Your analogy is exactly like saying that since the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Tunnel_State_Park took a million years to form, it's impossible for humanity to create 1000 foot tunnel in less than a million years.
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.
That is what you have done, as opposed to thousands of scientists and engineers and others that are applying a lot of science to this. Hence your generally poor conclusion from poor rigor and understanding.
There is no arguing that reducing and "fixing" anthropocentric climate change will require more energy expenditure than creating it in the first place. But that doesn't mean it is a priori impossible, and doesn't mean it will take 50,000 years to do so. This isn't a binary situation. It isn't "do nothing" or "repair all the damage done in a short amount of time". Those aren't the only options. This is hideously complex situation and problem and we likewise need a complex, multi-pronged approach going forward. CO2 reduction, mitigation, and fixation to start. Ecosystem collapse prevention and mitigation. Handling population. Massive education to handle people like you (and worse).
Just because we already have flour spread around the room, doesn't mean we can't clean it up, and certainly doesn't mean we should continue to spread more flour around the room (let alone at an increasing rate!)
For example:
We know that, if we all left the planet today it would take somewhere in the order of 50K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2. That is impossible to dispute. We have the data going back 800,000 years. In other words, we know how this planet, as a system without significant human input, behaves.
That rate of change corresponds to 0.002 ppm per year, or 1 ppm every 500 years, which might be easier to visualize.
What we have out there being pushed from every angle is that we can achieve a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 in, pick a number, 30 to 50 years.
OK. Let's take the longer timeline because it makes for easier math. 50 years for 100 ppm reduction in average atmospheric CO2 concentration.
That means we are claiming that we can achieve a rate of change that is ONE THOUSAND TIMES FASTER than if we all left the planet tomorrow.
Sorry, that is preposterous. It's silly without even doing any math. We are saying we can affect a planetary-scale metric at a rate that is 1000 times greater than if we were not around at all.
It is impossible.
One might say: Well, we added 100 ppm in just a few hundred years. Yes, of course, sure, but that is a very different process. You cannot compare burning millions of barrels of oil per day with what it would take to go and capture what that process produced and negate our influence. Physics just doesn't work that way.
Saying that thousands of scientists and engineers are working on this is also a misrepresentation. What people are working on is what governments and politics is funding. Nobody wants to stick their necks out because doing so would be career-ending. I mean, imagine someone in a funded research path coming out and basically saying that the entire narrative being pushed by our government is a fantasy. That's a sure way to go from scientist to full time Uber driver.
You need to understand that reality doesn't work in clear altruistic black and white terms. I mean, look at what happened with COVID and the vaccine and the craziness surrounding all of it. Science isn't this pure thing where the truth is always driving the narrative. There are people who realized how wrong they were about the vaccine in the hospital bed just days before they stopped breathing.
It is sometimes important to consider that you are not being told the truth. I don't mean this as a conspiracy or cover-up. Not at all. Things can derail simply because of the fact that, at the end of the day, money and power drives everything. If a university wants a hundred million dollar grant from politicians pushing the "sky is falling" narrative, they better fall in line. You won't find that in any contract, but it is very much a part of reality. In this way we have, sadly, corrupted science.
Don't take my word for it. Take the time to read this paper and then come back. Stop insulting me and using the "shoot the messenger" approach, this approach does not negate the validity or soundness of any of my arguments.
Read this. You will recognize the reputable source. Real science, not quackery. Then think about what you've been told and what you believe. Think about that this paper came out in 2014 and we have wasted at least that much time promoting absolute bullshit. Think about what we could have done instead.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
"Research by James Hansen shows that reducing global CO2 levels requires both a drastic cut in emissions and some way of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it."
CO2 does take a long time to get pulled out by natural processes. The paper you keep linking literally talks about needing to finds ways to pull it out via other methods. That's what we need to find.
You are saying, "nope, can't do it", a very black-and-white term you claim to avoid.
Let's assume absolutely everything I said is complete and utter nonsense. What is this article good for? Why am I bringing it up?
Because, for decades, we have been told that renewable energy is the secret to gaining control of atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change. We are STILL being told this is the case. We have thrown silly amounts of money at it based on this "truth" parroted by anyone and everyone who bought the hook, line and sinker.
And yet, at least since 2014, we have known that this is completely false. Quoting:
"Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use.
