I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.
With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.
Electric cars vastly reduce the environmental impact of cars. Everyone who's run the numbers agrees on this [1][2][3]. Battery vehicles aren't that much heavier than gasoline vehicles, and the volume of metals needed to make a battery is a tiny fraction of the volume of oil needed to fuel a car across its lifecycle. Power plants are much more efficient than small engines in cars, and as the grid decarbonizes the emissions of battery electric vehicles move towards zero. Electric cars really are far better for the planet than burning gas, there isn't a catch.
I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries.
Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale.
It's not just that. Solar is already cheaper than other generation methods, except that it's intermittent. So it needs some kind of storage technology.
The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.
It's 50%. It's significant, as much as gas car economy improvements over a few decades. We should of course still take it, but it's not nearly enough.
We need a order of magnitude improvement to make the globally growing car use remotely sustainable. Reducing car usage can be done many ways, eg ensuring gas is taxed enough that gas-based cars don't stay in everyday use, and developing non car transport and urban structure.
The only nuance is that it's often better to continue using your existing car than buying a new ev. That's the only situation I've heard any real suggestions that ice is more environmental than an ev.
Well the real answer is to reduce consumption. It can and should be done without sacrificing comfort. This is a very uphill battle against systems that are interested in distracting you by turning your attention towards fads (recycling, electrification, carbon capture) when in reality we need degrowth and permaculture. (Please read this thread a bit more, including my replies, before you tell me what I think degrowth means. I'm only using it to mean "less [economic] growth")
In a bit more detail:
How about less cars? More effective public transit is good for people and the climate.
Let's do away with golf lawns and pools for every house... Perhaps architecture can be adapted to suit the specific location instead of stamping the same stock photo "American house with garage that can fit 4 cars." Look at passive cooling and stuff. [Again, I'm talking about redefining comfort. Is a personal pool and large car and trimmed lawn really, honestly, what makes you comfortable? Or is it more a product of culture and advertising? You're absolutely free to believe either way, and I don't want anyone to force you to do anything.]
And honestly, we need to consoom less. Devices should not have a lifecycle of one year. You and I don't really need all these gadgets and trinkets, either. Let's stop buying random things
If you think this is a distraction or that it won't work because we can't get everyone to agree: Degrowth and permaculture requires honestly no critical mass. You can choose to buy things that last longer, and use them a bit more. Learn to fix things, etc. These are all nothing but straight benefits to you (more money in your pocket, skills that can make you more valuable in the current system, more time available now that you aren't swiping short form videos all day).
There is no way this world exists without an authoritarian global government.
Have you analyzed the impact of the total elimination of 4 car garages, golf courses, "trinkets", and enforced 5-year upgrades on devices? do those rank among the highest-impact against climate change, or do you just not like them very much?
Do you expect that the people who would have the authority to make and enforce these decisions agree with you about which things are important or not, and have also done the cost-benefit analyses correctly and in good faith?
And they're resistant to buy-off by the industries that have the most to lose under a degrowth paradigm?
> Well the real answer is to reduce consumption. It can and should be done without sacrificing comfort.
Comfort Or reducing their standard of living. Remember for most people in the world this they will keep consuming to get to *a* standard and will not care until they get there. One can say that the average person in a sub saharan african country X consumes 1/10th or 1/50th of the carbon that an american does. But unless N generations of X don't rise well above the poverty line they will continue to emit and it will add up by 2100 or 2200.
You don't even have to go to sub saharan africa. I believe there is non negligible double digit percentage of this country that is on the "edge" when it comes to many important living factors like Health, Education and Childcare Cost. Any of which when breached make one not care about reducing consumption.
As you've seen "degrowth" is a counter-productive argument and you are your own worst enemy and this gives ammunition to the side which claims that climate change is only possible via severe personal sacrifice -- which again reinforces the notion that climate change is an individual problem and failing and the whole "just recycle harder" idea.
We need to decarbonize the fucking electrical grid. Just get it done and that addresses the majority of the problem.
You'd also probably be better off if you focused on just changing the incentives and regulations which promote disposable culture. The CAFE standards need an overhaul and the Chicken tax needs to go away, that would do wonders towards getting us smaller, cheaper vehicles. Right to repair laws and EU regulations around replaceable batteries that are being imposed now on companies like Apple will help a lot. Better public transportation, sure, but that means building it (which means more economic output and jobs, but differently). But we're not going to manage to forcefully stop a lot of people from consuming, so we need to focus on making that impact less, particularly when it comes to GHGs, because that is more or less an emergency right now. We can have scalable carbon-neutral energy which still powers a lot of economic growth for the future up until we're all dead. And if you argue against that you will lose the broader war for the sake of trying to be a perfectionist (#include <leftists_being_their_own_worst_enemy.h>)
Personally, I wholeheartedly agree. Do you see degrowth as a realistic possibility? How would this happen in today's democracies with economic systems relying on GDP growth?
> How about less cars? More effective public transit is good for people and the climate
Well, I'm about to renew the annual rail passes (which cover our entire local region) for two of our children, but this approach only works because we happen to live 5 mins walk from a local station and their school is 10 mins walk from another station, on the same line.
Good luck persuading people who don't have the benefit of such "lucky geography" to do the same :/
> It can and should be done without sacrificing comfort ... How about less cars
... Let's do away with golf lawns and pools ... You and I don't really need all these gadgets
You went straight from "we don't have to lose anything" to "except of course for cars, lawns, pools and technology in general" apparently without noticing the contradiction. This is a good example of why degrowth advocates have no credibility and always come across as anti-civilization Amish wannabees.
There is no such thing as degrowth outside of recessions and wars. If you want to reduce your own consumption, do so! The rest of us who believe in material progress will increase ours to make up for it.
I agree with you about the steps to take, though I don't think "degrowth" is the right label to that approach. When people say "degrowth" they often mean a reduced standard of living. But it's possible to reduce raw resource utilization while at the same time improving quality of life and building wealth.
A high-quality, well-maintained car or a phone that lasts longer is more valuable than the disposable equivalent. Developing dense city centers creates wealth, reduces environmental impact, and improves quality of living all at the same time.
