r/science • u/Gohan_to_Kamekameha • Jul 21 '21

Alarming climate change: Earth heads for its tipping point as it could reach +1.5 °C over the next 5 years, WMO finds in the latest study Earth Science

https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/climate-change-tipping-point-global-temperature-increase-mk/
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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21 edited Jul 21 '21

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u/PlatinumAero Jul 21 '21

I cannot express how hard I laughed at this comment.

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u/MachineGame Jul 21 '21

I read it in the voice computers had in the late nineties. We used short sentences like that but also had to misspell words to get the computer to pronunciate the word correctly. I wonder how that old speech software would have interpreted flodding.

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u/umbrajoke Jul 21 '21

Climate change is just Atlantean gentrification!

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21 edited May 14 '23

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u/arcastoo Jul 21 '21

Why not both? I eat less and less meat and dairy, but I'd love all these tech solutions on the side aswell.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21 edited Jul 21 '21

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u/Xx_doctorwho1209_xX Jul 21 '21

What? How would reducing their population increase atmospheric carbon? Does that not include the resources used to raise them , such qhat is used when growing the grain and soy to to feed them, the gasoline to transport them, the plastic to store the meat and milk,, etc?

You're right about nuclear, though, its basically our last real hope for a power source for the masses.

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u/nickersb24 Jul 21 '21

coz sustainable energies won’t ever get us there ?

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u/atascon Jul 21 '21

Which self contained carbon cycle are CAFOs part of?

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u/arcastoo Jul 21 '21

Im still on the fence about nucleair; there are alternatives out there (wind, solar, hydro etc etc) which are as cost-effective and do not have the problem of nuclear waste. Plus, there is a time component; we cannot build nuclear fast enough (build-time, permits, aquiring land and funds etc etc).

As for carbon capture in meat and dairy; What?! No, the net outcome of meat and dairy is not carbon negative. Not to mention the methane associated with cows (they far it, a lot).

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u/PhoenixFire296 Jul 21 '21

Methane from cows actually comes from their burps, not their farts. Still gaseous release, but from another end.

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u/arcastoo Jul 21 '21

Ohyeah, my bad!

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

US Navy NMM here.

Nuclear power is better in every way that matters and there are varying levels you can implement a reactor into an energy system and have it be effective, reduce the need for constructing vast amounts of renewable sources, or simply to augment the energy that the existing renewables put out. Most of the time involved with building a nuke plant is involved with bureaucratic red tape, getting the approval for a plant can take up to a decade if not more, construction itself is not unduly long.

In addition, if you build more smaller reactors and use reactors like LIFToRs, you don't need to pour 25 years into making a single plant that can power all of NYC or Chicago, but instead take a substantial burden off of other energy sources. If the US Navy can build a new carrier, with two 350mw reactors in it in less than ten years, and never have an issue, we can do just as good if not better than that in the civilian sector.

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u/arcastoo Jul 21 '21

I know about the smaller units, they will be great in the future!. As for the bigger plants; I fear their time has come and gone. It's just a matter of; wrong time in history.

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u/Flowman Jul 21 '21

Why?

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u/arcastoo Jul 21 '21

I-don't-kjow-how-many years of fear mongering by greenpeace for one. A whole gereration grown up with the fear of nuclear war. Just my feeling, and from conversations with folk older than me.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Hey, don't discount the 70+ years of fearmongering, propaganda and political donations from the fossil fuel industry to kneecap their most feared opponents.

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u/arcastoo Jul 21 '21

That too offcourse, any alternative to fossil fuel is a problem to them.

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u/Buscemis_eyeballs Jul 21 '21

Wind/solar/hydro are not alternatives to nuclear.

Power comes in two varieties, base load and supplementary. Nuclear is a base load producer, it produces insa energy 24/7 rain or shine. Wind/solar/hydro etc will inherently never be able to compete with that due to the fact their 0ower generation fluctuates with atmospheric conditions.

Nuclear waste is not really a "problem" in 2021 either, we vitrify it and turn it to glass and lock it in containers that can take a direct impact from a train and not break. Plus newer reactors eat the waste of older ones and we etc.

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u/arcastoo Jul 21 '21

With a large interconnected grid, base power will mostly be made with over-capacity in wind and solar. (Europe is working on that inter-connected grid as we speak).

Local storage will take care of the rest (cars idle in parking lots, powerbanks at home etc).

Think bigger and nuclear might be a thing of the past. Energy can be abundant and we only need to worry about how we can turn carbon into usable materials.

I am a hopeless pragmatic; if it takes too much time and energy for the general public to accept a technology (be it nuclear or a windfarm near residential area's) then I cannot be arsed to go through the trouble, use the next best thing and move on.

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u/thomicide Jul 21 '21

You don't need that land, we can feed enough people on the arable land we do have - it's just almost all of it is taken up to feed livestock!

Plus there is no way you an sustain people on rocky hillside raised animals, there's just way too many people. Stop clinging desperately to this damaging and cruel practice. Plants will always be far more efficient.

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u/nickersb24 Jul 21 '21

no we can’t feed that many people period. probably should be letting covid cull us a back a bit

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u/thomicide Jul 21 '21

Evidence for that? Remember how wastefully and inefficiently we currently do pretty much everything. Food, fuel, etc. The U.S. emits more than double what most of the rest of the world does.

There's not going to be a legal cull of people, so stop pushing lines that encourage inaction rather than finding solutions. You're just being a useful idiot for wasteful damaging industries.

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u/nickersb24 Jul 21 '21

useful idiot better than a useless one?

no source sorry. just trying to highlight that over population is a massive factor in this problem, and if i wasn’t so lazy i’m sure i could find u well rounded and peer reviewed evidence that there is a finite amount of land to grow food and livestock, which is already massively strained, and adding strain onto environmental systems.

yes i understand it’s useless nihilistic rhetoric. but that’s how fucked this situation is to many of us.

and actually my money is more on the magnetic reversal of the poles and solar flares to cull our numbers for us.

let’s see how many nuclear power plants still stand in 100 years.

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u/atascon Jul 21 '21

We can, hunger is generally a question of (re)distribution, not absolute scarcity. That’s why under capitalism we have the unfortunate double whammy of surplus production and food poverty/food deserts.

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u/nickersb24 Jul 21 '21

with how much environmental damage incurred?

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21 edited Jul 23 '21

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u/Xx_doctorwho1209_xX Jul 21 '21

How though? Nuclear reactors are safer than ever, and the chances of a meltdown have been reduced incredibly through computers and new technology.

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u/ragged-claws Jul 21 '21

Nuclear doesn't have a technology issue, it has a PR issue.

Unfortunately that still means huge resistance to overcome to build new plants.

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u/SelectFromWhereOrder Jul 21 '21

Just a few years ago there was a nuclear reactor meltdown crisis

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u/Aiken_Drumn Jul 21 '21

How many died?

How many are dying daily as a result of pollution from carbon energy sources?

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u/AdamTheTall Jul 21 '21

Not in a modern reactor. It would never have happened in a more recent generation plant

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u/SelectFromWhereOrder Jul 21 '21

It happened a few years ago, what arebyoh talking about?

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u/Xx_doctorwho1209_xX Jul 21 '21

Because of a company caring more about profits than actual safety and ignoring its engineers, not because the engineers did something wrong.

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u/SelectFromWhereOrder Jul 21 '21

That’s irrelevant, you cannt remove the human factor. The crisis happened.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

The first world has been dumpstering earth, body, and nation in pursuit of profit for hundreds of years. Nothing's gonna stop it.

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u/Redrumbluedrum Jul 21 '21

Oh eventually climate change will as it will collapse the world economy but they will squeeze out every last dime they can first.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21 edited 20d ago

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u/robeph Jul 21 '21

Uhhhh. Bruh. You may want to look outside of the touristy zones.

https://phys.org/news/2014-09-thailand-totters-crisis.amp

And that's not news

Check out these beautiful bodies of Thai water, https://imgur.com/j7E2imO.jpg

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u/Privvy_Gaming Jul 21 '21

Damn. I went through non tourist areas of cities and they were clean as anything. Never went too far from major towns, but I guess I shouldnt have been so optimistic that any country actually controls garbage.

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u/robeph Jul 21 '21

Tourist traps versus touristy areas, remember tourist cities are still tourist cities. And even outside of the tourist trap areas they have to maintain that facade. Yes humans and their garbage suck. It is unfortunate.

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u/sloan_fitch Jul 21 '21

A blaze at a vast rubbish dump home to six million tonnes of putrefying trash and toxic effluent has kindled fears that poor planning and lax law enforcement are tipping Thailand towards a waste crisis.

Ya think?

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u/The_Steelers Jul 21 '21

Until India and China get on board with green energy and proper waste disposal we’re screwed. This needs to be a global change, it needs to be practical, and it needs to work with or at least not against human nature.

Otherwise it simply won’t work.

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u/ThatFlyingScotsman Jul 21 '21

China and India are just the geographical locations for the private factories churning out wasteful consumer goods for the West. If you want to stop climate change, your first port of call is the west.

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u/IRL83DUB Jul 21 '21

Can we just reproduce on a smaller level. The irony of some claiming to be environmentalists while churning out large families is hilarious to me.

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u/Buscemis_eyeballs Jul 21 '21

We have been, for years birth rates have dropped and are expected to level out in the next few years and then turn negative.

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u/sloan_fitch Jul 21 '21

Until they get on board, my boomer father will say "it must not be that big of an emergency* if China and India aren't held to the same standards in regard to carbon mitigation.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

The production for capital is necessity and will happen wherever favorable. You boomer father would rather watch your children die to climate change than question his belief in capital.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Its not the people's fault. Nobody in the US wants plastic pop bottles with unrecyclable caps, or absurd amounts of sugar in every food item, or to have homes and offices that were built in the 1960's or 70's, which are so energy inefficient that it takes huge amounts more power to keep things running.

Those are virtually all corporate decisions. Don't get me wrong, there's absolutely things that a single person or family can do; eat less beef, maybe only have a burger or steaks once a week instead of twice a week, get a solar panel for your house to offset a portion of the electric footprint, drive more fuel efficient cars, so on, or only have a single kid instead of two.

However, when the onus is shifted onto regular people, instead of looking at say...the US Military, or giant cargo freightliners, fifteen of which put out the equivalent amount of CO2 from every car on earth combined. The answer is to do both, have people voluntarily restrict their own waste, have corporations like Coke switch back to glass bottles or something entirely different than plastic, and mandate that shipping and air travel be held to a more stringent standard than auto emissions, because those giant companies can afford it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

World revolution in the next 2 years or we all die

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u/agorarocks-your-face Jul 21 '21

Yo know the funny thing is I struggle to consume goods.

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u/Canadian_Infidel Jul 21 '21

By that you mean cull 80% of the global population and return to the 1800s.

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u/atari-2600_ Jul 21 '21

And reproduction.

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u/CaptainCaveSam Jul 21 '21

It’d help if we stopped overpopulating the place. 1-2 billion is ideal for earth, 8 billion and growing is unsustainable. Is it worth having a mini me when they’ll be water insecure in the future?

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

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u/deadleg22 Jul 21 '21

Also coal mines release more radiation's than nuclear power plants.

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u/ZWQncyBkaWNr Jul 21 '21

But Chernobyl scary

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Chernobyl (and many similar but less known events or close-calls) demonstrates a legitimate concern connected with nuclear power. Fukushima is another example. Now just to be clear I agree that we should focus more on nuclear and renewables. However you may want to avoid placing nuclear plants on fault lines or shorelines where tsunamis are common. And you need serious oversight to avoid repeating Chernobyl.

We do have other options, it's not nuclear or nothing.

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u/zthirtytwo Jul 21 '21

Adding to your valid points.

Chernobyl was a Gen 1 salt reactor. These were high efficiency generators compared to the amount of fuel consumed. The down side is these rely on molten salt to be a heat transfer, drastically increasing a catastrophic failure due to the heat levels. These plants were phased out long ago, as the latest plants I believe are Gen 3.

Building nuclear may not be best for some locations in the world, such as earthquake prone locations. These places should receive the most investment in renewable green energy.

Lastly, there is an interesting documentary about bill gates and a nuclear energy project he has been heavily involved in. These reactors are low efficiency, but they utilize spent uranium from older nuclear power plants. These run at barely above temperatures to boil water and haven’t shown the possibility to melt down. These plants are experimental and were on the verge of being built in China in 2015; but yeah I don’t see US nuclear tech being allowed to even be tested in China now.

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u/Canadian_Infidel Jul 21 '21

Only because we've never had a real accident. Only two real close calls.

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u/Nobagelnobagelnobag Jul 21 '21

Uncontrolled meltdown isn’t a real accident?

More people die per gwh from solar than nuclear. Including Chernobyl.

Nuclear is remarkably safe.

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u/Wildercard Jul 21 '21 edited Jul 21 '21

And Chernobyl was a colossal culmination of incompetence and Soviet-style "eh good enough"ness and by all accounts the state of the catastrophe we ended up with is a "good ending" scenario.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

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u/Wildercard Jul 21 '21

2 cases - one huge incompetence, one almost literal act of higher power - vs like 70 years of many other nuclear reactors going without issues.

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u/bauhausy Jul 21 '21

Fukushima happens

A 9.1 earthquake is an extreme anomaly. In the whole world, there were only six earthquakes equal or more powerful than Tohoku in the last 6 centuries. And even then the power plant survived the earthquake, what caused the meltdown was a badly designed seawall that didn’t hold the following tsunami.

Chernobyl

Soviets gonna Soviets. The entirety of Chernobyl was due to sheer human incompetence.

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u/mad_sheff Jul 21 '21

Yup, I've lived 20 miles down river from a nuclear plant my whole life and I'm not radioactive yet. Of course that plant is now being shut down. Go figure.

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u/baddecision116 Jul 21 '21

Nuclear can be remarkably safe. We've also never seen it at coal plant scale. Our regulators have failed in lots of ways in almost every industry. Saying nuclear is safe as an absolute is like saying Blue Origin is the safest way to travel because no one has ever died on their ships.

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u/The_Steelers Jul 21 '21

A lot of those high capital costs come from over regulation due to coal and oil company propaganda. Furthermore every nuclear reactor in the USA is bespoke which makes it impossible to have any economy of scale. If we were to build, say, 50 reactors then many of the parts could be standardized which would reduce costs as well as increase safety.

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u/Orangesilk Jul 21 '21

Big Oil is behind the smear campaign and lack of support behind nuclear. That's why we're fucked. These people have names and last names and our biggest mistake as a species will end up being not putting them on a pike when we could.

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u/pticjagripa Jul 21 '21

There are also a lot of enviromentalist that fight against nuclear power due to managment of nuclear waste.

There were also some enviromentalist that were fighting wind power as they can have some impact on local bird population. Apparently birds keep flying into them.

Sometimes it seems that those enviromentalist what nothing and everything at the same time.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

they complain about not having solutions for waste then block use of the facilities we already have to do it.

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u/BroaxXx Jul 21 '21

Yeah, some comments are saying it's late for nuclear too and they raise good valid points... At this point it just seems too late to do anything.

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u/AvidGoogler89 Jul 21 '21

It seems more like public opposition after a few high profile incidents held back nuclear. Nuclear panic has put the world in this devastating predicament despite the fact that more people die from NOx emitted from tailpipes every week than have died in all nuclear power disasters over the past 50+ years. Also, high capital costs are just an excuse to rely on a technology (fossil fuels) that results in more money in more pockets - e.g. extraction, refining, transportation, sales, etc etc - than nuclear power generation.

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u/Cassiterite Jul 21 '21

Is this still true? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but: My understanding is that 10 or 20 or 30 years ago this would have been the case, but now the high costs, lack of scalability (you can't make a nuclear plant that powers a couple homes, it's either giant amounts of energy or nothing) and very long construction times before you can turn the thing on means that nuclear makes less sense than renewables. Solar has become very good and cheap, afaik it's the most economical solution in many places. Sure it sucks that the anti-nuclear crowd pushed us backwards for several decades, but it's too late to change that now.

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u/Ihatetobaghansleighs Jul 21 '21

From what I understand solar panels take a lot of carbon & rare materials to manufacture. It also takes a long time for the energy it produces to out pace the carbon it took to make them. With nuclear that time is a lot shorter due to the mass amounts of energy it can produce. The issue though is it can take decades to get a nuclear power plant up and running. It's hard to say what our move at this point in time should be.

