Just the other day I saw an article on a plant that removed the see-oh-two and converted it to rocks. Their words. It was on a Reddit and I did not save the URL.
Eastern North America used to be full of giant deciduous trees that produced blankets of dead leaves to coat the forest floor every fall. A large amount of the best land has been cleared of these trees to produce food.
The forest fires we see nowadays are a direct result of warming. Weather patterns are changing, the excess heat and low precipitation are turning wet decaying forests into dry firewood ripe for a good lightning strike.
The trick would be to recreate the forests as much as possible, while figuring out how to stop runaway heat waves from turning them into forest fires that simply recycle the carbon into the atmosphere. We’ve created a pulse of carbon dioxide, we need to figure out a quick way to remove it so time and natural processes can eventually properly bury it. Since oceans are 75% of the earth’s surface, something that works with them, like algae, would be useful too.
Again, the problem is scale. An average car, let’s say, does 12,000 miles a year at 30mpg. That’s 3,600 gallons of gas, so let’s say a ton and a half of carbon - each year. You’d need to grow and bury in your peat bog (where it doesn’t decay) about that much bamboo or grass or wood each year, solely to atone for your car. Not mentioning the carbon created for the electricity you use or the gas to heat your house in winter, or the CO2 to get your food to market, etc. etc. And that’s just to stay even. To start removing carbon, double that. You and everyone else.
Well said.
We already see this. Some of the social disruption that causes caravans to Texas or flotillas of boat people on the Mediterranean can be traced to the disruptions from changing weather patterns - droughts and crop failures, hurricane damage, etc. These factors are only going to get worse.
More than that. A gallon of gas produces about 20 pounds of carbon dioxide.
12,000 miles @30MPG = 400 gallons of gas. Six pounds per gallon, so 3600 pounds of gas. Maybe that’s what you meant, instead of 3600 gallons?
This 2015 report (PDF, 11 pages) is titled “The National Security Implications of a Changing Climate”, and describes a lot more than just an increasing number of refugees.
This is a terrible, terrible idea; not only do most insolation-blocking emissions from volcanos only remain suspended for a few months, sulphate dioxides will dramatically impact the integrity of the ozone layer, so while solar radiance may temporarily reduced the insolance in the UV range will increase to grievous hazard. Fortunately, we really have no means of artificially forcing volcanism (no, putting nuclear weapons at fault lines will not result in increased volcanic activity) and we don’t having any other practical means of geoengineering the atmosphere which is good because the potential for apocalyptic unintended consequences is grave.
I know that many people believe that “nuclear” is the solution to all things pertaining to energy scarcity and carbon emissions, but while the actual process of nuclear fission does not itself release atmospheric carbon, and the overall operations of a nuclear fission power plant is pretty low (but not zero) carbon emissions, there are a large number of reasons that the wide scale increase in nuclear fission power plants is not the panacea that many people believe it to be. Setting aside the vast problems with scaling up the infrastructure for extracting, milling, separating and purifying, enriching, processing into fuel elements, transporting, and the spectrum of issues with disposal in the nuclear fission fuel cycle, conventional Generation III/III+ require huge amounts of concrete, steel, and aluminum, all of which emit large amount of carbon dioxide in manufacture, as well as all of the power production that goes into the aforementioned nuclear fission fuel cycle which cannot be bootstrapped until there is sufficient excess capacity so it is also a net carbon emitter.
This is not to say that the problems of conventional nuclear fission cannot be addressed in a way that improves both the fiscal and technical viability of the cycle to reduce pollution (both carbon and radionuclide) as well as making far better utilization of fission fuel beyond the conventional once-through nuclear fission cycle, and nuclear fission is a good baseload capability that can be used to provide sustained power when other renewable sources such as solar and wind are not producing, but it is far from a cure-all and comes with some substantial challenges that beg further development of the technology before a wider adoption campaign that produces even more problems downstream.
As far as the question of the o.p. regarding sequestration, there is just no practical way to sequester a significant amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide in a timescale that would have a meaningful effect upon near term climate change. Planting trees is great because they are a sustainable resource in and of themselves, but trees grow very slowly and monoculture plantations used for lumber and pulp only offer very small amounts of carbon sequestration. True ‘wild’ forests are better because the canopy of trees also provides a vast ecosystem of other plantlife that will absorb carbon faster and store it into the peaty soil of a mature forest, but this too is the a process of many centuries to make a measurable dent. Aside from the oceans the largest absorber of atmospheric carbon are actually wetlands in which carbon is retained and absorbed through the entire aquatic ecosystem like a deep sponge, and the most substantial thing that we could do in terms of ecological capture would be to reverse the drainage and reduction of wetlands and encourage their renewal wherever they have existed previously. Wetlands, of course, offer numerous other ecological benefits.
