7 ms·

I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.

by Smoosh 5y ago

api 5y ago
If climate change were being caused by communists or Islamists to attack America we would have converted to post-carbon by now. Human adversity pushes buttons in our brain stem that natural processes or random threats do not.
robomartin 5y ago
It isn't that we can't afford to mitigate climate change. We cannot mitigate climate change, period. In other words, you could throw all the money on the planet at it and it would not make a dent. No purported solution passes the math and physics tests. It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place. That's the problem. We don't have it. Energy, resources or time. You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.
- WaxProlix 5y ago
  That may or may not be true right now. Was it true 10 years ago? 20? 30? There exists a point at which it was not true, and we're talking about taking that investment over a 20+ year historical period, not as a lump sum right now. Lots of fossil fuel aligned people have pivoted from "everything is fine" to "there's nothing we can do now", and echoing the latter might be factually correct, but in the context it smacks of disingenuity.
  - sgregnt 5y ago
    There might be an escape velocity to this: as technology evolves it is easier to clean pollution, and perhaps the innovation moves faster than the added pollution. So maybe the best time to start cleaning is 30 years into the future?
    - gruez 5y ago
      >There might be an escape velocity to this There's a better term for this rather than "escape velocity", because a similar problem exists for interstellar travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
      - sgregnt 5y ago
        Thank you for sharing!
    - anyfoo 5y ago
      That's like saying the best time to start saving for retirement is 30 years into the future, because by then investment returns may be higher.
      - sgregnt 5y ago
        It's a nice saying... but may I push back? Maybe it's like saying instead of insisting to keep a positive balance, take a debt and go study in a callege. Then profit for the rest of your life?
        anyfoo 5y ago
        Not even going into the issue that we don't have time to "go to college" before this needs to be fixed, what actually is the "college" in your analogy? And the balance is already negative.
        sgregnt 5y ago
        Restrictions on pollution would hinder economic development, which in turn would hinder scientific progress, so we will not invent new effective methods to fight pollution. "Debt" is unrestrained economic development, "college" is the research and added economic capacity that comes out of it. And profit are the new methods for removing pollution. But I don't necessarily believe in it. The point here is that, IMHO, for every, motto-like, populist data-less claim why we should fight pollution, one can easily come up with equivalently populist data less claim why we should not bother with clime change. In isolation from supporting data these two claims are equally unsubstantiated. If there is some concrete data to share please do so, otherwise it's an echo chamber where people would just upvote what they agree with and downvote what they disagree, without any concern for the actual facts brought out in the claim, it's not a argument taking place in the comments it just people preferences showing up in their votings.
  - taf2 5y ago
    I think nuclear is not a perfect solution but probably the fastest option we have.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      so do I. But try to convince the NIMBY crowd of it.
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      Wind and solar are cheaper and can be brought online as fast as we can build it... Nuclear has massive startup costs and takes a hella long time to build out. Solar efficiency had been undergoing a an exponential (!!!) drop in price per kilowatt hour. Think of it as Moore's law, but for energy. Comparing solar to nuclear at this point is sorta like saying you don't need one of these gosh darned desktop computers when you've got a perfectly good giant room full of multi million dollar IBM mainframe that you bought just twenty years ago... Exponential price curves should cause one to stay flexible on assumptions. DOE: Solar hits 6 cents per kWh in 2017, three years ahead of an ambitious goal, down from 28 cents per kWh in 2011. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030 https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030 Solar costs per kWh are unambiguously less than nuclear: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#/media/File%3A3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
      - robomartin 5y ago
        > Wind and solar are cheaper and can be brought online as fast as we can build it I love wind and solar. I built a 13 kW array on our property and will likely expand it to 20 kW next year. However, even if we deploy the most optimal forms of wind and solar energy at a global scale --forms that have yet to be invented-- this will not be enough to stop or reverse atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, even if we do this, it will continue to increase exponentially until such time as the planet --through weather-- sticks its finger on the problem. This is NOT my conclusion. This came out of a study where Google researchers --who were convinced renewable energy sources was the way to go-- set out to once-and-for-all show the world the path. They were stunned when they discovered just how wrong they were. To their credit, they published the paper and admitted just how wrong they were. This is real science, not hand-wavy stuff. Anyone with the appropriate science background can go through the paper, study the data and reproduce their claims. I certainly did. This paper is what opened my eyes to the nonsense we are being sold. It led to spending over a year trying to understand the reality of the problems we face. It is well worth reading. Here it is: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - robomartin 5y ago
