The difference between the complexity of software inputs versus complexity in problem solving the real world systems is the energy and infrastructure it takes in the real world.

Joseph Tainter had a really interesting paper about how real world costs rise in an extremely non linear way after a certain threshold.

" It is not a question of expending a lot of energy to discover “more efficient” ways to do these things - that process amplifies the decline. "

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity,_Problem_Solving,_and_Sustainable_Societies

So you imply there is a balance point, but what’s clear is that complexity in one area actually reduces resources in the other areas and drags lower the external standards to whatever problem you put a focus on.

So backing out and taking another look at this, the solution of adding any complexity in any area actually makes higher problems. More complexity in one area removes the existing complexity in another, complexity is constrained.

Foe example, the more software we make, the less talent, energy, money and resources go into, say, health care or food production…investments are finite.

This is an interesting paper by Tainter, its about how science and innovation and technology have diminishing returns on investment: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sres.1057

People discover the big easy things first, then it costs more and more to make smaller and less useful advancements…the figures and graphs in this paper tell an amazing story. Society is paying more and more for all these failing sectors. …

To be clear on what’s required, we would need something like a free infinite energy source that doesn’t pollute at all. It also would have to be rapidly scalable within a decade or so. At that point we could have a giant vacuum cleaner sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere. We need to discover this new technology yesterday and it needs to clean the whole planet in about 20 years.

At this point in the story, we are adding about 1% to the CO2 pollution per year. Given the vast scale of the solution we will be coming up with, do you think this extra 1% or 25% will be somehow pivotal?

To me, this is like having pancreatic cancer that’s untreatable by medicine and deciding if you are going to quit smoking or not. Yeah, smoking doesn’t make it better, but in the face of the only cure being basically a miracle, is it actually meaningful to ask this question?

Like, a miracle that can cure an unfixable problem is so huge that do a few extra cigarettes hang in the balance?

I mean…of course you’re right. Slowing down CO2 pollution is very very important. In 1950.

(We do not have 50 years. Lol.)

Conservation of mass and conservation of energy gives a very easy planetary scale answer to this question.

From an energy standpoint, what it costs to bottle up the CO2 is equal to the following:

1. Take all the energy (heat + work) that was chemically embodied in all the historical fossil fuels. We need to run all those chemical reactions that released energy again, but this time backwards.

2. We need to also add the energy it would take to run the thermodynamic change backwards, because the original energy was in concentrated high density form, and now the carbon has dispersed to a low coherence state where it’s stuck in air, ice, water and vegetation all over the place. It all has to come back out which involves major material movements and filtering / transformation

In conclusion, this is more expensive than all the money and energy and materials in the entire human history put together.

Unless…

Do you know of any magic?

I feel a little dissapointed that you think I’m “nitpicking”.

So …I apologize if that seemed harsh or insulting.

Let me explain from my perspective. Analogy time:

Claim: You have been a problem gambler for decades and you have a major lifetime debt built up.

Me: How are you going to get out of debt?

You: I’m going to gamble less.

Me: You need to pay back the entire debt!

You: I can afford the credit card payments if I get a new card with a lower interest rate.

Me: You’re not hearing what I’m saying.

You: But the interest rates are only…

Etc.

Like…whoosh…not AT ALL facing the elephant in the room which is that no amount of further INCREASE is a DECREASE!! Like the technical discussion and details are not FULL ACCEPTANCE of the main point I’m making. It’s DENIAL.

Climate change is exactly like this. The scheme you’re discussing is that we can kick the can and “still have time to act”. (Is it 3 degrees or 5? Is it 2 decades or 4? How dire and how immanent is the crisis that is 99.999% inescapable at this point, let’s direct our attention to this and argue?)

This is like when Wile E Coyote runs past the edge of the cliff and hangs in mid air and looks down. But he still has time, he hasn’t started falling yet. Ok…so time for WHAT? What option does Wile E Coyote have that puts him back on the cliff?

This is like gambling more to try to win to solve the gambling problem. If you fail you have dug a bigger quicker grave.

Equilibrium global warming for TODAY’S co2 concentration is 10°.

Here is one reference, this number is right in the paper’s abstract: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false

Long story short, ECS was underestimated for political purposes. If ECS was as high as the paleoclimatology data showed, it would have removed all hope, so scientists completely ignored that scenario going back to the 1990s…

As this paper points out, carbon capture cannot work…the discussion is under the heading “Greenhouse gas emissions situation”.

There’s still margin for human society to stop the worst of outcomes.

Ah, OK! Problem solved. Lol.

This is what everyone is saying. The paper I just linked also said that. But what are the solutions? What does everyone think we can do? How do we avoid the bad situation? I’m genuinely asking.

I have not seen any solution that is fully scoped that gives a specific way of changing anything. They just say we “have time” to do something but they don’t say what to do.

As I stated: we seem to not know what to do.

Hint: this is why you’re nitpicking about the degrees of rise. It’s a typical psychological defense mechanism. If it was 3 or 9 or 17 it would not have any relevance in the face of our utter inability to deal with ANY scenarios regardless of the number.

Yep. There is a lot of hubris.

In general right wing folks don’t believe we have a big problem, which is literal denial.

In general left wing folks believe we can solve the problem easily without much sacrifice, which is denial of the implications.

When right wing people look at left wing people they think the solutions are not going to work and would be a big scary change and a sure loss of our way of life.

When left wing people look at right wing people they think that they are stupid for being pragmatic and realist instead of idealistic and fantastical.

