This data is good for cognitive behavioral therapy and not much else.
In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentness.
Regardless of any change, more extreme weather events more frequently will become more normal. The socioeconomic impacts that are likely to be the most jarring in the global north will probably surface from migration pressure as people from the global south are displaced due to heat and sea level rise.
It is optimistic to think that we'll be on track for 2 degrees of warming, let alone 1.5. At this point, the quiet part just starting to be said out loud is that we'll never hit 1.5. We'll probably never achieve any semblance of the paris agreement goals.
And even as we approach 2 degrees, 2050 looks hotter and more extreme than anything humans have ever experienced in the past.
Probably one of the only short term options between now and 2100 will be solar radiation management -- a largely untested tech that is surely a terrible outcome.
I'm just summarizing the latest IPCC synthesis report [1]. Adding a bit of editorialization in perceived outcomes. One of the most conservative organizations on earth, their assessment is bleak: systems are already permanently damaged, and they're likely to become more so in the near-to-distant future.
My goal is not to make anyone reading despondent. I just think these kind of short snipes of perceived positive trends bury the reality of the situation that we are living through.
If the goal is to assure us that the world's not going to end, it's quite a low bar to set. And there's quite a gradient of suffering between.
> Probably one of the only short term options between now and 2100 will be solar radiation management -- a largely untested tech that is surely a terrible outcome.
Maybe it's time to put a billion or two into testing all these untested techs then.
That's what I find so baffling. Why aren't we putting serious resources into geoengineering, adaptation and mitigation? It's so underfunded in comparison to what we're spending in a futile attempt at emission reduction.
Because there's no economic incentive. We can only create one with proper policies, but politics have been bootlegged by industry who only looks at short-term gains.
> Why aren't we putting serious resources into geoengineering, adaptation and mitigation?
Are you running for president of the US? What do you think would happen to either candidate if they made this central their platform in today's political environment?
Spoiler: rich old people will not suffer, if anything, they'll just stop moving to Florida and Arizona.
In the vein of “this is what people considered ‘comically fat’ as the punchline of a joke when the Simpsons started running”, it’s funny to look back at the “Toby ruins everything” video and look at what Aaron Sorkin considered “comically devastating” for climate change in 2012 in The Newsroom.
I agree with your comment, not because I don't think there is any hope, but because I see a situation were valid and viable hope is buried in the noise of feel-good-show hope and subsidy-ogling hope.
I am not saying it will be easy to build it, or cheap, or without any drawbacks, but...
It is physically possible to generate energy by cooling the planet.
Its cold in space, its cold up there. To run a heat engine you need 2 temperature baths at different temperatures.
Lets take for the higher temperature our surface temperature, and for the lower temperature the temperature at or slightly above the tropopause (say 11 km above surface, somewhere between polar and equatorial regions).
At that height temperatures might be say -50 deg C.
Now consider the following engineering challenge: a buoyant vessel holds taut ~12 km "atmosphere elevator", made of SCG (single crystal graphene). Along such cables could be suspended chimneys made of light fabric, or perhaps pipes conveying coolant up and down, ...
As a thought exercise: suppose the hook floating in the tropopause/bottom of stratosphere is used to heave up and down buckets of water (the same number of buckes going up and down, so apart from friction this transport costs no energy (think of a pulley).
as the water travels up it freezes, giving off heat at a higher layer, closer to dark cold space where it would end up anyway eventually, as the ice is lowered it absorbs heat from the lower layers. If the water/ice buckets were insulated, and only brought in thermal contact at the top or bottom of the structure, then it would dump the heat at the top only, above the CO2 and water blanket where it can more easily escape to space, and it would absorb heat only at the bottom. This means we could run a heat engine at the surface generating energy, without proliferation concerns (because when we do it its for energy, but when others do it it must be for weapons, or for gaining experience requisite for weapons)...
> But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people.
Committed?
We will have extra energy for carbon capture on the next decade. This is a problem we can solve. Not before it gets worse, but we can stop it from being permanent.
Sure it can. Why wouldn't it? Say you find a source of energy with zero cost. Now direct air carbon capture is free. "But you don't have a source with zero cost." Great, now we're talking numbers, how cheap does it have to be? So long as energy transport has inevitable losses, carbon capture stands a chance. In other words, IMO we should consider fossil fuel offsetting with carbon capture as a highly lossy energy transport technology that can reach any fossil fuel consumer on earth.
Energy is not the only cost. There are also massive material costs building the carbon capture infrastructure. A reasonable estimate for the scale required is the existing fossile fuel infrastructure.
