Yes, But that’s not what the guy is talking about. He talking about reducing net emissions to zero so that CO2 concentrations don’t keep climbing.
Not very practical, but not insane.
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But doesn’t that mean you’d have to start killing off people at some point, as the population increased.?
Oh, that’s right. He wrote a paper about that.
No. It is in theory possible to maintain the present world population, admittedly at a pretty low economic level, while adding zero net emissions to the environment. All it really requires is eliminating the use of fossil fuels.
Actually, if there was truly massive implementation of nuclear power or orbital solar power, we might even be able to continue to advance economically.
Now I’m not recommending this approach, and there would undoubtedly be huge negative side-effects, but it is theoretically possible.
Here’s the deal: The ecosystem contains X carbon in soil, plants, ocean, atmosphere, etc. It goes in and out of the air over time much as water does. But as with water the concentration changes only minimally.
Fossil fuels consist largely of carbon in plant matter that used to be part of this carbon cycle, but was locked away from it many moons ago. When we burn fossil fuels, we add “new” carbon to the ecosystem, causing the concentration in the air to gradually climb.
What the effects of this will be are not nearly as self-evident as the greenies claim, but it WILL have effects if it reaches high enough concentrations. What exactly constitutes “high enough,” nobody really knows.
And it is simply not something a computer model can settle, because we don’t know all the factors, much less exactly how they will interact. I believe this is all knowable, but we are at present far, far away from that knowledge.
I suspect a century from now scientists will study the great Global Warming Scare as a case study for poor science.