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Great comment chain. The one thing sticking out to me though is what appears to be an assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2

Great comment chain. The one thing sticking out to me though is what appears to be an assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2 is the best possible baseline. If we are talking hypotheticals here, if humankind managed to shift all energy production to renewables and effectively reduce their carbon footprint to zero (this is pretty much an impossibility with current technology and culture), all carbon capture schemes would in fact be increasing the rate at which co2 was sequestered (faster than just natural processess alone). We are talking about technologies like bio-engineered trees that grow incredibly fast and are then harvested and stored safely. And there will likely be a myriad of technologies we can not even fathom right now to directly pull out and sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Are any of these things likely to happen in the next 20, 50 100 years? Maybe, maybe not. You did mention that scientists should be freed up to work on aiding humans in adapting to this inevitable future, and these kinds of technologies would likely be researched in parallel to that effort, in order to bring the Earth back into a more hospitable condition for us. I very much doubt it will take thousands of years to reverse the course we find outselves on, once there is enough political capital available to actually make change.

robomartin 6y ago
> assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2 is the best possible baseline. No, sorry. That's not what I meant. What the ice core data gives us as a baseline is what will happen if humanity and all of our technology leaves the planet. Let's call it 100K years for 100 ppm reduction. This is a real baseline based on highly accurate scientific data. The first thing I did when I reached this conclusion was to try to invalidate ice core sample data. It turns out this data is extremely accurate and, I think I can say, irrefutable. And so, this is the baseline from which, I propose, we need to evaluate any proposal that says: Eliminate X and we save the planet (fix the problem, stop climate change, etc., pick one). In other words, I propose it proves a simple idea: We cannot fix this problem by eliminating anything. We can say this because we know that if eliminate humans and human technology --let's call that "everything"-- it will take 100K years to drop 100 ppm. Every such proposal should be measured from this baseline. Eliminate cars? Nope, you can't just do that and fix it faster than 100K/100ppm, if at all. Eliminate cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships? Nope, that is still less than humanity evaporating. It's still, at best >100K/100ppm. Eliminate all fossil fuels and all of the above? OK, now we are getting stilly and it still isn't going to be any less than 100K/100ppm. Because for 100K/100ppm by elimination of human sources of CO2 we have to leave the planet. If you haven't I urge you to read the paper I linked to in my top comment. The researchers had enough and were convinced that the solution was a world-wide shift to renewables. They say so in the paper. And --thankfully-- they are also honest enough to say that they were astounded to discover that what they knew to be true was, in fact, false. We need honest scientists that are isolated from the consequences of looking at the truth of these issues. Their conclusion, paraphrasing, was something like: Even if we switched the entire world to the most optimal and efficient forms of renewable energy (yet to be invented) atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise exponentially. That is a sobering though. As to solutions like bioengineered trees, etc. From what I've seen the main issue (other than the potential for horrific unintended consequences) seems to be that when you look at the energy and resources it would require to develop, manufacture, deploy and manage such technologies you realize they would cause more harm than good. I don't know the answers. What I think I know is that we need to stop lying because the narratives being pushed are false and dangerous (because they prevent our scientists from working on the real problem).
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  You need to remove 30 gigatons per year to eliminate all the CO2 humans generate. This is the "what if humans disappeared" baseline you mentioned. If we eliminated 30 gigatons annually, yes the earth would recover at the rate you describe. If we increase above 30 gigatons or reduce emissions, we shorten the time dramatically. Growing trees or grasses, pyrolizing them into syngas and biochar, and sequestering the char could, in theory, supplement natural processes. It's a process that can be run with an energy surplus, but it does require a lot of labor and land. You'd need hundreds of thousands of square miles wholly dedicated to the effort. DACCS facilities are expensive, but achievable. You'd need roughly three major industrial DACCS facilities for every coal fire plant worldwide, which would be incredibly challenging but not impossible.
  - robomartin 6y ago
    I think where some of these ideas run afoul of reality is that they ignore the scale of energy and resources necessary to make them happen. And the probability distribution of each idea being realizable at scale. It's a planetary scale problem, which means the numbers are very large no matter what anyone suggests. I have no clue how much CO2 t-shirt manufacturing produces when you consider the entire supply chain and human footprint. If you add-up t-shirt manufacturing world wide, the number likely isn't trivial. And yet, even if we stop making t-shirts the need for clothing does not evaporate. I would be willing to bet that t-shirt manufacturing is now optimized almost as far as one could go and the providing an alternative form of clothing to billions of people around the world would be dirtier and consume more resources than just making t-shirts. This is frustrating to me because I can't find a path. The minute one includes the pesky little reality of conservation of energy things become real. I can't think of a single problem --regardless of the domain-- that can be fixed with less energy than that which created it in the first place. And so, if that's true --and I think it is true without dispute-- this idea of being able to control atmospheric CO2 concentration at a planetary scale is in a range between hubris and lunacy. Another way to put it is: We cannot fix it by subtraction. This means we cannot fix it by simply going down to zero CO2 generation, no matter what the approach might entail. That, at best, gets us to 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in CO2. I admit, this is a defeatist view. Yet, I believe this is reality and what is being pushed out there is fantasy. My fear is that, yes, we need to start doing a number of things to make human life better (the planet will do fine without us) but none of this work will begin until we frame it from a truthful baseline. As I have said before, there are tons of reasons to cleanup our act globally --and we should-- but let's not lie to ourselves and pretend that this is to save the planet or reverse climate change. We can't. We won't. And we won't because, even if we go to zero CO2 the planet itself will not cooperate. If you look at the charts for the 800,000 year ice core sample CO2 data one of the questions should be: How did CO2 increase, we were not around to make it happen? The answer is, for the most part, massive continental scale fires. So, we go CO2 neutral and cover the planet with trees. And then fires, massive fires, fires we cannot control, contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than we ever contributed before with our non-carbon-neutral technologies. Just look at what happened this year in California alone: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/off-the-chart-co2-from-california-fires-dwarf-states-fossil-fuel-emissions/ https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/off-the-chart-co2-from-cal... It is hubris to think we can control this at a planetary scale. We can't control it in a US state that recently surpassed the entire United Kingdom to become something like the fifth largest economy in the world...and we can't stop massive forest fires. From the article: "The fires have already generated more than 91 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is about 25% more than the state’s annual emissions from fossil fuels." I wish I had answers. All I am able to do is point out that we are lying to ourselves in hopes that, if enough people stop to think and understand this reality we will switch tracks and empower our scientific community to look at this from a different perspective. Maybe then someone with a unique perspective might discover a way to deal with it. We don't need to fix it, I don't believe we can, we need to understand how humanity can survive the cycle we are on. Thanks for engaging.

