Ive read that our carbon emissions have basically started a cascade effect that we can’t limit now. IS this right or wrong?
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Part of the “cascade” effect you’ve read about is trapped CO2 in ice. As CO2 warms the atmosphere, more ice melts, releasing more CO2, and therefore melting ice faster. There’s also rising sea levels, again due to ice melting, which increases the surface area of the oceans and therefore the heat they absorb, leading to faster ice melting.
Neither of those are irreversible, but it’s possible even if we stopped emitting more CO2 (i.e. reached the “net zero” that many are aiming for) those effects would continue to heat the earth. So instead we need to reach a net negative, a reduction in CO2. There are ways we could do that, although it would require pretty significant political and economic policies, and a noticeable change to our daily lives (less meat, travel, shopping etc.).
If we do start removing CO2 we’d need to do so carefully. A hot earth isn’t *necessarily* as bad as a rapidly changing one. It’s the *rise* in temperature that’s disrupting weather patterns and ecosystems as much as the temperature itself. So we’d probably want to spend the next few centuries cooling it down to pre-industrial levels.
> Ive read that our carbon emissions have basically started a cascade effect that we can’t limit now. IS this right or wrong?
It’s wrong, there are cascading effects, and tipping points, where because of the heating caused by our CO2 emissions further natural emissions will trigger. However there’s no point-of-no-return, and we can always work to mitigate, limit and reverse the effects. The only point-of-no-return is when you get a Runaway greenhouse effect similar to what happened to Venus, which is something we feared in the past to be where we were heading, but recent science has shown that it is very unlikely to happen even if we burn 10 times all the fossil fuel that exists on earth.
There are lots of climate interactions and with CO2 and methane emissions dominating we don’t know if the system will self correct or if we have already entered runaway climate change. Glaciers and icecaps have undergone substantial melting so the bright white shiny surface is being replace by a much darker surface which absorbs more of the solar radiation warming up the planet related to the albedo effect. https://youtu.be/GqkZsShfBL0
the truth is that we do not have the technology to do that.
The CO2 extracting facilities that are experimented around the world today are insignificant in their capacity and would require too much energy to scale up to make a dent.
In other words, even if it would help there is no way we will be able to do it.
That is why we “tried” to reduce CO2 emissions, Spoiler alert, we failed at that too.
Firstly, we’ve put about 2 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. It currently costs around $150 or so per tonne to remove it, and requires raw materials we simply don’t have enough of. So we’re not going to be removing it any time soon unless there are some remarkable breakthroughs.
But yes, it would make an immediate different in air temperatures across the planet. Sadly, some of the damage can’t be reversed, particularly the lost glaciers and land ice. That ice accumulates *very* slowly over millions of years, and once it’s melted it’s effectively gone forever. And any ecosystem damage will also take a long time to repair, extinct species won’t come back, etc.
But in terms of climate and temperature, if we were to stop emitting right now and magically remove all the extra CO2, we’d be back to “normal” fairly quickly, once the excess heat in the oceans in particular slowly gets radiated out into space. It won’t happen overnight, it will take many years or decades to fully revert, but that’s still quite “fast” by climatic standards.
Sadly, even with all the efforts we’re making, and cutting emissions *per person*, we’re still emitting more than at any other point in history. It will be *at least* a few decades until we can get even close to a net zero situation, and start to even think about reversing the damage. The only question is, will that be too late to avoid utterly catastrophic damage?
if we somehow cut our current carbon emissions to 0 tomorrow, we’d still see effects for decades, if not longer.
if we had a super efficent way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and implemented that today, we *might* be able to mitigate some of the effects of our CO2 emissions, but we’d still continue to see the effects for quite a while. it’s very hard to say how deep those effects would impact the planet as a whole, as the global ecosystem is very slow to respond. it’s real real big.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is harmful to plant matter. CO2 makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere.
Heres the thing about CO2… the EPA says in their guidelines for refrigerants (yes, CO2 is used as refrigerant (freon)) that CO2 has a global warming potential of….. ZERO. It also has an ozone depletion potential of…. yes, you guessed it, ZERO. Idk why all these scientists are up in arms about CO2 when the EPA says it poses no harm to ozone or global warming… the only thing CO2 really does is create a greenhouse effect (greenhouse gasses and such), which only makes the temperatures feel warmer. It does not actually damage the atmosphere in any way.
The weather channel can’t even predict 24 hours in advance and you believe the climate crisis bs that predicts chaos by 2050..lol.
It would have zero effect on the climate, but crop yields would be down, and plant life in general would suffer. The whole CO2 causes climate change is a junk science fraud. It is being pushed by the “Crisis and Leviathan” power-lusters as a rationalization to seize more and more political power. Don’t drink the koolaid.
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