Has anyone looked into the theory that SO2 is an "anti-greenhouse" gas and that much of the greenhouse effects of CO2 have been negated by SO2. Essentially SO2 particles stay in the air for a long time and reflects a large spectrum of light so it fails to be absorbed by land or sea/converted to infrared (infrared is primarily what the CO2 reflects).
Recently (since 2010ish but moreso since 2020 in shipping) there has been a global effort to reduce SO2 emissions (eg by installing scrubbers) which has caused the CO2 increase over the last 150 years to actually "take effect" since the SO2 is no longer negating the effects.
I stumbled upon this theory recently and it sounds compelling but am curious if better informed people could shine a light about this.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it is the most-researched solar geoengineering method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5 °C”
There’s a risk it’d affect the ozone layer. But Paul Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize for his ozone research in 95, said the sulfur plan is “the only option available to rapidly reduce temp rises and counteract other climactic effects”.
We’d also need to add shockingly little SO2 to the stratosphere. We currently emit 200m tons per year (25% is humans, rest is volcanos and other natural sources). We’d need to add an extra 100k per year.
Edit: I think one of the Microsoft co-founders was looking into it, the problems of proving it would work were political - not engineering-related.
It always strikes me as odd that the geoengineering experiment that got us into the predicament (dumping boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere), the politics were so much easier.
I've generally come to the belief that it's related to how humans think about cause and effect.
Dumping boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere is second order from the actual goal of producing electricity so most people just can't/don't/won't think about it.
In this case we'd be intentionally dumping SO2 so people are capable of thinking "wow that's not moral" or whatever issue they might have with it.
I think the biggest concern with something like releasing SO2 as a geoengineering project, which needs, quoting someone else in the thread "very little" to be released to have a big effect, the concern is over-correction or unforeseen effects caused by an insufficient understanding of the system as a whole.
Don't want to accidentally start an ice age by trying to prevent a hothouse planet from forming :P
And we want to stop releasing CO2. We don't want to wind up charging onwards to 1,000 ppm CO2 just because we released enough SO2 to compensate for the climate change.
Eh, don't worry, the rich among us will bottle up the 'good' air and, well, just watch the clip from the documentary "Spaceballs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz0xULQIaSU
The current predicament we are in was not produced by a deliberate attempt at global geoengineering. It was a global economic project with a byproduct of climate change.
I'd say that we need to discover a source of energy that produces SO2 as a byproduct, but given our species' track record we would probably trigger an ice-age in a few decades.
Or maybe if some billionaire could figure out a way for their space-tourism project to “accidentally” produce SO2, then we’d give them the moral mulligan.
It'd be a smaller amount that gets injected into the stratosphere, as opposed to what we normally release into the troposphere. A quick skim of the wikipedia link seems to suggest 5M tons in total, not sure what the annualized basis would be.
That's a tiny amount, relatively. But is that "just a little more" or is it "just a little more, but in a really inconvenient and difficult to reach altitude"?
What kind of infrastructure would be required to put it where it needs to go?
You would need a few pipes the width of garden hoses constantly flowing, suspended by helium balloons, near the Arctic where the stratosphere is 1km closer.
I think putting any amount of tons of matter into stratospheric altitude is a hard challenge.
Especially if we consider the fact that you would be putting upwards of 200t[0] of CO2 into roughly the same altitude Only to deliver maybe 5 tons of sulfur.
> To achieve a 2 °C result, the plan would inject 6.7 teragrams (6.7 billion kg/14.8 billion lb) of sulfur dioxide per year into each pole, calling for an eye-watering total of 13.4 teragrams (29.5 billion lb) of material annually.
>The study goes on to look at logistics, finding that existing aircraft can't carry enough payload to a sufficient height to get the job done... To hit the cooling target, this project would need 125 purpose-built SAIL-43Ks, flying a total of 1,458 missions per day during the four-month injection period at each pole. These planes would take off, climb for 30 minutes, vent their entire load of sulfur dioxide within two minutes, then come back down over the following 30 minutes, and spend the next hour loading up again and refueling for the next mission.
> All sulfur oxides are nasty to breathe in, harming the lungs and causing asthma and bronchitis if inhaled regularly... It notes that the effects of teragrams of sulfur dioxide and the associated acid rain deposits are risky both to humans and to the wider ecosystem, requiring lots more research. And it expects some stratospheric heating as well.
So yeah, we could. It would be expensive (but not $trillions), and the environmental effects would be horrific.
And yet its still being proposed, because that's how desperate we are.
Delivering the SO2 directly to the stratosphere needs some new tech to be developed.
Assuming that's done, the environmental side effects should be negligible, as I understand it. The stratosphere is pretty isolated from the atmosphere we live in, and the SO2 breaks down there over 1-2 years.
> sulfur dioxide tends to rise high into the stratosphere, where it combines with water molecules to create sulfuric acid particles, and remains for up to three years
> the way that sulfuric acid eventually leaves the atmosphere is by combining into larger and larger droplets that eventually become heavy enough to fall down to earth as acid rain
Probably make more sense to launch from ground. No reason to lift entire plane into the air. The launch stations can be placed in relatively remote locationst to minimize human or natural habitat impact. Possibly place launch locaitons close to So2 mining location to limit transport Co2.
> For the sort of globally effective SAI deployment in the tropics and sub-tropics envisioned in (Smith and Wagner 2018) and (Smith 2020), a deployment altitude of 20 km is commonly assumed in order to remain well above the tropopause, which can often appear as high as 17 km in the tropics. Injection of large masses of aerosols at 20 km is not judged to be feasible with existing aircraft, requiring the development of new lofting platforms designed for this mission as envisioned
Ground deployment is not extensively discussed, but perhaps the referenced papers discuss the necessity of high altitude more.
What does a "launch" location for SO2 look like from the ground? Is there any guarantee it would get as high as we'd like, especially given that SO2 is heavier than air?
Kinda feels like entirely too large a percentage of humanity already gave up entirely too long ago, and now it's rather too late for many of 'em to change their minds. Isn't that why we'd rather let our "leaders" geoengineer some more screw-ups upon our environment rather than actively work toward the changes we know will actually improve the situation? (eg; "fast track" our societal transitions globally toward more "planet-friendly" everything that we can? Just all-around "cleaner" modes of living? Better for the planet, and for humanity.)
Yes, this has been studied quite a bit (but not "extensively"). I am (guardedly) a fan of managing the earth's albedo, but not on a global scale and especially not with a toxic compound like SO2. Some of the most important issues:
* It's not just SO2, but soot and other particulates that reflect sunlight, in particular IR.
* SO2 (and soot etc, for that matter) have other side effects; its not that they were eliminated for no reason. And the point of any ecological activity (not just climate intervention) is to make the environment more supportive to human life and ativity. Stratospheric SO2 advocates tend to dismiss these issues.
* solar radiation adjustment has other consequences (on agriculture, for example).
In the case of SO2 the frequencies reflected by SO2 are not all ones we want to do without -- we need some UV to get through.
* Stratospheric SO2 injection (AKA "SAI") is hard to switch off, so if we are unhappy with the results (widespread reduction in agriculture, if that's what happens) we would be waiting years, possibly decades, to get things back on track.
Solar radiation can also be managed at a more local level in the troposphere through marine cloud brightening for example, and can be done with more benign chemicals than SO2 (e.g. water), and can be switched on and off quite rapidly (days). It will use more energy and activity, but also provide greater control (in some locations on the water you may not want increased shade because of microscopic marine life).
