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xkcd : Earth Temperature Timeline
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Earth, Environment, and Geosciences
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People are stupid. Let’s keep our hands off geo engineering.
And do what?
Step one: invest in nuclear power and renewables
Step two: stop taking carbon from outside the carbon cycle and putting it into the carbon cycle
Step three: use the abundance of energy from self-heating rocks to take carbon out of the carbon cycle
Your "step three" is geoengineering.
I guess when I think of "geoengineering," what comes to mind is cloud seeding and albedo modification
Yeah, let's do some light geoengineering after we've solved the energy issue
Let's just allow humanity to go extinct, and prevent this shitshow from establishing a permanent presence among the stars.
Imagine the amount of abuse and suffering and stress we can prevent by just not saving humanity? By not letting our numbers climb to the trillions?
Yep, this argument again. And like everyone who's ever seen this argument has already said, renewables are not currently at a point where they can fully take the load off of fossil fuels. Every nuclear power plant accident put together doesn't even come close to the damage that safe fossil fuels have done to the planet. We need to ditch fossils ASAFP, and nuclear, even if it's funded and ran by capitalists, is better than fossils, which are already funded and ran by capitalists.
I will weep for your family when they're killed by an ever-destabilizing climate.
Let's be honest, renewables are already geoengineering (changing water flow, air flow, albedo, etc.), just done in an uncontrolled fashion. Nuclear energy or renewables do not solve the long term problem unless coupled with large scale geoengineering. Granted all of the above are vast improvements over fossil fuels.
Thermodynamics is a bitch. If you make a nuclear reactor, you make heat. You add additional heat to the system, either at the source (energy production isn't 100% efficient), or at the point of consumption (the waste product of using energy is always heat). So, if you switch everything to nuclear, you're still adding heat to the system that wasn't there before (in addition to whatever the sun is blasting us with). If energy use goes up, and it always does, it just means we add more heat faster.
Literally the only way we can have our cake and eat it too is geoengineering. Solar shields in the earth-sun Lagrange point are my preference and least disruptive to other natural processes.
If we reach a point where such enormous space installations are possible with multi national budgets and technological progeess, we still have to live with the largest mass extinction, Destroyed soils, disequilibrated ecosystems.
Then what? Life will be possible. But not as worthwhile as it was.
Whether life is "worthwhile" is a subjective and personal decision. Different people will have different considerations of what makes life "worthwhile."
I think not having meteorological anomalies on a yearly basis, growing crops in a climate where humanity evolved, and having no dead zones on the planet is on a little bit different step of the hierarchy of needs than what people have different consideration on.
There are people who live in places where there are yearly meteorological "anomalies" on a yearly basis (hurricanes, heat waves, etc), and most people live in places that don't have the same climate as where we evolved. People wouldn't live in "dead zones", by definition. There's already areas of Earth where people don't live because their climates are too extreme and that doesn't make me sad.
I'm not saying climate change is fine and not to be worried about, I just don't see how future generations would consider life less worthwhile because of it.
Yes yes. Nothing wrong with your arguments. At first sight.
We are in the meantime so many people on this planet. That those places that are staying habitable are already occupied.
This means if people moving away from dead zones they puttung pressure on existing economies, imfrastructure etc.
And this in turn, through our global economy will hurt anybody. Simply because markets becoming destroyed, supply chains disorted.
Western countries are struggling maintaining its infrastructure. You think europe can host africa without lowering the standard for its people?
This will evolve in revolts. For the world economy not even began with.
Use the renewable and nuclear energy to remove the IR shield in the atmosphere (store atmospheric carbon in the ground), rather than put a shield in space. A space shield doesn't address CO2 levels in the atmosphere or oceans.
It's just a question of scale and thermodynamics. Using the renewables to do carbon capture is probably a good idea, because anything is better than the giant greenhouse gas. But that really is geoengineering too. And it'll only work for a period. As energy use increases, you will modify the planet more and more simply due to collecting and distributing the energy. Energy must flow from concentrated forms to dispersed forms. That dispersed form is usually heat.
Put paper bags over our heads and lie down.
Reduce emissions. That's cheaper, more effective and safer than any other method.
Geo engineering commonly only tries to fix temperature. While that would be a big achievement, it does not change the CO~2~ ppm. And that translates to ocean acidification. Which translates to mass extinctions. Which is still an existential threat also for land living species, and us.
There is only one solution to fix both (and many other, related / caused problems): Fix the source.
We cannot engineer our way out of all the individual symptoms. Just leave fossil fuels in the ground.
I don't think we can reduce emissions fast enough though. 2050 seems a long way away.
There are ways to capture carbon in seawater, kelp is the fastest growing I know of.
We need many solutions, not one.
Okay, that type of geo engineering is a good counter argument against my previous comment. It comes with other issues and does not solve all issues, but still, good point.
Thanks, good chat!
Rock dust is another promising option
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/30/rock-flour-greenland-capture-significant-co2-study
I wrote a similar conclusion back in 1996, not so much changed in that discussion, it's a distraction.