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Comment by CharlesColeman | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we could genetically engineer a new kind of tree with undigestible wood, to replicate this era to deliberately sequester carbon.

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Wood engineered to not rot naturally would also have a market, in addition to sequestering carbon.

Accoya make and sell a wood product where the wood lignin has been chemically altered by means of acetylation to achieve this very property: https://www.accoya.com/

Plastic.

So by using biodegradable packaging I am contributing to global warming? Oh the irony.

No, biodegradable is carbon-neutral. Plastic itself is carbon-neutral although it's a byproduct of carbon-polluting oil. We'd have to make plastic out of atmospheric carbon for it to have any sequestering effect.

If biodegrade-able products are from carbon based life, and carbon based life contains carbon, and biology breaks down biodegrade-able products, wouldn't breaking down something that contains carbon be releasing carbon into the air? And wouldn't that be NOT carbon neutral.

Carbon neutral means the carbon that gets released at the end was initially taken out of the atmosphere, not the ground.

If you burn a piece of paper it's carbon neutral because the tree absorbed that carbon from the air. If you burn a piece of plastic you're adding carbon that used to be sequestered below the surface.

How long must an item be buried before burning it loses its carbon neutrality?

If you first ask why CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem, then you'll find the answer. It's the same time scale at which the change in atmospheric CO2 is a problem. It's only a problem because it's changing rapidly. It would be OK if it happened slowly enough for species to adapt or at least for human activity to adapt without too much disruption to our daily lives. Ultimately, it's rapid disruption to our daily lives we don't want. We don't want to have to move somewhere else, have less spending power of our wages, get a different job, or change our eating habits. But if it happens gradually generation by generation, so we hardly notice it, then it'll be OK.

This is very much not true. Look at Venus, which was (we believe) subject to a runaway greenhouse event. Also, the Permian period ("Snowball Earth"). Climate change can be catastrophic whether it occurs fast or slowly.

But he has a point. The real answer is more complicated. Slow change gives natural selection several generations to evolve a complex solution to the problem and our minds the time to come up with a technological solution.

Life exists within the boundaries of available sunlight and liquid water. Changes that occur slowly within these boundaries don't necessarily have to be catastrophic. However if the changes exceed these boundaries whether fast or slow then yes the change will indeed be catastrophic.

Venus possibly has no liquid water and snowball earth doesn't have much water either, hence the catastrophe.

Venus had oceans at the time. They boiled off. The Permian Earth had oceans too, just ice capped ones. Microbial life and the simplest algae-like life survived, but that’s it.

I just don’t think it’s all that correct or useful to say the equivalent of “life will adapt” when life has never adapted to changes this fast, and we are hurtling towards changes so extreme as to wipe out complex life entirely.

As long as water and sunlight are available, we're good.

Venesians, if any existed, would disagree.

On earth there is life capable of existing in water far hotter than boiling. Not little bacterias either. Actual multicellular animals.

Catastrophic change will leave pockets of deviants in some dark corners of the earth that will remain protected somewhat. These deviants will go on to populate the world.

There was one such catastrophic change that happened before. A meteor. Wiped out an entire class of creatures called dinosaurs, now replaced with mammals. Mammals at this time lived as tiny rodents underground.

There is no life anywhere on Earth that is able to survive 90 atm and 500 deg C, like the surface of Venus. And fwiw, the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs is one of the milder mass extinction events in Earth's history. We are on trajectories in excess of those that predated the worst mass die-offs in Earth's history, and more resemble the lead-up to Venusian conditions.

You can't maintain liquid water at those temps. I don't think we are on trajectory for Venus like weather.

Plastic does degrade over time. It might take a long time, but then, there's a lot of plastic.

Only if you don’t count the supply chain

* Biodegradable is just, ya know, degradable by organisms within a relatively short timeframe

* The process of refining plastics and manufacturing products is generally NOT carbon-neutral

Yes, a bit more than by using non-biodegradable ones.

Plastic doesn't literally grow on trees...yet.

"Styrene is named after storax balsam, the resin of Liquidambar trees of the Altingiaceae plant family."

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

Plastics are typically made from oil, but they can also be manufactured from corn, or other plant matter.

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