> almost everything else I believe is incorrect.
> France went 80% Nuclear in the space of 10 years.
What data have you used to determine that going nuclear will materially modify atmospheric CO2 within a human time scale?
See, here's the problem, most people make assumptions or repeat what they are reading/hearing and never bother to quantify or verify claims in any way.
We already have data on this. We've had it for nearly a decade as far as I know. What does the data say?
Even if we moved the entire world to the most optimal forms of renewable energy --meaning, highly optimized forms that do not yet exist-- not only will atmospheric CO2 levels not go down, they will continue to rise.
You can read that conclusion here [0].
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.
Then we have studies about reversing ocean acidification with aggressive CO2 removal [1], the estimate being at least 700 years. I would not be surprised if reality is closer to 7000 years.
As I have said elsewhere, and I repeat here with data [2]: If you look at the data it isn't difficult to understand a simple reality: Even if the entire North American continent (Canada, US and Mexico) evaporated from the planet tomorrow. Poof. Gone. Captain Kirk beams everything into space. Not only would atmospheric CO2 not decrease, it would continue to rise as if nothing happened. That's the nature of planetary-scale problems. People think they are saving the planet by buying an electric car when, in reality, they are doing absolutely nothing at all. In fact, they could be causing a larger problem (remains to be seen).
The US contributes about 15% (2008 data). If you erase the US, what remains of the world still contributes 85%. CO2 will not decrease at all, it will continue to rise. Erase the US and China, that gets you down to 57%. It won't even slow down.
Do you get a sense of what I am talking about? A few hundred paltry nuclear power plants don't even compare to erasing the US and China from this planet. That can't possibly be thought of a solution in any objective reality. No way.
I went even further than this in my research and modeling. I wanted to get down to a baseline by answering a simple question:
How quickly would atmospheric CO2 concentration decline by 100 ppm if humanity evaporated from this planet?
The answer, believe it or not, is so easy to calculate even a high school math student with basic skills can do it: 50K to 100K years.
Think about that for a moment: If we all left the planet it would take (taking the low side) 50K years. That's the baseline. When anyone suggests a magical solution the first question has to be: How is that better than humanity leaving the planet? If someone claims to be able to fix it in 50 years (1000 x faster), they need to provide impressive proof of their claims.
[3], [4] and [5] show ice core sampling data going back 800K years. This is how we arrive at the baseline. We know --with a great deal of accuracy-- what the atmosphere did when humanity was not around (or when we were just a few hundred thousand with sticks and stones as our technology). We know this through this highly reliable form of historical atmospheric sampling. If you fit a few lines to these graphs you can get a sense of how long it took for CO2 to go up and down. That's how we arrive at a baseline of about 50K years for the case of no humanity on this planet.
Like I said, any solution that claims to be able to solve the problem a THOUSAND TIMES FASTER than the no-humanity baseline needs to offer unimpeachable proof. Nobody ever does. Everything is hand-wavy magical juju beans and pink unicorns. Well, that doesn't solve any problems, does it?
[0] https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...
[2] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
[3] https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png
[4] https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
[5] https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...