Direct carbon capture and sequestration directly from the air is a pipe dream because regardless of how many capture systems you can practically build or from what source of fairies where you get the energy to power them from, the density of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so low that the rate at which it could be ‘scrubbed’ from the air is too low to be practical. Yes, oil companies are funding many experiments in this and there is a demonstration project in Norway to pull a few hundred thousand tons of CO2 per year, but when you’re talking about over a thousand billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere the scale of any system to extract that without itself increasing the overall carbon footprint becomes apparent. Extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean is at least marginally more viable (~40% of excess atmospheric carbon is dissolved in the upper layers of ocean water) because of the density and has the additional advantage of directly reducing acidification of the ocean, but the scale at which this would have to be done is also colossal.
Of course, nobody is seriously working on this technology or even preparing to tool up to build and deploy systems to do this, and it would be decades before sufficient capacity could be deployed to even make a measurable dent the current excess amount of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere notwithstanding the more than 35 GT of carbon dioxide being released by fossil fuel combustion for energy production, even more by other industrial processes, and of course methane and other gases released both by ‘natural’ processes of agriculture, melting permafrost, et cetera, and by industrial processes releasing complex greenhouse gases far more potent (if not as resident in duration) as carbon dioxide.
In short, planting a few billion trees to scrub excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is pure doddle that will not accomplish any measurable effect in the timeframe of concern, i.e. the next half century.
Stranger
I do believe that the best response to climate change is to learn to adapt to it. Regulations and treaties limiting carbon emissions are vulnerable to political and economic shifts, and CO2 removal efforts will fail due to high costs. And even if we could end and reverse human impacts on the climate, the climate will still change anyway.
In a utopian world we would be able to shift crops to new, more suitable regions as conditions change, and to move people to where they can most efficiently live and work. Unfortunately, land has owners and/or is controlled by governments so climate change will benefit some and harm many others. The losers will want compensation and the winners will fight to retain their gains. Conceivably, the future might bring some new political/economic system that ameliorates the pain of relocation. But even if humans are living at maximum efficiency on the planet, population growth could still bring us back to the point of fighting over resourses.
Adaptation is addressed in the latest IPCC report. Many ecosystems are at their limits of adaptation. It is very well addressed here :
Section 3, Page 28 (Limits to Adaptation)
Also look at the next section, maladaptation
I agree it seems counterproductive to attempt it that way, but I don’t think this is one of those things where thermodynamics forbids a fossil fuelled carbon sequestration process from sequestering more carbon than it releases.
If you’re sequestering the carbon by turning it into something else, then yes, thermodynamics does forbid it. Though you might be able to do something like pumping carbon dioxide into old natural gas wells. And you might be able to do something that costs a (relatively) small amount of energy to cause plant life to more efficiently use solar energy, or the like, so solar is the actual main energy input for your process.
The difficulty there is that the way we currently determine what crops are suitable for what regions, and when in the year to plant them, and the like, is by trial and error, and each trial takes a year. Which means that it might be a decade before you have your answers, in which time the climate has changed again. If we’re going to seriously pursue the adaptation route, we need to be able to predict exactly how the climate is going to change before it happens, and understand all of the many details that determine how well a crop will do in given conditions. And that’s fantastically complicated.
We can always launch a sun-blocking mirror into space.
Say we want to reduce solar irradiance by 5%. That means the shield should be about 5% of the cross-sectional area of Earth, or about 6.25e12 m^2. If we use 1 micrometer mylar, that’s 6.25e6 m^3, or 8.75e9 kg.
A Starship can loft about 100 tons, so that’s 87,500 flights. Sounds like a lot, but with a fleet that launches every 15 minutes, that’s only 2.5 years.
Will the launches themselves cause more emissions than they solve? No: one launch emits about 2900 t of CO2, and all of them will emit about 2.5e8 tons. That’s compared to total annual CO2 emissions of 3.2e10 tons, so the launches will be <1% of the annual total, and the shields will last for many years.
It’s tricky to keep the shields properly in front of the Earth at all times, but they’re so light that they can stay in place via solar pressure. This is called a statite, and while they’ve never been built, they’ve been analyzed a fair amount.
- Grow biomass.
- Dump into oceanic rift.
That’s skipping over the details, obviously. I think that’s the easiest way we can get something similar to the coal and oil generation of past eras. And the closest we can get to undoing what we’ve done.
Indeed it would initially make it worse, due to the front-loading of emissions from building those plants, and the ongoing emissions from the vast amounts of concrete required - an emitter in its own right.
Exactly this. Geoengineering is mostly a fantasy that few scientists take seriously and which could have potentially devastating side effects. Not the least of which would be a catastrophic climate rebound if the intentional aerosol pollution had to be stopped due to unanticipated side effects. The only realistic workable strategies are mostly in the area of emissions mitigation, with possibly some assistance from adaptation strategies and direct carbon capture.
