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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.
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.
I don't think the issue is removal, but sequestration. Eventually trees or other plants die and the carbon from the dead wood or plant matter must go somewhere. On a geologic time scale it becomes coal, oil, etc. but more immediately forest fires and the like will be returning a good chunk of it back to the atmosphere. Even if we could do something like ethanol in an efficient manner to where we could replace growing crops with drilling for oil, we're still just creating a carbon churn. The real task is finding something that's economically valuable to do with all of the carbon that's been pulled out of coal and oil deposits so that there's a real incentive for people to solve this problem. Telling them the world is going to end in 30, 100, 500 years unless we get our act together doesn't seem to work at all.
I think what we should be researching is how to fabricate carbon into building materials. We've already found that things like carbon fibers are incredibly useful in several domains, and carbon nanotubes have been shown to have orders of magnitude more tensile strength than other materials we're using now. Figuring out how to synthesize those things less expensively would provide economic incentive to capture carbon and a good long-term solution for sequestering it.
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.
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.