You might consider reading Accelerated Structure Formation: The Early Emergence of Massive Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies. The paper is absolutely wonderful. The main thesis of the paper is, “Wow, the James Webb Telescope sure has been finding some remarkably mature galaxies for the early universe. Maybe we should consider the possibility that the models we use to predict galaxy formation, specifically lambda CDM, are incorrect and Non-Physical.”

The author states the difficulty in the conclusion:

Despite the predictive successes of MOND, we do not yet know how to construct a cosmology based on it. In contrast, ΛCDM provides a good fit to a wide range of cosmological observables but does not provide a satisfactory explanation of the many phenomena that were predicted by MOND, nor is it clear that it can do so. We find ourselves caught between two very different theories that seem irreconcilable despite applying to closely related yet incommensurate lines of evidence.

The complaints about the early maturation of galaxies seen by the JWST was widely reported. My favorite line from that article:

“Maybe in the early universe, galaxies were better at turning gas into stars,” Chworowsky said.

Sure, it’s not that our theories of cosmology are incorrect; things like star formation were just different back in the early universe. I guess you just had to be there.

The magnitude of the problem can be challenging to comprehend. There is about 1 Ttonne CO₂ to mitigate, which, at $100 per tonne, would cost $100 trillion USD to fully sequester. Throwing billions of dollars at it would not even start to make the smallest measurable dent in the problem at any scale whatsoever.

However, if the current rate of annual solar panel adoption continues at 26% for the next 18 years, then the global production of energy will be sufficient to pretty rapidly decarbonize the atmosphere at low cost, as the amount of solar energy will be triple that being produced globally from all sources at present.

Now, if that doesn’t happen, then another way to pay for decarbonizing is to bring about world peace and disarmament. The US annual defense budget is ~$800B. If the dividend from world peace was directed to climate mitigation, we could get rapid, dramatic reductions in CO₂ over the course of a century. And we would no longer have the threat of nuclear war looming over human civilization. I find that this idea is generally met with scepticism, but, unlike other government expenditures like healthcare and welfare, war is a highly discretionary expenditure that can be rendered unnecessary by some important people signing some papers.

This is a serious, expensive problem and the solutions, unfortunately, are going to need to be proportionally serious and expensive.

Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.

“Planting a billion hectares of trees won’t be easy,” he said. “It would require a massive undertaking. If we follow the paper’s recommendations, reforesting an area the size of the United States and Canada combined (1 to 2 billion hectares) could take between one and two thousand years, assuming we plant a million hectares a year and that each hectare contains at least 50 to 100 trees to create an appropriate treetop canopy cover.” (NASA)

This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.

This piece is just propaganda. One wonders what would be expected:

To date, it has received $281 million in taxpayer dollars via Department of Energy grants. According to the Department of Energy, it has stored more than 2.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide since 2011.

This would place the cost of sequestration at… $100 tonne, which is pretty much the price that everyone else has estimated for carbon capture and sequestration, as discussed in articles like this. How much was sequestration of 2.8 million tonnes of CO2 supposed to cost?

“Carbon capture project captures almost no carbon”. Really? Because 2.8 megatonnes doesn’t seem like “no carbon” to me. Was it that “it only caught 10% of the carbon produced on the site”? Well then, maybe it should have been $2.8B of taxpayer dollars to capture 28 MTCO₂. What would the headline have been then? “Carbon capture project costs taxpayer $2.8B for almost no carbon”?

I want the cost of sequestration to be lower just like anyone else, but doing nothing is a terrible strategy to learn how to reduce costs.

If you don’t want taxpayers to pay for it, change the laws and make the price of carbon emissions >$100 tonne. Then ADM will have to pay their own sequestration costs. If you don’t like sequestration because it’s expensive, then what’s the plan for decarbonizing the atmosphere and reducing global temperatures after emissions are zeroed out? If your plan for a carbon neutral world is “endure global warming for thousands of years until the carbon gets sequestered in soil”, that’s fine, but you can’t blame people for wanting to see things get cleared up on the order of decades.

This project was a success, insofar as it accomplished what it set out to accomplish as a publicly funded demonstration of the technology. The fact that the site emitted other carbon that wasn’t captured is irrelevant.

The fear of feedback loops is reasonable, but may not be inevitable. The reason complex life exists on this planet, in part, is that the biosphere evolved to prevent runaway climate change. As the life forms grew more varied and complex, the tools for maintaining a viable atmosphere also increased. So the Precambrian extinctions are attributed to changes that extremely primitive life forms couldn’t adapt to. Once life moved onto land, and trees, grasses, and flowers evolved, the number of ways for life to adapt went way up.

