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inigyou

People one or two generations before you felt that about the cold war.

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I think thats the wrong level of abstraction. The cold war ended, but clima change will not end.

Nuclear winter may cancel it out.

It can change, if we get to net negative emissions. Not probable but possible.

Or solar geoengineering? Which is scary but becoming more likely it seems.

It will just take at least three or four generations to get back to 90's climate, provided we don't trigger any irreversible tipping points, like the melting of the permafrost, in which case the climate is messed up for millennia.

The melting of the permafrost is already underway and it's not looking good for any hope of it slowing down, and that's only one (of many) irreversible tipping point we're facing right now. But hey, it'll be fine because it's all just "fake news" anyhow. (I wish that were actually true about it not being real, but it's crystal clear to anyone with an IQ higher than a houseplant that the scientists were right all along and we really should have started acting on all this stuff decades ago.) :(

The word abstraction does not mean the same thing as the words analogy or comparison.

Yes absolutely. They are different things . I am using "level of abstraction" in a sense to find a useful amount of details to drop or keep, which in turn makes an analogy/comparison possible.

Wow, you have the patience of a saint. It seems you have almost nobody actually engaging in discussion and instead trying to nitpick and play word games.

Hahaha ouch - and thank you. I think this particular topic is not about being right, but about revealing wild claims as what they are.

Answering to nitpicking and word plays is just fun along the way.

> The cold war ended

You wouldn't know it based on how everyone talks about Russia pulling the strings of just about every election (and being a moment away from conquering Europe while simultaneously being too incompetent to beat Ukraine).

Russia is great at stuff that can be automated cheaply like influence campaigns. They're not so great at physical hardware and logistics and so forth. Not everyone is good at everything.

Messing with elections by fooling the most volatile and eager to be fooled is not a genius move.

Let me remind you that launching nuclear weapons close to your border is an issue, launching them half a continent away not so much.

An animal is most dangerous when deeply wounded.

> and being a moment away from conquering Europe while simultaneously being too incompetent to beat Ukraine

TBF, I don't think anyone has seriously espoused this fear since the war in Ukraine bogged down. It's become very clear that NATO folks overestimated Russia's conventional military capability - and along with the Russians, underestimated how rapidly drone warfare was evolving.

The cold-war era risk still facing us is more that one of the unhinged megalomaniacs currently in power in Moscow/Washington decides to press the big red button and end it all

Of course it will. There is a finite amount of fossil fuels and it'll become uneconomical to use before those are fully exhausted. Give it some more years (say, a few hundred) after the last car fleet and power plant switched away and the climate will have triggered any tipping points it's going to tip. Then the animals that haven't adapted will soon have finished going extinct, the ocean finished warming up with its lag effect, and climate change is finished changing

After that it's 'over' no? The world map is redrawn (many countries' shapes will look different), people that needed to move have moved or got killed (quite possibly by territorial humans refusing to let them onto livable land), but it'll settle into a new normal eventually

That's the correct level of pedantic answer my comment deserves. Everything is true. Clima change will stop, how much of humanity or human society survives is open, but yes it will stop.

I think they meant "end before the near-extinction of humanity", but yes, it eventually will reach another steady state one way or another.

Indeed, climate change won't end; it never has and it never will, the climate always changes.

The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. Despite what the carbon capture techno optimists say.

>The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so.

During the covid start lockdowns when everyone was forced to WFH and nobody was driving to work for a couple of weeks, we saw a massive decrease in CO2 and emissions. So it can be reversed, we just don't want to because we gotta keep the GDP hamster wheel moving

We did not see a massive decrease. We saw a short-lived drop to levels normal in the mid tens. It is barely a blip on the graph. WFH won’t save us, unfortunately.

My bad, I was only talking about the readings in my city, not the whole planet. I assumed it would scale to the whole planet in that period.

Ah. I’d consider _city-level_ readings an absolutely useless metric here, because, particularly if it’s a city with a large commuter hinterland, a lot of people were simply not present in the city, but still existed out there somewhere, running their heating/cooling/etc. Daytime populations of large cities generally dropped during the covid wfh period, so yeah, no shit CO2 emissions dropped; people were off emitting CO2 elsewhere.

If you actually look at the numbers of carbon capture its entirely obvious that it can't work. It's honestly strange to me that they even waste money on it, personally I think it's a distraction - "look we're working on a fix, now let us just pump up the rest of this oil in the mean time and we'll definitely fix it later".

In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture facilities equivalent to the largest one we currently have. For comparison, the number of power plants in the entire world is a few tens of thousands. So we'd need maybe like 50 times as many capture plants as we currently have power plants.

Like it's not even in the neighbourhood of realistic, it's just completely infeasible and I am sure engineers know that. You basically need to suck the whole atmosphere through facilities, and there's a lot of atmosphere.

I think you're measuring one method against a goal it wasn't set for. I assume you are referring to Mammoth direct air capture in your comment -- Stratos in Texas will soon be up, at ~15x the size of Mammoth. But DAC is only one method, and it's the hardest to scale. Just look at options outside of DAC, like Vaulted Deep, whose costs (financially and energy-wise) are far lower.

