> That may or may not be true right now.
Well, being that the argument is grounded in physics and the math that accompanies the analysis, this is a time-independent truth.
To state the problem more accurately: We cannot do a thing about climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.
The numbers being thrown about for some of these would-be solutions are just plain silly. 50 years? For a planetary scale problem? Yeah, sure.
Again, one must understand that it was absolutely possible for us to add massive amounts of CO2 in short order. Removing it isn't quite as simple. We were able to add it because burning tens of billions of barrels of oil every year is easy. Any fool with a match can start a forest fire. It takes millions --billions-- of times more energy to reverse the effect of what started with a simple match.
That's the context. Every purported solution must pass the physics test. None of them do. Small scale, sure. Planetary scale. Not one.
Every time I look at this I am reminded of the joke one of my physics professors used to tell us with sometimes annoying frequency. He would start on a new problem, chuckle, and say: Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter. His point was that reality was always far more complex than what we had to do in order to learn and explore principles.
The very first problem is that we know, without a doubt, what the baseline is for affecting a (roughly) 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2: 50,000 years. However, this baseline has a pretty tough requirement: Humanity has to leave the planet or the clock does not start.
If humanity left the planet tomorrow, we know that, on average, it will take about 50K years for that 100 ppm drop. This is roughly what people are saying they can do in just 50 years with various magical solutions. In other words, they are claiming that they can do a THOUSAND times better than the rate of change that would correspond to humanity not existing at all.
How do we know this? We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric data taken from ice core samples. In other words, we can see what the planet was doing when humanity's influence on CO2 and the climate was so insignificant we might as well have been on Mars.
If, for example, someone claims that we can "fight" climate change (I love the hubris) by installing solar panels and wind power generator everywhere, well, they have to show how this is better than humanity leaving the planet. No hand-wavy stuff, real science, math, physics. These ideas do not survive the test of hitting the realities of physics inside an Excel spreadsheet.
You don't have to take my word on it for this particular case:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what was going on. It is real science, reproducible by anyone with the skill set, and nothing even close to hand-wavy bullshit. To paraphrase, the conclusion they reached goes something like this:
"Even if we deployed the most optimal versions of all renewable energy technologies. Meaning, versions of all technologies that have yet to be invented. Not only would this not reverse or stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. CO2 levels would continue to increase exponentially."
These researchers went into this work convinced renewables were the way to do it and they set out to prove it once and for all. I give them huge credit for having the guts to communicate that their bubble was popped by their own research and that, no, this idea is nothing less than utopia.
We don't even have to stop there. The chart in this article, when combined with the other data, absolutely made the issue crystal clear for me:
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
Remember what I said about the baseline? 100 ppm in 50,000 years, if humanity left the planet? Anything less than that is pointless as it will be in a range between never affecting CO2 concentration to taking far longer than 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
The chart in this article shows each country's contribution to the CO2 problem.
US 15%
China 28%
India 7%
Russia 5%
Europe about 7%
The rest close to 40%
If the United States were to beam up into space tomorrow --we evaporate from the surface of this planet and all of our technology and machinery disappears-- you are still pumping 85% of total CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, nothing will change. And atmospheric CO2 continues to rise exponentially.
In other words, if someone were to propose that we install solar panels on every single home in the US. The question they have to answer is:
How is that going to be better than if the US simply evaporated and we stopped contributing 15% to the global problem?
It isn't! Which means it isn't a solution. It is, at best, hubris and, at worst, criminally negligent or irresponsible to propose consuming a nation's treasure on something that is as pointless as can be.
OK, now China and the US are beamed-up by Captain Kirk. Same issue. Now we are down to 57%. Won't fix the problem at all.
If we all left it gets down to 0% and it takes 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
Anything LESS than that scenario will take longer or do nothing at all.
That's where the impossibility of things like "save the planet" or "affect climate change" or "become carbon neutral" come into the proper lens. These are all fantasies. Sorry. Anyone wishing to challenge this has to prove their purported solution can pass the physics test at a planetary scale. Showing that it works when we assume a cow to be a uniform one meter diameter sphere of milk isn't equivalent to planetary scale in the real world.
In the real world we have things like the massive forest fires burning in nearly every continent every year. In California we now have a fire that is likely to contribute more carbon in a few weeks than the entire gasoline-based ground transportation fleet in the US in an entire year. Last I checked it was only 31% contained. There are massive underground coal fires that have been burning for decades, even centuries in some cases. That's reality. Not the utopia we are being sold.
What to do then?
Well, we clean-up our act for other reasons. No, we are not going to "save the planet" at all. We don't have that power. We clean-up our act because it is better than being absolute pigs and causing more damage. We also clean-up our act because this is part of learning to live with what we cannot alter.
I urge anyone who think they know anything about this subject to get on Amazon right now and buy a CO2 meter. I have several. Go around your home, apartment, your friends and neighbors places, the mall, your car, etc. Measure and take notes. What you should discover is that, while atmospheric CO2 concentration is --depending on how and where you measure it-- in the order of 400 ppm, we have been living with much higher levels for a very long time, likely centuries. You will discover levels in the order of 650 ppm in your home and other homes. You will measure somewhere around 1,000 ppm in your car. It will be similar at the office and at the store.
The interesting thing is that the sky hasn't fallen and we have not turned into goo. We can, apparently, live just fine in higher CO2 content. Ideal? Perhaps not. I'd like to see a study that determines if we have an evolutionary adaptation for an optimal CO2 concentration range. I don't know of any, other than fear-mongering stuff that twenty years ago, was claiming we would suffer mass extinction by now.
None of this is to say that climate change isn't real and that we have not contributed to make things worse. It is very real. It has been for billions of years. And, yes, we managed to accelerate the rate of increase by burning the equivalent of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years of trees and bio matter in just a few centuries. That's how we did it. And we can't reverse that, not on a human time scale.
I continue to be baffled by how otherwise intelligent people just take what they are told --about any subject really-- and do not bother to confirm before parroting the stuff far and wide. This is not how we solve problems.