It should say something that the most recent mass extinction event (I mean, before the anthropocene), was caused by a giant asteroid and a decade(s?)-long winter, rather than a change in solar luminosity or runaway GHG shift.

With the advent of humans, this planet now has tools available for GHG and solar radiation management (SRM) that were unthinkable by nature. SRM with sulfur dioxide and air capture of CO₂ allow for the rapid reshaping of the climate almost as fast as fossil fuel combustion. As a result, the tools to stabilize the climate are available and their use is inevitable. The longer we wait to use them, the worse the problem gets and the more people are harmed, but given the unheard-of capacities that we’ve developed to stave off runaway global warming, I do not believe that humanity will choose extinction over GHG management and SRM.

Most of these thoughts come from Gaian Bottleneck Theory, which you can read more about here. You may be right, but I’m hoping you are wrong (no offense).

Yeah, FreeCAD is great, but I can only think of one project that I’ve done where SolveSpace absolutely could not work for the geometry I needed and I had to rebuild it in FreeCAD. But that’s just a product of what I am building: simple things like brackets, knobs, and replacement lids mostly. I don’t need chamfers, drafts, lofts, etc. and I get what I need with minimum of time and effort using SolveSpace.

When I do need those features, complex geometries, or modification of pre-built step files, FreeCAD has never failed me.

No one mentioned SolveSpace, so… SolveSpace. Solvespace is a fully functional 3D parametric CAD solver in a free, cross-platform, open-source, portable, single self-contained executable 10 MB file.

I do a fair amount of hobby 3d printing and SolveSpace makes design and CAD stupid easy. The interface is perfectly laid out, the hotkeys are intuitive, and the capabilities make small-scale projects a breeze.

Now, the program has its limitations, but if I just want something quick and simple, there is nothing better.

Mineralization. There is a paper from Nature estimating a capacity of 10,000 - 100,000 Gt CO₂ for mineralizing CO₂. This is more than sufficient for the 1,000 - 2,000 Gt CO₂ that we will need to remove from the atmosphere once we reach zero emission. Needless to say, mineralization to a solid carbonate would remove the threat of fugitive emissions permanently.

People can complain about DAC as expensive etc., but it is the fastest way to bring down CO₂ once emissions have ceased. Without it, we will be stuck with the climate effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions - severe storms, erratic climate events - for hundreds of years. The fact that it is expensive just means that we will need to know what our target CO₂ level is and how how fast we want to get there.

Often, it’s said, “Just plant trees.” However, trees are not a sufficient solution for greenhouse gas reduction. A 2022 article in Environmental Research Letters predicts a “121 Gt C increase in carbon in forests over the course of this century.” That’s great, but it’s not enough to get GHG down to an ideal level. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t engage in sustainable agriculture and reforestation - we should, but we should not rely on it as a climate restoration strategy because it cannot deliver those kinds of GHG reductions.

That was what happened to our data on the “family computer”. My parents were not happy with me that day.

Some friends of ours strapped down their roof for Hurricane Georges. They lived in a wood frame house on a hill and knew better than to just trust that everything would be ok.

Anyway, they still had a roof after the hurricane, but the winds were still strong enough to lift the roof up, damaging the joints between the rafters and the main posts holding the roof up. This damage I saw with my own eyes.

Wind shear can be remarkably strong at 140 mph, blowing across a roof like that. It would be a shame to lose the house because you didn’t take two hours to put some straps over it.

I’d also like to point out that the underlying model may well be unsustainable in the way that it is offered at the start. Who benefits when a for-profit company operates at a loss? We, the customers, do. We get low prices and customer-friendly practices that are genuinely enjoyable. That business can’t operate in that way indefinitely, as the early investors are not funding it as an act of charity.

Eventually, the bill comes due. The shareholders have funded the company on the premise that, after losing lots of money on customer acquisition, it can restructure and monetize those customers and recoup their investment, hopefully with a lucrative return when they decide to capitalize their holdings and find a new company with which to repeat the process.

There is absolutely no reason not to enjoy the perks of the early stage of the customer acquisition process; the shareholders are subsidizing your product at no cost to you. But we shouldn’t be surprised when the shareholders stop subsidizing and start squeezing their formerly pampered customers in the hopes of getting their money back (and more, of course).

This doesn’t excuse unethical or abusive practices, but it does mean that, even without them, the experience of those early days probably wasn’t going to last forever.

Is this it?

First, find a rock.

You make a good point. If there were no potential solution, trees (i.e. sustainable agriculture) would be the best solution. It would take a few hundred years but we would get back to pre-industrial levels at zero emissions.

