Atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 400ppm | Hacker News Reader

Atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 400ppm

climatecentral.org

273 pointsweatherlight242 comments

Whenever I see this figure reported on a numerically literate site like HN, I always wonder how many readers know whether the thermal forcing due to CO2 is (a) exponential, (b) logarithmic, or (c) linear as a function of the ppm.

Upvote if you didn't know the answer and had to Google it? Downvote if everybody knows the answer and it's a stupid question?

(b) logarithmic

Good question to pose.

Yes, but is the rate of growth of CO2 concentration sublinear, linear or superlinear?

I had just assumed it was logarithmic due to my high school understanding of the greenhouse effect.

To save people googling, it appears that I was right [0], however this is not try for all greenhouse gasses. For instance, methan grows as sqrt(x), and CFCs are linear.

Admittedly, the linked expressions are empirical, so only represent an approximation for the range of values that we have observed. There are also dynamic effects (such as increased water vapor, or a runaway release of trapped methane) that are not being moddeled by estimates of thermal forcing.

[0] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html

The thermal forcing is just the input to the model. What we'd really like to know is the climate sensitivity -- how does a given forcing affect Earth's temperature?

All questions about the legitimacy of climate science are questions about whether simulations of the earth's atmosphere ("general circulation models") can be validated or have predictive power, at least with realistic computing resources.

However, the big-O question is an interesting reflection on the ratio between how much scientific communication effort goes into influencing the public, versus educating the public.

There is also not much funding available for studying positive impacts of global warming. Scientists have known about the Arrhenius effect for over a century, and in pre-WWII texts the treatment is generally "isn't it cool that burning fossil fuels not only gives us power and light, but is good for agriculture and might prevent the next ice age?" The past is a foreign country, and in that country it was generally assumed that warm periods were good for humans and cold ones were bad. (Mostly because ag yields.) They didn't even really think about it -- and nor do we think much about it, either. Plus ca change...

Aside from the fact it's a good question.

I'm also upvoting because that "sounds" like maybe you are pessimistic about the significance and need them to recoup the robo downvotes given to anyone not willing to swear the worlds going to end tomorrow. (don't know for sure if they lurk on HN, but for sure they are everywhere else).

Not exactly any of the above although it can be approximated by (b). See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-satu...

for some details

In addition to that please raise your hand if you know why the answer to the above question is irrelevant for understanding climate change. Choose the best answer: A) CO2 is by far not the most important greenhouse gas B) the climate change is driven by complex interactions among (mainly) CO2, water vapors, clouds, precipitations, sea surface evaporation, air currents C) the thermal forcing mentioned above is determined assuming none of the interactions in point B) D) all of the above

I’ll bite: D?

By elimination, only (B) is true.

(A) is false - while water vapour has high radiative forcing, it is not "an important greenhouse gas" in the big picture, unlike what the coal industry reps say. This [1] should explain why. Methane and CFCs are far less important in aggregate (about 1/3 and 1/4 of the effect of CO2 respectively), although they are far more dangerous per unit of volume.

(C) is obviously false - even in the low level layman explanation in [1] you can see that they include a table with the forcings of various combinations (like H2O vapour+CO2); you can also see that the table is from 1978, so scientists have done that since way before you were born.

(D) false

[1] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-...

Thanks for your thoughtful reply and your link. I think that article is quite informative, and also well written. I guess it was not authored by the coal industry, but still it states literally "water vapor is indeed the most important greenhouse gas".

I wanted to make more sense of some of these CO2 headlines, so I put together a scraper that generates live D3 charts of the most recent CO2 measurements from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and keeps them up to date.

Here’s weekly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co...

Monthly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co...

And yearly (avg): https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-co2-co...

And the really scary one, similar to the recent XKCD, is the ice core data from the NOAA: https://www.numer.al/noaa_data/figures/antarctic-ice-cores-r...

(Fun fact, Postgres date fields underflow after 4713 BC, but the data actually goes back another 700,000 years!)

OT: All numer.al graphs are empty in my browser (I can see both axes but there is no line inside the graph). Using Firefox with Adblock Plus and HTTPS Everywhere. PS Temporarily disabling the aforementioned plugins did not help.

@mastazi Thanks for the heads up! I was testing in Chrome and Safari and missed that one completely -- apparently they allow for a circle radius ("r") to be defined in a stylesheet, but Firefox doesn’t. It’s cross-compatible now -- cheers!

Cool! Is numer.al a personal project of yours? Do you have a quick description of the features? By the way it looks good, congrats!

Thank you! Yes, I’ve been working on it as a way both to visualize and to stay current with some of the things I’ve been seeing in the news that are of interest to me, related to the environment, the energy sector, economy, etc. With the election coming up, I’ve been looking a lot at the types of indicators being mentioned in debates (crime, deficit, etc.).

At the moment you can “follow” figures and view a feed of the ones you follow in reverse-chronological order by the time of the latest update (I’m working on an “email me when this changes” option too), and you can drag the thumbnail graphs over one another and drop them to see two numbers compared. The comparison view also gives the option to make your own charts derived from existing ones: e.g., you can make a “per capita” chart by dragging anything over the Census figures and clicking “Proportion.” The “downstream” chart will automatically update when its “upstream” charts do.

It’s very much a work in progress, and if it proves useful, I’d love to hear more from you about the kinds of things that would be of interest to add to it!

Awesome! I've created an account so I can play with it. I believe that fact-checking is increasingly becoming crucial in the political discourse, especially given that many politicians are taking a "relaxed" stance towards it [1]. Luckily, at the same time, there are a number of electors who demand that candidates back their claims with sources [2].

One small and nit-picky suggestion: make sure that the non-www version of numer.al redirects to the www one (currently the former just doesn't seem to work for me).

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-h...

[2] https://xkcd.com/285/

I would love to hear any feedback you might have! I completely agree with you about fact-checking. One mini-feature that’s implemented right now is the ability to select a range in a graph and then copy/paste the URL, and when someone opens it in a new window they’ll see exactly the highlight you made with the same % change displayed. It makes it really easy to back up particular assertions across a time series.

And yes, I was having some issues with the DNS because of the way Heroku interacts with root domains, but that should be sorted as of today and the apex numer.al domain should work just as well as www. Thanks for the heads up!

Missing from the article is any explanation of why 400 ppm is more significant than 350 or 500 or 600. Is this something educated people are already supposed to know?

My first idea was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change , but that cites a 550 ppm threshold.

Based on the graph in op's article, my napkin math says if we maintain ppm increases we'd reach 550ppm around 2055.

It's a symbolic number because for as long as we've known about CO2's effects on the climate we have been in the 300s.

It's like the DJIA hitting 10000 or 15000 or whatever. Wooooo we did it people!!!

I wish it was something like a CO₂ meter version of the Y2K bug.

There are interesting side effects, like how as we burn more fossil fuels, we push the frontier where radiocarbon dating is accurate further into the past. But yeah, you're educated, you should know what the effects of increased CO₂ are.

I think it stems from this 2005 conference that basically concluded that at below 400ppm, it would be unlikely that temperatures would rise by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and most serious consequences of global warming may be avoided.

"Among the conclusions reached, the most significant was a new assessment of the link between the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the increase in global temperature levels. Some researchers have argued that the most serious consequences of global warming might be avoided if global average temperatures rose by no more than 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels (1.4 °C above present levels)"

"The conference concluded that, at the level of 550 ppm, it was likely that 2 °C would be exceeded, according to the projections of more recent climate models. Stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 ppm would only result in a 50% likelihood of limiting global warming to 2 °C, and that it would be necessary to achieve stabilisation below 400 ppm to give a relatively high certainty of not exceeding 2 °C."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_Dangerous_Climate_Cha...

