I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New.

And when the last ice is gone we will finally have revenge for the Titanic

Looks like it might be a good idea to paint sections of buildings black and white, colour coded for heating lol

Worse, when that influx of arctic water shuts down the North Atlantic current and others that cycle heat and cold throughout the world. That will be very bad for quite a lot of us.

Ive read somewhere that living in the clouds is in theory still possible. :)

This is nothing new though. Climate Scientist have ALWAYS been fearing a runaway effect. It has a wiki page and all. The author isn't wrong, but it's click bait. It's not telling us anything new.

I thought we knew this? I remember hearing that we're just now feeling the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from the 80s, and emissions have drastically increased since then.

Good. Burn this mother fucker DOWN. This is what you wanted people. Soak it in, bitches.

Here's the problems with net zero. First, it's a marketing term more than anything. But assuming it was an obtainable goal, it requires carbon removal techniques that have been shown by prototype and basic math to not be scalable to the task. Making another assumption that such emissions or their equivalent could be removed, we would need to go far beyond net zero into negative emissions to start chipping away at not only continued natural emissions from the mentioned runaway feedback loops already set in motion, but the historical carbon that still remains fro the last century or so of our pollution. If just net zero isn't scalable, the latter is magnitudes greater and impossible.

Net zero is the new "1.5 limit". It's an easy to remember catch phrase for a goal post on wheels. As we pass the old 1.5 mark the new one is used to distract from continued growth of population and consumption, catering to the wired tendencies of our species to procrastinate when danger isn't immediately in front of us. "They'll fix it".

I think the idea that if we can reduce our emissions warming and all that comes with it will also stop is also a subtle marketing being spread because most people don't understand that we're not the sole source of warming, we were just a small catalyst that started the reaction. And with most chemical reactions, at some point the catalyst isn't needed any more to sustain the rest of the reaction. We could stop all emissions right now (whether that be voluntary or not) and the Earth will continue to warm for decades or more just from environmental inertia and breakdown of the system, and then from the addition feedbacks that starts.

The only "fix" for the CO2 issue (which is only part of the problem, but the focus here) is to remove and sequester enough carbon to bring us down to 300 ppm or less, aka preindustrial levels. Put everything burned by our industrial age back into the ground. Entropy alone says that won't happen, calculating the numbers of how much carbon that means is mindblowing. We throw around the giga- prefix like it's nothing, and yet the total carbon we would have to remove gets into the tera- and possibly peta- levels. It's insane.

Net zero is a scam, nothing more. I'm not at all saying we shouldn't change, but don't believe anyone selling you a solution, as change means adaptation and preparation for a different and hostile world, not some science "fix" that will let us keep doing what we've always done.

I'm sure my rant that started as a short reply will get some responses of "what about ___?" Good luck showing me something new that changes the basic math of the problem. It's looking into some of these potential solutions and finding out the real problem that turned me into a hardened skeptic of anything "new". Show me the math that can tackle the numbers, then I'll consider it. In the end you can't fool Nature.

if the world gets to net zero, then (apparently) no further warming will occur (does this mean runaway warming -from lack of reflection via ice sheets, methane release from previous permafrost zones, etcetera - is no longer expected?).

I followed the links in that quote:

Climate models have consistently found that once we get emissions down to net zero, the world will largely stop warming; there is no warming that is inevitable or in the pipeline after that point.

Neither addresses tipping points. They seem to talk about something else entirely, like wether a model assumes constant atmospheric concentration, or constant emissions, that kind of difference.

"Runaway warming", as I understand it, merely describes the outcome, the effects, while being agnostic about the causes. My current understanding is, we ruled out one possible cause. Tipping points like sea ice or methane hydrate are still on the table, AFAIK.

Now there's a movie reference I haven't heard in a long time.

As long as the income stream isnt threatened either by unrest, mass deaths, or hardware malfunctioning, expect business as usual.

Hell yeah.

Thats for sure. Many finance analysts predict 3 digit oil prices.

Investments will ramp up once demand puts pressure on the price.

And fossil fuel industry will be the most profitable one again.

WE CANT EXPECT OUR SYSTEM TO CHANGE WITHOUT CHANGING THE SYSTEM.

What will we need all those fossil fuels for? Surely, at some point in the early 2030's, as capex for PV/wind turbines/heat pumps/batteries decreases and opex remains low, most people will have realized that fossil fuels are personally costing them money. The only business remaining may be plastics rather than electricity and heat. Granted, it's entirely possible fossil fuel companies successfully double down on plastics (which is what many are planning already).

Even covid was already too hypothetical and abstract and too far away in time and space for millions of people to act cautiously. Climate change is further away still... When it becomes very noticeable, it's far too late: hawaii fire level stuff before people actually realise it's fucked.

Run an ad blocker. Firefox + uBlock origin does wonders.

Reading the article is a prerequisite to not being taken by disinformation.

At the very least, even basic electricity production requires copper windings. Which requires copper wire. Which requires refined copper. Which requires copper ore. Which requires copper mining.

Generations of people with manual tools will need to die in the mines for enough electricity to be generated to run a small medical clinic, let alone get post-climate humans to a point of modern civilization.

Perhaps if it’s a few million years later and all us dead humans have turned into coal and oil, like the dinosaurs of the past.

That's a good thing, right? The vast majority of the results of technology and "civilization" has turned out to be nothing but a curse on this planet.

They wouldn't be able to take the same oath we did but that isn't saying they could never get to where we're at more or less.

The enlightenment spawn the industrial revolution but it didn't necessarily have to. Scientific inquiry could have eventually lead us to somewhere near where we're at now without fossil fuels. The path would look wildly different and there's a fairly high likelihood mass slavery could play a role in that but it's still possible.

Kind of a tangent here but the book children of time goes into some depth on how the author thinks a race of super intelligent spiders could overcome many of the same hurdles we had to in wildly different ways to become a space-aring civilization. It's science fiction and obviously not an in depth study into how feasible it all would be but it did get me thinking that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

It's really actually kind of fascinating when you think of how that energy source was made, with a mass die off of carbiniferous (I think) rootless trees, aka scale trees that all fell due to not being able to support their own weight probably because the incredible amount of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time, then the carbon from those trees got buried and pressed into "fuel diamonds", plentiful and packed with all the energy a type 0 civilization would ever need, but the very fact that using the results of that die off to power our species unabashedly, has doomed us, because we finally reached that ever important ceiling that ecologists/biologists are always talking about. We thought we outsmarted evolution and nature, but we are just as much a part of it as any other being or object.

It's kind of beautiful to me.

Unless I misunderstood, the article claims otherwise.

Yeah. Go Matrix and scorch the sky. Definitely no unintended consequences.

There are safer ways to sequester CO2.