As the Great Salt Lake dries up, it is emitting millions of tons of of CO2
npr.org
npr.org
Millions of tons is a lot, but when the overall Fossil CO2 emissions are in trillions then it isn't really where we need to focus. I can't see how they're justified in saying it is a significant contributor.
There are probably plenty of reasons aside from CO2 to maintain the lake.
The oceans, to date, have absorbed 1/3 of human CO2 emissions.
Climate change is full of tipping points and feedback loops, many of them unmapped and unknown to us.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/acidification.html
Edit: pH decrease, thans nwellinghoff
The ocean is far from being saturated in CO2 even at the projected temperature increase. It will not release its content into the atmosphere. That’s not how this particular equilibrium works.
The potential issue we are facing is not a release but the end or more likely a slow down of absorption as currents bringing water from the surface to the depth are distributed. That could lead to surface water becoming effectively saturated.
This would be a big issue because the current strategy to limit overall warming is reaching net zero in 2050 and then letting the ocean socks up some of the excess CO2.
From my point of view, that’s why we should be sceptical of a purely net zero based solution and need to invest heavily in carbon capture, clean abundant energy (we really need fusion more than ever) and seriously study geo-engineering based temporary solutions to grant us the time we need.
It appears to me that the "current strategy" is to increase carbon emissions ad infinitum until we can no longer find hydrocarbon deposits in the Earth or we can no longer harvest them because economic/life systems on Earth have collapsed too much to support civilization. Your idea is certainly smarter, but I haven't seen any evidence that it will actually be implemented.
On the other hand, Texas is home to the Permian Basin (I actually just went to the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, TX a few weeks ago and can heartily recommend it in the area, which you almost certainly never will be). It, along with oil and gas the country over are booming; I believe natural gas is so cheap that it goes negative in price at some times, and energy demand seems only limited by supply. Carbon content in the atmosphere recorded a record increase from last year to this year.
You are not wrong that there are some positive developments, but I would disagree that it is broadly pretty positive; it is possible (likely even?) that it is too late to stop the process that we have set in motion.
My one real hope is that we seriously consider solar radiation management - while it is not exactly a "solution" it does seem like it could buy time to work the problem and allow some of the tech you mention to mature.
While I’m broadly in line with the content of your comment, I wanted to react to this way of phrasing the issue.
We haven’t set something in motion. What’s happening is not a self perpetuating process that we have somehow triggered. Global warming is directly related to the amount of GHG in the atmosphere and the reason it increases is because we keep putting more.
If we stop, the situation will stop getting worse. That’s the heart of net zero and we are very much in the driving seat to make it happens.
"However, as water temperature increases, its ability dissolve CO2 decreases. Global warming is expected to reduce the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, leaving more in the atmosphere... which will lead to even higher temperatures."
I nicely underlined the important part which confirms what I said in my previous comment to help you.
Note that the effect of emissions on the ocean capture capacity is taken into account in the IPCC modelling work including the work done since the article you link was published in 2008 and none of the IPCC scenarios predict a reversing of the ocean sinking ability, not even the worse SSP considered.
You would be right to point out that using the same argument (IPCC modelling) you could say my scepticism regarding net zero is lacking foundations which would be fair. I would reply to that that I don’t actually believe we will reach net zero in 2050.
On the one hand there is a systemic underappreciation of the impact we have, a behavioral relic from bygone eras when, indeed, homo sapiens was just another species competing.
On the other hand there is overconfidence in our ability to solve technology-induced problems using other technologies. This behavior is in turn a relic of the recent industrial-scientific revolution, when indeed homo sapiens saw dramatic empowerement over the rest of nature.
This entenched denialism and lack of concern means that as environmental deterioration loops into itself and hits from unexpected corners, people's psychology will increasingly resolve the stresses by inventing scape goats etc. in a pointless and innefective blame shifting exercise.
All in all, a once-in-a-species level of challenge that if we manage to survive will have changed human society more than all previous revolutions combined.
I'm terrified of what appears to be coming, but I'm told that this is an anxiety disorder.
You are Exhibit 1 of what our collective sustainability problem is about: setting too short a time horizon and pretending that "rational" short-term optimisation will magically work for the long term.
This pathological thinking that pretends to be rational has an official name in financial circles: "the tragedy of the horizon". Or, more colloquially, sweeping problems under the carpet.
The long timescale of transformation due to exponentially increased human footprints does not make it less dangerous or easily tractable.
Your kind of "rational" people would never stop smoking (giving up a lot) and hence would die prematurely (but alas not immediately) from cancer, awaiting maybe a magical cure that somehow remains elusive.
