Trying to reverse climate change won’t save us, scientists warn

Two types of people reading this:

"Oh no! We should do everything we can to mitigate the damage."

and

"Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I'm doing."

And it's the latter that got us here in the first place.

“Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I’m doing.”
And that last group is going to be angry when they can't keep doing their stuff when insurance rates go insane so they can't buy houses or cars, or when food prices keep going up even faster than they are now.
- But but but... It's because immigrants. And trans somehow idk
It's the parable of office pizza: some people take 1 slice because there are many people to feed.
some people take 3 slices, because there are many people to feed.
And industrialists!
Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes.
It doesn’t make any difference what got us here in the first place. What matters now is what options are the best from now moving forward.
These scientists seem to say that trying to reverse climate change isn’t the right path forward. I wonder why.
edit: I wonder what makes them think that reversing climate change won’t work.
Someone was so offended by their misreading of my comment that they went through and downvote-bombed every comment in my history.
- What they're saying is that trying to reverse climate change won't be enough. It doesn't mean it isn't the right path, just that it won't go far enough.
- One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive. -- Hannah Arendt
- Because it won’t work? That’s what I got from the article. I’m not sure what else you’re implying.
Two types of people reading this, the cannibals, and the cannibees
- And now I’m just picturing myself cracking open a can of beer only for bees to start flying out!

Tipping point has tipped?

The one I remember scaring the hell out of everyone is the permafrost melt.

Thaw out enough permafrost and it releases enough greenhouse gasses to self perpetuate. No human interaction required.

https://www.space.com/methane-beneath-arctic-permafrost-climate-feedback-loop

There are many tipping points, and we dont always know if we've hit one yet or not. The drastic increase in sea temperature the last two years is possibly a tipping point we've passed, esp since the warmer the water is, the less co2 its able to absorb. OMAC shut down (if it happens) is possibly a tipping point, which will only feedback loop into warming waters.
Honestly, the permafrost melt is more likely to be the KO punch after one or more other tipping points accelerate it.
Yeah and it was pretty much going once we hit the twenty teens but took awhile to notice. At this point its about slowing things down as much as possible.

Startups are developing a whole suite of technologies to try to help

Do not think that they are seriously trying to save the planet.

(If they had wanted that, they should have done it 30-40 years ago)

They just want to make money, like everybody else.

I mean, the whole “startups are doing x” is really code for “venture dollars have been made available for entrepreneurs to explore x”. Startups these days are chasing fields which have investment dollars, so this means the rich are starting to invest in the tech a little more earnestly
Yeah no, it's just about the latest money grab before we all die
- They're are decent people in this world who want things to be better. Sometimes they even have money.
  Also, because we can only really see the world as ourselves, we tend to think everyone else thinks like us. So it's very telling when people think everyone else is evil.

If the people won't rise up for the sake of their own children then the only solution is to out spend climate change. Capitalism won't save itself, it will monetize the downfall. So in a way these tech companies are doing exactly what their suppose to but not really what they should.

People won't even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction
- Can't argue with that. At the end of the day we are another mammalian creature that runs around killing, fucking, and shitting then we die. The ecosystem of today dying is of no consequences to the dinosaur, the wooly mammoth, or what ever critter that roamed these same lands. I say build the buildings big enough and strong enough for the sentience of tomorrow to unearth them and wonder. Wonder hard enough and we are reborn.
Not sure if the future tense 'will' is appropriate here

The problem is people are only going to change their behaviour once the consequences hit them, and with global warming, the consequences won't really hit them until a long time later.

The second problem is the consequences are dramatic. And very hard if not impossible to turn around.

To really get people and companies to change their behaviour, we would need an immediate consequence to behaviour that is bad for the environment.

Bottom line is, some people try, some people don't give a shit, and in the end we will have to deal with it.

I hope governments are watching carefully, we will need to keep a lot of water away from us in the future, and we'll have to deal with the changing climate too.

