I think after the southern 1/3 of Florida and Louisiana along with the coastal cities from Miami to NYC plus the west cost are under water the Republican climate deniers will get concerned, that is if the Koch brothers allow them.
2
@Bruce Rozenblit
It’s almost like it’s a complex problem... that needs a reasearched, complex solution — perhaps multifaceted... maybe we should put money towards research to see if we can fix it!
See what I did there?
1
We need a Manhattan Project for carbon capture but there is no FDR in sight!! God help us!!
14
We have been moving inexorably, and irresponsibly, toward the end game of some kind of ultimate technological fix to save us from the very beginnings of our realization that anthropomorphic global warming is real.
We think we can end-run the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics with our cleverness.
My take is that this will be the ultimate big business hucksters game, much like social media. A huge nothing sucking your soul away for a dollar bill.
The unintended consequences will be legion, they will be ignored, and the costs will be offloaded onto the middle and lower classes as the 1% make out like the bandits they are.
Entropy will rule folks.
We can't unburn the combusted hydrocarbons.
Unlikely to put Humpty Dumpty back together again at the global level.
All we are doing is foisting the costs of our mindless consumption onto future generations.
That's it, that's all
Homo sapiens that we are.
(Right, Right...)
MB
8
Politics aside, we're a fairly stupid species. Although future reduction in fossil fuel use (and release of carbon from thawing tundra) are very important goals and may be affected by changes in human behavior the fact remains that the atmospheric carbon budget is already in the red zone. If a pandemic were to kill all of humanity next year the >400ppm carbon content of todays atmosphere would continue to accelerate climate change and foster vast changes to what has always been a dynamic system of climate, ecology etc. Mother Earth will adapt regardless, but possibly, eventually without humans.
To slow the effects of these changes the responsible species has no viable choice other than carbon capture through some sort of geoengineering effort. 250 years of burning fossil fuels has already tipped the balance, stacked the deck, etc. Development of new technology (lacking divine intervention) is imperative, but costs are an impediment within the current world economy: nobody wants to give up anything, not in GDP or lifestyle.
Its remarkable to consider the trillions the US (alone) has spent on defense, and will continue to spend, along with friend and foe alike since scientists first awoke to the threat of excess atmospheric carbon (mid 1980s?). And what little is being spent now to mitigate the effects of what humans have already spewed into the atmosphere. Geoscience and politics don't mix.
3
How about a crash program to control population?
11
Hey, if we don't handle this, the earth will. I say we handle it ahead of time...you know, give the earth a break on this. Stop producing CO2 like yesterday and pull the CO2 out of the air. Make it happen, or the earth will just make sure we're wiped out and then...problem solved!
2
We are in dire straights and I hope we have the good sense to act swiftly from multiple perspectives.
1
This is the biggest problem we face. Trump will be gone in a few years. This is the zeroth order problem for us all.
As several people have noted we need a 'all of the above' strategy.
Try everything. Keep doing what works. Try other things, see if they scale up.
Meanwhile do things we know work on reducing CO2 emissions:
-Increase renewables.
-Consume less power by insulating/reducing loss.
-Convert to nuclear from coal/oil power.
-Consume less meat and dairy.
-Pay farmers to plant fast growing (grass) crops across the arable world; don't harvest them, bury them & trap the CO2.
-Boost (but monitor) blooms in the oceans to consume more CO2.
-Use public transport.
-Invest in improved batteries & breakthrough tech.
-Vote for people who want to act on this.
2.Try truly blue sky stuff.
--Pay every farmer to grow grasses & bury them.
--Launch balloons & ocean-voyaging devices with powdered mineral CO2 reactants. Start leaking them out & see how this goes in small trials. Scale up where it works.
--Launch collapsable reflecting solar shades above the tropics. A small replacable density of shades may decrease the average solar flux hitting the earth. Scale up and buy us a little more time to find stuff that works.
--Pay people to have fewer kids.
--Pay people who use less power.
--Pay people whose Carbon footprint is smaller.
11
Unfortunately if our criteria for CO2 removal requires that it be economical it will never happen. There are numerous technological and natural methods for capturing and sequestering CO2, none of which will make corporations happy and since they own most governments, it will never happen.
You all don't want the corporations to fail. You believe in capitalism. The masters throw scrapes on the floor and you fight for them like dogs and just like dogs you look at your masters lovingly thinking they are gods. Even as they abuse you, you think it must be your own fault. Your cult leaders have planted this in your heads.
Please, send money to the victims of natural disasters, it will make you think you are kind, and then drive your SUV down to the store and buy a bunch of plastic garbage from China that will eventually fill the landfills. It's your duty as a consumer to keep the economy humming.
5
Regarding avoiding dangerous climate change, if you are a rancher who has lost their cattle to drought or a homeowner who has lost their home to wildfire or flood, or and island nation going under the waves then dangerous climate change has already arrived.
2
Given that it seems we are now beyond climatic redemption is our expensive attempt at shifting our petroleum based society to a lower emission based society even viable anymore as a response?
2
Thankfully this will not happen. Humans are terribly stupid when it comes to figuring consequences, as pesticides exemplify. Best to get used to the idea that extinction awaits.
4
Geoengineering is a fraud. It's just another techno-utopian capitalist scam.
