That record ? CO2 levels at their highest in millions of years and still growing faster than ever.
thank you for declickbaiting the title.
I thought it was the record for polluting everywhere that isn’t Earth as much as the Earth itself. I mean we have a long way to go yet, but still.
“This May, atmospheric CO2 levels hit 427 parts per million, or ppm, an almost 3 ppm increase since last May (annually CO2 levels peak in May, due to natural global fluctuations). What’s more, combining the increases since 2022 results in the largest two-year CO2 leap on record.”
I feel like we are gonna have to tech ourselves outta this one, there is no chance to stop it.
Tech obeys economics, and economics says polluting but cheaper is better.
Economics actually says it’s far cheaper overall to stop polluting right now than trying to mitigate it in the distant future. But that goes against the short-termism our economic indicators are built around. The line must go up, and shareholders need their maximized profit next quarter. Meanwhile pollution will only become more of a problem the further away in the future you look. And that sounds like a problem for future us.
Why I feel Stratospheric Aerosol Injection will be the route to go, yes stop pollution now is better long term, but no one wants to pay the price if there is a chance someone else will. So we might as well put on a bandage to the festering wound and continue using our carbon based energy like a still addicted junkie.
Up until a profitable solution starts making an appearance why would powerful selfish people make sacrifices
This is the second time I saw this suggestion in the wild, and I from now on I will label every such comment as lubing us up before someone actually does this.
The thing is, have you ever been to a coal mine. I am in the mining industry and have done multiple visits to coal mines, the magnitude of carbon they dig up, through underground or the cheaper dragline is jaw dropping if you realise that is going into the atmosphere. Like we have an exclusive club called a millionaires club for supervisors who in their section of the coal mine can extract more than a million tonnes in a year, they are greatly rewarded. This is excluding oil or petroleum products.
To counter this you need to put the same or more carbon back into the ground, what technology do we have that can do it economically or even scalable, carbon capture is a gimmick in my opinion to give stupid people hope that there is an easy answer that is just around the corner. Maybe I have lost hope but my belief is that the carbon put into the atmosphere will not be extracted by humans, but will after 100s of years be absorbed into the ocean only if we stop our current emissions. Should we in the mean time lose our ice poles, glaciers and ocean currents, have heat destroy the fauna and flora while we do nothing. We have engineered this hot climate, can engineer it to be colder while we get our shit together.
My country is the only developing country to be on target of meeting our Paris climate accord targets, how thanks to government corruption that led to the unavailability of our power stations where we have for years have rolling blackouts, or loadshedding as we call it. Fucks up our economy not having enough electricity, but great for the environment. I know there are green solutions to help alleviate our problems but our government has vested coal interests. So the best we can do is put solar power systems in our own homes
It’s absolutely maddening that this is the current state of affairs.
We know we drove off the cliff, we know we need to do everything we can to mitigate the fall, and yet we keep acting like nothing is happening.
Stop the economy, put everything into housing and feeding people, while building renewables and research into other measures.
Instead we will cut our leg after shooting the foot. Without even thinking about slowing down. Fuck me.
Do more with less!
As in, you get a lesser salary, while *I* get more!
The dangers of geoengineering cannot be overstated, and we have a good chance of dying from the results of deliberately fucking with the climate as we do from our centuries of inadvertent fucking with the climate.
Not saying that we shouldn’t if we have no choice, but people need to understand that this is NOT a good option we’re left with and our species needs to really take notice how close we are to ending our time here due to lack of forethought or care.
Don’t worry, the political upheaval caused by mass migrations will be more than enough to put the brakes on any global attempt to save the climate.
Very likely.
It will be really interesting from a Western perspective to see if the rest of the world, the part that actually makes up the bulk of the population of humanity, and the portion of the population who will be most impacted by climate change, take unilateral actions to geoengineer or design systems to alter the climate.
I can’t picture the US and EU doing anything other than posturing and use the idea of manipulating nature as a political tool to promote or attack and make people scared so some asshole or another can claim power for a day. But nations like China and India who have the most at stake are fully capable of taking action without a unified alliance.
The dangers of geoengineering cannot be overstated
Certainly the risk of geogineering is potentially more catastrophic than anything else humans have done, including use of nuclear weapons (short of all out Armageddon). However we’re screwing up our response to climate change badly enough that we’re already heading there. That last desperate hope is starting to appear like our only hope, even among those who think they understand the risk.
