Thread

Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second

60 points · 84 comments · blondie9x

blondie9x · 1790689817 · focus · HN ↗
It feels like the Earth’s oceans are at a tipping point and can no longer continue to absorb this amount of heat and acidification from the carbonic acid levels increasing when CO2 breaks down.
<a href="https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts/ocean-acidification" rel="nofollow">https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
This year it feels like the ocean is losing its ability to breathe in a sense <a href="https://scienceblog.com/the-ocean-stopped-breathing-off-panamas-shores/" rel="nofollow">https://scienceblog.com/the-ocean-stopped-breathing-off-pana...
When do we get to full stop on the combustion of fossil fuels to protect humanity’s future?
1. smj-edison · 1790692223 · focus · HN ↗
  Honestly burning natural gas is much better than producing electricity with coal, and we can retrofit existing coal generation plants with natural gas and be like 85% cleaner. I'm kind of fed up with the absolutist takes of "don't use any fossil fuels," since that's just completely unreasonable in the next 10-20 years. Setting up power plants takes massive investment, and excluding AI-driven demand, there's not much money in power generation.
  Solar has been making incredible progress, and works in sunny locations, but it's not a general purpose solution. Nuclear is getting there, but it's still too expensive and over regulated. I can't say much about wind as I haven't looked into it enough to say. Both thermal and hydro are location dependent, so good when it works but not a general purpose solution.
  So that leaves coal and natural gas. We have a lot of both, but switching over to natural gas to coal by retrofitting existing power generation would make a massive difference imo.
  At the end of the day, we want diversity in the power grid, not just one thing for every place, since every place is different/has its own history.
  1. tremon · 1790696111 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, your proposal would have been an acceptable approach in 1990. Instead, we have been happily increasing our CO₂ emissions every year since then*. No, we no longer want diversity in the power grid; "reasonable" solutions don't move the needle. Even if the entire world would go carbon zero overnight, the global temperature would continue to rise for decades before settling around a new steady state. It's not a matter of holding out a bit longer for tomorrow's magical solution: every piece of fossil fuel burned today makes the planet more unlivable tomorrow.
    We are currently on track to reach the "climate-compatible" scenario of the Paris accords (+1.5°C climate increase by 2100) in 2030. We will exceed the "minor change" scenario (+2°C) in 2050. Those targets are already locked in, they are unavoidable because of the delay between CO₂ emissions and their full effect. Maintaining our current levels of emissions gets us to 3.5°C above historic averages in 2100, which is the lower end of the disaster scenario in the Paris accords.
    <a href="https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-20/" rel="nofollow">https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha...
    * except for a short drop in 2020 due to Covid. You may not like it, but that is what full climate change mitigation looks like today because we didn't act sooner.
    boplicity · 1790697674 · focus · HN ↗
    It's become clear that when society suffers, they demand cheap fuel. There's no way around it. I don't see a path out of this: do you?

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