In a way, every point estimate or threshold is "arbitrary" in the sense that it and its consequences are indistinguishable from nearby point estimates/thresholds. So in statistics people usually pick a threshold based on some reasonable risk function and some utility function, and call it a day (but it's important to be clear which functions are being used!). Since there is rarely one right threshold, it is pointless to look for one, but also pointless to complain that the one that was chosen was arbitrary. Unless, of course, it is so far off as to be noticeably less useful in making decisions, and making good decisions is, after all, the whole point of point estimates and thresholds in decision theory.

carbon is bad, mmmkay?

I like this reference: https://350.org/about/science/

I'm more worried about that it increased around 4% on only five years

People in general are comforted by talking about arbitrary thresholds rather than derivatives, probability distributions, etc. It's unfortunate, but thresholding appears to be an effective way to communicate.

What I don't get is why policy makers doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth. Just start taxing emission and invest heavily in green technology and we could be on our way to start a new industrial revolution!

Three words: oil industry lobbyists.

Only part of the equation.

Actually I think it's one word: China. Companies are competing on a global scale.

Lobbying.

Policy makers are "put in office" by those that would pay these taxes.

While this is true, I think that there is much more to it. FinTech is taking business away from one of the strongest lobbies in the world, the financial sector, and the regulators all around the world seem to be embracing it, even bitcoin.

It isn't that simple when there isn't a global agreement on taxing emission, look at what is happening in Ontario:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-electricity-pl...

Ontario generates 93% of electricity from non-CO2 generating sources. They still signed contracts to add 18000 MW of renewable power in 20 years.

Cancelling 1000MW contract in that light doesnt seem so horrible.

Ontario has hydro sources and Nuclear.

At least on the hydro front, it's a difficult comparison. Quebec even more so - they have a lot of hydro opportunity.

France generates 85% from Nuclear, so effectively 'emissions free', but of course that comes with other complications.

I believe that Nuclear will be the way forward. Renewables are just not getting 'good enough fast enough' in a pragmatic way ... if we spent as much researching Nuclear I'll bet we'd have much safer choices by now. And most 'new reactors' are very safe. In particular CANDU reactors designed by Canada - and even they are decades old.

The reason Nuclear reactors are 'so expensive' to build has more to do with liability than anything. 'Insurance' is the expense - plus - there are very few entities capable of doing it and they have a 'military industrial complex' type oligarchy on it (i.e. it doesn't matter what the next-gen US fighter jet does, it will cost zillions - because he economic structure is there to make sure it costs that much).

A 'truly progressive' country should be investing in this as an option, the upside is just too good: enough Uranium to last centuries, with effectively no CO2.

The US government's investments in both solar power and clean coal have been either failures or ended up costs wayyy more and taking twice as long. Typical of modern government projects but still bad enough where just saying "throw tax dollars at green tech" isn't as straight-forward solution as it seems.

Why not reduce taxes for corporations building green tech? And provide R&D credit to pay the salaries of engineers working on the problem? Reduce capital gains taxes on investments in green tech? Make it easier for really smart immigrants to come to the US to work on the problem? Create a commission who's job is to review and simplify/eliminate/modernize regulations to reduce barriers to entry in the marketplace? etc.

There are lots of ways to incentivize industry to solve this problem instead of adding more taxes and hoping the government works as a good VC.

The Canadian government tried (and is trying) the angel investor/VC thing here and it hasn't worked at all well. They do stuff like matching investments of other angels or giving loans to entrepreneurs. I'd much rather they made it easier for me to start and run a company by reducing the stuff they are already doing instead of doing more things... like pretending they are private investors. For example, they recently announced a Startup Founder Visa which I think is a great idea and a step in the right direction: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/start-up/

Not really sure about that. The cost of solar has come down dramatically and the technology has made huge strides in efficiency, largely because of the government subsidies. Sure, it's a financial failure for the government, but usually government subsidies are not intended to run a profit (lest the government be accused of profiteering or crowding out private investment).

University grants are a different beast. I was addressing the direct investments made in two organizations.

The problem isn't the perception of government backed businesses being 'wrong' for profiteering (or competing with industry?). Most people would be happy if the government made successful organizations that had a real impact (NASA in the 1960s). But successful large-scale government projects are rare today. Any gov tech gains in the past couple of decades were usually a minor side-effect of other massive investments (see: wars, intelligence gathering).

Modern nation states are simply not known for being good speculative investors nor good at running projects efficiently or cost effectively. Even when it's via private industry collaboration. But they are good at being politicians (ie, creating tax policy, managing regulations, etc). So my view is that they should focus on that and let industry be good at building technology.

I was at a conference a couple of years ago and there speaker was proposing that government taxation of tech companies should be higher (or words to that effect) as the underlying tech foundation they were building on was all government funded in the past. I really wish I had a photo of the slide but an amazing amount of the fundamental technology we take for granted today started life as very expensive, commercially unviable readership funded by governments. Their summary was that government is the only place that can fund and progress the technology foundation that companies later build on top of and that the idea that government is bad at tech is wrong - they are just bad at tech when funding is slashed to a minimum. Their main example was Bell labs and semiconductors and then the internet from what I remember.

I don't think the problem is government, the problem is funding - companies with limited funding would do an equally bad job of tech as a government department

Manufacture of PV panels is being further subsidized in China, something that generally isn't acknowledged in the West. If the CPC wasn't as paranoid of political change borne of discontent over smoggy cities, it's hard to say where PV prices would be.

Also bear in mind that assessing the 'cost of solar' is a toy problem as long as solar can't supply baseload power requirements.

Solar + battery storage can provide base load. It already does so in parts of Hawaii.

The cost of solar will continue to crater; it is not a matter of "if" we will run entirely on solar, but only "when" at this point.

entirely on solar? never. solar + wind + geothermal + hydro + nuclear? sure, someday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2IVTM0N2SE&feature=youtu.be

100% nuclear would work too but is politically unviable. Waste and the risk of accidents are a big problem, but at this point I believe they would be preferable to breathing in fossil fuel emissions all day.

Every existing light water reactor in the world could melt down like Fukushima and it won't come close the human disaster that will happen if much of the world's climate exceeds a wet bulb temperature of 35C for any part of the year.

Very little until the SolarCity facility comes online, and the battery storage at the Port Allen solar array has been disappointing and expensive, with batteries that died unexpectedly early.

Also, Hawaii gets its electricity from oil and gas shipped in by tanker and residents pay $.30/kWh; the utility there managed to negotiate $.15/kWh from SolarCity, which is almost certainly below their cost of production right now; they couldn't meet the utility's original tender and reapplied several times. I'm guessing that SolarCity is betting that over the life of their 20 year (!!!) contract they can bring their costs down and eventually turn a profit. I wonder about that bet, though, given that SolarCity isn't in great financial shape.

Anyways, I'm very much in favor of subsidized and incentivized solar power; what grates on me are people who assume that there's a great deal of unrealized value in clean technologies ("new industrial revolution!"). Converting to clean technologies will destroy value because oil and gas, especially when untaxed, are cheaper and easier to exploit. But of course we must convert because, well, 400ppm.

I'm confident that battery cost reductions will be substantial when Tesla's Gigafactory is at full production (they've already signed yet another utility scale battery storage deal in the last 10 days), cost reductions that will further increase uptake in energy storage contracts.

Cumulative global installed solar photovoltaic capacity will surpass 310 GW this year, compared with just 40 GW at the end of 2010. Polysilicon module prices continue to plummet; even if storage costs have not caught up, we can continue to drive out fossil fuel generation with more solar and wind, not to mention shifting loads to renewable generation hours whenever possible.

"Baseload" isn't a real thing, it's just a framing. You need electricity generated when it's required by users, and in the exact quantities they demand.

