Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.
This reads like someone with the means to eat good food eating junk food and then putting themselves on weight loss drugs to counteract the effects. I'm sure temporarily it might work but I don't believe that the shocks that produce meaninful cooling effects are without consequence - in fact, I suspect they double the consequences by adding yet another factor to the destabilization.
I could be wrong, and it could a short term solution to stop the bleeding, but I have a deep suspicion of adding more things to the atmosphere given our history with the CO2 in question, tetrafluoroethane, etc.
Lookin at the wikipedia it does sound a lot like "chemtrails". They describe airplanes as being able to disseminate these aerosols and these days when I look up at the sky there is always a straight line of "cloud" forming behind airplanes.
So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well.
That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration
> apart from growing forests and keeping them protected)
I’m in a loop. I must be.
How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices.
Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.
There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff.
It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.
> in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.
And more trees have grown in their place, capturing an equivalent volume of carbon. Just because the carbon storage isn't static, doesn't mean it doesn't work.
The carbon in our atmosphere is already in the atmosphere and it won't go away. So there really is nothing more you can do other than take it out of the air and store it somewhere for as long as you can. Trees are a good way to store it until we have better technology/can handle climate change better
No. Pick a timeline that is influential, short or long. If it’s long, trees don’t capture carbon. Not in any scenario of population growth, which inevitably leads to some edgelord reductionist “maybe we should all die then for what we’re doing to Gia!” trite.
This “climate is a 100 years” thing while using ice core samples to make your case is not in support of science. It is in support of politicians.
The latter I’m personally getting sick of. And the people that can separate them, harm the former.
We're not really in a scenario of population growth - there is a direct correlation between being relatively well off and having less kids. Basically every developed nation hit peak population a long time ago, and the faster we pull other nations out of extreme poverty, the sooner their populations will start falling too
Even the most fatalistic estimates have world population peaking at 10 billion.
I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I think there will be more support for changing reflectivity (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).
Stratospheric aerosols: the dangers of this seem overblown. It is milder than a volcanic eruption. It seems like a reasonable thing governments should be attempting.
There are currently no power efficient and scalable ways to remove carbon dioxide from air or water.
Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being actively discouraged or canceled altogether.
You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8 cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.
> Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech...
This is mostly a US problem at this point. The rest of the world is adopting renewables considerably faster than anyone expected (and despite the best efforts of the current administration, the adoption curve is accelerating even in the US).
That said, it's still apparent that even optimistic estimates of renewable energy adoption aren't fast enough to fix the climate crisis on their own.
