for the environment. Environmental regulations will fall by the wayside and look at the price of oil.

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Re:Chloroquine, past and present by wolco on Friday March 20, 2020 @06:43PM (#22642471)

Not sure you can have it both ways.

Either shutting down all Chinese factories for a period of time reduced CO2. Or they made no difference and we can run those factories without fear.

Wouldn't a global recession/depression reduce production?

Increased funding for scientific output or more climate models isn't going to make a difference. People have to buy and use less. You can't have it both ways here either.

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Re:Chloroquine, past and present by gpm on Friday March 20, 2020 @07:13PM (#22642694)

If we set the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 to 0, a far greater reduction than actually occurred, we would be pausing the clock on global warming, which is a very far cry from resetting the clock. Yes, the emissions reduction helped, but not a fraction as much as you claimed.

> Increased funding for scientific output or more climate models isn't going to make a difference. People have to buy and use less. You can't have it both ways here either.

The science I'm most interested in isn't climate models. It's better solar panels, or better wind turbines, or better batteries, or better fission reactors, or (useful) fusion reactors, or space based solar shades, or ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and so on.

People buying and using enough less unfortunately does not seem to be a realistic solution to the problem. People buying less might be able to delay us hitting disastrous amounts of warming by a few years, but that only buys us time for the above kinds of research.

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