Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When food prices start to skyrocket, and refugees swarm in from lowland countries and every direction including our own country, where will we go? This should absolutely be seen as a slow motion meteor strike, a world-buster event that happens right in front of our eyes before we can truly react. But we must take action. The danger of methane release, particularly methane hydrates, is beyond scary. That, and the raising of sea levels by 2-7 meters, and other unknowns such as the halting of the gulf stream, species die-off, ocean acidification, coral reefs and god knows what else. As a society, we must intelligently react to these dangers as we've done in the past with threats like the ozone layer. We must plan as if a comet was going to hit the planet, starting now.
> We can science our way out of this shit. Not true.
Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air.
Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.
> Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.
COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. If things get real bad people will dig deeper to try to protect their own lifestyle right now, even if that means screwing things up 10 years from now.
And enough of those people have enough wealth and power to effectively counter even movements supported by the majority of humanity.
> COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons.
COVID is different because you need a massive majority, 80%+, to follow certain guidelines (vaccine, masks, etc). For carbon it just needs to happen, anyone can do it. If the tech gets cheap enough Bill Gates will just setup shop in the desert and start sucking.
Decarbonizing is happening, at least to electricity generation and transportation. There is a group insisting on denying this, but it's just your usual form of denialism.
There is reasonable freedom to debate the last 10% of emissions. Those are not being replaced right in front of our eyes. There is also room to claim that decarbonization is not enough. But then you'll have to claim that stopping things as they are is either catastrophic or won't stop the consequences from changing. That's not unthinkable, but not a reasonable default assumption either.
I imagine you are talking about that last one assumption. If so, starting from it is kind of an extreme position. Anyway, it's not clear what kind of cost you are classifying as insurmountable and why governments that are used to spend real amounts of money on all kinds of projects just can't spend on those.
What I want to say is: atmospheric carbon capture is not the deus ex machina that one might be tempted to believe it is after seeing news of startups like Climeworks doing it.
I responded to a comment implying that if there is a philantropist like Bill Gates camping out in the desert sucking CO2 out of the air, we won’t need a massive collective effort.
Maybe this will be a somewhat effective solution one day for areas where fuel energy density is important (e.g. flight), but that’s about it. Carbon neutrality will still need a distributed effort as point source capture is massively more economical where feasible.
>I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still
This is delusional thinking. There is no future where humanity will be able to continue the way it has and still have a non hostile planet to call home.
The math does not add up for carbon capture tech.
There isn't some scientific silver bullet there that will increase the capture yield.
Building the infrastructure will also emit. Powering the installations will take a lot of energy. There would need to be enormous amounts of these capturing station built around the world for them to make any significant dent in what is already in the atmosphere.
The resources and effort required is so wast, and for so little gain, that we should rather use the alternatives that would give us much more for less.
Subsidize farmers to switch from cattle rearing to forestry for instance. Turn swaths of reclaimed land back to its original wilderness.
even if we completely stopped emitting carbon immediately (impossible), the damage done might mean that we're still going to see a large percentage of greenland slide into the sea in the next 20-50 years.
Most likely outcome seems like the COVID vaccines. The damage is already severe. And while it can (drastically) reduce damage in the future, it will be there.
Someone had a theory that covid won't be the apocalyptic plague. Instead we'll be hit with another deadlier one that ends up poorly controlled with all the covid fatigue. Something like MERS or Ebola, that the old world managed to control.
I expect this to be the case of climate change. Gov has burned their political capital trying to control covid that there's none left to handle climate change.
First time I read a comment on the Internet about so well how bad things are, how even worse they are going to be and how nothing is actually done to avoid it. Thank you.
And if I may add, before COVID I was also concerned about antibiotic resistance, mainly because of how we produce a big part of our food (meat). But after two years of COVID, and given how we dealt with it so far, I think it's an even more worrying threat than I thought. Combined with air, water and soil pollution, there's too many fires to look after.
> As a society, we must intelligently react to these dangers as we've done in the past with threats like the ozone layer. We must plan as if a comet was going to hit the planet, starting now.
Have you seen the movie Don’t Look Up? It’s not gonna happen.
