For context, humanity produces about 50 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. This estimate of 100 billion tons is between now and 2100, so about 1.2 billion tons per year savings. That's not nothing, but it's not that impressive either. And if it turns out the assumptions in the estimate are a bit optimistic, then it becomes more or less a rounding error.
Why is it so commonplace now to conflate climate change with basically armageddon? I thought that most models predict some hard times (mass migrations and everything bad that comes with it), but species extinction (or even, civilization collapse) is still a fringe belief among the scientists.
While it is true that our species going extinct from climate change is extremely unlikely (even in the event of climate change leading to global thermonuclear war), and while I am also frustrated by binary thinking where everything is either "fine" or "disaster"[0], we are uncomfortably close to the lower estimate for the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which would cause a 7.2 meter sea level rise, which is a massive disaster.
[0] or indeed where everything is either "cold" or "hot", as someone recently posted here suggesting that global warming would solve the problem of EV batteries being too cold sometimes
Just to add some more detail, we estimate a maximum 2 m sea level rise by 2100 due to contributions from all glacier sources, including the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Antarctic Ice Sheet, but more likely closer to 0.8 m [1]. That is still a large amount given ~400 million people live below 2 m [2], and most of those in developing parts of the world.
The hard times are already upon us and will only be getting worse within our lifetimes. The consensus is that things will be somewhere between really bad and catastrophic by 2100, depending on how much we reduce CO2e emissions and implement mitigation strategies globally[1]. So far, the lack of progress on reducing our dependence on oil and gas globally suggests we're on track for a more catastrophic scenario, i.e. somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP 8.5 [2].
Also, there are many potential feedback loops that may put us on an irreversible course towards the planet becoming uninhabitable in the future [3]. There is still a lot of scientific debate about when we will hit these feedback loops and how significant they will be. Where you stand on this issue is often what separates the doomer climate scientists that think we're passed these tipping points from the optimist climate scientists that think it's still avoidable or the feedback loops will not be too significant.
Most climate modeling focuses on the years of 2050 and 2100. What happens if we continue to make little progress by 2050 or 2100? As long as CO2e emissions are above net zero, warming will continue, and the effects will continue to get worse. Even if we do level-off CO2e emissions and stabilize at 2°C or 3°C, that temperature and all the extreme events, places that are no longer inhabitable, and lower crop yields that come with it will become the new norm, making life a lot harsher for future generations.
>Also, there are many potential feedback loops that may put us on an irreversible course towards the planet becoming uninhabitable in the future
This seems extremely overblown. The idea that the Earth will become "uninhabitable" seems ridiculous at best: the Earth has been "habitable" for literally billions of years, even when the climate was vastly different than it is now. And if you mean "habitable by humans" rather than "habitable by any lifeform", humans in particular have adapted to an extremely wide range of climates, from frozen tundra to middle eastern deserts.
Perhaps you mean "habitable by 7-10 billion humans with today's civilization and level of technology and standard of living"? It's hard to imagine the Earth ever becoming completely uninhabitable by humans; someone will figure out a way to survive, no matter the catastrophe. But it won't be comfortable like today, and the planet probably won't support today's population levels.
I used the wiggle word of potential because the severity of these feedback loops is debatable, but I don't think it's overblown at all.
If a tipping point does in fact exist and we pass it, it means we will be on an irreversible course to indefinite warming of the planet. To make matters worse, a positive feedback loop implies an exponential growth, unless some sort of negative feedback loop kicks in to counter it.
It is estimated that we have warmed the planet by 1.21C so far (as of 2021) since pre-industrial era[1]. In the worst case scenario (RCP8.5), temperatures will reach 2.5-4.9C by 2100[2]. It's worth pointing out the impact of temperature increase is exponential as well, i.e. 2C global temperature increase will make severe weather events 4 times more frequent than a 1.5C global temperature increase. Some studies estimate that all of earth will be uninhabitable by humans if the global temperature reaches 12C above pre-industrial era[3]. I don't think it's overblown to say this is possible within the next few hundreds of years, especially if these feedback loops turn out to kick in and start rapidly pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere than we do.
I'm of course quibbling over the definition of "uninhabitable", but again this seems overblown. I concede you're referring to the habitability of Earth by humans, rather than just extremophiles. But still, even with a worst-case scenario, I don't see how this would ever make the Earth completely uninhabitable to humans. Would it make it impossible to sustain billions of humans? Sure, unless they develop some really interesting tech. But I don't see how a mere 12C rise in temperature (or even double that) would make it impossible for humans to survive. Life would probably greatly resemble a Max Max movie, but still, that's different from "uninhabitable". "Uninhabitable" means there's no way for humans to survive at all.
>But I don't see how a mere 12C rise in temperature (or even double that) would make it impossible for humans to survive.
Where is your intuition for this coming from? Note that 12C rise in global temperature is a very different statement than 12C rise in average temperature of where you live. The temperature increase is applied non-uniformly. Also, the volatility in weather scales exponentially with global temperature increase. For example, 1.5C to 2C rise is expected to create 4 times more extreme weather events globally.
>Life would probably greatly resemble a Max Max movie
We don't need a fictional movie to see what life would be like. We are seeing glimpses of it already with these mega weather events hitting areas with a higher risk index such as the recent flooding in Pakistan that resulted in 33 million people impacted, ~600K people displaced, ~2,000 people dead, and ~10 billion USD in damages:
2000 people dead is bad of course, but there's 7.5 billion people on the planet right now, so it's not much really.
I really feel like you're looking at a worst-case scenario, comparing it to living in modern civilization, and concluding that modern civilization can't possibly survive such an extreme climactic change, and then concluding that humans will go extinct. I'm sorry, but that simply does not logically follow. Civilization can be destroyed, but this is quite different from all humans going extinct. The Mad Max movies may be fictional, but they do show how humans are able to survive in very extreme conditions, which has been proven countless times in history by humans who really did survive in extreme conditions (go talk to the Innuit for instance). Will 7.5B humans survive in such conditions? Obviously not. Will a few thousand? Quite possibly. It was only a very small number of humans that crossed the land bridge from Africa to the Middle East to populate the rest of the world.
Mad Max is a fictional movie and has nothing to do with reality.
The greatest risk from climate change is not from natural disasters directly like in Pakistan, but the downstream effects of frequent severe weather events and warming of local climates. The loss of life and levels of migration will be much greater when critical infrastructure such as energy production, food production, and clean water supply, are impacted.
Either way, humans going extinct or being reduced by several orders of magnitude is a dire outcome, and we should be doing all we can to prevent it.
There's an enormous difference between total extinction, and civilization being wiped out; that's my whole point. You're trying to conflate the two, and they simply are not the same. For most of human history, there has been zero civilization, and certainly no "critical infrastructure". Humans can go back to that. It won't be pretty, but it is possible, and it's not like extinction.
A temperature increase exists where earth will become uninhabitable by humans. One study mentioned above estimates that temperature increase is 12C. It could be higher or lower, but we don't really know without further studies on the topic.
Before reaching that temperature, life on earth will become a lot harsher for all due to the effects of climate change, and we should be doing all we can to avoid those harsher conditions, regardless of what we think the upper bound temperature for humanity to continue existing is.
"mere" is doing some really Herculean lifting in that sentence. most of the terrestrial surface is water. even a 6C mean surface temperature increase means all of our forests are deserts now. 12C mean surface temperature increase is something I don't want to imagine.
Maybe it depends on what segment of society you are surrounded by? Most of my friends are barely hanging on (unhealthy/multiple jobs, multiple roommates, no kids, can't afford healthcare, etc.). So any decrease in quality of life would be a catastrophe.
mediopolitical narrative is driving hard on this topic right now since covid left a void that ukraine can't fill (though they're trying, with the nuclear plant[0]). i'd support a framing around pollution, but not climate change.
CO₂ (a gas that life co-evolved with and depends on) simply isn't our most important environmental issue. let's focus instead on pollution: CO, NOₓ, SO₂, VOCs (PAHs & petroleum hydrocarbons, phthalates, alcohols, aldehydes, terpenes, ketones, formaldehyde, etc.), lead, mercury, ozone, radon & other radioactive elements, fertilizers/pesticides, plastics, and especially particulates, which are things that kill millions of people right now, every year (not to mention all the harm to everyone else as well).
the focus on climate change is fashion, but with a little tweak we can actually address impactful environmental problems instead.
[0]: nuclear, by the way, has the potential to help significantly, principally by removing coal, our biggest categorical polluter, from the energy mix. incidentally, that would also measurably reduce CO₂ emissions.
>the focus on climate change is fashion, but with a little tweak we can actually address impactful environmental problems instead.
Strongly disagree. Climate change is a much bigger threat in the short and long term than pollution itself. See my sibling comment for more on that.
That said, it feels like a silly thing to argue about. We should be making efforts to reduce both general pollution and CO2 emissions. Fortunately, a lot of solutions in one area will benefit the other.
no, see, that's exactly the problem. CO₂ is a mediopolitical wedge issue designed to trap us in partisan gridlock, not bring meaningful change to the global population. that's why it's so fickle and formless, perfect for sowing discord, because it can be shaped in any number of desired directions.
and it's clearly not threat to anyone living today and probably not for many generations to come, no matter what the 'trust the science' rhetoric claims. pollution, however, has been and will continue to kill millions of people every year. it has the potential to unite all sorts of factions (something vested interests fear) and actually make meaningful progress.
CO₂ and climate change is a sideshow, but it's been brought front and center because it serves a powerful purpose for those vested interests. anyone jumping on the climate change train is only furthering those interests, rather than solving real problems. instead, we should focus on the actual problems like pollution, and discard the chosen mediopolitical narrative.
>and it's clearly not threat to anyone living today and probably not for many generations to come
I am not sure how to respond to this in productive way. You clearly deny the impact of climate change, and it is unlikely I will convince you otherwise, so I don't know if it's worth anyone's time. If you're open minded and want to have a conversation, maybe start by responding to the well understood impacts of climate change today, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Impacts
Deaths linked to pollution and climate change are both on the order of millions per year. Are there particular solutions you advocate for investing in that don't tackle both issues?
you've been lied to. climate change has not killed millions of people[0]. pollution has.
the core problem with the climate change mediopolitical narrative is the focus on CO₂, which as i've noted before, is among the least important and most nebulous environmental issues, and therefore among the most attractive for political distraction and do-nothing gridlock. you see the effectiveness of this narrative all over hn, via the casuistry with which climate change is discussed.
in contrast with pollutants, which have squarely been introduced relatively recently by human industry, CO₂ is a gas on which life depends and has been abundant in our atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. rising CO₂ levels is a long term issue, to deal with over centuries and millenia, not a short term one. pollution has been killing people for centuries now.
edit: to answer your question, there are many policy decisions that differentiate the two. what to tax, what to incentivize, what to regulate, what to evangelize, etc. we should be characterizing the externalities caused by each pollutant and then applying a tax or market-based solution (or whatever else) to address them.
[0]: to be precise, "more people", since our ecology inadvertently kills people all the time, throughout history.
>climate change has not killed millions of people[
"We found that 5,083,173 deaths were associated with non-optimal temperatures per year, accounting for 9·43% of all deaths and equating to 74 excess deaths per 100 000 residents."[1]
and in general, you won't, since we're each quite able to do our own research ourselves, and also because sources aren't ace-in-the-hole smackdowns but rather extended information that typically doesn't fit into a discussion post. no source, especially not recent research out of an academic journal, is by itself invulnerable enough to criticism that it can wholesale end a discussion, and therefore has limited utility in these circumstances.
but it's easy enough to verify that there have been at least dozens of papers (and at least hundreds of news stories) on coal by itself having killed millions of people over the past century and a half, and having nothing to do with CO₂ or climate change.
In this day and age of misinformation, I think reputable sources go a long way to making an online discussion productive rather than just spewing nonsense back and forth.
Also, they can short circuit a discussion. In fact, here are two articles that cover the exact topic we are discussing, and largely summarize the issue as climate change is a bigger threat and they are two sides of the same coin anyway:
Can you point me to some sources that helped you reach your conclusion, or is this just an idea you came up with by looking at deaths due to pollution compared to deaths due to climate change historically?
national geographic is entertainment (read: misinformation, owned by disney). this article uses dramatic photography and liberally employs weasel words like "could" and "might". even "linked" isn't as strong as you might think, as that only implies correlation, not causation. it mentions no counter-factuals or alternate hypotheses, just drives boldly forward with the messaging.
as for the second, i agree that pollution and climate change are linked, but why address the boogeyman when we have the villian right in front of us? [insert tribal, mediopolitical reasons unrelated to making lives better.] pollution is clearly a problem now. climate change might be a problem in decades/centuries. and the causation is pollution -> climate change, not the other way around, so fixing pollution (not simply CO₂) is win-win, but not the other way around.
a long arc of digesting and triangulating information has led to my understanding of the problem, which doesn't easily link to a study or two. i'm a proponent of sensible environmentalism, not tribal bandwagoning. i was a member of https://netimpact.org/ in business school and took courses on sustainability (i.e., i've studied the problem using primary sources rather than relying on mass media to tell me what to think).
Respectfully, I don't feel like there is much value to be found in this discussion (arguing what's a more pressing issue between pollution and climate change), so I'm happy to land on agreeing on this statement and moving on:
> pollution -> climate change, so fixing pollution (not simply CO₂) is a win-win
Imagine a world where everything between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn is essentially uninhabitable due to consistently high Wet Bulb Temperatures. Right now, we have over 3 Billion people living in that band (40% of humanity), and about 30% of all commercial agriculture is done here. Bye-bye to both.
Imagine a world where everything between the tropic of that hemisphere and the Arctic/Antarctic circle of that hemisphere has massively chaotic weather, such that commercial agriculture at any significant/effective scale is either impossible or produces utterly unreliable crops from one year to the next. This is where the other 5 Billion (60%) live, and where the other 70% of commercial agriculture is done. Humans could probably live here (although Wet Bulb temps would also make large chunks uninhabitable for parts of the year), but where will the consistent and reliable supply of food come from? Not this part of the world, that’s for sure.