    > That may or may not be true right now. Well, being that the argument is grounded in physics and the math that accompanies the analysis, this is a time-independent truth. To state the problem more accurately: We cannot do a thing about climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely resembling a human time scale. The numbers being thrown about for some of these would-be solutions are just plain silly. 50 years? For a planetary scale problem? Yeah, sure. Again, one must understand that it was absolutely possible for us to add massive amounts of CO2 in short order. Removing it isn't quite as simple. We were able to add it because burning tens of billions of barrels of oil every year is easy. Any fool with a match can start a forest fire. It takes millions --billions-- of times more energy to reverse the effect of what started with a simple match. That's the context. Every purported solution must pass the physics test. None of them do. Small scale, sure. Planetary scale. Not one. Every time I look at this I am reminded of the joke one of my physics professors used to tell us with sometimes annoying frequency. He would start on a new problem, chuckle, and say: Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter. His point was that reality was always far more complex than what we had to do in order to learn and explore principles. The very first problem is that we know, without a doubt, what the baseline is for affecting a (roughly) 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2: 50,000 years. However, this baseline has a pretty tough requirement: Humanity has to leave the planet or the clock does not start. If humanity left the planet tomorrow, we know that, on average, it will take about 50K years for that 100 ppm drop. This is roughly what people are saying they can do in just 50 years with various magical solutions. In other words, they are claiming that they can do a THOUSAND times better than the rate of change that would correspond to humanity not existing at all. How do we know this? We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric data taken from ice core samples. In other words, we can see what the planet was doing when humanity's influence on CO2 and the climate was so insignificant we might as well have been on Mars. If, for example, someone claims that we can "fight" climate change (I love the hubris) by installing solar panels and wind power generator everywhere, well, they have to show how this is better than humanity leaving the planet. No hand-wavy stuff, real science, math, physics. These ideas do not survive the test of hitting the realities of physics inside an Excel spreadsheet. You don't have to take my word on it for this particular case: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what was going on. It is real science, reproducible by anyone with the skill set, and nothing even close to hand-wavy bullshit. To paraphrase, the conclusion they reached goes something like this: "Even if we deployed the most optimal versions of all renewable energy technologies. Meaning, versions of all technologies that have yet to be invented. Not only would this not reverse or stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. CO2 levels would continue to increase exponentially." These researchers went into this work convinced renewables were the way to do it and they set out to prove it once and for all. I give them huge credit for having the guts to communicate that their bubble was popped by their own research and that, no, this idea is nothing less than utopia. We don't even have to stop there. The chart in this article, when combined with the other data, absolutely made the issue crystal clear for me: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi... Remember what I said about the baseline? 100 ppm in 50,000 years, if humanity left the planet? Anything less than that is pointless as it will be in a range between never affecting CO2 concentration to taking far longer than 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction. The chart in this article shows each country's contribution to the CO2 problem. US 15% China 28% India 7% Russia 5% Europe about 7% The rest close to 40% If the United States were to beam up into space tomorrow --we evaporate from the surface of this planet and all of our technology and machinery disappears-- you are still pumping 85% of total CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, nothing will change. And atmospheric CO2 continues to rise exponentially. In other words, if someone were to propose that we install solar panels on every single home in the US. The question they have to answer is: How is that going to be better than if the US simply evaporated and we stopped contributing 15% to the global problem? It isn't! Which means it isn't a solution. It is, at best, hubris and, at worst, criminally negligent or irresponsible to propose consuming a nation's treasure on something that is as pointless as can be. OK, now China and the US are beamed-up by Captain Kirk. Same issue. Now we are down to 57%. Won't fix the