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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).
Use salt-waterable plants to turn the Sahara desert green and you'll reach gigaton absorption. For perspective, the Sahara is about the size of the United States.
If one wants to help directly with helping reducing CO2 production then donating to solar and wind charities is the best bet. For solar, the best two seem to be Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ (which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters), and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/ which gets solar panels for people in developing countries. Right now, I haven't seen a specific wind charity that seems to be absolutely ideal, but of those in the US, the best one seems to be the New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund.
Most Americans care about and are concerned about climate change https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-americans-want-climate-change-policies/, but right now, the federal government isn't doing much. In the long-run, actually solving this is, as with the ozone hole problem and as with acid rain going to take a combination of government, market forces, charity, and new research. Until the current US administration is removed, the best most of us can do is focus on the charity aspect.
Just because these technologies and actions might not work well enough does not mean they will not help, and that they should not be pursued, unless there are viable options into which we should put our available resources.
Reforestation / afforestation is the best option, from what I understand. That and cutting down trees at a furious rate so we can bury them in abandoned mines and plant more.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Fact: there is no global warming. The world is getting cooler, and as sunspot activity ceases, we enter another Maunder Minimum.
First I thought that you are clueless denialist, but seeing that you stated that there is no global warming in bold totally convinced me.
Care to share you opinions about vaccines, HAARP, 9/11 or landing on Moon?
No the machine is attached to everyone's wallet.
...but humans are lazy. To which end, note the following:
I read somewhere recently, that - since the big campaigns for CO2 reduction started - humanity has increased CO2 output at an average rate of 1.6%. Before all this attention was focused on climate change, CO2 output was increased at an averate rate of... 1.6%. Even granting that reducing CO2 output is a good thing to do, it is quite apparent that we are not going to do so. None of the sequestration technologies make much sense, none of them (other than possibly reforestation) scale, and frankly some of them are hugely dangerous in their own right.
tl;dr: There's no point in fighting the inevitable. CO2 is going to continue to increase. Fortunately, this also means that there is no longer any reason to continue making exaggerated end-of-the world claims. The planet is warming, some anthropogenic, some natural. it will probably warm by a degree or even two in the next 80 years. Figure out what impact that's going to have, and deal with it.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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.
I'm pretty sure that blurb is not from the report. The conclusions of the report are
There's a lot of text around those bullets, but it doesn't read as doom and gloom to me.
From the introduction
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about how carbon capture would work should understand that that's a pretty self evident statement.
There is two fundemental fallacies in your argument.
1) because climate changed without humans, then humans can't cause climate change.
So, if lung cancer occurred before cigarettes, then cigarettes don't cause lung cancer.
2) changing human behavior is not the same as tinkering with nature. The tinkering/manipulation comes from emitting CO2, not from stopping CO2 emissions. So, limiting CO2 emissions is more analogous to NOT interfering with fires.
Now Slashdot has become a mouthpiece for Leftist Luddites. It is now the handmaiden to a New World Order of oligarchs and bureucrats enriching themselves thourgh manipulatioin of the truth and scare tatics. Fact: there is no global warming. The world is getting cooler, and as sunspot activity ceases, we enter another Maunder Minimum.
Scientists have been searching for a correlation between sunspot activity and climate for over a hundred years, and not found one. It's one of the most heavily researched topics in climate science. (And do note, that the Maunder minimum occurred well after the beginning of the so-called "little ice age".)
We measure the solar output from satellites, and have been doing so for many decades. One thing that measurements tell us with certainty is that the global temperature rise is not due to increases in solar output.
Next time Al Gore or Hillary Clinton tell you about "Global Warming", remember cui bono? Who benefits?
Al Gore is not a climate scientist, and, you know what? He isn't even cited by climate scientists. In fact, the only people I ever hear mention him are people trying to deny climate science.
In answer to your "cui bono" question, fossil fuels are a trillion dollar per year industry. Who do you think benefits?
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.
God you're dumb. It's not "impossible", but we can't do it fast enough to undo the warming cycle that we've started.
"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?
"Re-greening the desert is actually one of the most effective ways to sequester CO2"
Until the plants live their lifespan at which time they die and re-release the carbon to the atmosphere. It's like stuffing the credit card bill in the drawer, instead of paying it off.
Actual sequestration means removing the carbon from the biosphere nearly permanently----making new coal and stuffing it somewhere geologically isolated, uncombustible and undigestible.
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.
Now here is something that is relevant. The average American carbon foot print is decreasing. Slowly but it is going down. While your average Indian and Chinese footprint is increasing. What do you think will happen when 1.2 billion Indians and 1.4 billion Chinese have the same foot print as the average American today?
What do I think will happen? Then you'll actually have a leg to stand on that they are the problem.
As you pointed out, what's important is all of the green house gasses together. Which means Americans are the ones who are the problem, not the Indians. We may meet them in the middle somewhere, but all you've done for now is toss your own argument into the shitter. So thank you.
Woosh. No one cares about CO2 levels at a point on Earth. We only care about average levels of the entire Earth. There has not been such a dramatic change on CO2 levels over the past many tens of millions of years. The last time there was even remotely such a change, it was along side a mass extinction event, and even that change was quite mild compared to what is going on now.
Yea, we disagree. Trump just in the State of the Union Address outlined his thoughts on immigration, including a proposal to give DACA recipients a path to citizenship in his 4 pillars proposal. This is pretty much what the democrats had been saying they wanted. He even upped the total number allowed from 800K to 1.6 Million people. It was resoundingly rejected.
And I don't think opposing Trump will be a problem for the partisan democrats in the party. I understand you have to somehow whip up enthusiasm in your base to drive turn out to have a hope of getting elected. I'm saying that this bashing Trump and being obstructionist doesn't play well with the middle, a group you ALSO must appeal to because they are the actual selectors of who governs us. The republicans can keep making public attempts to compromise and appeal to the middle in the process.
But I get that you guys are between a rock and a hard place. Your opposition to Trump is the only way to keep the base united, but being obstructionists also alienates you from the moderate middle. Republicans may have their factions, but they also can claim that democrats are saying "no" to any legislation supported by Trump and rightfully call you obstructionists. The only other option is to compromise with Trump and give him legislative victories which your base is loathed to support, so that option is off the table.
Think about how this plays out in the long term. The tables have turned on you. The economy is going gangbusters, republicans are being seen as the moderates who made it happen and democrats are only able to say "no" and bash Trump. That may be the only hand you can play, but it's a losing one.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101