One theory is that it's too early in the cycle to attribute the warming to El Nino (which will make things even worse), but that it's due to a reduction in SO2 in shipping fuels causing lower solar reflection and heating up the oceans faster.
Decades of optimism along the lines of "something bad is coming, but we can still fix it" did way too little.
Perhaps now that it's actually bad something might happen.
At this point, geo engineering is probably the safer option compared to letting the planet spiral into an uninhabitable waste land. Of course, it should be combined with cheap and abundant renewable/nuclear energy.
Now that things are bad, there might actually be popular support for this, though we may still have to wait for the current political class to retire.
Any hypothetical sequestration into a fuel (as in the parent parent comment) would also require a power source, so the question goes back to low-carbon power!
Although in fairness liquid fuels are storable, so you can use intermittent solar and wind to run syngas processes. Low carbon power isn't really the hard part, grid stability and the existing vehicle fleet is.
Also of course, you could theoretically build nuke plants in the middle of nowhere that are remotely operatable, then use the power to make fuel. That could avoid NIMBY related costs.
I think low-carbon power is fairly well understood in the form of solar and wind, and in future, maybe wave. The big problem is we can't store it or meaningfully transport it over huge distances.
When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time.
The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.
Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over.
Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.
As a software engineer, I am seriously considering going back to college and studying nuclear physics.
I believe an abundance of emission-free energy is about the only thing that can move the global economy to where it needs to be. Fossil fuels need to be out-competed with very cheap electricity. Once you achieve that, capitalism will ensure that all fossil fuel burning devices will gradually disappear. Other methods that try to fight capitalism (e.g. CO2 taxes) are ultimately losing battles, because the global political goodwill will never be there.
Solar is great, and cheap, until it's not. You need to cover vast areas of land in solar panels to power the whole country (incl. cars, freight, industry, ...), which is impractical and extremely costly, and still only works part of the day/year. It's an important part of the solution, but not the solution.
Nuclear is about the only thing that can provide continuous abundance at a reasonable cost, though we need new technologies.
Due to unprecedented urbanisation you effectively have runaway inflation in large cities, which is wiping out whole economic classes. Raising interest rates would be the only sane thing to do from the city perspective, but outside of the cities high interest rates would wreak havoc to the small amount of industry and jobs that remain there. I don't think any country has come up with a solution to the economic imbalance created by the flight of capital to cities.
When I'm in Russia, I find the state-controlled media surprisingly critical of government policy and very outward looking. They are clearly ignoring the elephant in the room: the country being an ungovernable pool of corruption that can only be kept together by instilling nationalism and foreign threats and an authoritarian leader, but then again, it's not like US media are really asking critical questions. With or without free press, no one wants to hear that they're in a mess. It's much nicer to think that everything is good, but the evil-doers are trying to ruin it.
The US media as a whole may not be asking critical questions, but that's not the point of free press. The fact is that the US media is free to ask critical questions, and therefore some, though not all, of the media ask critical questions.
Bingo. I keep seeing the US chatter being about boo scary government, but then turn right round and supplicate themselves to the big US brands as some kind of deities of freedom.
fuck that shit. Every large org is a problem, as it will develop a internal culture and world view.
when you have corporations existing in the world that has bigger revenue streams than nations, it should bring pause for thought.
No it doesn't have to. Stop moving the goalposts. The US has a free press, and under no definition does free necessarily require fair. It would be better if it had a fair press, but it is not necessary for freedom.
You're again letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
However, it's hard to be sure. A discussion: https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/aerosols-are-so2-emissions-...