So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.
Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"
That's the conclusion. That's where they stopped. The business that is magic pixie dust is the next step, carbon sequestration. Their research, and this paper, did not go into that part of it.
In other words, to paraphrase, they said "We can't fix it unless we can go out and grab the carbon out of the atmosphere".
When I read that, years ago, I went into a mode any good engineer knows well: Problem solving. The revelation was that the "save the planet with renewable energy" plan was nothing but lies. That was shocking to me. I installed a 13 kW solar array on my property thinking that I was going to be part of a solution. It turned out to be a shocking lie.
And so, I started to dig. And dig I did, for over a year. I can't possibly lay out everything in detail here, I've been thinking of organizing it and putting it up on a website. And this isn't pull-out-of-my-ass conclusions. Math, physics, chemistry, science, reliable data from the most reliable universities, government organizations and researchers.
The problem is that everyone is on the bandwagon.
Anyone who took basic college physics can understand that what we are being sold is complete and utter nonsense. Thinking we can control the planet is hubris at best, a delusion. We can muck it up, sure, but going into the atmosphere to capture CO2 at a planetary scale to do in 50 years when powerful natural processes require a thousand times more is just silly.
And yes, I am saying, no, it can't be done. I have seen nothing that suggests this is possible. Not even remotely. And everyone who argues with me will spend time on personal attacks and very conveniently ignores the science. I have yet to run into someone who can present a single viable technique or technology, along with the science and math to support it, that can "save the planet". When you look at these "solution" as an engineer what you discover, 100% of the time, is that the scale and breath of resources and energy they would require could very well dwarf all the energy we produce on the planet. You generally discover these "solutions" will require burning so much fuel that we would likely double our CO2 output trying to fix the problem. In other words, the very definition of an exercise in futility. Chemical solutions require destroying entire ecosystems to mine pixie dust that has to be processed, transported and then distributed at a planetary scale. Please. This is ridiculous.
And then there's the doomsday scenarios. The planet isn't going anywhere. The planet knows how to fix balance things, it has been doing that for billions of years. We need to stop talking about saving it and start talking about adapting to it.
Not to go too far, here in California we are dealing with an absolutely massive forest fire. If I read correctly, it is the largest fire ever recorded in this state (or something like that). The carbon output of this fire alone is likely to exceed all emissions of all ground transportation in the US for the entire year.
And we think we can control the planet? C'mon.
One of the solutions that has been proposed is massive reforestation. Plant billions, trillions of trees. Let's ignore the energy and resource analysis for a moment (this would require burning massive amounts of fuel as well as equally massive amounts of water, nutrients, etc.). Yes, trees take CO2 and make tree parts out of it. Sounds like a great idea. Not a new idea at all, this is precisely what one of the ways the planet reacts to increased CO2. We would be doing more of it.
What's the problem?
Imagine we had a billion new trees in California (no sure that's possible). What you would have would be a billion more fuel sticks. And, probabilistically speaking, a far greater possibility of an hellish fire we cannot even imagine. We could wake up, twenty years from now, proud of having a billion new trees, only to live the reality of having created a horrific ecological disaster for having the hubris to think we can actually control the environment to our liking.
If I were to summarize my intent in wanting to have this conversation it is that we need to start talking about the reality of this problem rather than fantastic pixie-dust solutions. Only when we do that will we create an environment where it could just be possible to gain the understanding necessary to benefit both the planet and humanity. We are just passengers on this spacecraft. We just shit all over it. Sadly cleaning it isn't going to be that simple. And the nonsense we are talking about --like the idea that renewable energy will stop global warming, hence referencing the paper-- is between lies and pointless. We need to release our scientists from political pressure and start talking about the real problem we are facing.
If you read this paper when it came out and did not immediately understand we have been lied to mercilessly, well, I can only conclude you didn't in fact read it or you chose to read into it a conclusion that does not exist.
Planting trees is just the first step, the second is to use them to keep their carbon locked away, because whether they burn or rot they put their carbon back in the atmosphere unless we do something to prevent that. Build with wood, build lots of things with wood! And then plant more!
The problems are insanely difficult, and that's why we've been screaming for decades to start doing something. I'm glad you, at least, have finally listened. Of course, you came to the opposite conclusion of "oh well, nothing to be done!"
And if society collapses, it's likely nothing remotely as advanced could ever be created again because we've used up all the cheap fossil fuels: https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation...
And yet we keep talking about solar panels and wind.
> A switch to renewables isn't fixing anything, it is merely stopping even worse damage, and giving us a way to have energy that doesn't increase carbon.
No. That is precisely the point. The Google researchers went into their project CONVINCED of what you just said and came out of it shocked when they realized they were 100% wrong.
The conclusion was that, even if we use the most optimal forms of renewable energy (something that is likely ten years away, BTW) at a global scale, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, it will continue to rise exponentially.
Again (not yelling, just emphasis):
IF WE COVER THE WORLD WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES AND STOP USING FOSSIL SOURCES ATMOSPHERIC CO2 WILL CONTINUE TO RISE EXPONENTIALLY.
This is a massive finding. And one that is being summarily ignored by politicians and anyone pushing fake solutions.
Look, I am not saying that we should not cleanup our act. We definitely have to. All I am saying is that we should not lie about why we should do this. After all, I installed a 13 kW solar array and will likely expand it to 20 kW next year, with capacity for more beyond that. I will, once more options become available and it makes sense, switch to electric vehicles.
So, yes, we should be cleaner. Yet, we need to understand that this is not going to save the planet. It isn't even going to dent the rate of atmospheric CO2 growth.
> Civilization is going to struggle this century, how bad it is depends on the solutions we can figure out.
I'll argue humanity might struggle with this for centuries. If I am right in my conclusion that it is impossible to bend down the the rate of change of atmospheric CO2 much below the natural "no humans on earth" scenario, well, it's 1 ppm every 500 years or so --only if we all leave the planet.
That's the key value of the analysis I did on historical ice core data. It reveals the planet can, at best, bring it down 1 ppm every 500 years if, and only if, we are not burning a hundred million barrels of oil per day worldwide (roughly what we consume). That's what I mean by "a time when humanity was not significant". During those 800,000 years humans on earth did not number in the billions and we certainly did not burn 100M barrels of oil or anything equivalent to that each and every day.
And so, any purported solution must explain and prove how it will push down the curve, the slope, from 1 ppm in 500 years to 100 ppm in 50 years. A factor of a thousand. And, one must not forget, the scale is planetary. It is easy to conduct experiments in a lab or warehouse and achieve results. Quite a different scenario when these experiments have contact with reality.
> The problems are insanely difficult
Yes!
> that's why we've been screaming for decades to start doing something.
Yes! And at least since the Google paper we have known we have been screaming about a false solution. If we invested trillions of dollars on renewables the Titanic would still sink. That's my point. We have been having the wrong conversation.
> I'm glad you, at least, have finally listened. Of course, you came to the opposite conclusion of "oh well, nothing to be done!"
I think you are completely misinterpreting my conclusion and my intent. Also my position on this.
This last statement makes it sound like I was a denier and I finally listened. Not so at all. I was pushing the same kinds of agendas as most until the Google paper compelled me to devote over a year to reading piles of papers and actually doing the math to verify claims.
This did not turn me into a climate change denier. That would be impossible. My life is about science and engineering. The data clearly shows what's going on.
I am NOT saying "oh well, nothing to be done!". I don't think you'll find one quotable sentence where I say this.
I am saying we can't do anything about the rate of change, bending the curve, if you will. We do not have the technology, energy and resources to affect a thousand-fold improvement in rate of change (from 1 ppm in 500 years to 100 ppm in 50 years).
I am also saying we need to stop wasting time and money on fake solutions. We could bankrupt our nation or multiple nations going after full-out renewable energy everywhere and we would, most definitely, come out of the other side of that with a collective "Oh, shit! What have we done!" as we discover that atmospheric CO2 continues to rise exponentially and we blew our resources --and decades-- on a non-solution.
I am saying we need to start having the right conversation. Part of which must include the idea that it is delusional to think we are going to have control of a planetary scale problem on anything even close to a human time scale. We made a mess. It will take a massive amount of time to clean it.
This isn't about denying climate change or proposing we do nothing. This is about desperately wanting to start having the right conversation because the one we are having is based on a delusion.
Here's what I don't know (and hope to be true): If we stopped the delusion and threw our resources at research aimed at coming up with a viable carbon capture technology --I mean billions of dollars. Could we come up with something that help? It this even possible?
There's some basic science and math that can be applied to proving whether or not this is even realistically possible or attainable. I keep referring to the principle of conservation of energy because it is the single most "lets get real" heartless lesson in Physics.
<split due to length>
Have you done the math on what this actually means as a process? What I mean by this are things like:
- How many trees do we need to actually make a difference?
- It is even possible to plant these many trees?
- How much does the forest fire risk increase if we were to plant that many trees?
- What would be the consequences of adding fuel to the existing forest population?
- How much fuel do we need to burn plant trees?
- How much fuel do we need to support and maintain these new forests as they grow?
- How much fuel do we need to burn to make sure the forests don't burn?
- How much carbon do we produce when we harvest?
- How much carbon do we produce when we process the lumber (not a trivial amount, BTW)?
- How much carbon do we produce in all of the ancillary processes (manufacturing nails, brackets, etc.)?
- How much carbon do we produce building stuff from wood?
- What are the ecosystem effects of all of the above, to include other flora and fauna?
- etc?
That's what I mean when I ask if it is even possible. We don't need to dump trillions of dollars into something to determine if it is possible. We know enough science to be able to estimate basic outcomes. We don't need calculations that are correct within 5% to confirm if something works.
What I would want to see is something that, for example, can capture twice as much carbon as the solutions entire process will produce. We can't make anything without producing carbon and other substances, so that's inescapable. The process, then, has to capture its own "new" carbon and, at the same time, double that in order to actually claim to make a dent on the 1 ppm / 500 year natural rate of change. If it only captures 10% more than it produces it isn't a solution at all in that this will not even dent the 1 ppm/500 year slope. A forest fire alone can take out the effect of a 10% solution.
That is a very difficult hurdle. And, as far as I know, nobody has shown this to be possible.
I don't know the answers. I do not claim to know them. All I am saying is the emperor has no clothes and we are delusional. We need to start talking about reality and hold everyone accountable.
What we are doing is almost the equivalent of saying we can take a bus full of people from Los Angeles to New York City on a single 20 gallon tank of gas without refueling. Everyone gets on the bus and nobody bothers to ask anyone to do the math and prove this to be possible. And 200 miles later everyone learns they have to walk home.
So, no it isn't "oh well, nothing to be done!". It's "WAKE THE FUCK UP! WE ARE NOT HAVING THE RIGHT DISCUSSIONS AT ALL! THIS IS DELUSIONAL. WE ARE ON THE WRONG PATH!". Yes, in that case I would be yelling.
I don't think we are too far apart. I have a feeling you might understand where I am coming from if you took the time to fire-up Excel and do the math --as I have-- on various purported solutions. Things break down very quickly once to demand solutions that actually pass the laws of physics.
For example, replacing our entire fleet of vehicles with electrics sounds wonderful...until you run the numbers for the entire process and realize we need to build somewhere between 50 to hundreds of 1 GW class nuclear power plants to be able to do this. And, if we don't go nuclear, the CO2 we would produce to power these cars might be shocking.
I appreciate the conversation. And, despite what it might sound like at times, I do want to be challenged. What I hate are personal attacks, which is what happens most of the time in these threads. Attackers don't do a single bit of reading, math and expend no effort to understand. Their world view on this subject amounts to just repeating the mantra rather than someone like me, who devoted over a year to actually trying to understand. In that sense they are purely religious believers, drones, if you will. And deniers? They are the worst. They truly have no clue and refuse to learn anything at all.
What I would LOVE is for someone to show me what I am missing and how I am wrong with math and physics. I truly want to understand what I might be missing. We already know that the renewable story is delusional. Fine. How about the other stuff? Am I wrong? How? Please! I want to know. No hand-wavy stuff. Science. Math. Physics. This has never happened in the many years I have been having these conversations. I have had private discussions with PhD-level scientists in Physics and other disciplines, who, after reflection, end-up having the same questions I have. The most fundamental one being: Why are we doing this? Have we gone mad?
You keep saying "Why are we doing this?" I guess I don't understand what "this" is. You sound like you are being nihilistic.