problem at all. If we all left it gets down to 0% and it takes 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction. Anything LESS than that scenario will take longer or do nothing at all. That's where the impossibility of things like "save the planet" or "affect climate change" or "become carbon neutral" come into the proper lens. These are all fantasies. Sorry. Anyone wishing to challenge this has to prove their purported solution can pass the physics test at a planetary scale. Showing that it works when we assume a cow to be a uniform one meter diameter sphere of milk isn't equivalent to planetary scale in the real world. In the real world we have things like the massive forest fires burning in nearly every continent every year. In California we now have a fire that is likely to contribute more carbon in a few weeks than the entire gasoline-based ground transportation fleet in the US in an entire year. Last I checked it was only 31% contained. There are massive underground coal fires that have been burning for decades, even centuries in some cases. That's reality. Not the utopia we are being sold. What to do then? Well, we clean-up our act for other reasons. No, we are not going to "save the planet" at all. We don't have that power. We clean-up our act because it is better than being absolute pigs and causing more damage. We also clean-up our act because this is part of learning to live with what we cannot alter. I urge anyone who think they know anything about this subject to get on Amazon right now and buy a CO2 meter. I have several. Go around your home, apartment, your friends and neighbors places, the mall, your car, etc. Measure and take notes. What you should discover is that, while atmospheric CO2 concentration is --depending on how and where you measure it-- in the order of 400 ppm, we have been living with much higher levels for a very long time, likely centuries. You will discover levels in the order of 650 ppm in your home and other homes. You will measure somewhere around 1,000 ppm in your car. It will be similar at the office and at the store. The interesting thing is that the sky hasn't fallen and we have not turned into goo. We can, apparently, live just fine in higher CO2 content. Ideal? Perhaps not. I'd like to see a study that determines if we have an evolutionary adaptation for an optimal CO2 concentration range. I don't know of any, other than fear-mongering stuff that twenty years ago, was claiming we would suffer mass extinction by now. None of this is to say that climate change isn't real and that we have not contributed to make things worse. It is very real. It has been for billions of years. And, yes, we managed to accelerate the rate of increase by burning the equivalent of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years of trees and bio matter in just a few centuries. That's how we did it. And we can't reverse that, not on a human time scale. I continue to be baffled by how otherwise intelligent people just take what they are told --about any subject really-- and do not bother to confirm before parroting the stuff far and wide. This is not how we solve problems.
- poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
  Especially true given water vapor is a more potent ghg increasing with each upward temperature tick, in a way that's not linearly reversible from linear co2 reduction. Probably the only way that could potentially fix things is direct temperature manipulation schemes. There's a lot of them that have been proposed. Worth noting that the major economies in Asia aren't doing much of anything tangible for co2 reduction. The EU has basically the world's smallest petroleum industry so it's no sacrifice for them to push climate change measures. The US will effectively be transferring huge amounts of its economic wealth to other petroleum countries who don't care. Ugly all around. Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.
  - robomartin 5y ago
    > Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem. While I appreciate your perspective, the hard and cold reality of the situation is that it is illusory to think we can affect something of this magnitude. Not only is it a planetary scale problem, it is also something that, just from the standpoint of conservation of energy, is impossible for us to address. The principle is brutally simple. To state it in relevant terms: It cannot take LESS energy to solve a problem than that which went into creating it. To further lend context, it is important to understand how the planet dealt with this when humanity was insignificant. We have this data going back 800,000 years. This comes from highly reliable ice core atmospheric sample data. Here: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html The charts: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html And this is my curve fit to try and measure the rate of change: https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png And so, in rough terms, it took about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and about 50,000 years for the same decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Any inquisitive mind would want to know how this happened. How did CO2 concentration increase and decrease? The answers are relatively simple. We were not around (or we were insignificant), so it wasn't humanity, not going back 800,000 years. The increase, among other things, was caused by massive forest fires rolling through entire continent. Without modern fire fighting technology, these fires burned and rolled through the land constantly. The only thing