when i was a child, school programs told us about 🎵Reduce Reuse Recycle 🎶, and I can still sing one of those jingles. The county that I live in today, doesn't recycle: it asks you to sort your...
when i was a child, school programs told us about 🎵Reduce Reuse Recycle 🎶, and I can still sing one of those jingles. The county that I live in today, doesn't recycle: it asks you to sort your trash, and then they all get pushed into the same facility warehouse.
Climate change won't be like sudden power outage. It won't even be like a dimmer switch.
Instead, it's more like a cruel game of musical chair. The rich and powerful and down on ever dwindling chairs, but they don't get up between rounds, only the middle class chairs musical swap. As more chairs are removed, more and more peoples become displaced, and more and more rules will be in place to police/military the refugees.
There won't be any incentive to actually save the planet as long as there is police/private military available to maintain their power choke on livable land / climate dome
After a friend sent me this Xeet I looked up the article in the quoted screenshot (alternative link by the way) only to find it already posted here – I love Tildes. Some commentary from the linked...
After a friend sent me this Xeet I looked up the article in the quoted screenshot (alternative link by the way) only to find it already posted here – I love Tildes.
Some commentary from the linked post:
Hey, earth systems scientist here!
We have absolutely no idea why this is happening. All of our models currently underpredict climate change, we never expected the carbon sinks to fail. Expect major ecosystem collapse w/i the next 5-10 yrs
Anyways have a nice day!
Welp, at least we mentally already more or less knew it was going to happen, now it’s just happening sooner than expected by a factor of like 10. Unless we uncover another yet-accounted-for factor until then, fun!
There won't be any incentive to actually save the planet as long as there is police/private military available to maintain their power choke on livable land / climate dome
Concur (and I really like the musical chair analogy, BTW). I really do think there ought to be some way to make those in charge of potential changes – politicians, company executives, wealthy more-than-allotted emitters – truly feel the consequences of climate change. Because nothing's gonna change* otherwise.
*Or, well, change fast enough, but same difference.
Probably obvious to most readers here since we know photosynthesis is still working as intended, but to clarify, they are talking net absorption. Still horrific. Still not a reason to feel better....
Probably obvious to most readers here since we know photosynthesis is still working as intended, but to clarify, they are talking net absorption.
Still horrific. Still not a reason to feel better. But the title could be misunderstood. Scary to have children right now for sure though.
It seems obvious to me that we need to implement some form of carbon capture alongside drastic reductions in co2 output. We may even reach the point of needing to do some pretty crazy stuff like reflecting sunlight back into space with cloud seeding or aerosols.
One positive thing I'll say is this - our rate of technological progress gives me hope. While a lot of people trash tech for being energy intensive and wasteful of our (relatively) rare materials, it'll be tech that saves us from this if anything.
AI may soon be able to give us far more accurate models, and perhaps even put us on the course to correcting this issue. I imagine AI that can tell us what to plant, where to plant it, give us instructions for more efficient materials, solve the problem of room temperature superconductors, solve the problem of nuclear fusion, and much more. These types of advances in energy tech and materials science would be huge. Carbon capture powered by thermal or solar would buy us a bunch of time. Even better if we can process captured carbon into something useful.
This actually wasn't super clear to me given some of the comments about how unprecedented this is, so thanks for this clarification. It's still bad, obviously, but it's reassuring to know it's not...
Probably obvious to most readers here since we know photosynthesis is still working as intended, but to clarify, they are talking net absorption.
This actually wasn't super clear to me given some of the comments about how unprecedented this is, so thanks for this clarification. It's still bad, obviously, but it's reassuring to know it's not "photosynthesis stopped working" bad.
I'm honestly surprised this form of geo-engineering has gained so much traction recently. It feels very myopic and a very dangerous lever to push on. I absolutely get why people arrive at it being...
We may even reach the point of needing to do some pretty crazy stuff like reflecting sunlight back into space with cloud seeding or aerosols.
I'm honestly surprised this form of geo-engineering has gained so much traction recently. It feels very myopic and a very dangerous lever to push on. I absolutely get why people arrive at it being a possible solution, "oh, the sun's energy is causing the planet it to warm, so if we reflect some of that light back we want warm as fast," which is absolutely true. However, I'm really surprised people don't carry that thought further to the cascading effect that's going to have on solar, crop, and plant growth/natural carbon sinks. Less sunlight does mean less heat, but it also means less solar power production, potentially weaker winds so less wind production, and (what I think is the most terrifying consequence) slower plant growth for crops and natural carbon sinks. I think the interest I've been seeing in using sulfer dioxide specifically is a testimate to how effective air pollution regulations have been; as far as I can tell people seemingly forgot about acid rain (historically due to sulfur dioxide released from coal power production) because it's not nearly the issue it once was.
Like, we're warming because we've made the atmospheric heat storage capability too good, not because we're getting too much sunlight. We still need all the sunlight we can get to dig ourselves out of this mess!
I agree with you in that I also think technological innovation is unfortunately a required part of our way out due to it potentially being more feasible than easier solutions that involve large capital spending from governments (to redesign national transportation infrastructure) and lifestyle changes people view as inconvenient. But I think there's still a mix of both required. New high efficiency, low carbon technologies mixed with some lifestyle changes like reduction in single use plastics. I say "unfortunately is required" because while I am a strong champion of these technologies, it would be nice if our existence didn't depend on making them. It would be much nicer to be developing because of the joy of discovery.
It really confuses me as well. Aerosols are a terribly half-baked solution even under the best possible scientific interpretations of what's possible. It's a non-starter. The only geoengineering...
It really confuses me as well. Aerosols are a terribly half-baked solution even under the best possible scientific interpretations of what's possible. It's a non-starter.
The only geoengineering solution I've ever seen that's scientifically plausible is a swarm of solar reflectors and/or collectors at L1 between the Earth and Sol. It'll take a Texas-sized total surface area, likely in the form of a gargantuan drone swarm with paper-thin sails. They can be launched in waves over time, superior in every way to the impractical solar mirror plans common to older L1 solutions. That just got easier thanks to SpaceX's latest advancements.
Whatever is up there had better be able to collect solar energy and use it to maintain a stable orbit or it will not remain in position very long, that's the hardest part. Once deployed this gets us the ability to block up to 2% of total solar radiation, and that's enough to reverse climate change over time. Unlike the aerosols, this solution can be adjusted in real time, just pull in the sails and let the light back through.
It's just a couple trillion bucks in space technology, may as well pair it with orbital manufacturing while we're at it and get more bang for the effort. Figure out a way to beam it around without creating a death laser and we can grab a couple terawatts of extra power per year that will eventually pay for the whole smash. No way in hell that private industry provides this solution, though. It'd take a Manhattan Project to get there with any sort of speed, otherwise this is tech for 200 years in the future.
It's a lot cheaper than paying for all the climate-induced damage in the long run, so one could make the case that there are no valid reasons not to do it.
What makes you so certain that technology will get us out of this problem? From my perspective, technology has dug us deeper and deeper into climate devastation over the last 200 years. Ever since...
What makes you so certain that technology will get us out of this problem?
From my perspective, technology has dug us deeper and deeper into climate devastation over the last 200 years. Ever since we started to burn coal at scale, we've found "solutions" to help with the side-effects of industrialization. Gasoline, propane, and natural gas were supposed to be cleaner. Cars were supposed to get more efficient and cleaner. And while we've improved some of the worst parts of our emissions, like CFCs destroying the ozone layer and literal ash obscuring the sun in major metro areas (from industrial sources at least -- wildfires are a separate issue), at the end of the day everything requires power, and we're nowhere near generating all of the power we need from renewable sources worldwide or even in the USA. Even getting most cars off of gasoline is going to take decades! The trendline of emissions keeps going up, probably because the population of humans also keeps going up. I strongly suspect we need to focus on reduce above any technical innovation: a fancier whizbang isn't going to offset the millions of pounds of single use plastic we generate every day, or the microplastics from vehicle tires, or the many other knock-on effects. But if we get people to use less power, waste less, and be more cognizant about their impact on the world around them, we can turn that trendline around.
I see the point you’re making, but I don’t think that remaining a pre-industrial society was ever an option once industrialization became a possibility. The pull of making life easier, more...
I see the point you’re making, but I don’t think that remaining a pre-industrial society was ever an option once industrialization became a possibility. The pull of making life easier, more comfortable, and more convenient is simply too alluring to be denied.
So with that in mind, as bad as things have gotten I think it’s true that improvements in technology have prevented it from having gotten that much worse.
While reducing consumption will help and is something that should be advocated for and encouraged by legislation where practical, I think there’s a very good possibility that at this point it won’t be enough, especially when one considers how there’s no way the masses are ever going to be convinced to rewind their lifestyles by 50/100/200 years, even if it’s for their own good.
Something more is needed to slow this train down, and the only thing that holds any promise in that way is improved technology — anything that makes green energy sources more practical as replacement for coal/gas plants is great, as is anything that makes replacing fossil fuels for shipping and transportation practical. There might even be a place for carbon capture, though that has yet to prove itself.
Well said, you're right that people don't want to dramatically change their way of life. I'm increasingly convinced that the biggest single thing we can do is electrify everything possible while...
Well said, you're right that people don't want to dramatically change their way of life. I'm increasingly convinced that the biggest single thing we can do is electrify everything possible while making our electricity generation as clean as humanly possible.
The second biggest thing, IMO, is government regulation of needless waste like single-use plastics. The EU, for instance, has excellent rules that visibly cut down the single-use plastic involved in product packaging. In the USA, I am gobsmacked by just how wasteful our shipping is. It's insane to use molded plastic and styrofoam just to keep an SD card from getting damages in transit, for instance -- just use recycled paper! All so that I can toss it in a landfill. Simply regulating that away would save an enormous amount of petrol and energy, not to mention landfill space.
Agreed on the plastics for sure. Green energy will stop it getting worse. Carbon capture (and maybe reflecting some heat back into space for a few years) may actually bring us to a survivable and...
Agreed on the plastics for sure.
Green energy will stop it getting worse. Carbon capture (and maybe reflecting some heat back into space for a few years) may actually bring us to a survivable and sustainable level.
Even buying time while we continue to work out the tech is a viable solution. Just have to be careful that we don't squander that time we bought with more bad habits.
We aren't going back to pre-industrial society unless everything collapses. That would be, for humanity at least, just as bad as climate change itself. Back to diseases being deadly as hell, back to short lives and famines, back to hard labor instead of pursuing knowledge.
It's been said that we don't have enough easily accessible resources to re-industrialize the world. If that's true, we really only have one shot to avoid our great filter.
I worry about conservatism and it's impact on our technical prowess. Putting the eggs in the "we'll figure it out later" basket also seems short sighted.
One positive thing I'll say is this - our rate of technological progress gives me hope. While a lot of people trash tech for being energy intensive and wasteful of our (relatively) rare materials, it'll be tech that saves us from this if anything.
I worry about conservatism and it's impact on our technical prowess. Putting the eggs in the "we'll figure it out later" basket also seems short sighted.
Land regions exposed to extreme heat in 2023 contributed a gross carbon loss of 1.73 GtC yr-1, indicating that record warming in 2023 had a strong negative impact on the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to mitigate climate change.
The observation that 2023 had an exceptionally weak land sink despite being only a moderate El Niño constitutes a test bed for Earth System models which lack processes causing rapid carbon losses, such as extreme fires and climate-induced tree mortality in their projections, and may thus be too optimistic for estimating remaining carbon budgets. If very high warming rates continue in the next decade and negatively impact the land sink as they did in 2023, it calls for urgent action to enhance carbon sequestration and reduce greenhouse gasses emissions to net zero before reaching a dangerous level of warming at which natural CO2 sinks may no longer provide to humanity the mitigation service they have offered so far by absorbing half of human induced CO2 emissions.
One thing I always wonder about.... At some point, mitigating climate change is going to be an obviously huge economic opportunity. We aren't there yet, evidently, but I feel like once the dam...
One thing I always wonder about.... At some point, mitigating climate change is going to be an obviously huge economic opportunity. We aren't there yet, evidently, but I feel like once the dam starts to spring leaks and the big-money players decide that they can make more money by helping mitigate climate change, that's when we will start to see serious progress.
I would love to see the USG invest in a climate change mitigation project on the scale of the moonshot research in the 1960s.
when i was a child, school programs told us about 🎵Reduce Reuse Recycle 🎶, and I can still sing one of those jingles. The county that I live in today, doesn't recycle: it asks you to sort your trash, and then they all get pushed into the same facility warehouse.
Climate change won't be like sudden power outage. It won't even be like a dimmer switch.
Instead, it's more like a cruel game of musical chair. The rich and powerful and down on ever dwindling chairs, but they don't get up between rounds, only the middle class chairs musical swap. As more chairs are removed, more and more peoples become displaced, and more and more rules will be in place to police/military the refugees.
There won't be any incentive to actually save the planet as long as there is police/private military available to maintain their power choke on livable land / climate dome
After a friend sent me this Xeet I looked up the article in the quoted screenshot (alternative link by the way) only to find it already posted here – I love Tildes.
Some commentary from the linked post:
Welp, at least we mentally already more or less knew it was going to happen, now it’s just happening sooner than expected by a factor of like 10. Unless we uncover another yet-accounted-for factor until then, fun!
Concur (and I really like the musical chair analogy, BTW). I really do think there ought to be some way to make those in charge of potential changes – politicians, company executives, wealthy more-than-allotted emitters – truly feel the consequences of climate change. Because nothing's gonna change* otherwise.
*Or, well, change fast enough, but same difference.
Probably obvious to most readers here since we know photosynthesis is still working as intended, but to clarify, they are talking net absorption.
Still horrific. Still not a reason to feel better. But the title could be misunderstood. Scary to have children right now for sure though.
It seems obvious to me that we need to implement some form of carbon capture alongside drastic reductions in co2 output. We may even reach the point of needing to do some pretty crazy stuff like reflecting sunlight back into space with cloud seeding or aerosols.
One positive thing I'll say is this - our rate of technological progress gives me hope. While a lot of people trash tech for being energy intensive and wasteful of our (relatively) rare materials, it'll be tech that saves us from this if anything.
AI may soon be able to give us far more accurate models, and perhaps even put us on the course to correcting this issue. I imagine AI that can tell us what to plant, where to plant it, give us instructions for more efficient materials, solve the problem of room temperature superconductors, solve the problem of nuclear fusion, and much more. These types of advances in energy tech and materials science would be huge. Carbon capture powered by thermal or solar would buy us a bunch of time. Even better if we can process captured carbon into something useful.
This actually wasn't super clear to me given some of the comments about how unprecedented this is, so thanks for this clarification. It's still bad, obviously, but it's reassuring to know it's not "photosynthesis stopped working" bad.
That headline is stupid, isn’t it? Most intuitive interpretation is that trees are worthless at absorbing CO2 after all, which is dangerously wrong.
I'm honestly surprised this form of geo-engineering has gained so much traction recently. It feels very myopic and a very dangerous lever to push on. I absolutely get why people arrive at it being a possible solution, "oh, the sun's energy is causing the planet it to warm, so if we reflect some of that light back we want warm as fast," which is absolutely true. However, I'm really surprised people don't carry that thought further to the cascading effect that's going to have on solar, crop, and plant growth/natural carbon sinks. Less sunlight does mean less heat, but it also means less solar power production, potentially weaker winds so less wind production, and (what I think is the most terrifying consequence) slower plant growth for crops and natural carbon sinks. I think the interest I've been seeing in using sulfer dioxide specifically is a testimate to how effective air pollution regulations have been; as far as I can tell people seemingly forgot about acid rain (historically due to sulfur dioxide released from coal power production) because it's not nearly the issue it once was.
Like, we're warming because we've made the atmospheric heat storage capability too good, not because we're getting too much sunlight. We still need all the sunlight we can get to dig ourselves out of this mess!
I agree with you in that I also think technological innovation is unfortunately a required part of our way out due to it potentially being more feasible than easier solutions that involve large capital spending from governments (to redesign national transportation infrastructure) and lifestyle changes people view as inconvenient. But I think there's still a mix of both required. New high efficiency, low carbon technologies mixed with some lifestyle changes like reduction in single use plastics. I say "unfortunately is required" because while I am a strong champion of these technologies, it would be nice if our existence didn't depend on making them. It would be much nicer to be developing because of the joy of discovery.
It really confuses me as well. Aerosols are a terribly half-baked solution even under the best possible scientific interpretations of what's possible. It's a non-starter.
The only geoengineering solution I've ever seen that's scientifically plausible is a swarm of solar reflectors and/or collectors at L1 between the Earth and Sol. It'll take a Texas-sized total surface area, likely in the form of a gargantuan drone swarm with paper-thin sails. They can be launched in waves over time, superior in every way to the impractical solar mirror plans common to older L1 solutions. That just got easier thanks to SpaceX's latest advancements.
Whatever is up there had better be able to collect solar energy and use it to maintain a stable orbit or it will not remain in position very long, that's the hardest part. Once deployed this gets us the ability to block up to 2% of total solar radiation, and that's enough to reverse climate change over time. Unlike the aerosols, this solution can be adjusted in real time, just pull in the sails and let the light back through.
It's just a couple trillion bucks in space technology, may as well pair it with orbital manufacturing while we're at it and get more bang for the effort. Figure out a way to beam it around without creating a death laser and we can grab a couple terawatts of extra power per year that will eventually pay for the whole smash. No way in hell that private industry provides this solution, though. It'd take a Manhattan Project to get there with any sort of speed, otherwise this is tech for 200 years in the future.
It's a lot cheaper than paying for all the climate-induced damage in the long run, so one could make the case that there are no valid reasons not to do it.
What makes you so certain that technology will get us out of this problem?
From my perspective, technology has dug us deeper and deeper into climate devastation over the last 200 years. Ever since we started to burn coal at scale, we've found "solutions" to help with the side-effects of industrialization. Gasoline, propane, and natural gas were supposed to be cleaner. Cars were supposed to get more efficient and cleaner. And while we've improved some of the worst parts of our emissions, like CFCs destroying the ozone layer and literal ash obscuring the sun in major metro areas (from industrial sources at least -- wildfires are a separate issue), at the end of the day everything requires power, and we're nowhere near generating all of the power we need from renewable sources worldwide or even in the USA. Even getting most cars off of gasoline is going to take decades! The trendline of emissions keeps going up, probably because the population of humans also keeps going up. I strongly suspect we need to focus on reduce above any technical innovation: a fancier whizbang isn't going to offset the millions of pounds of single use plastic we generate every day, or the microplastics from vehicle tires, or the many other knock-on effects. But if we get people to use less power, waste less, and be more cognizant about their impact on the world around them, we can turn that trendline around.
I see the point you’re making, but I don’t think that remaining a pre-industrial society was ever an option once industrialization became a possibility. The pull of making life easier, more comfortable, and more convenient is simply too alluring to be denied.
So with that in mind, as bad as things have gotten I think it’s true that improvements in technology have prevented it from having gotten that much worse.
While reducing consumption will help and is something that should be advocated for and encouraged by legislation where practical, I think there’s a very good possibility that at this point it won’t be enough, especially when one considers how there’s no way the masses are ever going to be convinced to rewind their lifestyles by 50/100/200 years, even if it’s for their own good.
Something more is needed to slow this train down, and the only thing that holds any promise in that way is improved technology — anything that makes green energy sources more practical as replacement for coal/gas plants is great, as is anything that makes replacing fossil fuels for shipping and transportation practical. There might even be a place for carbon capture, though that has yet to prove itself.
Well said, you're right that people don't want to dramatically change their way of life. I'm increasingly convinced that the biggest single thing we can do is electrify everything possible while making our electricity generation as clean as humanly possible.
The second biggest thing, IMO, is government regulation of needless waste like single-use plastics. The EU, for instance, has excellent rules that visibly cut down the single-use plastic involved in product packaging. In the USA, I am gobsmacked by just how wasteful our shipping is. It's insane to use molded plastic and styrofoam just to keep an SD card from getting damages in transit, for instance -- just use recycled paper! All so that I can toss it in a landfill. Simply regulating that away would save an enormous amount of petrol and energy, not to mention landfill space.
Agreed on the plastics for sure.
Green energy will stop it getting worse. Carbon capture (and maybe reflecting some heat back into space for a few years) may actually bring us to a survivable and sustainable level.
Even buying time while we continue to work out the tech is a viable solution. Just have to be careful that we don't squander that time we bought with more bad habits.
We aren't going back to pre-industrial society unless everything collapses. That would be, for humanity at least, just as bad as climate change itself. Back to diseases being deadly as hell, back to short lives and famines, back to hard labor instead of pursuing knowledge.
It's been said that we don't have enough easily accessible resources to re-industrialize the world. If that's true, we really only have one shot to avoid our great filter.
I worry about conservatism and it's impact on our technical prowess. Putting the eggs in the "we'll figure it out later" basket also seems short sighted.
Link to the paper mentioned: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12447
One thing I always wonder about.... At some point, mitigating climate change is going to be an obviously huge economic opportunity. We aren't there yet, evidently, but I feel like once the dam starts to spring leaks and the big-money players decide that they can make more money by helping mitigate climate change, that's when we will start to see serious progress.
I would love to see the USG invest in a climate change mitigation project on the scale of the moonshot research in the 1960s.