Sea water contains from 0.001 to 44 ppb (parts per billion) gold. The amounts of gold in fresh surface waters and ground waters are also within this range. Cite : https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1970/0625/report.pdf
That was covered in the last three paragraphs of the web page I linked to.
Finally, while current best estimates suggest that temperatures will stabilise in a zero-emissions world, that does not mean that all climate impacts would cease to worsen.
Melting glaciers and ice sheets and rising sea levels all occur slowly and lag behind surface temperature warming. A zero-emissions world would still result in rising sea levels for many centuries to come, with some estimates suggesting that at least 80cm of additional sea level rise is “locked in”.
To stop these impacts may, ultimately, require reducing global temperatures through net-negative global emissions, not just stopping temperature from rising by reaching net-zero.
I think the good news is that if we make it to net-zero, we’ll have learned enough that making it to net-negative won’t be a monumental effort. Which doesn’t mean we won’t lose a lot of beaches and islands, but that we’ll be able to save the Arctic and Antarctic. The bad news is that it will be a monumental effort to get to net-zero and as a global society, I don’t think we’ve even quantified the problem yet, much less come up with a realistic holistic solution.
It describes the provisions in last year’s infrastructure bill and other funding opportunities and how they fit together. It’s right there in the title. I can’t what you think it’s going to lead anyone to think that isn’t true.
In relation to the trees discussion, what about grasses? Using the same concept of harvesting carbon (via plants) and then shoving it underground. Grasses grow quickly in the spring of each hemisphere, and I assume if there was enough square mileage grasses would capture some amount of carbon. I am not suggesting ripping down forests to plant more grassland, could that be a way to capture some carbon on a large scale? I guess some of the capture would be offset by harvesting, packing, and moving the vegetation to long-term storage. I dunno, just got thinking about it for some reason.
One thing that concerns me about bio-sequestration is depletion of nutrients.
With trees, there aren’t too many left in the woody parts that are actually dead, but with grasses, it seems as though they are going to have a higher concentration of nutrients.
In this article, grasses are discussed in terms of how they naturally move carbon below ground thru their root systems. Maybe we should be considering restoring grasslands in addition to forests.
Not quite the least green, I think. Your standard diesel semi-truck is probably less green. Those can be electrified and there are several class 8 EVs on the market right now. But the ones on the market so far do not have the range for long-haul trucking plus there’s no network of high voltage chargers needed for that. They’ll be useful for short-haul trips.
I’m sure we will electrify the long-haul trucking industry. There’s no network of chargers for them right now, but consider that there was no network of chargers for EV cars just a dozen years ago and now there’s a pretty decent one.
Cargo ships can be made more green by using wind-assisted ship propulsion. There’s half a dozen or so different ways to do that, everything from Flettner rotors to kites. They will reduce fuel usage and thus emissions by anywhere from 5 to 20%. Unfortunately, they don’t work with container ships, except maybe kites.
We’ve had several threads on a Bering Strait rail line. Conclusion: not going to happen. China to Europe is possible, but electifying it with RE would be a challenge.
The question of what constitutes a “crisis” is of course somewhat of a subjective one, but I think it’s fair to say that both the IPCC and the national science bodies of all the major nations have been unequivocal about the urgency of climate mitigation, based on objective evidence now of the damaging effects of climate change, such as extreme weather, health risks, and imminent risks to food and water supplies. I don’t think it serves a factual or useful purpose to call it “hyperbole”.
Bolding mine.
This statement glosses over so many important nuances that I think it’s fair to just say that it’s flat-out false, or at the very least, extremely misleading.
First of all, the concept of net negative emissions, or even net zero emissions, is something that even the most optimistic scenarios see as being, at best, many many decades away. We’re currently tracking somewhere between the two second-worst IPCC emissions pathways, RCP 4.5 and RCP 6 (disregarding the catastrophic outlier RCP 8.5). The numbers refer to the estimated W/m2 of additional net climate forcing power on every single square meter of the earth’s surface by the end of the century.
Secondly, the statement can only be true if two forms of magic occur simultaneously – net negative carbon emissions, and an amazing natural carbon uptake that sequesters atmospheric CO2 with amazing speed. In actual fact, CO2 persists in the atmosphere an average of about a century, much of it much longer, and also causes feedbacks like accelerated polar warming that amplifies the effects and adds additional GHGs like methane, from thawing permafrost and undersea methane clathrates, and accelerates warming through reduced albedo.
The thing that is the most egregiously misleading here is the implication that if we just reduced our emissions to net zero, global warming would immediately stop and we would immediately be at equilibrium. Completely wrong. There is a very important metric in climate science called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), defined as the eventual equilibrium temperature reached after a doubling of CO2, and the timeframe to even approach that is centuries, with final equilibrium likely millennia later. Meanwhile, the lag due to slower ocean heat uptake, accelerated polar warming, and other important feedbacks will continue to drive warming.
The long-term nature of ECS is precisely why climate models also estimate a more practical short-term metric called transient climate response (TCR) that is assessed in 20-year windows. More about those metrics here.