Having nuclear power plants running all night when no-one needs the power is sub-optimal. That's why many nations built hydro storage and offered financial inducements for people to use power at night. Because the numbers wouldn't work for nuclear if it wasn't used at max capacity the whole time, producing a static amount, yet demand rises and falls both daily and with the seasons.

Doing the same thing, decades later, for solar is hardly rocket science, the only difference is the power correlates very well with air-con loads on both a short and long term scale which makes it a no-brainer for many locations around the world.

A call for a carbon tax is the free market solution.

Resistance to it just redirects efforts into exactly the kind of thing you are railing against.

Most carbon tax proposals a) have stopped using the word tax as people have a visceral, but non-logical reaction to it, b) are designed to be revenue neutral, since raising money is not the point, but changing behaviour, and so cut other taxes so that it balances out.

More taxes is not free market in any form. Considering the alternatives are not yet inexpensive enough for general consumption combined with the fact any tax on oil/coal/carbon etc would likely get pushed down to the consumer, it's largely just punishing consumers who are acting rationally and within their means.

By reducing taxes for green tech companies the focus is on acellerating the time when it can become widely available for consumers and consumers can purchase it without large economic trade-off. As a result the coal industry, which is already in steady decline, with continue to go in that direction. Oil will get squeezed.

Only at that point would it make sense to punish consumption of the harmful energy. But doing so now is just wishful thinking and harming the already strugglign middle class.

Free market is an inexact term, but I would think that nearly everyone would agree that one goal of having a free market is having it be efficient. Which, of course, is what a tax on negative externalities does:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

What I don't get is why private industry doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth. Just start manufacturing green technology free of government incentives and subsidies and we could be on our way to a new industrial revolution!

"What I don't get is why private industry doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth."

There are thousands of companies trying. The inherent problem is that solar and wind are generally crap ways to make it work.

If you live near the equator, and don't regularly have access to electricity, and need a panel to power your TV for a few hours a day - then that's 'impact' but in the West it's really, really hard to make work.

Or you could bury gold bars really deep and people could develop technology to dig it up to start a new industrial revolution!

Not saying it won't work, just be aware of what you are suggesting.

If only people weren't so scared of nuclear.

If only nuclear companies didn’t cheap out on everything and bribed their way past all regulations and inspections.

EDIT: mostly talking here from a German perspective, where several scandals of corruption, bribing inspectors, and drilling holes into the containment vessel under operation have become public in the past years.

if only there was an organization that was given the task and jurisdiction to prosecute criminals.

The FBI? Don't hold your breath...

If only the greenies didn't lobby for insane levels of regulation on nuclear so that we can actually build a plant in less than 30 years.

Nuclear at the moment isn't scaleable.

We already have more nuclear waste than is currently able to be stored.. and we're talking about stuff that is going to remain deadly for tens of thousands of years.

There's nowhere to put the stuff unless we start blasting it out into outer space or develop ways to use it for more energy.

And without founding on new kind of nuclear reactors that burns nuclear wasted. Good job!

Where are we putting waste from all the coal firing plants? Directly into the air!

Does not make it an excuse for nuclear either.

When you have to choose one of two options, then yes it does offset.

I agree that there are issues, but issues that can be solved if more research and energy is put into it. Nuclear waste being the primary concern. Space depot is an interesting option for sure. Nuclear became a priori taboo for some odd reason though. That's why it lacks political momentum behind it. Nuclear can and should be solution for this.

> We already have more nuclear waste than is currently able to be stored..

Don't you mean, "If only we had a place to externalize the waste storage problem." All the nuclear waste obviously has a place to store it, I mean it's somewhere right now isn't it?

You need baseload power from SOMEWHERE. Some lucky types live in favourable geography for geothermal or hydro, but the rest of the world still has to decide between nuclear and fossil fuels. And fossil fuels produce much more, and less controlled, waste and radiation than nuclear.

Compare if we dare: one person lifetime of nuclear power generates about 350ml (one coke can) of waste, which you can keep in dry cask storage and monitor. One person lifetime of coal power produces 77 tons of carbon, and 68 tons of solid waste, plus ash containing lead, mercury, arsenic, uranium, and thorium. The solid waste we can monitor, though it poses a much bigger dumping problem than our coke can of dry storage did. The rest goes into our atmosphere and lungs. Not to mention, that thorium and uranium in the ash is radioactive. Coal ash gives off up to 100 times more radiation than the waste from equivalent nuclear power generation. And this is released into the air.

Don't be a sucker for the persuasion tricj of rejecting methods because they aren't perfect in the abstract. Always compare against the real alternatives. Nuclear does produce some waste, it is not a perfect world solution. But it's vastly better than any real world alternative we have, particularly on the waste front.

There's plenty of space for it to be stored, just not many people who want it stored near them.

There's nowhere to put the stuff unless we start blasting it out into outer space or develop ways to use it for more energy.

Put it in Antarctica.

Breeder reactors run on a different cycle, and allow uranium to capture neutrons and turn into plutonium (spallation). Last time I checked the US had two breeder reactors operational, to make material for nuclear weapons, and one ready but not operational.

I think we could take a vast majority of the nuclear waste we have today and turn it into fuel. But it would make plutonium as part of the process, which makes some lawmakers uncomfortable since it's easier to make small nuclear bombs from plutonium.

Why can't we build a breeder reactor near Yucca mountain, have a reactor core that's completely closed off from human interaction, and breed react current nuclear waste into energy? Design it to need refueling every 10 years or so, and have local national guard present during each refueling session. Considering it should need much less interaction than a non-breeding reactor, I think the plutonium threat could be mitigated.

Where are storing CO2? And do we have a method to move that CO2 to another storage location?

Fission isn't a perfect solution, but it's vastly better than the current one. Having to figure out what to do with the waste is a desirable quality.

To substantiate this comment a bit, David MacKay wrote a good book on this matter: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml

Is there a source of lifetime costs (financial and environmental) for nuclear, compared to other fuels?

I only remember the data from university over 18 years ago, when both nuclear and hydro came out very poorly on emissions (due to the concrete involved, storage/reprocessing, and biological matter decomposing in the lagoon for hydro).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

and an overview of the cycle: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

Not to sound like a broken record, but for the average American, $15/person/year will plant enough trees to offset all the CO2 released into the atmosphere by that person: http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-chang...

Why aren't we doing it? Because nobody is forcing us, and very few are doing it voluntarily.

Thanks for that, will donate. Here's a link to the charity itself. I'll take a look and make sure it's on the up and up when I'm home then either donate or sign up for recurring donations if possible.

https://donate.trees.org/charity/charity?cid=23832

To extrapolate, then, we can solve this for $15 * 300,000,000 = $4.5 billion for the US? And if we are 25% of the world's carbon production (I'm pulling this out of the air) then we can do this for $18 billion? This is on the order of a 10th of a percent of GDP per year. Can it really be that low?

I don't see how this could work. You need a place to plant all of those trees and let them grow and then store them so that they don't decompose and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. That's a lot of land and it seems like if you continually harvest trees without letting them decompose you'll need to fertilize the land to keep the trees growing well.

You can convert the trees to biochar, then a large percentage won't decompose. You don't need to fertilize trees because they get their nutrients from microbial life[0], which is increased by fertilization with biochar.

[0] elane ingham, food web talk - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

Microbial life has to get the nutrients from somewhere, so you do need fertilizer and the biochar is the fertilizer. It's not impossible to sequester carbon this way, it's just that it seems like it's going to cost significantly more than $15/person/year.

The soil has unavailable nutrients in large supplies that get converted by microbes. The biochar is technically inert and doesn't get absorbed, it stimulates microbial life because it has massive amounts of surface area. It's not technically necessary.

