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.

Comments

Manmade climate change is bullshit

[SensitiveMale]

Arctic ice was supposed to be completely gone by 2016 and there's more now that when that prediction was made.

Environmental doomsayers have been making these claims for decades. They have all been proven wrong.

Global temps haven't increased in sixteen plus years.

Manmade global warming is bullshit. At least they are getting smart enough to push the environmental disaster to 50 years away. There's less accountability that way.

Don't get me wrong. Reducing pollution is a good thing. But to constantly declare that it's the end of mankind unless we do something RIGHT NOW is exploitation.

Re:You would think science could help

[MightyMartian]

Except much of what is going on right now has to do with the amount of CO2 released over the last three hundred years. Trying to talk about global climate over hundreds of millions of years and referring to certain periods as if they represented the norm is absurd. It's almost as if you're cherry picking epochs of higher global temperatures, and because it suits your underlying argument that we should just merely adapt, to declare those are normal.

You understand, I hope, that what we call civilization, with urban living and agriculture, can only exist within certain parameters. Where you try to use less arable land, like, say, southern California, you need to find water from somewhere else, and then you need to fertilize the hell out of the soil, creating a vicious cycle of salinization of soil, more nitrates, and so forth, not to mention creating massive algal blooms off the coast.

The real bread baskets of the world. not just the tomato and almond farms, but the actual parts of the world where staple grain crops are growing, rely heavily on precipitation, either in the form of rain belts, or in places like India, on snow fall and glaciation in the mountains. When those rain belts start to shift, and that's what is happening now, areas now currently arable will become ever less so, which means more areas will end up in the vicious cycle southern California is in. It could also lead to new water wars as regions with plentiful water basically have it stolen as was done to farmers in the 1920s and 1930s to provide water to farms on what amounted to semi-arid and arid zones (desert). And what happens if the rain belts shift even further. What happens if all that precipitation that feeds the US's breadbasket in the Midwest suddenly moves northward, and ends up in Canada? Now you're talking about fucking with the single most important aspect of any civilization; its food supply, a food supply suddenly under a foreign nation's control.

And spare me the desalination line. It's incredibly energy intensive, which makes it only really useful for human consumption, and far too expensive for the kind of large scale agriculture that is typical North America and Europe, not to mention you have to get rid of the salt, which can, in large concentrations, prove as toxic as any industrial chemical.

No. You cannot "stop" climate change.

[Chas]

Because "climate change" is too broad and nebulous a term.
And the people looking for grant money LIKE it that way. You can basically wrangle ANY sort of phenomenon in Earth's atmosphere into some definition of "climate change". Basically there is no bottom to this well.

Also, climate change is a NATURAL process. Earth's climate has been changing since basically FOREVER.

Now, can we stop "man made climate change/global warming"?

Maybe. If we sequester enough carbon out of the atmosphere. It may make a difference.

Can we stop "man made climate change" PERIOD? No. Because anything we do is going to cause the climate to "change" in some way.