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A comment on Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022. Parent comment

Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by chinathrow on Thursday August 27, 2026 @04:47AM (#49461742)
By the amount of (some of it useless) tech we've come to build in the last 3 decades, we should have arrived at the stage where we can collectively control the CO2 levels in our atmosphere, by now. For ever.

We failed.

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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by sfn42 on Thursday August 27, 2026 @06:57AM (#49462756)
We can increase them, it's just really hard to decrease them which is why scientists have been telling us to stop increasing the CO2 levels for about a century.
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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by srean on Thursday August 27, 2026 @08:24AM (#49463652)
Indeed.

Cutting down on annual emissions will not be accompanied by reduction in atmospheric CO2, unless the current rate of emission is lower than that of natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere.

That's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, despite cuts, if the cuts at global scale are at all real.

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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by wafflemaker on Thursday August 27, 2026 @09:25AM (#49464582)
It's not hard, it just takes a lot of energy.

Enough cheap energy (that doesn't produce CO2) and some incentive and you could have CO2 slowly removed.

Like in Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez.

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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by ghosty141 on Thursday August 27, 2026 @09:51AM (#49464921)
Trees are that and they don't even need human intervention.
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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by lbriner on Thursday August 27, 2026 @11:09AM (#49466131)
And we can't even manage to plant those in most countries!
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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by sfn42 on Friday August 28, 2026 @01:56AM (#49474846)
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-many-new-trees-would-we-...
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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by lovich on Thursday August 27, 2026 @10:08AM (#49465171)
There’s some projects trying to figure out carbon capture that’s net negative for co2 emissions like Vesta[1], but yea, we haven’t done nearly enough.

[1] https://www.vesta.earth/science#Duck-Pilot

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Re:Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundar... by sfn42 on Thursday August 27, 2026 @03:49PM (#49470248)
It does not just take a lot of energy. If we got unlimited free energy today it would take decades if not centuries to build enough carbon capture facilities to just remove as much CO2 as we're producing.

Of course the free energy would instantly allow us to eliminate a huge amount of emissions but that's not really relevant to the point. All the concrete for the tens of thousands of facilities would add up a good amount of additional CO2 to scrub as well.

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