Bill Gates investment firm will put more money into adapting to climate change
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
“It’s time to start accepting reality and that we’re not going to be able to do this fast enough, the ship is too big, it’s too hard to steer,”
and
“It takes a while for the planet to cool down,”
As well as a reference to a quote from former Obama science advisor and Harvard professor, John Holdren:
“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering.”
I have been writing on HN about this for years, only to be met with violent reaction (in digital terms) and almost an absolute lack of interest in attempting to understand what I call reality. I have often said things like "thankfully your <insert reaction here> does not alter reality, which will eventually surface".
Necessary disclaimers (because people are just too quick to make assumptions):
Climate change is real
Humanity contributed greatly
We did this by burning fossil fuels,
which increased atmospheric CO2 and other GHG's
We have allowed climate change to become a cult. One that is mostly devoid of good science. A religion too, where people just believe what is pounded into their brains day-after-day by those who seek to benefit financially and politically from the narrative. They believe because they believe. They never question any of it. And they sure don't invest one bit of effort attempting to understand reality and evaluate what they are being told.
I have also repeatedly said that the truth would eventually have to take the front of the stage. Scientific realities, like Galileo's heliocentric claims, can't be suppressed forever. At some point enough people do the math. It might take time, yet reality always wins over fantasy.
The truth?
Brutally simple:
We cannot do a thing about climate change on anything resembling a human time scale.
Wait a minute! We added a massive amount of CO2 to the atmosphere in a relatively short period of time! Why can't we remove it just as fast?
OK. I'll play that game. Using Mauna Loa data [0] we can see that the current average is 420 ppm. Let's assume our goal is to drop that by 100 ppm, to 320.
How long did it take to go from 320 to 420?
The Mauna Loa Observatory data shows it took 60 years.
How do we do it then?
First: Absolute zero additional CO2 contribution by all of humanity for the next 60 years.
Second: A magical new technology that can extract/capture/whatever atmospheric CO2 at a planetary scale without generating one molecule of new CO2
Both of these are fantasies. Impossible.
Why is it impossible!!!!
Well, Physics, for one thing. It is easy to burn stuff and make a mess. It takes a massive amount more effort, resources and energy to clean-up the mess. This should be common sense. Consider the mental model of burning one cubic meter of wood in the middle of a Walmart building completely sealed from the outside world. Then imagine this task: You have to retrieve every particle and gas you emitted. The difference in energy in resources required to reverse the process is almost unmeasurable. No, you can't open the windows and ventilate the place with fresh air. It's a sealed environment.
Diving further into the common sense domain. It is helpful to get a sense of proportion on this at a global scale.
One of the preconditions for being able to drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm in 60 years (the time it took to contribute this much) is that the entire world must stop contributing additional CO2. Anything less than that extends the timeline, likely exponentially. Again, common sense.
...continues on next comment links at the end of second section
Can we achieve this anytime soon?
It helps to understand CO2 contribution as a global distribution. Looking at the data by country is useful [1]. I like the pie chart in the middle of the page because it is very easy to see reality without having to do much math.
Let's assume a fantasy scenario: Next Monday, China and the US stop producing CO2. Not some ridiculous carbon credit nonsense. Truly zero CO2 contributions from both countries. Note that this would require such things as no more fires in California (where one year of fires negates nearly twenty years of emissions savings) and zero economic and industrial output. No planes, trains, automobiles, heating or cooling home, construction, factories, going to school, taking vacations, etc. Nothing. Billions of people die and two countries come to a complete grinding halt. No more CO2. Yet, somehow, that's what happens.
Well, looking at that pie chart, it is easy to see this would be pointless. The rest of the world contributes 57% of atmospheric CO2.
It gets even better, well, worse, actually. In reality, if this were even possible, it would certainly not happen next Monday. It might take 50 to 100 years. During which time atmospheric CO2 might increase by another 100 to 200 ppm (I have my doubts about this, let's go with it for now). By the time the US and China go zero carbon and everyone is dead, the job is no-longer a 100 ppm reduction, it is more like 200 to 300 ppm.
Let's say all other nations in the world go zero carbon as well in 100 years from now. Everyone is dead, yet we manage to leave magical technology behind that can capture carbon and do so with no energy or additional CO2 emissions.
The story, then, starts on one glorious Monday, 100 years from now, with 620 ppm CO2 and not one gram of new CO2 being contributed to the atmosphere (fantasy, I know, but, let's go with it for now). Starting from the 1960 data point from Mauna Loa Observatory, it took 160 years to go from 320 ppm to 620 ppm and the fantasy of zero new carbon emissions.
Still assuming a fantasy technology that can violate physics and remove said CO2 using the same energy and resources used to put it there and in the same time scale, well, it will take another 160 years to get back down to 320 ppm. What is that, three or four generations? It certainly isn't the 2030 to 2050 claims being pushed by politicians and those who seek to financially benefit by pushing fantasies.
If we are only able to reduce atmospheric CO2 --remember, planetary scale, not in a lab-- at 1/2 to 1/10 the rate (I seriously doubt it) we are talking about 320 to 1600 years to get down to 320 ppm.
The real numbers are far greater than this. By many orders of magnitude.
The natural rate of change for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2 is in the order of 100K years. That is if all of humanity left the planet next Monday. We know this with absolute certainty. This is not a guess. We have real data on this from 800K years of ice core atmospheric samples.
Anything we propose must be measured against the "no humanity on earth" baseline.
Guess what? Nothing passes that test.
Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures is one in a slow-but-constant stream of entities, researchers and people starting to have to face the kind of reality the world had to face after locking-up Galileo for the rest of his natural life for daring to propose they were wrong: The truth, as inconvenient as it might be, cannot be bottled and negated forever.
Eventually people do the math. At some point enough people were able to look out into space and do the real honest scientific work to understand what Galileo said was correct and, without saying so, everyone else was in a range between cult member and demented.
That's were we are going with this. Slowly, yes, yet, it is impossible to ignore the science, the math and just plain common sense.
[0] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/mlo.html
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
Well let's do the math.
There are a variety of methods, no one alone will suffice. Let's consider a combination regenerative agriculture and plantation cellose crops like bamboo or timber as one small part. There are many variations, but a lot of them make useful stuff (or just dryable things or better soil to improve productivity next year) out of about 20t of carbon per year. It doesn't matter what so long as it gets buried.
We'll take as our resource half of the land that is currently used for animal feed and ethanol. A low meat diet is a reasonable price to pay by splitting the rest of the animal feed land 50/50 for the remaining 25% of grain/soy fed animals and protein for human consumption. So we have about 400 million hectares.
I'll assume we can replace 90% of emissions with some combination of nuclear, renewables, and efficiency improvements. This will happen basically on its own now without radical and rather extreme measures to prop up fossil fuels -- we can still hurry it up by several decades though.
Our 400 million hectares can sequester 8bn tonnes of carbon each year. That's about one ppm. Need half for our remaining 4bn tonnes or so of emissions so this method alone can achieve a 100ppm reduction in a couple of centuries.
Not great, but a start. Is it going to happen? Probably not, the social problems are really hard. But it indicates fairly definitively that the scale of the problem is a human one (it can be done with methods we know using resources we already use). It also disproves the assertion that machine-derived work well in excess of the heat initially released has to be put in to solve the problem.
You don't have to turn it all back into oil and carbon, just contain it.
Step 0 is to do that 90% reduction as fast as possible though.