One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth’s atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating “faster than ever,” scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found.
“Over the past year, we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever.”
Carbon capture is a fools errand.
It takes just as much energy to get the carbon out of the air as it did to put it there in the first place. You can’t fight thermodynamics.
So unless we discover cheap, plentiful fusion in the next few years, or dedicate half a continent to solar and wind farms, we aren’t getting back any more carbon than we burn already.
Nuclear and solar would like a word. My entire life we’ve been told we can’t have nuclear because NIMBY and “decade to build.”
We’d be swimming in available power without fossil fuel level carbon release if we had just done it.
Deku tree