The problem isn't "lets drive across the US on 20 gallons of gas", but rather "lets get across the US somehow". The math is brutal, yep, that's what we've been saying for decades. I happen to like civilization (mostly!), so I think I want to try to save it somehow.
Switching to zero emissions doesn't fix it, it stops the blood loss, but we still have the massive wound to deal with.
Trees can help (better than we thought, too: https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2021/08/09/planting-f... )
But it will take more. Glad you have caught up to the reality of the situation.
> You keep saying "Why are we doing this?" I guess I don't understand what "this" is.
"This" is many things. The simplest of which is an almost religious attachment to renewable energy as a savior. That is the way it is being sold. The mantra is that we need to switch to renewables as far and wide as possible and as quickly as possible to "save the planet".
So, yeah, why are we doing this when we know it will do absolutely nothing. It's a waste of money, time and resources.
I have no problem with pushing renewables to cleanup our act. Claiming that this will save the planet --which is how this is being sold-- is delusional at best.
> The problem isn't "lets drive across the US on 20 gallons of gas"
No, it is. Because when you do the math and check the purported solutions to see if they pass physics, what you discover it that they are ALL the equivalent of claiming we can drive a bus across the US with only 20 gallons in the tank.
That's the problem. That's another one of the meanings of "this". We are accepting lies as facts. We are making big decisions without demanding that the numbers pass basic process scrutiny. This --that-- is a problem.
> I happen to like civilization (mostly!), so I think I want to try to save it somehow.
Well, then demand that we stop focusing on the wrong thing. You are doing it yourself. You said:
> Switching to zero emissions doesn't fix it, it stops the blood loss
No, it does not. Not even close. When you look at the problem from a larger perspective you quickly realize these single variable "solutions" are false.
I am assuming you are speaking of vehicles, if you mean everything, even industrial processes, well, if there is such a thing as "more impossible" then that is "more impossible".
That's the problem. We are reducing everything to single variable magical solutions when reality is a complex multivariate problem.
Take a moment to list everything that has to happen to switch to zero emissions and quantify it all to the extent possible.
Then go back to my very original observation and answer the simplest question I asked:
How is going to zero emissions --which is impossible-- better than humanity leaving the planet today?
Any solution has to be OVER A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER than humanity leaving the planet. We know this. The natural rate of change is 1 ppm in 500 years. If we want to fix it in 50 years you have to be 1000 times better (actually, far more than that).
The problem keeps coming back to a very uncomfortable baseline. It's like Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. It takes a certain amount of energy to break away from earth's gravitational pull with a rocket. That's the baseline. Any solution that claims to be able to do it faster (in a rocket) either uses insanely more energy or is impossible (I also work in aerospace, helped get astronauts to the International Space Station and, with some luck, will have hardware on the moon in a few years --so, yeah, math and physics are kind of what I do). The baseline when it comes to atmospheric CO2 concentration the no-humans-on-earth scenarios. Anything that claims to be able to do better than that has to answer serious questions and show the math and physics will work on a planetary scale.
I don't know what your background might be. Maybe what I am saying is difficult to process because of this. Not a dig. I just don't know where you are coming from and if things like "Conservation of Energy" mean anything to you at all beyond a google search. I am trying to keep it super simple because I can't make the assumption that readers have the scientific background required for a different approach.
This one is current. It points to the dangers of massive reforestation and, in many ways, the hubris of thinking we can actually control (reduce) atmospheric CO2 concentration in anything approaching a human time scale:
This one is about reforestation:
https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-clim...
As is often the case, researchers stop at the "Bingo!" moment and do not go further to analyze the process as I have delineated in my prior comment.
So, one trillion trees minimum. OK. What does that look like as a process. What happens when a billion trees burn (not "if")? Etc.
On the CO2 impact of forest fires:
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/off-the-chart-co2-from-cal...
And then there's the world of coal seam fires:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
I believe the longest one in the US has been burning continuously for 50 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
These things exist world-wide:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/52869/5-places-are-still...
And it gets worse:
https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-oldest-underground-fire-has-b...
From the article:
"At Germany's Brennender Berg—literally "Burning Mountain" in German—the coal has been on fire since 1688. "
1688.
It is said that Chinese seam fires alone contribute over 1% of the total annual atmospheric CO2 generated.
