nostr:npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c consider the following:

1) plants die at 150 ppm. we need these to survive

2) co2 levels were down to 180 ppm the last ice age, very close to plant starvation levels!

3) multi-cellular life started at 5000 ppm - life does not die here; it does quite well (see cambrian explosion)

Given the above, is humans increasing co2 from 280 to 420 really a bad thing, considering the improvement of the human lifespan, and quality of life from fossil fueled energy?

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All you say is true. Life will be fine. Earth has been much hotter with much more CO2. More CO2 will improve plant growth. And we eat plants so that part is a good thing.

But humans evolved while CO2 was below 400ppm - the last time it was that high, 20 million years ago, there were no humans. We kind of got used to 280ppm.

I'm not saying we can't tolerate it (our speciality is standing upright, sweating, and persistance hunting which means we excel when it is hot... if we go back to the old ways). I'm not saying we cannot adapt (we will build sea walls, people will migrate, a bunch of cold tundra will become livable for the first time).

All I'm saying is this: IF it turns out that the consequences end up sucking for some reason that we did or did not expect (e.g. massively violent storms that no human has ever witnessed, huge unpredictable climate fluctuations that make crop planning nearly impossible, etc), THEN we cannot go backwards, we will just have to live with it for a thousand years.

Because the basic physics of drawing down CO2 are so fundamental that no technological innovation is going to do better than plants already do. And that's no where near as fast as we are emitting it.

Any hopes of a technological innovation in this regard IMHO is a fairy tale. It's not quite as impossible as faster-than-light travel, going backwards in time, or perpetual motion machines, but it is nearly as impractical as humans flying around in jet ships like the Jetsons, costing far more energy to draw down than to emit.

NOTE: I didn't do any research for this post, this is off the top of my head. I may have said something wrong. This was a best effort reply.

We foolishly keep acting like this genie can be put back in the bottle with all this CO2 emission control nonsense. It cannot. We are terraformers. We did it poorly.

Now let’s do it well. Thankfully we have the opportunity to build a sound economy to drive the growth in production we need to terraform at continental scale. The mad pursuit of energy to feed bitcoin miners during hyperbitcoinization will form the backbone of the energy economy we will require to take feet off the ocean and flood the great deserts with desalinated water.

De-desert the desert 🔥. This book is on my shelf precisely for this reason.

It’s fine to think about and have concern with these questions.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know the answer to your question/ assumption that

1) co2 will continue to increase linearly,

and

2) the complex system that is earth does not have a mechanism to store co2 at greater rates, and

3) humans cannot adapt to life at 5000.

As someone who has not spent his entire life on these topics, this seems like it could be a credible question to explore.

Going to your If/Then statement: if you are claiming crisis the onus is on you to prove this.

Thus far, humans have never been safer from climate.

Using the term crisis today is counter-productive in many ways.

I don't call it a crisis. I have about the same view as Michael Shellenberger who wrote "Apocalypse Never," which isn't actually too far different from the view of Bill Gates, but stated differently. They both believe we need to keep using oil right now in order to eventually solve the climate crisis, that far too many people completely discount how well we adapt (e.g. sea walls), and that it isn't an emergency or "crisis" but it is a looming eventuality that we need to continue to work on.

👍 Shellenberger is a sane voice in the field of climate speak.