It needs to be said here that Levitt and Dubner are controversial, to put it mildly, and have been criticized by many as a couple of hacks. I don’t care to get into a discussion of the value of their books overall, but it’s a fact that their framing of climate change and their advocacy of climate geoengineering is generally regarded as quack pseudo-science. The IPCC Working Group 3 report on climate mitigation (and other authoritative meta-analyses of current research) mention geoengineering only briefly and critically, if at all. The mission of Working Group 3 is described as “WG III focuses on climate change mitigation, assessing methods for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere”. The idea of injecting SO2 into the atmosphere is particularly ludicrous as it’s one of the major causes of acid rain, a major plague on the environment that we have thankfully brought under control by reducing SO2 and NOx emissions – one of the few great success stories of the EPA.
I agree that that is probably the only feasible way of lowering global temperatures. The problem is exactly how feasible it is.
I really don’t think it is until or unless we have space mining, which has its own feasibility issues, but if we did have viable methods of extracting materials from asteroids, then creating such a shade actually becomes almost trivial.
I was being a little tongue in cheek, though it’s fun to work out possibilities. The reality is that we just have to reduce emissions as much as we can and live with the remaining consequences. A large scale project like this is impossible given that half the population denies there is a problem and half the rest consider a slight increase in gas prices to be a an intolerable threat to their standard of living.
Still, something to think about in the very long term when we want to take active control over climate. That’s centuries out, assuming civilization lasts that long.
So, aside from the obsessive need to bring ‘Starship’ (and by association, Elon Musk) into every thread, this is also a terrible, terrible idea. All life on Earth is fundamentally dependent upon solar insolation, either directly in the case of photosynthetic organisms, or indirectly by consuming energy and nutrients delivered through the food chain starting with plans. Cutting solar radiance by some percentage simply assures that photosynthetic life—which is also essentially the only thing that is actively sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide—is less effective at growth. Far from contributing to a reduction in atmospheric carbon it will retard its natural uptake along with numerous other detrimental impacts.
The reality is that we will not engineer our way out of climate change; the current trend is inevitable even if we stopped using ‘fossil fuel’ and eliminated carbon-producing industrial processes today (impossible), nor is there a practical means of absorbing substantial atmospheric carbon dioxide in less than a period measured in many centuries if not millennia. We have no choice other than adaptation and even that is dubious in terms of retaining industrial civilization as we currently know it. We’ve observed disruptions in regional climate and severe weather patterns that are statistically attributable only to the effects of global climate change, and are occurring decades in advance of predictions of even pessimistic climate scientists. It is difficult at this point to predict how bad these changes will be in terms of being able to maintain agriculture, support urbanization and the necessities of industrial society, and so forth because this is so far out of prior experience but it is certainly hewing more toward RCP 4.5 or RCP 6.0, and the fact that most major governments are choosing to effectively do nothing in terms of actively reducing carbon emissions means that even optimistic impressions should be tempered against any expectation of a reversion to the previous mean.
Stranger
Only if solar irradiance is the limiting factor, which, in many cases, it isn’t. It might be, for instance, a lack of fresh water induced by drought.
Besides, as it stands, carbon sequesterization by plant life only helps if you can take it out of the cycle. Dumping it in a submarine trench is probably impractical.
While true, there is a difference between adapting to the end of technological civilization vs. adapting to a 50% decrease in quality of life. The latter is probably inevitable; I don’t think we’re quite at the point where the former is.
Have we passed the point of no return?
From a science point of view, I think not.
From a political point of view, yes. And because politics drives anything we could do with science, by the time politicians grow some balls, we will be past the science point of no return.
My view is “no” – climate change is a very serious and potentially existential problem, but there’s no evidence that we’re at any sort of tipping point quite yet, although those are real things that do exist in the climate record. A tipping point would be when positive feedbacks become self-reinforcing, resulting in runaway climate change.
But the fact that the earth will continue to warm for many centuries even if net new carbon emissions were reduced to zero has been known for a long time and is not in itself a harbinger of disastrous runaway climate change. However a really major loss of polar ice cover, or warming of the oceans to the point of drastically reducing or even reversing their CO2 uptake, would mean a complete re-evaluation of our estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity, which could double or triple. Meaning that instead of maybe a three-degree C rise in global temperature in response to a doubling of CO2, we might be facing a ten-degree rise.
We won’t actually know if we’re at a ‘tipping point’ (a point of instability after which the climate will shift to a new equilibrium) until well after we’ve passed it and there is no opportunity for reversion. Although the climate doomslayers argue that we’ve almost certainly passed one or more tipping points with the melting of Arctic ice and ‘fossil’ glaciers, the thawing of permafrost, alterations in the Gulf Stream, we are so far beyond historical experience and what little we can discern from geological records that we just don’t know, and any modeling is speculative. However, the climate changes observed thus far have hewn toward the more pessimistic end of the spectrum, and are coming faster than almost anyone expected.
If someone is telling you that climate change will result in the extinction of humanity on 16 June 2037 they’re full of shit, but people warning of radical changes by the 2050s and 2060s that may make equatorial regions at least periodically uninhabitable and overall changes that will drastically alter the industrial agriculture that modern society is dependent upon, they’re aren’t just telling ghost stories; those consequences are quite possible and well within confidence of predictions from models even if you want to call them speculative.
Stranger