Note I am working on removal of ambient greenhouse gas (CH4) and so am quite sensitive to the safety and consequences of intervention.
I wonder if there's a way to keep the SO2 localized to a geographic area? The best bang for the buck should be over the arctic to help with the ice loss and less reflectivity due to that.
I talked about localized marine cloud brightening, but why would you choose something toxic like SO2? There’s a reason why the first emissions trading market was one that controlled SO2 emissions: acid rain.
In the case of the arctic there are non-atmospheric (i.e. surface) interventions being investigated as well to change the local albedo. In fact the best way to brighten the arctic (and glaciers) is to reduce particulate emissions — and it’s happening!
> Has anyone looked into the theory that SO2 is an "anti-greenhouse" gas
Yes.. there is an entire section in the IPCC report dedicated to this. This is also the reason they believe there is a "missing volcanic eruption," as it would explain data anomalies in their back projections. Make of that what you will.
Yes, James Hansen. His page [1] has links to his newsletter posts, but here's a recent example that looks into the shipping emissions reductions and the role they may be playing:
FWIW, I found this book to be an extremely disappointing introduction to Neal Stephenson and an extremely disappointing exploration of Sulfur-based geoengineering. The actual geoengineering is just a vehicle for a semi-political thriller IMO.
It's not a great book, but the fact that a single billionaire could decide to change the climate with a relatively small amount of SO2 was news to me until I read this!
I felt exactly the same way. It seemed like he thought "If Elon Musk tried to stop global warming, what would happen?" and then just sorta fleshed it out an released it during his spare pandemic time.
Contrarian opinion, but given the models have been poor at predicting the catastrophes that they typically claim, I’m hesitant to support atmospheric engineering to try and cool the planet.
Let’s not kid ourselves, global cooling is FAR worse than global warming. Ice ages are no joke.
The risk/reward bet here is that we put jussst enough SO2 to drop by X degrees. I’m just not confident enough in our computational capacity to account for all the variables that could produce unintended consequences.
Tangential, but we can’t even figure out proper programs/legislation to improve education or reduce inner city poverty.
As a person from a cold country I'm not so sure about that. It's much easier to dress up on a cold day than to cool down on a hot day. It's cheaper to warm up a house than to cool it down. There are way less diseases/viruses/insects in cold climates. Granted, the food is much harder to come by, though, unless it's maritime (cold waters are much more abundant with life than warm oceans).
And in case of global warning, if it ever gets too cold, we know what to do.
As someone who went to school for this, no. Mammals evolved to survive colder conditions. Going hotter and with higher CO2 is not going to be awesome for our biology.
Sulphur dioxide. That's the thing that caused all the acid rain that was going to be the end of all life as we know it back in the 1980s when were still concerned about global cooling, right? The same thing that made it possible to practice the moon landings just downwind of Sudbury, Ontario because all vegetation was stripped by the fallout from the big stacks at the nickle smelters?
Yeah. Pump that shit into our atmosphere. What could possibly go wrong?
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
A plot of an absolute quantity like this should really have a zigzag line at the bottom of the y-axis indicating that it does not start at zero. Or else, it should start at zero and / or be logarithmic.
Why? I think there's some intuitive idea that something is being hidden or there's cheating in the presentation, but that doesn't have to be the case if the purpose of the plot is to illustrate relative change (and the y axis is clearly labeled).
The counter-argument is that it makes it look like CO2 has 10x'd instead of doubling, but since those values aren't calibrated in units that we can intuitively understand, it's not obviously the correct choice to start at 0.
The values below 150 have little value since we have always had CO2 except for maybe when earth was created. Look at the 800k view to get a better perspective.
That said I do feel like when people do that it is not a great practice.
When I was a physics undergrad, they drilled it into us to always choose axis limits such that they just perfectly frame all measurement points (with some reasonable padding). This way, you see the most amount of detail. Like you say, having a graph that is mostly whitespace is of little value. Axes must be labeled properly anyway, so there is nothing misleading about it. If people who don't look at the axes are misled, well, that's always going to be the case.
It's not a good thing because people have no intuitive understanding of ppm, unlike temperature. PPM can only be judged according to another measure (second y-axis) or in comparison to itself, in which case you want the comparison to be accurate. That means making a graph that starts at 0 so the ratio is self-evident by eye, here it presents an 8-fold increase instead of a <2-fold increase.
Honestly, for the topic at hand, none of these are useful.
What we need is a bright horizontal line that says ">50% chance your society collapses in the lifetime of your children", one that says ">50% chance your society collapses in your lifetime", and one that says ">50% chance your species does not survive 100 years." To properly frame the stakes and the significance of the numbers.
> ">50% chance your society collapses in the lifetime of your children"
That's not far from the default for all of us anyway, isn't it?
Soviet Union fell apart in my lifetime; my parents were born during and just before WW2, got to see the Winds of Change.
I'm not sure about my grandparents, other than one grandmother's funeral anecdote being that she wandered off unsupervised as an infant, which had the people looking after her scared she had been eaten by a tiger because this was in a military camp in the British Raj.
No Ottoman empire, no Austro-Hungarians, and the borders of the Germany I moved to no longer go as far as what's now Калининград.
I fully agree, but remember your target audience was other well-educated people. As you communicate closer to the lower common denominator, sensible things like labeling your axes and assuming the readers will check that are reframed as evidence of conspiracies and mind control.
I think the misleading aspect in this case is that when looking at the 800k view, it seems that CO2 levels have doubled (or more) compared to previous peaks, whereas it's actually a ~30% increase. It's still a very significant increase, and should be shown accurately.
The inverse of a 33% reduction is not a 33% increase. It is a 50% increase. In other words, humanity has added half of the preindustrial CO2 level on top of the preindustrial CO2 level.
What you probably meant is that 33% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is "man-made".
The demand that every graph should start at zero is completely absurd, probably from teachers that try to enforce random demands, nobody expect CO2 levels to go to 0 and it is better to use the full space of the screen.
I don't think 0 makes sense here. Nor does "50% lower in preindustrial times" makes sense either. The correlation between temperature and co2 exists, but the absolute values involved are not intuitive.
"The co2 level is N standard deviations out of the ordinary compared to preindustrial times" feels more useful here, but reading that requires basic statistics (which general audiences probably lacks).
Here's the thing... It might actually be 4x standard deviations higher, if not more. "Almost 2x absolute value" conveys less information here as the absolute minimum co2 value in the entire known history if the earth is non zero. And it is non zero. If I recall correctly it's closer to 80% of the value of recent preindustrial values (one should check this).
Would be cool to see that value on the graph, also a median/average/max preindustrial value.
It does not convey less information, it conveys accurate information. At the scale of the x-axis, the viewer can see that it was always at 280 so no information is lost. No information is added by breaking the scale, if you want to convey standard deviations, add a secondary axis.
It's still misleading. a naive glance would make someone think co2 levels had risen to 800% of original value, when it's only 150% of original (which is obviously still terrifying)
Misleading is omitting the axis label, or cherry-picking a disputably-appropriate range to let you use a misleading window (with or without labels). I don't think it does either?
I disagree. Clearly the absolute amount of CO2 is more important than the relative change.
It would have much more impact and be less misleading if they started at 0.
