That is absolutely great! But I will be really impressed if humanity as a whole ever "flattens the CO2 curve" -- still going up at a greater than linear rate!
At face value I was inclined to agree with you (SO2 causing acid rain and being generally impactful to health through cardiovascular and respiratory issues, damaging mammalian DNA, impacting hormones like testosterone etc.).
However given the strong role SO2 can play in reducing global warming, and that there are even proposals to introduce more SO2 to the atmosphere to achieve the Paris objectives, like most things in our complex interconnected world it gets a bit more complex.
Of course one hopes there are better responses to the changing climate than reactively doubling down on polluting contaminants into the atmosphere when that has contributed to the current mess and we clearly have narrow and incomplete understandings of systemic intervention.
Wow you guys are sensitive. I was trying to underline the hopelessness of what we are doing. I'm not condoning any illegal activity....jeez. But I'll leave. The hostility here is incredible.
definitly a bent mind, mixing "true hope" and "mass sabotage", but overlooking the scale of infrastructure involved in producing fossil fuels
and that destroying it would require a massive military industrial and technological base to do it with,hmmmmmmm
That realy, realy is a call for random terror.
I like to think of myself as 665, almost but not quite evil, but this guy goes that last bit,
blithly.Concerning given the goings on.
Takes all of the fun out of nibbling a bit at at the edge of (oh so) polite discourse.
I will have to up my game, as the last thing I want to do is encourage actual muckers.
> According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), 2025 will see renewables surpass coal to become the largest source of electricity generation. It also predicts that the next five years will see almost 3,700GW of new renewable capacity come online.
Looks like we got a good strategy. 3,700GW or 3.7TW versus the over 110,000TW provided by fossil fuels. Right on there...0.003% replacement in 5 years. Seems like a quick response to the climate crisis. /sarcasm.
Please provide a source for 110E3 TW for all fossil fuels, the US electrical grid time averages over a year about 0.4 TW in generation [0]. Did you actually mean TWh over a year, comparing instantaneous generation with annual production? was such a choice deliberate or accidental?
One thing I love is the continuing comparison to coal, even though coal is being phased out mostly from the expansion of natural gas, not the expansion of renewables. (keyword: mostly). Natural gas has risen to almost half our energy.
This is still a very good thing in terms of CO2 and air pollution. One can hope that renewables continue to expand at an exponential rate, eventually offsetting natural gas.
Right; natural gas in the US has gotten cheap. This has been a progressive trend (with some pauses) since natural gas was deregulated under Carter. The nuclear renaissance here in the US was knifed in the cradle because of natural gas prices becoming so low after a misleading burp upwards.
I remember you posting a similar comment last year. Certainly emissions have flattened, but just looking at temperature data from the last two years, it seems likely that we have already set in motion some positive feedback loops which is quite bad news. I suspect we'll have little choice but to intentionally alter the albedo of the atmosphere rather soon in order to at least buy our selves a bit of time.
It's about 20 years later than it should have happened, and we've got a lot of speed to scrub, but late is a heck of a lot better than never.
Climate change is accompanied by an incredible amount of doomerism. I've had lots of people tell me variations of "we're all doomed anyway, I'm going to vote for the drill drill drill party and party until the world ends".
If we don't celebrate the wins we do have, everybody will give up.
You are off by one derivation. Breaking would be putting the carbon from the atmosphere back into the ground, which we are not doing at all.
Your doomerism argument is a strawman, it is fact that we are still accelerating the current temperature excursion. If it helps you, we are at one of the coldest moments in earth's history, so most of what climate change will cause will have been there before.
Like when people took “two weeks to flatten the curve” with a silent “and then the pandemic is completely over” instead of the obvious “well then it has to go down later for it to mean anything”.
2025 emissions lower than 2024 emissions don't imply the flattening of the total ppm CO2 curve. It COULD result it that, but it's not a necessary outcome because of deforestation. Also, emissions accounting is sometimes wonky...
> Population is peaking soon which should be a good start for flattening that curve.
It might help but most of the world is still considered "in development", we need for that development to happen with sustainable energy sources, and for that it needs to be as simple and cheap to be harvested and used as it is for those countries to use fossil fuels today.
If that doesn't happen then these countries will use fossil fuels to develop, and the population peaking won't be of much help when those countries start emitting more per capita like many developed countries.
Yes, it's important that the development of large groups of people who don't emit much at all, leapfrog directly to more modern energy.
I think it's safe to say there is a large risk that a billion people in india will still use fossil fuel for a large part of their development. Their first cars will be internal combustion and so on. They'll use that increased wealth to eat more meat than they did before and so on. I'm not optimistic about our chances to change any of that.
