I believe in this. The future is bright. We are going to have energy breakthroughs. Once we have plenty of energy and energy infrastructure, we're going to have water desalination breakthroughs. Once we have massive water infrastructure, we will have farming breakthroughs. The global population will level off, which happens when there is plenty, we'll be able to return farmland to the wild.

In 100 years, I believe we'll have the Star Trek economy.

Thanks for these articles.

the temperature increase and sea level rise will still keep happening though, right? my understanding is those are pretty much going to continue since we've already pumped too much CO2 into the atmosphere and started some bad feedback loops that are contributing to global warming on their own (like thawing permafrost, and altering the Earth's albedo so it absorbs more sunlight).

michchamp said:

the temperature increase and sea level rise will still keep happening though, right? my understanding is those are pretty much going to continue since we've already pumped too much CO2 into the atmosphere and started some bad feedback loops that are contributing to global warming on their own (like thawing permafrost, and altering the Earth's albedo so it absorbs more sunlight).

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I don't know how long it takes for things to change, but my understanding is that the ocean is absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate close to 1/3 of the rate we're adding it to the atmosphere. That's bad because it makes the ocean more acidic which really makes life tough for coral and everything with a shell. At some rate, carbon is sinking to the ocean floor. Life on Earth is carbon-based and as things in the ocean die, some of the mass sinks. I don't know what happens after that.

Somebody has probably run simulations to figure out how quickly things could return to normal if you stopped adding carbon, but if I'm right about the 1/3 thing, then I think it would take about 80 years to go back to normal CO2 levels. Of course, getting to zero global emissions isn't realistic. And I think we'd need to cut by 2/3 just to stay where we're at.

But there's some ideas about fertilizing the oceans with iron to speed things up.

Googling, it sounds like my 80-year estimate might be off by thousands.

This guy thinks 250 years: https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/11/24/effect-zero-co2-2050/

Gulo Blue said:

Googling, it sounds like my 80-year estimate might be off by thousands.

This guy thinks 250 years: https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/11/24/effect-zero-co2-2050/

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This is a great link.
We have to try something soon in a big way but the agricultural and beef industry and the petroleum industry just have such big ingrained advantages from thier bias messaging from the past to how much lobbying the do to try and stop renewables. Look no further then the governor of Florida.

biggunsbob said:

This is a great link.
We have to try something soon in a big way but the agricultural and beef industry and the petroleum industry just have such big ingrained advantages from thier bias messaging from the past to how much lobbying the do to try and stop renewables. Look no further then the governor of Florida.

Click to expand...

I suspect I'll be eating lab grown meat before all is said and done too. I like cows, but we've got too many of them.