The role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024

Something to keep in mind in the comments when talking about climate change and CO2 levels is that it’s not the level so much as the rate. We’re on the path to doubling (or have doubled if you look at CO2 equivalents) global CO2 levels faster than likely any other time in earths entire history. We have the CO2 levels equivalent to a time period when the earths poles didn’t have ice caps and instead forests in the span of about 200 years.

Every organism and ecosystem you’ve ever encountered in your life is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we’ve recreated the conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it’s lead to a mass extinction. Yes it’s been hotter before but that change happened gradually. It’s like the joke about poison vs medicine, it’s the dose that kills you.

What is the temporal resolution of the ice cores or whatever else is being used to measure when the last “hot house” periods were? Because today we are measuring CO2 with minute-level resolution. But I feel like an ice core might be a year at best, probably much worse. Which if I’m right would mean we really don’t know how fast or slow we entered into the last hot period (the rate)

So it’s pretty clear we need to adopt solar radiation management r&d asap. Because that is the only feasible way we will stabilize the heat balance in the next few decades.

We had just that. But we accidentally banned it by banning sulfur in cargo ship fuel.

I have total fatigue about it. It is true, and also it is terrifying, and also it is completely debilitating to imagine doing anything effective about this.

The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad administration or one country's government. And there is a lot of progress happening.

It is?

To my understanding, the only time CO2 emissions were down was during covid.

While there are a few localized success stories, I'm not aware we've actually meaningfully impacted our trajectory.

To be abundantly clear: it's true that eg. Trump's administration will have limited effect, mainly because it's a global thing ... But global emissions have been rising, too.

People have predicted peak CO2 multiple times, but it hasn't actually crystalized beyond the shutdown year to my knowledge.

I think reality is a potentially a bit darker in that we really have impacted the trajectory, it is just grossly insufficient to have a meaningful change in the direction.

We now seem in the unfortunate place where we have kicked or are kicking off system dynamics that are going to cause a large scale reconfiguration of our life support system.

The upping was most clearly down 1940-1950. When shipping and/or industry took a hit. Together with the sulfur emissions debacle, it's clear that most interventions (either radiative cooling or at-source capture) need to focus on shipping.

But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!

https://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation...

I think we witnessed a profound paradigm shift last week - China is the new global driving force to avert climate catastrophy. The probably peaked CO2 output last year. Last yeear they reached their 2030 target for renewables as share of total energy production. Almost 60% of new cars sold there are electric. And China produced more PV cells in the first half of this year alone than have been installed in the US in sum, ever.

And now they stated a public CO2 reduction goal for the first time.

I suspect people in the US haven't really noticed this as much because the 100%+ tariffs on cars and PV isolate the country from the dramatic changes happening everywhere else. Here in Germany I can buy 2 kWp in panels plus an inverter for under 400€.

The US has turned to authoritarianism. It seems naive to think this is going to go away in an election.

Our government is owned by the ultra wealthy who pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of the common good. Some of these people are just cynical; others identify their narrow interests with the common good. In either case they’ll continue to steer our world toward self destruction.

The best thing to do isn’t to hide one’s head in the sand or place our faith in failed institutions. These are two kinds of denial. We should be building a base of popular power in labor unions. The ideology is solidarity and striking holds actual power over the ownership class. It’s really the only thing that has a chance of leading society out of the collapse we are witnessing around us.

We can say the growth curve is not exponential, its now linear. At the most hopeful, we can say its plateauing and we will hit peak carbon emissions soon (some say we've already hit it).

But all that's modeling, there are too many variables to really know.

No. Of course we shouldn't "place faith in our institutions" but there is a degree of "If Gorman is going to burn, let it burn all the more brightly". You can galvanize a lot of individual / collective action without the government when people see consequences enabled by authoritarian structures.

You might argue the ONLY progress -- in the US -- is not at all from the gov't but from private players genuinely caring about the issue. A lot of people wake up in the morning and decide they'd rather work on an important issue, like climate, than squeezing a tiny bit more profit for some soulless corporation.

I see the point you’re making now. Interesting perspective! That is a pretty cool angle I didn’t think of before. I’ll have to mull it over. Thanks!