that would stop them would be running out of fuel or heavy rains. The decrease was mostly a combination of having burned off enough carbon stores that rains, hurricanes, cyclones --the weather-- over tens of thousands of years, precipitated CO2. Forests grew once more, capturing more carbon...only to burn again at some point and repeat the cycle. How, then, were we able to influence this in a few centuries? Again, simple: We burned the equivalent of unimaginably massive forests at a much faster rate than the natural order of things. We did this by burning oil. One gallon of petroleum is said to have required about 100 tons of plants and biomatter. Today we are burning oil at a rate of nearly 100 million barrels per day, or 35 billion barrels per year. One barrel is equivalent to just over 31 gallons. Which means that burning a barrel of oil is like burning 3,100 tons of plants and biomatter. This isn't an exact calculation, of course. It does serve to get a sense of proportion about what we are discussing. The scale is absolutely unimaginable. And so, while the planet experienced these ~100K year cycles without us around, when we started to use oil we got to the point where we effectively burned the equivalent of entire forests in a single day...every day...every year...for decades, centuries. That's how we were able to change the upward rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Reversing it is a very different story. Making a mess is easy. Any fool can light up 30 gallons of gasoline and make an absolute mess. All it takes is a match. In sharp contrast to that --and going back to the concept of conservation of energy-- you simply cannot reverse the process by expending less energy than what it took to create it in the first place. Except that this energy isn't the energy of the match, but rather the energy stored in the 30 gallons of gasoline that went up in smoke. In reality, once dispersed, the byproducts of this combustion are nearly impossible to contain and revert. It would take an unimaginable amount of energy and resources to reverse the effects of 100 million barrels of oil used per day. And we do that each and every day and have been burning this stuff for centuries at an increasing rate. This isn't to say we should do nothing at all. What I am saying is that we are having the wrong conversations because we have allowed politicians and various forces to make a cult out of this thing. Very little of what is being put out on this every day is true. We can't reverse this in 50 years. We can't do it in a century. This will take tens of thousands of years. In other words, it is likely outside a human time scale. What to do then? Well, we need to start having the right conversations. We need to start figuring out how to live with this and survive. We are not going to fix it. We need to adapt to it. That's where our technological focus should be, not in magic pixie dust to "save the planet". If we persist, we will not only lose the opportunity to adapt, we will likely risk killing all life on earth through a hairbrained scheme to save a planetary scale ecosystem that we have the hubris of thinking we can control. Every time I post about this I get eviscerated with downvotes and sometimes comments. And yet, not one person ever takes the time to read and review the sources I provide, go through some super simple math and come back with something like "Hey, I think you missed this point". I want to be wrong about this. Personal insults and downvotes don't serve any purpose at all other than to reveal the intense indoctrination people have been subjected to. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we made it worse. No, we can't fix it. Think. Don't be drones.
sgregnt 5y ago
Maybe we can use our soft military power to force other countries to reduce pollution to at least to our levels? China looking at you....
pizzapill 5y ago
China and the USA are responsible for roughly half of global Green House Gas emissions. A few years ago China pledged to invest trillions into environmental protection over the next decades. We can only hope that the USA takes similar steps. Both countries can afford it and both have access to know how other countries have build up in this effort.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  When you look at who's polluting and who's emissions are on an upward trajectory, there's one obvious country that's actively working against the environment. China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has: - Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%) - A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%) Meanwhile for the same period China has had - a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%) - 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007 So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
  - pizzapill 5y ago
    There is a lot of headroom until China even reaches US levels of pollution per capita though. The USA is emitting ~2.5x as much GHG per capita than China. Also China is the workbench of the world, other nations just shift their GHG load there, first and foremost the US.
sollewitt 5y ago
The US military is a bigger fossil fuels user than most developed countries all by itself.
alexose 5y ago
At $100/ton (the currently accepted rate), that would have paid for the removal of 64 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere. Roughly two years worth of emissions. Although at that scale, you wonder if you could get down to $10/ton... in which case you'd have removed all of the carbon emissions from 2001 until now.