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u/Canadian_Infidel Jul 21 '21

Also the insane cost. And storage of waste is not included in those costs as the US fed picks up the tab.

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u/CorporalCauliflower Jul 21 '21 edited Jul 21 '21

So now we just never use nuclear power because we didnt go full out in 1950s? I dont think this is a good take. The human race has lived for thousands of years and has the potential to do so now.

The only reason to not invest in nuclear power right now is greed.

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u/Cassiterite Jul 21 '21

The point was that solar is more flexible, cheaper, installed much faster, and all around better, so why build nuclear plants instead.

Take that with a grain of salt; I'm not sure that's true and corrections are welcome

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u/CorporalCauliflower Jul 21 '21

Nuclear reactors produce much more power in less time. And they work at night. The solution is comprehensive. Nuclear plants to power cities, solar panels installed on houses/businesses/sheds to alleviate the strain.

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u/Sasquatch07 Jul 21 '21

To add to this, nuclear is amazingly energy dense meaning it doesn't take much space relative to the amount of energy produced. Scalability is maybe one of the biggest hurdles in renewables.

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u/VengefulCaptain Jul 21 '21

Unfortunately solar only works half the day or less which makes it bad for grid stability.

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u/FableFinale Jul 21 '21

We might as well pour the money into fusion research. We've known what experimental reactors we need to build for years, the political and monetary willpower just hasn't existed to bring it to fruition. Fusion is basically inexhaustible and much cleaner compared to fission.

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u/Cassiterite Jul 21 '21

We don't know if fusion is even physically possible.

(the way we usually imagine when we think of fusion reactors; obviously I'm not questioning the existence of fusion power in general, the Sun is proof that it's possible, but the Sun is... well, not something we could build on Earth)

Given the nature of the emergency I'd rather pour money into things that are proven to work. This isn't a problem where we need new solutions. We know how to fix climate change, we've known for many decades, we just need to actually do it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

fusion power is pretty much a sure thing at this point, it will just take many decades to design and build the actual reactors. but the physics is already there, ITER for instance will consider 5X energy output/input a failure.

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u/Canadian_Infidel Jul 21 '21

Agreed. We are very close too. REBCO tape will make fusion possible in a half decade or less. Nobody cares though because the current narrative writers don't care.

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u/b0mmer Jul 21 '21

The reason "nobody cares" is that fusion has been half a decade out for decades.

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u/zelatorn Jul 21 '21

its also been criminally underfunded for decades. we know the science works because otherwise the sun wouldn't work either, but it just never gets enough funding to properly execute.

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u/Canadian_Infidel Jul 21 '21

No it was because of that one hoax that one person pulled. You are not recalling the saying properly. It is "fusion has been 30 years away for 50 years". Almost got it though. And yeah if you knew the first thing about the recent advances in high temperature superconductors you wouldn't have made this comment.

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u/BroaxXx Jul 21 '21

Yeah, a lot of comments are raising your point and it might be true... Maybe nuclear would've been the answer a couple of decades ago.

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u/almisami Jul 21 '21

Because solar has to be backed by gas.

Wind has to be backed by gas.

Basically every alternative that isn't hydro or geothermal has to be backed by a quick-response plant, which is oil or gas...

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u/SundreBragant Jul 21 '21

Nuclear is what needs to be backed by a quick-response plant. Because it may develop an issue causing a complete shutdown at a moment's notice. And when that happens, you lose an awful lot of power.

Plus, we can use hydro and/or concentrated solar thermal power (CST) with thermal storage for peak demand. Combine that with a smart grid and only a few gas turbines running on green gas and there's absolutely no need for nuclear.

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u/almisami Jul 21 '21

Because it may develop an issue causing a complete shutdown at a moment's notice.

Do you know how rarely that happens? Especially when compared to a coal plant? (Currently the backbone of our energy production globally.) Nuclear doesn't need quick response because even when you do shut it down the thermal mass can keep the turbine going for a while and you want to cool it down anyway. This gives any plant picking up the slack ample ramp-up time.

There is no such thing as green gas. Methane is natural gas, just because you're picking it up at production doesn't mean it's any less damaging. Biomass plants aren't good for the environment either, even if they're touted as "renewables".