In an economy that really is shrinking, things tend towards stasis and people spend much more time fighting over the shrinking pie. A lot of the built environment needs to change to become sustainable, and that's only possible if the economy is vibrant, housing and transportation are plentiful, and people are motivated to improve their communities.
I don't know the solution to convincing suburban Americans to buy smaller houses and smaller cars, but I think the only way it works is if there is a positive vision of the future with both more wealth and a healthier planet.
There’s a ton we can do before we talk about degrowth. Living in dense urban areas vs the suburbs will greatly reduce resource usage.Eating a lot less meat is another thing that’s even easier and will greatly reduce our carbon footprint.
While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth, people will not go along with it. Instead I think we should advocate for living in dense areas, eating a lot less meat, reducing waste, etc.
This proposal is itself a nonsolution and distraction. You're not going to pull 7 billion people along with this.
We saw what a fairly massive reduction in consumption looked like during the pandemic. It basically put CO2 levels back to what they were in 2016. That's no where nearly enough.
> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives
Curb weight:
Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs.
BMW 330i: 3536 lbs.
Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs.
Is this supposed to be a massive difference?
> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it. But those things are all theoretical or uneconomical right now, so until that changes we should carry on with the thing we know works.
Without a change in legislation, there is no chance for "Make it cost effective".
Any new technology like making hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide requires the spending of a very large amount of money before becoming cost effective.
There are already several decades since almost all companies have stopped doing long-term research. Now everybody does research for things that will either become profitable next year or in any case when they are multi-year projects they are just improvements of established techniques, with known market, so that there is a very low risk that they might not be profitable.
The only way in which hydrocarbon synthesis would see the level of investment that is required for making it cost effective would be with some form of governmental intervention.
We could have had already today cost-effective hydrocarbon synthesis if a lot of money and research time would not have been wasted with research in various directions that have been considered as futile by most since the very beginning, especially for methods of hydrogen storage and for hydrogen fuel cells.
I'm not sure how helpful it is to compare different cars.
Here's a more apples-to-apples comparison: a 2023 Kia Niro (which is itself a conventional hybrid, with a gasoline engine and a small battery and electric motor) compared to a 2023 Kia Niro EV. Almost everything is the same except the drivetrain. The EV[0] is ~500-800lbs heavier than the hybrid[1] depending on trim level and options, which is basically the difference between an empty car and one loaded with four adults and some luggage.
> Curb weight: Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs / BMW 330i: 3536 lbs / Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs.
We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park!
> There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it
Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.
When NYC turned manhattan's 14th street[1](a bidirectional wide traffic street) into bus only for rush hours with very strict rules for cars, car farers yelled and hollered and people warned of traffic snarl-ups up the wazoo. In reality none of that really materialized.
And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Cars move at not more than 20 MPH on most streets there any way now and are inefficient at transporting people.
People will realize they can just park outside manhattan in Brooklyn or Jersey City and just take a train in and just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity of transit to work the economics of the auto based economy will change. Cities and areas around them are high density once car use changes there it will change everywhere(LA I am looking at you).
> And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better.
Are the high-density shops and restaurants that make those places such desirable places to be going to replenish their stock on mass transit? Or does that fall into your 10% exception?
How about vans for handicapped people? Do they also fall into the 10% exception?
What if it's just a miserably hot day in Manhattan, and you have a crying baby in a stroller and bags full of shopping, and you just want to catch a cab ride home this one time, damn it? Nobody said you had to have a baby and go shopping. Do you get a "necessity pass" then?
> just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity
Just price things accordingly and let people decide what's a luxury and what's a necessity to them. Categorical distinctions don't work very well because they're full of exceptions and ways to game the system, even without getting into the ethical question of who gets to decide what's a luxury and what isn't for everyone else.
There are real issues and unknowns here, you are right - but you also have to maintain perspective and scale.
The rare minerals and metals we are using to drive the transition are not being combusted into the atmosphere like gasoline additives are: when EV batteries wear out the lithium is right there ready to be recycled; it’s not a consumable.
Yes, EVs are heavier, yes their tires give off more particulates as a result, yea that is a problem. But EVs overall give off way, way, way fewer particulate emissions overall by replacing brake pad use with regenerative braking and by not combusting carbohydrates and pumping the residue out their tailpipes.
The things you list are not mutually exclusive: Reducing car use, replacing ICEs with EVs, replacing fossil fuels with electro fuels etc is an “all of the above” choice
Like how deadly they are, microplastics and pollution from tire/road wear, noise in residential areas, the huge waste of area, expensive upkeep of infrastructure, how they make cities less inhabitable etc etc.
Everyone says they would love to live in a walkable city, but for some reason, at least in the US, the biggest gainers in population over the recent decades have been all automobile-centric cities (which are probably more accurately described as a large patchwork of suburbs). NYC would have shrunk due to out-migration to other places if it wasn't for foreign in-migration[0]. Chicago lost people 15 out of the last 20 years[1].
> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier
Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.
For SUVs it's essentially nil. The #1 factor in the weight of a car is how big a car you get. Weight is also a secondary factor to size, as drag is the biggest cost. AND weight matters less in an EV, because at low speeds where weight matters, the EV recoups energy from regenerative braking.
> Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment
Lithium is ~2% of the weight of a battery. It's a tiny amount of what is mined to make a car. It's also absolutely NOT a new thing- batteries were a minority use of lithium until ~2015.
> without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment
Absolutely, completely wrong. Lithium is present in low concentrations EVERYWHERE, just like any other salt. The lithium concentration in batteries is so low that if they were ores, it would not be economical to mine them. Economically viable hard rock lithium ore is 2-3x more concentrated.
Lithium is already in your drinking water, in your dirt, and a huge amount is in the ocean. If we were dumping giant blocks of it into landfills that would be an issue, but nobody is doing that.
> what impact the mines themselves will have.
Lithium brine is found in very arid places like salt flats where no water has washed the lithium into the ocean. Clay and brine mining is pretty non-disruptive, as long as you replace the water and aren't dumping acids everywhere. Hard rock lithium is just like any other quarry, but we need very little of it.
