Slashdot Mirror
Can We Really Stop Climate Change By 'Capturing' Carbon? (vox.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The recently-ratified Paris Climate Accord calls on countries to keep the rise in average global temperatures under 2 degrees Celsius (a threshold which would bring extreme weather, water shortages and reduced agricultural production). But a recent article on Vox warns that "the world has to zero out net carbon emissions...for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065. After that, emissions have to go negative... We are betting our species' future on our ability to bury carbon."
That's why everyone's watching the W.A. Parish Generating Station in Texas, which came online this week -- on schedule, and under budget. "The plant will use a newly installed system to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide created during combustion."
Alas, Slashdot reader Dan Drollette brings bad news from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: To fight climate change with carbon capture and storage technology, we'd have to complete one new carbon capture facility every working day for the next 70 years. It's better to switch to a diet of energy conservation, efficiency, and renewables, rather than rely on this technology as a kind of emergency planetary liposuction.
That's why everyone's watching the W.A. Parish Generating Station in Texas, which came online this week -- on schedule, and under budget. "The plant will use a newly installed system to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide created during combustion."
Alas, Slashdot reader Dan Drollette brings bad news from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: To fight climate change with carbon capture and storage technology, we'd have to complete one new carbon capture facility every working day for the next 70 years. It's better to switch to a diet of energy conservation, efficiency, and renewables, rather than rely on this technology as a kind of emergency planetary liposuction.
Personally, I hate all of these "arguments through incredulity" that you encounter whenever it comes from energy, trying to argue that we can't expand fossil fuels fast enoigh, alternative fuels, solar power, wind power, nuclear power, you name it based on your ideology, fast enough to meet demand. It's always along the lines of "We'd have to build X units every Y days, and doesn't that numver sound impossibly large?"
Well, *everything* we do with energy is on unthinkably large scales. We spend a huge chunk of our entire planet's gdp, billions of man-years per year, on it. Arguments through incredulity gloss over this. When arguing against a given tech - as this article does with carbon capture - it's not enough to just act incredulous, you need to do a fibancial analysis (which on large scales is not trivial)
Also they do the "all or nothing" faælacy as well. It's perfectly acceptable ro pursue carbon capture at the same time as other technologies. More to the point, until one is sure that a particular solution is the be-all end-all in a particular field, it's only logical.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
Sorry, but this opinion is misinformed.
Rainforests are carbon-neutral. They're a festering sea of life and they emit as much carbon as they absorb.
Of course, that's no reason to ignore them or burn them all down. They play a very important role in climate regulation, and are a literal hothouse of interesting lifeforms with lots of interesting molecules in them. But carbon sinks, they are not.
That's not the only problem. We haven't yet experienced all the effects of the CO2 already emitted even if you don't include the knock-on effects like melting of permafrost causing emission of methane. So whatever we do, unless we actually decrease the atmospheric CO2 level, we're going to continue to get increased global warming, though some areas are predicted to experience the exact opposite. E.g. the gulf stream has been slowing, which may lead to Europe, especially Ireland and Britain, experiencing extremely cold winters (but probably hot summers). Also the temperature difference between the equator and the poles have caused the jet streams to weaken, which has already caused weather patterns to change more slowly, meaning longer heat, rain, and cold waves, etc.
That said, is we can just slow things up a bit it might help. But we aren't going to be able to hold things to a 2 degree rise.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So what is it going to be: mess up the entire planet, or build the safest nuclear plants we can and perhaps mess up one tiny spot every few centuries? Keep burning coal in endless quantities, or choose a completely emission-free technology?
And no, pointing to decades old plants that were in at least one case made by people with zero safety standards does not count as evidence of danger. The true danger is destroying our world; we will certainly do better if we limit that danger to the best nucleair plants we can build.
Exactly. There's only so much carbon plants can fix. The idea that photosynthesizing organisms just magically fix unlimited amounts of CO2 emissions is absurd, but it's the sort of mindless Heartland Institute-created meme that the pseudo-skeptics throw around, because it saves them from having to ever actually understand the science.
The thing is, it seems pretty clear that Planet Earth used to support much more lush plant and animal life than it does today.
If you look at the evidence of growth rate of hadrosaurs, for example, they grew extremely fast and went on very long migrations after a season of growth after hatching. They put on huge amounts of bulk very fast, way faster than anything alive today. They were herbivores. There must have been a LOT of very fast growing vegetation to support these huge herds of fast growing herbivores. Its like the Serengeti but bigger and faster; wildebeest are similar but smaller and go on a shorter migration. And they are fueled and bulked out by very special conditions involving very special volcanic fertilization of the grass they feed on.
When you look at plants, the bulk of what you are looking at is carbon that was sucked out of the atmosphere and is inflated with water. The only way to get very fast growth of huge amounts of plants is with lots of CO2 and fresh water.
I get the feeling that the Earth that the human race has 'grown up with', the Earth that we think is 'normal' is carbon-starved relative to its state in the past. 'Normal' is just a relative term. The 'normal' of the world the hadrosaurs inhabited was very different from this. Our 'normal' isn't the only one. The world of the hadrosaurs changed and could no longer support them. Our world will change and maybe won't be able to support us, this is inevitable whether its because of something we do or because of natural changes; the Earth changes and changes drastically. But it'll almost certainly support life. Live on Earth has survived almost being frozen into a snowball, almost being paved with volcanic eruptions and being hit with asteroids a couple of times.
Look at the big picture. We tend to look at just the last 5000 years and think thats what Earth is SUPPOSED to be like. Before that, for example, the Sahara Desert was lush and green; there is a remnant population of crocodiles in the middle of that desert.
We cannot count on maintaining the planet how it is now, not even with advanced future tech. What we should focus on is being adaptable, like most of the other life on this planet.
This meme did not come from a Heartland Institute.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
First, we have to phase out CO2 by 2050 or 2040 (1.5 deg C). Second, we do not need fancy carbon capture tech. We can rely on plant growth and reforestation programs which actually work. We had a few of those. Also we have to help countries to protect their forests. Also helpful would be to reduce meat production.
And nobody claims that global warming is a threat to life on Earth. For the biosphere in general it's probably great. Hell, it's not even a threat to human life on the planet, we are an adaptable species and global warming won't be enough to drive us to extinction. The danger of global warming is to human civilisation as it exists right now - it will cause coastal metropolises to flood and will mess with agriculture in many places. Nobody (who has an actual clue anyway) is worried about the end of the world here but that doesn't mean the consequences cannot be truly catastrophic.
So let's get this straight:
Conserving living species biodiversity and habitat,
Preventing a wholesale shift of climate into a new regime 10 degrees F warmer
Slowing down the massive rates of fresh-water pollution and over-use
Preventing the oceans from acidifying due to warming and killing off all shellfish and many other ocean lifeforms
All of these things would be radical?
As opposed to continuing on our present accelerating course to a profoundly messed up life-support system on this planet and the attendant mass-scale misery and resource wars. Which would be, what, conservative?
Do you see quite how f**ked up your perspective is yet?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?