The only things that have any hope of saving the biosphere from anthropogenic mass extinction is to scale back human population growth and adopt deep ecology rather than our current speciesist, earth-destroying, poisonous program.
3
A few years ago I read about a promising passive co2 extraction process being developed by Klaus Lackner. Air simply flows through his device and co2 is extracted. I had this fantasy that thousands of his devices could be mounted on a multi-level solar powered ship (like a giant cruise ship) that would simply cruise around the ocean--always navigating toward sunshine and away from bad weather. At the time it seemed to me a single vessel could absorb many tons of co2 in a very short period of time.
1
At this point it’s pay now -- or pay later. Does anyone have to be told what humanity will do ?
Natural systems in all their multi-dimensional complexity have a way of balancing out over time and Mother Earth is going to balance us, the agents of her degradation, out of the picture over time. Her greatest strength now meets our greatest weakness.
6
Here is an idea I've not seen mentioned.
Harvest biomass (wood etc.) and convert it to biochar (charcoal), thereby removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Then dump the biochar into several of the world's deep ocean trenches such as off Puerto Rico and in the Western Pacific. Because of adsorption, the low density biochar sinks.
The deep ocean trenches should keep the materials permanently removed--the process could be roughly considered the equivalent to the geological sequestration of vast amounts of carbon in the formation of coal beds.
Ideally, this could be done on a vast scale in tropical locations such as Caribbean and western Pacific Islands near the deep ocean trenches. It would give those places a valuable economic role on behalf of the world and would be subsidized by the rest of the world if necessary.
Yes, there will be some who will be concerned about effects on ocean life in the area and at the bottom of the trenches, but relative to the global benefit of being a viable way of capturing and permanently sequestering vast amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the environmental trade-off would be easy to justify.
3
@Leonard Miller
The biochar is produced from biomass though pyrolysis.
It is excruciating to see the matter quantified in dollars, but it reminds me that we are after all only capable of considering things in terms of self interest. "How much is that gonna cost?" The real hope for humanity is that we learn to measure things in a more subtle and encompassing way. Universal morality anyone?
1
We can't continue to speculate on what might work 10 years, 20 years, 50 years down the road. We must use what works, and do it now.
Renewables, with limited success in the most privileged nations of the world, will never result in a significant reduction in fossil fuel carbon emissions worldwide. Wind and solar have yet to provide more than 30% of any nation's electricity due to the intermittency of calm, nighttime and cloud cover. Hydroelectric is limited by location and scalability.
Another folly is stuffing toothpaste back in the tube - aka, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Despite hundreds of $millions in investment, today CCS is capable of storing 1 megaton/year - four thousandths of one percent of annual fossil fuel carbon emissions.
What works? In 1974, with an electrical grid powered almost exclusively by oil, France had been held hostage by the OPEC embargo when PM Pierre Messmer, by ministerial decree, initiated a plan to become energy independent by replacing oil with nuclear energy. 12 years later the country's electricity was 70% carbon-free; today it's over 80%, and with synthetic fuels generated with nuclear electricity there's no rational reason it couldn't be 100%.
There are plenty of irrational reasons to avoid nuclear energy, but we waste another moment on them at our peril.
"Nuclear energy is the only viable path forward on climate change." - Climatologists James Hanses, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira, and Tom Wigley
newfiremovie.com
8
Fossil fuel held the organic carbon for half a billion years. We released it. Trees will take up the carbon we released and hold it. Just allow trees to do what they have always done. Hold carbon.
If we let trees do it no one will get rich from the scam.
No company's shares will rise before the tech is later shown as a scam or useless weighing cost vs benefits.
3
@PK Jharkhand: For that to happen, we'll have to stop the deforestation of the South American jungles by greedy companies and leave them to the indigenous people living there. We have to replace the trees in the deforested areas asap and denominate the South American, but also the African, Indonesian and other jungles as protected areas, with perhaps only green eco-tourism accepted.
6
It took how many hundreds of millions, or even billions of years for Earth's ecosystems to evolve to the point they sequestered or trapped enough of the harmful gases that existed in our atmosphere to make it breathable for human life.
Hundreds of millions of years to create a breathable atmosphere and now in a mere century of two mankind is digging up and releasing all those trapped gasses back into our atmosphere. How smart is that?
9
A single tree can remove as much as 48 pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year. Rather than wait for government-funded action, I suggest a massive volunteer effort to plant trees anywhere there is cleared land that is not used for food production. Clearly more trees on their own will not solve the problem, but they may provide us a little more time until as a species we develop the political will to fund large-scale solutions.
6
Carbon capture technologies are too expensive? Compared to what? Compared to the cost of dealing with an overheated planet that will fast become dangerously short on water and food? Companies like Carbon Engineering in Canada have shown that it can be done -- all it takes to scale up the effort is money. I'd rather spend the money to scale up that technology than have to pay many times more down the road to deal with the results of not having done so. We spend billions annually on the military to "protect" our nation. We will need to spend that much or more to try to save our planet. Let's start now.
18
@David DeSmith, Carbon Engineering would have to remove 9 billion tons of carbon from the air each year just to compensate for new fossil fuel emissions going into it.
All it takes is money? There isn't enough money in the world now, nor will there ever be.
