Tthis is perhaps good news, but it does not amount to a change of course, unfortunately. If we have passed peak emissions, it is still a long way from net-zero emissions. Like if you pass your peak rate of overspending your salary, but you are still continuing to go farther into debt. Even when you get to parity between salary and expenditures, you will STILL have the accumulated debt and in the case of CO2, that debt is wreaking ecosystem destruction. Do not cheer this news.
I’m curious, what part of that statement needs substantive proof? I feel like you can come to this conclusion from first principles, as long as you have some level of understanding of the greenhouse effect and knowledge of how it has affected ecosystems in the past.
Still, this means that humanity is adding to the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and doing so at close to its fastest pace ever.
It’s good that this pace is at least not accelerating, but the plateau implies a world that will continue to get warmer. To halt rising temperatures, humans will have to stop emitting greenhouse gases, zeroing their net output, and even start withdrawing the carbon previously emitted.
The actual article is not nearly as positive as the headline :)
As they mention reducing is key. But I think it’s going to be really hard to do carbon capture at a scale that actually matters. It will require a lot of additional green power generation, and the material extraction for the capture machinery, the transportation, the maintenance etc will have to be low carbon as well, otherwise there is still no point.
And there is significant inertia in greenhouse production so the greenhouse effect would keep rising for a decade even if we were at zero now.
It’s worth noting that even in the best case where we hit net zero by 2050, we will still be dealing with 1.25-2 degrees of warming for centuries. We will have to go significantly negative to get back to where we started. In worse scenarios we will be dealing with 2-3 degrees of warming for centuries.
Yeah and another war would cause those policies to go on the backburner immediately. For example nobody in Ukraine cares about greenhouse emissions now, they are dashing their diesel tanks through the mud like there is no tomorrow. And in fairness, if they don’t do that there may not be a tomorrow for them. So a lot of this depends on world stability. Which is pretty unlikely with the type of ‘leaders’ the world is seeing now IMO.
It's good that we're decreasing our impact. That said, the climate is a really massive thing that we've been pushing against for over 200 years, and climate change now has an incredibly massive amount of momentum behind it.
That would be amazing. I grew up in the 80s/90s. I remember all the hype about the ozone and we as a society were able to change course and solve the problem.
Another thing we need to do as a society is recognize and praise the efforts that are being done to encourage those that are doing it and hopefully encourage more to follow in their steps.
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