[discussion] we have officially entered uncharted territory
(midwest.social)
A404
Anarchismam honestly scared for the future. what are we supposed to do?
Literally, the moral and logical answer to your question is to lead a bloody revolution and end this by force tomorrow to prevent absolutely as much poison from leaking out as possible. Not because it will save human lives necessarily (although I think the rates of death from such a revolution as compared to a few decades of worsening conditions before we get to the same point of lowered emissions is just about a wash), but because it could possibly save some measure of biodiversity which will allow for the POSSIBILITY of humans continuing as a species in some randomly calmer areas among the chaos.
That being said, I have been thinking that for a long time and haven't worked myself up to trying it. Dying painfully is kind of scary, even if you don't like living.
If you live in California or other areas where this will cause high flood risk, it could be worth doing some planning in case you need to evacuate. In my area at least, the models are showing some terrifying possibilities for how much rain we could get. Also talk to your neighbors and see if they need support or if they can cooperate with you in providing assistance tool others in the event that something like this happens.
In terms of the bigger picture I truly don't know... everything we've tried so far has failed. I guess anything you can do to throw sand in the gears of the planet destroying machine makes things a little better in the future. But the next couple decades are probably already baked in to be a bit rough at this point.
Lol I'm so fucked
Yes, it is too late to stop it.
But every 0.1 degrees makes a difference. So if you care, efforts are still worthwhile. There is no hope for civilization to survive as we know it, but the less we emit the better chance something liveable is waiting on the other side.
In short, you, me and everyone alive today and their kids and their grandkids and probably more....are absolutely fucked. We have to try to care about people who won't be alive for 100 years yet. But that's still worth it.
Atmospheric aerosals are already emitted into the atmosphere in huge quantities and are already cancelling out some of the effects of CO2 buildup. By deliberately increasing these, deliberately adding aerosols intentionally, rather than as a byproduct of combustion. The cost would be pretty affordable, and we could completely eliminate the extra heat retention of our higher CO2 levels.
Obviously there are risks, but it's not like we haven't already been adding huge amounts of aerosols to the atmosphere with little negative effect. It's not a perfect solution, but it sure as hell is better than the alternative.
But people have weird attitudes about it. The same folks who are firmly convinced that climate change has now doomed us all will often oppose atmospheric engineering efforts like this based on vague fears about messing with forces we don't understand. Obviously any technique will have unintended consequences, but when the alternative is civilization and biosphere collapse, it seems pretty damn silly to be worrying about hypothetical unforeseen consequences.
"Weird attitudes"? "Vague fears"?
Spraying chemicals in the air does nothing to fix ocean acidification, which will collapse marine life, which will make life hell on shore as well.
And will indirectly make the ocean acidifcation problem worse, since people will continue using fossil fuels.
If it even works at all, which is far from certain.
And blocking the sun won't have any adverse affects on plant life? You know, the primary carbon sink?
The effort to prevent climate change pales in comparison to the effort it would take to plan, deliver, and maintain, a controlled aerosol program like that.
The math has been done, I will see if I can find the source. If you're going to go through that much effort, you may as well just prevent it.
Also, termination shock. There is no free lunch. If the aerosol program ever stops or fails, the rebound effect of the increased solar energy in a now even more CO2 warmed world.....every year you're loading that bomb with more and more explosives.
Everything I've seen is the cost would be quite manageable. Sure, you're talking billions a year. But the figures I've seen are that it could be funded by something like a fraction of a penny per gallon of gasoline sales. It would require international cooperation, but it might be as simple as just adding an additive to jet fuel.
Termination shock is a legitimate fear. But again, the cost is relatively cheap. It's not something we can't continue to fund even if we have a major depression or a world war.
I couldn't justify rolling the dice on this if the stakes weren't so dire. But look at it. We're literally talking about the near-certainty of complete societal and ecological collapse from climate change. I'll trade "possible death" for "certain death." It's not the perfect solution, but we are well past the point of perfect solutions.
And moreover, it gives us what we really need: TIME. We have a path to a carbon-free future. But a planetary civilization is the slowest of ships to turn. We're trying to completely revamp the very material foundations of our entire lives. Solutions like atmospheric CO2 removal are not practical with today's technology. But, in principle, with sufficiently cheap power and good enough automation, meaningful direct air capture should be possible.
For example, by 2050 the world will be pretty awash in solar panels. Project the production curves forward, and we'll be sitting on a massive abundance of cheap available power. Especially in the summer time, we'll have access to vast amounts of otherwise wasted power. And if you had really good automation and robotics by then? Maybe then it becomes possible to affordably construct an industrial complex that would rival the current world's petrochemical complex...all just to take CO2 out of the air. Totally impractical now. But 2050? Or 2100?
