5 ms·

I think I'm a relative optimist about global warming because there are a number of possible climate engineering interventions which seem fairly cheap and could

by TillE 5y ago

I think I'm a relative optimist about global warming because there are a number of possible climate engineering interventions which seem fairly cheap and could plausibly buy us another decade or so. I can imagine a future where perhaps India or China decides to act on their own to this effect, risks be damned.

merpnderp 5y ago
Was reading about food and economic disaster in Sri Lanka and how much of their problems would be solved with cheap coal electric and fertilizer plants. If we had an easy way to counter global warming, maybe countries could more easily borrow funds for such projects.
- immmmmm 5y ago
  cheap coal electricity for the environment? i assume you are joking?
aaaxyz 5y ago
That's one of the main plot elements of The Ministry for the Future.
ncmncm 5y ago
All of the "climate engineering interventions" people keep trotting out that don't actually remove carbon from the air end up making things radically, disastrously worse. We know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, in bulk, with super-plentiful olivine. Cutting off emissions and deploying olivine works. Almost anything else ends up doing no net good, at best, and funnels us deeper into the hole. Soluble iron compounds scattered over the open ocean could help. Any way to get the sulfur hexafluoride and HFCs out of the air would be an important contribution, because even getting CO2 content down to pre-industrial level would not be enough; those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem.
- bobm_kite9 5y ago
  I have no idea why this has been down-voted. Sure, it's a strong opinion but that's what HN is all about. Couple of questions: - Do we have any estimates yet on how long olivine would take to be effective? - Can we do HFC-capture in a similar way to carbon capture? Would this be more productive?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    The CO2 capture capacity of olivine is well understood. You just need to get enough of it out there, wet, stirred, and exposed to air or surface water, i.e. on beaches. It will take many millions of tons, but we have that, or access to it. Of course it would do little good if we continued pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate at the same time. Getting the SF6 out of the atmosphere is a tougher nut. The present load already accounts for 10% of forcing. There are current efforts to phase out its use, and suck it out of the equipment it is used in. The HFCs in current use, if all vented, would have as strong an effect as all the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. Collecting it all up and destroying it is a huge responsibility. Probably most that is in cars, window A/C units, and refrigerators will end up vented.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I thought the nickel impurities in olivine made bulk deployment an absurdly bad idea from a toxicity point of view.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Nickel is a concern, but seems not to make the the whole idea untenable. In particular, the alternative of spreading powdered olivine on cropland will require monitoring. Different sources of olivine have different amounts of nickel and chromium, and the sources with acceptable levels can be favored for that use. Use on beaches and shallows seems to tolerate more. There is no reason to do one but not the other, and dozens of other measures besides.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem. If by big you mean 1/5 of the problem, ok. But that is really not big enough to remove the focus from the other 4/5 And the way those gases work on the long term, in that the amount of them on the atmosphere is proportional to the speed of emission, instead of total emissions makes any change of focus from CO2 actually harmful to solving the problem. And by the way, half of the non-CO2 emissions are methane, that comes mostly from fossil fuels mining and handling, and 2/3 of the rest are nitrous oxides, that comes almost entirely from fossil fuel burning. So "big" is really, really pushing it. A source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
