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447 points Brajeshwar | 2 comments | 03 Sep 23 14:53 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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alexchamberlain ◴[03 Sep 23 17:11 UTC] No.37372056[source]▶
I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.

With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

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abraae ◴[03 Sep 23 17:41 UTC] No.37372367[source]▶
CO2 levels have gone up by a third just since I've been alive.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that's an enormous problem that must be solved. To be honest, with the house well and truly on fire, who cares about hypotheticals like lithium leaching.

I feel the graphs on this site are underselling the problem. The scale should be "last 60 years", "last 30 years". The changes we are making to the environment are profound and speak for themselves.

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nvm0n2 ◴[03 Sep 23 18:08 UTC] No.37372676[source]▶
You actually do need to be a rocket scientist of a sort. You think CO2 increasing by that much is a problem because you've been told it is, probably since birth. It's not something you can observe directly with your own eyes, because it's all about small long term trends.

In practice it's rocket science because:

- The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions.

- There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory)

- Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.

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adrian_b ◴[03 Sep 23 19:26 UTC] No.37373494[source]▶
While the level of CO2 cannot be sensed directly, the climate change is something that I have seen with my own eyes, without anybody telling anything about it.

Where I live, in Europe, since I was a little child and until now, the climate has transitioned from winters during which there were three months or more of continuous snow cover to winters during which it snows at most once or twice and the snow melts immediately, usually in a few hours.

When I was a child, temperatures under minus twenty Celsius degrees were not unusual, while now there are more than ten years since the last time when I have used my winter jacket and my winter boots.

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nvm0n2 ◴[03 Sep 23 19:34 UTC] No.37373588[source]▶
If you were a child in the 1960s or 1970s then this is surely the case. However, if you'd been a child in the 1930s and then were talking about climate in the 1960s or 1970s it'd have been the other way around, you'd be talking about how it'd got colder.

You can't extrapolate from a feeling about a single lifetime to hundreds of years into the future, that's just nowhere near enough data points. Speaking personally, I've seen no difference in number of snowy winters over my lifetime.

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1. adrian_b ◴[03 Sep 23 20:02 UTC] No.37373895[source]▶
That is false.

All the written texts that I have seen from the last few hundred years describe winters identical with those from when I was a child. The same is true for much more ancient texts, even ancient Latin and Greek texts, though those are more ambiguous.

There is no doubt that at least during the last two thousand years there has never been any period with temperatures as high as during the last 40 years, and during these 40 years the monotonic increase of the temperatures has been obvious, e.g. 15 years ago we still had a few weeks with snow per year, but then the weeks have become days, and then during the last few years the days have been reduced to hours.

I am living in an area with continental climate, far from the sea, which previously had large temperature differences between summer and winter. Now the average summer temperature has also increased, but that is much less obvious than the increase of the winter temperatures from below zero Celsius degrees to above zero. I assume that in areas closer to sea coasts the changes in the average temperature must be less noticeable, as they must be buffered by the water.

Besides the historical texts, the fact that during the last two thousand years there has never been such a warm climate in Europe has also been recently confirmed by the study of tree rings.

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2. nvm0n2 ◴[03 Sep 23 21:14 UTC] No.37374660[source]▶
> There is no doubt that at least during the last two thousand years there has never been any period with temperatures as high as during the last 40 years

The archaeological record says the opposite. I don't know what Latin or Greek texts you're reading because they are full of references to things that can't be done today.

The Vikings were practicing agriculture in Greenland. [1] That's impossible now, it's too cold.

The Greenland climate was a bit warmer than it is today, and the southernmost tip of the great island was luscious and green and no doubt tempted Eric the Red and his followers. This encouraged them to cultivate some of the seed corn they brought with them from Iceland.

Bison skeletons have been found in mountain caves at altitudes that imply it was drastically warmer in the past [2].

From this it can be concluded that the beech limit but also the forest line during the »wisent time« (6,000 to 1,200 years before today) was much higher and the average summer temperature had to be at least 3 to 6 °C higher than today. Oaks (Quercus) at an altitude of 1,450 metres around 2,000 years ago also indicate a climate approximately 4 to 7 °C warmer than today.

This is well beyond the level that climatologists assure us means global destruction.

The fact that it was warmer in the past was not actually considered controversial up until Michael Mann started drawing his incorrect hockey-stick graphs. Go back just 20 years and you'll find the warmth of the Roman period being discussed quite openly, like this map [3] of suspected Roman England vineyard locations in which one is as far north as Lincolnshire, impossible in today's climate. This 2001 archaeological paper doesn't comment on the fact that it was warmer back then because everyone knew it and the fact was considered unremarkable.

Climatologists have done a great job of not only erasing this history but making it verboten to point out. Yet the problematic facts remain. Climatology doesn't have reliable methods for reconstructing past temperatures, has sparse data even for the modern era and routinely makes claims directly at odds with very well understood historical evidence.

[1] https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-archaeology-denmark/vi...

[2] http://www.museumgolling.at/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/9_Sch...

[3] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/27661.pdf (figure 6)