Hacker News Reader

> If humanity ceases to exist it will require 50K to 100K years per 100 ppm drop.

If we don't cease to exist we could do that in a lot less time than 50k years. We could do it, and a lot more, in under 2k years.

Assumption: we can indefinitely keep producing solar panels at a rate at least as high as current production. I will call the amount of solar panels currently produced in one year an "arseload" of solar panels.

If we produced 1600 arseloads of solar panels (which would take 1600 years at the current rate of production) and used those to build solar farms in the 5 largest tropical deserts, and used the power from those to power direct air carbon capture operating at the efficiency of current direct air carbon capture (DAC) technology they would be removing enough carbon at a rate that would reduce the atmospheric CO2 levels from 450 ppm to 280 ppm (pre-industrial levels) in 6 years.

If the captured carbon was stored as graphite and spread out evenly under that 1600 arseloads of solar panels (which seems like a convenient place for it) it would be a layer roughly 1 cm deep.

Note that at around 180 arseloads of solar panels powering DAC we'd be removing CO2 fast enough to be removing about 10% more each year than we currently omit so even if we can't manage to reduce fossil fuels if we can at least finally stop their growth we can start having CO2 reduction in a couple hundred years.

I've not done the math to figure out when a program of adding an arseload of solar panel powered DAC to tropical deserts every year would actually get us back to pre-industrial levels. It's somewhere between 200 and 2000 years, but I'll leave it to others to figure out where in that range it would actually happen.

You're not factoring the energy and resources (eg excavation) needed to build all those arseloads of solar panels and DAC machinery and the infrastructure to connect, maintain and control them all, including things like cleaning all those panels. And the societal impact of paying for it all.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424748 you can see some calculations about those issues. Basically they turn out not to be significant.

> If we produced 1600 arseloads of solar panels ...

A common misconception. This was proven to be wrong at least ten years ago. Read this paper for a sobering discussion on renewables as a solution.

TLDR: Not a solution.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273392977_Energy's_...

It turns out that it was proven to be right more recently; I explained how that "paper" got it wrong at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423291

Fair enough, but how is your argument incompatible with transitioning away from fossil fuels and bringing in more environmentally aware regulations? It might not clean/reverse the damage already done but surely it helps to reduce the magnitude of future damage?

It isn't. Please note the last paragraph of my much-maligned post:

"There are legitimate and worthy reasons for which we should clean up our act. Climate change and saving the planet just happen not to be among them. Because it is impossible without violating the rules of physics."

As for reducing the magnitude of, as you put it, future damage, I very much doubt this is possible as well.

Loose quote from a research paper released by Google many years ago: Even if we were to deploy the most optimal forms of renewable and clean energy sources at a global scale, not only will this not reverse the problem, atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise.

Part of our reality is inescapable. For example, massive forest fires drive more CO2 into the atmosphere than lots of human activity. Around the world, there are fires in mines that have been burning for centuries (google it, you'll be surprised). Etc. We are kidding ourselves if we think that a bunch of measures that are but rounding errors at a planetary scale will have any impact at all in, as I like to put it, anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.

There are things we can do (and probably should do) that I think are likely to make for better and cleaner life all around without the fantasy of saving the planet or reversing climate.

One example of this is to seriously address the massive pollution created by container ships travelling our oceans every day. These ships burn bunker fuel, perhaps the worst thing one could burn. The stuff is horrible and the pollution it creates goes far beyond just CO2. I also learned that they contribute to something called "species pollution". They ingest all sorts of marine life into the ballast tanks at port A and pump it out at port B, transporting species clear across the planet, where they can and have done serious damage.

How to address container ships is a subject that requires serious discussion. It's a complex multivariate problem. Would all-electric ships be better? Massive hydrofoils (for more efficient transport)? Wind has been tried, it isn't as much help as one might think. Another optimization vector would be to eliminate them by distributing the production of material goods closer to their points of consumption. In other words, eliminate container ships (unlikely) or reduce the fleet by only transporting materials that cannot be sourced at the point of manufacture.

Again, these are complex problems. Their resolution, as a first step, requires leaving fantasy-land to then be able to discuss, evaluate and address reality. Only then will we we able to improve life, clean-up our act and live better. The value in these three desirable outcomes is self-evident to the point that they do not need to be justified by some fantastical imaginary doomsday scenario where all life on earth ceases to exist in, as some politicians have suggested, a dozen years.

I am all for being far better about how we behave on this planet. My problem is with creating a religion out of fantasies. Reality does not care about these things and keeps moving forward. It's almost like like stock market.

So we burned a pile of wood and now everyone in the warehouse is having a bad time. Some people in the warehouse say: please stop burning piles of wood, we need what's left from the air for breathing. But you say: nah, can't clean it up, so it's fine let's just keep burning more piles of wood.

This is satire right?

Your comment is a case of taking a super-simplified thinking tool example and extrapolating it to make it fit a ridiculous reality. This, as well as ignoring the FACT that I did say that there are lots of reasons to clean up our act that have nothing whatsoever to do with the laughable idea of affecting change at a planetary scale.

So, yeah, thanks for a lazy and dishonest interaction. This is the reason we are still buried in fantasy-land.

Note that not a single person commenting against my claim has taken the time to explain how we can erase half the CO2 production from this planet by eliminating entire nations and actually make things better. Not a single person.

CO2 ligers in the atmosphere for 100+ years. It is impossible to claw it back in a meaningful way. It is also impossible to REDUCE atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely approaching a human lifetime scale, even several lifetimes. Believing anything else is to believe a fantasy of planetary proportions.

Here, read this:

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-woul...

and this:

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-woul...

and this:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273392977_Energy's_...

and this:

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...

and then look at this:

https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png

and then stop to think, learn, do some research and try to understand that you are in the Matrix.

You claim that a 14% or even a 50% reduction of emissions would make no impact. Well, current climate research suggests differently:

- no reduction: > +4ºC by 2100 - 50% reduction: +2ºC by 2100

And those are two very different worlds we are talking about here.

So no, my comment is spot on: you say that, because current CO2 levels can't be undone, there is no difference between allowing this level to raise indiscriminately and trying to keep it at bay. It looks like you are caught in some kind of thought trap you can't get out of, and you feel like you stepped out of the matrix. Be careful, there is no matrix. It was only a movie.

> 50% reduction: +2ºC by 2100

This is a fantasy. That's the problem. It will not happen. Not even close.

> you are caught in some kind of thought trap

The ones caught in a thought trap are people who actually believe things such as actually being able to reduce world-wide emissions by 50% in a few dozen years. It's impossible. Truly impossible. It will not happen. No matter what the US and Europe might do to destroy their entire economies.

The truth is uncomfortable. I get it. It is far easier to get onboard a religion than to challenge it and understand reality.

All I can say is: Remember this conversation and, in ten and twenty years, check what you thought you knew against future reality.

I have been doing this now for about twenty years. So far, none of what the merchants of fear and marketers of (fake) solutions has aligned with reality. In fact, this profitable cult goes back farther than that, with guys like Al Gore (Inconvenient Truth) pushing various end-of-the-world predictions as far back the 1980's and, arguably, as far back as the 1970's. These people pushed bullshit like the planet facing "full ecosystem collapse" in 8 to 10 years; with different forms of this delusion promoted in the '80's, '90's, 2000's, etc.