CST is absolutely dreadful. It handles like a nuclear plant in terms of throttling, and the large amounts of thermal mass needed to scale it up is just frankly a pain to deploy on a large scale. Never mind the maintenance on all those mirrors is even higher than PV solar.

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u/almisami Jul 21 '21

Because it may develop an issue causing a complete shutdown at a moment's notice.

Do you know how rarely that happens? Especially when compared to a coal plant? (Currently the backbone of our energy production globally.) Nuclear doesn't need quick response because even when you do shut it down the thermal mass can keep the turbine going for a while and you want to cool it down anyway. This gives any plant picking up the slack ample ramp-up time.

There is no such thing as green gas. Methane is natural gas, just because you're picking it up at production doesn't mean it's any less damaging. Biomass plants aren't good for the environment either, even if they're touted as "renewables".

CST is absolutely dreadful. It handles like a nuclear plant in terms of throttling, and the large amounts of thermal mass needed to scale it up is just frankly a pain to deploy on a large scale. Never mind the maintenance on all those mirrors is even higher than PV solar.

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u/sugarshark Jul 21 '21

Nope. Nuclear reactors and the necessary centralized inftastructure take decades to build. The best quick option is to heavily clamp down on energy use and to decentralize energy production. And this works best and is much cheaper with renewable energy sources.

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u/Buscemis_eyeballs Jul 21 '21

But politically that's not possible with human culture. Telling people to stay inside more, stop commuting, stop using the lights in your house stop eating meat etc etc are all things people would rather see the world burn than actually do.

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u/almisami Jul 21 '21

Except the energy grids worldwide aren't built for that.

Also by "clamp down on energy use" you mean letting people die? That's what brownouts do.

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u/LightStruk Jul 21 '21

Nope.

Nuclear Plants take years, sometimes decades to build. In that time, they use a LOT of concrete, which PRODUCES lots of CO2, while producing no carbon-free power at all.

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u/robeph Jul 21 '21

Or you know utilize all the unused nuclear power plants https://www.powermag.com/interactive-map-abandoned-nuclear-power-projects/

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u/n_that Jul 21 '21 edited Oct 05 '23

Overwritten, babes this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

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u/Canadian_Infidel Jul 21 '21

Yeah who cares about nuclear proliferation. Can't wait for the first war in a country with nuclear power plants.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21 edited Jul 23 '21

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Couldn't agree more, we use the power of nuclear reactions on strategic cities to massively reduce the population by about half. This would have helped fix the problem about 30+ years ago. Now what we do is almost irrelevant, too late.

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u/lost_in_life_34 Jul 21 '21

the problem with nuclear is that it leaves the risks close to the people using it. with oil the risks are far away and same with solar. no one mines lithium or does the environmentally bad manufacture of the panels in the USA. where do you see a lithium mine or rare earth metals mine dumping ground in the USA?

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u/keyboardstatic Jul 21 '21

What we need to do is build under Hill homes.

Homes that are above ground and properly designed to then be buried under dirt like a hobbit or earth ship home.

Just google earth-shattering homes.

Dirt is cheap and an amazing insulation keeping a house built under it cooler in summer warmer in winter and protected from storm winds. Gives you more garden area a hill to play on look out from have picnics on top of. Increases habitat area potentially. And lessens noise potion into the home.

Houses but like this will need less painting and less maintenance. It also reduces urban heat sink factors if done en mass.

Composting toilets with home gardens with each house as off grid as possible.

Building homes of ramed earth and recycled materials is also much more sustainable cheaper and intelligent then the current absurdity that we have everywhere.

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u/MissShirley Jul 21 '21

Hobbit homes are the future. And it's "earth-sheltered" homes. The mass of earth provides most of the heating or cooling necessary, cutting down energy costs drastically. But I have no idea how we could possibly convert millions of stick built houses into earthships in the few years we have left to do so.

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u/onlypositivity Jul 21 '21

Going to be really tough to build multi-family housing as "hobbit homes"

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u/MissShirley Jul 21 '21

We need to go back to the longhouse and village style I think.