> should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products
When you have a cycle that is 20% efficient on one side and 50% efficient on the other side, you're consuming 10x as much energy as a pure electrical solution. It's a terrible idea. The sheer amount of fossil fuels burned globally is also like, beyond comprehension. If we did this, it would be a plurality of all human effort to sustain it.
> better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing
lithium is not a rare metal, or a rare earth metal. There are no rare earth metals in batteries. Lithium is as common as lead. Coincidentally, gas cars use more lead than EVs use lithium. Lead is also way, way more toxic.
> > As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier
> Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.
Because it's approaching "common knowledge", at least for people paying vague attention to the switch. Here's three articles just from this year - took me 10 seconds to find on Google:
There's a good chance EVs aren't the best long run solution. But, right now, we don't need long run, we need immediate, short term solutions to the problem that we've got right now which is the need to keep people employed during the transition which, since people in many countries tend to live outside of transportation hubs, means keeping them in cars for the time being. EVs allow the use of non-fossil fuels to power that auto transport.
But, where you're definitely right is that we need to be exploring every avenue. No one can really predict what technologies are going to work best.
Pluggable hybrids (PHEVs) have never been taken seriously by politicians, here in EU, and I think it is absurd.
Most Europeans make short commutes, so these cars have a sufficient range for the vast majority of drives. They are cheaper, much lighter, and building them uses a lot less energy.
Plus, existing designs and assembly lines can be easily adapted to PHEVs. And in case of long commutes, there is always a gas engine to fall back to and therefore no range anxiety.
It is much, much too late for "maybe some other process will save us". Electric card are the solution that is already working. If we had all electric cars then transportation would no longer be the biggest problem.
We will not have spare renewables for a long time. They are all devoted to residential and industrial.
If fossil fuel companies wanted to fund solar to hydrocarbon, the time was three decades ago. Now they need to realize that electric cars are technologically simpler than the vast complexity of internal combustion, and they cannot reclaim that with "but wait..." any longer.
CO2 levels have gone up by a third just since I've been alive.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that's an enormous problem that must be solved. To be honest, with the house well and truly on fire, who cares about hypotheticals like lithium leaching.
I feel the graphs on this site are underselling the problem. The scale should be "last 60 years", "last 30 years". The changes we are making to the environment are profound and speak for themselves.
You actually do need to be a rocket scientist of a sort. You think CO2 increasing by that much is a problem because you've been told it is, probably since birth. It's not something you can observe directly with your own eyes, because it's all about small long term trends.
In practice it's rocket science because:
- The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions.
- There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory)
- Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.
Any hypothetical sequestration into a fuel (as in the parent parent comment) would also require a power source, so the question goes back to low-carbon power!
Electric cars are a terrible representative of electrification. When people talk about electrification as a climate mitigation a big part of that is the significant increase in the energy efficiency of electric systems. For example a heat pump in a well insulated house will significantly decrease the energy consumption over a gas heater. Likewise delivering electricity to a saw mill will yield power with much more efficient energy use, than an on-site diesel powered machinery.
Now electric cars are definitely more efficient than ICE cars (despite being heavier; excluding today’s monster trucks like the electric Hummer). However a the transportation needs of a significant majority of people could be much more efficiently solved with public transit, even if that public transit is diesel powered. This is why climate policy experts quite often point out how electrification of private cars is generally regarded as a rather poor (and expensive) climate solution, next to other options.
If we were playing Civilization, then public transit would be the way to go. For the world we live in, expanding public transit is a slow and difficult political process, but people happily buy electric cars because they're fun.
> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
Being able to do that cheaply is still science-fiction.
> simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
Capturing CO2 and converting CO2 to fuel requires putting the energy back into the molecules somehow. That requires a ton of energy. So either way don't we need to solve electrification?
If capturing CO2 would be done at large scale, obviously it would be done using solar energy, like the plants, or wind energy.
So solar or wind energy is a prerequisite for CO2 capture, followed by the separation from air by physical or chemical means, followed by the reduction to hydrocarbons, either by direct electrolysis or by using hydrogen obtained by water electrolysis.
>and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.
Our CO2 emissions are warming the Earth and making it unliveable for billions of people in the global south.
The localized toxic pollution problems you mentioned are a secondary problem.
I have quit worrying about it. We have a solution: nuclear power base load + wind/solar secondary. I will vote for candidates who promote that, otherwise there is nothing I can do, I've reduced my foot print quite a bit over the years and will stick to that. Otherwise I guess we're doomed. I'm not gonna obsess over it with a doom dashboard/countdown
> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
That's much harder than it sounds, because (unlike, say, lithium) what's important in propane is the energy stored in it in the forms of chemical bonds, not the constituent elements. Basically, the resulting C/O/H we have is just waste product. We can't "just reassemble it back to propane" because to do it we need energy, and if we have that energy, why not just use it directly? No need to insert propane as an intermediary, barring unusual situations like jet fuel.
It's basically like trying to turn feces and urine back to a beef steak. Having carbon and hydrogen atoms isn't the hard part of producing beef.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. We have plenty of energy, in the form of untapped solar and wind, for example. The challenge is storing and distributing it, for which energy dense hydrocarbons are very effective. (Even coal is more energy dense than lithium ion batteries, and that's nothing compare to oils and its distillates).
There was an interesting article discussed at length on HN recently about using electrolysis for synthesising propane, which along side the book The Material World has made me start questioning batteries as the storage solution of the future.
> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances
The "advances" are relatively modest efficiency improvements, but they don't change fundamental realities like the laws of thermodynamics.
"Unburning CO2" will require enormous amounts of energy. You may shave off a few percent of losses here and there, but the amounts are so huge, it is absurd to think that you could do that and just continue business as usual.
For your example of cars it makes even less sense. You have no practical way of capturing the CO2 from cars short of taking it from the air. So you added another extremely energy intensive process.