I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.

by Smoosh 5y ago

I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.

api 5y ago

If climate change were being caused by communists or Islamists to attack America we would have converted to post-carbon by now. Human adversity pushes buttons in our brain stem that natural processes or random threats do not.

robomartin 5y ago

It isn't that we can't afford to mitigate climate change. We cannot mitigate climate change, period. In other words, you could throw all the money on the planet at it and it would not make a dent. No purported solution passes the math and physics tests. It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place. That's the problem. We don't have it. Energy, resources or time. You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.

WaxProlix 5y ago
That may or may not be true right now. Was it true 10 years ago? 20? 30? There exists a point at which it was not true, and we're talking about taking that investment over a 20+ year historical period, not as a lump sum right now. Lots of fossil fuel aligned people have pivoted from "everything is fine" to "there's nothing we can do now", and echoing the latter might be factually correct, but in the context it smacks of disingenuity.
- sgregnt 5y ago
  There might be an escape velocity to this: as technology evolves it is easier to clean pollution, and perhaps the innovation moves faster than the added pollution. So maybe the best time to start cleaning is 30 years into the future?
  - gruez 5y ago
    >There might be an escape velocity to this There's a better term for this rather than "escape velocity", because a similar problem exists for interstellar travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
    - sgregnt 5y ago
      Thank you for sharing!
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    That's like saying the best time to start saving for retirement is 30 years into the future, because by then investment returns may be higher.
    - sgregnt 5y ago
      It's a nice saying... but may I push back? Maybe it's like saying instead of insisting to keep a positive balance, take a debt and go study in a callege. Then profit for the rest of your life?
      - anyfoo 5y ago
        Not even going into the issue that we don't have time to "go to college" before this needs to be fixed, what actually is the "college" in your analogy? And the balance is already negative.
        sgregnt 5y ago
        Restrictions on pollution would hinder economic development, which in turn would hinder scientific progress, so we will not invent new effective methods to fight pollution. "Debt" is unrestrained economic development, "college" is the research and added economic capacity that comes out of it. And profit are the new methods for removing pollution. But I don't necessarily believe in it. The point here is that, IMHO, for every, motto-like, populist data-less claim why we should fight pollution, one can easily come up with equivalently populist data less claim why we should not bother with clime change. In isolation from supporting data these two claims are equally unsubstantiated. If there is some concrete data to share please do so, otherwise it's an echo chamber where people would just upvote what they agree with and downvote what they disagree, without any concern for the actual facts brought out in the claim, it's not a argument taking place in the comments it just people preferences showing up in their votings.
- taf2 5y ago
  I think nuclear is not a perfect solution but probably the fastest option we have.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    so do I. But try to convince the NIMBY crowd of it.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    Wind and solar are cheaper and can be brought online as fast as we can build it... Nuclear has massive startup costs and takes a hella long time to build out. Solar efficiency had been undergoing a an exponential (!!!) drop in price per kilowatt hour. Think of it as Moore's law, but for energy. Comparing solar to nuclear at this point is sorta like saying you don't need one of these gosh darned desktop computers when you've got a perfectly good giant room full of multi million dollar IBM mainframe that you bought just twenty years ago... Exponential price curves should cause one to stay flexible on assumptions. DOE: Solar hits 6 cents per kWh in 2017, three years ahead of an ambitious goal, down from 28 cents per kWh in 2011. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030 https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030 Solar costs per kWh are unambiguously less than nuclear: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#/media/File%3A3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
    - robomartin 5y ago
      > Wind and solar are cheaper and can be brought online as fast as we can build it I love wind and solar. I built a 13 kW array on our property and will likely expand it to 20 kW next year. However, even if we deploy the most optimal forms of wind and solar energy at a global scale --forms that have yet to be invented-- this will not be enough to stop or reverse atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, even if we do this, it will continue to increase exponentially until such time as the planet --through weather-- sticks its finger on the problem. This is NOT my conclusion. This came out of a study where Google researchers --who were convinced renewable energy sources was the way to go-- set out to once-and-for-all show the world the path. They were stunned when they discovered just how wrong they were. To their credit, they published the paper and admitted just how wrong they were. This is real science, not hand-wavy stuff. Anyone with the appropriate science background can go through the paper, study the data and reproduce their claims. I certainly did. This paper is what opened my eyes to the nonsense we are being sold. It led to spending over a year trying to understand the reality of the problems we face. It is well worth reading. Here it is: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- robomartin 5y ago
  > That may or may not be true right now. Well, being that the argument is grounded in physics and the math that accompanies the analysis, this is a time-independent truth. To state the problem more accurately: We cannot do a thing about climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely resembling a human time scale. The numbers being thrown about for some of these would-be solutions are just plain silly. 50 years? For a planetary scale problem? Yeah, sure. Again, one must understand that it was absolutely possible for us to add massive amounts of CO2 in short order. Removing it isn't quite as simple. We were able to add it because burning tens of billions of barrels of oil every year is easy. Any fool with a match can start a forest fire. It takes millions --billions-- of times more energy to reverse the effect of what started with a simple match. That's the context. Every purported solution must pass the physics test. None of them do. Small scale, sure. Planetary scale. Not one. Every time I look at this I am reminded of the joke one of my physics professors used to tell us with sometimes annoying frequency. He would start on a new problem, chuckle, and say: Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter. His point was that reality was always far more complex than what we had to do in order to learn and explore principles. The very first problem is that we know, without a doubt, what the baseline is for affecting a (roughly) 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2: 50,000 years. However, this baseline has a pretty tough requirement: Humanity has to leave the planet or the clock does not start. If humanity left the planet tomorrow, we know that, on average, it will take about 50K years for that 100 ppm drop. This is roughly what people are saying they can do in just 50 years with various magical solutions. In other words, they are claiming that they can do a THOUSAND times better than the rate of change that would correspond to humanity not existing at all. How do we know this? We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric data taken from ice core samples. In other words, we can see what the planet was doing when humanity's influence on CO2 and the climate was so insignificant we might as well have been on Mars. If, for example, someone claims that we can "fight" climate change (I love the hubris) by installing solar panels and wind power generator everywhere, well, they have to show how this is better than humanity leaving the planet. No hand-wavy stuff, real science, math, physics. These ideas do not survive the test of hitting the realities of physics inside an Excel spreadsheet. You don't have to take my word on it for this particular case: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what was going on. It is real science, reproducible by anyone with the skill set, and nothing even close to hand-wavy bullshit. To paraphrase, the conclusion they reached goes something like this: "Even if we deployed the most optimal versions of all renewable energy technologies. Meaning, versions of all technologies that have yet to be invented. Not only would this not reverse or stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. CO2 levels would continue to increase exponentially." These researchers went into this work convinced renewables were the way to do it and they set out to prove it once and for all. I give them huge credit for having the guts to communicate that their bubble was popped by their own research and that, no, this idea is nothing less than utopia. We don't even have to stop there. The chart in this article, when combined with the other data, absolutely made the issue crystal clear for me: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi... Remember what I said about the baseline? 100 ppm in 50,000 years, if humanity left the planet? Anything less than that is pointless as it will be in a range between never affecting CO2 concentration to taking far longer than 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction. The chart in this article shows each country's contribution to the CO2 problem. US 15% China 28% India 7% Russia 5% Europe about 7% The rest close to 40% If the United States were to beam up into space tomorrow --we evaporate from the surface of this planet and all of our technology and machinery disappears-- you are still pumping 85% of total CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, nothing will change. And atmospheric CO2 continues to rise exponentially. In other words, if someone were to propose that we install solar panels on every single home in the US. The question they have to answer is: How is that going to be better than if the US simply evaporated and we stopped contributing 15% to the global problem? It isn't! Which means it isn't a solution. It is, at best, hubris and, at worst, criminally negligent or irresponsible to propose consuming a nation's treasure on something that is as pointless as can be. OK, now China and the US are beamed-up by Captain Kirk. Same issue. Now we are down to 57%. Won't fix the problem at all. If we all left it gets down to 0% and it takes 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction. Anything LESS than that scenario will take longer or do nothing at all. That's where the impossibility of things like "save the planet" or "affect climate change" or "become carbon neutral" come into the proper lens. These are all fantasies. Sorry. Anyone wishing to challenge this has to prove their purported solution can pass the physics test at a planetary scale. Showing that it works when we assume a cow to be a uniform one meter diameter sphere of milk isn't equivalent to planetary scale in the real world. In the real world we have things like the massive forest fires burning in nearly every continent every year. In California we now have a fire that is likely to contribute more carbon in a few weeks than the entire gasoline-based ground transportation fleet in the US in an entire year. Last I checked it was only 31% contained. There are massive underground coal fires that have been burning for decades, even centuries in some cases. That's reality. Not the utopia we are being sold. What to do then? Well, we clean-up our act for other reasons. No, we are not going to "save the planet" at all. We don't have that power. We clean-up our act because it is better than being absolute pigs and causing more damage. We also clean-up our act because this is part of learning to live with what we cannot alter. I urge anyone who think they know anything about this subject to get on Amazon right now and buy a CO2 meter. I have several. Go around your home, apartment, your friends and neighbors places, the mall, your car, etc. Measure and take notes. What you should discover is that, while atmospheric CO2 concentration is --depending on how and where you measure it-- in the order of 400 ppm, we have been living with much higher levels for a very long time, likely centuries. You will discover levels in the order of 650 ppm in your home and other homes. You will measure somewhere around 1,000 ppm in your car. It will be similar at the office and at the store. The interesting thing is that the sky hasn't fallen and we have not turned into goo. We can, apparently, live just fine in higher CO2 content. Ideal? Perhaps not. I'd like to see a study that determines if we have an evolutionary adaptation for an optimal CO2 concentration range. I don't know of any, other than fear-mongering stuff that twenty years ago, was claiming we would suffer mass extinction by now. None of this is to say that climate change isn't real and that we have not contributed to make things worse. It is very real. It has been for billions of years. And, yes, we managed to accelerate the rate of increase by burning the equivalent of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years of trees and bio matter in just a few centuries. That's how we did it. And we can't reverse that, not on a human time scale. I continue to be baffled by how otherwise intelligent people just take what they are told --about any subject really-- and do not bother to confirm before parroting the stuff far and wide. This is not how we solve problems.
poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
Especially true given water vapor is a more potent ghg increasing with each upward temperature tick, in a way that's not linearly reversible from linear co2 reduction. Probably the only way that could potentially fix things is direct temperature manipulation schemes. There's a lot of them that have been proposed. Worth noting that the major economies in Asia aren't doing much of anything tangible for co2 reduction. The EU has basically the world's smallest petroleum industry so it's no sacrifice for them to push climate change measures. The US will effectively be transferring huge amounts of its economic wealth to other petroleum countries who don't care. Ugly all around. Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.
- robomartin 5y ago
  > Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem. While I appreciate your perspective, the hard and cold reality of the situation is that it is illusory to think we can affect something of this magnitude. Not only is it a planetary scale problem, it is also something that, just from the standpoint of conservation of energy, is impossible for us to address. The principle is brutally simple. To state it in relevant terms: It cannot take LESS energy to solve a problem than that which went into creating it. To further lend context, it is important to understand how the planet dealt with this when humanity was insignificant. We have this data going back 800,000 years. This comes from highly reliable ice core atmospheric sample data. Here: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html The charts: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html And this is my curve fit to try and measure the rate of change: https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png And so, in rough terms, it took about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and about 50,000 years for the same decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Any inquisitive mind would want to know how this happened. How did CO2 concentration increase and decrease? The answers are relatively simple. We were not around (or we were insignificant), so it wasn't humanity, not going back 800,000 years. The increase, among other things, was caused by massive forest fires rolling through entire continent. Without modern fire fighting technology, these fires burned and rolled through the