I firmly agree that we've crossed several tipping points and that adaptation is a large and necessary part of our response. You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
Limiting warming to 2 or 3 degrees C is going to result in a situation that's a heck of a lot better than what 6 or 7 degrees C looks like. When asked if we should adapt or spend money on renewables/carbon capture/etc, the answer should be "Yes". We should be doing all of these things.
> You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
No, I am not doing that. I devoted a little over a year to taking a deep dive into this subject. I really wanted to understand. This was a few years ago, when I started to get this feeling that climate change was becoming a religion. It quickly became obvious that both non-believers and zealots are nothing less than delusional. Nobody devotes one iota of work and effort towards understanding the subject and everyone jumps on their respective bandwagon.
If you study that data --very reliable data going back 800,000 years--, do a little analysis, and read just a few documents, it becomes very obvious that we can't stop it and we sure as heck can't slow it down.
That DOES NOT mean it will not regulate. The planet is far more powerful than we could ever hope to be. The way our planet regulates CO2 is through weather events. That's the first reality we need to understand and accept. We are going to have lots more hurricanes, rains, cyclones, etc.
Every time I post about this people respond with negative comments and not one person bothers to look at the data and documents. I have had this conversation with people with advanced degrees in science over the last several years. Not one person has come back with a scientifically sound dismissal of my hypothesis. It goes as follows:
We know, from ice core atmospheric sample data going back 800K years, without a shadow of a doubt, how the planet behaves without humanity around.
The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 without humanity around (or when we were a rounding error in the planetary context) is about 100 ppm in 50K to 100K years. For easy numbers, let's call it 1,000 years/1 ppm.
It's a simple matter to fit lines to the up and down slopes and get a rough measurement of what I call the natural rate of change. That is, the rate of change with humanity being insignificant.
That rate of change is the baseline from which anything else has to be measured. Examples:
"Let's shut down the entire United States and move to Mars"
Nope, won't work. That is not better than if humanity left the entire planet, which would give us 1 ppm every thousand years.
"Let's cover the entire ecuatorial band with solar panels and have wind turbines everywhere we can put them"
No, again, how is that better than all of humanity leaving the planet?
"Let's build huge filters and suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere in every city"
Nope. First of all, building something like that at a scale sufficiently large to actually make any kind of an impact on a shortened time scale (50 to 100 years) would require resources to build, operate and maintain the systems of an unimaginable scale. Just the processing and transportation of the construction materials to build the thing on every major city on this planet would likely emit more CO2 than the system could ever consume. And then you have to power it. No, solar won't do it.
And then, on top of that, all seven-going-on-eight billion of us are still on the planet, which means that we can't do better than the baseline 1K years for 1 ppm reduction.
"Let's use magic dust to seed the ocean and capture CO2"
I don't even want to imagine the disaster and CO2 contribution just mining, transporting and deploying this stuff would entail. We are far more likely to kill everything in the ocean than to fix a darn thing with the atmosphere.
And, once more, billions of us would still be here, which means we can't do any better than the baseline.
Here's the easiest-to-read paper I found on this. In fact, back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
To paraphrase: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
This paper stopped at that conclusion (because it was the answer to the hypothesis they were trying to prove). I wish they had continued or done another paper evaluating the reality of controlling CO2 through any other means. The conclusion would have been the same.
Thankfully a group out of Germany asked that question and published results about a year later (2015):
"Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany say that if we were to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of 2.5 times that of the current annual emissions, oceans would not recover to a low-emission state by 2700."
And that is a best case scenario. In reality, anyone who has ever done real work of any kind in the real world knows that these estimates are, at best, optimistic and in most cases a complete fantasy. It is useful to have a number of some kind just to get a sense of proportion. The 700 year estimate means "not measured in a scale corresponding to a human lifetime". Generations. And, if we go back to the baseline I introduced, the real number, with all of humanity still around and growing, the real number is in the high tens of thousands of years.
I know I am going to get pounded on any time I post this. The vast majority of people who believe or do not believe have done near zero work to actually understand the subject, they take the conclusions from whatever side of the argument they like and go with it. That's OK. I am one who decided to stop regurgitating what I was being told and actually go out and try to confirm it first. If I just make a few people take that scientifically necessary path of skepticism and do the work, mission accomplished.
Yes, we have to clean-up our act. No, we are not going to save the planet. There are plenty of reasons for which we should clean-up our act. And, yes, climate change is real. And, yes, of course, we made a significant contribution to the problem. We just need to stop pushing fantasies and address reality.
What do you think about off-planet solutions (like space mirrors, etc)? Dealing with temperature regulation would mitigate a lot of negative effects of hight CO2.
No opinion at this point other than a sense that, if we did the math, we might very well discover that we would burn so much fuel and produce so much CO2 in manufacturing and transporting everything we might need (and then launch it) that it could be a complete non-starter.
What really worries me about some of these ideas is that they could go horribly wrong. We are talking about changing the fundamental energy equation for an entire planet. We can't even control the ecological effects of our technology at the local level and we are actually convincing ourselves we can hit the mark with a planetary scale process? This is scary.
So...having actually worked for companies in aerospace making rockets that leave the planet...
The cost per kilogram to orbit today is likely around $2000. That same kilogram landing on the moon (I also worked on a device that will get to the moon's surface in a future Artemis mission and dealt with all the lander companies) is somewhere in the two million USD range.
And asteroid? And mining equipment? Well, it will be a lot more than that. 10x? 100x? No clue.
Let's assume the cost is the same. Lets' further assume we need, say, 50,000 kg in equipment, supplies and fuel/energy to get there, mine and bring it back.
At $2MM per kg this would mean a one-way trip cost of $100 billion dollars. Round trip? Let's call it $200 billion. My guess is that might bring back somewhere between 500 and 1,000 kg of whatever was mined.
This is all hypothetical, of course. Just having fun.
Let's say we mine gold. Current value per kg is about $60K. So, a thousand kilograms of gold brought back from an asteroid would yield $60 million dollars. That would represent a loss of $199,940,000,000 dollars.
Diamonds? They are worth about 1,000x more than gold per weight. That still represents a loss of $140 billion.
The same is the story with fabrication in space. Getting tools, equipment, energy production means and raw materials there and back cost tons of cash (literally). If it can be done in low orbit it's much more manageable, still tons of cash though. Try to move farther away from earth and costs go exponential very quickly.
Asteroid mining is one of those neat concepts that people keep talking about over the years. Fun and interesting, of course. I just don't see it ever making financial sense.
Minion on mars to build stuff on mars is a different matter. Well, it will still cost tons of cash to get everything there, but at least you don't have to bring it back!
That would be (if at all) for the first mission only. The 'bootstrap'. And in-situ utilizing the shit out of anything available to build as much as possible of the equipment up there. And why would I care about the money? That's just a few wars, peanuts so to speak. By stopping that shit alone you'd burn way less carbon! See? Wheee!
Anyways, read the book I suggested and see if it changes your assumptions, or not.
edit: Btw. nobody needs gold from space. Maybe infrastructure needs gold in space. Be it for reflectors, wires, chips... don't know. Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'.
> Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'
Very funny.
Hey, if you ever need surgery, repeat the above to your experienced surgeon and ask that they bring over some dumb-shit with a two year old degree who can thing out of the box. Sit back. Relax. Enjoy.
Limiting warming to 2 or 3 degrees C is going to result in a situation that's a heck of a lot better than what 6 or 7 degrees C looks like. When asked if we should adapt or spend money on renewables/carbon capture/etc, the answer should be "Yes". We should be doing all of these things.