This has been my sentiment lately. I purchased a Tesla last year (primarily to save on gas) and its been an amazing car. You raise a couple points that have been on my mind. The rare metal argument is a good one. I believe that battery disposal is sort of an issue at this time too?
This question has been studied extensively for decades. a simple search should provide numerous references to referred articles in journals general (nature, science) and specialized.
And “rare earths” aren’t particularly rare, despite the term.
there are also no rare earths in batteries. There are rare earths in computers (the same kinds in regular cars) and in neodymium magnets. lithium is not a rare earth element.
Yes, much better solution would be massively boosting (and electrifying) public transport, but half of people will be shouting about socialism if you try to implement it.
Electric cars also make it harder for places to be livable with no car, which is what we actually need. They're faster and heavier, both of which will kill more people biking and walking.
If you pull up the last 2,000 years in the Yearly Average Observed Temperature anomaly, from 536 - 537 there should be a global average temperature anomaly of -2C to -5C from the Volcanic Winter of 536 (A period of 18 months where the sun was dimmed by volcanic ash), but the graph shows <1C. There's tree ring evidence of it from all over the world.
If they missed this, this puts into question all the rest of the data IMO.
> For the years leading up to 1850 we use PAGES2k Consortium reconstruction data. It is based on models where temperatures are reconstructed from proxies. Proxy analysis has higher uncertainty, and we display the smoothed set to highlight the longer-term fluctuations.
It would be in there, but smoothed over instead of the year-by-year entries that you are looking for.
For a lot of datasets like this that are before modern monitoring programs, you can often tell when something "big" happened in a certain time period or year from another source, but then you have to decide how to incorporate that with your long-range data that doesn't have year-by-year values. Sometimes it's best to just choose one method that covers all of the years and stick with it instead of modifying your model based on what you "think" is right from other sources.
What you're looking for is a different dataset that's what they are displaying. They're showing smoothed data to showcase trends over time, without the noise of single-year variation.
Can you speak to their data source? They're using other people's data:
"For the years leading up to 1850 we use PAGES2k Consortium reconstruction data. It is based on models where temperatures are reconstructed from proxies. Proxy analysis has higher uncertainty, and we display the smoothed set to highlight the longer-term fluctuations."
Normally in science you don't splice together totally different measurement methodologies onto a single graph line.
PAGES2K has no credibility unfortunately. If the proxies worked they could just use them for the modern era too and avoid the splicing, with thermometer readings providing only greater detail (which isn't important anyway because climate change is about long term trends).
They don't do this. The main reason is because the proxies fail totally in the modern era, with the computed temperatures being very different to observations. The correct interpretation of this is that the chosen proxies don't work for any era, but what they do instead is sweep this fact under the carpet by replacing modern proxy reconstructions with measurements so you can't spot the divergence.
The proxy timeseries also frequently contradict each other in magnitude and direction. For example many proxies show no change over time. If these were truly proxies for global or regional temperature as claimed then different proxies would agree with each other.
If you look at how PAGES2K was constructed it is a festival of pseudo-science. All the usual tricks are there. They delete or truncate data they don't like. What datasets they include varies wildly from release to release without justification. They include tree proxies that they know are distorted by increased CO2=greening in the modern era, and then claim it's a proxy for temperature (this is how Mann got his hockey stick graph in the early 2000s). They even flipped one proxy upside down, the correct interpretation was that temperature had fallen sharply at that location but because they already know what they expect to see, this was mistakenly interpreted backwards and turned into evidence of warming (see the dispute over the varve cores from Hvitavatn in Iceland).
Proxy reconstructions of the past are unfortunately quite a mess.
Large models, such as climate models, which are among the largest are highly vulnerable to high variance because of the high dimensionality of their parameter sets.
Say you have n continuous parameters to your mode. This equates to an n dimensional polygon. Unless you a high iteration Monte Carlo technique the output of your model is going to depend on where exactly your estimator point in n degree space lands, and its accuracy will depend on its distance from the actual (unknown) point in the set.
Now, many of the parameters in large models have never been measured. They are averages from the literature, or in cases where there is no literature, which is common in cutting edge science, the investigators guess.
If you look at the meta studies of climate models, which is what the IPCC uses to make projections, they come out all over the place. These models really aren't great prediction tools. They are best thought of as tools for understanding a the components of a complex system.
Covid was a perfect example: modeling was suggesting devastating impacts from covid, to which localities responded differently, some were aggressive, some were lax. It didn't seem to matter. Yes, one can find statistically significant instances where different covid responses led to higher mortality rates, but nothing substantial enough for any group to want to change what they did.
CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere and humanity is only responsible for 3% of its creation. We are making very fine grained estimated using a macro model. It's a bit like carving toothpicks with a chain saw.
> CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere and humanity is only responsible for 3% of its creation
What explains the remaining percent points then?
Atmospheric CO2 at the first measurement in ~1958 was ~318, latest in 2022 was ~419 (reading a plot on wikipedia[1]). Note that in 1958, the industrial revolution was already in history books, idk what pre-fossil-fuel values were. Going from 318 in 1958 to 419 in 2022 is +32%, you said 3%, so there's a few missing there
Edit: just noticed the article lede says +50% since mid-18th century, I don't need to be interpreting graphs here lol. Either way, you missed an order of magnitude somewhere. But it also doesn't matter, because if 3% would have changed our habitat then it still would have been too much right?
The CO2 level has increased by 50% since preindustrial times. You don't need a super-complicated model to figure out what that does to the global average temperature. It was predicted with decent accuracy in 1896, based on simple thermodynamics, and better accuracy several decades later with just slightly more complicated physics. No fancy computer modeling at all, just a calculation that a physicist can work out on paper, and we've been right on target since then.
For details see the recent little book The Physics of Climate Change.
> CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere and humanity is only responsible for 3% of its creation
That 3% extra per year is enough to tip the scales so that net CO2 in the atmosphere has been growing (don’t need a model for that, it can be directly measured).
Policy makers are rewarded for making decisions. Scientists are rewarded for being accurate.
It's a constant battle. A politician with a science report has official CYA for whatever they do, as they were making the decision based on scientific estimates.