2
peridotite is not a mineral. peridotite is an ultramafic rock primarily composed of two minerals: olivine and pyroxene. geological sequestration reacts CO2 with olivine to produce new carbonate and silicate minerals. fine grained mafic rocks like basalt are also, perhaps more appropriately, considered as sequestration reservoirs.
5
I am an engineer, but not an expert in atmospheric chemistry. Nevertheless, how to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere is something that I've spent a lot of time wondering about. The entropy gods may be against it. The process is obviously not impossible ; mollusks and other shell-covered organisms do it, trees do it, along with every other photosynthesizing plant. Seems to me however, there might be something like a Carnot's Theorem and a version of the Second Law of thermodynamics that applies to scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. by any process humans can invent. This law would say something like : It is impossible to move massive quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere without burning more petroleum or coal to do it. Or using more nuclear-derived energy.
We have the ability to, at great cost and energy inefficiency, put the evaporated perfume back into the bottle. But we can only do it with a huge increase in entropy, which means more heat created, one way or another. This just CAN'T be anything close to a reversible process. This really is a case in which a gram of prevention is worth 100 kilograms of cure.
The real business end of the problem is Donald and his mob of anti-intellectual, ain't-got-no-clue-about-that-science-stuff voters who don't want no part of cleaning up nuthin'.
25
@Iman Onymous - doesn't your comment assume that the power needed to power the CO2 removal system will itself be CO2 emitting? Don't we have many options for CO2-free power systems (wind, solar, tidal, nuclear, etc)?
This is a fallacy I see people fall victim to over and over. "We can't possibly convert from fossil fuels because we have to use fossil fuels in order to build the things that require no fossil fuels. So, instead, change nothing." Solar panel plants can be powered by solar panels. Are they today? No. Could they be if we build enough solar? Of course. So get to work.
This one example of how deeply ingrained our addiction to fossil fuels is. It even affects our ability to think clearly about alternatives.
Also, for the record, conservation is an option, and could easily be put into practice with some very simple incentives. It's not complicated. Use more energy / $ of value created, pay a tax. Use energy more wisely, don't pay a tax.
The market takes it from there.
11
@Iman Onymous This is a good point. If carbon in the form of coal is burnt to give CO2, the CO2 dispersed into the atmosphere, then recovered from the atmosphere and combined with "a CO2-capturing chemical" as the referenced sciencemag article describes, what is the net gain in usable energy? Is it even positive? Remember that the energy needed to produce this unspecified chemical must be taken into account.
4
@Iman Onymouse Hire lots of mollusks. Make higher polluting per captia states like TX, FL, SC, NC, MS carry the mollusks on their state payrolls.
/s
For those who missed the sarcasm directed at states who do not act proactively.
1
Even a casual reader can't read "the land required to grow biomass for these power plants could run into conflicts with the need for farmland for food" without recognizing that the common factor is a growing human population.
Any climate change article that does not include the words "growing human population," as this one does, is blindered.
The "engineering solution" described is at once inefficient, inadequate, and grotesque. *Never* let engineers try to solve a social problem.
Not just the size of the human population, but the nonchalance of the average citizen, needs remedy. And there are many immediate, cost effective and valuable steps we could take -- energy conservation, public transportation, vehicle fuel efficiency, frugal food consumption, building insulation, etc. -- that would both reduce emissions and educate the public that we're not fooling, this is serious.
Since concrete manufacture is highly polluting, we could stop infrastructure repair and expansion until the population "pays the carbon" for more concrete with more conservation. Collapsing bridges have the salutary effect of slowing the economy and forcing the issue.
If you think that's absurd, imagine the time, about two decades from now, when concrete is rationed by law or by exorbitant price.
9
@drollere
Please don't panic. Even if we take no action at all, humanity will naturally reach an equilibrium within the new environment. After all, If overpopulation prevents us from properly addressing climate change, biology will just apply the same.. "default"... solution given to yeast in a fermentation vat and other organisms without the intelligence to adopt birth control methods or preserve the environment sustaining their existence.
And to paraphrase a purportedly well-learned conservative jurist, "we like beer," right? The overpopulation/climate change thing will sort itself out with or without us needing to make any tough or uncomfortable decisions.
3
We clutch at straws (carbon sequestration will be expensive) because we are unwilling to pay the price to cut emissions. The technology to reduce carbon emissions today has already been tried and tested - electric cars, solar panels, windmills, etc, etc, - and works. But the will to switch and reduce emissions, is not there especially since the consequences (e.g. massive sea level rise) seem distant.
12
It is not just carbon that is released by burning fossil fuels. There are poisons like mercury and cadmium that are products of combustion. This is a good start but with the Trump Administration, we may have to rely on the rest of the world. If only GW Bush had not been selected what a different world we'd now have.
4
We need to stabilize or even reduce the population, especially in the major industrialized nations with the highest per capita consumption (we're #1). The US also should greatly reduce immigration, which currently as more than 80% of our population growth. The average immigrant's greenhouse emissions rise fourfold after arrival here, because most come from developing countries with small per capita footprints.
7
This will be the way to go. We humans are bad at exercising short-term restraint for long-term benefit, but we are very good at finding ways to actively solve problems. We will build the necessary technology for mass carbon-capture, especially when there is money to be made from it.
