Moody Monday: the deadline is fast approaching

[mellowtigger]

How pessimistic are you about the danger of climate change and the urgency with which humans must change their behavior?

You're not being pessimistic enough. The window of opportunity and the literal deadline for humanity is much shorter than you thought. It may be only 100 years away. Would you feel better if it's as much as 200 years away? Hear the prediction directly from Sabine Hossenfelder (with a PhD in physics) with the usual brutally dry wit:

Watch on YouTube

If you don't believe that lone voice, then consider what the other academics of Scientist Rebellion (part of the larger Extinction Rebellion movement) are also saying.

I said recently that we needed to return every carbon atom back to the ground where we took it. I didn't get into the facts of city heat islands or our mobile heaters that we call vehicles of transportation. All of that unleashed heat needs to be returned too, if it originally came from underground carbon... which came from energy that arrived geological ages ago. You know already that climate change is my #1 priority. I will post eventually about some changes I made at home recently. Earlier this year, I turned off the gas valve behind my kitchen stove. I "replaced" it with a single electric induction plate that current sits on top of the old stove. I'm also without a car of any kind, and I turned down my house thermostat even lower this winter. Details to come.

But we collectively have to change our behaviors immediately. Not next year. Now. There's no time to delay further.

Comments

[armiphlage]

Burying several hundred years' worth of carbon would require a lot of energy to shift dirt around, and there is the risk of it igniting and re-releasing the carbon. I think a better means of storage is to dump it into deep bodies of water (for inland regions, lakes with deep anoxic regions such as the Great Lakes or Black Sea), so it gets buried in silt and eventually forms an artificial coal seam.




We have two quotes for replacing our gas furnace and gas water heater with heat pumps, with a third quote in early May. Last winter will be our last winter heated with fossil fuels. We picked up two bales of rock wool panels last weekend, and this weekend I'm crafting insulating panels for our windows to reduce our overall heating and cooling loads.

[mellowtigger]

Yay for change! :) I've wondered many times over the years why we don't make use of Earth's native recycling machine, tectonic subduction zones, for "getting rid" of carbon and radioactive waste and maybe even plastic. Put it back into a cycle that takes geologic timescales to complete, with time and heat destroying the evidence of our follies.

[zipperbear]

On geologic timescales, there are volcanic vents above those subduction zones. It would buy us a million years or two, but might convert carbon to CO2 that could leak out much sooner. Radioactive waste might also dissolve into seawater before getting subducted. If you can build a container to keep spent nuclear fuel intact for centuries against saltwater corrosion and tectonic grinding, it seems like slag heaps and dry salt mines would be just as safe, and easier to monitor.

[mellowtigger]

I'm getting a deja vu feeling here, like we've had this conversation before? Oh, I hadn't thought of the potential for gaseous escape, like uranium->radon. Eventually, in the far future, I think that the only sustainable industry will have total atomic recapture by heating substances until their molecules break down, then the atoms are captured and sorted for later reuse. I was always bothered by that scene in Star Wars where giant ships simply eject their used materials. No, that's valuable matter, remold it to something else!

[zipperbear]

Radioactive gas escape is minor, decaying very quickly to solids (xenon half-life is a month, radon less than 4 days) or combining chemically (tritium lasts years, but it's combustible and corrosive like regular hydrogen).

Economic trade-offs between storage space, energy usage, and prices of labor/transport vs. raw materials will sometimes make recycling not cost-effective. Plasma mass-spectrometers were used in the WWII uranium enrichment programs, but gas centrifuges were cheaper, cleaner, and more practical.

If planet-busting giant starships are cost-effective, but smuggling is profitable, then garbage scows and trash ejectors also make sense. Scavenging and salvage are important niches in ecology (termites, worms, vultures, hyenas, mistletoe, vines, strangler figs, herbivores, carnivores) and also in economies and society (flea markets, recycling, theft, bureaucracy, agricultural byproducts, smuggling, counterfeiting, security guards, gated communities, home-invasion robberies, security system installers). Life is alwyas complicated.

And maybe Marie Curie or Argonne triggered your Sorbonne dream.

[dewline]

It's one more thing getting done.

[mellowtigger]

When I posted this morning, I thought it was Monday already. I didn't realize until about 8pm today that it was only Sunday. Oops. :)