In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming’s harms
In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming’s harms
Two responses.
Response #1 is that this is the same logic that the IPCC and many other climate agencies keep bringing up. In my humble opinion they are basically just giving us this idea that mathematically we can still fix this via carbon subtraction but they don’t really touch on the viability of this as a practical alternative. The problematic part is that if the technology doesn’t exist and can’t even theoretically exist because of basic thermodynamics, this is actually not a scientifically / technically sound idea even if the math was numerically valid in some divorced from reality sense.
Response #2 is that the argument is actually fundamentally wrong on one basic element. In order to reverse warming, we would have to now do climate forcing in the cooling direction. What is required is for the earth energy balance to go back in the opposite direction which would require we artificially lower CO2 below the pre industrial starting point and leave it there for decades and decades to actually refreeze the cryosphere and reverse everything. Most of the “net zero/ carbon capture” schemes are only considering a “pause” of additional pollution, not any sort of repair of the earth climate system. Its important to notice they want to do carbon sequestration to limit the warming to 1.5 or 2.0, not to sequester the CO2 to MINUS 1 to eventually put us to 0.0. Zero is the eventual “fix”. 1.5 isn’t a “fix”. So like…
The conclusion is that this is 96.3% psychological and not really a serious idea. This is telling people what they want to hear and nobody wants to be the person yelling fire in a crowded theater and starting an existential crisis…
You can tell this is purely a mirage because some very basic arguments simply demolish the illusion. This is grade school level math and science just being applied critically and the whole idea falls completely apart in a fairly horrifying way. It’s clearly a farce.
The decision of humanity has been made. And it has become rude to point it out.