This points to the hubris and danger of thinking we can actually control something at a planetary scale. Can you imagine if we planted a trillion trees and accidentally created more fires? Think back to my "if we left earth" observation.
I have looked at this from every angle, scientifically, not hand-wavy crap. I have a lot more than what can possibly be communicated in comments on HN. I should organize it and publish it on a website so it can be challenged by anyone who might care to do so.
This is not a single variable problem. "Magic pixie dust -> Less CO2" is the usual type of "solution" we are given and nobody bothers to ask about the other hundred or thousand variables that remain without published analysis. And yet everyone gets behind the pixie dust.
As you said. Not a simple problem at all. The sooner we start talking about this in real terms the better.
2. Humans are incapable of fundamentally altering the climate on any significant scale compared to natural processes.
Pick one.
Yes, feedbacks can outpace what we're already emitting. Yes, we're in a dire situation that is going to take radical innovation and a huge surplus of zero carbon energy to basically reverse the exothermic process we used to burn millions of years of stored carbon with an endothermic process to draw it back down. But this doomer stuff isn't helpful. Anything we do to mitigate the rise of greenhouse gases, even if it is not a complete reversal (that's pretty much off the table) will give us time to innovate and change the outcome from extinction-level catastrophic to merely a drastic change in our way of life. Every bit counts. Trees, BECCs, direct air carbon capture, lowering emissions, albedo alteration, etc. The sad thing is I don't think you've researched that thoroughly, you're only got the parade of some scary facts. Indulging in overwhelming doom is just another emotional coping strategy to avoid responsibility, the same as outright denial.
We shouldn't do this, but humans can certainly do things much faster than "leave the earth alone for 50k years"
Who's talking about global warming? This is about atmospheric CO2 concentration. It is related, yes, but reality isn't a single variable problem.
Stop global warming using a nuclear winter? Sure, that's a solution. And kill everything on the planet in the process. Brilliant.
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 <pick a number> 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.
1. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanishing-...
2. https://bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...
I really don't know where to go with your comment. You misrepresent everything I said and make claims that could only have come from a superficial google search and equally superficial reading.
Prime example, the second paper you link states, quoting:
"Most plants generally benefit from elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration through the “CO2 fertilization effect”, which boosts growth and yield [19, 23, 46, 52]. However, this positive CO2 fertilization effect strongly depends on the plant functional groups and species [7, 22, 53,54,55,56]. Even within the same species of winter wheat, the results from previous studies are inconsistent [22, 50, 57,58,59,60]. These contradictory results suggest that different plants and/or species may have different optimal CO2 concentrations for their growth.
Our results showed that the optimal CO2 concentrations occurred at 945, 915, and 1151 ppm for the aboveground biomass and at 915, 1178, and 1386 ppm for the total biomass of tall fescue, perennial ryegrass, and Kentucky bluegrass (Fig. 1), suggesting that a strong CO2 fertilization effect occurred at different optimal CO2 concentrations for these three perennial grasses."
They found optimal CO2 concentrations that are easily twice our current average atmospheric CO2 concentration. Your own link.
This is why massive indoor farms use CO2 injection.
> Vertical farms are not cost effective compared to many, many other options.
You clearly are not informed. Among other things, I have been developing technology for indoor farming, or more accurately, CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture). I have many friends who own and run various kinds of CEA facilities. No, not everyone is growing weed. For example, one of my good friends runs one of the most successful indoor farm operations in Asia. We also have relationships in the Middle East, where certain geographies are absolutely hostile to growing food and indoor farming is the only path to food independence. During the pandemic countries like Singapore quickly discovered their dependence on the outside world for food was extreme, they quickly set national objectives to use technologies such as CEA to become far more independent.
Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about.
1. Slow carbon emissions now despite the incredible amount we've already added and hope that the damage we've done is not enough to completely ruin the planet.
2. Do nothing and let emissions accelerate even further, create an even bigger problem than we've already created. Gamble to an even greater extent with our future.
Where in your incredibly long essay have you provided any reason to believe option 2 is better than option 1?
As far as I can tell, all you've done is prove we can't get back to pre-industrial levels quickly just by stopping emissions today. So what?
