He’s Silent Generation (86), and he’s very smart and savvy otherwise (he’s an aerospace engineer, still has his 9-5 job in airplane development and has recently started driving for Uber to fill his spare time), and plays VR games on Oculus with me and my sister on weekends, but he doesn’t have patience for our climate change talk. He’s extremely liberal otherwise, but he thinks this is all overblown and the natural cycle of climate, telling us he’s seen these changes before.
How do I convince him this is different? Im at a loss. Or maybe I shouldn’t bother because at his age it doesn’t matter and I should just let him ‘be right’?
My sister is disturbed by his attitude, but im not sure it matters, really.
Does your dad believe that we can continue with our current rate of emissions and waste without consequence though? Maybe it’s worth discussing from an environmentalist point of view rather than climate change specifically. Perhaps the phrase has become taboo for him.
That’s an angle I hadn’t considered, thanks. Fortunately he’s not closed minded. But I think you’re right, the phrase ‘climate change’ has likely become taboo. Growing up in the 70s to 80s, I saw the propaganda. It was bad.
I live in Michigan where we just had at least 7 tornadoes yesterday, and NOAA is basically saying get used to it, this is the new normal. I’ve been in this house for 20 years and I’ve never seen devastation like this. I’ll be without power for several more days because massive 200 year old oaks were snapped like toothpicks and my street is littered with downed power lines.
7 people have died, and when this happens in winter (which they’re saying it will), people will freeze to death in the aftermath. Things will get ugly soon.
You’re both right. The rich people have been doomsday prepping for several years now: buying private islands, building underground bunkers beneath them, and hiring private armies to defend them.
They say out loud that climate change is a hoax, but they’ve been frantically preparing for it because they know the truth, because they can pay for the truth.
And they can pay to keep us from it: that we should already have been in a panic about it, but they’re paying to stop us from panicking – at least until they can get out of the killzone.
It’s an excellent moment to remind you that even if we manage to dodge this, there is still the heat death of the universe, so it’s just a matter of how long do we want to waste energy postponing the unavoidable
You do realize that the heat death of the universe would only likely take place in literally trillions and trillions and trillions of years time? Climate change is happening now.
Exactly. Climate change we have the chance to mitigate, and very possibly prevent / reverse. The heat death on the other hand is not only just a theory as to how the universe might end, but also something that would likely be completely out of our control, assuming that humans even survive a fraction of the time until then. Most likely, there’ll be something else that kills us first.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
I mean, I feel like this year in particular illustrates quite well that there are already very real impacts of climate change in rich countries, with Canada, Greece, Hawaii etc. burning. Which makes it worth to delay climate change as much as possible, even if we can’t or don’t want to stop it at livable levels.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…
“That’s weather not climate!”
When there’s a wildfire somewhere…
“That’s global warming!”
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
The others already pointed out that there’s a global, rising trend of climate disasters. I would like to qualify:
This year did exceed everyone’s expectations. It’s the first year of El Niño after years of increasing temperatures, so while it didn’t come as a complete surprise, it could still be an anomaly.
If you ask climate scientists, they’ll tell you lots of climate change effects that could contribute to these wildfires, but yeah, ultimately, they’ll say they won’t know for sure until they’ve seen the following years.
However, these are raging wildfires all around the globe, in regions that don’t normally have them and that aren’t linked to each other. At some point, it stops being “a wildfire somewhere” and starts to become a statistic.
Surface-level ocean temperatures are significantly higher this year, globally, than in previous years. We can’t explain such a global increase without climate change. And obviously, warm water evaporates differently, leading to unusual weather patterns, leading to droughts, which increases the likelihood of wildfires.
So, yeah, while the snowball is simply irrelevant to the topic, the wildfire statistic correlates with all our other statistics. You’d have to ignore a ton of evidence to not attribute the wildfires to climate change until proven differently.
Are we supposed to be comforted about the timeline being decades? That’s generations alive today.
Scientists are also finding their estimates getting outpaced alarmingly often right now.
The Russia Ukraine war has disrupted civilisation quite significantly with 6 million refugees. We could see over 1 BILLION climate refugees by 2050. 1000 MILLION people having to leave their homes.
