The climate is changing. The world as we see it won't be like this forever. It's what you take for granted that you miss the most. Millions of people will be struck by poverty and disease. Millions will be displaced.
If ever there was a life that was worth preserving, a conscious life would be one, but our fictions that bring us together will cause our eventual extinction. Not just individual deaths, but the very prospect of being born, will become unavailable.
It's time to invent a more unifying make-believe story to replace the parochial and divisive ones. It should highlight, underscore, and italicise in giant bold fonts the fact that if the sky does fall on our silly heads, it will happen everywhere, and again with heavy emphasis of some sort, every time. If we can only get our minds together, there's a sliver of a chance, however miniscule, that this can be avoided.
But I don't see any proof of this realisation reflected in events around the globe, with leaders simply trying to shove the onus of action to another time, as if we already have it. COP26, the climate conference, was another shameful cop out. You'd think that they'd realise that it's getting rather hot lately.
I think, and I may be alone in this observation, that the COP was a designed flop, almost by definition: Sort of like expecting to outlaw rape by inviting all the rapists, excited juniors and experienced seniors, for a chat over tea. It's an event orchestrated for the camera, a flamboyant show of pretence and superficial amity.
It's just another way to shift responsibilities and blame, bury actions in kafkaesque policies, and perpetuate the status quo.
It's the developed countries that have to cough up the dough to provide transition for poorer countries, not simply to reverse the cruel historical injustice and crime asymmetry, but because otherwise it'll take too much time, which I hate to keep reminding you, the disinterested reader, that we don't have.
Climate change is a global, intergenerational issue.We are all on this planet, and there is nowhere else we can go, no planet B.
And while sea-level small islands, the areas near the equator, cities close to waterways, and the poor are the first to suffer, the rich and the powerful still live on this planet, albeit on slightly different islands, and these differences become less meaningful quickly when massive catastrophic accidents become ordinary. It will take an "x" foot wave a couple of minutes to wipe out an entire country along with all our vain differences. If x = 10, it may be the Maldives, if x = 100, it might be Australia. The scales are different, and the mischief is in the miscalculation. Undertelling the tale will only make the danger more apocalyptic and startling.
We mustn't forget that we live under the same sky, no matter how complicated the division story in our heads is. We don't have much time; it's already dire. After this short window of opportunity passes, it'll be too late to even pass on the burden of inaction to our progeny, for they will be sitting ducks, and generations after that won't exist for homo sapiens.
It's delusional to expect anything from a science-illiterate world where many still think the world is flat and the periodic table is furniture. With so little science education and so much oversimplification, dogmatism, and religiosity, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to get people to even "see" reality as it exists in the detail that is necessary, and until that time, there's very little that can be done at the crowd level. But that is the level at which I can operate with my limitations, and if I can get even one person to read this blog and realise that the stakes are high, I'd feel I've achieved something.
In a world fueled by selfishness, when situations get worse, people become more selfish, not less. The need for bread and the greed for knee-jerk, short-term solutions are going to dominate the thinking, not long-term, durable, wide-ranging, tough actions. Actions, not just a long list of policies and lies, is where I see a glimmer of hope. And without any action, that's where our storyline may end, abruptly, just like bad weather, without any further notice, unless we wise up to the warnings that are all around us.
While the utopian virtual universes are where technology companies want us to migrate to, where they tell you life will be like a fairy tale, you can't do that without your feet in a real universe, a wall socket for plugging in, and a place to keep the damn goggles.
We are already in a magical place. Let's wake up and save ourselves from extinction. Life is miraculous, and not in any ostentatious, metaphysical way. It's fortunate that we are here. These extremely improbable and delicate conditions, the thread of luck that life is, that which we take for granted, are fragile. If we abuse the ecosystem in which we live, the fate of our species is in the air, and all we have to do is watch the weather.
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Carbon Capture:
A lot of people are of the opinion that we should use some form of chemistry to absorb all the offending green house gases. They feel that trying to reduce emissions may be an intractable, if not an obviously impossible goal, since there's no centralised way to monitor or control them, or hold any country accountable.
When people talk about carbon sequestration and capture, they don't realise that it's more than what appears on the surface. And the difficulty can be appreciated with some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
The main greenhouse gas that needs to be considered is carbon dioxide, which is about 400 molecules in a million molecules of atmospheric air, slightly more or slightly less. Although that's a lot as far as trapping heat is concerned, it's not enough molecules in a single place to be able to do anything with it with the kind of efficiency that's needed.
So if we are looking at capturing it, even if the idea is to react it with some other material (with a finite exposed surface area), we have to get it to where it can be in contact with it. Blowing in, storing, and compressing large air volumes to get to a higher concentration level of carbon dioxide is often the very first thing that's needed (removal of other gases, liquefaction, etc.).
Unfortunately, today, any electricity used ultimately uses some form of carbon-based production, distribution, or carbon cost. Operating a single bulb, or even driving to our carbon capture facility, has a carbon cost.
And this is why: Burning just 12 grammes of carbon adds approximately 600 million million million carbon dioxide molecules to the air (12 grammes or the molar mass equivalent has an avogadro number of carbon atoms or 6.022 × 10²³ atoms). If you need to pump in 1 million air molecules to capture 400 carbon dioxide molecules, you'd need to process 1.5 million million million million air molecules (1.5 × 10²⁴) or about 60,000 cubic cm of air, to get all the carbon dioxide from that pittance of 12 grammes of carbon.
You can see where this is going, if we are even talking about just getting started. Until we do this entirely on a renewable energy platform (that is, with no input from other grids and without spending any carbon anywhere else), the mathematics will simply not work out. This is along the same line of reasoning why an electric car or bus may reduce city pollution but still put out a lot of carbon dioxide if the electricity you are using isn't based on pure renewable energy. It hurts to know the truth, but carrying on with a dozen blindspots doesn't help anyone.
This doesn't mean we can't solve the problem or not have a practical carbon capture setup one day; it simply means we have to be honest about these discussions to be able to resolve it properly, and we are not there yet.
This is true for anything in science, but it's especially important for this climate crisis. If we are hiding some facts or not comprehending the underlying complexity, then we'll only exacerbate the crisis, since we'll be pouring resources into attempts that will dump more carbon dioxide into the air, exacerbating the problem we are trying to solve in the first place. And this is also why we need to retrofit everything that produces green house gases before the gases get a chance to get mixed up with other molecules in the atmosphere. We can't forget entropy in these situations. While entropy allows carbon dioxide to mix effortlessly, we need energy to reverse that to get it to a more convenient and concentrated form. Any energy that is generating more carbon dioxide is only making the problem bigger.