And an error bar on a graph makes it less useful for making decisions?
Assuming they're not broader than the signal being measured, and they certainly won't be for recent history, it ought to actually make it more useful for politicians
Republicans + Joe Manchin don’t care about this. Most policy makers aren’t captured by the fossil fuel industry and many are pushing for the kind of structural changes we need, but it’s hard for them to accomplish as much with active opposition at the U.S. federal level.
There are two french persons who have really had a big impact on how I see the energy crisis (climate is a consequence of fossil fuels, hence energy).
One is Aurelien Barrau, astrophysicist and philosopher, who made me realize that CO2 is not the problem. If we changed fossil fuels with fusion, we would still be living a mass extinction. We are destroying biodiversity because of our way of life.
The other one is Jean-Marc Jancovici, who explains that the root cause is fossil fuels. Climate is just a consequence (a very bad one, hence we need to solve the energy problem even faster).
Sorry, I mean that the biodiversity loss is a mass extinction. We have lost 2/3 of trees, 2/3 of mammals and 2/3 of insects, that's a fact. It will continue (because we are not changing anything) and that is not a consequence of climate change. Climate change will just make it worse.
It is a consequence of how we live, including habitat loss, pollution, etc. Nuclear fusion (which almost surely won't happen in a useful timeline) is not a solution to our biodiversity problem, only to our climate problem. But if we could today do nuclear fusion in our smartphones, we would still be in a mass extinction. So we need to change more than just CO2 emissions (unless we don't care about biodiversity, but I do).
Nice, but this really doesn't cover the most important aspects of carbon pollution. From the start the oceans have been absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere which causes acidity to increase. At this point the oceans are so acidic that around the arctic some hard bodied creatures are dissolving faster than they can grow. The last time the oceans became this acidic there was a mass extinction. We really need to bear in mind the scope of impacts of massive scale carbon pollution extend well beyond the atmosphere into the oceans and the chemistry of topsoil and so on.
Also, don't forget about air travel, especially private airplanes, something that is on the rise (e.g Netjets). Often the virtues of world travel are extolled as a way to learn about the world and bring people together etc. Except, it's extraordinarily carbon intensive and honestly doesn't do any of that IMO. Sure, seeing the Patagonia in person would be cool and all, but if I actually cared about it, I wouldn't go. I would admire it from afar to help preserve it. It's time to start travel shaming and discourage people from flying around just to get a selfie.
Granted, cars and air travel, but I think it is more than minor. But anything that is unnecessary, is important. The point is, travel less, that's the best way to admire the places you admire. Something to consider the next time you plan a vacation.
How about a nice bike ride near where you live and marvel at the beauty that is near you? It's still beautiful. And you did our planet a favor.
For long-range high-capacity passenger (or cargo) travel, electric airplanes will always be a pipe dream. Battery storage capacities are too low, as well as lacking the fuel-burn-off characteristics of fuel-powered aircraft: half a long-range flight's takeoff weight is fuel, and for distances > ~3000 km, each passenger burns roughly their mass in fuel. The carbon dioxide emissions are actually greater than this as CO2 includes two oxygen atoms contributed from the atmosphere.
Mind that long-range flights are also overall more efficient,[1] as they have a longer low-fuel-burn cruise-phase, as contrasted with take-off and climb, which consume tremendous amounts of fuel.
For ranges at which electric-powered aircraft are applicable, ground-based transport (e.g., electrified, preferably high-speed rail) are even more optimal, though there are cases (e.g., inter-island travel, remote low-population regions) which might not suit those. Those tend to be outlier and marginal cases already, however.
________________________________
Notes:
1. On a fuel/passenger-km or cargo-kg-km basis. Though the large overall distance makes for prodigious fuel burn regardless.
What if, you said, hey, let's have a nice vacation and ride our bikes or walked to a nice park near us and enjoy the beauty of the environment? We can have selfies and brag about how we had a zero carbon vacation. That would be cool, right?
Hacker News represents some of the brightest minds in the US. If the climate change denial is so widespread here there is absolutely no hope for the US.
The rest of the world needs to be far more aggressive. Selectively sanction US states that elect climate change denying politicians.
Readit News
With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.
I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries.
Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.
We need a order of magnitude improvement to make the globally growing car use remotely sustainable. Reducing car usage can be done many ways, eg ensuring gas is taxed enough that gas-based cars don't stay in everyday use, and developing non car transport and urban structure.
In a bit more detail:
How about less cars? More effective public transit is good for people and the climate.
Let's do away with golf lawns and pools for every house... Perhaps architecture can be adapted to suit the specific location instead of stamping the same stock photo "American house with garage that can fit 4 cars." Look at passive cooling and stuff. [Again, I'm talking about redefining comfort. Is a personal pool and large car and trimmed lawn really, honestly, what makes you comfortable? Or is it more a product of culture and advertising? You're absolutely free to believe either way, and I don't want anyone to force you to do anything.]
And honestly, we need to consoom less. Devices should not have a lifecycle of one year. You and I don't really need all these gadgets and trinkets, either. Let's stop buying random things
If you think this is a distraction or that it won't work because we can't get everyone to agree: Degrowth and permaculture requires honestly no critical mass. You can choose to buy things that last longer, and use them a bit more. Learn to fix things, etc. These are all nothing but straight benefits to you (more money in your pocket, skills that can make you more valuable in the current system, more time available now that you aren't swiping short form videos all day).
Have you analyzed the impact of the total elimination of 4 car garages, golf courses, "trinkets", and enforced 5-year upgrades on devices? do those rank among the highest-impact against climate change, or do you just not like them very much?
Do you expect that the people who would have the authority to make and enforce these decisions agree with you about which things are important or not, and have also done the cost-benefit analyses correctly and in good faith?
And they're resistant to buy-off by the industries that have the most to lose under a degrowth paradigm?
Comfort Or reducing their standard of living. Remember for most people in the world this they will keep consuming to get to *a* standard and will not care until they get there. One can say that the average person in a sub saharan african country X consumes 1/10th or 1/50th of the carbon that an american does. But unless N generations of X don't rise well above the poverty line they will continue to emit and it will add up by 2100 or 2200.