My calculations assume a tree will sequester the carbon for 10 years. I'm sure we can do a lot better than that, but even with these assumptions, it's pretty cheap to sequester the CO2 on an ongoing basis.

Timber buildings.

Yes, and also food (fruits, leaves, etc), medicine, wooden furniture, clothes (http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/will-your-next-t-...), and many other items.

As far as your other concerns, they become a problem at scale. Which is what startups are all about solving, right?

I don't see how startups would help this, but this only becomes useful at scale so if it doesn't scale it's not useful. If we had unlimited land to grow things on we would have far fewer problems to begin with, but land is rapidly being cleared of trees for farming. Since we're already decreasing the amount of land we use to grow trees, we could just stop doing that instead.

I was merely pointing out that startups are good at solving problems that arise from taking products to scale.

The organization I linked to helps families grow food forests, so they both farm and plant trees on a given piece of land.

As pointed out elsewhere, we probably don't have enough land for that many trees, unless we figure out how to grow forests in the deserts or on floating islands in the ocean, etc. (technically possible, but not trivial). That misses the important fact, though: there are millions of acres where trees can be planted now. If we run out of land to plant trees on, we can solve that problem at that point.

I made a google sheet that calculated that planting trees along the state and interstate highways for 1/2 the state of MN would capture enough carbon annually (when minimum maturity of 30 adult trees per hectare) to offset the carbon footprint of the entire state.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dA5_AMW6EJPDZv2fP-KO...

That's fascinating! I noticed your US tab just multiplies the MN output by 50. Can you do a detailed analysis of planting trees along roads all throughout US (or at least the 48 states)? Or is there missing data needed to do that calculation?

I want to do that. Many states do not have as good information about their highways available though.

Please let me know when/if you get the info you need.

Edit: Can you just use an estimate for the total distance of highways in the US?

Interestingly, from the 1970s forward, a vast reforestation of North America has been taking place[1]. The problem is more in places like the Amazon rain forest that is being deforested and stripped at alarming and unsustainable rates.

1. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061113-fores...

It's like Climate Change has been engineered to play on our worst behavioral tendencies. It's the ultimate behavioral science problem. As a species, we tend to want to deal with things "tomorrow", and have a hard time identifying non-immediate, gradual, threats.

There's probably some surivor bias going on there - we don't really notice the threats that are easy to solve, because we solve them.

Trees are only sequestering the CO2, not removing it, so this seems like a bad solution at solving our removal of CO2. Also, for a densely populated area, where do you propose people go to plant said trees where they can survive without major care? What is the mortality rate of these trees over time considering weeds, water, bugs etc.

>"Trees are only sequestering the CO2, not removing it, so this seems like a bad solution at solving our removal of CO2"

I don't follow your logic here.

All of the atmospheric CO2 produced from fossil fuel combustion had been previously "sequestered" in the form of petroleum-based hydrocarbons before it was burned by humans.

Why do you feel that extracting atmospheric CO2 by building polysaccharide chains (aka wood) via photosynthesis in trees would be worse than having left it in its prior hydrocarbon form if we had never burned it in the first place?

I'd guess he's worried about the wood rotting, and the decay process venting CO2 (and, worse, methane) back into the atmosphere.

>Why do you feel that...

As a dead tree decomposes the heterotrophic organisms eating it release a large amount of the stored carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2 as we heterotrophs are want to do. That's where a lot of people stop and give up.

What I think a lot of people forget is that plants naturally spread. If you plant a tree and it survives for 50 years, it's producing seedlings for up to 90% of it's lifetime. If even two seedlings can become trees you have removed the CO2 from the air rather permanently.

Trees do spread naturally. We're revegetating 10 acres of land with native plants and its amazing to see the spread every year.

But that's not relevant in a situation where you're planting them for an end result like sequestering carbon (e.g. a renewable pine plantation).

Then you obtain the land, plant the heck out of it with seedlings, then thin them out http://www.gfc.state.ga.us/resources/publications/PineThinni... at regular intervals. Way more bang for the buck than planting a few and hoping for natural propagation.

Cool Earth [1] is a highly rated [2] charity fighting climate change.

[1] https://www.coolearth.org/ [2] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charity/cool-earth/

Changing your default search engine to Ecosia[1] can help with this too. A portion of their ad revenue (used to be 20% gross - not sure what it is now) goes toward tree planting.

[1] https://www.ecosia.org/

I recently started reading "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air"[1], which is available as a free book, and it's been a wonderful introduction to reasoning about alternative energy. The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2].

[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE

It's interesting, but his solar PV assumptions are pretty outdated in the book. He talks about utility scale solar being 10% efficient, where as it is around 17% now. Even at 10% efficiency, he says it's feasible, but too expensive. We are now at 2.42 cents per kWh unsubsidized for utility scale solar, in the best case. He says solar PV is 4x as expensive as conventional electricity production, which is clearly not true anymore. And the trend says PV will be 4x cheaper than coal within a couple of decades.

He addresses that in the book as well. His goal is to give rough estimates and a framework to reason about energy sources, not provide conclusions.

It would be cool to maintain a fork of the book with updated figures. Is the tex source available anywhere?

EDIT: What seems to be the latest version of the source files is hosted at http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/.

Watching the talk, now at 22 minutes. So far: highly recommended.

Yikes! At least it's good for the plants.

I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time.

Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better.

Ultimately, we'll stop burning so much stuff. Will it be too late, or will the relatively sudden dropoff in CO2 production affect the PPM? Should be interesting to watch, for those of us who live long enough.

> At least it's good for the plants.

There are plants (for example hop and wheat [1]) that cannot grow well at high CO2 concentrations.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5980/899.abstract

That may be the key. Save the hops.

SAVE THE BEER

"I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time. Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Efficiency gains and new technologies will not, in the long run, mitigate the externalities of resource consumption.

The driver is population. That's the only lever that could possibly be effective.

If you're frustrated and confused as to how the reactionary wing of politics in the US could be so willfully blind to the facts or "the science", understand that deep down they know - this is just a classic race for resources and even more deep down a fight for kin group survival.

You might think they're dummies but there is a deep human memory of reproductive calculus at work. They know that at the very end of this line of thinking is a one-child-policy. Or worse.

We are in deep shit.

We can change, or we can die. Continued emissions at our current rate will kill us. We're already teetering at the precipice of feedback loops and may be committed to some.

At this point, we need a Manhattan-Project-level effort to end carbon emissions as we know them. Else we just have to hope that colonies on Mars and the Moon will be able to sustain the species while we nuke ourselves over resource wars here on Earth.

The problem is worse than most people know. It doesn't help that we have a segment of the population here in the US that is willing to ignore all evidence on the issue.

An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.

Why is that? I imagine a lot of species would have to move too, but basically, if we all move north (or south, depending on where you are relative to the equator)... why doesn't that work?

Well, for one thing, we're on a sphere. As you go toward the poles, there's less square miles of land per degree of latitude.

The temperature range. The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field. The liquid water.

The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field.

Please explain. I always thought it was gravity.

Mars has nearly no atmosphere because the solar wind blew it away. The magnetic field acts as a shield that prevents the atmosphere from leaking out into space, basically [1].

[1] http://m.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cluster/Earth_...

That's assuming the ecosystem holds together and the warmer temperatures don't begin to cause massive die offs of sensitive plant and animal species. That's also assuming we don't kick off some kind of dangerous feedback loop such as destabilizing methane clathrate deposits or something similar. Are we willing to take the risks? I'm not.

Though I'm not a climate scientest, I'm sure if we had one here they'd agree that ten degrees farenheit is an absolutely MASSIVE change in global temperatures. To say that it would be livable is incredibly naive.

Even if all the plants and animals die, there is still an atmosphere, magnetic field, liquid water.

