3. MIT Bathtub Simulator for Emissions and CO2 Removal. Why emissions reduction is insufficient.
Cleaning up the excess CO2 overhead must become the major focus of our climate efforts. That changes everything.
In this talk, I am going to take a look at how big and quick the proposed cleanup methods are. The calculation is much like simulating a bathtub’s inflows and outflows, and MIT has a nice on-line tool for climate inputs and outputs. I will cover why emissions reduction is insufficient, why we must remove the excess CO2 from the atmospheric circulation very quickly, in the next 20 years.
Extreme weather has created a climate emergency, not so much through current damage but because of the lead time required to cool us off by removing the excess carbon dioxide from the air before global economic crashes destroy civilization, to cause a human population crash.
Reducing emissions is no longer the best goal for climate action. Most current efforts are still relevant to other environmental goals, but they now count little toward reducing our climate problems. They are worthy for other reasons but should not be characterized as “climate solutions” as more.
Remember that the bathtub simulation takes no account of how extreme weather might disrupt the CDR projects in the meantime, not just with windstorms and floods and fires, but through economic collapse, famine, wars, genocides, pandemics. It won’t take a complete collapse of civilization to create a slippery slope.
It is their potential for trashing a big repair project that has created the climate emergency, not their current level of annual damage..