robomartin 6y ago

> assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2 is the best possible baseline. No, sorry. That's not what I meant. What the ice core data gives us as a baseline is what will happen if humanity and all of our technology leaves the planet. Let's call it 100K years for 100 ppm reduction. This is a real baseline based on highly accurate scientific data. The first thing I did when I reached this conclusion was to try to invalidate ice core sample data. It turns out this data is extremely accurate and, I think I can say, irrefutable. And so, this is the baseline from which, I propose, we need to evaluate any proposal that says: Eliminate X and we save the planet (fix the problem, stop climate change, etc., pick one). In other words, I propose it proves a simple idea: We cannot fix this problem by eliminating anything. We can say this because we know that if eliminate humans and human technology --let's call that "everything"-- it will take 100K years to drop 100 ppm. Every such proposal should be measured from this baseline. Eliminate cars? Nope, you can't just do that and fix it faster than 100K/100ppm, if at all. Eliminate cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships? Nope, that is still less than humanity evaporating. It's still, at best >100K/100ppm. Eliminate all fossil fuels and all of the above? OK, now we are getting stilly and it still isn't going to be any less than 100K/100ppm. Because for 100K/100ppm by elimination of human sources of CO2 we have to leave the planet. If you haven't I urge you to read the paper I linked to in my top comment. The researchers had enough and were convinced that the solution was a world-wide shift to renewables. They say so in the paper. And --thankfully-- they are also honest enough to say that they were astounded to discover that what they knew to be true was, in fact, false. We need honest scientists that are isolated from the consequences of looking at the truth of these issues. Their conclusion, paraphrasing, was something like: Even if we switched the entire world to the most optimal and efficient forms of renewable energy (yet to be invented) atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise exponentially. That is a sobering though. As to solutions like bioengineered trees, etc. From what I've seen the main issue (other than the potential for horrific unintended consequences) seems to be that when you look at the energy and resources it would require to develop, manufacture, deploy and manage such technologies you realize they would cause more harm than good. I don't know the answers. What I think I know is that we need to stop lying because the narratives being pushed are false and dangerous (because they prevent our scientists from working on the real problem).