Sigh...this conversation is pointless.

I think he may be taking the human-survival-apathetic stance similar to this George Carlin bit, "The planet is fine; the people are fucked."

Not that I defend that viewpoint, but I can see its merits.

What will you and your 7 billion fellow humans eat if all of the plants and animals die? Why do you think that conditions which would be deadly to nearly all other life on this planet won't be deadly to you?

If you're making the point that life will find a way given Earth's strong life-supporting traits, I completely agree. But it won't be human life.

What are you planning to eat on Mars?

I've struggled with this for a while. As context to what I'm going to say, know that I've been gravely concerned about climate change for a good while. The rate, quantity and quality of 'bad news' climate-change related data has been increasing exponentially, and I might even be using that word in a literally correct way.

I've posted this elsewhere, but I'll just summarize.

> An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.

To first and second approximations, your statement is spot on accurate.

Mars has 1 or 2% of our atmosphere. Mars has radiation. Even under some of the best SpaceX scenarios, it will be something like $100/pound to the surface of Mars. ...many others...

I've come up with two basic advantages Mars has, or could have. 1. Its extremely thin atmosphere makes it virtually harmless to structures, to things we might build there.

I think that it's possible that the climate here on earth will get so wild and so intense that the air itself will become our primary physical enemy, in the form of storms. That is, property-damaging winds and floods might become frequent and wide-spread enough that any kind of large-scale surface building becomes impractical.

I haven't seen any science on this specific to this scenario, and, objectively, it's unlikely, but it's something to consider.

So, assuming it's not possible to build above ground, surely it's still cheaper to build underground on earth than above ground on Mars? This is the second advantage I can imagine for Mars.

2. There will always be (relatively) few people on Mars, and all of those people will be living with pretty intense self-sustaining frameworks/environments.

If things get really bad on earth, it's possible, perhaps likely, that people overall will make the future of other groups of well-prepared people precarious. I don't really need to go into what all that means.

So, those are the two Mars-provided 'survival-level' advantages I have managed to come up with. And both of them are contingent on some pretty extreme stuff happening here on earth.

In closing, I'll say that I agree with Elon Musk's statement about how we may as well get started now, rather than later. Over a long enough timeline, human survival on earth approaches zero.

I'm worried more about nuclear war, which would very quickly end the human species.

Life on Earth would continue but it would not be sapient.

Other celestial bodies do not have this problem we've self-inflicted.

Why nuclear war? Global warming/heating will cause drastic resource shortages... people go to war when they can't feed themselves. An unstable world increases the probability of nuclear war, especially accidental nuclear war.

I argued with a friend of mine about climate change. His first instinct was to dismiss it with a shrug: "So what if sea levels rise a little, we'll just have to move inland".

We really don't know how much instability human civilization will tolerate before devolving into slinging nukes around. Why even fuck with that possibility?

I know war and tension have always been part of the modern era, but it does seem like we're going back to cold war levels of tension again. U.S. vs Saudi Arabia. U.S. and Europe vs Russia. India vs Pakistan. North and South Korea (although it's been like that for a long time). One "Archduke Ferdinand" event and things might get ugly. With as much internal tension that we see inside the US right now, politicians might not be so reluctant to go to war. Giving citizens a common enemy might calm things domestically.

Yep...it's a pretty unbelievable situation. It's led me to face the fact that humans are really not special in any way and this Hollywood sense of "eveything's going to work out somehow in the end" is completely false. Indeed, we can easily kill ourselves off. The universe is perfectly happy to let us do that.

Given recent events[1], one cannot stress the word deep enough. To be honest though, it's not just the republican candidate who thinks that global warming is a non-issue. It's the entire Republican party.

Of course, I can't help but referring my all time favorite Daily Show clip, Burn Notice [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGEzFbRl-g8

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPgZfhnCAdI

Democrats had the presidency, senate, and house all under their control and didn't act like they believed it was a serious issue. It was a time where they could have done something big (e.g., carbon tax). But it was politically more useful to take token measures, stay friends with the carbon industry, and keep climate change as a political issue. If you want something done, you should pick us! If we do it, then maybe you don't need to pick us anymore. Keep chasing the carrot.

Agreed :-)

Doesn't this cheer you up a bit?

2016/09/27

"Since hitting its earliest minimum extent since 1997, Arctic sea ice has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. Already it is greater than at the same date in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015. Put another way, it is the fourth highest extent in the last ten years. Even more remarkably, ice growth since the start of the month is actually the greatest on record, since daily figures started to be kept in 1987"

Hardly the kind of observation to get wide coverage.

ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/north/daily/data/ https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/rec...

You're not the first and you won't be the last but it's useful to know the difference between sea ice and land based ice shelves and why they shouldn't be conflated.

I'd say it's more like we can change now or adapt later. And I mean adapt in the most Darwinian fashion. It looks like we've already picked the latter. Shame as the former would hurt a lot less.

The earth has been through huge changes before. I've still got my money on humanity to figure it out. We just passed up the early booking discount and are gonna hafta pay full price for the ride.

I think there's a good case to be made that "adapt in a Darwinian fashion" will mean "humanity doesn't continue to exist on the planet in any meaningful numbers".

I prefer to address the problem in a more timely manner.

The problem with Darwinian evolution is that it takes a long long long time. Humanity has never faced climate change so quickly before.

So what will actually happen is that large chunks of the world will become unlivable. As in, if your plane crashes in that section of the planet, you will die. Mammals all have a very similar limit here, the idea that we will quickly evolve around that is ridiculous.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2010/100504HuberLimi...

We will adapt, and not in the Darwinian fashion, by becoming a much smaller population, living in very different parts of the world, farming in very different ways.

The economic destruction in such an adaptation will be immeasurable, even if we somehow do it without causing all sorts of wars and revolutions from resource shortages where people are dying of thirst and starvation.

Maybe the doomsday argument wasn't crazy after all!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

I think Manhattan project efforts are useful when there's a goal where there's a clear engineering hypothesis, i.e. how do we achieve a nuclear chain reaction, or send a rocket to the moon.

But when there's a much much much broader research space to explore, such as methods to capture carbon, I don't think that such focused projects are as useful.

We already have the technology to get completely off of carbon, it's the industrial scale-up that's the issue. At current prices, energy costs would increase no more than 3-4x, at the very very worst, and double in a more likely scenario.

So what we really need is political will to cause the market to make these existing technologies efficient on the industrial scale. We need a stiff carbon price. And we also need a way to incentive pulling carbon out of the air, perhaps direct transfer of the carbon tax to those that are able to securely sequester carbon without the possibility of it escaping into the atmosphere. That way, if somebody wants to burn natural gas, that's fine as long as they also pay the cost of taking the carbon out of the atmosphere at the same time

With those two things, we could be off carbon in a few decades, worldwide, economically efficiently. All it takes is the political will, and the investment of a tiny fraction of our global GDP.

Most of all, we need to never, ever, vote for politicians who deny reality and live in a fantasy land on important issues like this. It's affected an entire political party in the US, and the disease is practically contained within them. They have politicized the science, have led large chunks of the US to believe these lies. And they have a huge persecution/inferiority complex so if you even mention that the Republicans are bad on this issue, they get defensive and dig deeper into their lies. There are a few respectable Republicans on this issue, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they are the exception, and the rest of the Republicans ostracize them them for it.

The technology and science is practically there for a solution, it's the politics that needs fixing right now.

Sadly, look what happens when someone tries to actually implement a carbon tax. The Sierra Club of all people try and sink it: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/09/will-naive-left-and-se...

Another strong point that the obstacles to addressing climate change are political, and not technological.

Alternatively, this is what happens when it does get implemented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax

If it were as simple as you claim, and as critical, why wasn't a carbon tax passed in 2009 when Republicans could not have stopped it? Was it even attempted?