We are on course for significant disruption to food supply before 1.5C warming. Doesn’t matter how rich your country is, with global food supplies low and that maybe people on the move, civilisation as we know it will change significantly. theguardian.com/…/global-heating-likely-to-hit-wo…
To be clear: I am not a doomerist. Don’t dwell on this and do nothing. Get angry! This is being done to you. This was not inevitable, it was the decisions of the most powerful and richest people in the world. Get out there and take action, the movement needs you.
Rule 1 of life: be skeptical when someone presents their opinion as facts.
Looking at Western European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to an extent, the road to net-zero is disrupting. Probably because necessary steps have been delayed until the last moment. Large numbers of refugees have a destabilising effect on democracy as well.
Some steps that are necessary for net-zero are expensive investments (like heat pumps) that are causing conflicts in society. Going ahead with it as well as delaying is sure to be met with very loud resistance. Don’t think that Germany can miss it’s climate goals without some serious protests, perhaps worse than they’ve ever seen.
At the same time, I wonder how well UK households are going to deal with even higher food prices as the percentage of failed harvests increases. There isn’t a lot of buffer space here.
It’s not so much whether rich countries have enough money to deal with climate change, but rather how well democracy will fare when it’s under duress.
If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.
It’s already happening, collapse on this scale is a slow process, and hard to observe from within.
The roman empire didn’t collapse from start to end in a single lifetime, after all.
Nobody alive today will be around to see the “collapse” collapse, the extremely dire breakdown that comes as a sudden crisis in civilisation terms, but we will continue to see a lot of hardship from our dated and crumbling institutions and our society slowly losing its grasp on what it is, etc.
In the end, just like the romans, our civilisation’s collapse doesn’t mean apocalypse, it’s not the end.
All civilisations rise and fall, and while ours is by far the grandest and strongest in many respects, it’s also the weakest, relying entirely on extremely fragile global systems that, should they fail for even a single month, would throw the planet into chaos (electricity grids/Internet), hastening or even triggering that final sudden crisis, once three slow rot of a dying civilisation has already set in.
But until then, such events will be overcome. Not until that rot has truly set in, and a sudden crisis is upon us all, will things finally collapse as we know it.
Just remember in 20 years when nothing changes and life proceeds as normal. No one will care what you think then because the robbery will have been done.
Over the history of earth, much worse happened. Statistically, this change is nothing over the millions and even billions of years.
I maintain that nothing is changing, and we don’t even have close to enough data to judge an earth that’s 4.5 billion years old to know that anything is changing because of us, and that paying politicians more is the answer.
Have you by any chance looked at a graph of average temperatures over time?
Over the history of earth, much worse happened. Statistically, this change is nothing over the millions and even billions of years.
Humans did not exist for most of that time, but yes it’s inconsequential to Earth that there’s warming, Earth is a rock with spinning molten metal inside so it doesn’t care. But it’s pretty fucking important to all the things living on the Earth that there’s warming beyond what they evolved to withstand.
When it comes to climate change we know the mechanism that keeps earth warmer than other random space rocks circling the sun (Greenhouse effect, which was discovered in 1856), we know which gasses contribute to that greenhouse effect, we know that we’ve added a shit ton of them which were buried for millions of years into the atmosphere, we can measure carbon dioxide and other gasses at higher volumes than they’ve been since humans existed, which also coincides with when we started releasing them in vast quantities.
After we’ve got the means, the methods, and the triggers, what more do you need to beyond a reasonable doubt to realize man made climate change?
Temperature going up over time? Over how long? 100 years compared to billions, the age of earth? Do you even understand basic statistics to calculate the confidence in such a measurement?
All the bullshit you’re parroting from television, like green house effect, is at best circumstantial evidence but it’s not proof, and it’s evidence with negligible confidence due to the huge error margin mentioned earlier. Even worse, it’s not even evidence because of the oldest rule in the book “correlation doesn’t imply causation”, yet somehow it’s still science when basic logic is broken to support a political agenda propped by ignorant people who know nothing in math and teenagers who still don’t know the difference between integrals and derivatives and cry that “math is hard”.
