Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.
This reads like someone with the means to eat good food eating junk food and then putting themselves on weight loss drugs to counteract the effects. I'm sure temporarily it might work but I don't believe that the shocks that produce meaninful cooling effects are without consequence - in fact, I suspect they double the consequences by adding yet another factor to the destabilization.
I could be wrong, and it could a short term solution to stop the bleeding, but I have a deep suspicion of adding more things to the atmosphere given our history with the CO2 in question, tetrafluoroethane, etc.
Lookin at the wikipedia it does sound a lot like "chemtrails". They describe airplanes as being able to disseminate these aerosols and these days when I look up at the sky there is always a straight line of "cloud" forming behind airplanes.
So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well.
That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration
> apart from growing forests and keeping them protected)
I’m in a loop. I must be.
How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices.
Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.
There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff.
It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.
> in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.
And more trees have grown in their place, capturing an equivalent volume of carbon. Just because the carbon storage isn't static, doesn't mean it doesn't work.
The carbon in our atmosphere is already in the atmosphere and it won't go away. So there really is nothing more you can do other than take it out of the air and store it somewhere for as long as you can. Trees are a good way to store it until we have better technology/can handle climate change better
No. Pick a timeline that is influential, short or long. If it’s long, trees don’t capture carbon. Not in any scenario of population growth, which inevitably leads to some edgelord reductionist “maybe we should all die then for what we’re doing to Gia!” trite.
This “climate is a 100 years” thing while using ice core samples to make your case is not in support of science. It is in support of politicians.
The latter I’m personally getting sick of. And the people that can separate them, harm the former.
We're not really in a scenario of population growth - there is a direct correlation between being relatively well off and having less kids. Basically every developed nation hit peak population a long time ago, and the faster we pull other nations out of extreme poverty, the sooner their populations will start falling too
Even the most fatalistic estimates have world population peaking at 10 billion.
I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I think there will be more support for changing reflectivity (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).
Stratospheric aerosols: the dangers of this seem overblown. It is milder than a volcanic eruption. It seems like a reasonable thing governments should be attempting.
There are currently no power efficient and scalable ways to remove carbon dioxide from air or water.
Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being actively discouraged or canceled altogether.
You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8 cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.
> Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech...
This is mostly a US problem at this point. The rest of the world is adopting renewables considerably faster than anyone expected (and despite the best efforts of the current administration, the adoption curve is accelerating even in the US).
That said, it's still apparent that even optimistic estimates of renewable energy adoption aren't fast enough to fix the climate crisis on their own.
Have you tried asking one of your peers who claims to get good results to run a test with you? Where you both try to create the same project, and share your results?
I and one or two others are _the_ AI use experts at my org, and I was by far the earliest adopter here. So I don't really have anyone else with significantly different experiences than me that I could ask.
What I like about Forth is that it can be expressed at the lowest level of computation, and that it can be used to bridge that to the highest level of computation. For example, Forth only requires about 12 opcodes to run, which can be implemented in a few dozen chips. But now that you have that, since it's Turing-complete, you can now pull across a lisp or C compiler, and build a working operating system from there. Granted, that would be a lot of work, but it's relatively straightforward work, and that's always impressed me.
Large planes are all fly by wire. In a commercial airplane, you're talking about moving maybe a quarter-ton of metal for the rudder alone, and against high wind speeds. There is no way to move those without powerful servo motors.
The (as of a this year) second-most popular airliner, the Boeing 737, has fully mechanical controls for the ailerons and elevator (with hydraulic boosting). Elevator trim is also mechanical.
The pilot needs to be built like a gorilla to fly it, but primary flight controls continue work, even with a total failure of all electrical and hydraulic systems.
There is a range between less profit and no profit. As a shareholder, I'd rather have a functional society for all at the cost of a bit less profit, rather than being the richest in a world of ashes.
You really are on the side of letting companies steamroll customers throughout this thread. There's what's technically true, and there's the society most of us would prefer to inhabit. I want mine to be less extractive of profits by any means necessary.
An Aeon ago in 1984, I wrote a perceptron on the Apple II. It was amazingly slow (20 minutes to complete a recognition pass), but what most impressed me at the time was that it did work. Since that time as a kid I always wondered just how far linear optimization techniques could take us. If I could just tell myself then what I know now...
Not allowing something to exist is a really strange way of conceptualizing reduction of harm.
I'm perfectly fine eating something that was alive, so long as it was treated with respect and was killed humanely. Doing so connects you, a living being, to other living beings that are part of the circle of life, which live and die the same way you and I will.
Unless you are actively managing your own herd or actively hunting I don’t see how you are connecting to nature at the grocery store.
People don’t care as long as it tastes good. The current methods we have for farming meat do not scale and we need to work on alternatives. Meat is tasty and people want to eat it.
Innovation will continue in the lab grown meat sector and when it eventually scales it will over take traditional methods. Current factory farming is anything but natural and there is plenty of harm being done.
Would you respect being eaten as part of the circle of life? What about your family?
Where is the line drawn?
Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
When the fish is yanked out of the factory farm and suffocated in air or chilled and frozen alive do you think they experience this respect we're talking about? If so, where?
Does the operator say thanks to each fish before their brutal, agonizing, often prolonged for market death?
'respect' is about the most stupid thing I can think to bring up when referencing loss of life in animals.
It's a meta human concept that means nothing other than the mans approval of method -- it means nothing with regard to the animal or the suffering.
> Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
I think if you could choose between that and being slowly consumed by five or six coyotes from the ass forward, you'd go for the cattle bolt. I have a ton of problems with the US meat industry (to the point where I only eat meat once a month or so unless somebody is throwing it away), but there are ranchers out there who do try to do their best for the food they raise.
One has human moral responsibility, the other doesn't.
I actually do think, if we solved all the other problems in the world and had time left over, it would be right to intervene in nature to stop the harms you described too, and that conversation is a pandora's box of its own. But I don't think the upshot of these harms in nature is that we're also allowed to engage in similar harms at any scale we choose, as long as the badness isn't as bad as what happens in nature. Mainly because that comparison sidesteps the role of unique human moral responsibility and implies an unmade argument that analogies to nature can serve the function of authorizing human-initiated moral harms.
Depends on the context, not necessarily weird. If the choice was between “world A” where sentient beings were perpetually bred into existence to be perpetually tortured until they died and “world B” where the breeding stopped and the beings became extinct, it would be insane to favour world A over B.
Farming them into existence creates moral responsibility, and killing then annihilates the remaining value of a life for which you were morally responsible.
The "connection" you're advocating appears to be a more a romanticized free association (along the lines of "we are all stardust") than a specific conceptual argument accountable to the interests of the animals being harmed.
> I'm perfectly fine eating something that was alive, so long as it was treated with respect and was killed humanely. Doing so connects you, a living being, to other living beings that are part of the circle of life, which live and die the same way you and I will.
Would you say the same thing about killing other humans for food? If not, why not?
I'll answer for that person. If humans were naturally cannibalistic then I think they'd agree. For instance, if we were spiders it would seem pretty natural to eat each other. But the fact is that cannibalism, even among the biggest fans of CAFOs, is just not that much fun.
I'd ask the poster a similar question though. If a monkey or chimp was treated with respect and killed humanely, would they eat that?
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