fake_meows

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.

Climate change isn't an on/off switch, it's something that can always be made better or worse by increments.

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.

David Brooks:

"Trump is the wrong answer to the right question."

According to the research team, the consequences of this reversal are already becoming visible. The upwelling of deep, warm, CO₂-rich waters is believed to be driving the accelerated melting of sea ice in the Southern Ocean. In the long term, this process could double current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by releasing carbon that has been stored in the deep ocean for centuries—potentially with catastrophic consequences for the global climate.

Oops. 350% growth, not 350X growth...lost some decimal places there. Thanks for the correction.

A constant 2% economic growth rate implies that we expect the world economy in 2100 to be 350 times as large as the economy of today.

That means it roughly doubles every decade remaining in the century.

Insofar as prices or costs can go up, there seems to be no limit to growth.

Insofar as we have real physical resources and production increasing, I have a hard time imagining we can meaningfully double production one time.

For example, I can't imagine a world with twice the built infrastructure we have now. (Houses, roads, power dams, airports, schools, etc). Seems impossible.

If growth has ended or is ending soon, it makes you wonder how long governments will be able to try to print their way out of stagnation before the whole system becomes irrelevant and comical.

Our local ranger station has the senior former wildfire people working now at the front desk just speaking to visitors. (The front desk people were eliminated and they just started moving staff around.) But obviously the normal experts are no longer doing any wildfire planning and response work.

At it happens, it's painfully obvious they also can't answer visitor's questions and don't know the processes to take payments, issue permits and all the things in the front desk job.

So not looking good.