This leaves only the Arctic and Antarctic, which will be quite warm at this point, but has almost no topsoil (or even arable soil in the first place) worth mentioning, and could produce enough crops for only about 2-3% of current human populations.
Now imagine the other 97% of humanity fighting tooth and nail for the right to subsist off of the consistent and reliable food supply from this agriculture-poor part of the planet. Most people who are starving and desperate will gladly shred and decimate infrastructure if it means that they can live another day. And this is the infrastructure that permits efficient, large-scale agriculture and distribution systems that can feed civilizational populations above the single-digit millions level.
Sure, humanity will likely linger on for another century or two. But not as any sort of a serious technological society, nor in any significant numbers beyond the low millions.
Mass migration and everything that comes with it, would be extremely destebalising, most likely leading to another world war and potentially the collapse of modern civilisation. Sure it's unlikely that human kind will go extinct but this is the next best thing.
Comment I replied to suggested scientists do not currently see climate change as a human species extinction level event
Modeling the future of a species of billions, many irrational actors, is too complicated to put my trust in scientists today.
My MSc in math may be old now; maybe I’m getting the math wrong, but I don’t need a math degree to know every scientist is a fallible human and fallible humans often lie unintentionally or intentionally to keep the peace and maintain their paycheck. Who wants to be the scientist that is all “end of the world is coming.”
Many “scientists” in industrial roles were complicit in keeping climate change evidence hidden since the 1860s.
“Authority figures” is the dumbest social construct we cling to.
False equivalence; we have a baseline for when water will boil due to years of experiment highlighting physical constraints.
We have no baseline for human behavior after another 100 years of climate change. Future hasn’t happened yet, past experience is not viable as it lacked the new constraints of the future.
There is evidence in biology that we go crazy after years of living in hot weather. The body heats is better than it cools us, and cooling us strains our systems.
So perhaps it can be shown in some academic way our biology could literally survive the conditions, but they can’t predict how well humanity will actually deal with it; we may destroy ourselves over resource constraints or the wrong people going mad, launching the nukes out of paranoia.
There are too many ways we can end ourselves to take the prediction “it won’t get too hot for the species to biologically survive” as evidence we won’t still destroy ourselves.
Constraining the prediction only to that which they can have most confidence in undermines the accuracy of the model.
Ok keeping it simple; any model we make has a non-zero chance of being bullshit.
Parameters could be over or under weighted given current state, choices of scientists.
And we have ZERO data points from a future where people actually are living with another 100
years of climate change; we could be massively over or under weighting without historical data of a future that hasn’t happened; your goal is rife with paradox and uncertainty; how do we use our trend modeling tools that rely on historical data without historical data from a future we haven’t experienced?
All our model is is old data points and some guesses at trends which may or may not hold. Scientists now cannot force people to stick to their model.
These are mathematical truths too, sorry you don’t have the context. I’m just gonna be done here. Cya later bye.
Anyway, I think the main disconnect is your misunderstanding about how climate modeling works. It's much more about the physics of GHGs in the atmosphere and how those impact the global temperature and the downstream effects on local climates and weather patterns. Human activity can be summarized as: humans emitted 51 billion tons of GHGs last year and that number continues to grow.
I was never talking about climate models. I rebuked the idea survival is certain because it won’t be “too hot” for biology according to a climate model. We have no idea if we’ll remain rational actors until we experience and try to adapt to further climate change.
Constraining “survivability” to one metric is stupid.
Replacing coal with natural gas has huge impact. It was probably the main driver of the reductions in emissions in the US for the last 15 years. Natural gas will continue to displace coal, so additional emissions reductions will be had.
Solar and wind electricity generation also have a huge impact; they account for 10% of the electricity generation in the US now, but 20 years ago they accounted for roughly 0. The increase of solar generation was above 20% per year each year of the last decade (except one); wind grew at maybe about 10% per year. It's not likely that they continue at the same rate, but even if they grow at only 15% and 5% per year for the next 2 decades, the impact will be huge.
We can get to a point where we only have solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and natural gas. The natural gas will be the most economic way to deal with the intermittency of solar and wind. Then we'll switch to hydrogen. Then we'll decarbonize steel and concrete. We'll actually start doing that in parallel. Once concrete is decarbonized, there's no point in wooden buildings.
Big impact for gas, yes, but limited. That will rid us of about 15% of emissions. Going renewable with nuclear could go to 50%.
Gas also has a problem of leaking, and methane is a potent GHG, so it's not just emissions due to burning it.
The remaining pieces are manufacturing and transportation. Former can be hard to make clean. Latter is the question of how quickly we can develop power grids for EV or hydrogen infrastructure and rebuild rail where it is insufficient.
Also clean up mass shipping.
New small block nuclear power plants are likely better than gas at filling in intermittent wind load (which is usually month spread) and can be toggled as needed.
A green grid supplying EV’s and home heating is enough to dramatically extend the window of time to deal with the other sources. I am not saying it’s the only issue, just that everything else is largely meaningless in comparison.
Methane gas leaks are front loaded they don’t have long term impact as long as we quickly stop using it. In the short term it’s a problem but long term methane is effectively identical to CO2 because 1 atom of CH4 produces water and 1 atom of CO2.
> Gas also has a problem of leaking, and methane is a potent GHG, so it's not just emissions due to burning it.
If we only use 10% of the current gas, we'll only have 10% of the current methane emissions. Once solar and wind ramp up you will not need more than 10% of the current nat gas plants. There are days when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing, but they are not that frequent.
The problem with decarbonization is that there isn’t any low hanging fruit.
At its core, hydrocarbons are the best source of energy at this moment, ignoring emissions. And the emissions problem is a massive tragedy of the commons.
So you have a need to drive behavior towards something suboptimal with incentives that benefit those who don’t change behavior.
> "The problem with decarbonization is that there isn’t any low hanging fruit."
Sadly, the problem with decarbonization is that it doesn't matter if there is or isn't "low hanging fruit", because even if it was all "low hanging fruit", too much of humanity will fight to the bloody end to avoid taking action on any of it for fear that they'll have to A) admit that we've really fucked up, and B) they'll have to alter their life in some small inconvenient way that they'll blow way outta proportion to make it seem like some massive world-ending inconvenience.
The other commenter may not have demonstrated any low hanging fruit, but I would say that there is still plenty of that:
• PV is approximately the cheapest electricity available, and not yet saturated in summer daytime
• BEVs have lower lifetime costs and emissions than ICE vehicles
• Not all homes are as insulated as they can be
• Given how cheap food is (and that the government subsidises and regulates it anyway), relatively modest updates can reduce methane emissions even without population dietary changes
And all that's assuming zero new tech. Vat grown meat is aiming for lower emissions, not just ethical benefits; there are efforts to produce low (and zero) emission steel and concrete.
The trouble is, the necessary reductions are around 99.9%, so we need more than just the combination of all the existing and near-term low-hanging fruit, we need all bar one of the apples in all the trees in the garden.
For exactly the reasons you describe, the low hanging fruit is (unfortunately) geoengineering. It is far easier to figure out the scientific engineering to increase the reflectivity of the earth’s atmosphere as safely as possible than to figure out the political engineering to make everyone willingly change their lifestyles dramatically and quickly enough to decarbonize at the rate the planet needs. No matter how you slice it, rapid decarbonization requires some reduction in our perceived quality of life, and that’s a politically intractable problem to surmount.
The only other semi-feasible hanging fruit are technological — e.g. someone figures out a magic bullet for carbon capture, or the price of renewables and battery technology suddenly gets so cheap that the price of fossil fuel energy becomes extremely expensive by comparison.
The low hanging fruit is to decarbonize the grid with solar, wind, and a batteries (and nuclear). Meanwhile, switch automobiles from ICE to EVs. And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps.
There are other challenges, but that is a big chunk of the job that is doable / already being done with current technology.
Better yet, redesign cities so they're walkable and bikable and have good public transit (running on electricity of course), so people don't need cars. Cars are bad in many many ways: emissions are only a small part of the problem with cars. Crashes kill tens of thousands of people in America alone every year, they cause people to be obese because they don't walk anywhere, I could go on and on.
>And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps.
Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather.
> Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather.
I think that statement needs to be qualified and quantified.
Qualified: your claim is probably only intended to apply to air-source heat pumps, not ground-source heat pumps. Ground-source heat pumps are popular in places with cold weather, for instance Sweden.
Quantified: If you mean -40°C, then, yes, air-source heat pumps aren't going to work. But most people don't live in places that cold, and just because we can't use air-source heat pumps in a few places doesn't mean they're useless everywhere. Here's a data sheet for a relatively cheap air-source heat pump that's rated to work down to -25°C (about -14 F):
They aren't readily available in the U.S. and even if you could buy it online or something no local place tends to service them. This is a generalization, so I am sure there are exceptions but it seems to be the case in most places I've seen.
As far as ground sourced those are significantly more expensive. The cost/benefit is not there unless the only factor in your purchase is climate change.
Yeah, this is what I was referring to. The heat pumps available in the US only seem to work down to freezing (0C). After that, they just turn on resistive heating, which is very inefficient.
> redesign cities so they're walkable and bikable and have good public transit (running on electricity of course), so people don't need cars
I think you underestimate how much people like their cars and aren't considering how unwilling people are to walk or bike when it's cold or hot out.
Public transit should be fixed though. Keep buses and their fixed route and schedule during rush hours and for the rest of the day have publicly funded ride-share type of service.
One way, the nearest plaza to me is a 7 minute drive. There's nothing closer than this plaza.
The route Google Maps suggests walking is 44 minutes. There are no sidewalks. There are two roundabouts, one mini, where drivers aren't even really sure whose turn it is.
It isn't a relaxing experience by any stretch of the imagination, especially if I wanted to bring my kids.
It's not that I'm unwilling. I want to walk more. I just don't have 1h30m to dedicate to the most basic of trips.
Yeah, this is why we need to redesign our streets. Even distances that are easily bikeable are currently made effectively impassable for most people outside of a car, and there’s no reason it should be that way.
If it’s a 44 minute walk I’d guesstimate that’d be 20 minutes at a leisurely pace on a bike, or 15 if you’re quick on a road bike (or still leisurely on an e-bike).
I feel you in regards to transporting your kids - or anything else for that matter. Walking and public transit is great but what about buying groceries or anything even slightly more to carry? It seems to me people often overlook the "payload capacity" needed for transit, we're not all just commuting to work all the time.
A car is overkill for carrying most things day-to-day if you don’t live in an area built solely around cars.
Walk to any Costco in NYC and you’ll see plenty of people doing just fine with 50+lbs of groceries and a shopping cart.
Alternatively, go to any suburban grocery store and you’ll see people driving away in massive pickup trucks and SUVs having only picked up a gallon of milk.
> A car is overkill for carrying most things day-to-day if you don’t live in an area built solely around cars.
> you’ll see people driving away in massive pickup trucks and SUVs having only picked up a gallon of milk
It's not about need. Most of those people didn't choose the massive truck or SUV because that was the most sensible vehicle for them. They bought it because they like it.
Even if they don't strictly need to drive their truck to the store, they still will because they like driving it. It's not a wildly different mindset from people who buy the latest and greatest phone every year or spend thousands on a wristwatch that keeps time worse than a $20 digital watch you buy in a drug store.
I've lived in cities and depended on public transportation when I was younger and now I'm out in the 'burbs. Right now, the suburbs is where I want to be. My quality of life is higher. If I had a self-driving car, I'd move even further out of the city.
I can answer this question as someone currently living in a pretty walkable city. Most of the time I just stop by the grocery store on my way to or from somewhere else and pick up a few things. City grocery stores tend to have pretty short lines because a lot of other people are doing the same, so you don’t have to wait for 5 people to empty a full cart in front of you. (The exception being Whole Foods somehow, I think the fact that it has a giant parking garage catering to drivers has something to do with it.)
If I do need to make a larger trip, I bring a folding wagon. It’s less convenient than just stopping by on my way home from something else but there are two full grocery stores within a 5 minute walk of home so it’s no big deal. Same as before, minimal lines.
I’m about to move to the suburbs where the nearest large grocery store will be a 7-minute bike away, so I’m planning to get a front-loader cargo bike like the Urban Arrow: https://na.urbanarrow.com/family-bikes/
…though while it is that short of a trip taking a direct route, that route seems somewhat inhospitable outside of a car, so in practice I might have to take some long detours. The town’s supposedly planning to put in bicycle infrastructure at some point, but I think that’ll be my rallying cry once I move there. :)
If nobody asks, a sidewalk will never be installed. It might be worth figuring out how to ask your city to install a sidewalk. In the city of Austin, a lot of the work is driven by ADA compliance.
The number of cars in very walkable cities (e.g. Tokyo) is underestimated also, but the fact remains that if the infrastructure is there people will use it. It's convenient. As it stands, being without a car is not very convenient in many places in N.A.
People liking their cars is why we're going to have a climate catastrophe.
And public transit is not feasible as long as cities are designed for cars. Train lines just don't scale when things are too spread out. Public transit only works when lots of people are going between the same two points. Public ride-share? You mean taxis? That's not feasible at all; we can't afford to give everyone a private chauffeur.
Depends on what you define as “very cold”. Comparatively few people live in climates where you consistently have extended periods where the average temperature drops below zero. And there are ways to work with that. For example what’s in German called “Eisspeicherheizung” (ice storage heating). It cleverly uses the crystalization energy of water [1]. You basically bury a few tons of water and use it as a buffer. You drive a heat pump that extracts energy from the water and on the other side, you run a collector circuit that collects solar energy and heat from the air.
Effectively, every time the temperature raises above 0 degrees, you fill up your buffer.
The size of the buffer is designed so that at the end of the heating period, most water has been turned to ice. And now you also have free cooling for the summer.
This system can cover periods where the outside temperature drops below zero without loss of efficiency.
