Heating is accelerating. IF we stop adding greenhouse gases to the air, the heating should stop. It won’t go back down without removing massive amounts of CO2, though.
Yes, net zero, which some companies and countries pledged to reach until 2050. Unfortunately it’s delusional, because they count on technological fixes being invented in the future and until then it’s “business as usual”.
Industries like cement, chemical and steel will never be net zero without carbon capture for example.
I feel like this is closer to the truth. Isn’t there a theory that theres about a 2 decade lag between the CO2 (or equivalent) being released and the effects of heating?
There are some tipping points that seem to have been hit - Amazon, Boreal forests, Baltic Sea methane, to name a few. Probably AMOC slow state as well. The Antarctic appears to be on a threshold. There’s no way we stop emissions altogether in the near term, and even if we did these tipping points mean that we would come to a different balance. For an idea of the scale of the challenge, all of our renewable energy so far hasn’t reduced fossil fuel reliance, it has only made up for some regions’ increases in energy usage.
I also recall that the studies showing that warming ceases quickly after emissions are not saying that this is true for minor emission reductions. Rather, the effect is only reached after bringing emissions to near-zero. The benefit is on a curve that is heavily weighted toward zero.
With as much damage has happened while we’ve idly watched, we should be acting like the rest of the tipping points are right around the corner. For all we know they could be.
The atmosphere stores negligible heat (only weather, not climate), but the ocean has a much greater capacity than the atmosphere, for both heat and CO2 (mainly in the form of HCO3-), and it takes a long time (centuries - millenia) to fully mix the ocean. Also it takes ages for icecaps to melt. If you really stop adding CO2, concentration in the atmosphere will go down slowly as it mixes into deeper ocean, but not back to preindustrial, the surface temperature will likewise go down slowly and partially after a slight lag, but ice will keep melting (-> sea-level rises) for a while. Other gases and aerosols make short term response more complex.
There’s no rule of thumb that summarises it, but I made an interactive model - here.
Heating is accelerating. IF we stop adding greenhouse gases to the air, the heating should stop. It won’t go back down without removing massive amounts of CO2, though.
It won’t stop unless we also remove the greenhouse gases that we put there
Unless I misunderstood, the article claims otherwise.
Yes, net zero, which some companies and countries pledged to reach until 2050. Unfortunately it’s delusional, because they count on technological fixes being invented in the future and until then it’s “business as usual”.
Industries like cement, chemical and steel will never be net zero without carbon capture for example.
Organic plant based cement is already a possibility, yet we’re still using the good old mixes purely to avoid change
I feel like this is closer to the truth. Isn’t there a theory that theres about a 2 decade lag between the CO2 (or equivalent) being released and the effects of heating?
Unless we crossed a tipping point. If so, the heating could continue although we stopped.
There are some tipping points that seem to have been hit - Amazon, Boreal forests, Baltic Sea methane, to name a few. Probably AMOC slow state as well. The Antarctic appears to be on a threshold. There’s no way we stop emissions altogether in the near term, and even if we did these tipping points mean that we would come to a different balance. For an idea of the scale of the challenge, all of our renewable energy so far hasn’t reduced fossil fuel reliance, it has only made up for some regions’ increases in energy usage.
I also recall that the studies showing that warming ceases quickly after emissions are not saying that this is true for minor emission reductions. Rather, the effect is only reached after bringing emissions to near-zero. The benefit is on a curve that is heavily weighted toward zero.
With as much damage has happened while we’ve idly watched, we should be acting like the rest of the tipping points are right around the corner. For all we know they could be.
@Neato @silence7
But how will the shareholders get that 17th yacht?
So we can continue on with increasingly worse warming of the planet, OR we can follow the plot of snowpiercer.
Yeah. Go Matrix and scorch the sky. Definitely no unintended consequences.
There are safer ways to sequester CO2.
The atmosphere stores negligible heat (only weather, not climate), but the ocean has a much greater capacity than the atmosphere, for both heat and CO2 (mainly in the form of HCO3-), and it takes a long time (centuries - millenia) to fully mix the ocean. Also it takes ages for icecaps to melt. If you really stop adding CO2, concentration in the atmosphere will go down slowly as it mixes into deeper ocean, but not back to preindustrial, the surface temperature will likewise go down slowly and partially after a slight lag, but ice will keep melting (-> sea-level rises) for a while. Other gases and aerosols make short term response more complex.
There’s no rule of thumb that summarises it, but I made an interactive model - here.