I’ve been thinking about this a great deal recently, and i’ve come to the conclusion that only fusion power can save us, and even then, we’ll probably lack the political will to implement it correctly and globally.
In an ideal world, we make fusion power cheap and prolific, replacing all but nuclear power for electric generation worldwide. It might be possible to create fusion powered atmospheric scrubbers but that seems a bit fanciful. More likely what needs to be done with fusion power is massive, massive geoengineering on a planetary scale. We’ll need to desalinate tremendous amounts of sea water and then pump that water across all the continents. I can even imagine leviathan like pyramidal structures across the Sahara spraying enormous jets of water 20,000 feet high across dozens of miles like an oversized lawn sprinkler. Another possibility is simply evaporating huge amounts of water into the atmosphere and letting it precipitate out naturally. Either way, we do this in order to create massive protected forested areas as “carbon sinks”, along with (assuming things turn out as bad as they appear), allowing most of Antarctica and the Arctic to become forested as the permafrost disappears or recedes. In other words, every government needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars figuring out fusion power right now, collectively, or we’re all screwed. Whole cities worth of engineers and physicists need to be doing nothing but living, breathing, studying and working on fusion power. We need to force half of all college entrants to become engineers and make them work on this problem because we’re screwed if they don’t.
Or make a bioengineered virus that will kill 90% of the pop on earth. Probably the easiest solution.
Oh, there are a lot of things that could mitigate the problem, it’s just that we won’t do any of them. You could, for example, seed the atmosphere with particles to increase the planet’s albedo. You could start an aggressive carbon sequestration program across the globe. You could immediately build fission nuclear plants and have them running in five or six years. All you need is the political will, tons of taxpayer money, and international cooperation in the face of a grave but subtle and complicated threat.
Me, I’m buying North Canadian land and hoarding . . . er, have already hoarded ammo.
You don’t need fusion power! Lots of fission and renewables would be perfectly servicable to get the carbon output down.
The stabilization wedges and the like stabilize emissions around 450 for surprisingly little cost. There’s an absolute ton of low hanging fruit, and outside of carbon emissions there’s even more - reduced methane and the like. None of them are “throw all cars in the ocean”; they’re changes like “convert almost entirely to a mix of nuclear and renewables for power production.” The sticker price isn’t cheap, but for the overall economy and standard of living a small fraction of one year’s income. This guy’s free book is good.
This is also why you don’t need ludicrous 1950s science fiction geoengineering; even ignoring the “really dangerous unpredictable consequences” and “don’t know in the slightest how to do it”, it’d be incredibly expensive compared to the above. I don’t know what it is with people and suggesting magical speculative science projects as a solution.
Thing is with anything else other than massive desalinization we’re screwing up the amount of sunlight the earth receives (in contrast to changing the albido of the atmosphere). And the only way we can desalinate on the scale i’m imaging, as well as move the water around, is fusion.
Now we could go fully electric/nuclear, but that probably won’t be enough to stop it, and you’ve still got massive deforestation worldwide, it will just dramatically slow it down. You’ve got to regrow hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest land and be able to sustain it in the long term.
OTOH, what MacKay promotes is realistic, while i’m talking near-Science Fiction, warp drive, imaginary outcomes.
Why not engineered bamboo farms coupled with a sequestration program? If you’re just wanting a carbon sink then forests aren’t a very good solution in the short term or the very long term.
Deciding what the “correct” level of carbon should be and actively managing to get it, with probably entirely new science, is like phase 27 someday, yeah. A lot of people seem to think that’s the solution right now for some reason.
This is exactly what I mean, a closed-minded refusal to even consider possibilities. There’s absolutely NO evidence that the US will even slow it’s carbon output down, Germany’s building coal-fired plants with “green” money to replace nuclear and as for China…
No, we should be doing research into alternatives before we’re in a situation we need them and haven’t studied them.
Enidigm - I disagree. A combination of Thorium and a few fast breeders could easily generate vast amounts of power. Moreover, you can use the peak-time power to run a hydrogen economy for cars, dramatically lowering oil usage, even before you get to things like carbon-fixing bacterial sludge tanks.
For reference, that “peak oil” thing? Seems not to be really true due to things like oil shale. We have enough fossil fuels around to deep-fry the biosphere.
I tend to agree that the hyperbole does not in fact help the cause. It gives extreme predictions which can then be more easily disproven, which then erodes the entire argument. It also tends to create more resistance by causing people to say, “Well, fuck it then. We’re already dead? Whatever.”
I know folks will say I sound like a broken record, since this is always the solution I point out… Nuclear power is the only real solution to reducing humanity’s carbon footprint. At least if you’re looking to do it in the short term. If you aren’t on board with nuclear power, then you aren’t serious about tackling the problem. Everything else is just a pipedream when it comes to actually solving the problem in the next few years.
I’m not as pessimistic as some of you, though I do share your frustration at the lack of global change. But I’m also not convinced the US has to take the lead for change to happen. Even if we did suddenly make a radical course change, India and China are still on the same path and will quickly surpass our negative effects simply by virtue of larger populations.
However, the scale of the problem is such that it almost seems insurmountable at this point anyway. For example, Europe pays way more for gas then we do but car ownership continues to rise as a whole, not decline, even when they do have far much better public transit options. That’s just the first thing we have to change. But even if we achieve the hydrogen break-through in the next few years and convert completely to that for vehicle power by mid-century, and even if we do manage to meet our other energy needs in cleaner ways, that is still only part of the problem.
Well… that’s a new one. Someone arguing that the IPCC is trying to slow climate-reform, rather than being alarmist.
But if what I say is untrue - please name names (of such national science bodies) and reference official statements.
IPCC 2007 represents the most comprehensive international scientific assessment ever conducted, based on the best research available at the time. Simply put - it is a summary of the leading relevant research on climate change. You can - if you wish - check the numbers and facts presented in the report against the peer-reviewed literature that was available at the date this was published. To suggest that the IPCC can misrepresent the science, belies the fact that such misrepresentation would be fiercely criticized by the more than 1250 contributing authors.
Of course, the world has changed considerably since 2007 and climate science has advanced in the six years since the last report. But that is why the climate scientists are currently working on the IPCC 2014 report.
I just meant that China has surpassed the US in annual greenhouse gas emissions (though the two countries are by far the largest contributors, representing nearly 50% of the total). So just the US changing isn’t going to be enough. And while India isn’t currently at that level, it is at a distant #3 overall and on the rise.
Its a global problem requiring a global solution, and that solution cannot ignore major players because they are considered “developing” countries.