Not starting at 0 both lets people dismiss the graph because they used the stupid not-starting-at-zero trick, and it hides the fact that CO2 concentration has increased by 50% which is insane!
Evidence for the statement that being potentially misrepresentative of your output can be misleading to others and lead to an incorrect conclusion, or that misrepresentable conclusions can be used by deniers to field their viewpoints ...?
Is there a certain type of evidence that would placate your very specifically worded and anti-intellectually framed question?
Evidence that a perfectly normal chart with clearly marked ranges "provides fodder for deniers".
I doubt climate deniers are specially aware of chart layout. Most have very little scientific education, unsurprisingly. But go ahead and prove me wrong.
> your very specifically worded and anti-intellectually framed question
For those wondering why there is zig zag in the plot after 1958. The data source changed at that date [1].
* 1000 - 1958: Historical CO2 record from the Law Dome DE08, DE08-2, and DSS ice cores
* 1958 - Today: in situ air measurements at Mauna Loa, Observatory, Hawaii.
Hawaii does month by month measurement and the seasons have vastly different CO2 levels due to plant activity. Going back further was just a rough yearly average.
The zig zags are a reasonably smooth yearly wave if you zoom into them.
It's absolutely mind blowing that we as humans were able to increase a constituent part of the atmosphere from from 0.028% to 0.04%. Written like that it looks small but, each part per million of CO2 in the atmosphere represents approximately 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon, or 7.82 gigatonnes of CO2.
I don't understand how people think Carbon Capture is a solution.
Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~1 millimeter of carbon.
Globally, we emit about ~13x that per year.
That's about equivalent to covering the state of Massachusetts in a foot of carbon.
Per year.
The entire planet is either the ocean, in use, desert, or already covered in forests.
~33% of the earth is desert. We'd need a decent chunk of that to get ~0% fossil fuel energy. But let's pretend we don't. We'd still need to cover all of that in several feet of carbon to capture all of our emissions.
> Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~3 feet of carbon
That seems high. I get a lot smaller number, but maybe I've messed up some unit conversions. I'm using:
1 ton = 10^3 kg
1 g CO2 = 12/44 g of C (C == carbon, not Celsius)
Density of C is 2.2 g/cm^3
1 Texas = 6.95x10^5 km^2
Assuming those are right and I didn't botch any conversions between metric prefixes I get this:
10^9 tons CO2 x 10^3 kg/ton x 10^3 g/kg = 10^15 g CO2
10^15 g CO2 x 12/44 g C/g CO2 = 2.7x10^14 g C
2.7x10^14 g C x 1 cm^3 C/2.2 g C = 1.2x10^14 cm^3 C
6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas x 10^10 cm^2/km^2 = 6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas
1.2x10^14 cm^3 C / (6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas) = 1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C
Check:
1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C x 1 km / 10^5 cm = 1.7x10^-7 Texas km C
1.7x10^-7 Texas km C x 6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas = 1.2x10^-1 km^3 C
1.17x10^-1 km^3 C x 10^15 cm^3/km^3 x 2.2 gm C/cm^3 C = 2.57x10^14 gm C
2.57 gm C x 44 gm CO2/12 gm c x 1 ton/10^6 gm = 9.4 x 10^8 ton CO2 = 0.9 gigaton CO2
PS: the above is for 1 gigaton of CO2 since that is what emissions figures usually use. But if you were just talking about after capture and extraction of carbon, multiply the above by 44/12, giving 6.2x10^-2 Texas cm C.
PPS: If we took all of the CO2 out of the atmosphere, the amount of carbon would be enough to cover to Texas to about 53 cm.
I don't think storage for the captures carbon is really a limit. I think the main limit would be the materials to construct enough carbon capture facilities to do the job.
One nice thing about carbon capture is it doesn't matter much where you do it. The atmosphere does a great job of spreading CO2 nearly uniformly. You just need places with sufficient available energy and somewhere to put the carbon.
One possibility would be subtropical deserts. They have plenty of sunlight for energy and plenty of land that could be used without displacing many people.
Imagine carbon capture facilities that consist of a solar farm for power with the panels mounted a few meters off the ground, and we dump the captured carbon under the panels.
As calculated earlier, 1 gigaton of captured CO2 would give enough carbon to cover Texas to a depth of 0.017 cm. There are about 3000 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so if we captured all of it, that would cover Texas to a depth of 51 cm.
The 5 largest subtropical deserts have a combined area 22 times as big as Texas. If we covered just 10% of that area in solar farms to power carbon capture with a meter of room under the solar panels we'd have plenty of storage space.
At the efficiency of current solar farms and current carbon capture, they would be capturing about 10% more carbon per year than we are currently emitting. Cover 90% of those 5 deserts with such plants and in under a decade we could get back to preindustrial CO2 levels.
The big limit that I see on doing this is production of solar panels. At current production rates, covering 10% of the 5 largest subtropical deserts would use about 180 years worth of solar panels.
I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.
> The big limit that I see on doing this is production of solar panels. At current production rates, covering 10% of the 5 largest subtropical deserts would use about 180 years worth of solar panels.
Yes, that is the problem. It is pie in the sky to believe that's happening any time soon. It would take >20 years before it's making any meaningful dent in emissions.
We're going to keep emitting CO2 at current rates for close to a decade before they really start to drop. You're looking at ~1/3rd of the earth being covered in solar panels and ~15 feet of carbon. Maybe I'm naive. I just can't imagine it.
You think we're going to do that and we can't even build nuclear power plants? That would've mostly solved the problem before it even happened.
And I imagine that would have cost 10,000x less.
> I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.
I don't know enough about the materials used for CC, but for solar panels - raw elements is not a problem if you're planning to use 90% of subtropical deserts...
> Imagine [...] solar panels mounted a few meters off the ground, dump the carbon under the panels.
When I try to imagine that, I can't help it. I see leaves mounted on top of a tree. Using solar power to bind carbon into a dense trunk package below. Ready to be carted off and hidden below grounds.
Also, given that we can't find anyone willing to pay for carbon capturing right where it is most dense, at the source, how are we going to find the will to pay for capturing it from thin air at much higher cost...
Imagine wind/solar power plants that pump water into present day deserts in volumes great enough to turn them into rain forests. How much carbon would that bind?
> I don't understand how people think Carbon Capture is a solution.
While the current crop of carbon capture technologies are rather inefficient and useless, once we've got more of a mastery of bioengineering, it's by far the best answer to the long term greenhouse gas problem (not without its risks though).
The tens of meters deep peatlands that cover Canada, Russia, and the rainforests of the tropics hold enough biomass to more than triple the planetary CO2 ppm if they were burned. Those peatlands only started forming 18,000 years ago when the glaciers started receding so we have hard evidence that nature is capable of sequestering mind boggling amounts of carbon very quickly. That suggests that if we engineered a system we could do it even faster. It might take us a century to develop the biotech to that point, but long term the solution is on the horizon.
If we had the political will now we could get a decent head start by industrializing seaweed, algae, and other fast growing organisms for CO2 capture.
The ocean. It not only significantly simplifies nutrient delivery but eliminates the geography problem and can utilize the giant hypoxic dead zones in the ocean to aid in organic capture. It also provides a constant mechanism for supplying carbon as atmospheric CO2 dissolves in the oceans that has a positive feedback loop with the climate and houses plankton that is already responsible for the majority of the world's CO2 uptake. There we can store carbon in many forms including microorganisms and seaweed that don't decompose, calcium carbonate in seashells, and so on.