Its a game where both sides blame one another and decades slip comfortably by while we remain deadlocked.

Those are also technologies, just not high tech.

Here is a question then:

According to the science, the ocean current changes are going to start driving climate change via a doubling of present day CO2. When the permafrost melts it will create as much additional CO2 as all human industry does on a repeating annual basis right now. This is an all natural process where CO2 pollution will snowball faster and faster with no human ability to adjust it.

so, do you think natural processes like growing trees have the potential where they going to erase that much feedback? Keeping in mind that the peat bogs, forests and ocean plankton we have today in a less damaged ecosystem ALREADY failed to curtail a much smaller human created CO2 pulse?

Hmm?

What you’re talking about is BECCS, by the way. Believe me or don’t, but the UN climate change panel already included this in all the accounting! Like, what the projections for the future say is that we are going to invent these technologies and deploy them and erase the CO2, and that’s assumed to be real and already factored into all the future projections…and they are still talking about 8 degrees of warming even including that. Notwithstanding that we have never done this yet and don’t know if it works.

So, there is a natural carbon cycle, natural nitrogen cycle etc.

On planet earth, the nitrogen cycle of the whole planet is only 50% of what humans need to eat every year. If you don’t have artificial fertilizers, tractors, refrigerators etc etc, there is no way people can be fed even if they are everything that nature created.

We are locked into an artificial life support system. Our agriculture system creates more CO2 than all the cars being driven by a factor of 3.

We have no technology that is waiting to fix this. There is no “fix” where lots of people wouldn’t die directly.

We DO NOT have sustainable technologies. For humans, we are committed to planetary overshoot if we stay alive, we have been in planetary overshoot for many generations already.

Your list of “solutions” are not real things that make significant change. Sorry. They slow down the worsening but they will not even extend civilization by one extra generation. You have been duped into thinking about this the wrong way.

Cities are giant factories that require the constant cycling of goods (food, water and other materials) using a transportation grid and they also require constant energy inputs to remove waste materials. Our ancestors didn’t build cities to permanently live in until they had cheap surplus energy and a way to store it. I have something to warn you about…so your idea about edencity and public transportation is like you almost see how unsustainable cities are, and why.

The idea that wind and solar are infinitely scalable has actually been properly studied in the literature. For example, Mark Jacobson has a fully elucidated picture of what that would look like globally. If I remember correctly, he calls for every river on earth to be dammed for hydro, windmills covering every continent and around 200 solar panels for every living human AND major deductions in energy usage. This is a more highly industrialized future than any previous human project. He did not explore the material or energy costs of building this system. So for instance, on a planet where we cannot feed, build houses and build transport for everyone it’s surprising if we can build them all windmills, batteries, wiring, solar panels and power dams. But…you know…we have to dream right? The main headline is that “the possibility is infinite”. I actually don’t believe that, it seems like all these large scale programs are already failing in many ways. Not that they aren’t the best idea we have, they are just not working out.

By the way , we could also eat insects ground into a protein mush instead of actual vegetables.

That’s geoengineering to reduce the strength of sunlight to get heat down. It has to be repeated indefinitely, forever, or heat increases again.

Also, it doesn’t reverse what’s causing climate change by removing carbon.

What’s an example of the technology, and can you explain what scale it works at?

There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc).

You’re only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That’s irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.

As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?

Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a “flow” or “rate” problem.

“If we could only slow down carbon…”

The thing is that what we have is a “sink” or “stock” problem where it’s how much carbon is already in the system – it’s past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now

The rate of change in climate isn’t from the rate of this year’s contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it’s from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.

There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.

The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn’t put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.

What you’re feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.

A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.

I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.

Climate change isn’t an on/off switch, it’s something that can always be made better or worse by increments.

I’m just speaking to the accuracy of this one sentence. This is completely 100% incorrect.

The climate system is a chaos system that has many areas of stability, rapid transformation and tipping points.

If you think the system is only incrementally changing, that’s just because you haven’t pushed it hard enough to rapidly shift to a new area of behavior you’ve never seen before.

Many of these regimes are irreversible and cannot be changed back. You cannot unburn toast, it’s a one way deal.

Once the climate changes, EVEN if you reset the conditions, you will not return to the initial state. Not at all. That idea is propaganda.

The fossil carbon and other climate related chemicals we have already dumped into the environment have a very long lag time before we see the effects (at all). These chemicals and their effects are more long living that most nuclear waste, for example. These are not going away while humanity still exists. That’s a done deal.

Oops. 350% growth, not 350X growth…lost some decimal places there. Thanks for the correction.

A constant 2% economic growth rate implies that we expect the world economy in 2100 to be 350 times as large as the economy of today.

That means it roughly doubles every decade remaining in the century.

Insofar as prices or costs can go up, there seems to be no limit to growth.

Insofar as we have real physical resources and production increasing, I have a hard time imagining we can meaningfully double production one time.

For example, I can’t imagine a world with twice the built infrastructure we have now. (Houses, roads, power dams, airports, schools, etc). Seems impossible.

If growth has ended or is ending soon, it makes you wonder how long governments will be able to try to print their way out of stagnation before the whole system becomes irrelevant and comical.

Our local ranger station has the senior former wildfire people working now at the front desk just speaking to visitors. (The front desk people were eliminated and they just started moving staff around.) But obviously the normal experts are no longer doing any wildfire planning and response work.

At it happens, it’s painfully obvious they also can’t answer visitor’s questions and don’t know the processes to take payments, issue permits and all the things in the front desk job.

So not looking good.