Slashdot Mirror
Hoping That Sucking CO2 From the Air Will Fix the Climate? Good Luck (easac.eu)
From a study published on Thursday by scientists on the European Academies Science Advisory Council: Senior scientists from across Europe have evaluated the potential contribution of negative emission technologies (NETs) to allow humanity to meet the Paris Agreement's targets of avoiding dangerous climate change. They find that NETs have "limited realistic potential" to halt increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at the scale envisioned in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios. This new report finds that none of the NETs has the potential to deliver carbon removals at the gigaton (Gt) scale and at the rate of deployment envisaged by the IPCC, including reforestation, afforestation, carbon-friendly agriculture, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCs), enhanced weathering, ocean fertilisation, or direct air capture and carbon storage (DACCs).
CO2 emissions from rotting plant matter are minimal. Most of the carbon is gobbled up by the bacteria, mold and bugs that are eating the dead plants. A tree will take in far more CO2 during it's lifespan than it will emit after dying.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
...by the Scientific calisthenics required derive a working AGW theory, that hasn't been show to be true by any empirical evidence.
The basic global circulation model incorporating the effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (what you call "AGW theory") has been around for fifty years now (the peer-reviewed publication was in two papers by Manabe and Wetherald, in 1967). That's long enough for the predictions to be compared with measurements.
Guess what? Over fifty years, the theory is pretty well matching measurements.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/
https://climategraphs.wordpress.com/2017/11/06/evaluating-the-prediction-of-manabe-and-wetherald-1967/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/mar/19/global-warming-accurate-prediction-1972
Anytime some authority insist that you give up freedom or money and the best they can do to justify it is to say, "It's complicated and you wouldn't understand, Trust Us", you know that something isn't right.
As it turns out, climate scientists have published extensive explanations of what they do, how they do it, how the models work, and all of the source code for their models. They don't say "trust us", they say "here's all the work we did, take a look at it."
As a starting point, look here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 and then for the actual details, start reading some of the thousand references cited.
Sure, with all that surface area. And you're not really "moving" the water. You're spreading it. I guess you're not aware how much water vapor comes from vegetation that actively pumps it out of the ground. Greening the deserts will produce great consequences, not necessarily harmful to the planet, on the contrary, but human economic issues will make even bigger headlines.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wouldn't that destroy delicate desert habitat and extinct a variety of species?
Not sure if you have noticed... but the Sahara is a bit of a desert. The least number of lifeforms of any ecosystem. Biodensity and biodiversity is very low.
The worst danger is if the winds are no longer able to pick up sand from the Sahara (parts of it are high in nutrients from when the Sahara was a tropical paradise many millennia ago). The sands from the Sahara are currently responsible for feeding the rain forests in South America with certain nutrients. Cut off the sand and the rainforests quickly become weaker. The rainforests are currently ARE high in both biodensity and biodiversity.
Not sure why this is marked as flamebait since it's true. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
When erosion was a problem in the American South, we brought in kudzu as a solution, and look how marvelously that turned out. We quenched forest fires in Yellowstone for a century and look how well that went. Gosh.
Yep. That's an argument against geoengineering proposals to "fix" the climate; you have to examine the side-effects of the proposed solutions. The proposals that say "why worry about global warming, we'll just fix it with engineering" need to be very very carefully examined.
Gosh. It's almost as if Mother Nature is unpredictable, as if the climate has been changing since the beginning
Climate has been changing since the beginning. The human contribution isn't instead of natural variations, it is in addition to natural variations. It turns out that this human contribution is somewhat faster than historical climate changes we see in the fossil record, so right now it's the driver. But that doesn't mean that in the long term there aren't other effects as well.
, as if we are barely impacting and certainly not in control of things...
Two different things. We are definitely changing the average temperature, by about 1C so far (with more to come if we keep burning fossil fuels); the basic science of that is really very well understood at this point, although there is still quite a bit of uncertainty in the exact figure. Whether you call 1C "barely impacting" or not is a judgement call.
Overall, we are not "in control of things." We are, however, in control of some things, such as how much fossil fuel we burn.
Humanity surviving into the future is a partisan concern, but I suspect you already know that!
The future's importance being subjective is the entire justification for Trump gutting the EPA. Pollution is ok with this president. Since the Republicans still support the president (why?!?!?) that means Republicans have taken a pollution-is-ok stance. i.e. they aren't conservatives; they're just a totally different form of radical liberals. Different in that there is a partisan schism about whether or not America should sell its entire future for this quarter's gain. Some people say yes, some people say no.
Go ahead: ask them. Half of the voters say there is no tomorrow and there shouldn't be a tomorrow, because fuck humanity. Humans bring their problems. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists.
If you're a human, humans aren't your friends. We're all in this together. "This" being a zero-sum competition where you need to hurt other people before they hurt you.
If you don't believe me, just ask the president. Or any Republican voter. If you didn't hurt someone today, you're a loser.
"Realistically, carbon taxes won't even discourage the production of more CO2. As we've seen time and time again, when taxes or other economic distortions are imposed on an industry, the cost is just passed down to the end users, who just suck it up and pay more for the product/service in question."
Ah, yes, ordinary people don't count as free market decision makers, only the glorious captains of industry? Or perhaps those suppliers who deliver economic value while emitting less pollution will thrive, and those who do not will fail. Which is the point---reductions in emissions are essential, and technological absorption is not feasible.
"It's like those on the left go out of their way to deny and belittle any approach to this problem that will make a real, measurable, physical impact"
(In this case, it was scientists, who looked at the physical and economic feasibility of the methods, not the political left. And no doubt that if it were tried, the 'right' would complain).
Funny, I remember the right complaining endlessly about the economic and job impacts of taxation---clearly it does make a difference. The 'left' recognizes that monetary, not ethical decisions, run the world.
"They say "NO!" to extraordinarily clean, relative to the amount of power obtained, energy sources like nuclear power."
Right now, it's conservative money-focused boards of utilities who are turning off nuclear plants prematurely, and the reason is $$$---fossil fuel, in particular, natural gas, is cheap (right now). Carbon and greenhouse taxes would change this decision far more than anything liberals have to say.
By the way, pollution taxes and 'cap and trade' were originally conservative economic ideas to deal with the externalities in the most economically efficient way instead of by regulatory force. The cap and trade program for sulphate emissions was instituted by the US Reagan & GHWB administrations and was and is highly successful. When's the last time you heard about major acid rain problems?
I'm not sure if you're kidding or not, but the concentration of CO2 isn't nearly as important as the rate of change. A small change every year over a couple of hundred thousands of years leaves ample time for species to adapt as the oceans rise and climate zones shift. A change as rapid as we see today is going to change them quite a bit faster, possibly faster than most species can migrate or evolve adaptations to.
So while it is true that CO2 levels have been higher in the past, the suddenness of the change is potentially very damaging.