The problem is that we share the same planet, we cant ask you to "go smoke outside" and your irrationality will take the rest of us with you.
Technology is not a magic wand waved at will. It unfolds along the constraints and possibilities created by natural laws, not to mention the gestation periods and our incremental learning processes.
The time available must be judged against our ability (and will) to respond to the unfolding impact and changes. On current form the human collective is more likely to resort to global wars using increasingly devastating technologies rather than solve difficult global problems cooperatively. So we are not exactly primed for success. The time to start worrying and figuring out sustainable pathways was yesterday.
2. It's not pathological it's intelligent and correct thinking on these timescales. There are a massive number of things that could change or be discovered to make current mitigations unnecessary and we aren't in venus style green house gas run off to push average temperature beyond habitable by a large margin, greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has been an order of magnitude higher than now in the past and the climate would be considered unpleasant but livable in that time. Therefore your risks are bounded below cataclysm (at least for thousands of years of current output), your costs are high and your timeline for technological and other progress is long.
3. Your take on smoking is bad analysis. The primary thing we did was put the facts into people's hands as our mitigation. The rest of the mitigations were comparatively minor vs something like a carbon tax and people changed over time quite dramatically. Also, your analysis on cost of treatment is wrong. It's actually way cheaper to treat a smoker because they tend to die quickly years before a nonsmoker, avoiding very expensives years to decades of assisted care and other treatments. There was a decent paper on this several years ago, but since this is just a side note I'm not going to spend a bunch of time trying to find it for you.
4. Yes we do share the same planet, thus game theory is in play and that makes stuff like carbon tax as implemented utterly stupid because it is harming countries that implement it (like my own country of Canada) with no benefit because we aren't meaningfully pushing out the timeline for negative effects without the big emitters curtailing their output. We should instead be setting our carbon tax to the global average and using that to cajole the others into doing the right thing (and raise our carbon tax as they raise theirs) rather than harming ourselves for almost no benefit
5. Of course technology is not a magic wand but on a long enough timescale it usually has a dramatic effect. Also, we have the technology to sort this right now without a large drop in quality of life (nuclear unhampered by bad regulation so that it is much cheaper plus renewables, steel and cement production electrically without co2 emission, better zoning to allow the stock of building to turn over with time to something much better for society and the environment than the current car centric nonsense, etc.) New tech would make this more pleasant but is mostly unnecessary. Our current problem is regulation keeping us from making changes (zoning and nuclear regulation primarily) that make green house gas cuts much less costly to the individual, If we can make it less costly enough we can change the rational analysis causing us to not want to mitigate and increase our desire to mitigate now, again all rationally.
Stopping fossil fuel use remains far and above the most important thing we need to do.
2. Look at per capita
3. Moving manufacturing of American goods to China can still be considered American caused emmissions, tho your stats are likely counting it as Chinese
4. The article is about the great salt lake in USA. CO2 as a global problem won't progress when everyone tries to blame everyone else
5. China is improving their efficiency. Look at electric conversion rates & cars' mpg. Americans complain about gas prices while having some of the lowest prices while driving some of the least efficient cars
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-Fuel-Econo...
But beyond that, China is making WAY bigger investments into green tech than the US does. They are world leaders in battery and solar technology and production. Global transition to green energy is largely going to be thanks to Chinese investments.
Edit: For those curious like me, sources 1,2,3 from the original paper go into more detail about it. Original paper: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(24)00326-...
[1] https://www.ufz.de/export/data/2/265343_Masterarbeit_Lelaina...
Or maybe there are not enough benefits for the US to fight climate change?
The US sees itself as a "force of good" through its influence on the world with its military.
But the US is very bad about CO2, and sometimes I have the feeling that climate change will probably be the reason why the US might lose its superpower status.
> But the US is very bad about CO2
You should probably drop the "but". The US seeing itself as a "force of good" doens't make it one.
> But is used to connect ideas that contrast. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/but
The way it's phrased puts "sees itself as a force of good" in contrast with "is bad".
"Is bad" doesn't make sense to be in contrast with "sees itself as...". It's more likely that it's "good [through influence/military]" in contrast with "bad [in CO2]".
Alternatively, perhaps it was meant as "(sees itself as) bad [in CO2]" but that's not much of an argument about anything.
It markets itself this way both to the world (largely unconvincingly) and to its populace (largely convincingly), in order to mask the military industrial complex that funnels tax dollars and new debt dollars to a handful of corporations and their shareholders.