I think he is referring to political will beyond the scope of the US, which collectively, is a much bigger issue.

Probably a similar reason why that carbon tax you mention wasn't passed. (Why do it if others aren't, and lose competitiveness economically?)

There is hope for international collaboration on this, however. The Paris climate agreement is an excellent step. We can't let it be sabotaged in the US by short-sighted, pandering, lying politicians. Such as those that believe that the Chinese invented the concept of climate change to sabotage us.

Why do you think I'm claiming its simple?

The Democrats could barely get a health care bill through in 2009, a health care bill that was based on a Republican plan. Ballooning health care costs were an issue throughout all the 2000s, which nearly everybody agreed needed to be addressed in some manner. The concept of Democrats also being able to also push through a carbon tax at that time is absolutely ludicrous. Try convincing the average Republican that climate change is 1) happening, 2) caused by humans, 3) addressable without destroying the economy. We can't even get broad consensus that there is a problem, much less on a solution.

Democrats could have enacted whatever carbon tax they wanted without a single Republican vote. Why didn't they?

Despite you ignoring everything I wrote, and repeating a bald and false assertion ("Democrats" are not a monolithic thing, they are a party with a wide diversity of views, and saying they could have enacted whatever they wanted presumes that "they" could have a singular view of what they want), I'll try to answer yet another way.

In this world many people assume that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between two sides, and one side is a mixture of those who accept climate science, and those who continually demonize the science and lie about economic consequences. Suppose the Democrats were 100% in agreement on the climate science and how the problem should be addressed, which obviously they're not. Then in that political world, moderates would assume that the truth lies somewhere between the climate science (in this hypothetical world the Democratic stance) and the official Republican party stance. Meaning that the moderates in the country would think that the Democrats would probably be extreme in their views, just because the Republicans have gone so far in the extreme the other way.

And in reality, Democrats are not a monolithic body, they have a variety of views in how to address the problem, and there are even a handful of Democrats from areas with heavy fossil-fuel industry that pay attention to their campaign contributors rather than the science, which makes this supposed Democratic control.

I'll ask you this: why would not even a handful of Republicans support addressing climate change, enough to make this even a slightly bipartisan issue? Why does it fall entirely on a single political party to come to a solution? Shouldn't this be a non-partisan issue where we come up with a solution that people of multiple political views can support?

Because the Democrats are a bourgeois party.

I like to imagine the Earth fighting back in some crazy Jumanji way. Plants start growing super fast and breaking apart buildings... stretching out into the sky to suck up the carbon.

Silliness. We're not hurting the earth. We're just making it a bit less hospitable for us. It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe.

I just think the idea of reaching a tipping threshold that we aren't fully aware of the consequences, is the main concern.

Yes, yes, as humans we will be able to adapt, and no, it's not the plot of 2012.

For the flora and fauna in the biomes being destroyed, they are facing extinction.

> It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe.

Maybe. Your statement masks the deeply serious potential consequences.

Yes, it's not going to look like fire-and-brimstone hell on earth; volcanoes spewing ash into the darkened, lightning-filled sky, mile-high tidal waves drowning major population centers, the ground splitting open and swallowing cities whole...

But what happens if another migrant wave washes over Europe consisting of starving people whose land is inhospitable due to drought-induced crop failure? One large wave from Syria has provoked considerable social unrest and has contributed to the rise of multiple nationalist, far-right parties. How much more instability can that region take before a war occurs? What would a world war in the age of nuclear weapons look like?

Or, what if we hit the scientifically-plausible scenario of runaway climate change resulting from multiple positive feedback loops triggering melting of methane ice on the seafloor, and arctic thaw allowing decomposition of large amounts of organic matter? If the average global temperature rises by 6 degrees C, the hottest days will be so hot that they will have the potential to outright kill many staple crops. In addition to the sea-level rise, large areas of land will be uninhabitable due to heat. As with the above scenario, what happens when large groups of people are starving and can no longer survive where they are currently located? How much instability can human civilization tolerate?

...and that's not even the worst case scenario. What if the temperature really takes off and we experience an anoxic event[0], where the oxygen level in the ocean depletes and they begin emitting highly poisonous hydrogen-sulfide gas? Such an event is linked to high temperatures, high oceanic acidity and high levels of atmospheric CO2. This event would kill the majority of life in the ocean, and due to the combination of the hydrogen-sulfide gas' effect on land animals plus the damage it would cause to the ozone layer resulting in increased UV exposure, this would kill the majority of life on land, too.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

>We're just making it a bit less hospitable for us.

Since we happen to be us, that's a massive problem. You're supposed to give a shit about people dying, you know?

Earth doesn't need to "fight back"---it only lets species that can cope with the changed environment take over.

Once, oxygen was toxic to most of the species on earth, when some algae started producing it by photosynthesis. If Earth fought back, we'd had very different species by now.

We'd be blue-green algae

Australia's short-lived carbon tax reduced emissions. Despite the overblown media claims at the time, it didn't impose a massive cost on consumers, nor hugely impact GDP.

https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...

What happened then? Right-wing came back to the affairs?

Murdoch smear campaigns happened, it's been a shit show ever since Labor voted to switch their party's head. Right wing has formed parliament in the two elections since, even after doing the exact same thing last year voting Abbott out in favour of Turnbull.

"Aw, but they're like exactly the same mate, I'm just gonna draw a dick on the house of reps ballot and vote One Nation for the senate instead."

Love it here.

The Liberal party (the conservatives) got in power denying climate change, and one of their major policies was scrapping the carbon tax ("It's costing you money!!"). They also defunded CSIRO.

Another policy they successfully passed was a law that makes it illegal to report on abuse, including sexual abuse, of children if that child happens to be a refugee.

We also were in the middle of building a taxpayer-owned, nationwide fibre-to-the-home network. It wasn't just a theoretical plan, it was in progress, and 17% of homes already have it. They cancelled that, too, instead opting to spend the same amount of time and more money on DSL, and have actually been installing slower internet in some people's homes than they already had.

Most electorates were very happy with these policies. In July this year they were voted in for a second term.

Permanently*

*Until we act to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere through various carbon capture methods

I don't see anyone doing this currently on a large enough scale, but I'm hopeful that the crashing costs of renewables, which will push the price of electricity down, will be a catalyst for implementing energy-intensive carbon capture and sequestration methods (currently being experimented with in Iceland).

It could be a good way of dumping extra load in a renewable national grid.

Spec the grid so that in low supply situations (low wind, low sun) there is enough power to cover actual demand 90% of the time. Then whenever there is extra power, (windy and/or sunny days) you redirect that extra power into carbon capture/sequestration.

I wish for something like a closed loop cycle: Solar energy into electrolysis to fuel a sabatier process and feed the resulting methane into a syngas-to-gasoline process should be the standard for fuel production in the future. It's energetically expensive, but we'll never run out of water and carbon dioxide.

Not exactly a closed loop - about 30-50% of the carbon dioxide we release is absorbed into the ocean[1]. So this process might actually decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, but ocean acidification will continue to increase.

[1] http://www.gdrc.org/oceans/fsheet-02.html

Carbonic acid in the ocean is in equilibrium with the atmosphere, so if you knock down the ppm in the atmosphere it'll eventually affect the oceans.

The third sentence:

> That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists.

So permanently as in our lifetime which is really the only type of permanence that matters.

and so people suddenly lose interest, those projects wont have much effect until after i'm dead and gone. If we can vastly expand the lifespan of an individual, suddenly they have a vested interest in the next 100, 1000, or whatever years. Suddenly it will make sense to spend a lot today to avoid pain later.

If I didn't make a mistake, we are looking at removing two trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide per ppm. That is probably not a small feat.

EDIT: Of course I made a mistake, it is probably more like three trillion metric tons, I mixed up fractions of volume and mass.

Don't forget that you'd have to do that in an entirely carbon free way and cease all current carbon emissions. That's not happening in our lifetimes.

I would use caution throwing around ultimatums. I'm sure pocket-sized digital supercomputers or a global near-instant communications network didn't seem likely within the lifetime of people born in the Great Depression, but here we are.

These exponential advances in technology are difficult to predict with human brains. I try to stay cautiously optimistic.

Today's computers were perfectly obvious to Gordon Moore in his 1965 paper. By contrast nobody today is writing papers about the inevitable expansion of carbon-free energy production.

Various forms of next generation nuclear would meet that requirement right? People are certainly writing papers on building better nuclear power plants. Doesn't even have to be something exotic like fusion.

If there is some kind of nuclear power that is millions of times cheaper per unit output than it was in 1965, I am unaware of it.

Some folks are certainly hinting at it. http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very...

This of course depends on the time frame one wants to achieve, but assuming we want to remove carbon dioxide as quickly as we added it, that means we would need some operation comparable in size to the global coal, oil and gas industry extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere around the clock. And while I agree with you, exponential growth is in some sense hard to predict, I don't really see us starting such a gigantic endeavor unless we are absolutely forced to by the consequences of climate change.

You make solar power cheaper than coal, and atmospheric carbon useful for something, and you'll soon have to regulate it extraction, not emission.

> Don't forget that you'd have to do that in an entirely carbon free way and cease all current carbon emissions

Plenty of carbon is naturally removed from the environment, at least partly by photosynthesis; that's how an equilibrium was maintained before we humans in wealthy countries started releasing so much more carbon into the atmosphere. We don't need zero emissions.

Carbon is generally not removed from the environment by photosynthesis.

In photosynthesis, CO2 is converted into sugar [0], storing the solar energy in the chemical bonds of the sugar molecule. Later, the energy is released through the reverse reaction where the sugar is converted back into CO2 [1].

Carbon is also used in biology for things other than sugar production, but in general the carbon that gets consumed by an organism eventually gets released when that organism (and the organism that ate it, and so on up the food chain) decays. This is refered to as the carbon cycle.

Under some circumstances, the carbon cycle is broken, and dead organisms end up sequestering their carbon in a place that does not allow it to return to the general environment (eg. fossil fuels).

TL;RD when we burn fossil fuels we are adding carbon to the environment. When plants consume carbon, they are moving it from the atmosphere to another part of the environment, and it almost always ends up back in the atmosphere.

[0] The full reaction is CO2 + Water -> Sugar + Oxygen, or 6(CO2) + 6(H2O) -> C6H12O6 + 6(O2)

Yes, good point. I knew that but somehow it escaped me when I wrote the post. My point was, the global ecosystem can handle the release of some carbon by human activity without a problem; we don't need to go to zero.

However, the sooner and farther we reduce carbon output, the faster we reduce excess carbon in the atmosphere. There's nothing magic about zero; negative output would help too.

until Elon Musk does something about it. Right ?

Plants are able to remove about 10ppm per year. If we stopped emitting, and starting burying plants in the ground it could be done without a huge problem.

i.e. the hard part is not removing the CO2, the hard part is not adding to it.

Trying to bury a significant portion of the global plant mass gain every year in a way that it does not emit greenhouse gases while decomposing seems like a major undertaking to me.

A quick calculation - one ppm reduction means extracting three trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide which contains about 800 billion tons of pure carbon which takes up about 400 cubic kilometers. That is a huge hole to dig even if we would just have to deal with the carbon. And that is for one ppm.

Don't we have plenty of old coal mines? They seem like a natural place to sequester carbon in, given that that's where a lot of it came from in the first place...

> three trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide

Billion not trillion (10^9). All the rest of your numbers are off by a similar factor.

> That is a huge hole to dig

Actually, using the correct numbers (.4 cubic km), if you made a 50 foot deep hole it would be about 3 miles by 3 miles. Not that big - a couple of city blocks.

A typical landfill is larger than that, and we have tons of those.

Nope, trillions. The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.15 × 10¹⁸ kg [1], 400 ppm of that are 2.06 x 10¹⁵ kg or 2.06 x 10¹² t which are about two trillion (short scale) or two billion (long scale) metric tons. I used the short scale [2]. And because the 400 pm are by volume and not by mass you end up with about three trillion metric tons if you take that into account, too. Of course only unless I messed things up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Your figure is for 400ppm. But we are talking about 1ppm.

Of course, sometimes you are just blind for the error.

is carbon capture actually viable? a completely carbon-free capturing method sounds like perpetual motion or free energy.

Like trees?

trees sound plenty viable. maybe it should be called tree planting instead.

I don't know why this is not on the agenda.

People are instead wasting money on crazy stuff like compressing CO2 into projectile like cans and dumping them into the ocean. Or my favourite, stopping the sheep from NZ from farting!!

The terrestrial biosphere makes a terrible place to store carbon, as you really can't store that much of it, and eventually it has a tendency to burn and release it all back. If you wanted to grow a bunch of forests/crops, and then bury them and grow new stuff I guess that might work. But not as well as pumping new CO₂ underground or into the deep ocean (below the carbon compensation depth, where it will dissolve existing carbonates and buffer the ocean).

Also forests make the Earth's surface darker, thus decreasing albedo and potentially increasing global warming.

"Also forests make the Earth's surface darker, thus decreasing albedo and potentially increasing global warming."

Obligatory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albino_redwood

Or just use the wood to build things! Has the added benefit of reducing the use of carbon intensive materials like concrete and steel.

Good idea. Now tell me how you plan to offset the carbon emissions from land use change... You weren't planning on building dense housing with wood, were you?

There's a group doing that.

They can make some pretty impressive engineered beams these days. The fire intensity required to destroy them, they claim, also structurally damages concrete, so it's not the issue most of us take it to be.

The presumotion is that the land would have changed anyway, just in a more carbon intesnive way. Of course "burying it" would seem to require some carbon outputs, and a temporary land use change. What do you think that would be sustainable?

Any carbon you can put below the surface tends to stay put. So it's not 'grow trees' it's 're-establish healthy forest ecosystems'.

A bunch of Doug firs growing on compacted clay isn't going to sequester much of anything.

I'm not saying that healthy forest ecosystems don't have a lot of benefits, it's just that "grow moar trees" as a carbon sink is a trigger for me. Planting trees is the perfect feel-good solution that solves, at most, 0.1% of the problem. It's a "send food to Africa" or "build the wall" analogue solution that doesn't address any of the root causes.

Things one can actually do to help solve this: Plant trees as part of restoring ecoystems; recycle metals (esp. Al); join the diplomatic corps and negotiate climate and trade agreements; buy locally grown food and locally obtained materials; start a massive battery/solar/car company to obsolete the fossil fuel industry; research atmospheric alchemy; eat less meat. Not necessarily in that order.

no reason why it should sound like that.

why shouldn't it? the phrase itself, in my mind, conjures up images of impossible patents and theoretical technology.

maybe I just have a good imagination, but when someone says "carbon capture" I imagine some sort of artillery sized vacuum we can point at the sky and turn on to start sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.

Ignoring costs, it's "trivial" to do with nuclear energy providing the carbon capturing power. But doing so requires a tremendous amount of power (proportional to how much hydrocarbon-based power we're using now, as noted elsewhere in the comments) and a tremendous amount of resource investment (building the power plants, building the carbon capture mechanisms, etc.). So: doable, but insanely expensive.

That said, if the alternative is the death of most ocean life, the depletion of most of the planet's food resources, and therefore the death of a large chunk of the planet, we may end up reevaluating our willingness to spend that kind of change.

Only the solar powered ones.

There is carbon cogeneration though. Diverting point-source CO2, scrubbing it and using it in industrial applications that require carbon dioxide.

There's a very good chance that all this CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for longer than your permanent backups, permanent government/business records, and even some permanently owned land...

That's permanent enough for me.

> and even some permanently owned land

... especially coastal properties ;)

This makes me so unbelievably sad.

No do not be sad, fortunately we have a robust, state of the art, highly refined and efficient device for removing cO2 from the atmosphere, they're called trees.

Too bad they're only good for about 30 years or so before falling over and leaking it all back out again, and nobody is going to be seeing it as good RoI to bury them in the ground unfortunately.

Right, well I don't know what you mean, leaking it back out. Surely not atmospheric carbon dioxide. At any rate, bamboo also.

When the tree is decomposed by bacteria and fungus, most of the sequestered carbon is released back in to the atmosphere. Sorry for the vague wording :)

In the post-apocalyptic science fiction novel The Death of Grass (and the movie No Blade of Grass), a virus threatens all the world's grass crops. Some governments begin plotting to nuke (their own!) cities to reduce food demand.

There is a worrying analogy to global warming, where governments might consider nuclear war to reduce carbon emissions (from other countries). Though at the point global warming is really bad, it would probably be too late to make much difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass

And as a bonus you would get a Nuclear winter.

Just because we're a proto-Arrakis doesn't mean we need to panic. But we should really start investing in spice.

No, switch to Heinlein. We should be investing in boost, and becoming belters.

Worth reposting: What can a technologist do about climate change? http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ (2015)

The Newsroom s03e03 climate change interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

Migrating to emissions-free or at least CO2-neutral power sources is slow and expensive, but it must be done, of course.

What I wonder though, is why we can't capture our CO2 output and prevent it reaching the atmosphere in the first place. Is it simply prohibitively expensive or difficult?

There are no market forces which would bring CO2 capturing technologies to the forefront. i.e. it's cheaper just to dump it in the atmosphere.

Something like a carbon tax would very quickly make CO2 capture relevant.

Because no one is forcing coal power plants to pay for it.

What a common people can do to help to fix that?

Try to calculate your carbon footprint, then take steps to reduce it where possible. For example, taking fewer airplane flights.

If everybody murdered someone else, that would help a lot. More would be better.

Also helpful: don't have children, don't drive, don't fly, don't eat meat. Plant trees. Erect solar panels.

Some ideas for positive action:

"What can a technologist do about climate change?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615

(Spoiler: Be engaged, be influential, use your high-leverage superpowers)

And it's not only climate change but there's also a negative effect on human cognition: https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...

I haven't researched this enough to know how stupid it is, but, just throwing it out there:

Why don't we make giant phytoplankton farms? [1]

[1] http://nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-bre...

North America, Europe and China are slowly wiping out everyone and their own future generation.

Scare tactics/propaganda. Whether the article is rightly or wrongly indicating something significant, I can't tell.

1. Chart shows carbon dioxide going from light red to dark red. The color scale is wildly different from the measurements (388ppm -> 404ppm -- 4%; assuredly higher, but not their drastically darkening RGB depiction (247,211,211) -> (134,3,8)

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me the percentage change is irrelevant. I'm a fairly ignorant outside observer of climate science with an interest in the presentation of this material. I saw http://xkcd.com/1732/ but many people will assume heuristic from http://xkcd.com/605/ I don't think fossil fuel is going away until prices are adjusted to the externalities. Thanks for the downvote, made me think a little harder about the importance of--(jeez, it is hard to say "politically correct" with sounding sarcastic).

2. Cherry picked a solitary data source: "At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide" -- Is there only one? Couldn't the article have provided a global average?

3. Animated image (with unhelpful caption) provides a little movie that looks like the northern hemisphere was on fire for the month of March 10 years ago.

This is terrible stuff. Not for passing the "symbolic threshold", but for the beautifully crafted subtexts in presentation.

HN, I welcome these threads.

I downvoted you because of (1.). The change in CO2 measurements should not be compared to a "baseline" of 0ppm, because that is not the baseline. It should be compared to the time-average value before, together with what the standard deviation used to be. So, looking at wikipedia, if the range since year 0 used to be ~260—280 (not sure what it was), your figure of 4% would be a wildly misleading way to present the subsequent change to 400. The baseline for CO2 is not zero.

Quickest way to get an answer on the internet, state something wrong on a forum.

Baseline CO2 apparently (from other comments) has always been in the 300+ppm range for human history, but I'm not arguing the details. If, for example, 4% of the world's people were to die from Zeka, it would make Ebola look like a sniffle.

I'm arguing the article is a too fine example of persuasive writing. I came for the comments, got a lot.

Here's a dry, boring presentation of the data[0] (with a 'world average' tab as well as Mauna.) My understanding is that CO2 is close enough to well-mixed that levels are consistent at most measuring sites but Mauna one of the longest continuous same-site record and is relatively isolated [1].

The best record keeping we have is that humanity has always lived in with CO2 in the 300's [2], it will now be in the 400's until sometime quite fundamental changes (or, at current rates, it goes into the 500's in 40-50 years) [2, linear extrapolation].

[0] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/full.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa_Observatory [2] http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

Dry and boring sounds interesting. Thanks for the tip.

I had the experience of working in healthcare doing data visualization for doctors. The first version of my software I took a very "engineering" approach, a simple, no-frills just-the-facts visualization of the data, defaulting to showing as much data as possible so the well-qualified doctors could decide for themselves what was important. I found very quickly that did not work well at all. Giving a "dumb" scale of graphed data obscured the fact that your blood pressure can vary 20% in a normal conversation, while a change of 10% (F) in your temperature would be generally fatal, that streams of information from redundant sensors make it hard to discern variations in unrelated ones, that a sudden spike in heart rate is likely medically interesting, while a sudden spike in blood pressure is often an artifact of the way that information is collected. In order to effectively present information even to a highly informed audience I needed to contextualize, prune, edit and carefully present that data because by not doing the system was actually creating more confusion and misleading through data overload.

The challenge I'm sure that these climate scientists have is, they see this data not as dry, boring information, but more like health information for the planet. They would like the rate of increase of CO2 to slow and give the planet (which they live on) more time to adapt to the rapid warming which is potentially disastrous. They are trying to properly frame the fact that these are all quite bad signs so we take appropriate actions. A doctor with a patient with a fever of 107º should not present the patient with a report saying "The 2 week moving-average of your temperature is looking normal", or "your temperature is up 9% today", or "while your brain temperature is trending higher, your extremities are cooling so your average temperature is staying even". Those all might be true, but would be medical malpractice.

For comparison, when Boston got record snow and everybody froze to death in early 2015, the temperature was:

> ... the average temperature [of Boston] in February [2015] was 19.0 °F (−7.2 °C), which was 12.7 °F (7.1 °C) below the 1981–2010 normal, making it the second-coldest month of any month all-time, behind February 1934.

So the average temperature in Feb 2015 was 266K, only 2.6% below the normal value of 273K. Sheesh.

Measuring change in absolute percentage is misleading, when your chance of survival strongly depends on it being in a narrow prescribed range.

(You die if your body temperature increases by 2%.)

Nice calibration of the subject.

(You die if your body temperature increases by 2%.)

98.6 * 1.02 = 100.57, not life threatening.

310.15 * 1.02 = 316.5, and you'd be dead.

There is such a thing as absolute temperature, not just different relative scales. Multiplying it makes sense.

98.6 F = 558.3 R; 1.02 * 558.3 R = 569.5 R; 569.5 R = 109.8 F

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