I hate to break it to you, but people who can’t calculate the standard error on measurements shouldn’t open their mouths about science, and certainly shouldn’t ask us to surrender all our power and money to corrupt politicians for a fictitious goal.
I’m bored of hearing all this politicized nonsense. Maybe go find a book of someone who disagrees with your opinion and learn something outside of what you learned on television.
I have a degree in statistics, do you understand statistics?
Correlation doesn’t imply causation. But we have casual and testable mechanisms to validate these theories and what we’re seeing. We can measure the greenhouse effect directly by experiment.
I hear your argument, Earth’s been hotter millions of years ago, sure, but that doesn’t invalidate human climate change at all.
I have a PhD in physics. I spent half of my life in labs doing measurements and calculating systematic and statistical errors on them in an experiment that collects data over years to get a single number. A good chunk of my thesis is on how to properly estimate errors in measurements that are years long. I have even worked with complicated concepts like propagating errors through mathematical models to minimize them.
No you don’t have measurements to validate anything. You have “this line goes up, this other line goes up, and we think we can explain it with green house nonsense, and hence the correlation coefficient is 1.00000”, and hence we caused it. You think I haven’t seen this nonsense? 99.99% of the people have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.
Yes, earth went hotter and colder million times before. This invalidates climate change. We have no proof, not even statistical, that humans caused anything. We only have political agendas and research groups who get funding if they agree to come to that result. And we have dumb people who don’t understand basic logic or can add two fractions parrot what the television says in fear.
I’m afraid you are severely mistaken. This is only the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first one that was caused by a species that knew what it was doing. Even on the scale of billions of years, what’s going on right now is highly unusual.
Nor would any of the other mass-extinction events have been considered “life proceeds as normal”, if there were any humans around to witness them. Certainly a huge asteroid hitting the planet and shrouding it in dust for years would have turned some heads.
Wow, the denial is strong. People are actively dying this year because of events that would have been statistically improbable just 10 years ago. Considering how important agriculture is to feed billions of people on a daily basis I would argue that any change to that jeopardizes our existence; and this is just one of the many effective ways that climate change could destroy modern day society.
You can believe what you want and I hope you the luck to never encounter fires, deadly weather, water or food shortages as many people today are dying from.
Who said I was ignoring all that? I’m well aware. But what the Fuck am I supposed to do about it?
I drive a hybrid, pickup litter, recycle, make most of my own food from scratch, and talk about how we need to do more (like with this tongue-in-cheek meme). I ain’t in Congress (yet), but even if I was look how productive they’re being towards this issue.
Most rich people don’t just stand around outside waiting to get shot. Especially not if they know someone is gunning for them. They may be morally bankrupt, but they’re not stupid.
I would suggest to, first, join your local Eco-social organizations. Normally the “take a gun a shoot a motherfucker” approach, while very satisfying to say, it’s usually way less effective than organize with your community.
Totally agree, hence, the need for organized non-institutional action 😉. In institutional terms, the difference between a bunch of eco-anarchist and eco-terrorist is pretty nebulous to say the truth!
The interesting part are those who still don’t write letters to their congressmen and still vote for climate deniers. I just can’t.
It would be insanely easy to solve: Not one of the billionaires out there would recognize if they only had 999 mil left and neither would anybody else. That‘s a cool 10 trillion to pay towards climate change. You‘re welcome.
That money was earned using earth, so to saving earth it goes back (because no earth, no money and our billionaire overlords suprisingly havent saved us yet.)
Though I agree with you on taking money from the rich people, that’s mostly not how it works. Most rich persons has most of his “worth” in stocks. Even scammer musk’s worth mostly is “worth” because of his ownership of Tesla and the such. He doesn’t actually have that money.
Most importantly: It’s not insanely easy to solve, Sven if you pump in trillions. Even if we stop pumping carbon in the air tomorrow it will still take centuries until the atmosphere is back to normal, barring any carbon capture.