[1] freezing a liter of water at 0 degrees requires an equivalent energy to heating a liter by 80 degrees Celsius.
Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather.
Sure they do, their efficiency just drops to below the point where it remains feasible (i.e. cheaper than furnace/boiler). Technology has come a long way and most of the world's population doen't seem to live in that 'very cold' weather, so I'd wager heat pumps are still the way to go. Especially ground source heat pumps thrive well enough in cold climates, just not always doable to install on existing sites.
> Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather.
You can use heat pumps with a underground heat sink (not sure what they are called in english). However, they really only make sense in climates where it is extensively below -10 degree Celcius. Even in southern Sweden they don't really make much sense.
How soon before we have electrical grids capable of handling all the people charging their cars at the same time?
This was five days ago - are we putting the horse before the cart right now?
The announcement by the California Independent System Operator (Cal ISO) on Wednesday asking California residents not to charge their electric vehicles during peak hours to help conserve electricity continued to face backlash on Thursday, due to the state approving a ban on the sale of new gas powered vehicles by 2035 only a week earlier.
At the same time, the power supply in California has been in a state of constant flux due to the same 2045 policy removing oil, gas, and coal plants at a rate faster than wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable sources of energy can replace them. On Thursday, a huge 9% loss of energy in 2025 was averted by the legislature passing a bill saving Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station for several more years as a bridge to help meet power needs in the state.
And we've seen examples from other domains where 1% here, 0.5% there adds up to meaningful gains (I'm talking of the marginal gains philosophy of UK cycling, and then Team Sky).
If we write off every "This will only help 1%" then you ignore that in combination the effect is magnified.
The impact of cutting a military budget worldwide to half of today's spending would bring up to 8% percent.
If we still need to have wars worldwide, why not take a look at the current China India conflict as an example. There they agreed to fight only with sticks and clubs, and it's working great for both sides.
But that's the beauty of the Military Industrial Complex. It's not about war(s). It's about enriching the few at the top of the MIC food chain.
In theory, I agree with you. The reality is, we'll likely be seeing the MIC(s) be enlarged. The argument will be that more power and more force are necessary as resources become limited, "interests" need to be maintained, etc.
It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the other changes we need.
Of course we can do things in parallel, and I’m not saying this isn’t worth doing, but this is one of the least important things we could do to curb emissions.
I live in an old wood house that was built 200-400 years ago. I only know because my neighbor's house looks identical and is built around 1640. No structural things have been changed, only internal renovations and addons.
I was surprised myself. Even more so when you hear that most old concrete or brick town houses have been either destroyed and rebuilt or structurally renovated in the last 40 years or so.
It should be noted that old growth wood is significantly higher quality wood than what you'd get from most stores these days. The fast-growing wood is flimsier and less rot resistant, but it can also be replanted and replaced quite easy.
Only using old growth as a source of wood would cause quick deforestation of the remaining old growth forests and nature reserves only for the trees to be replaced with the worse trees we use today. It would only work once, the next generations would still get the crappy quick lumber we use today or be stuck without wood while waiting for forests to regrow, so it's not really an option. If we go for wooden houses everywhere, we're going to need to use the "industrial" wood.
“Old growth” wood isn’t materially better for construction along most axes, and possibly all that matter (example: modern SPF is roughly as rot resistant as “old growth wood”, but we also have way better ways to keep it dry too). Construction requires straight-enough material with sufficient flex (compression strength is a gimme) that can effectively hold fasteners. The “crappy quick lumber” that old people complain about today is actually, genuinely fine for what it is intended to be used for and fifty years from now people will be complaining about what they can buy at Robo Home Depot with the same fervor that people complain about modern silvaculture today.
I can only talk from a smaller scale. All the wood houses here are built with wood from here. Forests are strictly regulated and it's heavily illegal to deforest faster than its sustainable for the region. At least half of the people here also heat with wood, usually from their own lands. I personally have literally zero heating cost increase this year, which is crazy in Europe.
There are however at least thousands of trees for every person living here so that couldn't be scaled to a city.
Engineered wood solved that problem. Plywood is a type of engineered wood. Same for gluelams, LVLs, and CLTs. These are typically stronger than solid timber, including old growth.
It does take more energy to fabricate, but still much less than concrete and steel.
I live in Sweden,there's plenty of wooden houses that are hundreds of years old. How long a building lasts is much more a function of other factors, not the building material itself.
My house was built in 1905, all wooden frame. The timber is in perfect shape and as long as there are no leaks, will last for another hundred at least. It becomes very hard though and difficult to nail into. I would imagine wood has more longevity under the right (dry) conditions than steel.
When done properly, wood charring actually strengthens the wood by drawing out moisture. Charred wood is also more fire-resistant, repels insects and doesn't rot.
Of course all this can be achieved differently but charring usually lasts much longer than other surface treatments.
It used to be common in Japan (yakisugi) but I assume this must have been common throughout the world.
My neighbors large barn in the gold country of California has support pillars under the floor that were treated by charing. Built around 1890 and they are still in good shape.
Structurally modifying wood can be done even better than fire treatment, hence the mention of polymer enhanced wood. (And yes, biopolymers work for this.)
I had a civil engineering friend who worked for a firm that specialized in wooden buildings (the proper name escapes me, but think office buildings made of wood?).
According to him it’s very in demand, and it can rival traditional building methods.
Had a relative who was an executive at a timber-only structural design firm and I visited them a few times so I know a little bit more than a layman. Comments here are kinda low-brow, honestly. A little disappointed by that.
Anyway, there are all sorts of timber-based products these days. I'll pick one, cross-laminated timber, and just link a bunch of basic stuff:
- structural integrity example https://www.ascentmke.com/ 25 story building in Milwaukee (strictly uses both CLT and glulam, but well, give me a little slack)
When you say "wooden structures", you're referring to typical stick framed construction with likely no sound dampening or insulation. This post is about mass timber construction[1], where the (manufactured) timbers function more like a concrete or steel columns/girders/shear walls.
Many modern concrete buildings use steel stud framed walls, which are actually worse than stick framing for noise isolation.
Noise isolation is much more a function of how the actual insulation being put in. If houses are build to the lowest standard than yes they will be incredibly noisy. I mean cheap concrete apartment buildings are essentially made with large concrete frame and thin plaster interior walls.
Mass, decoupling, and air tightness are all required to isolate sound effectively. All three are expensive to implement, and spec homes (houses built to immediately sell, as opposed to live in) are all about saving money to make more profit.
Yeah, I lived in a wood frame building. The first week we were there, we heard some young kids right outside our door making noise. I opened the door to ask them to quiet down and there was nobody there. But I can still hear them. So I go up one floor. No kids, but they’re still just as audible as before. I go up one more floor to the top floor. Sure enough that’s where they were, 2 floors above us. It sounded like they were at our doorstep. Needless to say we moved out after just under a year because of the noise problems.
Note that this isn't a problem in wood frame buildings built with proper sound insulation, so it's more that regulations in many municipalities allow weak sound insulation, and developers build to the cheapest spec possible if there's no compelling reason not to.
Except when someone wants to drill a hole to hang a painting. You can hear that multiple floors up or down. I live in a 30 story building and the drilling noise in a real nuisance.
noise transmission (and the reduction thereof) is affected by all aspects of building design. A wood building will not always be noisy. More expensive buildings tend to have multiple mitigations in place for sound transmission. These can be multiple special purpose layers in floors and walls, from elastic layers that are only a few mm thick, to inches of poured concrete present only for the sound response. A technique in very nice stick-built (the 5-over-1s mentioned) buildings is to have walls built with different structural systems for either side of the wall. Two layers of drywall on a single structural wall acts like a membrane, transmitting sound to the other side. Attaching drywall to disconnected structures greatly inhibits that vibration, at the cost of a thicker wall (lost rentable sqft) and ~2x spent on structure.
They’re already used extensively. Anywhere there’s a wooden beam over 2” x 6”, not to mention plywood/chipboard/etc. old growth wood, which you’d need to make a solid beam of any bigger dimension, is waaay too expensive (not to mention less reliable/predictable) these days.
All modern homes require active humidity management as they're sheathed with plywood externally and drywall[1] inside. Even if you use concrete or brick you still need active humidity management if you don't want mold growing on all your furniture, etc.
There's no more old growth timber to build (and furnish) homes the way they were built 100+ years ago. All the alternatives require active systems to prevent rapid degradation.
This is even true of modern towers--the types of steel, the techniques, the tolerances, the use of reinforced concrete, etc, require active systems. Towers built 100+ years ago were in some ways more resilient than today, having used materials and techniques--knowingly and unknowingly--that could hold up to the elements better with active management.
[1] Even in high-end builds, nobody except perhaps a die-hard DIY'er with money to burn uses more moisture resistant drywall variants or alternatives throughout an entire home. I once toured a 100+ year old house supposedly renovated and lived-in by an architect. They basically rebuilt the entire structure, including replacing much of the timber with steel. Everything _looked_ high-end, except the walls if you paid attention. They just used regular drywall--not the cheapest, but definitely not the nice stuff (e.g. what you might find in a class A commercial office). IIRC, the internal doors were solid core, but that hardly mattered given you could hear everything through the cheap walls.
To add, humans emit a lot of moisture just by breathing. Also, modern code limits how much air can leak out of a house. It’s those leaks in old homes that let them survive without moisture control, because that leaked air would carry the moisture away.
Would one be able to achieve a similar effect by simply opening the windows on a regular basis? (Assuming all the other principles around good air-flow and ventilation were following in the building layout.)
Yes, but modern humidity controls are able to regulate moisture levels while also reclaiming heat. That is, if you open all the windows your warm/cool air will flow out while fresh air flows in; an energy recovery ventilator will partially precondition the fresh air as it flows into the house, using the outgoing air as the source.
The city of Shibam in Yemen shows how a high-rise rammed earth/adobe city might look. It's possible to adapt this technique to wet climates with appropriate plasters and maintenance:
My sister lived in a very new timber apartment building on the 3rd floor.
I'm not sure if there had been a water leak or what but the whole floor of her apartments main living area notably drooped in the middle and was kind of bouncy.
She claimed she couldn't notice it but I found it really unnerving.
The article is talking about mass timber which is a building type that is still pretty uncommon in the US but is emerging in Europe mostly. If you (and she) are American it's likely just a wood frame building.
The issue with wood based homes is that they are really good for SMALL individual homes. NOT for tall buildings despite theoretically xlam and co allow to build them...
It's not only a matter of water-leaks but also of noise, low thermal mass with the need of more effective ventilation and precise heating hard to get in a large building etc.
In ecological terms it's a matter of scale: trees keep growing IF we do not cut them too much. So at a certain level of demand wood is renewable, above it's not.
In human terms pushing revolutions is not much good because anything have and EOL and if we build much in a short period of time we need to rebuild en mass when it will reach it's EOL and we do not know up front in what kind of situation we will be at that point in time. So better a slow evolution, sparse, to have backups and low "new generation" demand in the timeline...
The real points though are IMO:
- who need apartments? People or those who sell them/sell the land since selling many apartments means much more profit than single-family homes?
- how can dense city/big buildings evolve? We know that they have a limited lifecycle, however no one seems to care up-front about it. Single family homes with a bit of land around can be rebuilt for instance at a generational change, it's easy to reach the decision as a single owner with a single family impacted, it's nearly impossible with MANY families in a single building.
- can dense area evolve well? For instance few decades ago cars was not that spread, so cities was not built for them. Cars arrive. Dense cities have struggled enormously to add them and nowadays we mostly agree that in dense are the sole option is public transports for nearly all since there is no physical place for cars for all. Cities built for cars for all on contrary struggle to maintain their road networks, their economy need a continuous growth witch works ONLY until old infra reach their EOL. Again not evolutionary plans was made up front. We are talking about flying cars nowadays, where to land tomorrow? We have seen the shift from shopping centers to on-line retails where to adapt to receive large boxes when we are not at home in a tall building? Spread enough single-family homes with small scattered buildings for work/service purpose on contrary CAN evolve. No matter much if we foresee well or not.
Well... IMVHO cities have reached the point of "too much density", there is no more economy of scale in them respect of their many issues. We still need a bit of density, we still are social animals, but instead of evolving toward bigger and bigger dense area, hubs in the middle of nothing, we need to spread, in a partially interconnected and mixed network. Like who? The classic internet vs today's one? In the end actual research shows that "any kind of network" tend to behave similarly... And those seems to be lessons no one want to take...
It seems a bit like you are just making stuff up without evidence to back this up. Many of the supposed issues have been solved ages ago.
> The issue with wood based homes is that they are really good for SMALL individual homes. NOT for tall buildings despite theoretically xlam and co allow to build them...
> It's not only a matter of water-leaks but also of noise, low thermal mass with the need of more effective ventilation and precise heating hard to get in a large building etc.
Sure at the moment nobody builds sky scrapers from timber, but large apartment buildings are absolutely no issue e.g. https://www.arup.com/projects/haut
Moreover while you are correct that they tend to have lower thermal mass, they can typically be build much better insulated and air tight. Many low energy houses both small and big are timber houses. Heating and ventilation is not a bigger issue compared to concrete houses and noise is much a function of insulation so typically modern timber houses are better because they get build to a higher insulation standard.
> In ecological terms it's a matter of scale: trees keep growing IF we do not cut them too much. So at a certain level of demand wood is renewable, above it's not.
What is your point? you can always grew more trees if the demand is higher. The issue is not just that timber is renewable, its also that building based on timber is extremely CO2 and energy intensive.
> In human terms pushing revolutions is not much good because anything have and EOL and if we build much in a short period of time we need to rebuild en mass when it will reach it's EOL and we do not know up front in what kind of situation we will be at that point in time. So better a slow evolution, sparse, to have backups and low "new generation" demand in the timeline...
I don't know why you're bringing this up in this context, nobody is proposing to tear down cities and rebuild with timber.
> The real points though are IMO:
> - who need apartments? People or those who sell them/sell the land since selling many apartments means much more profit than single-family homes?
