CO2 levels mark 'new era' in the world's changing climate

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37729033

by nedsma • 10 years ago

65 60 10 years ago

rb8082• 10 years ago

Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have surged past an important threshold and may not dip below it for "many generations".

Is this at all reversible? I presume not.

The real problem is that lots of people and putting a lot of effort and money into reducing emissions - where if the above is correct seems very very difficult (with a growing developing world) and likely a waste of time.

Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions?

grhino• 10 years ago

The path to reducing emissions is much clearer than the path to efficiently scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Also, scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere gets harder and harder as CO2 emissions grow. There is some research to sequester CO2, but I don't think we have an ideas that are better than planting trees.

czechdeveloper• 10 years ago

We release it because it allows us to produce energy (burn something). To remove it from atmosphere would require to put it some higher energy state so that we can store it and that require again some source of energy. Pumping pure CO2 in some mine will probably not do the job.

In reality, we will try to just reduce temperature without removing CO2, but CO2 causes problems other than tempterature rise. See ocean acidification.

There seems to not be any good solution really.

ep103• 10 years ago

yeah, but we release it because burning things is an easy way of releasing energy whenever / wherever we need it. Reducing CO2 can be done pretty much anywhere in the world. So if we needed to build a nuclear powerplant somewhere just to power our CO2 scrubbers, so that our cars and planes could burn fuel, that's completely doable.

collyw• 10 years ago

Plant a hell of a lot of trees?

madshiva• 10 years ago

Just stop growing is the solution itself.

Brakenshire2• 10 years ago

Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions?

It's simply a matter of cost. While we are continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere, preventing one gram of CO2 from being emitted is equivalent to scrubbing one gram of CO2 from the atmosphere, and at present the former is far, far cheaper than the latter, and there is a huge amount of low hanging fruit still to be gathered. In fact, a lot of the emissions abatement is profitable - for instance an LED lightbulb might cost $5-10, but saves you 500-750 kWh over its lifetime, which is $50-100 worth of electricity even without pricing in carbon. The hope is if you introduce a carbon price (for instance by cutting other taxes and introducing a revenue neutral carbon tax) that you can further spur investment so that the market will make more of these technological developments towards resolving the problem. That may involve scrubbing carbon, for instance the recent process which has got a lot of publicity, using renewable electricity to turn CO2 into ethanol. But you're looking to resolve things at the lowest cost, and it may be that scrubbing is unnecessarily costly, and you can do everything through other means. We need to just price in the externality and let the market do what it does best.

rb8082• 10 years ago

Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high. If we magically stop all emissions right we should be scrubbing as well.

So maybe we should be reducing emissions where its easy - and scrub

jamesblonde2• 10 years ago

The elephant in the room that people don't talk about is population growth. If we don't get that under control, there really is no chance of us avoiding catastrophic consequences, like melting of the methane clathrates.

Scarblac2• 10 years ago

The vast majority of the CO2 is produced by only a small part of the population (the rich people in the west), and they aren't the ones whose population is growing.

WhoBeI• 10 years ago

Education, prosperity and equality can solve that.

TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...

mrb• 10 years ago

Here the scary chart in question: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/pl...

The last 2 years where it can be seen the level never returned under 400 ppm: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/pl...

avar• 10 years ago

For context here's the Earth's level of CO2 over geologic time periods: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.g...

_ph_10• 10 years ago

While this diagram shows, that the current CO2 content is lower than in many historic phases of the earth climate, this has little impact on the seriousness of our current situation. The biggest problem we have with the change of the CO2 content of the atmosphere is the speed by which it changes, and consequently the speed of the warming up. Eco systems change way quicker than they can adapt too. And dying eco systems and their input on our life are the big problem humanity is facing in the next 100 years.

agumonkey2• 10 years ago

I can't help but to think that it will solve the problem by putting pressure on its source, aka Humans.

z_mollusk2• 10 years ago

Ecosystems are "greening." The increased amount of CO2 has led to rapid vegetation growth. CO2 is essentially plant fuel.

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fert...

diafygi2• 10 years ago

If you're wondering what software entrepreneurs can do about it, here's a reply I recently wrote:

----

I'm in a climate change startup, and here's how I look at it: 87% of the energy sources we use are fossil-based[1] and will need to be replaced with non-fossil alternatives in the next 30 years. That's trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure and technology growth opportunity for clean energy and energy efficiency[2]. The next Google will be an energy company[3].