The problem with is that the extra CO2 in the air comes from energy we took from burning fossil fuels. If we want to capture it back, we need to spend the same mount of energy that the world spent for the past, say, 2 centuries, from non carbon sources to get that done. This energy does not include the energy that the world needs to function.
That is an insane amount of energy that, again, has to come from non carbon emitting sources.
Also, until all energy comes from non carbon emitting sources, carbon capture is useless because if both you’ll spent 100 carbon for each, say, 50-70 (optimistically) carbon you capture.
If I say “Were not even close to 100% non carbon emissions in energy creation” it’s a huge understatement. I believe something around 10% of our energy production is non carbon emitting. Cars are not included.
Making all out cars electrical is also cute. It’s a nice thought if it weren’t that all that electricity still mostly comes from CO2 emitting sources so including conversion losses electrical cars may actually send more CO2 in the atmosphere.
You want to actually solve this?
Make ALL our electrical generation non CO2 emitting in the next 10 years. Air and solar are cute, but fractional and will remain that, probably for ever. We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the “bad” ones.
This obviously isn’t going to happen.
We will likely end up with some form of atmospheric engineering where we’re going to meas with the atmosphere, seeding clouds, or pumping other chemicals in there that negate the effects of CO2. I’m unsure what the results of that will be though
Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children’s children
Even if we stop pumping carbon in the air tomorrow it will still take centuries until the atmosphere is back to normal, barring any carbon capture.
That would, however, stop it from getting any worse, which is kind of a big deal because it’s getting worse at a frightening rate.
Making all out cars electrical is also cute. It’s a nice thought if it weren’t that all that electricity still mostly comes from CO2 emitting sources so including conversion losses electrical cars may actually send more CO2 in the atmosphere.
You severely overestimate the energy efficiency of gasoline engines. A big reason to get rid of them is not only the fuel they burn, but how much of it they waste.
We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the “bad” ones.
You severely underestimate the resources required to build those. It costs some $20 billion to build one nuclear power plant. There’s a reason everybody’s focusing on solar and wind.
Small modular reactors may be cheaper, but they also generate huge amounts of radioactive waste. Radioactive waste isn’t a serious problem now, but it will be if we start powering everything with SMRs.
Atom cracking will not save us. Not unless there’s some kind of breakthrough.
We will likely end up with some form of atmospheric engineering where we’re going to meas with the atmosphere, seeding clouds, or pumping other chemicals in there that negate the effects of CO2. I’m unsure what the results of that will be though
It works.
Big Oil chants “spray, baby, spray!”
It works too well. Global freeze occurs. Everybody dies. Game over.
Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children’s children
Have you stepped outside at any point in the last several years? Global warming is no longer a looming future threat for someone else to deal with. It’s here and now.
Yes, it would stop making it worse indeed. I’m not saying we shouldn’t stop, I’m just saying that stopping alone won’t solve the issue
Global warming is an ENORMOUS problem that will require generations of people all over the world working together to fix it and I smjsut don’t see that happening because face it: politicians and rich people don’t give a shit.
I don’t overestimate gas engine efficiency, they’re about as efficient as it gets and the same goes for fuel burning in other places. Gas / coal / fuel power plants really aren’t much more efficient and now you have energy centralized and Ned to transform it, transport it, transform again, store in batteries so more and more losses that altogether makes driving electrical really not that much better for climate change.
I know nuclear reactors are hugely expensive but I honestly don’t see we have another option here. We can’t continue with coal or gas, we need a HUGE amount of STABLE electrical energy that solar and wind simply won’t be able to supply, not to mention the amount of money that goes into building solar and wind farms that gives the same energy as nuclear. That also ignores the amount of mining required to build solar and wind farms. Those alternatives aren’t all that “clean” once you get into the nitty gritty details.
I fully agree with you about this, something must be done, but here is the realest problem of them all: Nothing will be done. A few token things will be done to say “look at us! Aren’t we awesome politicians?” There will be a lot of clapping and patting on backs, and nothing changes. The Paris accords were a joke and even that joke wasn’t followed up on anyway by most parties.
The way that I see it is that we’re fucked. I’d love to slice it if I could but I can’t. Neither can you. All we can do is hope (or pray of that’s your thing) that our leaders will get it into heir heads that humanity is dying and start doing something real.
