That’s sobering. Humans are well and truly fucked unless governments get off their asses and put serious money into solving this.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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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:
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The graph highlights major percentiles, such as 75%.
The one that struck me though was the value for age 60, because that’s clearly when the graph starts to flatten out, which means it’s when things started to really grow.
And, as one would expect, it lines up pretty perfectly with the young end of the boomer generation. That is, those born ~1960 and earlier have overseen 80-90% of all global emissions.
And if you’re an early boomer ~1945-1950, then ~80% has happened since you’ve been able to vote.
And these people also had the most exposure to airborne lead from leaded gasoline. So no wonder we have such limited intellectual capabilities.
People were using other fuels before they start using fossil fuels. Like wood. It is double whammy - more CO2 (less efficient burning) and no CO2 recapturing by those burned trees.
Wood is more or less carbon neutral though, the carbon that is released by wood burning is the same carbon that the tree pulled out of the atmosphere to build the wood in the first place. The only extra emissions come from how the wood was gathered and prepared, so if they weren't using diesel trucks to haul the wood and they weren't using chainsaws to cut the trees down then yes, it would be carbon neutral.
If the result is deforestation it's not really carbon neutral, that would require another tree to grow in its place. Otherwise oil would be carbon neutral too, since that once came from plants.
The main difference is the sheer amount of energy we use honestly, if we covered all our current needs with wood we'd probably run out of trees faster than they could ever regrow. In that sense coal isn't strictly worse, if we stayed on 17th century level energy consumptiom but used coal instead of wood, we wouldn't have to worry about global warming either.
But a tree grows quickly, say 50 years. compared to how fast oil is produced by dead organic matter underground. Is not the burn wood-> grow a tree -> burn wood a much shorter and more sustainable co2 cycle?
Wood burning do have a problem with local polution do.
There are plenty examples of total destructions of forests in the beginning of industrial revolution in Europe. So, no, a tree does not grow.