To answer your question more specifically, in order to actually pull the 87% energy transition off, clean energy sources face huge financial and engineering challenges. This presents a lot of business opportunities for tech startups that can improve efficiencies for those clean energy companies. Energy efficiency, electric self-driving vehicles, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, public transit, etc. all need to grow by 100x in 30 years, and a huge chunk of that growth will be software driven.

The advanced energy industry is already a $1.4 trillion industry (larger than airlines and fashion industries)[4]. So there is, right now, a ton of market size for climate change tech, and it will grow by several orders of magnitude over the next few decades. Now is one of those rare moments where you can save the planet and have a business model. For example, my startup is a SaaS company that is used by tons of distributed clean energy resources to smooth out the process of collecting energy data for feasibility analyses. We shave about 5-10% off the installed cost of energy audits and distributed solar, and make money doing it.

So if you're interested in doing tech startup in climate change. Do it! We need all the help we can get. If you're interested in the Bay Area professional clean energy scene, check out the calendar https://bayareaenergyevents.com/ (I run it) and start showing up to stuff!

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

[3] http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/

[4] http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy...

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344113

melling3• 10 years ago

Without nuclear power, there's no stopping global warming:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

We squandered the past 3 decades, now we're screwed.

_ph_10• 10 years ago

Nuclear certainly keeps the CO2 emissions down. France has a pretty low CO2 footprint based on 80+% nuclear electric power. However, nuclear is not only controversial, but going forward, expensive. For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached.

hacker42• 10 years ago

For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached.

Citation needed.

melling3• 10 years ago

You made that up, right? The current project is that solar will be cheaper than nuclear by 2025.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/11/solar-an...

briandear2• 10 years ago

Little environmental risks attached?

6000 birds are killed each year at one solar facility:

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-dea...

Nuclear can be done correctly as France has proven. How many major nuclear disasters have their been? Japan is the most recent, but are nuclear disasters really a major threat compared to covering large swatches of land with solar panels or worse, windmills?

I pose that as an honest question: what's the cost benefit of nuclear vs. highly inefficient solar or wind?

What's the environmental cost of producing massive batteries to store solar or wind energy?

There are huge unintended consequences that ought to be explored.

Recurecur2• 10 years ago

I was going to post on this topic, so thanks for getting it started!

If the interests vested in CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) want to be taken seriously, they MUST push for drastically increased funding for advanced nuclear. Designs for advanced nuclear reactors already exist that eliminate the possibility of meltdown, as well as the need for water cooling. Such reactors would be perfect for coal plant replacement, which is the main necessity for power generation.

The grid needs a large percentage of electricity to be reliable, unlike wind and solar. We also need a source for the rapidly increasing power needs of the world. Safe, clean nuclear power is the answer, and is also the best solution in terms of environmental footprint. Yes, better than solar. (Solar is great when the real estate is "free", in other words rooftop solar and solar buildings.)

One innovative company (of many) working on this is Thorcon Power. Thorcon's concept is to site the reactors 30 meters underground for extra security and safety. It believes it can deliver electricity at three to five cents per KWH in today's dollars.

http://thorconpower.com/

_ZeD_• 10 years ago

Sigh... https://xkcd.com/1732/

dougmwne• 10 years ago

I really wish people would stop saying we're screwed. I know it's a compensation for climate denial, but I think it's terrible rhetoric. If you say, "it's too late, we're screwed," then the message is that nothing really needs to be done but deal with the consequences.

This is a big, scary situation and it's easy to feel hopeless in the face of it. But we are faced with multiple potential futures. Our outcome is tied to our action and the outcomes could be anywhere between mild and catastrophic. No invisible hand is going to swoop down and fix this one for us. This one's on us.

grondilu2• 10 years ago

"[...] all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. [...] There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans."

Freeman Dyson, heretic thoughts about science and society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM

https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-th...

idlewords3• 10 years ago

The scary thing about global warming is that it happens on a timescale that our political institutions aren't equipped to handle, and requires concerted effort by countries that are not equally affected. It's also hard to model and has outcomes that range from "mild disruption" to "Earth turns into Venus".

The precautionary principle suggests that we take it seriously.

grondilu2• 10 years ago

Earth turns into Venus

Unfortunately I don't remember where I did read it, but I do recall reading a paper rejecting the idea that Earth could follow a runaway green-house effect as on Venus.

I don't know if people seriously see that as a real possibility or not, but at the very least I've never heard any scientist mentioning it seriously.

EDIT: well, apparently it wasn't so hard to find. It's right in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article about runaway greenhouse effect[1]

"For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus-- appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect

2. http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf

CO2 levels mark 'new era' in the world's changing climate

Related Stories