1
I wish the other countries of the world would force the USA to make greener choices. With the battles over tariffs going on now, other countries could add in a clause about the source of US made products, for example, to charge less for items generated in an environmentally conscious way (and vice versa).
9
This isn't going to happen. CO2 makes up something like 400 parts per million of the atmosphere, a tiny percentage. The sheer volume of air that would have to me moved by mechanical means to capture enough CO2 to have any impact is beyond all reality. We are talking about millions of horsepower of fans to suck the air in and push it through some kind of extraction device. There is also the problem of dispersion. The atmosphere is miles thick. How do we get the the CO2 thats miles above ground?
Basically, we are in for it. It's too late. All we can do is mitigate the damage, which we must do. We can't put a bandaid on this problem. We must reduce our carbon emissions as much and and as fast as we and then brace for what is coming.
22
@Bruce Rozenblit
CO2 mixes fast in the atmosphere. You don't need to move it around yourself, just rely on natural atmospheric circulation and diffusion of the gas. (You could think of this mixing as powered by natural solar heating.)
8
@Bruce Rozenblit. Trees
@Bruce Rozenblit: Hmmmm, I guess the experts in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine didn't think of that. . .but Bruce did!
I always find it confounding that articles such as this almost never mention one, immediate step we all can take--conserve the forests and wetlands that already exist! It works on every level, from international efforts right on down to your own property or neighborhood. Support your local land trust.
26
Seems like the solution must be "all of the above"... Whatever it takes. For a start everybody plant a tree or ten trees, cities plant thousands of trees, and keep planting them. Cut funding for highways to deter driving. Increase funding for electric mass transit everywhere. Build high-speed electric railways all across the world to reduce the need for flying. The number of initiatives that can be undertaken seems huge, and many will create new industries and millions of jobs. Vote out the Republicans en mass and let's get started.
17
Regenerative agriculture, regenerative agriculture, regenerative agriculture. Mostly what is needed is spreading 1/4" of compost on range, grazing and agricultural lands. France knows it. Lots of countries do. Alternative types of folks know it. Scientists and the US somehow can't figure it out. Doesn't take much more than the will to do it. Ah, Mother Nature!
https://www.iatp.org/blog/201512/what-to-make-of-the-soil-carbon-initiat...
4
@Miriam Warner
An important component of the solution, but inadequate by itself; only an all-feasible-methods approach has any hope at all of solving the problem.
To be sure, increased compost usage is one of the most ready-to-go methods, and there's no excuse not to use it on a wide scale.
1
Population control and reduction are another part of the long-term solution, but they won't happen fast enough. It is not likely that most of the world's people could be convinced to stop having children for the next 20 years. A few billion extra deaths in that time seems even less likely.
7
The Earth has recovered from far more massive disasters about 5 times in the last 4.6 billion years. Life on Earth will recover in our absence. It will take many thousands of years but eventually it will be back just as abundant and diverse as it was before we appeared. This isn't about saving the planet; it's about saving ourselves. I am not an optimist.
36
Ill advised scientists keep calling for more untested, energy-intensive scrubbing methods, whereas the urgency of the problem should focus us on technologies we have now in production. New construction of power plants should be renewable-only (in US it is already over 50%). In 5 years production of new cars should be electric only. Start switching industrial processes over now. Replacement cycles for power plants are around 40 years, for cars 10 years on average. It's not new technology that requires more energy out of thin air. It's just saying that every car company has to go electric. Tesla Model 3 is already the 5th more sold car in the US, for all of their problems and with a price that's not entry-level. And agree on a carbon tax at the WTO level with tax collection at the border for non-compliant countries. Enough voluntary target. Enforce with space-based measurement. OCO-2 is in space now and is considered a technology validation for an authoritative CO2 mapping mission. All this is massive but not hard in the sense of being technologically challenging. We just have to scale technologies that are already there. Stop talking about CO2 scrubbing fantasies. The more we do, the bigger the temp change will be by the time we are done.
3
There are parts of the system that could already be out of our hands. And those parts are related to the ocean. Because we know that we’ve already put a lot of heat content into the ocean.
And in the case of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, regarding the marine based ice which is very sensitive to ocean temperatures—West Antarctica 3.3m, East Antarctica 19m—we may end up being committed to some response of the ice sheet to the heat that has already gone into the ocean. And Greenland has around 3m worth of marine based ice as well.
How much response? According to the paleoclimate record, at 1.5-2 degrees C above preindustrial temperature, around 6-9m sea level rise (we’re likely already committed to at least 2C)
At 3 degrees C, tens of meters eventually.
Times scales are the big question and the community in general has been conservative with time scales.
It is not the current rate of sea level rise of around 4mm per year which concerns glaciologists, but a past rate from around 15,000 years ago of 4m per century for 4 centuries during Meltwater Pulse 1A. http://vademecum.brandenberger.eu/grafiken/klima/post-glacial_sea_level.png
There were larger ice sheets then, but that rate indicates that ice sheets can do dramatic things when they retreat.
8
We are out of time. The single fastest remedy (*not* a complete solution) is to replace every coal-fired power plant with a nuclear plant. They are of comparable size and power, and the existing electric distribution network supports them. No, they are not dangerous. Yes, it will be expensive, but still far less expensive than not doing it.