I’m surprised this got so many upvotes, a lot of it is factually incorrect! For instance many grids worldwide are over 50% renewables. You can scrub carbon with a net carbon loss if you use solar powered to do it.
There’s also no reason that capturing the carbon would cost all the energy that was released by burning it (you don’t have to make it into the same fuel molecule).
Honestly this sounds like climate change denier shit, “it’s too late there’s nothing we can do, buy more oil.”.
On the positive side, I agree that nuclear is great!
Sorry to ruin this dream, but not a single developed country (and most likely not a single non-developed either) has a remote chance of being carbon neutral in 10years.
Reason number one is “carbon-neutral” is yet another greenwashing marketing idea involving emissions compensations that are just not there.
We’ve seen now that planting trees will probably not do any good: we already see trees growing failure rate increasing due to excessive heating. They grow slower already, making all compensation calculations wrong, and they’ll burn in wildfires in summer, releasing all the carbon they captured.
The second reason is the insanely high dependency we have to cheap oil. You need to convert haul truck, small trucks, buses, etc. to electric all while you turn the grid to 0 emission.
You need to convert cargo ships to electric otherwise your net neutrality will need to conveniently ignore all importations and exportations.
You need to convert all farm machines to 0 emissions and abandon quite a lot of the chemistry considered for granted today, which means yields will drop.
You need to convert blast furnaces to alternative energies. Today, there is almost nothing done there other than “we’ll get hydrogen” that everybody know cannot be produced in the volume they need, let alone at an acceptable price.
And no energy source whatsoever is carbon neutral!
Solar panels need quite some metal and semicon-based manufacturing techniques. Wind farm need concrete for their anchoring, and use advanced materials to build. They both have a limited lifespan, after which you need to recycle (By the way: noticed that when “recycling” is advertised, no one mentions if it’s rectcling for the same usage and not recycled to lower grade material we can’t use back to produce the same device? That’s because we just can’t get them back with the same purity level…) and make some replacement, that will again have a share of emissions.
Short of producing absolutely everything in the chains of supplies locally, you will import emissions from another country
Any human activity is basically emitting or causing greenhouses emissions.
And while you think all of that can be managed, we already have all signals to red on the natural resources: we can’t extract lithium fast enough, and we may not want to given how dirty the mines are. We may run out of some metals we rely on.
And most of these issues are eluded in the great plans, because it’s too complicated or we simply have no solution and no one wants to say it up and loud.
Now, the good/bad news: all of this will end because we’re also running out of cheap oil.
It’s a good news because that will put a break in humans activities and so greenhouse gas emissions.
But it’s bad because not a single country is preparing for the aftermath, and that means… they will collapse!
How else? How about not? You simply don’t because you can’t. Barring some weird exceptions, no country will be able to be carbon neutral in 10 years, let alone the entire world.
Yes we need to do loads of work, and yes, nuclear will form a huge part because we don’t have another choice. Nuclear will cause CO2 too, yes, during building mostly and nothing near what coal or similar plants do.
I’m simply saying we can (and must) do nuclear next to solar and wind.
Either way it doesn’t matter since entieht you nor I make those decisions and those that do mostly don’t give a shit as long as they get their paycheck
Edit: you want to make a real change?
Increase taxes on carbon fuels significantly every year. Prohibit the construction and sale of useless throwaway products like fashion that lasts 3 wears until it breaks, phones that will work for only 1-2 years. Invest heavily in improving recycling so that we can recycle everything. Invest in alternative nuclear fuels like thorium so that more countries can go nuclear without having to worry about bombs. Stop the "delivery in one day! " economy, which basically requires alAmazon to be destroyed . Redesign American continent cities completely to no longer be car dependent so that people can walk and cycle for 95% of their needs and use public transportation or shared cars for the rest.
Those are some insane but required solutions if we want to stop climate change.
Car dependent cities are unsustainable, financially and environmentally. Our throwaway economy is unsustainable. Our dependency on fossil fuels in unsustainable
That’s a disturbing but interesting take. Thank you very much.
