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."

Comments

Re:Another thing they don't tell you about the mod

[cats-paw]

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.

Re:GMO trees...

[silentcoder]

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.