? how about the people living in the apartment buildings. Building cities from single family homes is completely unsustainable. the land use, transport cost and building costs are extremely high.
> - how can dense city/big buildings evolve? We know that they have a limited lifecycle, however no one seems to care up-front about it. Single family homes with a bit of land around can be rebuilt for instance at a generational change, it's easy to reach the decision as a single owner with a single family impacted, it's nearly impossible with MANY families in a single building.
? You make it sounds like cities are a new phenomena. We have build cities for hundreds of years, this is a solved issue. Moreover an advantage of apartment buildings over individual homes is that they typically lasts longer. We do not want to rebuild our housing every 30 years or so.
> - can dense area evolve well? For instance few decades ago cars was not that spread, so cities was not built for them. Cars arrive. Dense cities have struggled enormously to add them and nowadays we mostly agree that in dense are the sole option is public transports for nearly all since there is no physical place for cars for all. Cities built for cars for all on contrary struggle to maintain their road networks, their economy need a continuous growth witch works ONLY until old infra reach their EOL.
Yes building cities for cars makes them very unlikeable, how about we stop? Also blaming this on cities is a bit rich, the issue is that we suddenly changed our transport method to cars, which got us into the mess we are in. But importantly, you completely omit the fact that we can't have modern rural living without cars, so the costs are much higher (both in terms of energy and money). Rural living is completely unprepared for cars to disappear.
>Again not evolutionary plans was made up front. We are talking about flying cars nowadays, where to land tomorrow? We have seen the shift from shopping centers to on-line retails where to adapt to receive large boxes when we are not at home in a tall building? Spread enough single-family homes with small scattered buildings for work/service purpose on contrary CAN evolve. No matter much if we foresee well or not.
Funny, what you describe is largely suburbia, which has lots of sustainability issues (you need a car to get around, typically not walkable... )
> Well... IMVHO cities have reached the point of "too much density", there is no more economy of scale in them respect of their many issues. We still need a bit of density, we still are social animals, but instead of evolving toward bigger and bigger dense area, hubs in the middle of nothing, we need to spread, in a partially interconnected and mixed network. Like who? The classic internet vs today's one? In the end actual research shows that "any kind of network" tend to behave similarly... And those seems to be lessons no one want to take...
So how would this work, how are you proposing to spread out cities like New York, Tokyo or London? I mean you can look at cities like LA or Melbourne to see what happens if you restrict density of housing to largely single family dwellings. The cities become huge in terms of land area. Gridlocked as everyone has to travel large distances and making extensive public transport networks is much more difficult.
> It seems a bit like you are just making stuff up without evidence to back this up.
Sorry for being rude, but you seems making just PR up without evidence... I have built a wood-frame home for myself few years ago, assessing all the techniques available at that time, witch happen to be the same for today. It's just a two levels home, and while WELL insulated for noise it's not in practice. Some others here who live in different wood buildings report similar issues and I think most of them are from USA so with far lighter and different structure than mine. The PRs claims to have solved all issues, but that's a claim I still have to see only one who actually really live in an wood based building agree with that.
Also you can't made "much better airtight" wood based buildings because they are not by nature, even massive XLam usage can't do better than concrete simply because it's NOT nor can't be a unique isotropic surfaces built locally. You can made airtight enough buildings, of course, but still less than equally new one in CA. That's not a big issue for small homes/homes in general where the "plastic" (steam-brakes coating) is small enough, but on a large building ensure airtightness not only the day you end the construction but after years is an issue. Nothing "exceptional", like the reduced thermal mass, but still a negative point.
The positive is that in LESS volume you can push more glass wool, so yes you can say that a 40cm wood-frame perimetral wall is better insulated than an equal 40cm CA wall. It's also easy to change them once built, pass conduits etc. These are their plus. Fire resistance is a marginal plus. But that's not a real win. The real win is IF they cost less than CA or if like me you want them for some reasons (miscalculations included).
> What is your point? you can always grew more trees if the demand is higher.
You can't forests do not grow up in a finger snap. The actual demand is a thing, if you switch from CA to wood it's a very different one. My point is that if we SLOWLY push single-family homes wood made we can effectively get ecological benefits because the overall wood demand do not skyrocket and the slow growth today means a slow rebuild rate in the future. Something actually sustainable since you do not remade a home after few years, so trees have time to grow up again. If we push it at a schizophrenic speed instead of an environmental benefit and a new way of life we only made a mess with very few who profit and all others, environment included who loose.
> I don't know why you're bringing this up in this context, nobody is proposing to tear down cities and rebuild with timber.
That's the actual trend. UN New Urban Agenda admit we need to rebuild our cities, and we should not rebuild them as today, one of the new characteristic is the massive use of wood. Of course is an UN agenda, not a thing all the world blindly follow at warp seep, but that's is.
> ? how about the people living in the apartment buildings. Building cities from single family homes is completely unsustainable. the land use, transport cost and building costs are extremely high.
Are you really sure or you just imaging that? I know veeeery little studies on that topic, like http://www.newgeography.com/content/006840-high-density-and-... or casual news like https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2... but in general terms is see far much more expensive constructions sites in towns than outside. Not only. I came from a big south-EU town, now living in the French Alps and well... My transportation costs are now LOWER than before. No traffic, a distributed local economy, "local buffers" (like mass usage of freezers vs buy ready-made foods as habit etc) do the trick.
People living in apartments? Well... Just this very year they are a little bit upset due to the skyrocketed energy prices and they have no choice. While people living in individual homes have little but still some choices, like room for p.v., wood stove etc...
> We have build cities for hundreds of years, this is a solved issue.
The very contrary: very old cities (who happen to be far little than modern ones) was built mostly with rocks. When you destroy a home the old rocks are ready at your disposal to build a new one. Wood based cities was far little in the history and source woods in the surroundings. CA or modern wood/steel structure can't be recycled as they are.
> you completely omit the fact that we can't have modern rural living without cars, so the costs are much higher (both in terms of energy and money).
I do not omit, I APPLAUD car's need. Really. Public transport is a CAP-like theorem solution: or you get efficient public transport or you get economically sustainable one. Pick one only. If public transport is good to serve ALL Citizens ALL the time is terribly inefficient in energy and economic terms. If you try maximize "very used" transit than the service is terrible for Citizen and as a result citizens need cars. There is NO way to have effective public transit. Car's are not that efficient, but serve a purpose and in the New Deal setup are NEEDED because you can't live alone on renewables and you can't have an electricity grid on renewables the load vary so much no network can keep the frequency. To have a grid with big p.v./wind you need batteries, since they do not last longer and are not cheap... Well cars have casually a very similar lifecycle than cars using car's batteries makes the grid stable enough and casual blackouts a non-issues for homes who run on their batteries for a short period of time and the p.v. usage compensate another bit of the costs. If you think we can have a new deal without cars, you are just dreaming nuclear fusion or something else who is not there.
> Funny, what you describe is largely suburbia, which has lots of sustainability issues
Suburbs was a failure because was done in USA for cars. EU rivieras where single-families homes are mixed with workplaces on contrary prove in EU that they works better than cities in all terms.
> So how would this work, how are you proposing to spread out cities like New York, Tokyo or London?
I propose a SLOW de-urbanization following WFH and retirees who are the first two cohort who can leave a city. Behind them a small local service industry can spring to life and behind it more. So the economy can work. Only few productions still need density and for them we can build districts, they tend to be also polluting industries so having them apart is good anyway.
Public transport MUST NOT be done there, only private one.
Land use must be regulated with the sustainability principle: we allow as much homes as they can source water and subsistence food locally. This create also a resilient society in all terms, natural disasters, attacks etc. Transports are not an issue either because a local-centric economy lower the need for them and more important push the need of many smaller routes instead of big ones. You travel less because you need to travel less.
To visualize of course you need to really start thinking about a new society, otherwise you clearly fail but not differently than those from the past who say "fly? Ah, no, mans can't fly! They have no wings". Remember that at their times they have perfectly reasonable objections for their statements. not differently than those before against steel-made ships.
Given that Santa Monica is in the USA, my suspicion is that it's wood frame rather than mass timber as deployed elsewhere, with thick heavily insulated flooring, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZGuSC7KNvM
Cut the trees to save CO2 emissions. Somebody forgot that trees consume CO2 themselves and if this type of housing gets adopted widely, some companies will not wait for 10-20 years for the planted trees to grow, but will look for less ethical sources like existing wild forests.
Trees only have a finite lifespan. Even "wild" forests reach end of life stage and that's when responsible logging and forestry management can promote healthier forests.
Using those trees sequesters the captured carbon into structures. Leaving them to stand and die in the forest releases that captured carbon.
> Trees only have a finite lifespan. Even "wild" forests reach end of life stage and that's when responsible logging and forestry management can promote healthier forests.
I absolutely agree with you.
In the book "A Landowner's Guide to Managing Your Woods" the authors point out that the fragmentation of contiguous forest parcels into small private holdings is problematic when it comes to managing healthy forests in the US, especially in the Eastern part of the United States.
The book points out that in 2006 the United States grew 26.7B+ cubic feet of new timber, but has only harvested 7.6B cubic feet. The reason being that much of that acreage is not accessible to harvest.
Many small land owners of forest properties are reluctant to harvest mature trees due to conservation messaging in earlier decades. They often also manage the mature stands of forest in their small parcel for their pleasure, not for 'forest health' or optimal carbon sequestration. Imagine anyone buying a shoreline cabin property and then electively cutting down all of the mature trees on the property.
Secondly, and more importantly, many foresters can not economically harvest from small acreage/parcels. Unless many nearby land owners band together to have their forests managed at the same time, it doesn't happen.
I'm guessing that most dead-stand is going up in smoke (literally turned into firewood) because it has no utility as lumber once it has started to rot or is attacked by parasites.
For larger contiguous tracts, some counties in the US States will tax-incentivize property owners for adopting a forest management plan (that includes timed harvests of mature trees).
Some US states are also purposely expanding public forests to increase contiguous holding and close gaps (of private ownership). The goal is not necessarily to expand the boundary, but rather the consolidate the holding within the existing boundary to incentivize large tract harvest (among other reasons).
Land owners who are managing habitat for hunting are often proactively, positively harvesting (by bringing in logging companies to make clearings). Cervidae (deer, moose, elk) need contiguous stands of immature trees for habitat.
> Leaving them to stand and die in the forest releases that captured carbon.
I own a stand of mature oaks that are quickly succumbing to oak wilt. They are being naturally replaced by aggressively spreading sugar maple, which can propagate quickly in a shaded understory and then bolt up when the dominating oaks die off due to disease.
I've been turning the dying mature oaks into lumber and firewood. If they're too far gone, they have no utility other than as firewood. I'm considering pre-emptive salvage in the areas that the oak wilt is prevalent so they're not completely relegated to firewood.
Trees can grow over a century and stay up for centuries. Large old trees over here have scars from multiple survived forest firest etc.
Cutting down a 50 year old tree and putting it to a building instead of letting it grow is not an obvious carbon sink to me. The branches might be used for energy nowadays, but the bark and roots will release CO2 etc. The new sapling will grow very slowly (kg carbon per year) for the first 15 years.
Some trees can grow over a century. Some can't. Some trees growth top out by 50 years and then grow incredibly slowly (sequestering carbon at a much slower rate). Some grow for 300 years and sequester carbon at a constant rate. Which is why it's called woodland _management_.
"Having survived multiple forest fires" says a lot to me. Surviving a forest fire still invokes a huge release of otherwise captured carbon for no gain. Harvesting trees for timber means the bulk of the tree sequesters carbon into the structure, and the waste byproduct can be utilised to provide energy for the process.
With the correct tooling and processes, it's as close to carbon neutral as you can get.
Sure. Willows grow fast and are short lived. Typically you don't make timber out of willow either, though you can use it in building, it's a different method (and might be great).
My examples were of typical local forests here, which are long and slow growth by majority.
I know there are a lot of people with vested interest in selling logging as CO2 negative, and I see the idea promoted all the time.
Letting a tree grow to complete maturity is a gamble.
Many of the US's classic native tree species are under incredible stress (or nearly wiped out) due to the rapid spread of parasites and disease, e.g., oak wilt, emerald ash borer, Dutch elm disease, American chestnut blight, Beech bark disease, et al. Many large stands will never reach maturity/old-age. Most American hardwoods only have a maximum lifespan of 250 - 300 years.
In a stand of mature trees, only the healthiest tree specimens should remain, as they will be the most resistant to disease and parasites.
Public forests managers are using something called "pre-emptive salvage", i.e., if a parasite has breached an area extensively, they're going to log off those stands while the wood can be salvaged into products (other than firewood).
> The new sapling will grow very slowly (kg carbon per year) for the first 15 years.
The rate of growth is really a function of access to light and water (and nutrients) [mostly light]. Some trees (like sugar maple) will grow slowly, nearly dormant, in the understory of a mature forest, and explode with growth when a column of light opens up due to the death of a mature neighboring tree.
Some trees (Redwood) grow incredibly quickly, reaching 6+ feet diameter in 100 years. Other trees only regenerate when clear cut, and have short lifespans (Aspen at 70ish years).
>Some trees (like sugar maple) will grow slowly, nearly dormant, in the understory of a mature forest, and explode with growth when a column of light opens up due to the death of a mature neighboring tree.
There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas
Clear cutting is the dominant forestry method here. Everything else was actually illegal only a short while ago. One can personally sample by eye the wood piles one sees on forest roads, or on wood trucks. In general, the material is quite small. There is very little forest in the whole country that has trees that are over 100 years old, and it's not because of forest fires.
My family owns forest and some of that was felled 60 years ago. The trees are quite small for clear cutting. The plan is to remove some of them, to make the others grow more. The proposed standard alternative (that most neighbors are doing), clear cutting it all and planting saplings - would that really be carbon negative? The trees in a way have the most growth potential right now.
concrete puts out around 180kg per ton. a pine tree planted for harvesting lives about 20 years, will absorb 100-300kg in that lifetime, will supply more material in both weight and volume, and when processed into CLT that material will be much stronger per unit weight.
let's be generous to concrete and say we're only absorbing 100kg per 20 years, only get one ton of material, and that CLT is only twice as strong as concrete (it can be ~5x or higher in some cases). this still means one tree will have a 640kg advantage over concrete for the same output.
if we're even more generous to concrete and assume _only_ timber has wildly inefficient production and construction methods, the advantage is still in the order of hundreds of kgs.
This needs to be strictly strictly controlled..
It'd be excellent if we could use something like genetic manipulation, both to improve the material, and also identify it as being grown specifically for building.
Building material, CO2 scrubbing and CO2 storage, all in one package. Awesome stuff.
They mention mass timber, but lots of buildings in the US already use wood framing, and 5+1 apartment blocks (with the top 5 floors using wood framing) are going up everywhere.
Mass timber is a specific type of building type which is distinct from wood framing. From this[0] article:
>If the primary load-bearing structure is made of either solid or engineered wood, it’s a mass-timber building. A building that uses mass timber as an accent and not a primary structural element isn’t mass timber.
Yes, I agree. I think mass timber is only used in fancy commercial or institutional buildings, though? So it seemed worth pointing out the more common, ordinary kind.
It seems doubtful that "future cities" will be primarily skyscrapers when quite high densities can be achieved with buildings that don't go above five stories or so and are cheaper to build.
2. It takes materials to make buildings. What are the potential materials?
A. Wood
B. Metal
C. Concrete
D. Soil
E. Rock
F. Plastic
G. Ceramics (brick)
H. Others?
3. It takes energy to process materials for construction.
4. It takes energy to construct buildings.
5. Energy sources:
A. Sun
B. Wind
C. Water/Ocean
D. Nuclear
E. Fossil fuels
F. Others?
6. Other parameters? e.g. cost, speed, labor, quality, durability, aesthetics, etc.
If one takes all of the parameters into consideration, a model (with weighting) can be developed and one can attempt to optimize the model for either net CO2, or convenience, or whatever. It's a decision problem.
Calling all math/physics/engineering folks in this forum: please propose a way to help figure this out. And thank you.
And those people want tear down the old house and build a bigger, fancier house where the smaller, less environmentally impactful houses stood.
In my old upper middle class neighborhood, our entire block of houses on our small cul-de-sac were all California ramblers. Small (under 3K sq ft), but on larger lots (some were 1/4 or 1/2 acre lots) near several natural ponds and wetland areas. Over the course of the last 15 years, out of the two dozen or so houses, only four or five are left as original. Thee rest were all bought, torn down and had huge, multi-million dollar houses which took up almost the entire lot built instead.
You're right, personal preference is a big one, and there are other obvious mechanisms at work here such as the city letting this happen because they benefit from the increased taxes they collect, but its not helping the environment at all.
many new houses are much more energy efficient, though. Modern building code basically guarantees that this is true. from an energy consumption POV, a bigger new, efficient house may be better. (within reason).
OTOH, modern tax laws and lot coverage calculations actively discourage energy efficient design. In many jurisdictions, you are taxed on the size of the house measured from the eaves, not the walls, and this encourages builders to maximize the house relative to the roof overhang. this reduces the ability to implement passive energy efficiency strategies like large eaves to increase shade on walls / windows.
A house that's 2x the size would have to be more than 2x efficient for it to be better. I doubt that new houses would be that much more efficient than an older house with some insulation and efficiency updates.
this article suggests that newer homes are more than twice as good, but that the size cancels some of this out, so that the new homes are only a bit better than old ones.
This isn't comparing new homes to old homes, but the overall homes over time. Obviously heat pumps, furnaces, etc are more efficient today than in 1970. If you updated an older home with efficient windows, doors, heat pump, and attic insulation, then I doubt there would be much difference.
Production of Concrete releases quite much fossil carbon (8% of all emissions), and you can't fix that with renewable energies. Growing wood does not require extra energy aside from Sunlight and sequesters carbon from the air. Switching from concrete to wood would surely make a big difference.
Ingredient for concrete is calcium oxide, which is won from calcium carbonate, releasing carbon dioxide. Calcium carbonate is limestone. Thus: Making concrete takes carbon from the ground and puts it into the air. This is climate-wise as irreversible as a coal plant.
If we stop digging out carbon out of the ground to insert it into the carbon cycle, that would be a real good solution to be carbon neutral. I hope that qualifies as holistic to you, because its at the source of the problem.
Many cities were originally built mostly in wood (e.g. London, Amsterdam). There's a good reason that they aren't any more. They burnt down - quickly and spectacularly. Typically laws were then made to require only re-building in stone e.g. After the great fire of London "The Rebuilding of London Act 1666 banned wood from the exterior of buildings"
I think the new processes for smelting steel are carbon neutral, and steel is highly recyclable. I think it would make sense to have hybrid steel-wood buildings, using a steel superstructure. And also use MgO cement where something mineral is needed or desired, as I think that is also carbon neutral.
Steel is much stronger so you can build much bigger buildings with it. Imagine 25-stories apartment/office building with steel skeleton and wood for walls.
Exactly, and CLT can even be used structurally, but it has diminishing returns as buildings get bigger, which is where steel could come in. And I think steel is easily recycled.
I did not say not to use wood.
What advantages do you 'imagine' for using wood as main supporting structures, against something already extensively used, steel?
Sure, 2020/2021 the prices of Timber exploded due higher demand. This variable is simply not taken into account.
"And there are also big question marks over the safety implications of shifting to predominantly wood-based construction. While the paper states that engineered wood is “associated with fire resistance,” the jury is still out on whether it is truly as safe as traditional building materials."
Not just that. Aging and Maintenance, warping, pest infection and other benefits from concrete like durability, energy efficiency...
I guess the authors never read the 3 little pigs. You just need a Wolf with some Howitzer trying to free your country from the West, to you understand the advantage of Concrete vs Timber..
>Sure, 2020/2021 the prices of Timber exploded due higher demand. This variable is simply not taken into account.
Indeed, the article ignores costs entirely. According to a 2020 study, mass timber buildings costs 2.4-12% more than concrete buildings over their lifetime[1]. That said, if carbon emissions were taxed to account the destruction they cause to the world (and consequently the global economy), I bet wood timber buildings would be way cheaper to build, even in the middle of supply shortage like we saw during the pandemic.
Has the sand issue been resolved? It'd been reported that we're running out of sand suitable for concrete.
Yes, I know, "Sand? Are you crazy? The world is full of sand!". But river-polished coarse sand is no good for concrete. It has to be of a particular size and roughness to be any use. And the easy sources had run out.
Sure, you could find a process to 'make sand'. But it by definition is more expensive than 'drive a truck to where the right kind is lying on the ground and load it up'. So the price of concrete went through the roof.
The 'age of concrete' may be over. So this issue may be moot.
> Nonetheless, the researchers admit that there is still likely to be some impact on biodiversity due to the replacement of virgin woodland with timber monocultures.”
Is there something preventing us from replenishing the natural woodland after harvesting wood without making it monocrop? Presumably it’s more expensive to thin out an area vs. just clearcutting. But even then if you just cut blocks inside a larger area and replant the trees, won’t everything else come back too?
For what it's worth: wood actually has better properties in the case of a structural fire than today's usual stuff - it gradually loses its rigidity, compared to the iron in reinforced concrete which suddenly snaps [1].
On the other hand, the reinforced concrete itself isn't combustible, and gradually losing rigidity whilst burning isn't exactly a desirable structural property. And building entirely from timber implies using a whole lot of combustible woods, not just glulam beams. (Then again, this is pretty standard practice in housing anyway...)
Construction solely in reinforced concrete might be undesirable for other reasons, including environmental impact, but does tend to isolate household fires so they burn themselves out long before the structure is threatened
> Construction solely in reinforced concrete might be undesirable for other reasons, including environmental impact, but does tend to isolate household fires so they burn themselves out long before the structure is threatened
So what? Then change building codes to
- mandate fire suppression systems like sprinklers in wooden houses
- require a licensed electrician to review the condition of the electrical wiring every ten to twenty years and to bring it up to code at least every twenty years
- ban space heaters and force landlords to provide state of the art heating systems instead
These are the most common causes of house fires not related to cooking [1], so forcing landlords to actually do their job and not be slumlords should cut down on a very high amount of fires.
5-over-1 buildings have been known to burn pretty well while under construction, when the building is bare timber with no fire suppression. But once the walls and sprinkler system go in, they resist fire well.
Exactly! what would happen next time riots break out in the US? Potentially near entire cities burning down to the ground, if it's a windy day. The way fire spread in wood built Japanese cities like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_fire_of_Meireki
This would be a great solution, if we could reliably prevent them from going up in flames, for two obvious reasons.
How many times have we heard about [old-town] burned in [year]? This would happen again negating any environmental benefits and obviously costing a ton of money to rebuild.
Maybe if we could get the burn rate down to 1% a year it would be a benefit?
I don't think that really applies here. The article concentrates on replacing cities and concrete with timber. Old towns burning down have different issues than downtown office buildings.
Also in general, processed timber can be made more fireproof than many usual materials.
I am not sure why. But this is really uncommon here in Switzerland. Sure sometimes there is an old house burning down somewhere but nether do we talk about spreading fires nor do I have to pay more insurance for living in a 100% wooden house.
That isn't a problem with CLT, which is so dense it usually just chars the outside. Only at temperatures that could destroy concrete and steel buildings does it really burn.
Right, but wood is also a great insulator compared to steel, so where a steel beam's yield strength would go down quickly throughout, you're only going to burn the outer layer of the beam, allowing it to retain most of its strength. /Hand-wavey-assertion
It’s not really what LA did. LA built suburbs, single-family homes, and no mixed-use development and it was all supported and serviced by auto-only transit. That’s why they have a traffic problem. To see that this is the case you can look to many cities in Europe and how they achieved adequate results without building skyscrapers. These successful cities built single family homes but also apartments, condos, and other living arrangements while also injecting grocery stores, shops, offices, parks, and other amenities into the city and neighborhoods.
LA limited housing density via multiple policies (including a residential height limit) [0].
When I think of high density cities with low transportation problems relative to the number of residents, I think of Asia where there are not building height limits or setback laws.
I think of things on a spectrum where Asia is one end of the bad spectrum (too dense), and then LA or Houston is going to be on the other end of the spectrum. A city like Amsterdam is in the sweet spot where you have all the benefits of density and you can still have a single family house or an apartment, access to good transit and locally grown food from nearby farmers, and offices and coffee shops within walking and biking distance. They're more resilient too because you're not as reliant on fossil fuels for heating or cooling or construction, you can do maintenance on your own home (most likely) and can do retrofits for new technology, to name a few.
I think skyscrapers are an anti-pattern (though they're better than suburbs of course) because the are oppressive, block the sky, create artificially high density, and don't have features like porches where you can say high to your neighbors. You can't just walk out your front door. If there's a fire? Screwed. If you need something fixed? You depend on specialized workers (even more so than a house). Etc. They're a little anti-social. You also don't tend to have any meaningful outdoor space. I think somewhere like Amsterdam (and there are many, many other examples) is a better model. You want diversity in your buildings and living arrangements too. You want to be able to walk out your front door and down the block to a coffee shop without any barriers (car, or elevator). You want to see your neighbors and their kids. You want to be able to do work on your dwelling that you control.
Now I'm not saying that living in a skyscraper is like some sort of dystopia (though I think they look dystopian in a different way than suburbs do), but then again neither are the suburbs really. So I don't think I can honestly rail against one (except on energy expenditure) and not the other since to me they are both bad compromises whereas medium density, mixed-use walkable towns and neighborhoods with height limits probably around 3-5 stories give you everything you could ever want and more. They blow everything else out of the water.
not really because the load bearing parts don't tend to burn (the same way a log doesn't because the charcoal layer eventually stops the fire). That ironically even may make them somewhat safer than concrete which tends to crack. The largest currently existing timber high rise as far as I know stands in Norway and is about 81 meters tall.
There are 10+ storey timber high rises in Canada now. The building and fire codes are being updated all across the country. Turns out heavy timber is actually pretty decent for fire - it chars before it fails whereas steel loses its strength at high temps.
It also expands. Sometimes pushing walls apart letting floors fall. I asked a neighbor who is a firefighter what his nightmares are made of. He said steel girder floors silently expanding and pancaking him and his best friends.
Well, they do build tall timber buildings. The thing is they are virtually solid wood, with corresponding fire resistance ratings. I'd much rather be in a mass timber high-rise than a stud-and-cavity mid-rise building in a fire.
He's talking about 5-over-1 or one-plus-five buildings. They're 6 story midrise buildings that have 5 stories made of wood on-top of one made of concrete. They're extremely common in North America, and they aren't firetraps because they have sprinkler systems, redundant emergency staircases, building wide fire alarms.
"5" and "1" are not the number of floors, they are the construction type, 5 being (primarily) built of dimensional lumber and drywall, 1 being reinforced concrete. The type for heavy timber is "4".
This, a building with CLT would never be 5-over-1. It might be 4-over-1, but I bet it's sufficiently inherently fire-resistant that most designs will be solely type 4.
> The name derives from the maximum permissible five floors of combustible construction (Type III or Type V) over a fire-resistive Type I podium of one floor for "5-over-1" or two floors for "5-over-2", as defined in the United States-based International Building Code (IBC) Section 510.2.
> Some sources instead attribute the name to the wood framing of the upper construction; the International Building Code uses "Type V" to refer to non-fireproof structures, including those framed with dimensional lumber.[5][6]
First sentence affirms my comment, second sentence affirms yours. I suspect the second usage is primarily European, or just mistaken. In America, 5-over-1 refers to the number of floors. Particularly, the upper five might be Type III not Type V, but it's still called a 5-over-1. And if there are two bottom Type I floors, it's called a 5-over-2.
Residential requires a higher level of fire safety than commercial and additional separation between uses for occupant comfort (f.ex. sound). Additionally, there is usually parking and that also requires a lot of separation.
Timber isn't the answer. The system is complex, and we need holistic solutions, not single-factor ones.
I think the answer is to stop building so dense, reduce our population, and reintroduce more nature to our deforested, inefficiently farmed, overly-paved modern world.
The more we have 12-story buildings, the harder they are to build and maintain. 3 and 4-story buildings are much easier, can be made with timber easily, etc. But we need to spread them out more. This would be good, as we could create more small businesses to service the people, less dense areas would require less intense civil management, communities would be smaller and more familiar.
The more people we have, the worse things get. You need more homes, cities get more dense, you require more resources / food / consumer goods / land, create more CO2. Quite simply, we have a shitload of people, and that causes us all kinds of headaches. If we just had fewer people, we'd have fewer headaches. We don't need to live like bunnies/rats/cockroaches constantly multiplying. And quite frankly, the planet would do much better with fewer of us.
We would also thrive more in a world closer to nature. You notice how there's fewer insects, fish are mostly disappeared, invasive species are rampant, and cities are increasingly hot and polluted? Most of that changes if we undo most of our "developing" and let nature come back. Replace concrete sidewalks with forest trails, grass lawns with trees and weeds and bushes. Remove [at least] half the roads and replace them with canopy and gardens. Grow only sustainable multicultures of foods on a quarter of the existing farmland (and stop growing so much fucking corn!) and pay a decent wage to work the land. Bring rivers and streams back. You will notice cities get cooler, biodiversity increase, CO2 emissions decrease, and our health will improve. Not to mention fewer car accidents, less noise pollution.
> if at least 90 percent of the world’s new urban population is housed in buildings made from wood
I put this in the category of my favorite joke with regards to physics in the classroom vs. real-world physics. It goes something like this:
"Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk, one meter in diameter"
Anyone who has studied physics to a reasonable depth understands the great disparity between the "assume..." constraints of classroom teaching (which are necessary to be able to learn) and what happens with real-world problems.
This is at that level. At least NINETY PERCENT? C'mon. I thought Disney was where fantasies are made for entertainment, not in scientific research.
We've just experienced several very large fires in California. Just one of these probably emits more CO2 than all internal combustion vehicles in the state in a day. I remember reading vegetation fires in California, in one year, emit the equivalent of 25% of the CO2 emitted by the entire transportation sector in the state during the same year. In other words, if internal combustion engine cars went away tomorrow, we would still produce so much CO2 from fires it would almost be pointless.
Now add to this the additional fires we would have to contend with if we plant millions/billions of trees. The fires would be larger and likely more frequent. They would probably destroy more property and wild life. And now, add to this entire cities built out of timber, rather than concrete. In other words, in a sense, storing the CO2 containing wood in a structure full of electrical wiring, gas lines, and other fire hazards.
Yes, that would be intelligent. Instead of creating less fire danger, increase it. Exponentially.
Like a I said, assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter and everything is possible.
EDIT:
The irony, of course, is that massive reforestation around the world is likely the only realistic way to capture CO2 at scale.
Except forest fires do not produce CO2. They release carbon that has been temporarily stored in trees and is part of the carbon cycle.
On the other hand, by driving a car, you are adding to the atmosphere carbon that has not been in the cycle.
Btw, for the same reason, neither planting trees nor building cities out of wood will do anything. It is awfully hard to preserve wood forever in any large quantities that would make any difference.
> Except forest fires do not produce CO2. They release carbon that has been temporarily stored in trees and is part of the carbon cycle.
By that reasoning burning coal doesn’t produce CO2 either. It’s just a matter of the size of the time constant. Coal burning is just a forest fire with greater hysteresis.
The coal formed because plants produced lignin but there was no organism that was able to break it up, until fungi evolved. Now it is pretty much impossible for new coal to form in significant amount (except maybe for peat bogs) because every tree that falls will rot.
> Except forest fires do not produce CO2. They release carbon that has been temporarily stored in trees and is part of the carbon cycle.
I hope you are kidding.
The planet has had multiple cycles of atmospheric CO2 increases and decreases over millions of years. We have very accurate data to cover 800,000 years, where the range was between, roughly, 200 and 300 ppm.
The question is:
How did CO2 increase when humanity was pretty much insignificant and not burning fossil fuels? How did that happen?
The answer is simple: Massive, continental scale forest fires. Without modern fire fighting and mitigation technologies these fires burned for very long periods of time and razed areas the size of entire modern cities.
The average 100 ppm increase took about 100K years. Nothing other than fires could cause this change. Fires over a very long period of time.
The other question is:
How did atmospheric CO2 concentration decrease?
After all, we were not around to "save the planet" with technology.
Also simple: Rain, hurricanes, cyclones, weather and vegetation regrowth over 100K years. That's how long it took the natural planetary engine to react to a 100 ppm change in atmospheric CO2 and revert it.
Next question:
How did humans add another 100 ppm+ in such a short period of time?
Because we burned more forests faster than nature could have ever done on its own. Except we did this by burning oil, petroleum. One way to look at petroleum is that it is a highly concentrated form of plant and other biomass materials turned into goo we can easily burn. And so, by burning it, we engaged in the equivalent of burning entire forests on a daily, monthly or annual basis for the last several hundred years. As population grew, the more we burned. And here we are.
Forest fires absolutely produce CO2. That has been the cased for millions of years. If it makes your more comfortable to say they release CO2, so be it. That's fine. The net effect is the same: CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Same thing cars do.
The greater point is a dark one, and one most people are not ready to accept: There isn't a thing we can do about it. It's a planetary-scale problem that will take in the order of tens of thousands of years to affect. We can't do it.
EDIT:
One more question we should ask:
How many trees (or plants) went into creating one unit of petroleum?
"Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all –
into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes,
whose study will be published in the November issue of the
Journal Climatic Change.
There's been a natural carbon cycle underway for millions of years. Wildfire is a core character. I'm not saying that tree farms are good or that we aren't doing a terrible job managing forests (or that climate change fears aren't being exploited for political and financial gain). But there is a fundamental difference between the "carbon cycle" and humans digging up / burning hydrocarbons.
> there is a fundamental difference between the "carbon cycle" and humans digging up / burning hydrocarbons.
There is no difference. The stuff we dig-up is the same stuff that was burning naturally in the form of trees and other biomass. It just happens to be a highly concentrated form.
The carbon cycle of plants isn't and has never been the only driver of what composes our atmosphere. It's a complex multivariate problem. The only difference here is that we are actually pushing ridiculous ideas about being able to meddle with forces and effects at a planetary scale when we can't even extinguish a coal fire that has been burning for a hundred years, much less one burning for six thousand years.
At some point we have to start recognizing that we are being sold absolute nonsense. This, BTW, in my opinion, also includes the idea that we are all going to turn into jelly if CO2 increases above what seems to be an ever-moving threshold.
I invite anyone who is open-minded enough to consider the idea that what they think they know might just be wrong, to go out and do something very simple: Buy a CO2 meter.
Take your CO2 meter with you everywhere and understand where you have been living. As I became more and more interested in understanding the subject, this is one of the first things I did. And what I learned was eye opening.
We live our daily lives in a range between 600 and 1400 ppm. This is true of probably most of humanity. The only exceptions likely being those who work in wide open fields. Maybe.
Here's a picture of my CO2 meter in the kitchen (no cooking at all for probably 12 to 14 hours):
I don't have a picture handy. In the car the number ranged from about 900 to 1400. The higher number came in once on the road. Numbers at the homes of friends and family and other business locations were similar. Last I checked, nobody is turning in to putty.
It is also fair to assume these conditions have existed in indoor living for a very long time. If we believe today's buildings are healthier than during a time when they burned wood for heat, well, they likely lived in even higher concentrations.
So, what are we talking about really? If your entire family and those of your friends and extended families, for generations, have been living in 600 to 1000 ppm CO2 concentrations. Why are we pushing a narrative of impending doom in a dozen years?
I look at this as the lunacy the Y2K problem became. It was going to be the end of the world. And then it wasn't. Except the opportunists pushing outlandish narratives made money and never paid a price for the consequences of the nonsense they pushed.
I firmly believe this is what climate change has become today. That isn't to say its not real. That is not what I am saying at all. It is.
What I am saying is that it has become a cult for political and financial gain. It will not destroy the planet or kill everything on it. And we sure as hell can't do a thing about it. We can't even put out coal mine fires and we have the hubris to claim to be able to "save" an entire planet. Please.
> How did CO2 increase when humanity was pretty much insignificant and not burning fossil fuels? How did that happen?
> The answer is simple: Massive, continental scale forest fires.
You are factually wrong because you don't seem to be getting the hang of this "cycle" thing.
If you are earning $100 from your employer every week and then proceed to give that money back to your employer within two weeks, are you saving money?
No, your net effect of the cycle comes to zero. Same as with trees burning up. See, trees are built of carbon taken from the atmosphere. The net effect of the tree growing and then burning up is exactly zero. Almost all trees will eventually burn or rot with the effect that forest do not materially influence amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Humanity emits more carbon we dug from underground into atmosphere than is stored in the entire biomass, every 10 years.
This is the real culprit, not the trees burning up.
(Yet another way of thinking about forest fires is that they are promoting growth. When the old forest burns up there will be, for couple years/decades, a flurry of new growth that is making up for the biomass that burned up.)
> No, your net effect of the cycle comes to zero. Same as with trees burning up. See, trees are built of carbon taken from the atmosphere. The net effect of the tree growing and then burning up is exactly zero. Almost all trees will eventually burn or rot with the effect that forest do not materially influence amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
No, I am not missing this part at all.
The problem with the way you put it is that it does not include the element of time. And this is massively important.
The CO2 emitted by burning a forest the size of a city in just a few days isn't recaptured at the same time scale. In fact, the time scale looks to be orders of magnitude greater.
Forget about humanity for a moment (which is easy to do if we go back 50K, 100K, 200K years. Yes, CO2 was emitted through many mechanisms and re-captured. One of those mechanisms was massive continental-scale fires. There was nothing whatsoever to oppose them. No modern fire-retardant carrying aircraft, etc.
The natural rate of change for atmospheric CO2 is in the order of 1 ppm per 1000 years. Source [0], graphs [1], rate of change [3].
This rate of change --at a planetary scale-- exposes both the realities of natural atmospheric CO2 accumulation and capture.
From there it is somewhat easy to calculate the time required to recapture any CO2 added to the atmosphere. Since we don't have any technology today that can beat the natural rate of change, the only reliable metric we have is 1 ppm per 1000 years. CO2 doesn't magically hang around forest fires until, 20, 30 or 40 years later, it is recaptured. It contributes to global warming while trees are growing, for a very long time.
Side note: Lab experiments are irrelevant. We need something that works at a planetary scale. Nobody has shown a solution that can pass a physics test working at that scale.
Here's a simple article essentially saying the same thing [3]
Quoting:
"The idea that forest biomass is carbon neutral is not wrong. Trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. So if a tree is burned for fuel, the thinking goes, another can be planted to replace it. And then that replacement tree should eventually re-absorb the carbon.
But while burning wood immediately releases carbon, it takes decades or even a century for a replacement tree to absorb the same amount of carbon. In the meantime, all that atmospheric carbon will continue to drive climate change."
That is the problem. You are not including time as a variable in your mental model of how this works. That time scale is easily in the hundreds of years, particularly if you include what happens with soil, root system and natural vs. managed forests (as discussed in the article).
> That is the problem. You are not including time as a variable in your mental model of how this works.
People are absolutely including time as a variable here. What they're not doing is pretending that time is the only variable.
I can't tell what you're arguing here at this point. This thread seemed to start with you disagreeing (in a very long winded and winding way) that trees are a materially different sort of contribution to the carbon cycle than fossil fuels, but that's precisely where time matters. Every subthread you go on a different tangent with the only unifying theme being "fuck it we can't do anything even if we try" which, sure, that may be true but it has little to do with whether there's a short term carbon cycle.
50 year old trees can only contribute carbon back from 50 years ago or less. They slowly absorb and, given the total biomass of the planet vs the amount burning at any given time, also slowly release it back.
Short of burning down every tree on a continent and preventing any regrowth (probably an even harder project than carbon capture tbh), there are limits to how much carbon surface cycles can add to the system.
Even taking a pessimistic view of how long it takes for a burned tree to have its released carbon captured, the calculus we're faced with (if we insist on burning anything at all at scale anyways) is:
Burn trees: add carbon to the atmosphere that will be reabsorbed by a roughly equivalent amount of plant matter in a century, or
Burn fossil fuels: add carbon to the atmosphere that requires a net increase in planetary plant matter to be reabsorbed.
One of these is clearly better than the other by quite a bit, and saying otherwise is verging on nihilism.
Also you keep saying that no system is 100% efficient but planetary atmospheres are about as close to one as you can possibly get. If the carbon cycle weren't extremely efficient, earth would be like Venus by now.
You are arguing against things I am not saying at all. Not sure how to respond. Please don't misrepresent my position. If you don't understand it, because, perhaps, I am not being clear enough, ask and I'll try to clarify.
We don't "insist" on burning anything. For lack of a better explanation, it just happens.
In the last week in Southern California we probably had somewhere in the order of 20,000 acres burn down. That CO2 isn't going to be recaptured by trees for, more than likely, centuries. Those 20,000 acres are not going to be repopulated instantly. A fully grown tree can capture about 25 kg of CO2 per year (species dependent). Yet, that takes time. A seedling can't capture 25 kg per year. The capture rate is likely closer to a sigmoid curve, likely without a flat top. That sigmoid curve for CO2 capture does not start until way after the 20,000 acres burned down. It is probably fair to say the capture rate is insignificant for a year or more. Add this to the fact that atmospheric CO2 hangs in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and you have a cycle that isn't as squeaky-clean as these arguments about trees make it sound.
In CA, annual fires produce the equivalent of 1/4 of the CO2 produced by the entire transportation sector.
We are in a drought. What do you think the regrowth rate might be here? I have no clue. Yet, I think I can guess: Not great.
We engage on all of this hand-wavy-ness about trees being great and ignore all other variables. Time seems to be the most egregious one. Most discussions seem to assume a seed is capturing carbon at 25 kg/year. That's the only figure I see quoted when searching for this kind of information. Actually, no, I've seen numbers all the way up to 40 kg/year. This is preposterous. Once you get past that, then there's rate of growth and the realities of achieving a rate of growth (for example, burn down 20,000 acres in CA and you have no water to encourage rapid growth).
Of course, there's more.
We now know, with a great deal of certainty, that we have very large forests that are actually net CO2 contributors, rather than what we used to believe. These are important revelations that nobody is talking about, because, if you dare mention these things you are labeled as a nut. Well, it is a matter of well documented science. Not sure what else to say.
What everyone is ignoring in the general climate change debate is that we cannot materially improve the natural rate of change of atmospheric CO2 reduction, which sits at about 1 ppm per thousand years. Any purported solution out there quickly dissolves into nothing once having to pass the test of physics at a planetary scale. And yet here we are, pretending that we can accelerate this process by many thousands of times with nothing to support the assertion.
The baseline from which every single proposal has to be measured is something that is both extreme and known to be true. We have this data from atmospheric ice core samples going back 800K years. What it says is very simple: We know what would happen if humanity did not exist at all.
The best we can do for the planet is leave. Talk about carbon neutral! We cannot do any better than that without requiring insane amount of energy and materials, which, of course, likely means we add CO2 to the atmosphere, which defeats the entire purpose.
The ice core data shows us exactly what would happen if we were not here. That rate of change is in the order of 1 ppm per 1000 years. Any purported solution has to explain how it is better than us just leaving the planet. If it can't, it isn't a solution at all, it's a fantasy. Solar panels are not going to do it and trees sure as heck can't. We are living in a fantasy and everyone is buying it without question.
This is not to say that we should not clean-up our act. There are excellent reasons to do that. We just need to stop this madness about saving the planet. We can't.
Weird .. and here I was naively thinking the dominant process for past increases in C02 prior to the Pleistocene+Holocene was magmatic processes and could be demonstrated by examining the isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon.
"Dominant process" implies other processes .. it's difficult to know all the details of any such complex transforms .. it's less difficult to pick out the major contributions by scale from the signature after traces.
You're correct that fossil fuels are buried sunlight from many many millions of years ago and bringing them to the surface now is the major factor contributing to our current swing against the norms of the past 800K years re: climate.
With forrest fires, unless there is burial and no regrowth, we are very much looking at the surface carbon cycle; trees grow (capturing carbon), burn (releasing carbon), cycle, repeat.
It takes a major expansion or a major reduction (significant in terms of Earths surface) of forrests to alter the over all long term balance; forrests to peat bogs, peat bogs drying out and burning is another big shift on the accounts .. but again these are the "near surface" accounts of organic carbon.
These differ (by isotope) from deep carbon bought up to the surfce (from FF) and from magma carbon.
> With forrest fires, unless there is burial and no regrowth, we are very much looking at the surface carbon cycle; trees grow (capturing carbon), burn (releasing carbon), cycle, repeat.
The point is that this cycle isn't anywhere close to 100% efficient and takes orders of magnitude more time to reverse than the time it took to burn it. On top of that, atmospheric CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere and is incredibly difficult and grotesquely inefficient to remove.
As I mention in another comment, here in SoCal we recently had a fire --one of many-- that took out over 5000 acres in a matter of two to four days. The recovery of that land, the regrowth, will likely take twenty years (how long does a mature tree take to grow?). The CO2 released in that short event will take orders of magnitude more time to be re-captured. It doesn't hang around over the burn area waiting to be absorbed.
The natural rate of change for atmospheric CO2 concentration reduction is in the order of 1 ppm per 1000 years. That figure comes out of ice core sample data, which is very accurate. Anything that claims a significant improvement to that rate of change must come with equally significant proof.
We have people claiming we can drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm in twenty years. Put a different way, they are saying they can do what nature does in 100K years in just 20. This is a rate of change with a slope 5000 times faster than the natural rate...and nobody seems interested in questioning it. It's one thing to achieve this in a lab experiment. Quite another at a planetary scale.
And so, my point, with regards to forest fires, is two fold: The net effect is the same, meaning, CO2 in the atmosphere. Second, the CO2 generated per unit time isn't recovered at the same rate. It is recovered orders of magnitude slower. Therefore, forest fires are likely just as damaging (in terms of atmospheric CO2 accumulation) as burning any other fuel.
>> Therefore, forest fires are likely just as damaging (in terms of atmospheric CO2 accumulation) as burning any other fuel.
On a natural scale (100 years as a base unit) they are distinct from the carbon dragged up and released from where it was buried millions++ of years ago.
As far as human activity goes we as a global race do need to put back forest growth we've clear felled, drop our ongoing and ever increasing emmissions, and claw back through capture the excess we have emitted in the past century.
This will take both time and significant mindset change; the myth of unlimited growth as 'good capitalis' needs to die.
On the matter of time scales, here's a nice bit of work revealing a 14 million year wet woodland mass emerging from a receding sea:
Research reveals secrets hidden in Nullarbor’s not-so-featureless plains
> On a natural scale (100 years as a base unit) they are distinct from the carbon dragged up and released from where it was buried millions++ of years ago.
Of course. Where they are no different from each other is that, once in the atmosphere, it makes no difference which one you have, you are growing a blanket over the planet. This is why I say it is just as damaging. CO2, regardless of source, "sticks" to the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. Same effect.
> As far as human activity goes we as a global race do need to put back forest growth we've clear felled
Definitely
> drop our ongoing and ever increasing emmissions
Agreed
> and claw back through capture the excess we have emitted in the past century
That would be nice. I have yet to see any evidence that we can really do this at a planetary scale. In the lab? Sure. Planet? At this stage, I don't see any evidence of that being possible. Lots of purported solutions; none seem to pass the planetary scale physics test.
> This will take both time and significant mindset change
The part where I hyperventilate is the time element. We actually have politicians pushing the idea of saving the planet in a few dozen years. That is preposterous. In a rational environment these people would be laughed off the stage. You simply can't change something like this, of planetary scale, in a few years, and likely not in even in a few centuries.
This is the paper [0] that, years ago, really got me interested in understanding what was going on; to try to separate facts from fiction. It hit me like a bucket of cold water. I was all in on renewables and everything we were being told would reverse climate change. I built a beautiful 13 kW solar array on my property (soon to expand to 20 kW). Soon after that, as I gained experience with my system and started to analyzed the performance and data, I realized we were being sold a bunch of nonsense about solar. And then I read this paper. It was a shocking revelation that launched me into research and questioning absolutely everything for about a year. This work and experience is where my position on this general topic comes from. I see a lot of hand waving and a lot of claims. I have yet to see anything that passes the physics test at a scale that is even a reasonable fraction of the planetary scale of this problem.
Note that none of this is about denying what is happening. When I get into conversations with people one of the first attacks I am subjected to is an accusation of being a denier. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This is real. What I am saying isn't real is what we are being told about what we can actually do about it.
And yet, I must clarify. This does not mean we should not clean-up our act. I agree with what you said about what we must do. My objection is that the political and money-grabbing forces behind the climate change industry are connecting one to the other as if it were a magical solution. These are lies. Nobody has shown this can be done. For obvious reasons, I would be more than happy to be proven wrong on this. We are all on the same boat.
All I want is honest conversation and for the powerful political forces to not force or otherwise compel our scientists into sticking with the chosen narrative. This paper is very unique. A university research team would commit suicide if they published something like this. Grants would evaporate and careers would be ruined. That, sadly, is the reality we live in. One that really bugs me to no end.
Of the anticipated side effects of anthro climate change increased forest fires -> more C02 in atmosphere until trees grow back to match isn't a biggie, C02 isn't the most insulative of the gases to worry about, it's the methane and water vapor that will really push this to another level .. that's just physics.
>> You simply can't change something like this, of planetary scale, in a few years, and likely not in even in a few centuries.
As a counterpoint we, as humans, got here in roughly 100 hundred years with the bulk of the damage done most recently.
Although most of that can be cast at "advanced western civilisation" and ideas of capitalism based on unlimited growth etc. Not really something that culturally had much traction with my people, but we are all the shit together.
I'm fairly optimistic that we (locally, here in W.Australia) can hit production of 15 million tonnes / per annum of green hydrogen by 2030 (that's generative from renewable eneragy with no "blue hydrogen" from natural gas).
Small beer against the petawatts required on a global scale but we act locally and ask that others make some kind of effort to match.
> As a counterpoint we, as humans, got here in roughly 100 hundred years with the bulk of the damage done most recently.
Right, of course. In the simplest possible terms, causing a mess is always easier than cleaning it up. That is true in every sense; time, energy and resources.
I tried to answer this question in my research. In other words, if we can make a mess in 100, 200 or 500 years (take your pick, we started burning oil a long time ago), why did we make such an impact and why is it that we can't clean it up just as quickly.
In the end I think it boils down to energy. It's a long topic. I'll try to summarize it as best as I can.
When we burn one liter, gallon or barrel of oil we are burning a concentrated form of energy that took mountains of plant and other matter and an unimaginable amount of time and energy to produce. I have not run the numbers at all. I would not be surprised to find out that the only energy source on earth that is denser (per unit mass) than oil is nuclear.
A loose way to think of this is that each barrel of oil burned might represent burning down a forest-load of trees. I can't calculate an accurate number because it is so hard to get reasonable estimates. Just judging from the results then: If, in 100 years, we did what normal took 100K years (a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2), then (very hand-wavy now) we are burning a thousands times more fuel per day than whatever occurred in the natural cycle.
This is, in my opinion, also why we just can't fix this without, I don't know, magic of some fundamentally incredible discovery of the scale of the Theory of Relativity. We need a ridiculous amount of energy and resources to fix this. Most people think local/laboratory, when, in reality, this has to be viewed at a planetary scale. And, at that scale, we might just need more energy and resources than exist on this planet if we claim to be able to fix this (drop it by 100 ppm) in 20 to 50 years.
I would really like to see honest scientific conversation around this reality.
Why?
Because, if it is true that we cannot fix it, we should be investing money, resources and brain-power on how to deal with it.
I don't think I am wrong. I have yet to see any proposed solution --of any kind-- prove viability at a planetary scale. If I am right, we are wasting valuable time and resources.
I just read this article this morning [0]. Quite a revelation. I am still trying to understand it. No conclusions on my part yet.
There's so much we don't know. And, again, to be repetitive, we can barely control things at a local level (coal and forest fires) and we are actually claiming to be able to fix an entire planet in two decades. At some point one has to take a moment to think that this might just not be a reasonable claim.
I'll repeat that none of what I say is to propose we do not need to cleanup our act. We definitely do, at all levels. I just don't want lies about why we should do it. And, of course, I firmly believe nuclear is the solution to energy generation. From what I've seen so far, nothing else can compare, not even close.
> I tried to answer this question in my research. In other words, if we can make a mess in 100, 200 or 500 years (take your pick, we started burning oil a long time ago),
Start from ~1880 or so, look at the records for (deep underground) oil consumption (as opposed to whale oil) and watch the consumption rates slowly ramp up with the adoption of cars, the industrialisation of WWI and WWII, and the post war boomer era ... it's not so much the "burning oil" that is the issue, it's the sheer scale of it once it really ramped up.
> .. We need a ridiculous amount of energy and resources to fix this. Most people think local/laboratory, when, in reality, this has to be viewed at a planetary scale.
Regardless of the vast base material tonnages and time to decay, compress, and transition that funnel INTO a barrel of oil, what's at issue is the percentage of that barrel that finds it way into the atmosphere as C02 and the means by which we can reduce that total and means by which we can extract C02 over the Holocene mean quantities.
I'm not sure how your hard numeracy | physics | technical paper reading is, but have a look at the mean estimate of daily global energy consumption by humans (petawatts) and the daily energy fall on earth from the sun .. now you have an order of the energy at play here.
Yes, this is "moving Mt. Fuji" scale engineering that needs to take place across the planet, yes there are existing companies that already work at this scale - the daily energy and material needs of human consumption are met by the likes of Rio Tinto, BHP, Exxon, BP, et al.
Two decades isn't the timescale for a complete fix, two decades is the time to make a hard start on getting stuck into breaking the back on attack of a hard problem .. bear in mind the problem grew exponentially over 100 years from sweet FA to ever more every day, the pullback has the advantage of already having industry at scale, the challenge is to address the solution.
Re: your [0]
This is an Oak Ridge PR release (not the core technical papers) announcing they have a better grasp on part of the preexisting "non human status quo" carbon cycle - this is good to know and useful, but isn't carbon | methane emissions that are causing the "increase over the norm" that we have seen, this is "the norm" that acts as the reference base.
The paper is linked in the Oak Ridge release. That's what I am reading. I can't say anything intelligent about it yet. I do have a full time job that consumes 12 hours a day, almost 7 days a week (the life of an entrepreneur). Posting here takes far longer than I should devote to this.
The fallacy with the commonly used argument about how much solar energy comes into the planet is one that ignores the fact that this energy isn't, for lack of a better term, doing nothing.
A silly comparison would be to say something like "look at how much energy I have in my Tesla" and then attempt to use it both to drive the car and power your home. Sure, you can theoretically do both, yet the car's range will be greatly reduced and your home will go dark in less than a day.
The assumption that we have so much energy often treats this as excess energy. Well, it isn't. We can only tap into it so much before we start to affect other things. It's Conservation of Energy at its most based: It can't be created. It is transformed. Right now, all of that energy from the sun is in use. It is being transformed into so many things it is impossible to list them.
The estimates for just how much energy is required to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at a global scale are not very accurate. This is to be expected. No technology exists today that can do this at that scale. The numbers range from a requirement of 25% of all the electrical energy produced in the world to somewhere around eight times the worlds electric power production.