The funny thing is that you can sell stocks. I know that a billionaire does not have dagoberts vault at home (maybe some do).
But their net worth is calculated somehow and in selling all assets above 999 mil, you get exactly what I‘m talking about.
I get that this is a long undertaking but we are still on the way up. This needs to stop now so we do it now. Use the money to stop the gravest polluters first and by the time you run out of money, you‘re a lot better on the scale.
Btw the estimated cost to 2030 to stop climate change is 90 trillion. So this does part of it.
Just wanted to put that out there. It’s surely gonna be a big job since most of us lack vision.
Not like we could start working only on that since we need to make stuff nobody needs to impress people we dont like./s
Also, my personal favorite in idiotic ideas is telling citizens to just not buy and suv. Just outlaw the production you maggots! We saw with covid how well voluntary behavior helped.
Yes, I blame governments for not doing what needs to be done to save the fucking planet. A mass of humans is easy to manipulate if you’re rich and can not be given this much responsibility. We elect people for this.
Once a major stock holder starts selling his stock like crazy, that stock will nosedive. See Elon “I’ll be the last one to sell tesla stock!” Musk dumping tesla stock and check it’s current value.
And governments should not ask not to buy SUV’s, they should ban SUV’s. Yes, ban. They are horrible for the environment, horrible for safety of the driver, horrible for the safety of others, horrible in every aspect and they only exist because car manufacturers want to sell more so they told people they look cool.
Start taxing the crap out of cars, all short distance travel (< 5 - 10 kms) should be by bike, with Electrical the engine support in mountainous areas.we use 2 tonnes of steel and plastics to mostly move single 50-100 kgs persons around. That. Is. Insane. It’s unsustainable. Redesign American cities (American being the continent here, not just the country) to no long have these horrible suburbs, make all cities human Centric, not car centric. People should be able to walk to 50% of local stores and cycle to 95% of stores. It makes for wonderful safe cities to live in (see every single city, tiny and large in the Netherlands), makes people healthier due to more exercise, makes healthier air (no car pollution) bad lowers CO2 output by a literal fucktonne.
This would make everything better, which is why it not only will never happen, politicians will beber talk about it because big oil, big car and big whatever the fuck need more bigger cars polluting more because WE WANT MONEY AND POWER.
Well, I don’t have a congressman, which would make that hard :-P
But yes, while I don’t agree that our civilisation’s issues could be easily solved by a one time very minor global redistribution of wealth, I do agree with your overall argument, for sure! 100%!
These issues will only be fixed with a complete societal personality change. We’d have to completely rethink who we are, what we want in life, what our priorities are, as a civilisation and individuals. In a way fundamental enough to completely change how we distribute wealth and power, how we interact with nature and each other, the lens through which we view everything.
I don’t think those things will happen until there’s a change in civilisation, as ours passes and the next one rises (which, while a turbulent time in history, will not be the end of the world, all civilisations come and go eventually, on the timescale of humanity), that’s usually when such sweeping and complete fundamental changes in how we think and structure our entire society are allowed to flourish.
It’s sad that we won’t live to see it. Maybe in the mean time we could cheer ourselves up a bit, by eating the rich? nomnom
I’m thinking of moving to a state that’s colder where I can buy land that has water within the property.
I also think to do anything sizeable you need the resources a company can bring. Our problems are at scale. You need a scaled resource pool and reinvestment in that to work up to some of the issues. I like the idea of carbon extraction for example, but I don’t see any resources invested in it from US companies.
Carbon extraction isn’t a viable solution until its whole area is running on green energy. With current technology, at least, running it on a green power source will make less of an impact than hooking that green power source up to replace some fossil fuels.
In other words, don’t rely on heal spells until the battle’s over. They’ll never outpace incoming damage.
If you’re on the brink of death, yes. If you can take another round, better to take out more enemies first.
But that’s not the way our situation works. Until the whole grid is green, carbon scrubbers just give corporations a way to virtue signal without having to make changes to their supply line, and actually do more harm than good. Because the power it takes to run them puts out more carbon than they collect.