I do agree that it's unlikely that we can ignore reduction and just depend on purely scaling capture, especially if we care about avoiding more negative climate effects as the scaling goes on. But to say it is "completely infeasible" is not accurate.

A 15x improvement over mammoth (spot on by the way) is still many times more capture plants than we have power plants. And there's limits to the efficiency of these facilities in terms of how much air they can consume per day. Not to mention the carbon costs of building and operating them.

Maybe I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert. It just seems like a hopeless case to me. Even if they make one significantly more effective than this Stratos you mentioned, we're still talking about tens of thousands of them to have a real impact.

The cold war never heated up.

Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal.

Won't the climate change naturally even in the absence of fossil fuels? Like it has during all of history? What's "normal" is based on a small slice of human history, which itself is a small slice of the planet's history.

It isn't the fact of change but the rate of change which is anomalous.

Your question betrays the fact that you simply don't understand the scale of what's happening.

Imagine a line chart. It displays average global temperature over millions of years. It goes up a little, it goes down a little, it fluctuates over time. That's the natural change. It occurs over thousands and millions of years.

Looking at the last few decades on that chart, you'll see a wall. It's going almost straight up compared to the rest that just meanders lazily. You can see a few other similar peaks on the chart many millions of years in the past, they generally correspond with things like apocalyptic meteorite impacts etc. And even then the change occurs much more slowly than what we're seeing now.

It's honestly insane to me that we're watching the world end and half of people are like "but are we sure this isn't normal?"

Yes we're sure. We double checked. Just look at any "global average temperature" chart and try to predict where it's going. This isn't the stock market it won't just randomly start doing something else. The movement we're seeing is directly correlated to our ghg emissions, and there's a lag - the effects of current emissions won't be fully seen until up to two decades from now. So even if we stopped right now it would continue warming for decades.

Warming also releases more GHGs. As poles and permafrost thaws, enormous amounts of methane are released that was previously trapped, further accelerating warming and acting as a positive feedback loop on top of our steadily rising emissions.

In short were fucked, we know it, and anyone who doesn't know is not paying attention.

> it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal

No. There is no such thing as "normal" climate. It's ever changing. We're just making the change a whole lot faster.

Replace 'normal' with 'optimal for humanity' then.,

I'm sure the lizards will love the new normal though.

What's "normal" really? You could argue the climate has never actually been normal, or it always has been and always will

There's a lot of worry about the future, and has been since world-ending threats became apparent

However while apocalypse scenarios (Nuclear war, asteroid impact, AI powered biological warfare) are low likelihood, extreme impact, climate change is extreme likelihood and high impact, not just the immediate effect on places like Europe, Canada etc, but also from the conflicts that climate change will drive, which in turn may escalate to those extreme impact nuclear wars.

On a 5x5 matrix, grand extinction events would be a 5 for effect but a 1 for likelihood, putting them in a "medium-high" category

Climate change is a 3-4 on effect but a 4-5 o likelihood, putting them in a "very-high" risk category

Space weather that would bring down our systems is not such low likelihood.

I am not convinced nuclear war or biological warfare are as unlikely as you think. We have historically had narrow escapes from nuclear war.

Climate change also greatly increases the chance of a huge global conflict breaking out.

It might raise the chance of some conflicts (e.g. over Antarctica or Russia's border) and some land grabs, but I cannot see it leading to a world war.

That largely depends on to what degree food production collapses in newly-tropical regions. A whole bunch of staple agricultural production isn't going to survive widespread drought and heatwaves, and everyone dependent on those food sources is going to end up very hungry, and taking a hard look at cooler neighbouring regions...

India and Pakistan are both reliant on the Indus River for their agriculture. The Indus has its source in glaciers in the Himalayas. As those glaciers disappear, the Indus will deliver less water, and deliver it much less reliably (melting ice and snow provides a nice steady flow, runoff less so).

So: you have two nuclear powers who are both relying on the same diminishing resource to feed their people. Do you not see how that could cause....tension?

Yes, but that would be a regional, not global conflict. There are already tensions over it and plenty of other tensions between India and Pakistan. the comment I replied to claimed it would cause a "huge global conflict" - i.e. world war. Serious as a war between India and Pakistan would be I would not characterise it in the same way as, say, an all out war between the US and China.

You appear to be forgetting that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons. A war between two nuclear powers has never happened before and the results would likely be calamitous, unleashing a huge global catastrophe and unquantifiable additional conflict as food, health and energy systems fail.

I am not just some random internet person making this up. A lot has been written about this subject by respected researchers:

- https://www2.acom.ucar.edu/news/waccm-model-simulates-global...

- https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-in...

- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529589-a-nuclear-war-b...

- https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/india-and-pakistan-i...

Let's just say that, if we're talking likelihood, climate change is the "we've already smashed the button and are now debating whether we should get in the vault" category.

Well, they had a point, and we've got pretty close to that outcome. It didn't happen, thus today we're able to discuss the fact that it didn't happen.

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