The potential solution is direct air capture. Although there are many forms, I am fond of the method proposed by Klaus Lackner. By making a large number of CO₂ scrubbers, as opposed to a few very large ones (like Climeworks), the economics of carbon removal get very easy, very fast.

A 1 m² area that gets an average 2 m/s breeze through it sees about a gram of CO₂ pass through every second. This is about 100 kg of CO₂ per day. So let’s make a machine that catches CO₂ from a 2 × 5 m area and catch 1 t per day, or 300 t per year. For this machine to pay off its carbon debt, it’s going to need to be around for a while, say 10 years. What happened during those 10 years? 3 kt went out of the atmosphere for good. If you liquefied the CO₂, this would fill 3 McMansions.

Lackner seems to think we can build this machine for $100k. Now we have a price of $30/t of CO₂ captured. As it stands, we need to get about 1,000 Gt of CO₂ out of the atmosphere to stabilize the climate, so we need to build $30T worth of these machines. How could we possibly afford that? Well, we would spend ~$1T on this per year for about 30 years.

Where would that kind of money come from? Sacrifices would be needed, it’s true. I think the biggest would be giving up on war. Global defense budgets add up to this scale of funding, and if the nations of the world decided to put an end to war, we could use the peace dividend to pay for the restoration of the climate. Perhaps there wouldn’t be any other sacrifices needed at all.

If this seems unrealistic to you, that’s ok too. We can still keep war and do things the slow way or (more likely) not do them at all. I suppose a decade-long nuclear winter would also do wonders for global cooling and emission reductions. Personally, though, I would prefer world peace and direct air capture to stabilize the climate.

I think, from your post, you would agree. If we are going to fight, we should fight climate change, not each other, no?

Of course, trees should be planted, but the notion that they are an expedient way of decarbonizing the atmosphere is plainly wrong. Had nature optimized plant life to remove carbon from the atmosphere, there would be no CO2, no plants, and the planet would be a snowball instead of the vibrant, warm (too warm) climate we have today. Nature maintains stasis - and therefore life - by avoiding carbon sequestration.

You may have seen the Keeling Curve, the “graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii from 1958 to the present day.” Notice that it goes up and then down in Seasonal Variation. This is because, during the summer months in the Northern hemisphere, all the plant life decarbonized the air to form new leaves and greenery. Then, in the winter, all the leaves fell back to the ground where they were consumed by fungi and detrivores and converted back to CO2.

Suppose we stopped producing fossil fuels tomorrow. The Keeling Curve would still have seasonal variation, but it would be against a constant mean, rather than the current rising one. If we then just planted more trees, the seasonal variation would increase, perhaps, but the mean would remain more or less constant. While beneficial, none of the planting would make more than a dent in the hundreds of billions of tons of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere. The potential for soil sequestration is on the order of 1 Gt/year.[source] That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice sustainable agriculture and forestry, rather we should, but it won’t reduce our carbon debt or start to reverse climate change. Believing that it will is just magical thinking, coincidentally an inadvertent implication of the meme.

Given that nature is (almost) perfectly inefficient at long-term carbon sequestration, it would seem that effective, long-term decarbonization of the atmosphere on any scale short of millennia has to include mechanical means, no matter how inefficient such means may appear.

As a preliminary test, you might look at a “sleep apnea adjustable mouthpiece” for sale online. I don’t know how well these work, but my custom sleep apnea dental device has been amazing for me. It may be that the boil-and-bite varieties also work well. If so, you might get relief without having to interact with the healthcare system.

You might find more information here.

As for the sleep test, many factors are important, but you could learn a lot from monitoring your pulse oxygen while you sleep. A casual search turned up several very affordable fingertip pulse oximeters that connect via Bluetooth. This would let you create a record of your pulse oxygen levels while you sleep. If you are dropping below 92% while you sleep (link), then you might be sleeping poorly because of sleep apnea.

In fact, you could record your SPO2 levels with and without the sleep apnea device to rule its use in or out without spending a ton of money on doctors visits and the like.

I hope things get better for you.

For anyone who feels this way after waking up from what should have been “enough” sleep, consider getting a home sleep test. Going from moderate sleep apnea to none was life-changing. If this is how you feel regularly, it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way.

Hey, what are the exact dimensions of the part with the thermal paste? I’d be curious know just how much area is being covered.

Because crystallography and solid state chemistry is the foundation of every modern convenience?

But it’s also beautiful. If they’ve never heard of Bravais-Friedel-Donnay-Harker, then you can’t really blame them for not knowing.

Is that the symbol for bleem?