One of these days, once this ceases to be a political football, people will finally accept the reality of the matter and allow scientists to speak the truth about all of this.

What is that truth:

We cannot fix atmospheric CO2 concentration. The amount of energy and resources necessary to accomplish such a feat is far more likely to kill all life on this planet than reduce CO2 by even 10 PPM.

I know people don't like to hear this but I still haven't found anyone who is able to refute the most basic of arguments proving this reality. I have challenged many. What usually happens is a range between ignoring the question and insults (or both).

This is about pulling our heads out of the sand to take a look at the data in order to understand what it is screaming at us very loudly. It goes something like this:

If humanity --all of us-- left the planet tomorrow and we took all of our technology, cars, planes, buildings --everything-- with us...it would take somewhere in the range of 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm (which is roughly what we need).

This isn't me saying it. We have very accurate data on this. We know, with a very high degree of certainty, what the atmosphere looked like and how long it took for CO2 to increase and decrease when humanity was but a bunch of apes on trees.

This data is provided to us by the 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data we already have. Ice core atmospheric composition sampling is a highly accurate way to learn about what the atmosphere looked like in the past. And, again, to be redundant, we have data going back 800,000 years.

This means we KNOW how the atmosphere behaved when we were not here.

This also means we KNOW how it will behave is we all left.

If it takes the planet 50,000 to 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction --without humanity around-- there's NOTHING we can do at a small scale (solar panels world-wide, stop using cars, stop using planes, ban all fossil fuels, etc.) that will accelerate the slope at all. If we stay on the planet the rate of change is GREATER than 50K to 100K for 100 ppm, because we are contributing more CO2 to the equation.

Please don't take my word for it. Look at the data and you should have the same revelation about this issue I had many years ago. This does not mean we should not make an effort to clean-up our act, there are many reasons for which this is a good idea and none of them anything to do with climate change. I does mean we need to not lie to ourselves and start having real conversations about this stuff rather than, on the one hand, denying it, and, on the other, thinking we can actually affect planetary scale problems with truly insignificant measures. Hint: Everything is insignificant when compared to humanity leaving the planet. Both extreme positions are unreasonable and delusional.

Finally, a problem: Scientists, researchers, don't want to talk about this reality because their careers would be over if they did. At the very least their grants would evaporate. This is a terrible side-effect of the religion climate change has become. We need to free our researchers so that they can be honest about what we know and we can put them to work on how to deal with reality.

Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:

https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...

https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

I have looked into this issue in depth and I have yet to find any argument or proposed solution that can do better than all of humanity leaving the planet, which is to say we can't fix it. We better start talking about how to live with it soon rather than propose ridiculous "solutions" that are far more likely to kill us all than fix anything.

Here's the problem with any carbon sequestration proposal: You have to prove how you are going to violate the law of conservation of energy. Seriously. Any sequestration approach has to, by definition, consume more energy than what it took to create the problem in the first place. Not to mention resources.

We have the hubris to think we can do millions of years of work in 30 years. This is delusional.