It feels like we're at a point where simply dropping emissions down to 0 wouldn't be enough, we need to outright start pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and have negative emissions. Given the way politics is right now, catastrophe feels inevitable.
So what? Trees don't live forever. As soon as they die and rot, that CO2 is right back in the atmosphere. This is not a real plan, it's some feelgood video clickbait.
It isn’t just the trees that matter. It’s the rest of the forest ecosystem around the trees. Reforestation is still a great idea as part of a larger plan to restore the atmosphere to and global temperatures to what they were, but it isn’t a silver bullet. There is not one place in the world where you can plant a bunch of trees and declare mission accomplished, but you’ll want those forests there flourishing and absorbing carbon dioxide when we do neutralize emissions.
We can chop down the trees and landfill them to prevent the carbon from being released back into the atmosphere. Of course, with that we are talking about re-doing millions of years of prehistorical carbon capture by the earth.
And how much carbon does the forestry and digging equipment to do all that generate? That's one of the problems. Yes, growing trees and 'discarding' the wood is a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but we have to do it in an efficient way, and we're not there yet.
From what I understand, the best course of action recommended by scientists a long time ago was:
- Step one: _stop_ polluting (in like 1995).
- Step two: Work out ways to get the genie back into the bottle or co2 back into the ground.
It seems like we forgot to enact step 1 and now step 2 will pretty much be pointless because we are still spewing out co2 faster than ever.
If we're too survive we need to do both steps as of yesterday, unfortunately I don't think there are very efficient says to sequester enough carbon yet, so I think we might be in some trouble.
>> If we're too survive we need to do both steps as of yesterday,
Huge supporter of climate change action, but scientifically is there any basis for the idea that current models point to human extinction? (Don't answer if you don't have a hard source, but I'd like what the projected point is for that)
Extinction, no. Collapse of civilization, quite likely. A lot of people say the former and mean the latter. This isn’t really an error, as most people don’t interpret phrases like “if we survive” to mean the literal extinction of every breeding pair of humans.
So, those events seem to be the dissolution of continent-sized political regimes. Is that what you’re talking about? And then they were replaced by other regional political regimes in due course?
I’m trying to think of what regimes would qualify: the US, China, the EU... India, Brazil. One of those? Is that what you’re thinking?
I guess it would be easier to understand what you think is a high probability event if you give just an example of a a regime that think is at risk.
The global regime. So, all of them, to some degree at least. Large tracts of the world will simply become uninhabitable for humans due to rivers drying up, wet bulb temperatures being too high for human survival absent ac, etc
This will push people to kigrate or start wars. And our system won’t be able to handle a much larger amount of migrants, it’s straining even under existing low numbers.
You generally never saw a collapse in just one part of an empire. So I mean a collpase of lur global civilization, on the scale of past collapses that affected prior local civilizations.
We depend on caebon to feed the people we have, too. If we try to reduce and can’t replace, we have trouble. But if we don’t reduce, we have worse trouble as temperatures keep going up.
If we sort out energy and figure out how to suck co2 from the sky we can reverse this of course.
I always take that as a simple shorthand for "civilisation to survive", or "survive as a technologically advanced civilisation".
I suspect for most of us, and our descendants, it's pretty academic if the future holds extinction, some Mad Max future where the few survivors have the capability of the 19th century, middle ages, or somehow bomb^W emit ourselves back to the bronze age. All will see them surrounded by tons of surviving things (and packaging) they can see but can't understand, make, repair or refill.
> This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
> As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
> After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere. There are several ways to sequester greenhouse gases, from reforestation to soil enrichment to cow backpacks, but the backbone of the envisioned negative emissions is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
> BECCS — raising, harvesting, and burning biomass for energy, while capturing and burying the carbon emissions — is unproven at scale. Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
...
> Check out that middle graphic. If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
To state the obvious, we will not reach 0 CO2 emissions in the next 7 years. Everyone better strap in, because it only gets worse from here.
