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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

>Though the world is on track to reach net-zero carbon emissions around 2062,

I did not realize this. Does anyone know where this statement came from?

This piece is written as if it's covering the event in 2041 as it unfolds, so I read that as just a fictional projection based on what this writer thinks could be in the cards.

This tracks with the general tone I get from the Economist's (excellent) climate coverage: unconvinced we'll get where we need to be quickly enough to achieve the best case climate scenarios, but optimistic that we will eventually hit more of a medium-case scenario, and therefore may need some interim solutions (they often allude to geo-engineering) to bridge that gap.

Most countries had pledged to reach net zero by 2050, China at least said to reach net zero by 2060, with few exceptions. Of course, it must be achieved.

But net-zero carbon emissions means that till that year, the GHG will keep accumulating, the carbon cycle is slow enough to not significantly reduce the amount that you have in the atmosphere for decades.

So the problem won't be solved that year, nor 10 years after that goal is achieved, but when GHG are finally below of pre-industrial levels (I don't know, near half of what is it now) so we lose more heat than what we keep.

All the way till that point, the global yearly average temperature should be rising. And extreme weather events will continue to pile up.

And, of course, net zero doesn't take into account the positive feedback loops that either emit more GHG or rise global temperature.

I feel a bit overoptimistic that article. Or that they try to push that solution tried by Hyderabad as a magic wand (or a cash cow).

Pledges for things that will happen after a politician dies are even more meaningless than pledges made before an election. Zero value should be attached to them.

The only thing that matters are actions that are happening now which is... not very much.

It is what we have. A president could discard all pledges as Trump demonstrated during his mandate.

Maybe different kinds of governments, with less variation of ruling parties (China, Russia) or broad agreements in their political systems (EU?) may keep their promises in this topic.

So, the effect of all excess CO2 put in the atmosphere in 2050 will have an impact between 2065 and 2070 (roughly). The atmospheric CO2 "half life" is more than a 100 year.

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...

It is a piece of speculative fiction after all.

The article is a what-if senario for the year 2041. The carbon neutral by 2062 statement is part of the what-if Szenario.

I don't have access to this article so I'm not 100% sure, but at a guess they mean "many nations have made public claims that they plan to target reaching net-zero by around <some date>"

To my knowledge, carbon emissions are still increasing every year, and increasing in their rate of increase every year. I would love to be wrong.

This site doesn't include pandemic data: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Doesn't the plot on that page directly contradict that?

It was effectively flat from 2012-2017, then small upticks in 2018 and 2019?

The second derivative of CO2 seems to show a huge decrease in the last few years.

There were similar "flattenings" in the early 80's

If you had a plateau with twice the number of points (years) than any previous plateau then I would buy that something was going on.

But sadly - we don't.

I would also assume that there are still billions of people around the world aspiring to live lifestyles like people in the US/Western Europe, so absent the development of an energy source comparable to the convenience and low price of fossil fuels, any slack in demand from US/Western Europe will be picked up by the poorer billions.

I'm at least hopefully because this one appears longer (~9 years; if you count 2012-2019; most of the other drops were shorter and seem to be tied to major economic events - the 73 and 79 oil crises, fall of the Soviet Union in 91 and subsequent recession in Eastern Europe, and the great recession in 2009.

Seeing an apparent flattening in a period of major economic growth is really encouraging.

Atmospheric CO2 growth rate over time

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html

Year-by-year is alot of noise, but over decades we see mostly steady accelleration.

That sounds insane to me. You'd need a large carbon sequestration program running, which means you'd need to be producing enough clean energy to supply all human needs and sequester the carbon.

And no, trees will not cut it.

Sounds pessimistic to me. I think we can make it there earlier. Don’t underestimate technology, the solutions to carbon sequestration and clean energy are getting exponentially better each year.

> exponentially better each year

I'd love to see sources supporting that; it sounds a lot more optimistic than I would expect.

Ramenz Naam has been showing this for years:

https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...

There are identical stories to write about onshore wind, offshore wind, and lithium ion batteries. This summer has seen a huge number of new storage chemistries announced from startups with skin in the game and experienced management that will close the gap for longer term storage.

The most optimistic prediction for renewables were too pessimistic. It's likely that we are still in the same situation today, and not nearly enough people are predicting the future accurately by short-changing new tech.

There probably aren't too many people on HN these days that remember computer tech in the 80s and 90s, but it had far fewer doubters, and didn't have an industry dedicated to creating a propaganda cloud about how awful computers are. And still, the internet and computers are far more advanced and penetrant into everyday life in ways almost nobody anticipated.

The renewables revolution will likely be as big. We will have more cheaper energy accessible to us than ever before. This may be enough to jump to a new stage of technological development.

Why do you need carbon sequestration to reach net zero new emissions?

The goal isn’t net zero new emissions, it’s net zero emissions, so sequestering every bit of CO2 you emit

There's a lot of stuff that you simply can't prevent from emitting CO2, for example various chemical processes, and other applications like air travel where fossil fuels are simply too much better than alternatives. True zero emissions is not a realistic goal. But net zero emissions is much more reasonable - you can still use carbon where you need it, you just need to make up for it.

Growth in wind and solar production is really really high, we are roughly on course to produce enough electricity for current needs by 2035 entirely from clean resources.

We could expand production even more, but private producers would probably need some guaranteed buyers for that expanded future production.

Fossil energy is on its last legs. The question is not if it will be phased out by 2050, but how many more years of new fossil fuel infrastructure we let FF companies invest in before banks stop backing it entirely. Already, large institutional investors and banks are demanding changes. It's only crony capitalism that allows for new extraction, and this will end up hurting share holders in the long run. FF companies are already taking our loans to pay dividends, so as not to spook investors. The future is clear.

Africa and other places will skip over thermal fossil fuel electricity generation, just as they skipped over sites telephones to cellular networks. Micro grids and batteries will be far cheaper to deploy than large transmission lines and large central generation.

As for carbon dioxide removal, we will probably have to start that in the 2040s, but the best tech is not yet clear. You are right that trees are insufficient, and recent fires are showing that forests can by carbon sources in addition to climate sinks. (I believe that Canada's "managed forests" have become net carbon sources this year, for example.)

I don't think this passes the usual concerns around base load, local energy needs vs. overall network totals, and storage capacity for nighttime use. Maybe that's ok. Maybe we just get a ton of solar and what we can't do in batteries we just funnel into carbon sequestration. And at night we just turn off the lights unless it's an emergency or high priority task.

But I have my doubts that this is likely to play out...

It's likely that we will have a ton of excess capacity because solar is so cheap.

These are all solvable problems. Christopher Clack has been doing global optimizations for renewable grids for a long time, and finds that lots of upgrades to the distribution grid today, along with additions of storage and distributed solar, is a surprising cost optimal route.

People always doubt the new, but it's really hard to prove that it's not possible. And once it's done, it will seem obvious in retrospect.

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