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Comment by froggychairs | Hacker News Reader

We are not doomed. The climate is changing but we can still adapt. We can still lower emissions. We can still remove GHG from the atmosphere

Doomerism is an awful mindset to have. It’s difficult to feel this way but there’s still a lot of hope and a lot of amazing people working on this.

There is certainly lots of pain ahead. My home nation will be underwater by 2100s, lots of animal species will go extinct, but we are not doomed.

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> We can still lower emissions.

If the world were to decrease to net 0 today and until 2050, we'd still expect average and mean temperatures to continue to increase through 2050.

> We can still remove GHG from the atmosphere

These are mostly prototypes and we do not have the capacity to get to 0 with these technologies yet.

ah I think even that is a bit pessimistic. I'm optimistic that we can figure out carbon sequestration and transition to renewables in the next few decades and prevent any catastrophic sea level rise. I fully admit that the global North will not give a shit if some peripheral nations are destroyed by climate change, but I think this summer is starting to show people living in Vegas and Phoenix that their days there are numbered if we don't do something. Maybe I'm being optimistic though.

The recent news that Greenland was ice-free at +1.5C has increased my pessimism again.

yeah I think it's becoming clear that stopping emissions isn't enough and we will have to do carbon capture but Iceland has a functional carbon removal plant up and running and Exxon apparently sees it as part of their economic future. Lots of bad news out there and we need to accelerate the pace but optimism gives us energy for pushing the political front.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...

The Iceland plant will pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 / year, so my toilet-paper math says we're going to need at least 9 million more of these plants to achieve net zero.

That's actually a bit less bleak than I would have expected.

/sarcasm . dark humour

Sorry for the misplaced optimism , if it makes you feel more bleak, building all those DAC facilities, transporting them and running them will require millions more of DAC facilities.

I just mean that it seems like actually a somewhat possible number for humans to build, though obviously it's more like infeasible than impossible. I pretty well realized how fucked humanity is around a decade ago, so it has been interesting to watch the realization spreading.

oh ya I'm saying we need to achieve net zero plus have carbon removal. We need to be net negative, we are already in catastrophe territory as far as much carbon is in the atmosphere (I am not a scientist to be clear).

To be clear, Net Zero requires massive direct-air carbon removal, i.e. the only way to achieve it 'net zero' is the permanent removal of billions and billions tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it somewhere.

36-37 Billion tonnes of CO2/yr, ..

We aren't doomed as a species, but billions of people will die.

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