101–110 of 133 posts
Is this cheaper than growing wood and turning it into charcoal? That doesn't take energy (in fact you get some out), it only takes time and land.
These sorts of ideas are in a weird place. To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts. ATM, the debate is (1)"is the carbon-climate problem real?" and (2) "If so, how do we reduce carbon emissions?". "Climate Engineering" would complicate 2 a lot, probably splitting political support. Politically, they open the door t…
We should continue to shout loudly that reduction is needed, but we need a Plan B asap. Counting on politics to turn in our favor is a losing cause.
There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere. Some of the resistance to action on climate change comes from the notion that the cost is unknown, which in turn stems from the fact, that to date there was no scalable way to undo the emissions. Now that a way has been demonstrated emitters can choose whether they want to reduce their emissions or undo them(assuming the r…
Just for fun: Humans have added ~1 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over 200 years, taking atmospheric CO2 from 275 to 407 ppm by volume. Ongoing emissions are around 36 billion tonnes (2015).
Climeworks apparently costs $600/tonne of CO2[1], with 10 year goal of $100/tonne (although skeptics estimate it really costs closer to $1,000, but I see no reason to believe them either). So the total cost would be $100 trillion to $1 quadrillion dollars to reverse climate change (this would be about a 50% overestimate since ~30% of emissions are anti-greenhouse aerosols), and the ongoing cost would be $3.6 trillion to $36 trillion. Over 80 years that would come to $4.85-$48.5 trillion annually, while the nominal GDP is currently just under $80 trillion. So 6% to 62% of annual GDP.
The total cost to transition the entire world to solar power including all heat, industrial and burning oil would be [1]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-capture-1-g...
People seem upset that this is working? Maybe because this provides a solution to the problem that doesn't mean we have to fundamentally change society, or bring down the 1st world, or say that "America was the bad guy to ignore all the EU regulations".
So the problem is one of framing for this technology. It is not so much a game-changer but more of a sight of hope that maybe given an heroic effort in emission-reduction, this technology might help to achieve the internationally agreed upon goals for climate-change. Hence it is often seen as a kind of moral hazard, when portrayed as a means to happily keep on emitting.
[1] http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/
[2] e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
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…
what about a GeoCoin where you create the coin by paying someone to suck up carbon dioxide?
https://climatecolab.org/contests/2017/carbon-pricing/c/prop...
https://github.com/DennisBPeterson/Climatecoin
I presented an earlier version at MIT's Solve:Fuel conference:
https://solve.mit.edu/articles/check-out-our-solve-challenge...
For some reason I thought the runaway in temps will come from water vapor from melting permafrost, which is starting now. In other words, the CO2 ship has sailed, no?
People seem upset that this is working? Maybe because this provides a solution to the problem that doesn't mean we have to fundamentally change society, or bring down the 1st world, or say that "America was the bad guy to ignore all the EU regulations".
- Supposedly CO2 is also a green house gas that helps earth trap some heat from the sun. The link between how much heat CO2 captures based on the concentration is very difficult to find, suggesting that the link is not very strong and propaganda driven "climate science" deliberately doesn't want anyone to know. My guess is that it is very weak at best which is why they supplement the theory with heating will cause water vapor concentration to rise, which is also a green house gas, which will cause snowball effect. This could be tested in a controlled greenhouse but most probably it didn't turn out to be favorable for the propaganda so the research has not been published.
- Climate has been changing throughout the history of the earth and there are no known consistent patterns that we have been able to model which can help us predict anything, not that we have seen working at least. Overall though, it has been cooling and there is no reason that it will not continue to do so in the long run.
- The causal relation between CO2 levels and global temperatures has not only not been established, but it is impossible to establish because of large number of factors affecting it and affecting each other. The best we can get is some kind of correlation but even that hasn't been consistent over time. They keep adding more explanations to anomalies to pretend that they know what is going on but it's obvious that they just don't want to accept it. Max Plank said "Science advances one funeral at a time", but it seems increased life expectancy will keep "climate science" going for a while.
So, yeah some people may be upset that people are touting this solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
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…
It's been said multiple times that reduction is no longer enough - even a cut to zero won't prevent warming at this point. Geo-engineering to actively reduce carbon is the inevitable conclusion.
However its very apparent that there's no way in hell we'll actually stop emissions any time soon. I think that's what has been distorted into "it's too late". It'll take 30+ years at the most optimistic to see significant decreases in CO2 emission which is why some people advocate for geoengineering.
Armchair skeptic: manually removing CO2 is the least dumb way of doing climate engineering. It's possible, it hasn't got nearly the terrible side effects of something like sulfur aerosols, and it can actually produce useable products (although the commercial viability of producing graphite and hydrocarbons from CO2 is... suspect). It's a nice dream though, and a fun counterargument to people saying we will always need coal and oil for steel and plastics. Ultimately of course the amount of carbon exceeds our need for oil/graphite/coke by a factor of several million, even over several millenia.
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.
OK, let's assume you can't undo what's already done. However, if there is a choice between "let's consume less, shut down production, adapt to a less comfortable lifestyle and be extra careful about the environment, so we won't damage it again" and "let's engineer a process that negates the damage we are already doing, keeping our nice comfortable lifestyle", isn't the second choice more natural and rational?