Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[donsutherland1]

6 minutes ago, LongBeachSurfFreak said:

It’s not a gimmick. Once fusion becomes a reality. And with AI advancing at warp speed a solution to making fusion viable could occur significantly sooner then previously thought.

limitless clean energy makes carbon capture and sequestration real. And it just might save the planet. 
 

 

The promise of fusion is real. It will supplant much of conventional power, when realized. 

I'm referring solely to carbon capture. The actual CO2 captured is tiny. Moving to clean energy, including nuclear fusion, will make a much larger contribution than carbon capture will.

Investment should be focused on promising technologies such as nuclear fusion, not carbon capture. Climate projections should be based on realistic assumptions not fictional ones that assume carbon capture.

[LongBeachSurfFreak]

1 hour ago, donsutherland1 said:

The promise of fusion is real. It will supplant much of conventional power, when realized. 

I'm referring solely to carbon capture. The actual CO2 captured is tiny. Moving to clean energy, including nuclear fusion, will make a much larger contribution than carbon capture will.

Investment should be focused on promising technologies such as nuclear fusion, not carbon capture. Climate projections should be based on realistic assumptions not fictional ones that assume carbon capture.

I agree that fusion solves further increasing GHG levels. But that still leaves us at a level that corresponds to significantly more warming then has yet to be realized. My premise is that energy being essentially limitless allows for technology that was once too power hungry to be environmentally and economically feasible. Carbon capture may very well be feasible when removing the energy equation paradox. Desalination is another prime example. 

[chubbs]

This is a good news /bad news chart. The world is moving quickly to clean energy technology, but the US is lagging and policy support in the US is being removed. We will be left with an outmoded energy system.

 

[Typhoon Tip]

I think it possible, if not likely that, that the positive feed-backs a real and ubiquitous fusion future brings for humanity, are not being fully visualized. 

Example,  the CO2 sequestering is obviously physically possible.  But the problem isn't in the mathematics, it's in the engineering: 'How to do so by not requiring equal or more energy?'   Point for discussion ... it takes a lot of energy to crack apart the CO2 molecule.  If you're needing so much energy, particularly when the energy is coming from carbon combustion sources to do so ... you are not effectively lowering anything.  We know all this ... 

The solution up at the Orca facility in Iceland was to tap the region's effectively limitless geothermal energy source.  How that is a gimmick - or why... - is actually not really an engineering 'know-how' related matter.   I'll have to read exactly why they are on the wrong side of the results.  Gimmick doesn't add up for me, though, because there's no way that the secretive or dishonest mechanism for perpetuating some other cause ( in this case preserving combustion of carbon) would ever conceivable work or remain clandestine form people frankly noticing that - that seems too childish to believe.  ...Although as afterthought, shit ...we put one of Satan's colon polyps in the white house so anything's possible...

Back on fusion, it's an easy case to make that a fusion would be more than equal to that challenge.  The range estimates vary some based upon source ( MIT ...vs "AI" ...vs - ) but as many as 5 to 8 orders of magnitude more power is accessible over any present conventional means.  That's between 10, and some estimates as high 100 million times more.   The expression, "an embarrassment of riches" leaps to mind.  So... with essentially 0 on the negative side of the net equation, this problem of CO2 above the background correction capacity of the planetary systems becomes no problem at all. The remaining challenges, beyond the sociological assholeness of our species, are rendered to a trivial endeavor.

But, this kind of "Kardashev 1" level control at a planetary scale would really mean fixing, or having the ability to fix the problem, fast - precisely what is needed. Any limitations beyond that would be sociological - different discussion.   It wouldn't have to take centuries to correct the anthropomorphic CO2, back to state prior to the Industrial Revolution. ... Even if CO2 were suddenly halted, (not remotely realistic), a natural extinction rate of CO2 is too slow to stop the other usage of the term extinction; and toppling indirectly linked ecological systems exposes thresholds in multitudes - true dystopia is realized. The general biology science ambit argues that it's already beginning...etc.  It's a snow ball just starting to roll down hill.

Fusion would create a favorable synergy space for innovation in general - that's an intuitive no-brainer.  However the truly transformative extent of that is likely hard to visualize in terms of discrete applications.  If, and most like when, quantum computing is brought on-line,  power and intellect assist in both solution gathering and engineering applications ... staggering.  Huge, huge steps in the department of, "innovation got humanity into this crisis; innovation is required to save us"    

[Typhoon Tip]

It's CNN, so taken with caution ... but interesting nonetheless

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/climate/ice-sheets-sea-level-rise

forward, the journal Communications Earth & Environment. Phys.org has a version too

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-15c-paris-climate-agreement-high.html

 

 

[LongBeachSurfFreak]

1 hour ago, Typhoon Tip said:

It's CNN, so taken with caution ... but interesting nonetheless

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/climate/ice-sheets-sea-level-rise

forward, the journal Communications Earth & Environment. Phys.org has a version too

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-15c-paris-climate-agreement-high.html

 

 

Good read. The lag effect between warming and melting is elephant in the room. So even if we stay at 1.5c it would take centuries to play out. It’s the feed back cycles that haven’t occurred yet that should raise the most concern.