With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that's an enormous problem that must be solved. To be honest, with the house well and truly on fire, who cares about hypotheticals like lithium leaching.
I feel the graphs on this site are underselling the problem. The scale should be "last 60 years", "last 30 years". The changes we are making to the environment are profound and speak for themselves.
In practice it's rocket science because:
- The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions.
- There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory)
- Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.
Where I live, in Europe, since I was a little child and until now, the climate has transitioned from winters during which there were three months or more of continuous snow cover to winters during which it snows at most once or twice and the snow melts immediately, usually in a few hours.
When I was a child, temperatures under minus twenty Celsius degrees were not unusual, while now there are more than ten years since the last time when I have used my winter jacket and my winter boots.
You can't extrapolate from a feeling about a single lifetime to hundreds of years into the future, that's just nowhere near enough data points. Speaking personally, I've seen no difference in number of snowy winters over my lifetime.
All the written texts that I have seen from the last few hundred years describe winters identical with those from when I was a child. The same is true for much more ancient texts, even ancient Latin and Greek texts, though those are more ambiguous.
There is no doubt that at least during the last two thousand years there has never been any period with temperatures as high as during the last 40 years, and during these 40 years the monotonic increase of the temperatures has been obvious, e.g. 15 years ago we still had a few weeks with snow per year, but then the weeks have become days, and then during the last few years the days have been reduced to hours.
I am living in an area with continental climate, far from the sea, which previously had large temperature differences between summer and winter. Now the average summer temperature has also increased, but that is much less obvious than the increase of the winter temperatures from below zero Celsius degrees to above zero. I assume that in areas closer to sea coasts the changes in the average temperature must be less noticeable, as they must be buffered by the water.
Besides the historical texts, the fact that during the last two thousand years there has never been such a warm climate in Europe has also been recently confirmed by the study of tree rings.