That is, direct air carbon capture means investing an amount on the order of the value of the existing fossile fuel infrastructure to spend energy to achieve nothing of value (except offsetting the damage we caused by not switching to renewables earlier).
It's a complete nonstarter. Only a vehicle used by the fossile industry to delay the transition.
What extra energy? Energy consumption around the world is rising every year and will rise even higher because of climate change. And carbon capture is not a viable solution to climate change.
"According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth."
"Even today, some projects already operating around the world have not been as successful as planned. In Australia, the CCS project run by Chevron has not yet made its Gorgon project meet its target of 80% carbon dioxide capture.
A recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) on two Norwegian projects that store carbon dioxide under the seabed called into question the long-term viability of CCS."
"There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions."
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
That’s significantly moving the goal post. Yes, it’s a given that biodiversity will take a hit for a pretty long time due to human activity but frankly, so what?
I personally care more about avoiding millions dying of starvation but you do you. I understand that said millions being mostly in Nigeria and India make some in the west care less about them that cute animals, but still.
Well we kill it for pleasure, to eat them and treat them horribly, and almost absolutely nobody ever bats an eye. Folks that visit slaughterhouse often don't eat meat for few weeks but then revert back. Don't expect miracles, humans are mostly still pretty primitive species driven largely by emotions which swing semi randomly, all wars are, if you drill deep enough caused by this and only this. Or check any elections.
One day, maybe not so long in future as many may think, our descendants will judge us as primitive barbaric savages. And they will be mostly right.
Great, now we need viable large scale carbon capture technology and enough loose funds to bribe an industry into existence globally. That 2nd part is the real trick.
If anything the Russian invasion of Ukraine diverted attention away from climate change to defence. Look at how many countries in Europe took the opportunity to cut climate progressive policies to reduce fuel prices during the price crunch after the invasion. The prices were temporarily inflated, and affected groups could have been supported by other means, but instead green policies were targeted and you bet they will not be re-introduced any time soon.
And yet, do you know when the hottest month on record was? It's easy to answer: last month.
It's been "last month" for the last 12 months at least. Basically, we've hit the J curve.
The "extraordinarily significant events" you cite amount to little more than a guy who jumped off a bridge thinking: "you know, I think I've changed my mind".
(And yet, we just bought $700 of seedlings and I spent my birthday, and many other days planting them. It's not a pointless exercise, it will improve things in my little corner, but it won't materially affect anything either).
And yet, this is baked into climate change models if you’ve been paying attention.
Unfortunately, yes, even after we hit a plateau of emissions, we’re going to see effects.
The important bit is that, yes, we are seeing changes, and yes, we are seeing dreadful environment effects, we’re making progress to slow this down.
We’re fortunate that the last few years gave us excuses to shift policy that otherwise would’ve had us keep going down this path for another decade+.
I would certainly hope those pushing the “doomerism” takes in this thread do not work for any AI companies, cloud computing, NVIDIA, or other organization responsible for insane datacenter power growth this past year.
2023 is 37.4, which is a fair increase on 2019. More importantly the chart that matters is total CO2 in atmosphere. You can't even see 2020 on here. That was a one off 5% decrease.
Imagine if you had $1,000,0000 in your bank account and were spending $100,000 per year, except one year you spent $95,000. That's 2020.
This methane news is on top of CO2 as it has its own added impact. Proper optimism that we can do it first requires taking stock of where we actually are. So far we haven't actually displaced any carbon energy and we are at the all time highest levels of both annually emissions and also CO2 in the atmosphere.
Interesting - thanks for the CO2 concentration link. I am curious what prior to 2019 looked like (eg: if it was a comparable size, yet dipped in 2019-2021) and is back to normal.
Have a look at the right hand chart. That shows the increase from 1960 until now. You couldn't spot 2020 by eyeballing the chart.
2020 was a 5% dip in the pace of the increase. It's like someone gained ten pounds in 2019, 9.5 pounds in 2020, and 10 pounds in 2021. CO2 emissions are analogous to a total gain, so a 5% one off cut isn't very meaningful.
The emissions, not the level. The level is increasing at the level of emissions (minus absorptions). We are accelerating as fast as 2019 towards the wall.
- a noticeable and rapid dip in emissions has proven to be viable due to COVID lockdowns
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe and the US to accelerate plans to diversify energy generation away from natural gas
- China’s insanely rapid growth in green energy production domestically
It seems like 2022 CO2 levels are near 2019 CO2 levels[1], which is impressive.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions