Climate Change Tracker

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.

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.

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.