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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).

2 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Climate models are pretty accurate so far by XXongo · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.

  2. Re:Complete BS by EvilSS · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

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    I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.