Don’t Worry about CO2, Worry about the Earth’s ‘Energy Balance’

- "Don't worry about bugs, worry about your program crashing."

- "Don't worry about extreme weight gain, worry about cardiovascular disease."

- "Don't worry about your bad parenting skills, worry about your child being a brat."

Energy balance is the effect, CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) are the primary root cause.

To fix the energy balance, we need to fix CO2, so we should indeed worry about that.

It's debatable at the moment, but if we continue along this path and positive feedback does take over, CO2 emissions would cease to be the main driver and would be eclipsed by positive feedbacks. In that case, direct intervention in the energy balance would be the only effective means to prevent further acceleration. Think of it like an object being pushed over - a small push at the start tips it over, but if it starts accelerating under its own weight, you need to catch it - not just stop pushing it over.

A while ago someone here on HN linked to a blog post with the name "Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist", which seems very relevant here:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

Quote:

> Physicist: Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.

Reminder: Overfocusing on CO2 and ignoring other metrics is dubious at best.

People tend to confuse "carbon neutral" with "sustainable", instead it's not enough.

Many people described this pattern as a deflection tactic.

So all we need to do is to get these pesky 0.3% out of our atmosphere, right? Let me do a few quick calculations ...

Ok, ..., thats, ..., 520 trillion watt years.

So, if we create 5.210^6 sqkm of photovoltaics farms, say by covering half of China, move all bitcoin miners into low earth orbit and power them with said photovoltaics, emitting the waste heat away from earth* (take that, sun!), we are golden. We just have to ... produce three thousand times as much photovoltaics as we do today. This is certainly much simpler than any alternative, right? Right?

A bit of an aside, but if we were to want to work on these things as software engineers, what's a good way to do it?

I started looking for a new job recently and I'm considering jobs that work on these problems (not completely certain I want to, seems like a drop in pay and benefits), and so far the best I've been able to find are a couple of jobs in the energy and power industry that aren't really about working on climate change issues directly, it just might give me some domain knowledge for future work.

I find the the title of the news really misleading. We MUST worry about CO2, as much as other greenhouse gases to stop the energy imbalance. Some journalists are irresponsible to beat around the bush of global warming, constantly trying to reinvent terminology to drown their readers.

Even if the energy balance were fine, too much CO2 leads to ocean acidification, which is really bad for the ecosystem. Anything with a carbonate shell has a harder time forming its shell in an acidic ocean.

Dismissing the causes means that they won't be addressed. Something else will be tried to be done instead of the most obvious course of action if you know the cause.

And that something else could go horribly wrong, as we are dealing with a very complex system that we don't properly understand, and taking drastic/massive measures because of the urgency it will take.

Yes, positive reinforcement is adding more factors to the game than just CO2 or GHG emissions, so the problem is not just CO2 anymore. But doing nothing about the source, and in fact keep worsening it won't do any good.

Oh great, I was running low on things to worry about.

The article makes the very valid point that global warming is of course about the energy balance.

An increase in carbon dioxide is one of the factors that will influence this energy balance. But there are several other processes that could influence this. The processes that are the most worrying are the ones with positive feed-backs, i.e. they are faster when temperature increases. Virtually all physical, chemical processes run faster when the temperature increases[0]. There are some simple feed-back processes that could become important, such as the thawing of permafrost (releasing methane, also a greenhouse agent) or the melting of snow/ice (reducing the albedo of the earth and enhancing the radiation it absorbs).

[0] It is also true for most biological processes.

Understanding the fact that "pollution causes global warming" itself is an uphill task for humanity (For various reasons and vested interests).

Moving that conversation to "energy balance" will doom the planet.

I wonder if "Energy Balance" would resonate better with more people than "CO2" or "global warming"?

Ignoring the technical details, what message would be most persuasive?

Don't worry about either, worry about climate change because we've decided not to prevent it and it will be your problem to survive it when it starts to bite.

Edit: to be clear, I mean as individuals. I don't think humanity is going to die out, I just wouldn't by a house on low lying ground...

Don't worry about anything, worrying doesn't help.

so why can't we worry about both? this isn't a sophie's choice of what massive global problem to fix ... we can work on multiple things at once.

From the fine article:

  > Earth’s global average temperatures have risen by
  > nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 150 years or so.

I get that this is Scientific _American_ but in discussing climate change / whatever we're calling it today we have a well-known benchmark of 2 degrees _Celsius_ that we warn about. As we are talking about a Δtemp and not absolute measurement of a specific temperature, in my opinion we should continue to use degrees Celsius for this purpose. And 2 degrees Fahrenheit is over three and a half degrees Celsius - far more alarming.