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What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change (economist.com)
Countries are scrambling to limit the rise in the earth's temperature to just two degrees by the end of this century. But Slashdot reader dryriver shares an article titled "What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change."
No, it is not that Climate Change is a hoax or that the climate science gets it all wrong and Climate Change isn't happening. According to the Economist, it is rather that "Fully 101 of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to chart what lies ahead assume that carbon will be taken out of the air in order for the world to have a good chance of meeting the 2C target."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
Oh please... I'm not a denailist. But let's be serious, a lot of the people promoting Global Warming also tell you (if you listen/read long enough into the rhetoric they're spewing) that their plans can't work, were never going to work, and that it's probably hopeless. You really think those dunces were ever trying to help when they're literal nihilists? No. They were trying to make a buck.
While it's helpful for a number of reasons to plant trees, note that humans put about 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias from seed to maturity in one year, every single year.
A mature 100 acre woodland captures enough carbon annually to offset seven automobiles driven an average amount.
So while trees help for many reasons like flood and erosion control, and can be part of a strategy to reduce fossil fuel emissions (e.g. by cooling cities), they're not really a attractive climate engineering option for bulk removal of CO2. Fertilizing the ocean to increase phytoplankton production is more easily scalable, but has potentially devastating side effects.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
According to this link and taking some round numbers, an Albizzia lebbek can sequester 70 lbs of CO2 per year.
Assuming a 40-year project lifetime, we would then need 637,765,000,000 trees to pull the mentioned amount out of the atmosphere.
For comparison, the Amazon rainforest has an estimated 390 billion trees.
Dividing these two numbers indicates that the world would have to plant and grow [the equivalent of] 1.6 Amazon Rainforests for a 40 year period.
I'm not saying that this is a bad solution, only that it is an incomplete solution. We should probably plant trees in areas where it makes sense and is easy to do, but we'll still need an epic-level solution to the problem.
The old alarmist predictions of climate catastrophe have proven false again and again and again, so why do people believe the new ones?
You would expect that a group that consistently makes inaccurate predictions would lose credibility because of that and the public would stop believing what they say. Or, well, maybe not.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly ... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process.)
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad solution, only that it is incomplete. It should be used in conjunction with as many other scaled-up solutions as we can come up with.
You mean this Roy Spencer
https://skepticalscience.com/R...
right ?
What is it with the slashdot crowd and the "lone wolf" saviour thing ? Is it just the usual right wing astro turfing, or do they really think that it's normal for lots and lots of scientists to be wrong AND lie about it, but that one person is the real purveyor of truth.
Roy Spencer is right but 95% of the climate scientists on the planet are wrong ? really?
We're dumping GIGA tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, a heat trapping gas, and it's doing NOTHING ?
oh wait, I forgot it's all natural variability. oh that's awesome, i'm glad you thought of that. before Roy Spencer came along nobody thought to check to see if maybe this warming is due to natural variability. wow- what a brilliant insight !
Well, all of those lying climate scientists on their big fat research paychecks showed that it isn't natural variability, but THEY'RE ALL WRONG. and they're liars. and Al Gore is fat.
Absolute statements are never true
No, no it doesnt (well, the actual fact is some of it does, most of it does not).
BURNING wood puts most of it back.
In case you dont realise, dirt actually holds quite a bit of carbon. Dirt is mostly rotted plants.
This is also why grasslands absorb (and hold!) quite a lot of carbon, grass grows fast and dies often.
Funny, that.
On the other hand, the cost of nuclear power in the USA is pretty much 95% the fault of Democrats. Various Democrat sub-groups came up with a plan to use the courts to make nuclear power too expensive, and it worked. This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.
See that "Preview" button?
Wow, these democrats are really powerful—they managed to influence even the construction of nuclear reactors in Finland!
The Olkiluoto reactor #3 has been a spectacular failure for years. Works started in 2005, slated to finish in 2010 for 3 billion €. Works are still unfinished, with completion slated for 2019 at 8.5 billion € (barring further fuck-ups, which at this point have become a habit).
Building the plant is not some Finnish farmer, it's Areva and Siemens, top-notch companies in the nuclear industry. If that's what nuclear can provide, well some politicians looking for a humongous boondoggle may be happy with that, but I as a consumer and taxpayer, not so much.
Your link appears to be mostly a whining rant about how terrible it is that nuclear power plants are forced to respect minimum standards of environmental decency: this, in particular, blew my mind [my bold]:
So as long as it's not commercially harvested, it's all right to exterminate species in the ocean? The temperature may seem mild to us, but higher temperatures do reduce oxygen content in water, and for every GW of power out of nuclear power plant there are 2 GW of heat; that could have altered the ecosystem significantly. Look at the location of the Seabrook, NH plant: it is right on the inside of Hampton Harbor, which has a very narrow inlet. Heat would easily accumulate in there over time. And boo-hoo, they had to build 2 miles of pipe, cry me a river.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Termites - who just *love* to feed on dead trees (including timber houses), collectively release a *lot* of methane and CO2.
http://www.ghgonline.org/metha...
https://www3.epa.gov/ttnchie1/...
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/10...
Termites are a major vector for converting trees back into greenhouse gases.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Nope. That's unlikely.
Coal was a result of the circumstances during the carboniferous period - when wood was a pretty new evolution and nothing had evolved that could eat it yet.
All that carbon that got trapped under ground instead of becoming CO2 again had some pretty weird results - one of which was that the O2 level of the atmosphere reached it's all-time high at over 40%.
In that environment insects and arachnids could grow way bigger than they can in our 21% oxygen atmosphere (book lungs are not very effective - so the size of insects and arachnids depend directly on how much oxygen the atmosphere holds). Hence the famous 1m long dragonfly and other giant invertebrates of the age.
Eventually, bacteria, fungi and insects evolved that could digest wood. Carbon stopped being trapped and, gradually, the atmosphere reverted to it's normal 21% oxygen level.
But new coal is extremely unlikely, even from mulch which isn't fully converted. The trees that became coal were just about 100% unconverted only the leaves got eaten. Mulch is nowhere near that resilient.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *