Having an example like that from my older sister means I only ever took paid by the hour summer jobs. Not that some of those weren’t shitty but I did a lot of different things. Best one as a teenager was bundling magazines at a printing press and finding out most of what they printed were adult magazines.
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This story is 17 min long but Stuart was the best.
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When I check into twitter these days its a hard battle between climate change believers and deniers. When I look at the reactions of our polticians to these desasters I would assume that the deniers are fighting a unnecessary fight since politicians are mostly on their side. Now there is another flood in China. It feels like a boxing match: Nature just hit hard several times but the deniers arent on the ropes yet. As bad as it sounds you have to hope of few more blows to get the job done during this round and not letting it getting to the next break so that deniers can catch their breath.
How much has to really happen that people understand that doing nothing will be so much more expensive? It will get harder and harder to get insurance against these kind of desasters. I am also very much against giving money for free so that people can rebuild in the same location making the same mistakes all over again. If you want free money you better rebuild in a more sustainable way.
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Last night I started thinking what we want to achieve with the Paris climate accord. I am not sure if the goal is just to stay below 2°C warming compared to pre industrial times. Right now we are still below but when I look around the conditions are already fkn shit: wildfires, droughts, warm enough air for heavy rains(floods), an imbalanced system that allows heat domes to happen, the fresh water lakes dry out etc… So if we somehow magically flip the switch tomorrow and would be carbon neutral we would still have to live with the current conditions? If so I think we are more fucked than I ever imagined.
Australia scrambled to keep its status through a flurry of last-minute lobbying, including taking ambassadors on a snorkeling trip to the reef.
Last week, Australia’s official reef ambassador Warren Entsch took a number of ambassadors, including a number from countries voting on the World Heritage Committee, to the Great Barrier Reef for a snorkeling trip.
But Lesley Hughes, spokeswoman for the Climate Council and a distinguished professor of Biology at Macquarie University, said she believed the Australian government was also concerned about being embarrassed over its poor record on climate change.
In a report released by the UN in July, assessing progress in reaching the global sustainable development goals, Australia was ranked last for climate action.
We are. This is the hottest year on record to date and it’s also the coolest year for the rest of the century.
Yeah. Achieving 1.5 or even 2 is a wildly ambitious goal, one that requires a few big technology bets to land, on top of political action.
And at both of those, the climate is still going to be really fucked.
When the scientists use the word “catastrophic” to describe scenarios over 2.0… they mean it.
The chances we stay below 2C without geoengineering are pretty close to zero imo.
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Once we figure out how to get to carbon neutral it won’t be that difficult to go a bit further and reduce carbon and reverse the impact of climate change. Reversing it and nature recovering will take a lot longer then the time it took us to mess it all up though.
In the very long run we actually need to be able to work the levers of the Earth’s climate. The Holocene has been a period of amazing climate stability. Much of the rest of the history of the Earth has swung wildly between a mile of ice over the northern US and then to jungles at the North Pole.
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Regardless of what happens with climate we’re not going to last long enough to have to worry about those time scales. (And yeah, even like the ice age-y few thousand years kind of time scales.)
to some extent damming rivers and sea gates are already doing geo engineering.
i think the obvious thing to try is precipitating cloud cover over the arctic during the winters to promote more freezing. possibly also antarctic and himalayas, although it’s unclear if more ice will actually accumulate there.
eventually it will probably be needed to shift rains away from the oceans and towards arid areas, using similar technology and opportunistic weather events.
cities might require some high altitude engineering to reflect sunlight, although as last year’s forest fires demonstrated, smoke does a similar thing. we may find that strategic burning cools down some areas during heat events.
perhaps more in line with hurricane mitigation than climate change, but attempting to bring lower temperature water from ocean depths to the surface in the path of forming tropical depressions also seems worth trying.
another thing that’s overlooked in the public discourse right now is with energy prices still coming down on account of renewables, it will eventually make sense to pump water from river mouths back uphill for irrigation, or even desalinate ocean water for this. in a really hot environments like desserts, if you can pipeline seawater and evaporate it, and condense it into fresh water using the seawater as the heatsink. it would probably make sense to pipeline the super salty brine back though.
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This is normal for interglacials though. They are definitional periods of climate stability.
None of these are feasible in the timescales needed.
By big tech bets coming off. I mean things like BECCS. Bio energy with carbon capture and storage. Done on a mass scale this would generate energy at negative carbon emissions.
carbon capture via trees, kelp, and soil can literally start tomorrow. i don’t know which specific technology you are talking about, but there’s nothing else really that can be scaled right now because of the massive amount of energy required. there’s a project in iceland that uses dirt-cheap geothermal energy which makes that project infeasible elsewhere, but that’s it.
atmospheric geo engineering is already underway, and can apparently scale with drones. although i have not read anything about year-round scale that would be needed. some links are clearly fake news, while others seem to be at least confirmed. Dubai is making its own fake rain to beat 122F heat | The Independent
managing surface water temperature for hurricanes is also relatively simple, and just needs to be deployed in more places.
controlled burns have been done for centuries. desalination is done at scale in israel already, and the r&d keeps finding cheaper ways to do it.
we are going to need all of those things before they are really “ready” at scale.
The point i am trying to make is that the technologies you talk about are not going to help in time, with the exception of reforestation, land use, etc. Which could help some.
These revolutionary technologies are thrown about as a way to distract from the well understood paths to 1.5 that do exist. Not saying that you are doing this, but these ideas are a central part of the discourse of anti environmental groups that oppose change.
Carbon capture and storage is capturing CO2 at power plants and then pumping it underground. Its a near stage technology that could come good, or it might not. If you put this on a coal or gas plant. It makes it close to carbon neutral, if you put it on a biofuel plant, it makes it carbon negative. Because all the carbon captured by the plants in the biofuel is permanently removed from the atmosphere.
Regarding links about potential technology. You need to read these with caution.
Theres this real trend where articles are like " this interesting technology could help climate change!" but they are reporting on something which is just at a trial stage, 50 times more expensive than it needs to be, or perhaps even impossible to work at the scale/cost required. They dont say this either because they dont understand that, or because it doesnt get clicks.
Because most of the technological change we experience is IT or electronics based, we think that energy technology can change/improve at the same pace. It doesnt, partly because cycles for heavy engineering are much slower (a trial for prototype energy project could take 5 years, vs 2 months for a phone) and partly because their are inherent limits in energy tech that we are often right up against already, limits based on physics, not human ingenuity.
For example. Solar panels might get 3 times more efficient, they will never get more than 5 times more efficient than they are today.
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you are right that anti-climate think tanks coopted a lot of the mitigation terminology to hurt the environmental movement. by the way, biofuels is something oil industry loves, because if they can pivot to it, they will keep their stranglehold on the world economy. biofuels are neutral, but presumably you are going to burn them at some point, otherwise it’s not really a fuel. if you are just pumping it underground, you might better off pumping co2 there and letting a chemical reaction lock it within rock. but that’s not the most expensive part, co2 capture is. at “only” 400ppm, you have to go through a lot of air volume to capture it, and the methods don’t extract it all either.
but still, biofuels are definitely a part of the eventual solution. a friend of a friend is high up at Sweetwater, which commercializes a biofuel. it’s fucking impressive.
but i think most scientists disagree with the view you are postulating here. climate change isn’t going to be solved by one silver bullet technology, or really one out of a dozen yet unproven tech ideas in the running for capture and storage. but rather a concerted improvement in all polluting industries. e.g. agriculture is already a scaled up industry. changing its methods to no-till makes it carbon negative in year one, and in years 2-5 the negative value is going up. in 10 years, it’s conceivable soils that depleted over a century will be back to say 50%. on top of that, farmers are doing fewer machinery passes over the land dropping the diesel usage, not to mention no longer applying nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer. you should listen to “how to save a planet” podcast on this. it’s not wishful thinking.
reforestation sounds like it takes a century to work, but that’s also likely going to work faster than we expect. burn scars after forest fires take decades to recover naturally, but managed forests are replanted with saplings that essentially move the clock forward 20 years or more.
the idea of capturing co2 with kelp is super interesting. you can do it in open ocean on floating structures and periodically let it sink it to the bottom, where it’s essentially locked away forever. nothing escapes from like 1km down or something.
the timescale is obviously a big issue. a lot of climate mitigation is just buying time for these methods to work, or alternatively for carbon capture tech to hit a breakthrough. however you want to look at it.
We are talking past each other. Carbon capture im referring to is direct from the flume out of a combustor. Not out of the atmosphere.
Fwiw. Im half way through a masters in energy.
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It’s like The Box, but the same people get to keep pressing the button.
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