land constantly. The only thing that would stop them would be running out of fuel or heavy rains. The decrease was mostly a combination of having burned off enough carbon stores that rains, hurricanes, cyclones --the weather-- over tens of thousands of years, precipitated CO2. Forests grew once more, capturing more carbon...only to burn again at some point and repeat the cycle. How, then, were we able to influence this in a few centuries? Again, simple: We burned the equivalent of unimaginably massive forests at a much faster rate than the natural order of things. We did this by burning oil. One gallon of petroleum is said to have required about 100 tons of plants and biomatter. Today we are burning oil at a rate of nearly 100 million barrels per day, or 35 billion barrels per year. One barrel is equivalent to just over 31 gallons. Which means that burning a barrel of oil is like burning 3,100 tons of plants and biomatter. This isn't an exact calculation, of course. It does serve to get a sense of proportion about what we are discussing. The scale is absolutely unimaginable. And so, while the planet experienced these ~100K year cycles without us around, when we started to use oil we got to the point where we effectively burned the equivalent of entire forests in a single day...every day...every year...for decades, centuries. That's how we were able to change the upward rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Reversing it is a very different story. Making a mess is easy. Any fool can light up 30 gallons of gasoline and make an absolute mess. All it takes is a match. In sharp contrast to that --and going back to the concept of conservation of energy-- you simply cannot reverse the process by expending less energy than what it took to create it in the first place. Except that this energy isn't the energy of the match, but rather the energy stored in the 30 gallons of gasoline that went up in smoke. In reality, once dispersed, the byproducts of this combustion are nearly impossible to contain and revert. It would take an unimaginable amount of energy and resources to reverse the effects of 100 million barrels of oil used per day. And we do that each and every day and have been burning this stuff for centuries at an increasing rate. This isn't to say we should do nothing at all. What I am saying is that we are having the wrong conversations because we have allowed politicians and various forces to make a cult out of this thing. Very little of what is being put out on this every day is true. We can't reverse this in 50 years. We can't do it in a century. This will take tens of thousands of years. In other words, it is likely outside a human time scale. What to do then? Well, we need to start having the right conversations. We need to start figuring out how to live with this and survive. We are not going to fix it. We need to adapt to it. That's where our technological focus should be, not in magic pixie dust to "save the planet". If we persist, we will not only lose the opportunity to adapt, we will likely risk killing all life on earth through a hairbrained scheme to save a planetary scale ecosystem that we have the hubris of thinking we can control. Every time I post about this I get eviscerated with downvotes and sometimes comments. And yet, not one person ever takes the time to read and review the sources I provide, go through some super simple math and come back with something like "Hey, I think you missed this point". I want to be wrong about this. Personal insults and downvotes don't serve any purpose at all other than to reveal the intense indoctrination people have been subjected to. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we made it worse. No, we can't fix it. Think. Don't be drones.

sgregnt 5y ago

Maybe we can use our soft military power to force other countries to reduce pollution to at least to our levels? China looking at you....

pizzapill 5y ago

China and the USA are responsible for roughly half of global Green House Gas emissions. A few years ago China pledged to invest trillions into environmental protection over the next decades. We can only hope that the USA takes similar steps. Both countries can afford it and both have access to know how other countries have build up in this effort.

908B64B197 5y ago
When you look at who's polluting and who's emissions are on an upward trajectory, there's one obvious country that's actively working against the environment. China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has: - Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%) - A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%) Meanwhile for the same period China has had - a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%) - 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007 So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
- pizzapill 5y ago
  There is a lot of headroom until China even reaches US levels of pollution per capita though. The USA is emitting ~2.5x as much GHG per capita than China. Also China is the workbench of the world, other nations just shift their GHG load there, first and foremost the US.

sollewitt 5y ago

The US military is a bigger fossil fuels user than most developed countries all by itself.

alexose 5y ago

At $100/ton (the currently accepted rate), that would have paid for the removal of 64 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere. Roughly two years worth of emissions. Although at that scale, you wonder if you could get down to $10/ton... in which case you'd have removed all of the carbon emissions from 2001 until now.