And it doesn't need to be 1000 feet deep, just a few meters worth since we only need to collect an equivalent of a fraction of the CO2 that's stored in peatlands - which cover only about 3% of the Earth's land surface to begin with*. The trick is to sink it in just the right way to keep it from reentering the carbon cycle.
We actually do have a lot of space that's already capturing far more carbon than we ever possibly could ourselves, the organisms filling that space just evolved to maximize survival, not maximize carbon capture to save humanity.
* Edit: actually that's just cold climate peatlands, I haven't seen estimates for tropical peatlands
The best technology that exists is much lower tech than most people think. It's called reforestation. We have lots of space for complex forest ecosystems, and we'd have a lot more if we could start reversing car-dependent suburban sprawl.
Yes - I think in 20 years - we will need far less steel and cement as we have better alternatives, and there will be alternatives to fossil fuels by then for producing steel and cement anyway.
In the short term - CC is not a solution - there's too much carbon being emitted and there isn't an economical, scalable solution anyway.
We are going to emit what we're going to emit - and no amount of realistic CC is ever going to dent what we've already done by the time the technology is ready.
I think that you slipped some decimal places somewhere. The most common allotrope of carbon, graphite, has a density of 2.26 metric tons per cubic meter. Texas has an area of 695,663 square kilometers. Covering Texas with a 1 meter (~3 foot) layer of graphite would consume
People think its a solution because its one tool in a toolkit. You are right capture alone won’t solve everything, but I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting as much, and are saying instead its an important complement to other strategies.
It's really not even a compliment. We could not cover even a thousandth of Texas in ~30 feet of carbon per year.
That would only account for ~10% of global emissions.
It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Honestly, hope seems like a better strategy and less a waste of time than that.
If you really want to discuss it - you should preface very discussion with - "This isn't going to make the slightest difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but hear me out anyway..."
Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend like there is any viable alternative from phasing out fossil fuels almost entirely.
The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could - much to the younger generations detriment.
Economics alone should phase out ~60% of fossil fuel usage by 2050. There is nothing they can do to change that at this point.
Unfortunately, depending on the curve - the planet could get way hotter by then.
But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
> We could not cover even 1/1000th of the US in ~30 feet of carbon per year.
We wouldn't ... ?
Billions of gallons of crude oil are removed from the earth every year, millions upon millions of tons of stone are mined from the earth every year.
I'm misunderstanding how "covering Texas" is a meaningful measure in terms of carbon capture.
> It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%
I'm unsure how you've come to this metric or conclusion honestly.
> Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend....
The oil industry seems to be interested in pivoting to CCS because it is dependent on pipelines and drilling infrastructure, which is comfortably inside their position at global-scale. The fact that they caused a large portion of the problem is tangential - practically speaking. Blame who you will, we have a problem and there is an army of geological engineers and pipeline experts, etc etc with decades of experience to draw from.
> The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could
This is myopic and honestly childish
> But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
> It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%.
Here's what the IPCC said [0]:
> “The technical geological CO2 storage capacity is estimated to be on the order of 1000 gigatonnes of CO2, which is more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C, although the regional availability of geological storage could be a limiting factor.” – SPM, p. 37
The story in many ways is even more subtle than that -- the carbon cycle (both natural and augmented by human activity) generates ~200Gt of carbon annually, and absorbs ~200Gt of carbon. Human activity yields about 6-10Gt annually. So CO2 emissions are increased by about 3% from the natural baseline, but some of this is absorbed by natural increases in carbon sinks. We don't completely understand how the budget works out.
Funny! I read your comment in exactly the reverse way: "2.13 / 7.82 gigatonnes" sounds high. 0.28% to 0.04% sounds absolutely tiny. Maybe THAT's the right way to think about it?
And the global averaged temperature was 20 degrees warmer. Also this increase has been faster by 100 fold compared to previous increases. This is about to get very chaotic and civilization crushing.
We can perhaps look at current trends and extrapolate. Currently at less then 1.5° C and we are seeing a lot of failed policies both regarding minimizing further warming, and dealing with the current damage.
We are seeing many people dying in various climate related disasters (by some estimate covid level numbers and growing).
We are seeing crop failures, a mass extinction event, we are seeing pests becoming more severe, both in the natural world (see the giant Sequoias in Yosamite) as well as in our crops. This will get worse. Note, we will probably have enough food, but just like now, it will not be evenly distributed. Expect famines in the future. Currently things are not so bad.
We are seeing a lot of people fleeing their homes, and we are not seeing anybody accepting them as refugees. As the climate warms further, one can expect either our refugee policy changes and we open our borders (unlikely) or we can expect wars to break out as migration crises become severe (likely).
As the global hunger increases, as global wealth distribution gets worse, and as the global poor are at serious risk of dying from climate disasters, famin, etc. As tension grows on our borders, and as our governments become increasingly hostile towards refugees, then I honestly don’t see how our democratic world can survive.
Of course our governments can make the right choice and open our borders, then it will be a different world, that still sucks from all our climate related disasters, but at least it might survive. The other option is a increasingly facistical world. Which in my book is definitely civilization crushing.
It will be bad news for any civilization who lives in low lying areas and will be completely underwater. Many island communities will be lost or displaced.
One thing the GP post didn't mention is that in that time period the entire US midwest was an inland ocean. Many counties that we have today simply won't exist.
20,000 years ago sea levels were 120m lower than today yet civilisation has thrived during that period and we've hardly noticed the rise. People move house every decade or so and the change in a decade has averaged 6 cm so it's possible to outrun it by moving.
20 000 years ago we didn’t have closed borders, nation states, global markets, etc. Heck, the crops we grow today and depend on were mostly still in their way less nutritious and harder to grow wild variants.
20 000 years ago we also had a massive number of big game animals which grazed in gigantic herds on vast prairies. These prairies don’t exist anymore, and neither do the herds.
On top of that, our historic sources don’t reach this far back, and our archeological records gets really blurry this far back, so what do you know. Perhaps there were multiple time periods where societies did indeed collapse, where a governing structure spanning an entire region was suddenly and violently disrupted and never returned, with cultures and languages lost with no descendants. Surely this happened multiple times between 30 and 20 thousand years ago.
Around 3000 years ago society in the Middle East, North Africa and Balkans certainly did collapse because of some volcanic eruptions and the subsequent migration crisis and the market failure of a single industry.
I googled the 3000 year ago thing and the Wikipedia for Late Bronze Age collapse says competing theories for the collapse have been proposed including volcanoes and also "disease, invasions by the Sea Peoples or migrations of the Dorians, economic disruptions due to increased ironworking, and changes in military technology and methods that brought the decline of chariot warfare."
So a lot of stuff going on really. I think similarly through our lives there will be all sorts of stuff going on such that the sea rising a foot or so will be not that noticable.
I think most historians agree that the Sea People invasions was a result of the migration crisis from Europe into the area. Whether the initial cause for this migration crisis was a volcano or some other disaster is kind of irrelevant to our discussion. What matter is something changed, causing people to need to migrate, causing wars and destruction, and an eventual collapse.