Governments will fail. Wherever unpopular "Green" Measures are implemented, the right-wing cockroaches appear, destroying any discourse.
The consequence will be a global war by stupid populists who think that is one solution (which it kind of is,... Dead people won't emit CO2)
- In the Netherlands a number of cities were banning fossil fuel for deliveries in the city. It was in planning for years, easing into implementation.
  Our new government just scrapped all of those plans because the largest party doesn't believe in climate change, and another party in the coalition is the "farmer's movement" party and opposes environmental regulations.
  😢
We’ll have a big environmental 9/11 moment where a major American city becomes permanently uninhabitable and then there will alot of handwringing about “What could we have done!?” Then we’ll start getting lukewarm serious about it for maybe a few years, but by that point it’s way too late.
- So far, we have smaller towns wiped off the face of the earth and can’t seem to figure out they should be moved rather than rebuilt
people are only going to change their behaviour once the consequences hit them
Or if there's a proper incentive to change. We're seeing that incentive today with solar becoming cheaper than other energy sources, so it's getting a lot of adoption. We do incentivize those, but they're honestly about at the point where we don't need subsidies to get people to switch, and the subsidies merely accelerate adoption.
I'm a perennial optimist, and I'm confident we'll continue to innovate our way out of problems. We'll be late like we always are, but we'll also innovate ways to "catch up." Maybe we'll mess w/ geoengineering in the arctic (we're already experimenting w/ cloud seeding and thickening glaciers), or maybe we'll come up with other options in the future. I honestly don't know, but what I do know is that once we're convinced there is a problem, we do a pretty good job of solving that problem. Look at COVID vaccine development, lead poisoning, or recovery of endangered species.
We're usually late, but we are also pretty good at engineering our way out of problems. Solutions probably end up costing more than they would with prevention, but I'm confident we will come up with solutions, it just might take a bit of... encouragement from mother nature.

well yeah, you can't just try, you need to actually do it.

Stupid title, grammatically at least.

This is a by-product of modern society (maybe late stage capitalism). We need to be sold a "solution" to a problem. Reducing consumption is not something that can easily be sold hence these carbon capture, recycling plastic "solutions".

Unless someone can make money off of it, reducing emissions is going to be difficult.

Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)
The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.
Also... always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.
- So, because I can afford an EV , to electrify, to add solar, I also get a carbon bonus to sell or bury.
  While normally I like where you’re going, we’re already past the point of early adopters deciding to do the right thing in lot of ways and need to scale up for affordability.
  Or if your goal is to influence more personal decisions, like how much meat you eat and what temperature you set your thermostat, I’m not sure it’s enough
Imagine if you could get FREE MONEY by not using all your energy coinz!
Carbon capture does not make money, wtf?
- Carbon capture doesn't make money. Selling the service of carbon capture does.
Things that reduce consumption are frequently successful in capitalism. Generally, using less, costs less. There are always those selling a thing who are trying to increase the consumption of that thing, but often at expensive of those selling a competing thing. One successful way of doing that is to be cheaper to buy or run or both, by doing more with less.
However, sometimes we want something to be made with more a bit more to last longer and be repairable.
Raw capitalist won't do all this on its own. The invisible hand isn't very good at planning long term. Governments need to structure markets for outcomes they want, and keep measuring and correcting.
It's simple, you have a shared resource running out, nobody wants to grab less of it.
Grab less of it yourself - the others will compensate for you. Produce some of that resource - the others will just profit from it for longer.
The biggest emitters are too strong to be climate-crusaded, the smaller ones do successful bribing and greenwashing, but I think there will eventually be climate crusades - against those poor bastards who formally fail to do something right, but don't really contribute meaningfully to emissions.
Other than finding some wonderful (like in Total Recall) process to turn fossil fuels into matter practically not separable and not usable as fuel, I don't know what one can do.
Profitable personal mobile nuclear batteries are still not reality.
Some new magical principle of producing energy, sufficiently decentralized (here go big NPPs). There's none, so prepare for dark future.
- As far as energy production goes, we already have the technology: solar, wind, nuclear. We also already have the technology for cars and personAl transportation. Above all we have transit. If we can get our shit together with things we already know, we’d be in better shape. If we would have done it as little as ten years ago, we could have stayed within the Montreal targets for global warming.
  Now it’s no longer enough. We need to fix harder areas as well: aviation, shipping, grid storage, steel and cement, etc, and we need it asap … how is there still not any urgency?

Really?!

!