16
@Richard Schumacher
Horrible idea. Nuke plants produce long lived isotopes in the containment vessel that will take — pay attention here — 2 million years to decay to background levels. We already have this problem at about 400 sites around the planet.
Saddling thousands of future generations with the responsibility of taking care of nuclear waste products from power used by a single generation is exactly what we’ve already done with fossil fuels.
Besides, where do you live? Want one of these things next door? Doubt it. Nobody else does.
Flush this idea.
If there is one thing humans do as a species is survive at all costs. It will only take the media magnates to start trumpeting the now-obvious climate changes and necessity of a technical solution to start the wheels rolling for a moon-landing level of effort.
Not incidentally, carbon sequestration is the industry that will create the world's first trillionaire.
3
@Steve M
Laws of thermodynamics state that every energy conversion process is less than 100% efficiency. Therefore, to power these carbon-extraction machines — which do not exist now — will require enormous amounts of energy to operate. Unless dedicated renewable (non-carbon based) power systems are used, carbon capture will not help.
Good news is that there are huge areas of desert for solar and thousands of mountain passes for wind that could be dedicated to this purpose.
But...the political will is not there. The world is owned by and operated by people who profit from carbon fuels. You think they’re going to walk away from these cash cows?
4
Scrubbing and emissions reduction have to be part of a global treaty arrangement that includes quotas and penalties. We had our chance to let freebooting nations voluntarily fix the problem. Nations acting in their perceived interest perceived too little interest in action. Now we need a large scale approach in which everybody has a role to play.
The bad news is that in terms of deployment of resources, the effort to limit climate change and preserve the balance of natural forces that has led to the civilization we enjoy may take an investment equivalent to a world war. Governments may have to spend the kind of money on research & development that in the past have gone to weapons development. The introduction of renewable energy sources (and quite possibly a new generation of nuclear power) will have to proceed at a pace far greater than market forces otherwise would sustain. Shareholders in coal may simply have to be bought out, coal’s labor offered retraining packages. Somehow, this is going to have to get paid for just like the massive restructuring of the US industrial economy needed cash and government authority.
The good news is that this does not require the sort of global government so many fear. We can get by with a well-written treaty with enforcement mechanisms.
3
Voluntarily or not (read mass starvation, pestilence and war) population control is going to end up being part of this.
Given the race towards automation in so many industries it seems to me we're at a tipping point where growth is no longer tied, necessarily, to increasing population.
At some point reduced population growth has to become part of the conversation.
Of course bringing to bear all of our technological capability and also some self control on the part of individual consumption is going to be huge also.
9
As the middle classes of both India and China rapidly expand, usually the first things they want is a car and air conditioners.
We're doomed.
11
What we need is a good catastrophic event to reduce the population on the earth maybe have a good Comet strike or something worser (sp!) because the "advanced " mankind that is occupying now ain't going to change for the better unless there's less people. Mother earth will be able to heal itself with a bit more time, and it's seen much worse… A few comet crashes would be like a mosquito bite to her/him
2
@Nasty Curmudgeon fr. But that's already happening with climate change. That's our comet strike. It's not clear Nature has seen worse as far as the speed of change. If I can remember, it hasn't in the last million years, beyond that we don't quite have the data resolution to detect a sub-century increase. But sure it has recovered from higher temps and C02 levels, but on time scales that are not relevant to this civilization.
@Nasty Curmudgeon fr. Maybe the Comet will fall on your head. That would be a start.
1
And the plea bargaining begins in earnest. What with the current climate of kicking the can down the road, and the real climate change upon us faster than anyone predicted, we are in no position to strike a bargain with Mother Nature. Not anymore. The time to have done that was decades ago.
Now we have to deal with the hand we dealt ourselves. Move away from the coasts. Do away with growth based economics. Live small in things and large in life. Get with the real program. Of course most people will do nothing of the kind. They will double down on sucking the life out of what's left of the earth's resources and party like there's no tomorrow.
It's my contention that the root of all this discord we are in the midst of right now is the fear of what we all know is coming. We can deny it all we want, but our guts know it's true. All else is diversion and projection. Join the fray if it makes you feel better, but there's no solution in any of it.
There are many of us who have seen this coming and we have been living like there IS a tomorrow. Hopefully enough of us will survive this and seed the future with a different version of ourselves. This incarnation of it has been a dismal failure.
10
Let's treat this like the iPhone -- a couple of guys in a garage start Apple, which seemed more like having fun solving a problem than setting out to change the culture and make a ton of money, and end up with an iPhone plus a whole lot more. Think of all the ancillary products that were invented, like the cover I bought for the phone, in response.
Let's incentivize investors and entrepreneurs to solve the remove-carbon-from-the-atmosphere problem by putting a price on carbon now through national legislation. The obvious choice is Citizens' Climate Lobby's proposal called Carbon Fee and Dividend (CFD). CFD makes fossil fuel extractors internalize the social cost of carbon released into the atmosphere and, in returning all the fee-money collected to the American public in equal shares, grows the economy, improves respiratory health, creates jobs, and propels other countries to follow suit. Best of all CFD incentivizes entrepreneurs to create viable carbon extraction solutions to the 412 ppm problem. citizensclimatelobby.org
2
How about trees?
1
@northlander - Trees would be part of what's needed, but at the same time, with a global population heading towards 9 to 11 billion (UN estimates 11) the demand for land use is going to be intense.
11
We don't need technology to address the global warming and the associated pollution.
We need to control human breeding and overpopulation.
5
@mrpisces We actually need technology. Cutting the human population of Earth is a desirable goal, of course. But it is slow, very slow. And it is not population per se that is the major cause of global carbon emissions. It's that 5% of the humans are responsible for 25% of the emissions.
6
@mrpisces But the few people that you'd allow on the planet have a God-given right to an SUV each. Explain the logic of that. I say stop overconsumption.
1
Pulling carbon out of the air is great, but not yet possible to scale. So why don't we just cool the planet until we can? That's simple, and doable today. All the environmentalists scream that we can't since then people won't reduce emissions, but that's ridiculous. We have a problem, clearly. We have to fix it. We need the time to fix it. If you were very sick, and running a 105 fever, would you say not to take aspirin because if you do you won't want to cure your illness?
@Jeff M - I suppose you are talking about releasing sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere on purpose - acting like very powerful, very long-term volcanoes.
Here's some of what could go wrong with an untested approach that would effect the entire planet.
1 - single, very large volcanoes can hurt harvests for a year or more. Study finds, no surprise, same could happen if we act like volcanoes. Link from Chemical and Engineering News:
https://cen.acs.org/environment/climate-change/Solar-geoengineering-depr...
2 - we'd be producing more acid rain. That's what SO2 does when it falls back out of the sky. Bad for fish, infrastructure, etc.
3 - Just trying it at scale would require very close cooperation globally, so two nations don't both try it. How's international coordination looking lately, esp. with the wave of destructive nationalism?
4 - depending on where it's released, the effects could harm some areas more than others. The harm could be taken personally by affected nations. See #3
5 - stopping would very quickly un-hide the effects of the heat buildup that will be continuing while we mask it with SO2 release.
6 - what happens if humanity is acting like a very large volcano, then a very large volcano erupts without notifying us?
3
@b fagan It's of course not without effects. But are the possible effects worse than the known negative effects of global warming? I doubt it. And it's self correcting, it comes out of the atmosphere quickly. Aspirin has negative effects too.
@Jeff M - "Self correcting" could involve widespread starvation if we overshoot, and humans have no experience with global weather control. Suppose we even managed to pull it off for a decade. Complacency slows reductions in emissions. Suddenly we have to turn it off, and it "self corrects" with us suddenly facing the unmasked warming impact of an extra decade of CO2.
In the meantime, along with increasing acid rain, we'd be simultaneously continuing to add CO2 to oceans, so acidification would actually speed up a bit. The impact of our changing the ocean's chemistry is a part of the issue that doesn't get enough press.
Lots of people worldwide get an important source of their protein from oceans, and a lot of the food chains involved depend on plankon or shellfish that build carbon-based shells. That ability gets more difficult as pH declines. Research also shows that fish can respond differently as pH changes - so, for example, larval clownfish have been found to get slightly larger, but they also are more inclined to swim towards predators than away from them.
So no, this isn't aspirin, and since we're not even at the point where effects are going to be really harmful, masking the effects slightly instead of dealing with the underlying cause isn't a great idea.
So you want to scrub CO 2 from the atmosphere? Seems it’d be a lot easier to reduce unchecked human population growth to sustainable levels than monkey around with Rube Goldberg proposals like the ones described here. Would also help folks avoid choking on their own filth.
8
@Blue Dog, re: "reducing unchecked human population growth: are you volunteering? Or where do we start checking?
I like the creativity of many posts. What I find dismaying is the moral hazard argument. Do we need to win this fundamental issue only the right way? It seems that once we are spending huge sums to lock away carbon, people will see that releasing carbon makes no sense. If we wait until everyone with a Ford Expunger permanently parks it, its too late.
1
In one of his recent books, Peter F. Hamilton wrote about about gigantic atmosphere scrubbers being located around the planet. Hundreds of them— running non-stop for a century to bring our atmosphere back to pre-industrial levels. No government is likely to jump into this. ‘Nationalists’ will only want to clean air above their borders. Maybe we need Sir Richard, Bill, Elon or Sergei to entertain the idea!
5
@Keith Wells - take a look at what Bill (Gates) is investing in at Carbon Engineering in Canada. That is exactly what he (and CE) are proposing to do. The technology exists and works - it just needs to be prioritized, scaled, and put into place. It may not be the whole answer, but it is AN answer, and it's available now if only enough human beings would have the will to use it.
1
why do so few writers suggest that LESS - people, consumption, driving, tossing, etc - has got to be a central element of any global strategy to ameliorate climate change?
29
@Lee De Cola You ask why? Because the whole purpose of ameliorating climate change is to continue the growth of industrial civilization and enable continual economic growth that assumes increasing population and consumption
The article states that absent atmospheric CO2 reduction, tens of millions of people will experience life threatening consequences. That implies the population decrease(and likely consumption decrease) you're asking for. The specter of that happening is the only reason for this call to action and its the only reason climate change is seen as a problem.
2
@Lee De Cola
Go look up which countries have the greatest per capita carbon emissions and consider whether you want to ask those people to give up their stuff and not have children. (Hint - you live in the "greatest" country in terms of carbon emissions per person)
As a side note, maybe some attention could be spared for overpopulation, which is certainly a contributing factor.
3 billion in the 60's to currently 7.6 billion.
8
@Thomas Problem is "overpopulation" is a term that always applies to other people and places. In actual practice, when population does decreases in a place, it's seen as a frightening sign of stagnation, decline, and impending loss of National(or local) security, independence and essential competitiveness. Invariably, countermeasures are taken to reverse any population decrease.
3
@LivesLightly, yes that's part of the issue. Economic expansion depends mostly on an expanding population. Obviously this is not an infinitely sustainable model.
Until somebody can prove that you can extract CO2 from the air without using the primary energy output from power stations, either directly at the source, or indirectly by preparing reagents such as aluminum or activated minerals such as lime, then all this will be pie in the sky.
It would be much easier to simply shut down the sources of CO2 and live with the reduction in available power.
And by the way, nitrogen dioxide emissions, a tracer for CO2 production, are declining in the USA and increasing in China. That's where the problem is.
1
@Daedalus
Joule ARTICLE| VOLUME 2, ISSUE 8, P1573-1594, AUGUST 15, 2018
Addresses your objections. Any form of energy, wind, solar, tidal can supply the required energy.
3
@Daedalus - look into what Carbon Engineering in Squamish, B.C. is doing. It's exactly what you've asked for.
Focusing our attention on the other end of the CO2 pipeline may give us a fighting chance to stave off our own extinction. World leadership will not limit emissions. Plus, the feedback loop of warming Arctic waters and methane escaping from thawing tundra, for example, may be unstoppable and runaway even if we cut all new emissions today. We need to tap human motivation to fix this. As unmotivated as we are, collectively, to slow emissions across the world, we are similarly motivated to engineer new solutions - it is the story of the success of the human species.
6
Genetically engineer shell-forming organisms, from plankton to oysters, to form thicker shells quicker, locking carbon in calcium carbonate.
9
@Georges Kaufman
Not gonna happen. CO2 already lowers the pH of water making it acidic. Our dying coral reefs are a testament to that. The CO2 picked up by shells will likely leach into the oceans over time.
It is time to think about dynamic yet stasis economies rather than more and more growth on a planet with finite resources.
7
We need to take advantage of every promising opportunity to sequester carbon in biomass. Especially low-cost proven methods.
Evergreen Agriculture (Garrity et al., 2010, see below) adds trees to cropland in ways that *increase* crop production. No trade-off between food production and biomass/carbon sequestration as *both* increase together. This is a proven method that has been highly successful in Sahelian Africa, a very difficult landscape, and adopted on 7 million hectares across several Sahelian countries. The cost per hectare is very low.
It is one of the few approaches where biomass/carbon on the landscape *increases* with increasing human population and agricultural intensity (Figure 10, Reij et al., 2009, see below).
This is one of the most promising techniques in existence and should be adopted at large scale as quickly as possible to help us, given the climate crisis that we face.
* * * * *
Garrity, Dennis Philip, Festus K. Akinnifesi, Oluyede C. Ajayi, Sileshi G. Weldesemayat, Jeremias G. Mowo, Antoine Kalinganire, Mahamane Larwanou, and Jules Bayala. “Evergreen Agriculture: A Robust Approach to Sustainable Food Security in Africa.” Food Security 2, no. 3 (September 2010): 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-010-0070-7.
Reij, Chris, Gray Tappan, and Melinda Smale. Agroenvironmental Transformation in the Sahel: Another Kind of “Green Revolution.” IFPRI Discussion Paper 00914 00914. International Food Policy Research Institue, 2009.
8
@Jonathan from DC Have you heard about wildfires. Unless that biomass is buried deeply underground, like the coal, oil, and natural gas was, the "storage" is temporary. And anyway, economics and profits always create incentives to produce more food at lower marginal cost to sell today. Coffee grown among trees costs more and the coffee market would be smaller if that was the only variety produced.
@LivesLightly
If you change the character of the landscape overall you will be sequesterting carbon even if parts of the landscape burn and then regenerate. Over time the net quantity of carbon on the landscape will increase and can remain at the higher level even with some fluctuation.
It is also a "no tears" approach because even without the sequestration benefit you are providing a significant climate change adaptation strategy to vulnerable people who are then less vulnerable to drought and who have greater food security.
The value of crop production under trees is recognized by the the thousands of smallholder farmers in Niger, Mali, and elsewhere who have adopted these methods and added trees to their fields spontaneously.
You are casting about for Solutions: Look no further. Project Drawdown offers the Solutions and they are here, requiring only scale and will. Please refer yourselves to Drawdown.org
1
We can't jump on this quickly enough, or aggressively enough.
Carbon taxes and cap and trade are like trying to stop a flood with a screen door. Carbon removal is the only viable method for addressing this existential threat.
1
I thought I knew a good bit about climate change until reading a recent article in the Atlantic discussing the "Carnian Pluvial Episode," entitled "A Climate Catastrophe Paved the Way for the Dinosaurs’ Reign." The article discusses a 4 - 7 degree Celsius temperature increase (comparable to what the IPCC is projecting for us) brought about by oceanic volcanos that spewed out large amounts of CO2. Among the consequences was a mega-monsoon that lasted a million years, flattening mountains and covering forests with a layer of red clay several meters thick. Embedded in the clay are seashells, indicative of the seawater inundation. At the end, a new species emerged, the dinosaur. What I failed to recognize is that we're not only creating hot weather, flooding, and increased natural disasters; we are unleashing a million years of environmental disaster that threatens to bury us.
29
@Karen Not to worry. There's evidence of five previous global mass extinctions. and genetic evidence that humans were nearly decimated 50,000 years ago. Elon Musk has a escape plan for humans to relocate to Mars. Enough people have the personal means to fund his project as a private insurance plan if your scenarios come to pass.
1
A recent article in The Economist puts the cost of direct CO2 capture at $100-200 per ton of CO2.
To put this in terms we can easily grasp, I calculated the amount of CO2 I generate from my totally obsolete ICE car to 10,000 miles
per year/30 mpg = 333 gallons gasoline.
333 gallons x 20 lbs CO2 per gallon = 6660 lbs CO2 per year, or 3.3 tons.
Thus, for $330-660 additional expenditure per year, my 1992 Honda could be operated in a carbon neutral fashion.
For perspective, the total cost to operate for the cheapest new car you can buy in the US is about $5,000 per year.
35
@Doc Who i dont understand your math: how can a gallon of gas wiehging 6.3 pounds create 20 lbs of CO2? (Not doubting but don't understand)
@Roger: It's the added oxygen from combustion air. One carbon atom weighs 12 units. One oxygen atom weighs 16 units. One carbon atom plus two oxygen atoms ("CO2") weighs 12 + 32 = 44 units. This simplification ignores the hydrogen in gasoline, but you get the idea.
@Roger
Good question.
Oxygen from air combines with gasoline during combustion to form CO2 and produce energy.
The extra mass is from the oxygen in the air that ends up in CO2.
C8H18 + 50 O2 ---> 8CO2 + 9 H2O
Tell the Koch’s that they can make more zillions and they will quickly come up with a solution!
16
FINALLY, some interest in this idea. My favorite candidate is artificial photosynthesis, currently being investigated (successfully) at both MIT and CalTech. The problem is partly political: left-wingers don't want to admit that there may be a way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere without shutting down our industrial economy, while right-wingers don't want to admit that it needs to be done in the first place!
1
@Urbie4
Left wingers don't think that at all.
22
Nice sentence-did you make it all up by yourself? Generalizations are easy to write, easy to understand, and indicate a slant towards ignorance.
1
@Urbie4 Harvard has also developed this, by Daniel Nocera and his group (actually, I believe Nocera was at MIT, so this may be the same person you are thinking of). I believe they are getting the efficiency into the realm of useability. And no, left-wingers like myself are not against this. We are wildly enthusiastic, but its not commercially feasible yet.
1
Most of the articles about the new National Academies report focus on two areas: the various technologies for capturing CO2 and the rapid pace at which they must be implemented.
Distressingly absent is a realistic examination of the likelihood of any of that happening given the earth's geopolitical realities. Consider that the world's historically worst contributor (that's us) is moving in the exact opposite direction.
Why can't we get the atmosphere scientists and the political scientists together to determine whether or not there are any realistic solutions?
Personally I see no chance that the changes that are recommended, at the speed at which they must occur, are remotely possible. I would welcome being proven wrong, but first someone must take an objective look at the question.
20
@Dick Yates, the answer to "why not" is simple : money and power.
3
A stitch in time could have saved nine...
3
Too bad we can't pump it into space. Sky tubes?
@Alan Hamde: the physics for a space elevator are already worked out. The technology needs development (though carbon nanotubes are a prime candidate). I wonder though, if we simply pump up captured CO2 (remembering that the likely base for the elevator site, would be along the equator, so capture would have to be local to that or the stored gas would need to be transported) - would we find use for it, or would it simply form a ring around the planet?
2
How much carbon could be sequestered if you halved your coverage of the denier-in-chief?
It'd be a good start, practical now.
29
Why stop with him? “Congressional carbon capture” has a nice ring to it, too.
Any crisis of the size and complexity we face with global warming will necessarily require multiple strategies. so along with carbon reduction, carbon capture, we must deal effectively with population growth and consumer growth. Not one or two but all strategies operating as soon as possible.
44
@operadog
That's true as far as it goes, but what are the realistic odds of any of those strategies "operating as soon as possible".
The technological solutions approach seems to me to be of the form of a reductio ad absurdum argument where we do not recognize that the conclusion is impossible and so must change the premise (i.e. that we can reverse warming).
4
It would seem that the easiest and cheapest ways to enhance carbon recapture would be to use natural processes such as vegetation, ocean algae enhancement, etc. because most known mechanical carbon recapture schemes have have very high energy density requirements to work on a large scale. The latter is sort of like running in place and expecting to get somewhere.
1
@Mister Ed Good luck. It took 100's of millions of years for the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas to be sequestered by natural processes on a very large scale. Even considering that only a fraction of that carbon is back in the atmosphere(and oceans) now, my guess is it would take thousands of years if those natural processes could even reoccur today.
1