this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Yeah I know cool people who are interested in the science but not only am I skeptical as a geologist it will work long or medium term, I don't trust ANY of the money being sloshed around for something that feels like far too convenient of a distraction from why climate change is happening.

If this works we will burn even more oil at a greater rate mark my words.

This whole concept hinges on the understandable delusion that we can create, no find in nature an almost perfectly hermetically sealed space to put the consequences of our actions in so they don't hurt anyone, we can't.

Despite advances in corrosion-resistant materials and specialized cement blends, ensuring structural integrity over hundreds of years remains unproven in practice. The oil and gas industry’s historical challenges with long-term well integrity, evidenced by numerous abandoned wells leaking methane or other fluids decades after closure, further underscore doubts regarding the feasibility of ensuring permanent CO₂ containment on geological timescales.

Scaling geological sequestration to multi-gigatonne levels exacerbates these engineering uncertainties. To manage several billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, thousands of injection and monitoring wells would be needed, each subject to stringent corrosion and structural integrity requirements. Sourcing sufficient volumes of specialized corrosion-resistant alloys, durable elastomers, and advanced cement mixtures at such massive scales could strain global manufacturing capacity and supply chains.

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Given these substantial risks and uncertainties, prudence suggests treating large-scale geological sequestration as a solution of last resort rather than a cornerstone strategy. Climate policy must prioritize accelerated electrification, increased renewable energy deployment, and aggressive demand-side measures to reduce fossil fuel dependency as much as possible. Restoring and expanding natural carbon sinks, including forests, wetlands, and soils, similarly provides credible and ecologically beneficial alternatives.

While I haven’t found time to do the full analysis yet, my working hypothesis is all decarbonization scenarios from the IPCC and other major organizations are wrong because they vastly underestimated solar, batteries and global penetration of electric vehicles of all scales, and vastly overestimated hydrogen’s potential in the energy sector. Realistic scenarios that aligned with the rapid acceleration of electrification and the developing world leapfrogging the developed world would not see a need for enormous pipeline networks to sequestration sites for garbage disposal of carbon dioxide.

so many good quotes!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Also a geologist, I know there are smart people working on this stuff but I've also heard from folks that the modern carbon sequestration solutions are largely a grift.

Scalability is a big problem to tackle for sure and I largely agree that carbon sequestration should not be our number one solution to pollution. It infuriates me to no end that these things aren't even solved problems and yet still touted as reasons why we can keep pumping oil and gas and building pipelines.