The scariest climate plot in the world | do not let small children read this

It's a pretty good plot if you want to understand the time period where civilization has existed; it shows the warming which was going on for the few thousand years before civilization, the relatively stable temperatures during civilization, and then the sudden modern warming from fossil fuel burning, and what we expect to happen after we're done burning fossil fuels.

Yeah it's great because it's a very small slice of earths history. It shows how dramatic the affect we humans have had on earths climate has been.

Earths climate has done crazy things.

See history of the world on YouTube. The stuff earth has been through is crazy.

But the key is how long it takes for something so dramatic to happen to earth. The great dying, snowball earth, etc etc all takes hundreds of thousands of years. Not hundreds of years.

And we can see in the geologic record how fucking extreme the consequences were for life on earth in those events. Extrapolating to what we are doing here, it could be an extinction event. We won't know it because it'll still be thousands of years for that irreversible process to happen.

https://youtu.be/uxTO2w0fbB4?si=G2SL3Gh-GqQlDR6h

https://youtu.be/H476c8UjLXY?si=fY6moTrWa2_iZtRn

https://youtu.be/rwHFwltF4yk?si=-wVgVQxJEOc7m-Ba

Look at this xkcd that's much less arbitrary about it's time scale

https://xkcd.com/1732/

In short, the time scale they are showing this graph on is generous if anything.

It's very easy to release CO2. It's FAR harder to recapture it. Much of our generation is less than 20% efficient. Assuming they get it up to 50% efficiency in recapturing CO2 (which would be impressive, plants are around 4-6%) they would have to expend 10x the energy we have, since the industrial revolution to undo the changes. That's a HUGE burden to put on future generations. If we can't not burn it in the first place, why do we expect them to do so much better than us?

That's going to require:

• Essentially free energy
• Industrial carbon removal ~8x the size of the current oil industry paid for out of taxes
• actual geological sequestration, and not just "let forests grow" kind of stuff
• No more non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions

i would agree with you if not for the very real possibility of total societal collapse due to climate change.

future scientific discoveries, very complex in nature due to the incremental advances already made, need a long time of social stability to be achieved. lots of specialists that spent 20 years in school, lots of special resources, lots of functioning scientific grade equipment, lots of logistical support. if we are talking about complete control over the quantities of whatever gas there is on the atmosphere, then than makes it 1000 more difficult to achieve and implement.

so, no. 200 years will not be enough time to achieve that kind of control over the atmosphere.

I don't believe in technomagical solutions that might come save it all

Edit: and y'all are neglecting future advances in energy production and CO2 removal too

I hope there are advances too. But 70 years ago they also thought we'd be flying around in cars and have colonized multiple planets by now.

It depends on if we are still profit driven. If we are profit driven then it's likely we wouldn't manually dial in anything unless there was a significant and immediate profit to be made from repairing the climate that was far greater than the profit from destroying.

lol. 200 years. so a period like between 1823 and now. So like 4x the change I have seen in my lifetime and then we will dial it down. I mean I do think we will dial it down quite a bit in that time but not because of a lack of desire.