The climate crisis isn’t just the sea-level rise, I think civilization would survive Florida and Bangladesh going under (but it will suck). But our climate crisis is this sea-level rise at the same time as a bunch of wild fires, more powerful hurricanes, crop failures, droughts, ocean acidification, etc. All of this in tangent will result in mass migration, just like the Sea Peoples, just in the opposite direction. And unless our governments change their border policies (unlikely) there will be wars and destruction in our remaining cities.
I think the current thinking is that the sea people were a symptom more than a cause of the collapse. The few surviving records talk about crop failures and widespread unrest even before the sea people appeared. You had a number of feudal kingdoms teetering on the brink of collapse and the sea people provided a convenient excuse for the rulers so they didn't have to blame themselves.
Exactly. As I understand it the invasions came as a result of a migration crisis, this migration crisis was also a symptom of the collapse, i.e. something else (most likely devastating volcanic eruptions followed by nuclear winder, crop failures, etc.) which made life in Europe really hard, forcing the migration. I imagine these migrants weren’t super welcomed into the more rich Bronze age cultures, otherwise perhaps the migration might have been less violent, and collapse could have been avoided.
If you can remember the Jurassic Park tagline (original movie), "an adventure 65 million years in the making", then you've got a good ballpark figure for this.
Don't think 6 million would be enough, the max temp and co2 levels of the Cretaceous was 66 million years ago, and the Cretaceous period was 145-60 million years ago.
That perioid may be a somewhat large peak in a co2 graph, making the current co2 increase look negligible. However ocean levels are also estimated to have been 50-100 meters higher than today at that period, along many other side effects.
When looking over a vast time like this with a high levels of variations and varying local maximums and minimums, linear graphs become misleading. If you were going to include the Cretaceous you would have to plot it logorithmically, but at that point the graph becomes uninteresting because every peak except the current one would be just slim lines.
Edit: I saw my dead sibling pointed to a graph which is some weird logarithmic-linear hybrid, i.e. it show three distinct timeperiods in three different scales. This is indeed a rather odd way of representing data, and I don’t think it is helpful.
Seriously!! ;) The systematic monitoring of carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere began in the 1950s. The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, established in 1958, has been continuously monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. So anything before that, I'd take with a grain of salt and maybe extra some cayenne pepper.
What's the view on the immediate impact on elevated CO2 levels on humans? I know high indoor CO2-levels correlate with poor mental performance, but as far as I know that might just be because it also correlates with reduced O2 levels. But it seems reasonable that a 25% increase of CO2 in ambient air would do something to our health.
No problems outdoors but my worry there is that being inside can easily more than double CO2. Even with a window cracked slightly. So we're ok if we have really good ventilation. A fan makes us safe. At <300PPM we would have had far less to worry about here.
As CO2 reaches over 500PPM (this is not that far away) that doubling of CO2 levels from being indoors puts us in the cognitive impairment range. Not good.
Mauna Loa is not the only source of historic CO2 levels, though it has the oldest data. You can see all the other ones that NOAA keeps track of through their data interface [1]. Most of the data sources report very similar numbers, especially in the trendlines.
That shows levels over the last 1000 years looking exponentially on the rise but if you look over the last 600 million years the impression is very different and much of the time higher.
The vast majority of that time had neither modern humans nor anything like our civilization, so wouldn't really be relevant though. Hell at 600 million years ago there were just the first "complex" (not individually microscopic) life forms emerging.
Also the ups and downs in temperatures happened over a far longer period of time than what we're experiencing now, giving life more time to adapt.
We need a graph for oil, coal, and natural gas consumption. The goal is to get those number to 0%. We must use nuclear, electrify, and end private ownership of cars and trucks. I am absolutely ready to make the changes required to meet these goal. I'm halfway there already.
If you want a depressing graph, check Canada's oil production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Canada#/... (the US has a similar curb, although I'm not an expert, just a slightly depressed Canadian, especially since the government will soon shift further right, expect production to increase in 2 years)
This kind of chart makes me wonder what the weather of places like Florida and New Orleans were back in the exploration age or before. Was it appreciably cooler? I always thought they'd be about perfect if they were just about 5 degrees(F) cooler in the summer.
I believe too much CO2 in the atmosphere is a bad thing, but it is hard to find good, global suggested remediations to this issue.
- I use public transportation with my family of 6. (We do not own a car).
- My kids walk to school ~1 mile away.
- I stopped buying oak, because I read somewhere oak removes a good amount of CO2 over other types of trees.
- We live in an area where it is easy to find evironmentally-concerned food producers and buy from them.
Convincing more people that your approach is necessary and that technology will not evolve quickly enough to we (western people) continue to live like we used to? (until now, I brilliantly failed around me)
The surface of the ocean is in equilibrium with the atmosphere, so increasing atmospheric ppm increase the ppm of CO2 in the mix layer (think of it as a gas sponge). The ocean buffers that co2 (carbonate/bicarbonate system), so the amount of carbon there is a lot higher than just 420ppm, and in doing so it becomes slightly more acidic.
As the ocean turns over (every ~5000 years), it brings that acidity down to depth where it can react with various forms of alkalinity that are at down there (mafic rock at the bottom of the ocean, sediment, etc), partially neutralizing it. It takes about 20 cycles (very slow) to do this, so ~100k years to return to a pre-industrial level. The pre-industrial ppm is defined mostly by biology.
Not really. The ocean serves as a natural carbon sink to a degree- but this is acidifying the ocean. And some feedback loops accelerate rather than decelerate warming- such as ice loss decreasing albedo.
Life on Earth can adapt to a new normal, certainly, and on a geological timescale normal has shifted many times. Humans will adapt too, but will likely endure catastrophic losses on the way.
The assumption you're making here is that the Earth "heals", as if a wound has been inflicted. Likewise, that there is a "normal" level. In other words, that there is a prevailing state to which the system returns to, or must return to. I invite you to question that assumption first and foremost.
You must think of the Earth more as a process than a fixed thing. Thinking about this system in terms of feedback loops may be more helpful here.
Drastically increasing C02 levels affects several feedback loops in the system, essentially transitioning it to a state that is different to the current one.
As noted elsewhere in the comments, the Earth has gone through different eras in which the atmosphere had "high" and "low" levels of C02.
This chart doesn't look right. The it went from 280 in the 1700s to not even 500 now (not even a double) yet the chart looks like there was an astronomical spike. With dishonest exaggeration like this, who needs climate change deniers.
I'm no expert, but it seems one prominent theory on why CO2 dropped around 1600 is that it's a result of Europeans killing so many indigenous Americans. The reduction in agriculture led to forests regrowing, giving a temporary boost to CO2 sequestration. The CO2 dip is referred to as the "Orbis Spike".
I used to following a twitter account that would post the average CO2 level each day, and I distinctly remember the few weeks where I started to see a few 400s amongst the high 300s, and then, finally, never saw 300s again.
Population decrease won't stop global warming but global warming will lower population quicker, which will likely then be reciprocal.
Sadly it'll likely be the poorest that bear the brunt of it (high price food, expensive land to live on, poor living conditions due to heat), but hopefully we'll innovate more extreme weather resistant crops, ways to remove CO2, plant more trees etc.
I can’t stress enough the importance of house plants. Man this is depressing. I know the left-hand scale should be factored but this isn’t stock, it shouldn’t but “up and to the right”.
Anyone can explain why the curve is sawtooth-shaped? I get that it has to do with seasonal variations, but shouldn't the curve be sinusoidal in that case?
If you stretch out the timescale horizontally it is close to sinusoidal.
There does seem to be a slight sawtooth effect. A smoother rise followed by a more rapid fall.
But if you think about what vegetation is doing, that fits. Plants slowly gather resources and build structures for reproduction. This extra mass and activity absorbs CO2.
When the plants have successfully reproduced (spread fruit and seeds) the most efficient strategy is to quickly discard the reproductive support structure and processes that are no longer required. So the CO2 intake falls rapidly.
Autumn leaves falling are one of many symptoms of this, though decaying vegetation also releases CO2
It could be that you are living in the forest or a wooded area. The official measurement happens on Mauna Loa, purposefully chosen to be without vegetation or soil or nearby human activity.
> The observatory is surrounded by many miles of bare lava, without any vegetation or soil. This provides an opportunity to measure “background” air, also called “baseline”” air, which we define as having a CO2 mole fraction representative of an upwind fetch of hundreds of km. Nearby emission or removal of CO2 typically produces sharp fluctuations, in space and time, in mole fraction. These fluctuations get smoothed out with time and distance through turbulent mixing and wind shear. A distinguishing characteristic of background air is that CO2 changes only very gradually because the air has been mixed for days, without any significant additions or removals of CO2. Another common word for emissions is “sources”, and for removals, “sinks”.
> Volcanoes emit carbon dioxide in two ways: during eruptions and through underground magma. Carbon dioxide from underground magma is released through vents, porous rocks and soils, and water that feeds volcanic lakes and hot springs. Estimates of global carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes have to take both erupted and non-erupted sources into account.
But there's still logistics problems when you have to evacuate the facility or the power supply is disrupted. Or is it somehow not an issue?
It's a yearly average. As the trees lose their leaves and they start to decompose the CO2 levels will spike. In the spring the CO2 levels will dip again, but when you average it out you can see the trendline pointing up.
Most (if not all) CO2 monitors need to be calibrated. The ones that I have looked into recommend putting it outside and calibrating it to 420ppm. I am not sure how much local variance in outdoor CO2 concentrations one can expect, but my guess is maybe 1-2ppm, definitely not 30ppm. But that is just a wild guess.
Your CO2 sensor is probably calibrated to 400 ppm. Most sensors auto calibrate to setting the lowest value over a period of time to some base value, usually 400 ppm.
If we built a habitable dome on Mars with a breathable atmosphere, Mars would still have a globally inhospitable atmosphere. Our key word "global" does not strictly mean every square inch of available space, but the overwhelming majority, which in this case also heavily impacts the remainder (such as requiring a habitable dome in the Mars example).
Isn't the effect that increased CO2 levels logarithmic rather than linear or exponential? As in the more CO2 that gets dumped into our system the more slowly temperatures will rise.
> The modern record of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels began with observations recorded at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
> The seasonal cycle of highs and lows (small peaks and valleys) is driven by Northern Hemisphere summer vegetation growth, which reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide, and winter decay, which increases it.
Basically the northern hemisphere has more land/forest. When it's summer there, trees turn CO2 into wood much faster. Until mushroom season. (It's more complex of course, and not just the trees.)
Likely continuous measurements rather than ice cores. We can clearly see the difference between winter and summer (what you call the zigzag pattern), when a small portion is absorbed by the biomass.
I suspect it's the earliest date from when they have more granular data. The zigzag was still there pre-1958, but it was never recorded, so the smooth line is the best you're going to get.
> The Keeling Curve also shows a cyclic variation of about 6 ppmv each year corresponding to the seasonal change in uptake of CO2 by the world's land vegetation. Most of this vegetation is in the Northern hemisphere where most of the land is located. From a maximum in May, the level decreases during the northern spring and summer as new plant growth takes CO2 out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. After reaching a minimum in September, the level rises again in the northern fall and winter as plants and leaves die off and decay, releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Don't forget that while it's summer in your hemisphere, it's winter in the other one. I believe this has to do with the fact that there's land in the northern hemisphere and hence more biomass. I'm not sure if it has more to do with photosynthesis or cellular respiration. My guess is that the strongly seasonal effect is more photosynthesis in the summer, with the differential effect being stronger for the N hemisphere. I'm guessing respiration is less seasonal, and anthropogenic input is not very seasonal. I took classes about this a decade ago and I remember asking this question at the time, but don't remember the exact answer.
Even better it seems to spike in May almost every year. I didn't see if it mentioned where these measurements were taken but typically July/August are the hottest months so if it was AC, we should see the spike in those two months, no?
I cant believe how many people continue to fall for this nonsense.
First of all the manipulation of the graph to make it look like there is massive changes going on in the atmosphere.
You have to see it in true perspective.
For instance represent all the components 100 % on a wall as 100 inches ( A little over 8 feet high)
21 percent of oxygen in our atmosphere would take up 21 inches
Carbon Dioxide at 421 PARTS PER MILLION is actually 0.04 percent
To represent this we need a little less than one millimeter (about 1/25) of an inch
That 280 ppm to 421 ppm jump that looks so frightening on their graphs is actually about 1/7 of a millimeter of a scale of the atmosphere over 8 feet tall
water vapor in the atmosphere has a much greater heating and cooling effect.
They have convinced millions of people that carbon dioxide is some kind of dangerous pollutant that we must control by giving them control over our activities and travel.
In fact carbon dioxide is an essential component for plants (a plant food)
In fact many green houses go to a lot of trouble to keep pumping up carbon dioxide levels up to 1500 ppm because it results in lush growth and is absorbed by the plants resulting in higher yields.
Pretty incredible that so little CO2 can affect so much change of heat on the planet. And also pretty incredible how much more CO2 there is now than before.
What are you arguing about exactly? You are saying that CO2 isnt contributing to global warming?
Actually yes. The chart is put together by "The 2 Degrees Institute" which has a stated objective of influencing "behavioural and lifestyle changes". That isn't science.
> The CO2 Coalition was established for the purpose of educating the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.
This sharp rise of global CO2 level, combined with the small rise in global temperature of 1 degree F over the past 100 years [1], is evidence against the idea that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
Here is a simple experiment you can do at home (designed for children, it's that easy). Just do it and come back to me with what you find. If you are smart enough to be on HN, you are smart enough to do this experiment in your kitchen. No need to read research papers, or 'trust conspiring climate scientists'. Just go prove it to yourself.
This is completely pointless. No one questions the greenhouse effect (it is used to grow food all over the world). The question is whether or not additional CO2 that was put in the atmosphere by human activity over the last ~100 years is the primary cause of the ~1°C average surface temp increase in that time period.
An experiment for children isn't going o add anything of value here.
Labor or in this case kitchen experiment do not model the real wold.
And Correlation does not imply causation.
And finally when you establish a correlation, it does not have to be linear i.e. more of X does not mean it must case more of Y. Complex systems that are in some kind of balance often produce their own counter effect to change. This is the primary reason why such a stable balance could even form over long periods of time. The self correction properties of the whole system is very much a requirement for the balance to exists in a complex system like the climate.
I'm not sure if you read the same one. The guy asking for "data that supports your claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas" because he won't accept it without an alternate CO2-less Earth for comparison? Seems the experiment was convincing enough for him.
>ozone is considered pollution on grown level and its UV radiation shield high up
Shortly after the lowest average temp in the last 10k years the temp goes up a tiny bit and that is bad?