I think there's signs of that happening already, as well as precedent. A lot of developing countries just kind of skipped ahead to modern internet infrastructure, for example, and solar is booming in India, especially, at the moment.
If the developing world develops, there will be less exploitable cheap labor, so everyone in already developed countries will have to start consuming less when their wages aren’t so disproportionally high compared to where their iPhone gets made.
Ignore everything this guy states. Look at his comments, he is an eco terrorist at best who benefits and uses technology himself but then turns around and wants to sabotage human advancement and the use of any fossil fuels.
"I believe the only true hope is mass sabotage of fossil-fuel producing infrastructure."
He is calling for terrorism in his posts and preaching his gospel. I personally don’t think terrorism should be tolerated in any form. Maybe it’s ok with you but not me. His gospel is hypocrisy and dangerous.
There is no such thing as polluting substances, only an accumulation of those. The problem lies in the fact that our technological process graph has too many sinks leading to an accumulation of 'dead-end' by-products. There is almost never such occurrences in nature, and when it does (great oxygenation event), the system manages to circle it back into the process graph.
Contrast this with current ecological recommendations: they boil down to reducing the production rate of such substances, which can only asymptotically delay the looming apocalypse.
> There is almost never such occurrences in nature, and when it does (great oxygenation event), the system manages to circle it back into the process graph.
It is actually recent earth's biosphere with its many negative feedback loops which is the exception here. Earth could have turned into a Venus or Mars if conditions were just slightly different, and it almost did several times.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Life never appeared on Venus or Mars as far as we know.
The question I want to ask is: why is there almost no existential pollution problems in nature ? Why does the way civilization lays out its own process graph lends itself so easily to dead ends ?
I visited China in 2014 and I have literally wondered out loud this morning whether air pollution has improved since then. I am gald to hear the answer is yes!
I've been visiting China every 1 to 3 years since 2014 and definitely in the last 4 years, on multiple visits, I've noticed that pollution is visibly lower. You can actually see the blue of the sky on most days. Everyone has noticed it. It's a massive change.
Yes. Some climate scientists believe that the unexpected increase in warming over the last couple of years is an unintended consequence of SO2 reduction.
The general quote from NASA climate scientists and others is that the recent years increase in warming is unexpected even after accounting for the reduction in marine fleet SO2 emmissions and the parallel increase in high atmosphere SO2 from a large volcanic eruption.
Marine fuels were the last remaining stronghold of anthropogenic SO2.
The two large scale changes in recent years of atmospheric makeup were the SO2 generation reduduction from marine fuel phase outs and the unuual high altitude water vaper injection from a volcanic eruption.
Atmospheric gas makeup changes are mapped from a number of global sites, and recently mutlispectral orbiting gas sensors have been fine scale mapping sources.
And cause health problems, acid rains and much more. It is not a solution.
With complex systems touching a variable impacts a lot of places, something that may become obvious in hindsight. Undoing how we triggered climate change, that is first drastically reducing emissions and then capturing the excess of greenhouse gases, looks like a less disruptive way to effectively solve the problem.
My prediction is that at some point in the next 50 years the problems of SO2 will be considered an acceptable tradeoff for the cooling. At least one major world government (or perhaps sufficiently wealthy oligarchs) will begin intentionally pumping SO2 into the atmosphere.
It is kinda nihilist statement. But most efficient tool against climate change is population reduction in places that produce most emissions per capita.
What a deranged take on the story... The green washing mostly comes from the west btw, China doesn't give a fuck either way, they just go where it's cheaper and more efficient/convenient for them at a given time. If anything they have more reasons than the US to go green because they don't depend on decades of wars for and dependence on petrol
I can find the same for Europe and the USA... the carbon credit system is a scam by default. And regardless, it's not a "china = communism = Stalin = propaganda" problem, it's a money problem
Its a western perverse incentives to lie to yourself + money combined with eastern face culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept) and maoist reality is what the loudest person in power shouts combined into a hyper toxic mix of lies. That whole investment would be so much more productive if went straight into a state governed fusion lab instead of into some pretentious "lets pretend" circus of fraud.
While you are right in saying China is a totalitarian regime, its implementation of state capitalism creates a lot of economic freedom, even though citizens still employ very limited personal freedom (as seen during COVID).
China's economy is very capitalistic, a far cry to the socialist west with its redistributive politices - and that's exactly why they're getting richer and slowly buying the rest of the world.
Once a country get rich, its population's tolerance for pollution drop, so this article is entirely plausible.
From personal anectodes I've heard from China, pollution improved greatly in the last decade. It's not just propaganda for once.
Mysterious. There own planned economy stats claim to have more coal power lined up for the years to come. And then there faked environment stats claim they produce less pollution. Its magic, going up and down at the same time.
