this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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collapse of the old society
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I'm just speaking to the accuracy of this one sentence. This is completely 100% incorrect.
The climate system is a chaos system that has many areas of stability, rapid transformation and tipping points.
If you think the system is only incrementally changing, that's just because you haven't pushed it hard enough to rapidly shift to a new area of behavior you've never seen before.
Many of these regimes are irreversible and cannot be changed back. You cannot unburn toast, it's a one way deal.
Once the climate changes, EVEN if you reset the conditions, you will not return to the initial state. Not at all. That idea is propaganda.
The fossil carbon and other climate related chemicals we have already dumped into the environment have a very long lag time before we see the effects (at all). These chemicals and their effects are more long living that most nuclear waste, for example. These are not going away while humanity still exists. That's a done deal.
I think you're right, but I don't think OP would necessarily disagree (although I don't know them).
The point is, we don't really know where, or how many, tipping points there are. Every 0.1 degree warming is a higher chance of reaching them. And most climate models predict very different outcones for 2 degree vs 3 degree vs 4 degree warming.
So, there are a bunch of lags effects and tipping points, but we still don't have any information to suggest that every 0.1 degree avoided has huge value.
Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a "flow" or "rate" problem.
"If we could only slow down carbon..."
The thing is that what we have is a "sink" or "stock" problem where it's how much carbon is already in the system -- it's past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn't from the rate of this year's contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it's from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn't put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you're feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don't know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We've had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that's just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women's rights all made huge political changes. If there's any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today's political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don't think there's any guarantees, but it's still a lot too early to give up.
[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carbon-dioxide-remains-atmosphere
You're only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That's irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what's the tech for that?
The closest thing I've heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
We absolutely have the technology, it's just being blocked from being implemented on emergency timescales by soulless oil and gas corpo suits that have almost de-facto control of governments in most countries.
What's an example of the technology, and can you explain what scale it works at?
The tech is there. The only thing stopping us is a lack of political will due to capitalism resulting in oligarchs who have captured the political system, and a lack of public awareness of alternative ways of life due to poor education and propaganda.
A properly informed public that understands the extreme dangers of climate change, oligarchic capitalism, and the viability of changing things with collective power would allow us to use these existing technologies and prevent the devastation we're headed toward.
Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don't address the issue if the carbon that's already in the atmosphere, which is what they're talking about.
This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they're making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn't sufficient to stop the runaway effects.
Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.
I'm aware, but I was addressing that one point at the end of his post about us not having sustainable technology, which I consider distinct from tech that sequesters existing emissions. As in, had we structured our societies with that other tech, it would've been fairly sustainable.
For sequestering carbon, I'd read a bit about growing mass amounts of some sort of seaweed or grass in shallow areas being somewhat promising, though ultimately I think we're locked in for some extreme change regardless. My recommendations of sustainable tech would only limit the ceiling we reach in the future.