Maybe it is bad, who knows, but it sure seems better than if the interglacial would have ended and the temp would drop 10°C in the next few hundred years then another 10°C in thousand years and then a 90k year long ice age or something.
You may or may not remember the warnings about the coming ice age.
Overall the chance that human caused CO2 will case some kind of mass extinction due to warming is about as high as that a random ice age that should have started already but didn't (and we dont know why), causes a mass extinction.
> Shortly after the lowest average temp in the last 10k years the temp goes up a tiny bit and that is bad?
A degree in 20 years is not “a tiny bit” in this aggregated form. That’s why the ice age scenario you suggest is also bad. There is little evidence that scenario is happening right now though.
It seems to be much more than 20 years, but does it even matter? We have no clue about the climate of the future, even if all the warming we attribute to our pollution is 100% correct, we still do not know if this will cause problems for future generation or help them cope with an ice age. Both is at best equality likely, the ice age is probably more likely because whatever causes it, is a much much bigger force than human pollution, there is probably not enough human accessible fossil CO2 to prevent an ice age.
CO2 is known to be a greenhouse gas for hundreds of years. Without it, earth would be freezing. Also, you didn't say how much the temperature should have risen instead of the 1 degree which you believe to be wrong.
You didn't make a point, so there is no argument to be made here.
It's basic quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. All molecules with three atoms are greenhouse gases. The information is readily available, I'm not going to repeat it here. Pick up some textbooks.
Wait, what? Why does three atoms make it a greenhouse gas?
Not saying you're wrong, but from the quantum I know (senior level undergrad), that's not "basic". Could you explain the "three atom" bit at an undergrad level?
Molecules with three atoms that are not considered greenhouse gases include:
Ozone (O3): While ozone does absorb some solar radiation, it's primarily involved in blocking ultraviolet light from the Sun, rather than acting as a greenhouse gas in the way that CO2, CH4, or N2O do.
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2): Although it's a significant air pollutant and plays a role in smog formation, it is not primarily considered a greenhouse gas.
Nitric Oxide (NO): Like NO2, nitric oxide is more involved in air pollution and is not considered a greenhouse gas.
Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2): This compound is more known for its reactive properties and is not considered a greenhouse gas.
Carbon Monoxide (CO): While carbon monoxide can have indirect effects on global warming by reacting with other substances in the atmosphere, it is not itself considered a significant greenhouse gas.
Iodine Trichloride (ICl3): This is a more exotic example and not commonly found in the atmosphere. It is not a greenhouse gas.
GPT is not a reliable source. Note that 4 out of 6 of these "molecules with three atoms" it offers do not have three atoms. (Carbon monoxide and nitric oxide have two; iodine trichloride and hydrogen peroxide have 4.)
The GP's somewhat cryptic statement about 3 atoms is explained better here:
Monatomic gases and diatomic molecules made of identical atoms (e.g. O2, N2) are not "active" with regard to infrared radiation. They are transparent to it. Almost all other molecules are "IR active," meaning that they can absorb IR radiation in ways that are characteristic of their vibrational modes. This includes the well known greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Greenhouse gases are those IR active molecules that have a significant residence time in the atmosphere and can thus partially trap IR radiation emitted from the Earth's surface.
Some substances are IR active but are not usually classified as greenhouse gases because they quickly break down in the environment. Other substances are IR active but not counted among greenhouse gases because they have a low vapor pressure and do not significantly make it into the atmosphere.
Tropospheric ozone (O3) is the third most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Ozone absorbs infrared radiation (heat) from the Earth's surface, reducing the amount of radiation that escapes to space.
Nitrogen dioxide is infrared active and absorbs IR re-radiated from the Earth, as seen in the spectral plots available here:
However, its short atmospheric residence time means that its emissions have little heat-trapping ability, so it is rarely considered as a greenhouse gas:
Add the fact that more or less sophisticated measurement of temperatures started some 150 years ago and approximately 200-400 years ago we reached the coldest temp in the last 10k years.
It's always good to approach historical CO2 measurements with a degree of skepticism, especially when they cover such an extensive timeline. How confident are we in the proxies used for pre-industrial CO2 levels? I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing a decline in the future followed by a flurry of research into the causes of that.
A question. Without going into detail on all the different ways to measure CO2 historically and how scientists align them against each other and also to modern direct measurements what difference does it make here anyway?
We have the very accurate direct measurement for a while and the most alarming part of this in this recent direct measurement era. I feel that such questions like yours miss the rather obvious point here. How do you feel about CO2 going up ~50% since we started direct measurements?
There's a significant possibility that our assumptions about past CO2 levels might be off the mark. Considering this, it's conceivable that today's CO2 levels could actually be lower than they were at certain points in the past. What if CO2 levels fluctuate over millennia in a sinusoidal pattern, akin to seasons, and we are currently experiencing an upward trend? With that in mind, the accuracy of the existing measurements doesn't matter.
It's not so much about believing in coincidences; rather, it's about considering all possible variables. The sudden and substantial rise in recorded CO2 levels could be attributed to advancements in measurement techniques and the increased frequency of those measurements. If we had access to the same level of precision and quantity of data 500 years ago, it's plausible that we might have observed similar CO2 levels. Looking at the "Last 800,000 years" chart, one can observe many sudden spikes throughout the history, meaning the current "sudden spike" could be nothing but the organic state of the planet.
I think it makes sense to be at least somewhat skeptical of the proxy data and treat them somewhat adversarially for the purpose of science. They seem to carry a significant amount of interpretive weight right now so they should be probed with equally substantial weight, IMO.
This was something I was concerned about, but then an environmentalist friend told me that a few companies are responsible for the majority of emissions. This means that my behavioural patterns are not likely to matter. The number one way to change a few companies is to acquire money and power so one can apply force there. So I don't care that much about air flight and stuff like that which I would kind of try to manage earlier. Previously used to use public transit plus bicycle primarily and then use Terrapass to clear net.
I still use ebikes because more convenient in SF, but there's no way I could Terrapass each flight reasonably now. Too many of them.
This is actually pretty fortunate that the best way to deal with the problem is personal enrichment. One of the few things in life where all incentives align.
Yeah you could apply pressure on those companies. But that would cause gas prices to skyrocket. And nothing else would provoke Americans into actually getting out guillotines than $15/gallon gas.
I wouldn't call this friend an "environmentalist".
Long story short:
- These 'few companies' are part of the '100 companies produce 70% of emissions' statistic. This is true, but it's oil companies and governments on the list. Their emissions are driven by the demand by you - the consumer.
- Behavioral changes do matter. It normalizes (and then, in the futures, put's pressure for) sustainable behavior throughout society which is needed;
- Ebikes are great, more efficient (in terms of CO₂ emissions) than normal bikes.
- Please consider removing your flight emissions, then you'll truly appreciate the real cost of flying.
I actually argued that my Terrapass (I paid a fortune to be net zero) helped, but then the environmentalist friends told me that that's just "like indulgences and doesn't help the environment" so I stopped doing it. It's a lot of money per year, man, and everyone will just act like you're the problem if you buy any. No one who didn't buy any got the lecture.
Yeah, it helped that I mostly use bikes and ebikes. I think it's like a 10-15% increase in flight cost with Terrapass (I bought aggregate per year, but you can do per flight) for something like SFO<->LAX so that's manageable though unpleasant. But there's not that much reason to do that since it's apparently not real.