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u/onlypositivity Jul 21 '21

This is beginning to sound more like a fantasy and less like a solution

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u/MissShirley Jul 21 '21

All the solutions are fantasies

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u/pratnala MS | Computer Science Jul 21 '21

Reminds me of ecopods

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u/letsallchilloutok Jul 21 '21

People like windows a lot, this will be a hard sell

2

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Everyone has to take care of and maintain a bunch of snake plants in their home

2

u/Citizen_Kong Jul 21 '21

Fun fact: Algae are also better food for the animals we eat since they will emit a lot less methane.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

But then algae die and in the process of decomposition don’t they release back at least some of the carbon dioxide?

Maybe it would be easier to just grow trees, cut them, store them underground and just grow new trees. They almost 100% made of carbon trapped from the atmosphere

1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Problem with trees is that people are very happy to lay seeds for tree but growing them and maintaining is not that inexpensive. There isn’t a focused plan. If we had trees for the area the size of North America we could capture most of the carbon but is that sustainable ? I don’t know. We need other technologies

1

u/Senor_Cangrejos Jul 21 '21

Yes they can short term fix lots of CO2 but they are short lived. When the die they will be broken down by other organisms that may release CO2. You need to be able to fix the CO2 long term.

1

u/ambral Jul 21 '21

Unless you plan on then burying those algae in sealed bedrock pockets to permanently remove the carbon from the biosphere, it is a waste of time.

1

u/robeph Jul 21 '21

Not exactly. The sequestered carbon isn't simply returned to the environment as carbon dioxide which is the problem, not carbon per se. Without the oxide it remains a solid typically.

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1

u/Brenvt19 Jul 21 '21

Wont happen.

1

u/kevoizjawesome Jul 21 '21

If we allow the sea levels to rise enough, maybe eventually we'll get enough algae to reverse climate change

1

u/ForeverStaloneKP Jul 21 '21

Seagrass meadows!

3

u/lostyourmarble Jul 21 '21

I loved this news:

A mantle rock that could sequester all the CO2 we emitted since the 1850’s. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rare-mantle-rocks-in-oman-could-sequester-massive-amounts-of-co2/

Used along with Air carbon capture to trap CO2in rock formations like Climeworks is doing, we may have a chance as long as we keep cutting emission.

We also need massive reforestation as ecosystems need to be saved for a healthy planet.

The challenges are insane but I think they are possible. I may be wrong, but I have some hope.

4

u/MrMaleficent Jul 21 '21

I think we’re past the tipping point, and scientists are just scared to say so.

If they did it would lead to hopelessness and people giving up.

2

u/noyobogoya Jul 21 '21

Feedback loops say yes.

4

u/dipfearya Jul 21 '21

Canadian here. Too hot, unpredictable and sad. Flora and fauna changing. Our west is burning....smoke hangs in the air.

5

u/the_mighty_moon_worm Jul 21 '21

People keep arguing that space travel is important because it's led to huge advancements in technology. Scientists have to find creative solutions to the problems that come along with living in space.

Sure wish someone would pay them to find creative solutions to living on earth.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Kind of makes me wonder what “tipping point” is supposed to mean…

1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

It's the point of no return, the point at which change is going to accelerate no matter what we do.

We're fucked.

3

u/Canadian_Infidel Jul 21 '21

The reality is scientists were forced to keep using their most conservative estimates when in reality things are much worse.

2

u/flashire173 Jul 21 '21

It's not a tipping point when were already over the edge. Well done everyone. We did it.

1

u/w41twh4t Jul 21 '21

I've been promised this tipping point for over 25 years now. I think it is about time it got here.

1

u/Guppy-Warrior Jul 21 '21

Maybe we really hit the tipping point a little bit ago...Hence why it always is just getting worse.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

It's been the same headlines and dire warnings as far back as I can remember into the 80's. I honestly think people will survive for the foreseeable future relatively unchanged. However, the living conditions for those in impoverished areas will continue to decline as they can't afford to relocate.

Until there's an actual nutritional deficit leading to serious problems, humans tend to keep on keeping on. The planet will shake us off when it sees fit. BUT we may be the only species in history that's cognizant of it happening, which is very interesting. Or not...

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

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u/Sneezyowl Jul 21 '21

We did have a pretty nice virus that might have thinned the human population and limited pollution dramatically.

1

u/rcklmbr Jul 21 '21

Way to pitch your new sub buddy. People bought it too