I think it's honestly silly to discuss money at all when discussing habitability of the planet. No amount of money is too great to keep the planet habitable.
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
152 points (98.7% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5240 readers
653 users here now
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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, but it's the only language decision makers understand.
There's nothing silly about it. The people who matter in this argument only turn their heads to money.
Because they are silly people. So yes, the tunnel view of the moneyed is completely silly.
future generations would rather pay it off than have a destroyed world
but... but WAR. we GOTTA have war, what would we do without war???
Money is the only thing the rich care about
Oh, but that will all happen after the rich jerks who caused all this are dead, so it doesn't matter! Why would they do anything to stop it?
EDIT: Plus they already have their apocalypse bunkers lined up so even if it all hits sooner, who cares about the poors right?
I just don't understand how these people don't just do their "jobs," they always used to say they are the Great Job Creators and profits were the reward of creating those jobs.
Ok. So create "climate friendly" jobs that will take the X trillions and make yourself profit...
If the money is there to take and these people are so Hard Working™ then why can't they just do the right thing AND profit?
Because doing the right thing might lead to ever so slightly less profits in the direct short term. Everyone knows that short term gains at the cost of your future is the best course of action
The numbers are so mind-bogglingly out there, its just hard to fathom, let alone believe it can actually happen.
I was working on some back of the napkins this weekend. I came up with the number 70 trillion megagrams of CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. If you've got a better number, would love to know but its what I got.
For reference, Mauna Loa is about 70 trillion cubic meters from ocean floor. So just round numbers, hand-wavey estimates, thats how much carbon we have to get out of the atmosphere. The largest mountain on earth.
I am sorry, but a bit of searching more then doubles the problem
However it is propably smarter to store just the carbon in the form of coal. That would only be 0.475 trillion t. Thats like 1200 times the global paper production in mass.
However it is propably smarter to store just the carbon in the form of coal. That would only be 0.475 trillion t. Thats like 1200 times the global paper production in mass.
So I tried doing my calculations with better data.
My estimate is that there are 2041 gigatonnes of co2 in the atmosphere remaining post industrial revolution. This equivalent to about 5% of the mass of Mauna Loa, in the form of wood equivalent carbon. Still a bewilderingly large amount, but much smaller.
We would need to sequester approximately 1,133,900,000,000 megagrams of wood from trees to offset these emissions.
Would also love a sanity check. I'm using this dataset and some conversion factors for my math: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?country=~OWID_WRL
Wouldn't it be a 1m square base tower the same height as the mountain? Nowhere near the mountain's volume.
A 1m square tower that size would only be 4,169 m ^3 . Mauna Loa is mostly basalt, which weighs about 2.9 Mg per m ^3 . This tower would therefore weigh about 12,000 tonnes. You'd need almost 6 billion of those towers to get to the 70 trillion Mg figure.
Mauna Loa's actual mass is probably about three times that number because of the density of the rocks in it, but in terms of orders-of-magnitude estimation it was about right.
Thank you
Oh hey! Another signpost on the road to oblivion!
These numbers are getting too big
1 million seconds is 11 days. 1 billion seconds is 31 years. What is 1 quadrillion seconds?
31 million years
Holy shit.