No, we are past that point. A gradual reduction in CO2 levels is not enough any more. If you want to save billions of lives we need to cut CO2 production hard and right now. Since that is never going to happen you happy go lucky scenario becomes impossible. In any realistic climate scenario humanity is already fucked, it’s only matter of how much exactly.
Correct, we are likely going to need to do geoengineering for a 100-200 years while CO2 gets reduced gradually.
Baking soda aerosols are looking promising. They can just at 2-3% sodium additive to all jet aircraft exhaust and it will be enough to reverse the current levels of elevated CO2.
i mean, i’m not sure where you live but we’re seeing sizeable towns [populations <10,000] getting eaten by fire on my side of the continent (pacific west coast, north america [i’m in california. it’s been a mild year so far but fire season officially started two weeks ago in my town. so far only three fires worth mentioning!]) and before you start on any “need to rake your forest or manage it better or let it burn”, people been living there for 400 years if not longer at the one close to me that burned a few seasons back. much longer at the one with 200,000 people that half burned a few more seasons back. kindly leave that victim blamey bullshit at the door.
agreed, we’re already fucked. the question now is how fucked and whether we’ll be around when the planet recovers.
The planet isn’t going to “recover”. We’re fundamentally changing the atmosphere, and it’ll never go back. The planet will be fine, some forms of life will go on, but the planet will not settle back into something hospitable to current complex life.
So oxygen in the atmosphere is relatively new geologically speaking, and oxygen is incredibly reactive, it oxidizes things which is a fancy way of saying it dissolves things slowly. It pretty well killed most things that weren’t already equipped to either process or release oxygen as waste. We’re good at dealing with it but we’re pretty sensitive to the exact mixture of air (which is mostly nitrogen anyway) and we’re likely past a point of no return for cascading runaway effects changing that mixture. That’ll kill most air breathers. The greenhouse runaway effect will acidify the oceans, killing most ocean life. The increased energy in the system from the greenhouse effect causes continent-wide superstorms that literally scour the face of the earth into something unrecognizable. Most of what survived before won’t survive that.
So yeah, earth will move on and there will likely still be some form of life on it in a few thousand years. But it won’t be us, or anything like us, and it never will be again. We are this planets only shot at producing space-faring life.
No, we are past that point. A gradual reduction in CO2 levels is not enough any more. If you want to save billions of lives we need to cut CO2 production hard and right now. Since that is never going to happen you happy go lucky scenario becomes impossible. In any realistic climate scenario humanity is already fucked, it’s only matter of how much exactly.
Correct, we are likely going to need to do geoengineering for a 100-200 years while CO2 gets reduced gradually.
Baking soda aerosols are looking promising. They can just at 2-3% sodium additive to all jet aircraft exhaust and it will be enough to reverse the current levels of elevated CO2.
Start doing some real chemtrails.
i mean, i’m not sure where you live but we’re seeing sizeable towns [populations <10,000] getting eaten by fire on my side of the continent (pacific west coast, north america [i’m in california. it’s been a mild year so far but fire season officially started two weeks ago in my town. so far only three fires worth mentioning!]) and before you start on any “need to rake your forest or manage it better or let it burn”, people been living there for 400 years if not longer at the one close to me that burned a few seasons back. much longer at the one with 200,000 people that half burned a few more seasons back. kindly leave that victim blamey bullshit at the door.
agreed, we’re already fucked. the question now is how fucked and whether we’ll be around when the planet recovers.
The planet isn’t going to “recover”. We’re fundamentally changing the atmosphere, and it’ll never go back. The planet will be fine, some forms of life will go on, but the planet will not settle back into something hospitable to current complex life.
megafauna never really came back. like, this one is very different from the ones before, but it’s not going to extinct everything.
So oxygen in the atmosphere is relatively new geologically speaking, and oxygen is incredibly reactive, it oxidizes things which is a fancy way of saying it dissolves things slowly. It pretty well killed most things that weren’t already equipped to either process or release oxygen as waste. We’re good at dealing with it but we’re pretty sensitive to the exact mixture of air (which is mostly nitrogen anyway) and we’re likely past a point of no return for cascading runaway effects changing that mixture. That’ll kill most air breathers. The greenhouse runaway effect will acidify the oceans, killing most ocean life. The increased energy in the system from the greenhouse effect causes continent-wide superstorms that literally scour the face of the earth into something unrecognizable. Most of what survived before won’t survive that.
So yeah, earth will move on and there will likely still be some form of life on it in a few thousand years. But it won’t be us, or anything like us, and it never will be again. We are this planets only shot at producing space-faring life.