Emissions budgets are calculated using accounting best practice, which are not designed for full transparency (ref: the creative accounting used to obscure every financial scandal and economic bubble). THIS is the curve that matters:
These two views are not necessarily in conflict: atmospheric CO2 concentration is (vagely/roughly) the integral of emissions. So if emissions are basically flat (-0.4%) you'd still see atmospheric levels rise.
There’s too much for abstinence to fix it now. We are going to have to intervene in land management practices to draw down the CO2 we already released. They’ve been trying to figure out how to decarbonize concrete and some of those techniques might eventually lead to net negative or at least closer to neutral.
We can think about capturing AFTER we stop emissions. Emissions can be significantly reduced. All vehicles can be electric, they add storage to the system and can supply power back, which means we can wean off of oil (transportation), coal and natural gas (electricity, heating).
If people stop buying gas cars, and every vehicle bought is EV, it will take 20 years for all vehicles to be EVs. Thats enough to build massive storage just using EVs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257308
Western countries have high wealth and disposable incomes, they can ban all ICE cars and bring down costs significantly (already cheaper CapEx and cheaper OpEx), accelerating everything else. Ethiopia banned new gas cars in 2024, western countries can do it too.
This is doable in 20 years. All road transport, electricity from fossil fuels. In these 20 years, we can focus on other things and have R&D breakthroughs (maybe zero/low carbon concrete).
Realistically it's easier to stop producing more than sequestering carbon. That's what the only target should be to stop releasing more carbon into the atmosphere as carbon capture etc requires energy which releases more carbon till we reach carbon free energy all form of carbon sequestration is mostly a con to get government contract or by oil and gas companies/countries to keep burning more.
If we reach net 0 carbon, which we won't, we still have the extra carbon we already added. That doesn't just go away. We will have to get to net negative to fix most of this.
Particularly because all the CO2 we dump into the ocean will return to the surface in ocean upwellings once the currents have run a full cycle.
if we get to 0 carbon that would mean we have reached carbon free energy so then using it capture and store carbon would be okay till then any carbon capture apart from growing more tree is pointless
I'm not talking about putting gas into holes in the ground and then expecting it to not bubble back out and/or kill us. I'm talking about recarbonizing farm land, which we will need anyway to deal with climate change, aforestation, and probably accelerated rock weathering.
It took us 200 years to break it, we'll probably be 300 years fixing it, at which point the ocean will have likely absorbed all it can and started giving it back to us.
The silver lining is that if world population really has peaked and we are on the decline, we can follow the model of Christchurch and The Netherlands and refuse to let people rebuild in the most vulnerable areas. We can return those areas to nature and in some cases, like the Netherlands, use those areas to also improve the chances to survive the next extreme weather event. Every time the a Netherlands declares a moratorium after a flood, their ability to avoid flooding in population centers improves a little bit. And the reforest land which helps a bit with the drawdown (asterisk for methane production, which may represent less carbon in the atmosphere but a greater greenhouse effect)
It’s too late for the pebbles to vote. It’ll take as long as it takes. And it will seem like it will take even longer because we will need to find new physics, chemistry, biology, and manufacturing to solve it.
Electric Cars are the future, and that is speaking as someone who still prefers to drive a petrol / gasoline car. It will be a long 10-20 year replacement cycle. And China is rapidly reducing its CO2 emissions. To the point I won't be surprised if in the future they could advertise to the west about their product being cleanly produced.
Solar and Batteries are advancing fast. To the point it isn't even about being green, it makes zero economic sense not to use it. We aren't that far away from it.
It is going to be a bit of a bumpy road. But we are advancing in the right direction.
Transport is only 25% of emissions. If we converted all planes, trucks, ships etc to electricity tomorrow then emissions would go back to what they were in... 2005.
China emits ~33% of global CO2, they could get 50% of their electricity to be renewable in next 5 - 10 years. When Solar and Batteries ( Semi Solid State Sodium Battery ) catches up for grid, and Electric cars, we are talking about a global reduction of ~20%+ say by 2035.
It is not perfect, but I dont think that is too bad. We should be able to cut 50% globally by 2050 if not earlier. As I believe both the technology and production scale will accelerate in typical Chinese fashion.
And all of that is without any incentives. Just pure economical play.
Levels as in emission levels or total levels? Emission levels may have blipped (and the Iran war is a pretty clear inflection point especially in the developing world) but obviously until we're net negative total levels will not decline because it's cumulative
If we stopped emitting carbon, cutting down forests, and got lucky with forest fires, natural processes would automatically begin to bring down total atmospheric carbon.
How long would it take to go down, and how sure are we?
I'm sure natural processes have some capacity to absorb additional carbon, but I feel like we're way past that point. Given how much we've already increased CO2, it will likely take centuries for any noticeable drop.
I didn't say you made any promises. But I've noticed that in the context of discussions like the one around climate change, this kind of ambiguity has a high chance to poison the debate - IMO because it unnecessarily leaves room for wildly unrealistic interpretations, which then become the assumptions on which subsequent arguments build. Once there are enough opposing assumptions it becomes impossible to bridge the gap, because you can't even tell anymore which faulty assumptions are at the root vs. which ones sprouted from those.