We shit on redditors for being arrogant and having grating personalities.
Yet it's ridiculously common to come into a thread here and see it flooded with low effort "well duh!" Comments.
Lemmings apparently know everything and everything is obvious to them.
Which doesn't even make sense here. A lot of smart people are dumping money into carbon capture as a way to offset what we've done. Yet here you are, so smart, that this is obviously wrong.
- There’s a good chance we’ll need to try, so we need to have that technology. However it would be so much cheaper and easier to moderate our energy use, electrify, and use renewables

This is clearly a "why not both" situation.

Emissions must be cut and new technologies for reversing existing damage must be developed. There's a whole bunch of different things that needs doing, because there is simply no single solution, but using one approach to argue against another is certainly not helping anyone.

There's a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:
Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.
“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.
It's obviously a matter of "why not both?", and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that'll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.
Yeah, though I think currently only emissions cutting should be implemented, mostly because damage reversing tech like DAC take green energy that could otherwise be used to more effectively cut emissions elsewhere. Once we start getting excess green energy to do such things, then it should be implemented. It should still be researched and developed now tho
Exactly, which is why I don't get the point of this article.
Yeah, even after we get emissions under control there will still be problems, and we'll tackle those when we get there.
- I think the point is that some capitalists, both in business and in politics, encourage us to put our faith in future carbon capture so they can keep profiting off their polluting activities for now without having to invest in carbon emissions reduction. This is unrealistic and just an excuse not to tackle the difficult task of reducing emissions. We can't afford to let the problem become that much worse before we attempt to mitigate it by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, if there's ever a technology that can do that effectively (which right now doesn't look likely). We need to focus most of our efforts on reducing emissions.

Do people seriously think we could "reverse" climate change?

That's not how the climate works.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Glaciers formed over millennia. If they melt, they’re gone, even if we drop CO2 to pre-industrial levels. The Antarctic ice sheet is millions of years of snow that fell at the rate of a few inches a year and just didn’t melt. If significant portions of that fall off and melt, it’ll be millions of years more for the water it adds to the oceans to cycle back to the ice sheet again. The changes we have made will not be reversed automatically or in many cases at all.
- It's because I didn't go on a rant about capitalism.
Remember it used to be called global warming, because that's what's actually happening. But morons thought a cold winter day disproved global warming, so it was renamed climate change.
And yes we can reverse global warming, but obviously that won't recreate polar or mountain ice, or lower sea levels quickly, but we can get the temperature down to stop it first, which will also curb the increase in natural disasters, then the restoring of sea levels and ice will take at least decades and probably centuries.
- Hm I always remember hearing this:
  In a confidential memo to the Republican party, Luntz is credited with advising the Bush administration that the phrase "global warming" should be abandoned in favour of "climate change", which he called a "less frightening" phrase than the former.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz
  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/27/americans-climate-change-global-warming-yale-report
- My point is that slowing down the heating of the planet is doable (though you'd need the majority of the world contributing, which is highly unlikely to happen), but we can't reverse the damage that has already been done, which some people seem to think is possible.
  We're not as powerful as we think we are.
- I'm pretty sure it wasn't renamed because people were morons about child weather, at least not completely. It's always been "climate change", because that's a better representation of what is happening.
  The climate is changing, and one is the main side effects it's global warming... But there's extra fun side effects, like ocean acidification, that aren't because of the warning
Are you trying to tell me that the spirit of capitalism won't return to us, dressed in the splendor of new technology, to absolve us of our past planetary transgressions, and take us to a new, perfect place amongst the stars where we will live in profit and harmony for ever?
Well, thats the second time I've fallen for that story......
Lol this is the same argument I've heard from climate change denialists for years: we can't possibly change the climate!
Now doomers are saying the same thing, but even more ridiculously because they almost certainly believe we have changed the climate already.
- I think the issue people are arguing is you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You're not going to reform glaciers by choosing to drive an EV. You're not going to stop increasing rates and extremes of floods by turning off the basement lights when not in use.
We just change it to something else.

The only examples this article gives of irreversible damage:

homes destroyed by hurricanes: clearly and obviously reversible. Build new houses. Fin.
rising sea levels: reversible. Cool the climate, get more glaciers, lower sea levels. Obviously it's more of a "100 years from now" solution, but it's definitely a solution.
lives lost: yeah, that's a fair point.