01100011 5y ago
I'm not too worried about warming for the same reason. I am still worried about increased CO2 levels and their health effects. Either we figure out a carbon neutral energy solution(efficiency gains + mass solar and/or fusion) or I think we're screwed(), at least as far as our modern standard of living goes. - Humans and the earth will survive in any case, just not in our current form.
Faaak 5y ago
If you're interested, the book "The Ministry for the Future" from "Kim Stanley Robinson" (who also wrote the Red Mars trilogy) talks about that. It's really interesting to read
Seb-C 5y ago
I'm quite optimistic about this too. Sure, we have to reduce our impact on the climate and be responsible about it, but even in the worst case scenario, I'm confident that we'll just find a way to deal with it. The current apocalyptic scenarios we see on the medias is too extreme and pessimistic. "If the Earth can't support seven billion people, then all seven billion of us just have to figure out a way! That's how science works!"
- rusk 5y ago
  We’ve spent so long fantasising about living on inhospitable planets it’s not too much of a leap to imagine earth as one. Ala planet of the apes [spoiler alert] though, could a time traveller end up on earth in the future and mistake it for an alien planet? Could we do this with 7 billion people though? Will my children make it to this world? That’s what keeps me up at night.
- Avalaxy 5y ago
  > The current apocalyptic scenarios we see on the medias is too extreme and pessimistic Source? If anything, scientists have been too conservative in their warnings. Time and time again, we see that climate change is going _much_ faster than we anticipated.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    The models climate science is based on don't say that climate change is going much faster than expected. We're at about 1.2°C right now with with a current rate of 0.18°C per decade. This last IPCC report puts us in the expected warming range between 2.4°C and 4°C by the end of the century.
  - Seb-C 5y ago
    I don't need a source to express my very own and subjective opinion about how mankind will adapt in the future. Besides, you did not give any for your own affirmations either.
immmmmm 5y ago
you should share your optimism with the million(s) starving in Africa due to extreme drought. also don't forget to put the IPCC in copy, i'm sure the scientists that devoted their life on the subject are interested on your views.
myrmidon 5y ago
I'm extremely sceptical that climate engineering is gonna help: Mitigating continued CO2 emissions is VASTLY more expensive than reducing emissions themselves (in every scenario I've seen so far), and we had 4 decades (!!) to do anything about the emissions but nothing happened. I see no reason to assume that governments are suddenly going to spend significant parts of GDP on climate engineering if they could not be arsed to spend a tiny fraction of that on mitigation so far :(
- phreeza 5y ago
  You're right from a financial standpoint, but I wonder if from a psychological standpoint, it is easier for humans to start doing something new than it is to stop doing something they have been doing for a long time?
  - baron_harkonnen 5y ago
    Exactly, this is why wearing masks and getting vaccinated worked so effectively at curbing the pandemic. People didn't want to change their way of life. Stopping the pandemic would have required an extreme economic shut down in April, far more extreme than what we saw. Sure this economic hit would be much less than the long run impact of pandemic never really going away, but it was too much for people. So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path. While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free. Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change. We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago

by TillE 5y ago

merpnderp 5y ago

Was reading about food and economic disaster in Sri Lanka and how much of their problems would be solved with cheap coal electric and fertilizer plants. If we had an easy way to counter global warming, maybe countries could more easily borrow funds for such projects.

immmmmm 5y ago
cheap coal electricity for the environment? i assume you are joking?

aaaxyz 5y ago

That's one of the main plot elements of The Ministry for the Future.

ncmncm 5y ago

All of the "climate engineering interventions" people keep trotting out that don't actually remove carbon from the air end up making things radically, disastrously worse. We know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, in bulk, with super-plentiful olivine. Cutting off emissions and deploying olivine works. Almost anything else ends up doing no net good, at best, and funnels us deeper into the hole. Soluble iron compounds scattered over the open ocean could help. Any way to get the sulfur hexafluoride and HFCs out of the air would be an important contribution, because even getting CO2 content down to pre-industrial level would not be enough; those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem.

bobm_kite9 5y ago
I have no idea why this has been down-voted. Sure, it's a strong opinion but that's what HN is all about. Couple of questions: - Do we have any estimates yet on how long olivine would take to be effective? - Can we do HFC-capture in a similar way to carbon capture? Would this be more productive?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The CO2 capture capacity of olivine is well understood. You just need to get enough of it out there, wet, stirred, and exposed to air or surface water, i.e. on beaches. It will take many millions of tons, but we have that, or access to it. Of course it would do little good if we continued pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate at the same time. Getting the SF6 out of the atmosphere is a tougher nut. The present load already accounts for 10% of forcing. There are current efforts to phase out its use, and suck it out of the equipment it is used in. The HFCs in current use, if all vented, would have as strong an effect as all the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. Collecting it all up and destroying it is a huge responsibility. Probably most that is in cars, window A/C units, and refrigerators will end up vented.
zdragnar 5y ago
I thought the nickel impurities in olivine made bulk deployment an absurdly bad idea from a toxicity point of view.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Nickel is a concern, but seems not to make the the whole idea untenable. In particular, the alternative of spreading powdered olivine on cropland will require monitoring. Different sources of olivine have different amounts of nickel and chromium, and the sources with acceptable levels can be favored for that use. Use on beaches and shallows seems to tolerate more. There is no reason to do one but not the other, and dozens of other measures besides.
marcosdumay 5y ago
> those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem. If by big you mean 1/5 of the problem, ok. But that is really not big enough to remove the focus from the other 4/5 And the way those gases work on the long term, in that the amount of them on the atmosphere is proportional to the speed of emission, instead of total emissions makes any change of focus from CO2 actually harmful to solving the problem. And by the way, half of the non-CO2 emissions are methane, that comes mostly from fossil fuels mining and handling, and 2/3 of the rest are nitrous oxides, that comes almost entirely from fossil fuel burning. So "big" is really, really pushing it. A source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases

01100011 5y ago

I'm not too worried about warming for the same reason. I am still worried about increased CO2 levels and their health effects. Either we figure out a carbon neutral energy solution(efficiency gains + mass solar and/or fusion) or I think we're screwed(), at least as far as our modern standard of living goes. - Humans and the earth will survive in any case, just not in our current form.

Faaak 5y ago

If you're interested, the book "The Ministry for the Future" from "Kim Stanley Robinson" (who also wrote the Red Mars trilogy) talks about that. It's really interesting to read

Seb-C 5y ago

I'm quite optimistic about this too. Sure, we have to reduce our impact on the climate and be responsible about it, but even in the worst case scenario, I'm confident that we'll just find a way to deal with it. The current apocalyptic scenarios we see on the medias is too extreme and pessimistic. "If the Earth can't support seven billion people, then all seven billion of us just have to figure out a way! That's how science works!"

rusk 5y ago
We’ve spent so long fantasising about living on inhospitable planets it’s not too much of a leap to imagine earth as one. Ala planet of the apes [spoiler alert] though, could a time traveller end up on earth in the future and mistake it for an alien planet? Could we do this with 7 billion people though? Will my children make it to this world? That’s what keeps me up at night.
Avalaxy 5y ago
> The current apocalyptic scenarios we see on the medias is too extreme and pessimistic Source? If anything, scientists have been too conservative in their warnings. Time and time again, we see that climate change is going _much_ faster than we anticipated.
- goatlover 5y ago
  The models climate science is based on don't say that climate change is going much faster than expected. We're at about 1.2°C right now with with a current rate of 0.18°C per decade. This last IPCC report puts us in the expected warming range between 2.4°C and 4°C by the end of the century.
- Seb-C 5y ago
  I don't need a source to express my very own and subjective opinion about how mankind will adapt in the future. Besides, you did not give any for your own affirmations either.

immmmmm 5y ago

you should share your optimism with the million(s) starving in Africa due to extreme drought. also don't forget to put the IPCC in copy, i'm sure the scientists that devoted their life on the subject are interested on your views.

myrmidon 5y ago

I'm extremely sceptical that climate engineering is gonna help: Mitigating continued CO2 emissions is VASTLY more expensive than reducing emissions themselves (in every scenario I've seen so far), and we had 4 decades (!!) to do anything about the emissions but nothing happened. I see no reason to assume that governments are suddenly going to spend significant parts of GDP on climate engineering if they could not be arsed to spend a tiny fraction of that on mitigation so far :(

phreeza 5y ago
You're right from a financial standpoint, but I wonder if from a psychological standpoint, it is easier for humans to start doing something new than it is to stop doing something they have been doing for a long time?
- baron_harkonnen 5y ago
  Exactly, this is why wearing masks and getting vaccinated worked so effectively at curbing the pandemic. People didn't want to change their way of life. Stopping the pandemic would have required an extreme economic shut down in April, far more extreme than what we saw. Sure this economic hit would be much less than the long run impact of pandemic never really going away, but it was too much for people. So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path. While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free. Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change. We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago