> You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
No, I am not doing that. I devoted a little over a year to taking a deep dive into this subject. I really wanted to understand. This was a few years ago, when I started to get this feeling that climate change was becoming a religion. It quickly became obvious that both non-believers and zealots are nothing less than delusional. Nobody devotes one iota of work and effort towards understanding the subject and everyone jumps on their respective bandwagon.
If you study that data --very reliable data going back 800,000 years--, do a little analysis, and read just a few documents, it becomes very obvious that we can't stop it and we sure as heck can't slow it down.
That DOES NOT mean it will not regulate. The planet is far more powerful than we could ever hope to be. The way our planet regulates CO2 is through weather events. That's the first reality we need to understand and accept. We are going to have lots more hurricanes, rains, cyclones, etc.
Every time I post about this people respond with negative comments and not one person bothers to look at the data and documents. I have had this conversation with people with advanced degrees in science over the last several years. Not one person has come back with a scientifically sound dismissal of my hypothesis. It goes as follows:
We know, from ice core atmospheric sample data going back 800K years, without a shadow of a doubt, how the planet behaves without humanity around.
The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 without humanity around (or when we were a rounding error in the planetary context) is about 100 ppm in 50K to 100K years. For easy numbers, let's call it 1,000 years/1 ppm.
Here's the data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
It's a simple matter to fit lines to the up and down slopes and get a rough measurement of what I call the natural rate of change. That is, the rate of change with humanity being insignificant.
That rate of change is the baseline from which anything else has to be measured. Examples:
"Let's shut down the entire United States and move to Mars"
Nope, won't work. That is not better than if humanity left the entire planet, which would give us 1 ppm every thousand years.
"Let's cover the entire ecuatorial band with solar panels and have wind turbines everywhere we can put them"
No, again, how is that better than all of humanity leaving the planet?
"Let's build huge filters and suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere in every city"
Nope. First of all, building something like that at a scale sufficiently large to actually make any kind of an impact on a shortened time scale (50 to 100 years) would require resources to build, operate and maintain the systems of an unimaginable scale. Just the processing and transportation of the construction materials to build the thing on every major city on this planet would likely emit more CO2 than the system could ever consume. And then you have to power it. No, solar won't do it.
And then, on top of that, all seven-going-on-eight billion of us are still on the planet, which means that we can't do better than the baseline 1K years for 1 ppm reduction.
"Let's use magic dust to seed the ocean and capture CO2"
I don't even want to imagine the disaster and CO2 contribution just mining, transporting and deploying this stuff would entail. We are far more likely to kill everything in the ocean than to fix a darn thing with the atmosphere.
And, once more, billions of us would still be here, which means we can't do any better than the baseline.
Here's the easiest-to-read paper I found on this. In fact, back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
To paraphrase: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
This paper stopped at that conclusion (because it was the answer to the hypothesis they were trying to prove). I wish they had continued or done another paper evaluating the reality of controlling CO2 through any other means. The conclusion would have been the same.
Thankfully a group out of Germany asked that question and published results about a year later (2015):
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...
The summary:
"Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany say that if we were to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of 2.5 times that of the current annual emissions, oceans would not recover to a low-emission state by 2700."
And that is a best case scenario. In reality, anyone who has ever done real work of any kind in the real world knows that these estimates are, at best, optimistic and in most cases a complete fantasy. It is useful to have a number of some kind just to get a sense of proportion. The 700 year estimate means "not measured in a scale corresponding to a human lifetime". Generations. And, if we go back to the baseline I introduced, the real number, with all of humanity still around and growing, the real number is in the high tens of thousands of years.
I know I am going to get pounded on any time I post this. The vast majority of people who believe or do not believe have done near zero work to actually understand the subject, they take the conclusions from whatever side of the argument they like and go with it. That's OK. I am one who decided to stop regurgitating what I was being told and actually go out and try to confirm it first. If I just make a few people take that scientifically necessary path of skepticism and do the work, mission accomplished.
Yes, we have to clean-up our act. No, we are not going to save the planet. There are plenty of reasons for which we should clean-up our act. And, yes, climate change is real. And, yes, of course, we made a significant contribution to the problem. We just need to stop pushing fantasies and address reality.