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. sfn42 · 1790695284 · focus · HN ↗
    Gas produces about 40-50% less CO2 per unit of electricity produced, than coal. Not 85%.
    As far as I'm concerned, a planet that is able to support human civilization ranks just a bit higher on the priority list than a diverse power grid and economic viability.
    smj-edison · 1790696076 · focus · HN ↗
    Economic viability is how we support human civilization, no? Economics is literally observing how humans interact and prioritize scarce resources like time and materials. So being not economically viable means it not happening.
    Is your goal to reduce global temperatures? If so, it needs to be a sustainable effort. You don't get sustainable effort without economic viability.
    If your goal is to dramatically reduce temperatures in the next 5 years, why not dump SiO2 in the atmosphere? That would bring the temperature down pretty fast by reflecting out sunlight in the upper atmosphere.
    But if your goal is long-term change, we need an approach that works long-term.
    Edit: sorry I forgot to mention your point on coal vs natural gas efficiency, I didn't realize it was not that much gain. I still think it's worth it though, since it's still making progress.
    sfn42 · 1790703480 · focus · HN ↗
    The only reason fossil fuels are "economically viable" is because we're ignoring the cost of the destruction they will bring in the future, and are already causing today. Nuclear is economically viable. We already have lots of nuclear power. Maybe it's a bit less profitable than fossil, maybe if we invested more into it it would be more profitable. Either way it seems entirely viable to me, except of course for all the trillions of dollars being made by extracting and selling fossil fuels to the detriment of all our futures. The only reason alternatives aren't "viable" is because they're priced out by fossil fuels. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and lots of new things become viable.
    How is dumping SiO2 into the atmosphere economically viable? How do you make money doing that? If you're thinking that governments should pay private companies to do it, why can't governments simply pay private companies to produce clean power instead? Without having done any actual research on this topic, I suspect you might find that this would be far more "economically viable" than paying for the experimental climate engineering that might not even work, and might have devastating unintended consequences. For example I imagine shitloads of fine sand in the atmosphere would be a problem for aviation, and that's probably far from the only issue with it.

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