Slashdot Mirror
Can We Fight Climate Change With Carbon-Absorbing Rocks? (indiatimes.com)
The New York Times reports on rocks in the country of Oman that react naturally with carbon dioxide, turning it into stone.
Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale -- admittedly some very big "ifs" -- it could help fight climate change. Rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the Industrial Age. And by turning that CO2 into stone, the rocks in Oman -- or in a number of other places around the world that have similar geological formations -- would ensure that the gas stayed out of the atmosphere forever...
Capturing and storing carbon dioxide, is drawing increased interest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that deploying such technology is essential to efforts to rein in global warming... At a geothermal power plant in Iceland, after several years of experimentation, an energy company is injecting modest amounts of carbon dioxide into volcanic rock, where it becomes mineralized. Dutch researchers have suggested spreading a kind of crushed rock along coastlines to capture CO2. And scientists in Canada and South Africa are studying ways to use mine wastes, called tailings, to do the same thing.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
"Optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilization is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognizes he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives."
Capturing and storing carbon dioxide, is drawing increased interest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that deploying such technology is essential to efforts to rein in global warming... At a geothermal power plant in Iceland, after several years of experimentation, an energy company is injecting modest amounts of carbon dioxide into volcanic rock, where it becomes mineralized. Dutch researchers have suggested spreading a kind of crushed rock along coastlines to capture CO2. And scientists in Canada and South Africa are studying ways to use mine wastes, called tailings, to do the same thing.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
"Optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilization is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognizes he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives."
Next inane 300 years from now question.
Great. But let's fund it on a global scale, along with everything else we can think of. Because https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good gravy, this is the silly season for climate warming theories.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Actually, we are all going to die... just not from climate change.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Their parents saved it and the boomers wreaked it....good job jerks.
Okay, sure. I'm a bit skeptical but do your rock thing if you want...
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Is there a way to convert that carbon into something, ideally with a solar/wind/nuclear powered device?
portland cement capable of doing the same thing, (absorb C02) and make all concrete mixing companies use it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
do u trolls believe teh earth is flat 2? go read your bible and leave the rest of us alone
Actually, we are all going to die... just not from climate change.
not me. so far so good :)
The editors here are not even editors. They are WEE-TODD-DID.
"Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
From that article:
Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”
Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too. Can it be done without a collapse of civilisation? “I don’t think so,” says Hillman. “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?”
I equate all the doom and gloom climate change people with Thanos.
Absorption is a fools' game. It has an innate limit and expanding that limit has to be expensive. What we need is catalytic conversion. Something that can turn Carondioxide into something else.
Life would make the most sense. A living thing that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen + hydrocarbons, using nothing more than sunlight and water. Happily, such things already exist, they are called plants.
The trick is to breed/genetically engineer a safe, non-poisonous plant that does it better, quicker, and one that can thrive in mainy existing climates without significant human care and also without becoming an invasive species.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Human absorbing rocks would be much more effective as they are the root cause of the issue.
No, we can fight climate change by emitting less CO2. And that's the only way we can fight it.
That's simply not true. The best, long term solution is definitely to stop, or least reduce, CO2 emissions. However, we have a legacy of what we have already emitted and for the forseeable future we are still going to be emitting sizeable amounts of CO2. Hence, capturing and trapping the CO2 we have already emitted plus what we are going to emit is a very sensible way to fight climate change if we can do it.
What we should definitely NOT do is listen to a 86 year old social scientist making apocalyptic predictions which are unsupported by real science.
We have coal, we have shale, we have petroleum, and all of it because ancient dead bodies (with massive carbon being stored inside) piled up much faster than the bacteria could chew and digest them
Our trees still grow, but they ain't got no chance to be turned into coal or shale or whatever in the future because the bacteria have become so efficient that they would chew up and digested the tree-remains much faster than the tree-trunks could have the time to be buried and turned into future source of fossil fuel
Hence the approach should have been on the bacteria level --- Put a stop to the bacteria which decompose carbon-based carcasses (animal and plants), or at the very least, SLOW THEM DOWN so that the carbon deposit inside the carcasses don't get to be release so fast into the air
Try not typing like a 12 year old next time.
Dr. Hillman is not a climate scientist. I don't see how he is qualified to make climate predictions.
Table-ized A.I.
no
Yes, you can fight climate change with rocks.
You can also fight mental illness with exorcism.
(I give the rock absorption a better chance than the exorcism, but not by all that much.)
I've no doubt we 'could' fight it in several ways, but even if every human on the planet did something positive one day of a volcano eruption would do more 'damage' than anything humans can do to the opposite. Not that we should give up, reforestation, advances in science and humanity not contributing to our own downfall are goals worth pursuing, but we better start looking for ways to adapt our selves to a changing environment. Whether we are the cause or not, the world is and always has been changing, and the environmental balance in the world has never been stable on a geological scale.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You see that's why people give short shrift to elaborate and expensive plans to "Fight" climate change. If you think CO2, or mankind in general is the only thing that affects the climate, you're just ignorant and not credible.
Too few characters so, LOL again.
The problem is, CO2 holds the atoms at a very low energy state. So you get energy out of creating CO2, and converting CO2 into a different form usually involves putting in energy. But if that energy came from burning fossil fuels, then the second law of thermodynamics says you're creating more CO2 than you're capturing. So most of these ideas for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere involve putting even more CO2 into the atmosphere to generate the materials used to pull out the CO2.