Besides, while you say this on HN, the top comments are often how China etc. are the problem. So if they're going to be the problem how does it matter if I fly some.
Eh you've just found a way to not feel guilty about your personal pollution.
I don't know what your friend says but I imagine it was along the lines of "it's not your fault! 80% of carbon emissions are due to these 5 oil producers!", conveniently ignoring the fact that it's ordinary people buying the oil...
Still, you can't fix this by hoping people and companies will care. We probably have to force them with laws. So voting is about all you can really do on a global scale.
>This was something I was concerned about, but then an environmentalist friend told me that a few companies are responsible for the majority of emissions
It's sad that I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or not because I've had people sincerely say that. BP really won their gamble on feigning interest in carbon footprints.
"Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."
Man that link you provided is quite an entertaining fiction read circa 2009.
Good thing I followed the author's lead: "If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. "
Every time I hear people talk about leaked emails proving a conspiracy I'm reminded of an incident on a Minecraft server I played on when I was 16. One faction (us) leaked some internal chats from another group, they made them look pretty bad, but we were selective about it. We choose the bad quotes and then implied more meaning on top of the words. We took things out of context, and then there was the fact that if anyone had leaked our slack (this was before discord took off), they'd have been able to paint a pretty nasty picture of us.
Also here's the wikipedia article about this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c.... I think Scott Alexander was right when he pointed out that scientists are willing to say pretty unpopular things in anonymous polls, but the vast majority still report, even anonymously that they believe in human caused global warming
human caused global warming is a low bar. That part (humans create CO2, CO2 creates some warming) is not debated. The debate is catastrophic change due to CO2, which requires runaway positive feedback loops beyond what CO2 alone can do.
A better anonymous scientist poll would be: Will human sources cause catastrophic warming or results by 2100?
I think the precisely better poll would be: "Will the consequences of continuing to emit CO2 at the current rate be greater than the cost of reaching net 0 by 2100?", but regardless of how weak the idea that humans aren't at least contributing to global warming that's exactly what the link verisimi posted seems to me to be doing. Yes it's true that we're very unlikely to tip Earth into becoming another venus, but tipping it into becoming another Pliocene on a short timetable would be pretty catastrophic.
I don't expect global warming to kill me or render the earth uninhabitable, but things aren't looking very sustainable right now and I think most scientists if polled would say we aren't currently doing enough to address the problem.
> Will the consequences of continuing to emit CO2 at the current rate be greater than the cost of reaching net 0 by 2100?
I think exactly zero humans are qualified to give expert opinion to that question right now. That would require both mastery of climatology, economics, and public policy. I think this makes a great question for a team, but not a great expert poll question.
BTW, does anyone even have an estimate of what net zero carbon by 2100 would cost?
For anyone else taken aback by the nostalgia-inducing mention of "climate gate" and wondering what's up: no, there don't appear to have been any new developments, it continues to be the case that scientific misconduct was not uncovered.
Its very hard to find any of the emails to make up one's own mind. The wiki page is pure information management. That is one of the few places where you can see what the researchers said in their own words.
Your waybackmachine archive link? That page is the opposite of convincing. Half the examples are "climate scientists human, news at 11", another quarter don't say what the framing claims they do (unless further context shifts their meaning—but that's not provided, what is provided does not say what the framing claims it does) which makes me really wary of the remaining 1/4 or so (strongly suspect their meaning shifts to be rather less nefarious as one expands context).
They appear to be all over Scribd, but I'm not convinced it's worth creating an account to see more than the first page. The case for there being anything worth reading doesn't look strong. You seem to feel otherwise, though, so go for it. First page of DDG with naïve search terms, multiple results. Or, here:
Can't verify it's unaltered (how would I?) but it's 261 pages and the first page reads like it's raw emails. That seems like a plausible length for ~1000 emails, assuming quite a few are very short. Not sure if it's organized so that it's easy to follow email chains.
Climate change skeptics seem to share around some other PDFs, but they're all heavily edited and contain only a small part of the total set of stolen data, often not even very many complete emails, just parts of them, as far as I can find. They seem to have no trouble getting access to them and are keen to share excerpts, which appear to survive just fine—reddit, internet archive, their PDFs are everywhere—but not the whole thing.
I'm going to summarize Physicist, Caltech President, and Obama DOE appointee Steven Koonin on climate change:
1) Climate is an extremely complicated phenomenon
2) It is extremely difficult to model beyond a limited time frame.
3) The models we have, running on the most powerful, purpose built, computers rely on massive aggregations because there are otherwise too many interactions to handle. These aggregations are too large to be reasonably interpreted.
4) There is a large industry of well paid scientists, researchers, and policymakers who have built careers on Climate Change. Alarming news keeps them in a job, so they have an incentive to bias towards worst case outcomes. " It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
5. Efficient and clean technology is worthy of pursuing regardless of its climate impacts. We can do more for the planet creating market based solutions in those directions than trying to manage CO2 directly.
Finally, I must acknowledge the Yale paper and climate scientists who have criticized his work. Rather than fire from the bushes, they should debate Koonin directly. He isn't a Fox News kook, if anything his credentials are superior to theirs.
Remember, one of the oldest ruse of charlatans is promising they can change the weather.
If you're going to note his credentials as a physist & Caltech president, you should also note that he was also employed by BP as the oil and gas company’s Chief Scientist from 2004 and 2009.
Remember, one of the oldest ruse of climate-change deniers is to equate weather and climate.
So how is that different from veing a full time job in climate change as a scientist or policy maker?
Do you believe that Koonin wants a climate catastrophe?
If a person could be so monumentally blindsided to ignore a threat that will not only harm themselves, but everyone they know and care about, then could not others be too, e.g. Climate scientists?
Another question;
Accepting Climate Change as presented by the IPCC, how do we resolve the problem of the major oil producing states like Russia and Saudi Arabia refusing to give up the oil wealth which allows them to exist as they do, and the developing world states from consuming it? Green conversions are not feasible for large segments of the world population in anu useful time frame.
The net zero policies being advocated by the G7 nations are very expensive and handwave away big problems with "batteries will get cheaper, and the tech will improve" but they fail hard if thar doesn't turn out.
If we are really concerned about CO2 driven climate change the best solution is next gen nuclear power and mitigation strategies. Make electricity so cheap that no one will want fossil fuels if they can avoid it. Yes, they just started talking about nuclear power, but it's late. James Hansen was talking about it 20 years ago, it's not a surprise.
People commonly downvote to signal disagreement, and that's not discouraged by the guidelines. There is, however, a rule against complaining about votes.
You forgot to mention that he worked for BP. And he wasn’t president of Caltech. He is also theoretical physicist who does urban engineering neither of which make him qualified on climate science.
Market based solutions won’t be enough. We are very lucky that clean electricity is cheap. But there some emissions that will never switch because of economics. Airlines are a good example, where fossil fuel will be always cheaper than green alternatives. We will have to force them by raising fossil prices with carbon tax or by banning them. Some would call the former market based but that isn’t what they mean.
Recently (since 2010ish but moreso since 2020 in shipping) there has been a global effort to reduce SO2 emissions (eg by installing scrubbers) which has caused the CO2 increase over the last 150 years to actually "take effect" since the SO2 is no longer negating the effects.
I stumbled upon this theory recently and it sounds compelling but am curious if better informed people could shine a light about this.
https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1687535525169930241
https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1688145475289931776
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/07/sea-surface-temperatu...