We’re on the brink of death right now so I will support people trying to start CO2 sequestration even while coal plants in other countries no one can stop are still running, please and thank you.
Does your country run on green energy? If so, cool. Go for it.
If not, it’s better to switch from existing fossil fuel plants to green energy. Running a carbon scrubber on fossil fuels puts out more carbon than it saves. It’s like casting heals from HP when they cost more than they heal. There might be a time for that, but it’s not during combat.
Even if the scrubber itself is on green energy, if the whole grid isn’t green, the energy it’s using could have gone to replace fossil fuel consumption, so it’s the same cost.
If you want to sequester CO2 without putting out more than you take, plant trees.
We are not on the brink of death. We may be on the brink of the point of no return (or past it depending who you ask,) but that’s not immediate death. The world isn’t going to die of heat in the next 10 years. There’s no need to rush to something that sounds good but does more harm.
Also, as far as resource costs go, planting tree is more efficient at capturing carbon then any industrial scrubber. Research should still be done, but anyone trying to sell a scrubber plant is just fishing for VC funds.
They’re also typically embraced by fossil companies, selling both the disease and cure. If they can socialize the costs of sequestration they can keep drilling for profit. We are in desperate need of a carbon tax.
Most energy production still emits carbon. Adding in loses, you’d spend 100 carbon for each maybe 50 carbon you captured. You’d literally be making it worse.
Same goes for electrical cars. Car engines are pretty much as efficient as burning fuels get, so with electrical you have extra losses (losses in electrical transmission, extra conversions, storage in batteries, then the electrical engine itself) so they may actually end up emitting more carbon than fuel cars.
Want to stop this? Make all electrical generation carbon frer
Air and sunlight are cute but fractional and likely will remain that forever
We need nuclear power plants, and loads of them. Spent fuel there IS a problem but it’s a manageable one.
Even if we replace all cars and powerplants for non carbon within the next ten years, it’ll still take centuries for the atmosphere to return to normal.
Want to carbon capture? That is HARD because of loads of technical problems but one to keep in mind: all that carbon (yes yes, CO2) in the air is because we took energy from a system and used it. CO2 was the result. You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back. With losses in conversion, you’ll need to spend probably double that. With what nature can remove by itself, you mght get a 10% discount.
What does this mean? We need to spend the same amount of energy as we generated over the past two centuries on top of the energy we need every day to be able to capture all that CO2. That is a metric shit tonne of CO2 and capturing it requires first and foremost that ALL our energy production is CO2 free.
Ah also: for technical reasons airplanes will never be electrical, cargo trucks neither. Yeah yeah, tesla truck blah, nobody will use it and musk, besides being an absolute moron, is also a scammer. Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight. Think batteries will magically become 2000% more efficient? They won’t. Batteries are pretty much elat the roof of what’s possible and barring some revolutionary new energy storage that may or may not exist, batteries won’t become much more efficient beyond maybe tops 30% more than we have today. Either way, cargo trucks d Airplanes need light batteries and even li-ion batteries (lithium being the lightest metal) won’t cut it. Cargo trucks would lost most of their cargo capacity in batteries or would require recharging (and waiting for hours) way WAY too many times. Fuel based trucks lose their gas whilst driving and become lighter. This adds range and cargo weight. Electrical ones don’t. Electrical (heavy) trucks aren’t practical and won’t be used.
Also, battery fires are a BITCH and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.
Same for airplanes. A laptop battery in and airplane is risky. An electrical plane would require 50-70% of it’s weight in batteries (so we transport 100 people instead of 300) and of that thing catches fire, which happens a lot, those 100 people are screeeeewed.
Hydrogen also won’t work as the atoms in the gas are so small that they escape though just about everything. You’ll need very heavy tanks to transport it compressed enough so you’ll again lose the “weight war”, if you will.
So we’ll continue puahing CO2 in the air with airplanes and trucks, but cars are doable. Powerplants are doable.
But look at the will of politicians. More and more politicians are willing to lie about climate change because that’s what their conspiracy theory believing base believe, so they’ll happily parrot that bullshit because they’ll watch the world burn if it means they can rule the ashes.