You don't even have to go to sub saharan africa. I believe there is non negligible double digit percentage of this country that is on the "edge" when it comes to many important living factors like Health, Education and Childcare Cost. Any of which when breached make one not care about reducing consumption.
We need to decarbonize the fucking electrical grid. Just get it done and that addresses the majority of the problem.
You'd also probably be better off if you focused on just changing the incentives and regulations which promote disposable culture. The CAFE standards need an overhaul and the Chicken tax needs to go away, that would do wonders towards getting us smaller, cheaper vehicles. Right to repair laws and EU regulations around replaceable batteries that are being imposed now on companies like Apple will help a lot. Better public transportation, sure, but that means building it (which means more economic output and jobs, but differently). But we're not going to manage to forcefully stop a lot of people from consuming, so we need to focus on making that impact less, particularly when it comes to GHGs, because that is more or less an emergency right now. We can have scalable carbon-neutral energy which still powers a lot of economic growth for the future up until we're all dead. And if you argue against that you will lose the broader war for the sake of trying to be a perfectionist (#include <leftists_being_their_own_worst_enemy.h>)
Personally, I wholeheartedly agree. Do you see degrowth as a realistic possibility? How would this happen in today's democracies with economic systems relying on GDP growth?
Well, I'm about to renew the annual rail passes (which cover our entire local region) for two of our children, but this approach only works because we happen to live 5 mins walk from a local station and their school is 10 mins walk from another station, on the same line.
Good luck persuading people who don't have the benefit of such "lucky geography" to do the same :/
You went straight from "we don't have to lose anything" to "except of course for cars, lawns, pools and technology in general" apparently without noticing the contradiction. This is a good example of why degrowth advocates have no credibility and always come across as anti-civilization Amish wannabees.
There is no such thing as degrowth outside of recessions and wars. If you want to reduce your own consumption, do so! The rest of us who believe in material progress will increase ours to make up for it.
A high-quality, well-maintained car or a phone that lasts longer is more valuable than the disposable equivalent. Developing dense city centers creates wealth, reduces environmental impact, and improves quality of living all at the same time.
In an economy that really is shrinking, things tend towards stasis and people spend much more time fighting over the shrinking pie. A lot of the built environment needs to change to become sustainable, and that's only possible if the economy is vibrant, housing and transportation are plentiful, and people are motivated to improve their communities.
I don't know the solution to convincing suburban Americans to buy smaller houses and smaller cars, but I think the only way it works is if there is a positive vision of the future with both more wealth and a healthier planet.
While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth, people will not go along with it. Instead I think we should advocate for living in dense areas, eating a lot less meat, reducing waste, etc.
We saw what a fairly massive reduction in consumption looked like during the pandemic. It basically put CO2 levels back to what they were in 2016. That's no where nearly enough.
Curb weight:
Is this supposed to be a massive difference?> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it. But those things are all theoretical or uneconomical right now, so until that changes we should carry on with the thing we know works.
Any new technology like making hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide requires the spending of a very large amount of money before becoming cost effective.
There are already several decades since almost all companies have stopped doing long-term research. Now everybody does research for things that will either become profitable next year or in any case when they are multi-year projects they are just improvements of established techniques, with known market, so that there is a very low risk that they might not be profitable.
The only way in which hydrocarbon synthesis would see the level of investment that is required for making it cost effective would be with some form of governmental intervention.
We could have had already today cost-effective hydrocarbon synthesis if a lot of money and research time would not have been wasted with research in various directions that have been considered as futile by most since the very beginning, especially for methods of hydrogen storage and for hydrogen fuel cells.
I'm not sure how helpful it is to compare different cars.
Here's a more apples-to-apples comparison: a 2023 Kia Niro (which is itself a conventional hybrid, with a gasoline engine and a small battery and electric motor) compared to a 2023 Kia Niro EV. Almost everything is the same except the drivetrain. The EV[0] is ~500-800lbs heavier than the hybrid[1] depending on trim level and options, which is basically the difference between an empty car and one loaded with four adults and some luggage.
[0]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro-ev/2023/specifica...
[1]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro/2023/specificatio...
We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park!
> There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it
Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.
And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Cars move at not more than 20 MPH on most streets there any way now and are inefficient at transporting people.
People will realize they can just park outside manhattan in Brooklyn or Jersey City and just take a train in and just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity of transit to work the economics of the auto based economy will change. Cities and areas around them are high density once car use changes there it will change everywhere(LA I am looking at you).
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml
Are the high-density shops and restaurants that make those places such desirable places to be going to replenish their stock on mass transit? Or does that fall into your 10% exception?
How about vans for handicapped people? Do they also fall into the 10% exception?
What if it's just a miserably hot day in Manhattan, and you have a crying baby in a stroller and bags full of shopping, and you just want to catch a cab ride home this one time, damn it? Nobody said you had to have a baby and go shopping. Do you get a "necessity pass" then?
> just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity
Just price things accordingly and let people decide what's a luxury and what's a necessity to them. Categorical distinctions don't work very well because they're full of exceptions and ways to game the system, even without getting into the ethical question of who gets to decide what's a luxury and what isn't for everyone else.
The rare minerals and metals we are using to drive the transition are not being combusted into the atmosphere like gasoline additives are: when EV batteries wear out the lithium is right there ready to be recycled; it’s not a consumable.
Yes, EVs are heavier, yes their tires give off more particulates as a result, yea that is a problem. But EVs overall give off way, way, way fewer particulate emissions overall by replacing brake pad use with regenerative braking and by not combusting carbohydrates and pumping the residue out their tailpipes.
The things you list are not mutually exclusive: Reducing car use, replacing ICEs with EVs, replacing fossil fuels with electro fuels etc is an “all of the above” choice
Like how deadly they are, microplastics and pollution from tire/road wear, noise in residential areas, the huge waste of area, expensive upkeep of infrastructure, how they make cities less inhabitable etc etc.
Everyone says they would love to live in a walkable city, but for some reason, at least in the US, the biggest gainers in population over the recent decades have been all automobile-centric cities (which are probably more accurately described as a large patchwork of suburbs). NYC would have shrunk due to out-migration to other places if it wasn't for foreign in-migration[0]. Chicago lost people 15 out of the last 20 years[1].
[0]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/dcp-p...
[1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-chicago-me...
Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.
For SUVs it's essentially nil. The #1 factor in the weight of a car is how big a car you get. Weight is also a secondary factor to size, as drag is the biggest cost. AND weight matters less in an EV, because at low speeds where weight matters, the EV recoups energy from regenerative braking.
> Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment
Lithium is ~2% of the weight of a battery. It's a tiny amount of what is mined to make a car. It's also absolutely NOT a new thing- batteries were a minority use of lithium until ~2015.
> without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment
Absolutely, completely wrong. Lithium is present in low concentrations EVERYWHERE, just like any other salt. The lithium concentration in batteries is so low that if they were ores, it would not be economical to mine them. Economically viable hard rock lithium ore is 2-3x more concentrated.
Lithium is already in your drinking water, in your dirt, and a huge amount is in the ocean. If we were dumping giant blocks of it into landfills that would be an issue, but nobody is doing that.
> what impact the mines themselves will have.
Lithium brine is found in very arid places like salt flats where no water has washed the lithium into the ocean. Clay and brine mining is pretty non-disruptive, as long as you replace the water and aren't dumping acids everywhere. Hard rock lithium is just like any other quarry, but we need very little of it.
> should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products
When you have a cycle that is 20% efficient on one side and 50% efficient on the other side, you're consuming 10x as much energy as a pure electrical solution. It's a terrible idea. The sheer amount of fossil fuels burned globally is also like, beyond comprehension. If we did this, it would be a plurality of all human effort to sustain it.
> better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing
lithium is not a rare metal, or a rare earth metal. There are no rare earth metals in batteries. Lithium is as common as lead. Coincidentally, gas cars use more lead than EVs use lithium. Lead is also way, way more toxic.
> Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.
Because it's approaching "common knowledge", at least for people paying vague attention to the switch. Here's three articles just from this year - took me 10 seconds to find on Google:
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems
https://globalnews.ca/news/9587791/electric-vehicle-weight-s...
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148483758/ntsb-heavy-electri...
But, where you're definitely right is that we need to be exploring every avenue. No one can really predict what technologies are going to work best.
Most Europeans make short commutes, so these cars have a sufficient range for the vast majority of drives. They are cheaper, much lighter, and building them uses a lot less energy.
Plus, existing designs and assembly lines can be easily adapted to PHEVs. And in case of long commutes, there is always a gas engine to fall back to and therefore no range anxiety.
We will not have spare renewables for a long time. They are all devoted to residential and industrial.
If fossil fuel companies wanted to fund solar to hydrocarbon, the time was three decades ago. Now they need to realize that electric cars are technologically simpler than the vast complexity of internal combustion, and they cannot reclaim that with "but wait..." any longer.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that's an enormous problem that must be solved. To be honest, with the house well and truly on fire, who cares about hypotheticals like lithium leaching.
I feel the graphs on this site are underselling the problem. The scale should be "last 60 years", "last 30 years". The changes we are making to the environment are profound and speak for themselves.
In practice it's rocket science because:
- The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions.
- There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory)
- Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.
In the end, what the world needs is an abundance of cheap energy without proportional carbon emissions. Everything else is secondary.
Now electric cars are definitely more efficient than ICE cars (despite being heavier; excluding today’s monster trucks like the electric Hummer). However a the transportation needs of a significant majority of people could be much more efficiently solved with public transit, even if that public transit is diesel powered. This is why climate policy experts quite often point out how electrification of private cars is generally regarded as a rather poor (and expensive) climate solution, next to other options.
Being able to do that cheaply is still science-fiction.
Wind and Solar are here right now.
Capturing CO2 and converting CO2 to fuel requires putting the energy back into the molecules somehow. That requires a ton of energy. So either way don't we need to solve electrification?
So solar or wind energy is a prerequisite for CO2 capture, followed by the separation from air by physical or chemical means, followed by the reduction to hydrocarbons, either by direct electrolysis or by using hydrogen obtained by water electrolysis.
Our CO2 emissions are warming the Earth and making it unliveable for billions of people in the global south.
The localized toxic pollution problems you mentioned are a secondary problem.
Which is not enough. We need nuclear + wind/solar + degrowth. Because those energies don't remotely replace fossil fuels.
Still, that is a solution (at least that's the less bad I see). We just need to accept it.
That's much harder than it sounds, because (unlike, say, lithium) what's important in propane is the energy stored in it in the forms of chemical bonds, not the constituent elements. Basically, the resulting C/O/H we have is just waste product. We can't "just reassemble it back to propane" because to do it we need energy, and if we have that energy, why not just use it directly? No need to insert propane as an intermediary, barring unusual situations like jet fuel.
It's basically like trying to turn feces and urine back to a beef steak. Having carbon and hydrogen atoms isn't the hard part of producing beef.
There was an interesting article discussed at length on HN recently about using electrolysis for synthesising propane, which along side the book The Material World has made me start questioning batteries as the storage solution of the future.
The "advances" are relatively modest efficiency improvements, but they don't change fundamental realities like the laws of thermodynamics.
"Unburning CO2" will require enormous amounts of energy. You may shave off a few percent of losses here and there, but the amounts are so huge, it is absurd to think that you could do that and just continue business as usual.
For your example of cars it makes even less sense. You have no practical way of capturing the CO2 from cars short of taking it from the air. So you added another extremely energy intensive process.
https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=HfRWIIMJbDmFhQ-z
And “rare earths” aren’t particularly rare, despite the term.
Dead Comment
If they missed this, this puts into question all the rest of the data IMO.
It would be in there, but smoothed over instead of the year-by-year entries that you are looking for.
For a lot of datasets like this that are before modern monitoring programs, you can often tell when something "big" happened in a certain time period or year from another source, but then you have to decide how to incorporate that with your long-range data that doesn't have year-by-year values. Sometimes it's best to just choose one method that covers all of the years and stick with it instead of modifying your model based on what you "think" is right from other sources.
"For the years leading up to 1850 we use PAGES2k Consortium reconstruction data. It is based on models where temperatures are reconstructed from proxies. Proxy analysis has higher uncertainty, and we display the smoothed set to highlight the longer-term fluctuations."
PAGES2K has no credibility unfortunately. If the proxies worked they could just use them for the modern era too and avoid the splicing, with thermometer readings providing only greater detail (which isn't important anyway because climate change is about long term trends).
They don't do this. The main reason is because the proxies fail totally in the modern era, with the computed temperatures being very different to observations. The correct interpretation of this is that the chosen proxies don't work for any era, but what they do instead is sweep this fact under the carpet by replacing modern proxy reconstructions with measurements so you can't spot the divergence.
The proxy timeseries also frequently contradict each other in magnitude and direction. For example many proxies show no change over time. If these were truly proxies for global or regional temperature as claimed then different proxies would agree with each other.
If you look at how PAGES2K was constructed it is a festival of pseudo-science. All the usual tricks are there. They delete or truncate data they don't like. What datasets they include varies wildly from release to release without justification. They include tree proxies that they know are distorted by increased CO2=greening in the modern era, and then claim it's a proxy for temperature (this is how Mann got his hockey stick graph in the early 2000s). They even flipped one proxy upside down, the correct interpretation was that temperature had fallen sharply at that location but because they already know what they expect to see, this was mistakenly interpreted backwards and turned into evidence of warming (see the dispute over the varve cores from Hvitavatn in Iceland).
Proxy reconstructions of the past are unfortunately quite a mess.
Deleted Comment
Say you have n continuous parameters to your mode. This equates to an n dimensional polygon. Unless you a high iteration Monte Carlo technique the output of your model is going to depend on where exactly your estimator point in n degree space lands, and its accuracy will depend on its distance from the actual (unknown) point in the set.
Now, many of the parameters in large models have never been measured. They are averages from the literature, or in cases where there is no literature, which is common in cutting edge science, the investigators guess.
If you look at the meta studies of climate models, which is what the IPCC uses to make projections, they come out all over the place. These models really aren't great prediction tools. They are best thought of as tools for understanding a the components of a complex system.
Covid was a perfect example: modeling was suggesting devastating impacts from covid, to which localities responded differently, some were aggressive, some were lax. It didn't seem to matter. Yes, one can find statistically significant instances where different covid responses led to higher mortality rates, but nothing substantial enough for any group to want to change what they did.
CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere and humanity is only responsible for 3% of its creation. We are making very fine grained estimated using a macro model. It's a bit like carving toothpicks with a chain saw.
What explains the remaining percent points then?
Atmospheric CO2 at the first measurement in ~1958 was ~318, latest in 2022 was ~419 (reading a plot on wikipedia[1]). Note that in 1958, the industrial revolution was already in history books, idk what pre-fossil-fuel values were. Going from 318 in 1958 to 419 in 2022 is +32%, you said 3%, so there's a few missing there
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...
Edit: just noticed the article lede says +50% since mid-18th century, I don't need to be interpreting graphs here lol. Either way, you missed an order of magnitude somewhere. But it also doesn't matter, because if 3% would have changed our habitat then it still would have been too much right?
For details see the recent little book The Physics of Climate Change.
That 3% extra per year is enough to tip the scales so that net CO2 in the atmosphere has been growing (don’t need a model for that, it can be directly measured).
These graphs really would benefit from error bars, especially the breakdowns into sector. I would not want a policy maker to rely on those numbers.
It's a constant battle. A politician with a science report has official CYA for whatever they do, as they were making the decision based on scientific estimates.
Assuming they're not broader than the signal being measured, and they certainly won't be for recent history, it ought to actually make it more useful for politicians
CH4 numbers are also questionable.
One is Aurelien Barrau, astrophysicist and philosopher, who made me realize that CO2 is not the problem. If we changed fossil fuels with fusion, we would still be living a mass extinction. We are destroying biodiversity because of our way of life.
The other one is Jean-Marc Jancovici, who explains that the root cause is fossil fuels. Climate is just a consequence (a very bad one, hence we need to solve the energy problem even faster).
I strongly recommend his book, which explains his ideas really well. Probably works better if you know Europe a bit, but I think that the English edition is modified a bit for US citizen: https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...
It is a consequence of how we live, including habitat loss, pollution, etc. Nuclear fusion (which almost surely won't happen in a useful timeline) is not a solution to our biodiversity problem, only to our climate problem. But if we could today do nuclear fusion in our smartphones, we would still be in a mass extinction. So we need to change more than just CO2 emissions (unless we don't care about biodiversity, but I do).
Whoa, could you point me to the source?
I found only this statement so far:
> If the pH gets too low, shells and skeletons can even begin to dissolve.
src: https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
You'll notice something special about the time plot thus far for 2023 ...
Granted, cars and air travel, but I think it is more than minor. But anything that is unnecessary, is important. The point is, travel less, that's the best way to admire the places you admire. Something to consider the next time you plan a vacation.
How about a nice bike ride near where you live and marvel at the beauty that is near you? It's still beautiful. And you did our planet a favor.
Mind that long-range flights are also overall more efficient,[1] as they have a longer low-fuel-burn cruise-phase, as contrasted with take-off and climb, which consume tremendous amounts of fuel.
For ranges at which electric-powered aircraft are applicable, ground-based transport (e.g., electrified, preferably high-speed rail) are even more optimal, though there are cases (e.g., inter-island travel, remote low-population regions) which might not suit those. Those tend to be outlier and marginal cases already, however.
________________________________
Notes:
1. On a fuel/passenger-km or cargo-kg-km basis. Though the large overall distance makes for prodigious fuel burn regardless.
The rest of the world needs to be far more aggressive. Selectively sanction US states that elect climate change denying politicians.