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We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

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Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#231

Post by harimau777 »

spodek wrote: post #174
acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

Glad to see reducing consumption at the top. People's scarcity mindset makes them think burning less fossil fuels and consuming less stuff will lower their quality of life. On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements . People convolve reducing consumption with returning to the stone age, which is a false dichotomy. It's more like exiting a mindset that stuff means…

Are there any resources that you'd suggest on life improvements that also reduce consumption?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#232

Post by ouid »

lopmotr wrote: post #38
ouid wrote: post #2

why do they get to start the annual temperature anomaly graph at around -.3 in 1900.

It's not a quantity that has any natural zero, nor is time (year since Jesus?). So you can start it wherever you want.

that's not true at all. We're trying to measure the human impact on global temperature. The natural zero is whatever our best guess for the temperature would be without human intervention.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#233

Post by aforwardslash »

grive wrote: post #130
aforwardslash wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most western countries have proper regulation regarding waste disposal. Plastic pollution is a big is a big issue, but wont be solved while big economies decide to export their waste to places with less strict regulations. This is - in my opinion - the point that needs pressure from conscious citizens. We are only now starting to measure up the microplastics impact and their origin. Switching to reusable cups is a dr…

> Most western countries have proper regulation regarding waste disposal. > wont be solved while big economies decide to export their waste Western countries do not have proper regulations if one of the possible outcome for waste is to be exported where those regulations do not exist.

They do. Keep in mind, most of the produced residues arent recyclable or compostable. What gets exported is a small fraction of it. Could legislation be better? That was my point.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#234

Post by avmich »

scythe wrote: post #230
avmich wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. You've calculated the energy required to pressurize the gas. You can get that energy back if you make the gas doing work; if you pressurize it quasi-statically, you at least won't lose energy while compressing... I didn't get your last line though. I assume you compress "dirty" air.

You can't get the energy back because I assumed you have a magical compressor that only compresses carbon dioxide. I didn't include any terms for compressing air. You get a slightly cheaper term (ca 420 J/kg) if you set the upper pressure to atmospheric but then you're storing gaseous CO2 which is not practical. But recovering energy by restoring the original [partial] pressure of 0.0004 atm is not possible unless yo…

Ok, let's take 500 J/kg of CO2. Do you think it's a lot? To get 1 kg of CO2 you'll need to process roughly a ton of air. There are ~5e15 tons of air in the atmosphere, so it's 3e18 J to process all the air. We produce annually 75e18 J annually on the planet - can we handle this expense?

I'm afraid it will be more than that - but how much more exactly?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#235

Post by distances »

RobinL wrote: post #194
spodek wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see reducing consumption at the top. People's scarcity mindset makes them think burning less fossil fuels and consuming less stuff will lower their quality of life. On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements . People convolve reducing consumption with returning to the stone age, which is a false dichotomy. It's more like exiting a mindset that stuff means…

Agreed. I spent some time making a calculator [0] to help me understand what matters when it comes to energy consumption. This made it very clear that by far the best way most consumers can make a difference is just to stop buying stuff. In the west we get away with 'low'(er) emissions because we import a huge amount of CO2 though imported goods - maps of total energy consumption are quite interesting here [1] Stoppi…

Nice calculator. What's assumed as energy source for warm water of it's not part of the electricity consumption?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#236

Post by cjlars »

acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

The whole "reduce, reuse, recycle" approach isn't tenable. Even a very environmentally conscious US lifestyle still produces a very substantial appoint of carbon emissions.

For more, see how Hans Rosling covered the idea in his 2011 "Magic Washing Machine" presentation.

https://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#237

Post by maerF0x0 »

willj wrote: post #13
maerF0x0 wrote: post #6

Why do we always phrase it as changing the climate instead of facing that it's an energy balance issue? Too much energy is entering the earth and getting trapped. We can solve it by letting less enter, or otherwise sinking some of it. Consider if we stored the excess energy as chemical energy? or reflected some fraction of the energy back out away from us? reducing consumption is a failing project and the greener tec…

It’s not just an energy issue. The abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to ocean acidification.

This is a good point. Thank you for pointing it out.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#238

Post by distances »

incangold wrote: post #143
philbarr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this "circular sustainable economy" work? People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make. We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.

The U.K. will soon charge manufacturers for the recycling of their packaging: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46261129

That's from 2018, did it go into effect?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#239

Post by lopmotr »

Elrac wrote: post #187
lopmotr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an existential crisis. That's not what the science says. There's no evidence that climate change will make humans extinct or end civilization. If that's not what you mean by existential crisis, then don't use that word because that's what it means.

It's anticipated that at least millions, more likely hundreds of millions of humans will die to the consequences of climate change including effects of extreme weather, flooding and (especially) famine. This won't extinct all of humanity but can be expected to severely impact civilization(s), with a chance of this impact being fatal to individual cultures. For a prospectus of what could happen, I point to the large-s…

100's of millions is not necessarily an existential crisis because it already happened in the 1900's due to war, disease, and famine. Even if that absolute scale of deaths happens again because of climate change, it will be proportionally smaller due to the global population being an order of magnitude larger.

Do you have a reference to that prediction of it probably killing 100's of millions of people? On it's own, it doesn't really mean much because what time scale and what's the no-climate-change number to compare to?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#240

Post by AstralStorm »

m12k wrote: post #199
BurningFrog wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy. I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic…

> We don't have that lever. As far as I understand we have a red button that will induce a nuclear winter

Unfortunately the effects of which would be different from just cooling the climate in an unpredictable and likely extremely bad ways, so it's not an option.
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