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CaptainExplosion on 28 May 2026
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SvennoJ said:
shavenferret said:

But it gets more expensive every year at a much higher rate than inflation. That has to be hurting economic growth.  Secondly, while humanity’s expansion will no doubt leave some ugly spots on the earth after things slow down, the climate should go back to normal since plants eat carbon dioxide. 

Here's what your local AI data center has to say about that:

It is physically impossible for trees alone to scrub the (CO_{2}) increase since the industrial age. Even if emissions stopped immediately, Earth’s ecosystems and oceans would take centuries to thousands of years to naturally sequester and rebalance the vast backlog of carbon. [1, 2]
Here is a breakdown of why this is the case:
  • Short-Term Capacity: If we stopped emitting today, natural processes (like plant growth and ocean mixing) would scrub roughly 50% of the excess (CO_{2}) from the atmosphere within 30 to 50 years. However, the remaining carbon is incredibly difficult to remove. [1, 2]
  • The Geological Timeline: It takes tens of thousands of years for deep-ocean mixing and slow geological processes (like weathering and mineralization) to completely remove the (CO_{2}) added by fossil fuels. [1, 2]
  • The Problem with Trees: Trees are excellent temporary carbon sinks, but when they die and decompose (or burn in wildfires), the stored carbon is released right back into the atmosphere. To act as permanent carbon storage, the wood would need to be continuously harvested and turned into long-lasting products, or buried deep underground. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
  • Ecosystem Vulnerability: Recent research has highlighted the fragility of natural carbon sinks. Extreme events such as severe droughts and wildfires can occasionally cause global forests to emit more carbon than they absorb

Sure the climate will eventually go back to normal or back to an ice age following the natural cycle. Meanwhile fresh water will run out, coastal cities will have to move, deserts will grow. We can go live in Antarctica though and Siberia, Northern Canada.

Plus there are more dangerous greenhouse gasses than co2 and we're also polluting the Earth with micro plastics and so many other things that will take hundreds of thousands of years to recover from.

Then we might as well all sit back and wait to die. -_-