5-10 years ago, I would have agreed: just say no to geoengineering. The risks are way too high. But we keep getting worse at climate change, not better. A lot of the technology we need to reduce output impact on the climate has been developed, is affordable and practical, yet there are still so many obstacles to building it out. As a tech guy I relish the challenge of figuring out a tech solution, but we have many partial solutions yet society won’t budge and I don’t know how to fix that. It’s so frustrating and hopeless.
It’s time to consider our last desperate hope. Time to try to figure out a way. Time for serious investigation, including pilots. We may never want to take that risk, but it’s starting to look like we’ll have to
Is it even possible to do effective geoengineering if the biggest countries aren’t even on the same page?
Yes, and that is one of the huge problems with it. One developed country can do geoengineering that affects everyone, for better or worse. One developed country can decide to take the risk regardless of the rest of the world.
If my relatively well off country decides to spread some aerosol in the stratosphere to reduce incoming solar, for example, it can likely afford to make a difference in the rate of climate change. But just by calling it climate change, we’re recognizing it could affect everyone. Whatever I’m pumping into the stratosphere will not stay within my borders. If I’m able to change climate patterns in my country, those changes do not stop at the border
And of course a related issue is that any intentional change in climate systems will have different effects in different places. Even if you succeed, there will inevitably be those worse off. You can easily picture this turning into an out of control conflict. We all know about historical atrocities around resource exploitation of less developed countries, so what do you expect will happen if weather patterns are intentionally changed to benefit the climate of the wealthier countries at the expense of those who can’t afford it?
At the risk of giving away spoilers, see Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. A truly awesome read.
People keep saying that but the queue at my library is ridiculously long so I’ve never been able to read most of his books
Here’s another library that might be able to help you: https://annas-archive.org/md5/e220f3cdd16f62f0ed8045af2530d11e
Agreed. See the recent floods in Saudi Arabia due to cloud seeding for rain, for example. They’ve been doing it for years, but suddenly Everything Changed.
Ironically, because we are too stupid a species to put willingly pit ourselves through any austerity on a large scale. No one is will accept less than they have it seems, even though the only people who would actually need to downgrade their lives are the ultra wealthy. It doesn’t make it any easier though because they hold all the power. And they use their propaganda power to tell us to change our lifestyle choices, while they flaunt their own wealth. They tell us to choose more expensive “eco-friendly” or “ethical” options most of us can’t afford, and so are encouraged to feel guilty for failing to buy. And they buy them of course, but then still drive million dollar cars and own multiple multimillion dollar mansions.
We’ve really got to find a way to stop fucking over ourselves like this. And we’ve got to do it by somehow getting the richest people and organizations of the world on board. Violent revolution has rarely worked long term, and it’s slipping further and further away as security technology gets more powerful. Nevermind drones and the inevitable rise of autonomous weapons systems. The “rabble” will never have access to these ordinances. So we’ve got to get in their heads. Trick them into doing the right thing enough to see that as the challenge to which their should commit their wealth.
There is, air was so good during the covid 2 week lockdown, India was able to see their Himalayan mountains that were previously obscured by pollution for the first time in decades. We are polluting daily and stopping for even 2 weeks shows signs of healing. gonna need a lot more than 2 weeks to go back to 1900’s co2 levels tho
Something people need to understand is that there is a difference between smog and CO2.
You can get everyone off the road and the smog will clear, but as long as industry and power grids are still running, the vast bulk of CO2 is still being pumped into the air and it’s totally invisible. Covid was great for a lot of things in nature, but even if we all went to Covid-lockdown-levels of activity we would still have an out-of-control death-spiral greenhouse effect happening.
CO2 is just a gas that has molecules of three atoms instead of one or two, so it stores more energy than say, an O2 molecule. As long as we’re sending stuff into the air that can wiggle just a little harder and store a little more energy, we’re going to continue to see temperature increases. Smog is particulates, like basically dirt, soot, chunks of material. It falls out of the air relatively fast when the fires and tires aren’t moving, but most machines that power our grid and supply our products still push tons of carbon molecules into the air, and that gas goes much higher than smog where it gets lit up by the sun and stores energy that it then releases into the air and ground.
“You have no chance to survive make your time”.
All your base…
https://youtu.be/qItugh-fFgg?si=1RhQ2GlkqLQ45ALk
One of the top comments: “The Algorithm didn’t suggest this. You searched for this.”
Lol, true. Can’t believe that video was posted to YouTube 17 years ago
Man, the Earth looks so small 11,000 feet up…
So even thought more is being done now than ever before in human history to curb CO2 output, the levels are rising faster now than they ever have? Kinda seems like all the “green” shit we’ve been paying more for doesn’t do anything.
This comment has antivaxxer energy.
It’s dumb lazy ass thinking. Yeah we have been increasing green energy but CO2 output has also increased dramatically and has always been underreported. Stopping green energy is completely backwards. We need a hell of a lot more of it.
Solid argument! Good job.
What? We’re burning more fossil fuels than ever and the earth feedback loops seem to be kicking off. Just because we’re also expanding use of less destructive energy sources doesn’t mean we’re curbing output. Making things worse slightly less quickly isn’t making things better.
Problem is, we’re ADDING shit. While building solar panels, we’re also still building coal plants, bigger cars, consuming ever more from the other side of the planet.
We need to de globalize our economies. And even politically, it would not be a bad thing with the ever more power of China.
Problem is, it’s gonna cut either in billionairs benefits…
So won’t be done before it’s too late.
If we weren’t doing any of the “green shit” that we’ve been working in for decades we’d probably be a decade further down the catastrophe hole than we are.
This chart on Wikipedia sums it up neatly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:Global_Energy_Consumption.svg
You can see that from 2000 to 2021, renewable energy usage grew faster than any other type. However, coal, oil, and gas usage still grew, by a lot (with a couple recent dips that don’t appear to constitute a trend yet). Overall energy usage is increasing and that is unlikely to change. For now we’re merely slowing the growth of fossil fuel usage. Slowing down is not the same as reversing course.
So yeah, it’s true that “more is being done now than ever before”, but we’re operating from a baseline of nearly zero from 40 years ago. It’s easy to grow in proportional terms when you’re tiny to begin with.
Out of all the comments here, this is the only one to bring data and a legitimate argument, so I commend you.
You’re right, we are still growing overall energy usage and the balance is not being picked up solely by alternative energy. But that’s not really my point.
We keep hearing about this climate change topic in ways that put the responsibility on the general consumer, but clearly that is not solving the issue. Maybe the issue is that the type of alternatives we are picking aren’t actually working. Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.
I’ve had people shame me for driving a gas powered car but the reality is my Corolla puts out next to nothing compared to the shear volume it takes to get me a solar powered phone charger off of Amazon. Think about food and clothes and shelter. How much pollution does it take to fill a wardrobe. People need to think about things other than basic transportation. Bicycles aren’t going to make the planet greener.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Deflecting the blame to consumers is a misinformation tactic by corporations and governments. That doesn’t mean consumers can’t or shouldn’t take action on their own, of course – just that we also need to hold corporations and governments accountable. There are things that need to be done at a personal level and things that need to be done at an institutional level. Individual behavior influences institutional behavior, and vice-versa.
Take bottled water, for example. We ship fucking water across the country in plastic bottles when it is verifiably no better than the tap water in any reasonably-maintained system. Is it the consumers’ fault for buying it, the corporations’ fault for being completely amoral, or the government’s fault for allowing these ass-backwards incentives to exist and persist in the first place, and failing to provide sufficient alternatives? My choice to avoid bottled water whenever humanly possible in no way absolves these instutions of their failures and corruption that have made it a global problem.
Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.
That is unquestionably the bigger problem, yes.
We really do need to reduce car usage, but that’s not something that’s easily done by individuals when the cities they live in were designed to be unsustainably car-centric. We’ve spent about a century accumulating infrastructure debt and there’s no quick fix there. For me personally, I would not want to in a city that wasn’t walkable and bikeable, and I don’t ever want to drive if I can avoid it, but there aren’t enough cities like that in the world for everyone to do that. I do what I can in the hope that I will contribute to reaching critical mass. And this strategy is working to a degree – there’s a lot more attention given to city infrastructure today than there was even 10 years ago. There is political pressure locally to redesign cities to be more sustainable, driven by passionate grass-roots efforts. I always promote and vote for transportation alternatives in local elections, which is always a highly divisive topic because oil addiction is pervasive, deep-rooted, and in some places even lionized.
The same argument can be made for a lot of eco-friendly lifestyle choices, like vegetarianism. I’m not a strict vegetarian, but it’s really not hard to cut the vast majority of meat out of my diet. I understand that for some people that’s not viable, and we don’t have the infrastructure for everyone to go veg overnight anyway. So no judgment. It’s a drop in the bucket, to be sure, but hey, a drop is better than nothing.
On a larger scale, we have a huge problem with our economic structure. We’ve chased efficiency year after year, decade after decade, and now we’re so gosh-darned efficient that we have little redundancy or resiliency, wealth is hyper-concentrated, and local economies just bleed resources into the void. What would it take to feed a major city without importing food by truck and ship? It’s hard to imagine. It would require change at many levels of society, from the personal to the global.