Pfhreak 6y ago
You need to remove 30 gigatons per year to eliminate all the CO2 humans generate. This is the "what if humans disappeared" baseline you mentioned. If we eliminated 30 gigatons annually, yes the earth would recover at the rate you describe. If we increase above 30 gigatons or reduce emissions, we shorten the time dramatically. Growing trees or grasses, pyrolizing them into syngas and biochar, and sequestering the char could, in theory, supplement natural processes. It's a process that can be run with an energy surplus, but it does require a lot of labor and land. You'd need hundreds of thousands of square miles wholly dedicated to the effort. DACCS facilities are expensive, but achievable. You'd need roughly three major industrial DACCS facilities for every coal fire plant worldwide, which would be incredibly challenging but not impossible.
- robomartin 6y ago
  I think where some of these ideas run afoul of reality is that they ignore the scale of energy and resources necessary to make them happen. And the probability distribution of each idea being realizable at scale. It's a planetary scale problem, which means the numbers are very large no matter what anyone suggests. I have no clue how much CO2 t-shirt manufacturing produces when you consider the entire supply chain and human footprint. If you add-up t-shirt manufacturing world wide, the number likely isn't trivial. And yet, even if we stop making t-shirts the need for clothing does not evaporate. I would be willing to bet that t-shirt manufacturing is now optimized almost as far as one could go and the providing an alternative form of clothing to billions of people around the world would be dirtier and consume more resources than just making t-shirts. This is frustrating to me because I can't find a path. The minute one includes the pesky little reality of conservation of energy things become real. I can't think of a single problem --regardless of the domain-- that can be fixed with less energy than that which created it in the first place. And so, if that's true --and I think it is true without dispute-- this idea of being able to control atmospheric CO2 concentration at a planetary scale is in a range between hubris and lunacy. Another way to put it is: We cannot fix it by subtraction. This means we cannot fix it by simply going down to zero CO2 generation, no matter what the approach might entail. That, at best, gets us to 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in CO2. I admit, this is a defeatist view. Yet, I believe this is reality and what is being pushed out there is fantasy. My fear is that, yes, we need to start doing a number of things to make human life better (the planet will do fine without us) but none of this work will begin until we frame it from a truthful baseline. As I have said before, there are tons of reasons to cleanup our act globally --and we should-- but let's not lie to ourselves and pretend that this is to save the planet or reverse climate change. We can't. We won't. And we won't because, even if we go to zero CO2 the planet itself will not cooperate. If you look at the charts for the 800,000 year ice core sample CO2 data one of the questions should be: How did CO2 increase, we were not around to make it happen? The answer is, for the most part, massive continental scale fires. So, we go CO2 neutral and cover the planet with trees. And then fires, massive fires, fires we cannot control, contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than we ever contributed before with our non-carbon-neutral technologies. Just look at what happened this year in California alone: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/off-the-chart-co2-from-california-fires-dwarf-states-fossil-fuel-emissions/ https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/off-the-chart-co2-from-cal... It is hubris to think we can control this at a planetary scale. We can't control it in a US state that recently surpassed the entire United Kingdom to become something like the fifth largest economy in the world...and we can't stop massive forest fires. From the article: "The fires have already generated more than 91 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is about 25% more than the state’s annual emissions from fossil fuels." I wish I had answers. All I am able to do is point out that we are lying to ourselves in hopes that, if enough people stop to think and understand this reality we will switch tracks and empower our scientific community to look at this from a different perspective. Maybe then someone with a unique perspective might discover a way to deal with it. We don't need to fix it, I don't believe we can, we need to understand how humanity can survive the cycle we are on. Thanks for engaging.