Either end of that scale is a disaster of global scale waiting to happen. We can't go there. We probably have to quadruple energy production world-wide and might still be short. Not to mention the massive consequences of producing that much energy. Energy is transformed from one form to another and every time you do that. Heat, for example, is a byproduct of almost any transformation.
And yet, there's another reality. All of this is absolutely futile unless we stop generating CO2. It would be a sad joke to quadruple world power generation (not sure it is even possible) only to add more CO2 than we can extract in the process.
You don't quadruple anything at a global scale without producing an unimaginably large amount of CO2 and waste material.
Restricting this to the US. We have to convert our entire ground transportation system to electric power. Sounds great. So long as one does not run through some of the basic physics of what that would mean.
A few years ago I wrote a simulation in order to try and understand just how much more energy the US would need to go 100% electric. I divided the population into time zones, created thousands of behavioral patterns based on such things as drive distance, fast and slow charging, urban vs. rural, etc.
The simulation resulted in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW. This is additional power, over and above what the US produces today.
How much is that? We produce 1200 GW of power today. That means a vast nation like the US would need to create a full duplicate (in terms of power) of the current power system. And I do mean this in the full sense of the term. The wires we have carrying power today could not handle transporting twice as much. The entire power distribution grid needs to be rebuilt to double its transport capacity.
It is important to have a sense of proportion for things at this scale. A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. In other words, the US would need to construct over a thousand nuclear power plants just to enable electric cars.
This will not get us to zero carbon emissions. Not even close.
And then we have to produce even more power to eventually run carbon capture systems. That could very well mean adding another 500 to 1000 GW to the power grid. Nobody knows.
Once you start looking at the subject while exploring all the requisite tentacles, it is hard to avoid the thought that, at best there's a high level of hubris involved. An honest analysis of the matter includes conclusions such as the cost of oil having to come down to $20~$40 a barrel. This sounds crazy, until one looks at the cost of infrastructure and carbon capture systems at a global scale, all of which are driven by transportation and other costs that are inextricably linked to the cost of oil. Simply put, in the US alone, we cannot afford to engage in infrastructure construction at such a scale...with fuel at these prices it is impossible to pay for it.
This topic isn't simple at all. And it sure as heck does not benefit from people coming at it from a blind ideological perspective, as many (most?) do today.
> The fallacy with the commonly used argument about how much solar energy comes into the planet is one that ignores the fact that this energy isn't, for lack of a better term, doing nothing.
Whereas I merely suggested you look at the daily global human use energy numbers AND the daily mean solar fall energy.
> No technology exists today that can do this at that scale. The numbers range from a requirement of 25% of all the electrical energy produced in the world to somewhere around eight times the worlds electric power production.
Hence the need to build such tech asthere is no where to go buy it.
How long ago did humans use 25% less energy than they do today, how long ago was the total global human enrgy demand less than an eigth of what it is today?
I'm not a fan of wesetern consumption, but the ability of humans to do things at greater and great scale has expanded beyond linear .. which is a reality to factor into any modelled proposed solution.
As I mentioned we (locally) are designing and preparing to build hydrogen generation infrastructure now in the same manner in which we built mining infrastructure some 40-50 years past that put anything comparable within the USofA to shame.
> And yet, there's another reality. All of this is absolutely futile unless we stop generating CO2. It would be a sad joke to quadruple world power generation (not sure it is even possible) only to add more CO2 than we can extract in the process.
> You don't quadruple anything at a global scale without producing an unimaginably large amount of CO2 and waste material.
It's not that we can (or should) stop generating C02, it's that we need to slow and eventually stop net C02 increase while actively acquiring and deploying the means to reduce net levels; to which a multi pronged approach is required- population reduction, mean consumption reduction, tree planting, change in agricultural practices, etc.
> Restricting this to the US. We have to convert our entire ground transportation system to electric power.
Throw in * build the public transport the US allowed the Koch & Co to lobby them out of, change the "me me me" mindset that encourages oversized yank tanks and excess consumption, etc.
Point being, it's not just a "tech problem" - there are social aspects, education, lifestyle et al.
> This topic isn't simple at all.
It is rather thorny.
The other key thing about oil is we have already reached "peak oil", the Saudi fields are already on the downslop there, globally availibility will decrease and demand and extraction costs rise.
I thought most of our fossil fuels come from a time before fungi evolved the ability to digest lignin and other plant tissues. Thus piles and piles or wood and other detritus would end up undergoing very inefficient/incomplete combustion or being buried without decaying for a long time.
So basically that amount of sequestration could not happen again without some technological help now that the “digesting wood” abilities have become commonplace.
But those burned trees pulled the fire-released carbon from the atmosphere not all that long ago.
...Vs. the carbon in fossil fuels, which has been underground for literally millions of years.
Not sure what your point might be. If you burn the equivalent of thirty years of forest growth and release that carbon it will take, I don't know, a thousand years to get it back. This isn't a 1 to 1 game. Nothing in the real world works with 100% efficiency.
Atmospheric CO2 remain in the atmosphere for a very, very long time. Thinking we can just reach out and retrieve it --at a planetary scale-- is nothing more than a fantasy being sold to make money.
> If you burn the equivalent of thirty years of forest growth and release that carbon it will take, I don't know, a thousand years to get it back.
Something is wrong with your statement and the answer is right there in your sentence.
If you burn thirty years of forest growth it would take thirty years of forest growth to get it back. A carbon cycle is a cycle, plants die AND plants grow. And the best part is we simply leave it alone to grow.
GP's point is that fossil fuels don't grow like this.
It's easy to get a sense of proportion for these things.
Example: One of the latest fires in Southern California burned through 5200 acres in about four days. What was burned easily represents twenty years of growth.
Simple math: 20 years x 365 days = 7,300 days
The CO2 was released in four days, therefore 7,300 / 4 = 1,825
If carbon re-capture was 100% efficient and 100% reversible (not the case), that means you need 1,825 units of time to recapture what you release in one day.
I used "a thousand years" as a figure of speech to communicate that it takes a massively long amount of time to grab CO2 out of the atmosphere, no matter the source. These are not efficient processes. Even if my figure of speech is off by a factor of 100, it means the annual CO2 contribution by forest fires takes ten years to recapture. That is an unwinnable ratio.
Sticking our heads into the ground and ignoring reality isn't going to solve any problems. For example, there are fires around the world that have been burning continuously for hundreds and thousands of years. And these are not small insignificant fires. If all of humanity evaporated from this planet tomorrow, atmospheric CO2 would still require tends of thousands of years to come down. These are planetary scale problems that are impossible for us to solve. The "save the planet" narratives out there are hubris at best, and money-making/power-grabbing scams at worst.
What I find truly remarkable is that we can't even control these fires that burn for a century or more and we are actually buying into the idea of saving the planet. The scale of these fires, when compared to a planetary scale problem is a rounding error, laughably small. One way I think of it is: Put out all of these long-burning fires and they I'll believe we might be able to affect atmospheric CO2 at a planetary scale. Until then, it's a fairy tale. A fantasy.
You seem to obfuscate pretty simple concepts through some pointless math. Yes if we burn a forest that took 20 years to grow, to capture the same amount of carbon you will need to grow the same amount of trees for 20 years (or equivalently double the trees for 10 years ...). The recapture is 100% efficient and 100% reversible or are you suggesting that carbon is somehow transformed into a different element. If a tree contains e.g. 1 tonne of carbon it needed to extract that amount of carbon from the atmosphere. The thing is, growing trees happens much more frequently than forest fires. So we can capture significant carbon from the atmosphere by planting more trees (with the added side effect that it would make places more pleasant to live).
Regarding coal-seam fires, the amount of carbon they release compared to the amount of coal we burn purposefully is negligible (that doesn't mean we should not put them out though)
> The recapture is 100% efficient and 100% reversible
Nothing is 100% efficient. Nothing.
On the question of time. here's an easy read [0]:
Quoting:
"Changes to our atmosphere associated with reactive gases (gases that undergo chemical reactions) like ozone and ozone-forming chemicals like nitrous oxides, are relatively short-lived. Carbon dioxide is a different animal, however. Once it’s added to the atmosphere, it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years. Thus, as humans change the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide, those changes will endure on the timescale of many human lives."
This article is very interesting in that it shows just how some of our assumptions --things we thought we knew-- are wrong. For example:
"We’re seeing that Earth’s tropical regions are a net source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, at least since 2009. This changes our understanding of things."
Sadly climate-change has mutated into an area dominated by some of the most incredible fantasies I have seen in pseudo-science. This is one of them. Looking at burning trees or wood as carbon neutral with the benefit of ignoring the most important variable in the equation: Time. Others are claims to be able to reduce CO2 at supernatural rates (save the planet in 20, 50 or 100 years), etc.
If there's on thing I have learned by taking a deep dive into this subject is that most of what is out there in political and popular circles is somewhere between a fantasies and outright lies. The real science is having trouble getting out to the surface because it has no political or financial value.
You can't get votes if you talk about dropping CO2 by 1 ppm in a thousand years. If, on the other hand, you convince people that we are all going to turn into goo in two decades and we can fix the problem --if you give me money, power or both-- well, that's powerful. And so climate change turns into a cult to the benefit of politicians and those able to make money out of the narrative.
If I spend 20 years accumulating baseballs, and then go out and drop them all in a baseball field full of people over the course of about 4 days, and all those people really want baseballs for some reason, will it take 1825 days for them to pick all the baseballs up?
I'm sorry, that has no relationship whatsoever to the subject. I could take it apart piece by piece. Still, it would be an exercise in futility.
Here's one that might highlight the nature of the problem:
Imagine you burn a cubic meter of wood at the base of a building with twenty floor. All internal doors and stairs are open, so the smoke and gasses can go everywhere. Particles can travel into cracks, air ducts, all kinds of places and land.
A few hours later the fire is out.
Now go and remove all gasses dispersed through the building and recover every particle deposited on every surface across twenty floors.
First. It's impossible.
Second. If you really wanted to attempt such a feat, it would require more energy and resources --by orders of magnitude-- than what went into creating the mess in the first place.
Third. It would take exponentially more time than what it took to consume the pile of wood.
Now take that and extrapolate to a planetary scale.
> Is there math behind this? Even back-of-napkin math?
Here. Maybe this qualifies for "back of the napkin" [0].
Quoting:
"Changes to our atmosphere associated with reactive gases (gases that undergo chemical reactions) like ozone and ozone-forming chemicals like nitrous oxides, are relatively short-lived. Carbon dioxide is a different animal, however. Once it’s added to the atmosphere, it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years. Thus, as humans change the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide, those changes will endure on the timescale of many human lives."
It isn't a matter of just looking at a tree. You have to consider the entire process. This includes energy and time. The time scale for CO2 in the atmosphere isn't measured in days or years, it's measured in centuries or thousands of years.
You can't recapture the CO2 produced by burning a thousand trees in a few days on the same time scale. The real recapture, when all things are considered, is orders of magnitude greater in time. And, of course, because everything in real life is a complex multivariate problem, there are a million other factors that make the process far less from the idealized image a lot of people have in their minds. A lot of those variables are unknown to us. My guess is a good deal of it isn't even measurable. We are still learning a lot. For example, again, from the article, quoting:
"For as long as we can remember, we’ve talked about Earth’s tropical rainforests as the ‘lungs’ of our planet,” he said. “Most scientists considered them to be the principal absorber and storage place of carbon dioxide in the Earth system, with Earth’s northern boreal forests playing a secondary role. But that’s not what’s being borne out by our data. We’re seeing that Earth’s tropical regions are a net source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, at least since 2009. This changes our understanding of things."
Going back to the back of the napkin calculations. A tree absorbs about 25 kg of CO2 per year.
A tree.
Not a seedling.
Not a twig.
A seed just weeks out of germination isn't going to absorb 25 kg of CO2 in a year. It takes years, maybe decades (likely species dependent) for it to become a tree that can capture carbon at that rate. Some trees never reach that rate of capture. They are not large enough.
And so, you don't burn a tree in a day --one that captured thousands of kilograms of CO2-- plant a seed and instantly start capturing 25 kg per year. It doesn't work that way.
This is why including variables such as time, growth rate, species and many more is important. Without them we are constructing a fantasy. It might take twenty years for a tree to reach this 25 kg/year absorption rate. By that time you have twenty years of forest fires that have contributed CO2 to the atmosphere that will "stick" to it at a time scale longer than human life or even human generations.
My guess is that the shape of the rate of CO2 absorption for any plant or tree is roughly a sigmoid function [1]. I tried to look this up but Google isn't being helpful in this regard. All you can find are numbers for mature trees. I want to know the rate of absorption per year from seed to maturity. Beyond that, I want to know how this behaves after a tree reaches maturity. Does it continue at the same rate? I have a sense this might not be the case. This is why I am guessing it must look somewhat like a sigmoid, with the possible exception that, once a certain age is reached, it might not stay flat but it might actually decline to some lower rate of absorption. This, in particular, makes sense to me in the context of a canopy or a forest. Interaction between trees and other factors means sunlight can only penetrate to a certain depth into the canopy. This likely means the rate of absorption has an upper bound or might experience a reduction, maybe even a cyclical reduction.
And then there's NASA's discovery that the tropical rainforests have actually become net CO2 contributors. I don't fully understand that yet. It raises a lot more questions in need for answers.
It is all too easy to fall into what I like to jokingly call the "assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk, one meter in diameter" syndrome. Anyone who has studied physics to a reasonable depth is familiar with the many "assume..." simplifications we are forced to use while learning. Reality is too complex and it would be very difficult to understand things we we stopped to account for all variables while learning. That does not mean that we can then take the cow assumption and apply it in real life to every problem. Sure, a tree can absorb a lot of CO2...but this isn't some magical process that happens instantly the minute you are done burning it. Not even close. A cow is not a uniform sphere of milk. It just isn't.
