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Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

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Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#81

Post by intended »

bazzargh wrote: post #68
intended wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So be forewarned - spending more energy to clean the system is just adding more heat to the system. Any solution must somehow be a net negative in the long and medium term - and must also not have complex unpredictable knock on effects. To give you an idea of how often mankind tries this - before the internet there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over…

there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water Have been wondering about this sentence since I read it, it seems there must be multiple typos in it for it to make sense...eg "London's docks were so odorous ..." (makes a kind of sense, during the Great Stink chemicals were dumped in the sewers to reduce the smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grea…

oh dear. I meant Fog.

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#82

Post by marcosdumay »

Gravityloss wrote: post #62
atemerev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's exactly wrong with that? Assuming that technology works, and it is possible to reverse the environmental damage — why not do just that and keep our life satisfaction? Looks like win-win-win for me.

Oh, you broke an egg. Well, the next guy can probably put it back together. It should be as easy as breaking it, right? It makes no sense to first burn coal and then try to suck out the 400 PPM CO2 from ambient air. And where are you even going to store it?

Today we can do nothing without breaking eggs. Non egg-braking technology is on the pipeline, and getting perfect. We will almost certainly switch to it soon. Egg restoring technology is further away, but it does not have to be easier, because we will have mostly stopped breaking eggs when we get there.

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#83

Post by bbctol »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
intended wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will have to forgive me when I cannot fathom how actively meddling with a complex system, which requires a substantial investment by our species in terms of scientists, research departments, universities, government offices - is going to result in a tightly controlled, well predicted result. As opposed to getting a project with moving targets, hard to prove results, great optics and massive funding requirements.…

Climate is a complex, dynamic system, but is not magic. I have the feeling that most people desperately try to pretend everything is a static system (so it can be described, once, in a non-time-evolving form, and then called done), and in the few cases it fails, they throw their hands up and say "it's complex, dynamic, beyond human comprehension". I mean, you could use the same argument against entire modern medicine…

It's a good thing we get so many tries!

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#84

Post by [deleted] »

mac01021 wrote: post #76

> Working around the clock, each capture plant can vacuum about 50 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere a year, Wurzbacher says. And then from [ https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions ]: > Global carbon (C) emissions from fossil fuel use were 9.795 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2014 (or 35.9 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide). This doesn't seem like a great solution to me.

[deleted]

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#85

Post by refurb »

adrianN wrote: post #66
atemerev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's exactly wrong with that? Assuming that technology works, and it is possible to reverse the environmental damage — why not do just that and keep our life satisfaction? Looks like win-win-win for me.

You can't undo all the damage. For example coral reefs are gone for a long time once they're dead. It's also unclear whether we haven't set off, or will set off, any feedback mechanisms that make it much harder to revert the climate to preindustrial times, for example because millenia old permafrost released massive amounts of Methane.

You can't undo all the damage.

So? Does that mean you shouldn't try and undo some of the damage?

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#86

Post by intended »

AKrumbach wrote: post #77
intended wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will have to forgive me when I cannot fathom how actively meddling with a complex system, which requires a substantial investment by our species in terms of scientists, research departments, universities, government offices - is going to result in a tightly controlled, well predicted result. As opposed to getting a project with moving targets, hard to prove results, great optics and massive funding requirements.…

"You will have to forgive me when I cannot fathom how actively meddling with a complex system, which requires a substantial investment by our species in terms of scientists, research departments, universities, government offices - is going to result in a tightly controlled, well predicted result." Any model of atmospheric carbon dioxide which is sufficiently accurate for generating public policy should suffice in pre…

there are multiple models modelling aspects of climate, many of which individually need super computer levels of horsepower. So separate models for ocean heating, or air currents etc.

all of which would have to re-work to account for the new entropy being added to the system, and its intended effects.

And this gets further complicated by different methods to change the environment.

Unless a climate scientist corrects me, its not as simple as just plugging in a x=x-c.

And that adds more complexity to the model too, not to mention the change in all the data - before G-eng, after G-eng.

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#87

Post by oconnore »

Pxtl wrote: post #54
intended wrote: post #6

I find that the idea of "climate engineers" and "geo engineering" has markers which will make it appeal to the same people currently peddling climate denial. My running bet/prediction is that 1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue, 2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat 3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to…

I see a lot of people saying "technology will solve it for us, we should do nothing. sure I'll fight climate change - when it's zero cost to do so" as an argument to wait for better batteries, better windpower, better coal power etc. This will be another "wait for the scientists to fix it" item.

> "wait for the scientists to fix it [while slashing scientific research budgets]"

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#88

Post by rbanffy »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #27
Reason077 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, most of the captured CO2 eventually ends up back in the atmosphere anyway - either through leakage, or eventual decomposition of the greenhouse plants being grown. But it's still a net gain if the CO2 would otherwise have come from fossil-derived sources?

Some work has been done on mineralising extracted CO2, ending-up with a stable form that doesn't return to the atmosphere. For example: "... use electrolysis or heat to split common salt, sodium chloride, into hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, then react the soda with the carbon dioxide to make bicarbonate." [1] The obvious question is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way. Either way its just a fix: we…

> is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way

Wind, PV and waves can be employed for this. You don't need a constant supply and can control capture rate to match available energy.

For many uses, renewables like these are already perfect.

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#89

Post by mannigfaltig »

Tade0 wrote: post #78
mac01021 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them. The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. But unless we're starting from some kind of reasonable estimate of the cost of the damage, however approximate, it can't be right to say that these guys are setting the price o…

> The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. This is what I'm getting at. There's resistance because we're not giving any specific numbers, only saying that they're "probably very high". This is far from a convincing argument. With this technology we can instead say: "Ok, so clearing a tonne of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere is going to cost $X. These are going to be your addit…

[deleted]

Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

#90

Post by adrianN »

refurb wrote: post #85
adrianN wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't undo all the damage. For example coral reefs are gone for a long time once they're dead. It's also unclear whether we haven't set off, or will set off, any feedback mechanisms that make it much harder to revert the climate to preindustrial times, for example because millenia old permafrost released massive amounts of Methane.

You can't undo all the damage. So? Does that mean you shouldn't try and undo some of the damage?

No, it means that you shouldn't bet everything on the hypothetical ability to undo any damage and maybe change your behavior so that you do less damage in the first place.
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