This is my first post here, cross-posted from

https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-1-review-of-basics/

Posting was suggested by Vaniver, and the actual work of cross-posting was done by Benito.

Comments appreciated. (Will only cross post the first of the 3 climate posts here.)

This is the first of a series of three blog posts intended as a primer on how technology can help to address climate change.

Note: you can annotate this page in Hypothes.is here: https://via.hypothes.is/https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-1-review-of-basics/

Excellent documents and courses are available online on what we are doing to the climate — such as the IPCC reports or Prof. Michael Mann’s online course or this National Academies report. Even more so, this type of open source analysis is what the field needs to look like. But I had to dig a bit to see even the beginnings of a quantitative picture of how technologies can contribute to solving the problems.

There are integrative assessments of solutions, such as Project Drawdown, and a huge proliferation of innovative technologies being proposed and developed in all sectors. There are also some superb review papers that treat the need for new technologies. Bret Victor has a beautiful overview emphasizing the role of general design, modeling and implementation capacity, and there is now a climate change for computer scientists course at MIT. But, as a scientifically literate (PhD in Biophysics) outsider to the climate and energy fields, I was looking to first understand the very basics:

How can I estimate the world’s remaining carbon budget for various levels of warming? What are the uncertainties in this?
What would happen if Greenland melted?
What are the fundamental physical limits on, say, the potential for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? How low could the cost theoretically go?
How many trees would you need to plant, and are you going to run out of water, land or fertilizer for them?
If we did manage to remove a given amount of CO2, how would the climate respond? How would the climate respond if we magically ceased all emissions today?
What would be the real impact if we could electrify all cars?
Are batteries going to be able to store all the variable renewable energy we’ll need? Is there enough Uranium obtainable to power the world with nuclear? Order of magnitude, how much would it cost to just replace our entir

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