Then there are the millions of scammers with perpetual motion machines or their magic clean water from air machines or their Hyperloop ideas that were refuted over a century ago yet we spend literally billions into that because humanity is stupid and dickish…
I dunno. This can be solved if we wanted to but I think humanity in part doesn’t care. The young just watch TikTok, the old are too dumb, somehow.
Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that! And if you try to say anything about that, you get the army of trained retards (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it) yelling over you that theyr read a Facebook post saying that science is evil.
In a sidenote, various diseases that were nearly eradicated are coming back as well because of anti vaxxers now. Humans suck.
So before you can even start thinking about solving this you first need to fix the retard problem. People need to start believing in science and reality again because too many people are now with their heads stuck in fantasy world where “god would never allow this” or "scientists are evil because EVERY GODDAMN TV SHOW AND MOVIE NOW SHOWS EVIL SCIENTISTS.
/rant.
But I do encourage you to tell me I’m worng in anything I said. Please, if you think there is a solution, please please tell me
Also, battery fires are a BITCH and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.
There are plenty of EVs on the road already. If that was as likely as you’re trying to make it sound, it would have happened many times already.
Yeah, lithium-ion batteries are volatile, but they aren’t that volatile. Solid-state batteries are even less so.
retards (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it)
I won’t comment on whether it’s acceptable, but it definitely isn’t correct. The R word refers to people whose brains are impaired, not merely underused.
Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that!
That’s the real problem, not the technology. We can solve this problem. We don’t even have to sacrifice our modern civilization and creature comforts to do it. But we won’t, because some very lucrative businesses would become obsolete in the process, and their owners would sooner burn down the world and rule over the ashes than tolerate the loss of their wealth.
No it’s not. If you want to lower the CO2 in the atmosphere then you need to break up the carbon bonds, that leaves you with carbon. For all I care you make diamonds out of it, it’s irrelevant. If you want to break CO2 in O2 you need to spend that same energy. That was my point. If them youale fuel or whatever out of it that is a wholly different story that too will require yet more energy.
Trains indeed resolve the long haul truck issue but they’re hardly anywhere in the US. Good luck with building new train tracks there.
We haven’t had an electrical fire in a tunnel yet. Fires in tunnels are bad but can be controlled. Electrical battery fed fires are a nightmare as they have all the ingredients to keep going all by themselves. This is why fire departments see these cars as a problem as they require more water to put out than they can carry.
Li-ion batteries are indeed volatile and no they won’t explode by the thousands but if you have hundreds of millions of them, then statistically yes, you will get thousands of fires world wide every day. Tunnel fires are just a waiting to happen. I’m not saying there is no solution, but it IS a huge problem.
Hey, so be careful if you’re planning to move up north-up north.
The ground has started exploding in some areas that have permafrost, and some of the lakes are starting to release a lot of methane. Think Alaska and Siberia.
The weather is probably going to be fucky in one way or another everywhere you go. I don’t think there will be an area that you can move to to really escape climate change. Wildfires are kicking the butts of many communities that are further north, and the winter ice storms that happen are pretty deadly too. I can’t imagine that those things will go away or improve anytime soon, since they are heavily thought to be linked to climate change.
Some of the great lakes are so polluted now that the governments of both the US and Canada have recommend a safe yearly maximum number of fish to consume. The limit for at least one of those species is literally zero, due to how much fish absorb from the water around them. These are “forever chemicals” that are being absorbed.
We still need to try to work on climate change, regardless of location. I hope that people don’t think moving north will protect them from the effects of climate change, because it probably really won’t.
I know that you probably already know that, but I would like more people to see this stuff. I’ve seen too many people saying that they think just moving up north will make them safe from climate change.
Thanks for sharing some info. And no I didn’t know that. I appreciate that it was a mild sharing of info. I’m from New England and I think even just getting back to home and leaving the intense heat of California would feel far more comfortable.
You’d be surprised what living on the other side of the mountain - in silicon valley - brings for heat. Santa Cruz feels nice normal and cool to me while the valley just gets so scorching it’s almost untenable living here.
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