So I'm asking you in the hopes that your argument will be understood correctly, instead of being misleading due to distorted interpretations.
It will be interesting to see if the security implications of unreliable fossil fuel supply brings forward the date of peak co2 emissions. Adoption of EVs and solar PV is really spiking, particularly in the developing world.
Its also entirely possible things go back to "normal", like happened after the ME oil shocks of the 70s.
From 1980 -> 1990 the CO2 mole fraction (ppm) rose 20pts. from ~340 to ~360.
From 2022 -> 2025 the CO2 mole fraction (ppm) rose 10pts. from ~416 to ~426.
It seems we'll have the ppm rise 10pts. in 6 years, which is 40% faster than 40 years ago, which seems like an insane increase to me; almost like things are getting MUCH worse not better.
why did you use 2 different time scales? why not 10 or 3 years for both? What is the 10 year increase 2015 to 2025?
edit: I looked up the answer to my question. NOAA reported 25 ppm increase 2015 to 2025, from 400 parts per million (ppm) to over 425 ppm. (A 25% increase from 1980s)
The difference between those curves isn't "accounting", it's that the emission rate is essentially[1] the time derivative of the CO2 concentration. They have different shapes because they're different (but related) quantities.
It's entirely consistent with precise and good faith emissions measurements for CO2 to be still increasing.
[1] Modulo the seasonal variation, absorption in the ocean, emission from other sources like permafrost thawing, yada yada.
The substack linked below only looks into one tiny sliver of the off-sheet circular financing that dwarfs even the most optimistic revenue growth, but it's a good place to start to understand why this is a bubble and that, yes, Anthropic is in fact "losing gigantic amounts of money":
"Boom and bust is not about revenue. To find that kind of risk, start by reading the balance sheet... [The 2008] bust came from off-balance-sheet instruments."
I agree, but then learning to code isn't much of a hurdle. It's a similar effort to learning vim. The difficult part is getting to know the language. I never coded in Haskell for example and learning to use that language would take effort. On the other hand, it would be pretty easy with an LLM at hand.
It might even help in figuring out whether Haskell would be a good fit. Something I couldn't do, as I do not know the language. Then again, it's not a question that really gets asked much in a corporate setting. Most things are just solved in a few popular languages, whether that makes the most sense or not.
> learning to code isn't much of a hurdle... The difficult part is getting to know the language.
I agree. The people who depend on chatbots to write their code for them won't have either of those skills though. They don't know (or are in the process of forgetting) how to code, and they're missing out on the opportunity to really learn the language by turning off their brain and letting a bot spoon-feed them code.
An LLM would only get in your way if you actually wanted to learn Haskell.
We’re like 6-7 tiers deep on that aren’t we? Does every c developer understand the instruction set on the cpus their code is executing against? Does every c#/java/other managed memory language deeply understand their garbage collector?
It’s abstractions all the way down and most people aren’t going to have an intimate understanding of every layer, and it’s not economically worth it for the vast majority to even try
Abstractions are very different from having a bot regurgitate code for you. Abstractions are an aspect of the programing languages we use. Using them means using the language.
LLMs just give you results (of highly variable quality) and if you lack a solid understanding of the language being used that result gets blindly accepted as valid (especially if it manages to 'do the thing' when you test it). Learning how to type a prompt is not the same as learning how to code or learning a programing language.
Actually, if by “learning to code” you mean “writing good usable code”, my experience is that many people struggle to code. Especially when you consider planning a (human-level) complex project.
Maybe you don’t know those people. I work with them every day.
I don't think there is a wrong pixel, each of them maps into thousands of galaxies but many of them may be outside of our visible sphere of the universe. The fact that even light from those subjects can't reach you is surely just a minor technicality
Yeah not seeing it for technical writing. Especially in industries with even a hint of regulatory compliance, the imprecision is too significant. It's not for lack of trying or wishful thinking.
Either your colleagues are facing stiffer competition off-shore (not LLM driven) or their jobs were more about organizing, checking and sorting topics and data (LLMs can take that away)
As a tech writer myself, I often hear from other tech writers around the world that they find themselves as editors for llm-written slop. The main problem is that even before llns, almost no senior manager understood what the TWs actually do. As a result, there is a strong desire to get rid of the editor team.(see the case of Snowflake when a team of 70 documentarians was let go in a single day).
The company I work for also encourages us to use agents as much as possible. Now, I spend more time in the terminal than in VS Code. However, the situation is different for those who work in regulated areas.
> You are one person. The corporation is not. Scale matters
Correct, if you violate it too often to count, you have to pay around less than ~2.5ct per violation.
So the lesson here is: Create a company to do torrenting professionally, and resell its values for higher prices. Then get sued and pay a dime on the dollar you made.
More like how using hand-held computers programmed for dopamine hits could further entrench a sedentary lifestyle, reduce social cohesion, and lead to individual brain rot
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html
The Iran blip is clearly seen, but it's just that - a blip. Levels continue to steadily rise.
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