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Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

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Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#91

Post by pdkl95 »

graeme wrote: post #68
lend000 wrote: post #41

Geo-engineering projects could not come too soon. Because of how grand they are in scale, they don't seem to get much attention from the mainstream scientific community, but it seems feasible technologically (albeit expensive) to put forth major projects to reflect sunlight over deserts and capture significant amounts of carbon from power plants and oceans, amongst numerous other creative approaches. https://en.wikip…

How well would geoengineering work, considering the acididation of the oceans? I haven't seen any proposals to handle that, yet it seems like a fairly major consequence all on its own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtQxF_3BSxQ#t=567

This is the only proposal I've seen regarding ocean acidification.

In brief, we need massive amounts of lime to dump into the ocean as an artificial carbon cycle. The problem is how to get lime? If we have massive amounts of clean power, something similar to the cement process (CaCO3 -> CaO) is possible because limestone is cheap.

The problem is the energy requirements are insane. One of the estimations in the talk that remediates only 10% of our yearly CO2 emissions requires 700 TWh (2.52E18 J). Unless we start building \several hundred new GW-scale nuclear[1] power plants (and started a decade ago), I doubt we will be able to do much to address ocean acidification.

[1] I know solar has improved a lot recently. Unless it's possible to generate >1TW of continuous power (24x7), nuclear is probably the only option.

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#92

Post by protomyth »

epistasis wrote: post #47
protomyth wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, then is there any proposed plan to remove the excess CO2 from the air and oceans?

I'd love to hear people's proposals for this. There's of course natural methods such as reforestation and soil building, but I have a feeling that we'll want to augment that with more synthetic means. Carbon chains, or in the simplest case, methane, are expensive to produce, as one might expect. By far it's better to never have burned that fossil fuel than to try to reclaim it from the atmosphere or ocean. Setting a…

If we are already past the point where conservation will help, a carbon tax seems like closing the barn doors after all the cows escaped. the market is already going down the alternate fuel route.

What I want to know is there any concrete plan to build something that will remove excess CO2 from the air and ocean that can be built by the government. Build this is going to go over a whole lot better than tax this.

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#93

Post by jacquesm »

mgbmtl wrote: post #70
hueving wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would civilization be over? The sea rise wouldn't happen over night and people would move or build walls.

That's a lot of people to move and things to rebuild. Op did say "the current round of civilization". I also agree that lots of things changing at once are likely to create instability, with negative economic and social impacts (unless governments massively intervene, which I suspect many in the US would not appreciate). I'm sure walls are an option, but they will be expensive to maintain and it doesn't take much to…

And that was just on a city scale. Doing this country or continent wide is engineering on an entirely different level. NL has something like this but it's only 30 feet high and extrapolating from that experience to something able to withstand 60 meters of ocean (which is dynamic, an an average of 60 meters does not include storm surges and tides) is making me think this is infeasible.

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#94

Post by jacquesm »

neotek wrote: post #52
idoh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feedback loop peaks out at a global temperature increase of 5-8 degrees celsius, if the models and past events are to be believed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maxim...

Isn't a 5 - 8 degree rise catastrophic though? Genuine question.

Yes, it's not the temperature (though that would already cause lots of problems) it's the secondary effects such as oceans rising, likely a change in the gulfstream and so on.

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#95

Post by protomyth »

philipkglass wrote: post #89
protomyth wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, then is there any proposed plan to remove the excess CO2 from the air and oceans?

Accelerated silicate weathering seems like the best bet. Naturally occurring silicate compounds of magnesium and calcium react with ambient CO2 in the presence of water to form stable carbonates and silicon dioxide: CaSiO3 + CO2 -> CaCaO3 + SiO2 The thermodynamics are much more favorable than "combustion-in-reverse" (trying to reform hydrocarbons from CO2). The products are stable and the process can deal with point…

That sounds really interesting. If a government said "yep, we are doing that" what is the mechanism they would use?

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#96

Post by idlewords »

jacquesm wrote: post #90
hueving wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would civilization be over? The sea rise wouldn't happen over night and people would move or build walls.

Because a 60 meter high seawall around pretty much all of the country would be a bit problematic material wise alone (you'd have to chop down a couple of major mountains, assuming you have those), coupled with the slight problem of then having to get rid of all the water landing in your nice new bathtub by precipitation. A seawall isn't just a wall, it's more like a dike if it is to survive and that means it has a wi…

BUILD THE WALL

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#97

Post by jacquesm »

tornadoboy55 wrote: post #8
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard, scientists still feel that way, but they've gotten burned-out on trying to explain to the public exactly how doomed we actually are.

Yeah, the common sentiment is 'the best time to take action was 40 years ago. The absolute limit was 20 years ago. There's no stopping it now, even if we reduce our emissions to zero . The latent emissions in the atmosphere will already bone us. I'm glad I live in the Netherlands. We're a very rich country, and we have been battling water for more than a thousand years as a people. Places like Bangladesh will be comp…

> I'm glad I live in the Netherlands.

It would be a damn sight better to be living in Switzerland, NL will be sea again once that kicks off.

Not much to do against that kind of rise in water levels.

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#98

Post by philipkglass »

protomyth wrote: post #95
philipkglass wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accelerated silicate weathering seems like the best bet. Naturally occurring silicate compounds of magnesium and calcium react with ambient CO2 in the presence of water to form stable carbonates and silicon dioxide: CaSiO3 + CO2 -> CaCaO3 + SiO2 The thermodynamics are much more favorable than "combustion-in-reverse" (trying to reform hydrocarbons from CO2). The products are stable and the process can deal with point…

That sounds really interesting. If a government said "yep, we are doing that" what is the mechanism they would use?

I'm not an expert, but here are some ideas:

0) Donor government identifies a country where acid soils are already cultivated for agriculture. The recipient country should also be reasonably stable so you don't have to plan around armed conflict. Palm oil production in Malaysia looks like a good candidate. It's important to get buy-in from the (potential) recipient country's government too.

1) Within the chosen country, identify a region that has a lot of acid soil cultivation and that has easily accessible deposits of ultramafic rocks nearby. (Shouldn't be too hard, as such rocks are very common.)

2) Provide electrically powered crushers and/or grinders for size reduction, plus power sources if remote from the grid (ideally solar, maybe diesel generators as are common for mining sites; even if it's fossil powered the net CO2 is deeply negative). There may be some necessary R&D optimizing said crushers for low-maintenance conditions, since ultramafic rocks are among the hardest and toughest.

3) Pay locals to run the crushers and transport discounted-or-free rock dust to farmers in place of limestone. There might be some gaming of the system if e.g. drivers are really just dumping rock dust on the nearest empty land instead of finding farmers to take it, but that's tolerable. The project is already 75% done if you just get the rock crushed to dust in the first place. So key metric is ensuring that the crushers are still operable and are actually being used to crush rocks as intended.

Another idea, after I've written this out: there is less but still some acid soil under cultivation in the richer nations of the world, e.g. parts of Australia. Might want to try it first in the developed world where monitoring, language barriers, and infrastructure are all less challenging.

EDIT: a somewhat less effective but still potentially interesting idea is to put the ground rock in near-shore ocean environments where wave action will help abrade/weather the particles. Probably not as good as acidic warm soil in the tropics, but still a speedup over the natural way.

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#99

Post by astrange »

greggman wrote: post #84
hackuser wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the common sentiment is 'the best time to take action was 40 years ago. The absolute limit was 20 years ago. There's no stopping it now My impression is that this is the latest fallback position intended to stop/delay us from acting (I don't know that the parent commenter intends it that way; this isn't a criticism of them). In rough order: 1) There is no global warming 2) There is global warming, but it's not caus…

I'm curious what you expect people to do and what you're doing yourself. I worry about climate change and so do most of my friends but I see ZERO action on any of our parts. Example: Nearly all my friends FLEW to GDC this week, many of them that's a HUGE amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere just so we can have fun, network and party. Then we go to BBQ and hamburger restaurants and eat lots of beef which we're told w…

You could probably get them to buy carbon credits. It'll be slightly less bad.

I did stop eating beef but my tech company cafeteria seems to be huge fans of it and will not stop giving it to us.

Re: Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

#100

Post by tasty_freeze »

hackuser wrote: post #46
tornadoboy55 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the common sentiment is 'the best time to take action was 40 years ago. The absolute limit was 20 years ago. There's no stopping it now, even if we reduce our emissions to zero . The latent emissions in the atmosphere will already bone us. I'm glad I live in the Netherlands. We're a very rich country, and we have been battling water for more than a thousand years as a people. Places like Bangladesh will be comp…

> the common sentiment is 'the best time to take action was 40 years ago. The absolute limit was 20 years ago. There's no stopping it now My impression is that this is the latest fallback position intended to stop/delay us from acting (I don't know that the parent commenter intends it that way; this isn't a criticism of them). In rough order: 1) There is no global warming 2) There is global warming, but it's not caus…

You forgot the people who are global warming enthusiasts. They say things like, "CO2 is plant food, and we'll have a boom of farming productivity."
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