this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions (thebulletin.org)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I get that $500/t seems like an absurd price, but honestly that's not wildly out of line with what the cost of emissions likely are

Even if we eliminate ALL emissions, we will also need some degree of DAC in the mix. You don't fix an oil spill by closing the well. You close the well and then cleanup the spill. And if you wait to develop the technology to clean up the spill until after you closed the well, you've fucked up. It's too late.

There's a presumption in this kind of publishing that money spent on DAC necessarily is being pulled from other projects. If that's true, that's a disaster. But these DAC projects ALSO have to happen. They just have to. And the first and second generations of the facilities aren't going to be very good -- neither were solar panels.