And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won't come back.
- And to those who say "well, the Earth will bounce back": we're much closer to the end of Earth's ability to support life than to the beginning. Earth doesn't have endless time to evolve new kinds of creatures. We could be doing damage from which Earth's biodiversity never recovers.
- Guess we'll have to Jurassic park this shit but with Pandas
- Yeah, I've always wanted us to have a genetic Doomsday Vault, with the sequenced genome of every species. We can clone them from that.

My headcanon past 2050 is basically nuclear wasteland. I try and stay optimistic in the moment, but the old faith in humanity gas-tank is running a little empty these days.

I feel you. There is this little bit oft hope, that all my effort actually achieves something. But its like hoping for thr existance of god it feels like

Most problems would simply not be a problem if we drastically reduce the human population. Which would not only avoid the issues caused by climate change but also would prevent further increases in pollution and CO2 emissions.

I don't know why the best solution is often the less talked about. Just stop having so many children. We don't have 70% infant mortality rate like we used to, there's no need to have 4 kids to preserve your legacy.

if we drastically reduce the human population. Which would not only avoid the issues caused by climate change but also would prevent further increases in pollution and CO2 emissions.
Ignoring the genocide-apologist trend, the pandemic did wonders to reduce global warming.., perhaps start taxing more the companies that force back-to-office when they could clearly keep most of their work force at home?
- And, eliminate Euclidean zoning in the U.S., so that people can live near where they work, or work near where they live. (Not all of us can do it, or like working from home.)
- What genocide? Just sensible reproduction. There's two options. 10 billion people living miserably like during the pandemic. Or maybe 1 billion people being able to live good lives.
One difficulty with that is that the way we organize economies currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population. When you have far fewer workers than retired people you start having problems. I don't know what the answer to that is, but it's another instance of how any plan to seriously address climate change tends to require deep changes to how we run society. The current systems can't simply be tweaked to make the problem go away.
- There is a lot of things wrong on how we organize the economy.
  If we are going to change that we may as well change it good.
- currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population
  This is only a problem if production does not increase dramatically, as it has for the last century. The reason it feels like there are insufficient working people is because parasites siphon from the resource distribution between more and more productive workers and their non working counterparts
- We already have far more people than necessary jobs. One person with modern trchnology can produce way, way more than one person could even just a century ago.
Yeah. Thanos should simply have made half of all living beings gay. Much less violent and this would probably also make future generations more likely to be gay too. So it‘ll probably have a much more longlasting effect than killing 50% once.
- Gayness saves lives. I've always said it!

Then I guess you guys have no use for this climate change reversal machine I made. I knew it was a shit idea. I'm so stupid. I'm scrapping it now.

Might I suggest you use the time machine you created to go back and talk yourself out of making the climate change reversal machine. I can think of nothing worse than for you to feel like you are stupid.
- I'm taking my hatred-curing pills back with me to feed to my past self so that I stop hating climate change so much.

You hear that? It's too late now! Welp ggs guys

Dibs on Vault 12!

It is too late. We are going to die!

They say scientists are saying this but is it like all scientists, the majority of scientists, a significant or intelligent minority of scientists, or is it just like this one person and because it's an alarm worthy headline it's being amplified?

Oh any worth their salt has been saying it for years. Climate change can be seen in nearly all disciplines of science. But every time we hurdle a new tier of awful they say it again so that when the end comes for us all due to our own hubris, the last man in a lab coat will scream the collective scream of his people “i told you so” before spontaneously combusting
- Oh any worth their salt has been saying it for years.
  For decades even.
Dude, have you read the article? this is from an article on Nature.
Nature! Not the flat earth society scientific newsletter.
For publishing on Nature it is necessary that a number of the most well reputed experts in the field have peer reviewed the article.
By modern standard of “science”, publishing on Nature or Science is the closest to get to “consensus”.
I see your point in some newspapers articles but this is not one of that cases
- flat earth society scientific newsletter
  Such a contradictory sentence. Can't wait for The Final Experiment to be done with, so we can eject any remaining flerfs from society.
Close to all scientists

It is a pointless endeavor.

No need to be such a Nihilistic Nick..
- It is not rational to think that humanity will stop Climate Change.
If you lived in the medieval, would you have rooted for the apocalypse?
- It's just a rational view of what has been happening my entire life. Nothing is going to stop climate change now. We will only be able able to mitigate the effects.