this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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collapse of the old society
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Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don't know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We've had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that's just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women's rights all made huge political changes. If there's any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today's political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don't think there's any guarantees, but it's still a lot too early to give up.
[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carbon-dioxide-remains-atmosphere
You're only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That's irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what's the tech for that?
Does it have to be tech? Ocean plankton, peat bogs, forests, etc all do a great job of removing and storing carbon. They're being destroyed currently, but we could choose to bolster them instead.
Those are also technologies, just not high tech.
Here is a question then:
According to the science, the ocean current changes are going to start driving climate change via a doubling of present day CO2. When the permafrost melts it will create as much additional CO2 as all human industry does on a repeating annual basis right now. This is an all natural process where CO2 pollution will snowball faster and faster with no human ability to adjust it.
so, do you think natural processes like growing trees have the potential where they going to erase that much feedback? Keeping in mind that the peat bogs, forests and ocean plankton we have today in a less damaged ecosystem ALREADY failed to curtail a much smaller human created CO2 pulse?
Hmm?
What you're talking about is BECCS, by the way. Believe me or don't, but the UN climate change panel already included this in all the accounting! Like, what the projections for the future say is that we are going to invent these technologies and deploy them and erase the CO2, and that's assumed to be real and already factored into all the future projections...and they are still talking about 8 degrees of warming even including that. Notwithstanding that we have never done this yet and don't know if it works.
I guess maybe I'm missing something?
You're arguing like current climate models predict 8 degrees warming, but my understanding is that a worst case scenario is 4 degrees- the best reference I can find is UN climate summit comparisons[0].
Do you have any references of stuff predicting 8 degrees or is it your personal prediction? If it's the second, I don't really have the knowledge to debate current climate models. If it's the first link me some stuff!
My understanding (based on reading around and nothing else, I'm not a climate scientist) is we're at 2 degrees already, 3 degrees is likely and 4 degrees would be close enough to catastrophic that talking about 5 degrees isn't worthwhile. There's still margin for human society to stop the worst of outcomes.
[0]https://unclimatesummit.org/comparing-climate-impacts-at-1-5c-2c-3c-and-4c/
Equilibrium global warming for TODAY'S co2 concentration is 10°.
Here is one reference, this number is right in the paper's abstract: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false
Long story short, ECS was underestimated for political purposes. If ECS was as high as the paleoclimatology data showed, it would have removed all hope, so scientists completely ignored that scenario going back to the 1990s...
As this paper points out, carbon capture cannot work...the discussion is under the heading "Greenhouse gas emissions situation".
Ah, OK! Problem solved. Lol.
This is what everyone is saying. The paper I just linked also said that. But what are the solutions? What does everyone think we can do? How do we avoid the bad situation? I'm genuinely asking.
I have not seen any solution that is fully scoped that gives a specific way of changing anything. They just say we "have time" to do something but they don't say what to do.
As I stated: we seem to not know what to do.
Hint: this is why you're nitpicking about the degrees of rise. It's a typical psychological defense mechanism. If it was 3 or 9 or 17 it would not have any relevance in the face of our utter inability to deal with ANY scenarios regardless of the number.
Thanks for sharing - I feel a little dissapointed that you think I'm "nitpicking". From my point of view I'm asking you for further details, and you've explained really fully.
I'm not some internet troll, just a normal person concerned about climate change, and to this point:
Go back and read my first comment, in no way did I claim climate change was solvable.
Thanks for the paper though, will definitely take it away and read it.
So ...I apologize if that seemed harsh or insulting.
Let me explain from my perspective. Analogy time:
Claim: You have been a problem gambler for decades and you have a major lifetime debt built up.
Me: How are you going to get out of debt?
You: I'm going to gamble less.
Me: You need to pay back the entire debt!
You: I can afford the credit card payments if I get a new card with a lower interest rate.
Me: You're not hearing what I'm saying.
You: But the interest rates are only....
Etc.
Like....whoosh...not AT ALL facing the elephant in the room which is that no amount of further INCREASE is a DECREASE!! Like the technical discussion and details are not FULL ACCEPTANCE of the main point I'm making. It's DENIAL.
Climate change is exactly like this. The scheme you're discussing is that we can kick the can and "still have time to act". (Is it 3 degrees or 5? Is it 2 decades or 4? How dire and how immanent is the crisis that is 99.999% inescapable at this point, let's direct our attention to this and argue?)
This is like when Wile E Coyote runs past the edge of the cliff and hangs in mid air and looks down. But he still has time, he hasn't started falling yet. Ok...so time for WHAT? What option does Wile E Coyote have that puts him back on the cliff?
This is like gambling more to try to win to solve the gambling problem. If you fail you have dug a bigger quicker grave.
The closest thing I've heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
That's geoengineering to reduce the strength of sunlight to get heat down. It has to be repeated indefinitely, forever, or heat increases again.
Also, it doesn't reverse what's causing climate change by removing carbon.
Well, it has to be repeated indefinitely until we actually manage to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere significantly. Which, yeah, that might be forever, but it could also be somewhere around the corner. Personally, given the trajectory we're on it seems like a reasonable stop gap that might actually help cool the planet somewhat, but it's not up to me.
Conservation of mass and conservation of energy gives a very easy planetary scale answer to this question.
From an energy standpoint, what it costs to bottle up the CO2 is equal to the following:
Take all the energy (heat + work) that was chemically embodied in all the historical fossil fuels. We need to run all those chemical reactions that released energy again, but this time backwards.
We need to also add the energy it would take to run the thermodynamic change backwards, because the original energy was in concentrated high density form, and now the carbon has dispersed to a low coherence state where it's stuck in air, ice, water and vegetation all over the place. It all has to come back out which involves major material movements and filtering / transformation
In conclusion, this is more expensive than all the money and energy and materials in the entire human history put together.
Unless....
Do you know of any magic?
That may well be the case, but it's always a mistake to assume we know everything. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. It wasn't long ago that we didn't know what germs were, didn't have electricity, didn't understand things like relativity or quantum mechanics. We don't know what we're going to learn tomorrow, or next year, or 50 years from now.
If there's an option A in which we both fail to do anything to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and also fail to do anything to cool down the planet and an option B where we for now fail to do anything to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but manage to cool it down enough to provide a stop gap, option B might get us to a point where we can actually do something. At the very least it could give us a little more time before we fully run out of options for survival. Option A doesn't give us that breathing room and doesn't make things better in the mean time.
Saying that neither option can fully solve our problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing the thing that makes the immediate issue less severe. It's a bandaid, to be sure, but sometimes a bandaid is what you need to slow down an infection until you can get somewhere where you can actually heal.
I don't know the long term answer. I don't think anybody does. But I also don't think we can say with honesty, given the history of human knowledge and technology, that we actually know whether or not an answer will exist in the future. In the mean time, we should probably be acting to create the possibility that we can make use of an answer if we find one.