Or, in the worst case, you don't need to sustain this forever. My understanding is that the main mechanism that governs the timing is ocean currents. It would take about a thousand years for ocean currents to move enough water up to the surface and back down to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels, but we're talking a task on the order of centuries, not forever.
I do believe that something like what you're suggesting is going to be necessary to avert the total collapse of civilization as we know it. However, the part that trips many up, including myself, is that what you are proposing is a last ditch effort which should be taken after all other reasonable steps have been taken. I think we'll get to the point where that discussion is necessary, but first we need to do what we can to limit emissions. If we don't then we're just going to give those with the power and influence to make changes an excuse not to.
In short, we can't even get the world to agree to address the problem in a reasonable timeframe. That step has to be behind us before we start seriously considering geoengineering in pretty much any form.
For one, we're going to need a bigger chart.
We can always change the scale. Logarithmic scale is always an option. At least, up until the total collapse.
There's a triple-whammy coming between the fuel/fertiliser crisis, economic collapse, and El Nino. The system has no reserve left to absorb any of them, and their contradictions are going to feed into each other as a cascading collapse. In a moment of world-historic rupture like this, those contradictions will be plainly visible to people who deeply feel them. It's going to be like the kind of polycrisis that drove radical movements in the 1930s, but potentially worse. There isn't going to be any kind of institutional answer which meets the questions people will be forced to ask, and they don't have the language to ask or answer those questions themselves coherently.
Now's the time to double down on reading eco-feminist and scientific theory. Mutual aid projects are poised to become a much more impactful tactic, but leftists have to communicate their wider socioecological importance and make it like a post-wildfire town rallying together. Linking ecocentric localism with supporting families is going to give the public an offramp from liberal environmentalism and bourgeois electoralism. Otherwise the reactionary answer to the polycrisis is going to be looting local landscapes for price-gouged commodities, undermining the environment's ability to recover in time for the next climate shock. I think "bread, roses, and habitat too" is going to be a very resonant kind of message when the entire urban ecosystem is maximally alienated. We're the one group in society which is going to have some kind of holistic solution if we can seize the moment with a critique meeting the human and natural sides of it.
Usually I'd hold out hope some brilliant people can figure out teraforming or some way to reverse this. Except in this world some company would buy the patent and destroy it or something. I still have some hope, but its buried under so much cynicism.
Right now I'm building a knowledge base to hopefully create processes to enzymatically catalyze chemical reactions. Most importantly reactions that incorporate CO~2~ into sugars and nitrogens into amino acids (and atmospheric nitrogen into, well, not atmospheric nitrogen). If successful we wouldn't have to rely on increasingly unstable/extinct environmental systems for nutrition and materials because we could create nutrients and other plant-based stuff in some sort bio-reactor-like machine.
It's difficult because mostly I just want to walk into the sea as I often think it's mostly too late for any sort of intervention.
This sounds interesting. Could you share an example of how that works?
The idea is to cut out photosynthesis from the food chain. I mean, we have hydroponics, but those require nutrient washes which AFAIK still rely on plants which means it's still susceptible to environmental damage/collapse. As well, using energy to power special light bulbs just to convert them back into energy in a plant is kind of silly imo.
Take the biosynthesis of Vitamin A for example; the reaction that produces it is catalyzed by an enzyme called retinal dehydrogenase which uses NAD+ to remove the hydrogens from retinal (hence the name!) and produces retinoic acid (AKA Vitamin A). Without the enzyme this reaction can still happen, just it would take millions of years to produce one molecule (catalysis).
The NAD+ is turned into an NADH (NAD+ is like an empty dump truck, NADH now has the hydrogen and the electron from the reactant), but the NAD+ was 'created' via photosynthesis (I still don't know exactly where the NAD+ comes from), so my goal, as it were, is to create standardized set of reactions to produce compounds like Vitamin A in standard conditions (room temp and pressure). The enzymes themselves are created in different ways, perhaps directly after transcription (from the RNA polymerase (RNAp)) or afterwards when two clumps of proteins are brought together somehow (enzymes making enzymes?).
In short, I want to create a "cellular matrix" in like a steel chamber or something. The electrons produced by photosynthesis would instead come from, say, a solar panel or whatever; then one would just have to supply normal air (with nitrogen) and water, to create their food instead of attempting to grow plants in increasingly non-viable conditions. I imagine it producing something like tofu that also has all the nutrients and sugars one would need for the day. This still might require as much land as a factory, but it could also be just another appliance one can have in their kitchen.
There is certainly a whole lot of issues to overcome, most I don't even know about right now, but if it works people won't have to rely entirely on capitalist systems to feed themselves. Hopefully not at all.
Also this is like the first time I've written it out. Some things I haven't studied in a while (or at all really), so they might not be exactly right.