Who ever said the goal was to get back to pre-industrial levels? I think all climate science believers aim to do is reduce the extent of this incredible gamble and unintended experiment humanity has undertaken. Instead of gambling on a 1% odds of survival slot machine, climate scientists want to slow down and gamble on a 10% odds of survival slot machine. No one ever said we could move that probability back to 100% odds of survival slot machine.
To me your post comes across like someone on the Titanic saying 'Hey guys, we've looked at the data and situation, stop thinking these 20 lifeboats will be able to rescue us. Just give up.' when there are some people arguing that the ship isn't sinking at all, and others trying to quickly come up with ways to create more impromptu lifeboats, trying to figure out how to stop the ship from sinking, or trying to urge those that they can to get in the lifeboats, despite the fact some will still die. At the end of the day your post just encourages those who don't think the ship is sinking or those that think there's no point to try getting in a lifeboat or creating a new one out of furniture to just go back down below deck and listen to the violinists for another hour before drowning.
First of all, where did I ever claim we need to get back to pre-industrial levels? Please don't put words in my mouth. The consensus seems to be that the objective should be a 100 ppm reduction from --roughly-- current levels. That will take 50,000 years, give or take a few tens of thousands of years. We can't fix it. Why? Because we can't fix it faster than leaving the planet. Any other imaginary 50-year solution will require planetary scale energy and resources we do not have. We are far more likely to kill all life on earth by trying some dumb "save the planet" solution than to fix a thing.
> Do nothing and let emissions accelerate even further, create an even bigger problem than we've already created. Gamble to an even greater extent with our future.
OK, how about not taking my word for it. Please read this paper. Really read it. Then come back to your statement.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I won't ruin the conclusion for you. I give huge credit to these researchers for daring to speak the truth. They actually say they went into this to prove, once and for all, to the entire world, that their renewable energy vision --one shared and still promoted globally-- was our savior. What they discovered is interesting and very much parallels my conclusion, yet they come at it from a very different perspective. If you are honestly open-minded and want to understand the subject, this is your starting point. This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what's going on. Read it and come back to me.
> To me your post comes across like someone on the Titanic saying 'Hey guys, we've looked at the data and situation, stop thinking these 20 lifeboats will be able to rescue us. Just give up.'
Exactly the opposite. I am the guy saying: We can't save everyone. We don't have enough boats. We need to figure out if we can build more.
What zealots are saying is: We can save the Titanic with this magical cork.
That's the difference.
Read the paper. Please. It's from a very reputable source you will recognize and respect. No quackery. Real science.
We need to build more boats and stop this nonsense about saving the Titanic.
Getting people behind goals with long timelines is pretty much impossible. As you said, the pandemic demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) how we behave and think.
> Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology
No. Sorry. You are buying into propaganda.
Put simply: We (humanity) cannot do a thing about atmospheric CO2 concentration.
This is a planetary-scale problem requiring resources and energy over tens of thousands of years, not a few dozen. It is unreasonable to think we can actually affect a planetary-scale problem in anything approaching a human time scale. Yet this is exactly what we are being sold. We are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to fix atmospheric CO2 concentration.
This is NOT a guess on my part. This conclusion is well supported by data going back 800,000 years. The science is there and this conclusion has already been reached. The problem is that the issue of climate change has been politicized to the point where --much as is the case with certain aspects of the pandemic-- the scientific truth does not matter.
Most intelligent people with a modicum of science coursework are perfectly equipped to understand this conclusion. The problem is in pulling people away from what has effectively become indoctrination to have them take a few minutes to actually exercise critical thinking.
What if I told you a high school kid with basic math skill could understand this conclusion?
How many of those reading this would be open-minded enough to say: "OK. Show me. I am willing to do the work in the interest of learning if what I am have been led to believe is wrong.". In my experience people would rather stick to their beliefs, punitively issue a down-vote and move on rather than understand. In this way one is no different from anti-vaxers.
OK, so a few of you are interested in confirming this claim. Good news. It's easy.
Here's the first and simplest claim to confirm:
If all of humanity left the planet today and all of our technology was shutdown, it would take somewhere in the order of 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop 100 ppm.
How do you confirm this?
What if we had atmospheric CO2 data from before humanity industrialized to the point of being relevant?
We do! We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric CO2 data extracted from ice core samples. Here it is:
Here's that graph:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
And the data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
You then fit straight lines to the graph in order to determine the rate of change of both atmospheric CO2 accumulation and decline. Here are my lines for the decline portion of the data:
https://imgur.com/37AKa8L
Looking at it in rough strokes, it looks like it took, on average, somewhere around 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and, say, 50,000 years for a corresponding 100 ppm decrease. In some cases it took twice that time, I am just trying to generalize.
The planet did this entirely on its own...because we were not around or we were insignificant during this time period.
This is extremely valuable data and an equally valuable conclusion because it establishes an important baseline:
BASELINE: If humanity LEFT THE PLANET tomorrow, it would take about 50,000 years for a reduction of about 100 ppm in atmospheric CO2.
I'll repeat that: If we left the planet and all of our technology was shut down, you are looking at a minimum of 50,000 years for a meaningful "save the planet" change in CO2 concentration.
At this point the question becomes glaringly obvious:
How does anything LESS than leaving the planet even make a dent on CO2 at a human time scale?
Because of the baseline revealed by this data we know, without any doubt, that anything less than leaving the planet cannot possibly delivery a faster rate of change, a faster decline than 100 ppm in 50,000 years. It's a planetary-scale problem that requires planetary-scale time.
Any solution proposed by anyone must pass the simplest test: How is that more than humanity leaving the planet?
Solar panels all over the planet? How is that MORE than leaving the planet?
A billion electric vehicles? Same question.
No more fossil fuels? Nope.
In fact, Google Research boldly set out to show the world that a full migration to renewable energy sources could address the issue. To their credit, when they discovered just how wrong they were, they published the data. In this charged environment these researchers deserve a ton of respect. They went in --and say so themselves-- with a position of believing that renewables could save the planet. What they discovered instead was precisely what I understood through the simple exercise on this graph, that this is an impossibility. Their methodology was different from mine, the result was the same.
Here's that paper, it is well worth reading:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
From the paper:
"we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope"
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work"
"if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal"
"<snip> to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use."
"Suppose for a moment that <snip> we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants <snip> Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"
Well worth reading. Like I said, these guys deserve a ton of respect for effectively saying "we were wrong, and here's why".
Why aren't we talking about this AT ALL?
This is reality. Not what we are being told by politicians and zealots.
Climate change has become a religion or a cult and science has been left far behind. Here are two ways to come to the same general conclusion. One uses a super-simple look at 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data. The other took a detailed look at mathematical climate and other models. The conclusion was the same: We can cover the planet with renewable energy sources and do NOTHING to atmospheric CO2, or worse.
I've been trying to elevate this to some level of consciousness here on HN any time the topic comes-up. It is often met with a pile of downvotes and attacks. Because, of course, they "know", even though none of the detractors bothered to devote even 1% of the time I have trying to understand reality in a sea of nonsense.
Frankly, I am not sure what else to do. In this charged political climate it is actually dangerous to stick your neck out too far. I am not denying climate change, I am simply saying "the emperor has no clothes" to all the nonsense we seem to be told to focus on.
I think we need to learn to live with whatever is coming. We can't do a thing about it. New industries will sprout to help us manage it. The planet will deal (and is dealing) with CO2 as it has for millions of years.
And that's the other set of questions that the graphs and some research can answer:
How did CO2 increase when humanity was not around to muck it up?
Continental scale forest fires burning for 25,000 years as well as other sources of CO2. The fires in CA right now are contributing more CO2 than (informed conjecture) the entire fleet of internal combustion vehicles in California, if not the country. It is hubris to think we can counter this and "save the planet". Truly laughable in some sense.
How did the planet bring it down?
Rain, storms, cyclones, hurricanes, and the regrowth of vegetation over 50,000+ years.
So, we have to learn to deal with changing weather patterns and perhaps start helping the planet a tiny bit by planting trees. Judiciously though, because more trees could also mean more fuel to burn. In other words, we could, if not careful, actually increase CO2 if we plant a billion trees and create the conditions for the mother of all forest fires.
Please push for promoting an understanding of the reality we are living rather than a the fantasy of thinking we can actually affect planetary-scale problems. We need to apply our minds, investment and effort towards transitioning into a high CO2 future rather than a fantasy that says we can control how an entire planetary ecosystem works in 50 years. It would be like believing we can "install" an atmosphere on Mars in 50 years. Yeah. Pretty crazy if you ask me.