Whether the goal is reduction of CO2 emissions, or sequestering CO2 already in the atmosphere, the solution is the same - we need to switch away from hydrocarbon-based fuels for energy. This is why decommissioning nuclear plants is extremely short-sighted. You're putting all our eggs in one basket (renewables) and gambling with the future of all life on Earth that we'll be able to develop renewable energy quickly enough before climate change reaches catastrophic levels. Why gamble when we already have a carbon-free energy source which we could ramp up within a decade or two, to provide the energy needed to power all these carbon sequestration strategies? Nuclear doesn't have to be the end-solution. We just need it to buy ourselves more time to develop renewables, then we can slowly phase out nuclear plants and replace them with renewables.
There is one way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere without us having to do anything. Plants do exactly that via photosynthesis. They take the energy from sunlight, break the CO2 up into O2 (released into the atmosphere), and lock the carbon up in a hydrocarbon chain forming sugars, starches, and cellulose. Normally that carbon is released again when the plant dies and bacteria decompose it. If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition, then all we'd have to do is let forests grow, chop them down, seal the wood and bury it, and plant new trees to continue the process.
Let's create energy by releasing CO2 and then use that energy to create something that absorbs 1% of the CO2 released.
A much better first step would be to stop introducing tens of billions of tones of the stuff into the atmosphere per year. AFTER we do that we can start toying around with ways to sequester what we've already emitted. Most of these CO2 capture schemes are a little like trying to save a sinking ship with an SUV sized hole in it by using a home aquarium pump.
Yep, there's already millions of tonnes of sequested CO2 in rock form in the UK, AKA "the white cliffs of Dover". It's called chalk (calcium carbonate), was made from decaying coccoliths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., and took about 80 million years to form.
Sea-based microorganisms are probably one of the fastest and most economical ways of capturing massive amounts of CO2 but still not fast enough for our predicament. We haven't got 80 million years to reign in global warming before it severely reduces our food supplies and floods our coastal cities.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Personally I like warm temperatures. And every single time our earth has experienced a warm period it has been a great time to be a plant or an animal.
And for that matter we are actually in the middle of an ice-age. Yes, look it up, we are basically in an intermission smack dab in the middle of an ice-age. Heating things up taint gonna hurt a thing.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Climate change, it's made of people.
The reddit doomsday cults are claiming scientific proof that life will be extinct in ten years because of warming. I think there are a lot of people who believe this. It's fun to mess with them.
Maybe you should die first?
+4C was better for humans for a good portion of the Holocene. Why panic about +2C now? If our nice interglacial is about to end, which it looks like geologically from empirical records, we may well wish we had put more CO2 in the atmosphere to keep it warmer just a little longer. +4C we can deal with. A mile of glacier on Manhattan would force all humans to live and farm below 30 degrees North and South. Have fun with that.
Try not understanding like a 12 year old.
This is an old idea, so why its debated now is a mystery to me.
To use rocks to absorb CO2 requires energy to expose the rocks to the air. If we wait for natural erosion we'll be gone by the time it has any effect.
If we use renewables to expose the rocks it can be a significant help, if it mulitplies the effect of using solar that is. If it is about equal we might as well use solar directly to capture and split CO2.
We need multiple solutions to be applied at the same time. We may decided to nuke a CO2 absorbing mountain,but we should also use the easy methods, like planting trees wherever we can.
Nuclear winter.
Since America produces the most CO2 per person I suggest we sequester away Americans in disused mines. Kill 2 birds with one stone.
Swill like Hillman’s article, in which a crabby old misanthrope hopes that the human race will die out along with his own cirrhosis-wracked liver, is what prompts the same reaction that most people have had to the previous string of crabby old misanthropes, from Malcolm Muggeridge to Paul Ehrlich. These people have spent their unhappy lifetimes making wrong predictions, so, the reasoning goes, they have to be wrong about climate.
But they’re wrong about apocalypse, not necessarily about greenhouse gases. Today’s vast extent of melting ice is the best evidence we have that warming is occurring. Though we don’t know how much of it is caused by human-emitted carbon, it is prudent to work on producing less carbon and sequestering what’s already out there. These are engineering problems, just as those earlier unsolvable problems of population control and plugging the ozone hole once were.
Then we get something which we seem to use a lot of (wood / paper) and it'll release oxygen to boot.
That being said I've seen people, on this very site, claiming that if you grow a tree that is absorbing carbon, when the tree dies it actually slowly releases a lot of this, into the atmosphere, more so than you'd think. What eventually seeps into the ground, hundreds / thousands of years later (?) is very little carbon.
I might be wrong on that quote and he might be wrong on the science, I'm not sure, but long story short, I would have thought more trees is better than rocks.
Carbon dioxide is a depleted gas, it has already been sequestered into limestone and fossil fuels. For now humans are providing a brief reprieve for carbon life forms that have evolved for higher atmospheric levels.
Having spent years studying thermodynamics, including a degree in mechanical engineering, I can assure you that a layer of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doesn't trap heat, simply because those who assert it does say it occurs in the troposphere. The troposphere tends towards constant entropy, which tends towards equilibrium this in turn creates turbulence, high and low pressure systems and weather.. Only once you reach the stratosphere does entropy increase due to ultraviolet light and ozone reactions.
I had no idea there were editors. I've always assumed that trolls were given totally free reign and that propaganda machines were welcomed...
Encouraging that butterfly in that remote location to flap it's wings.
Let's be fair - he started it.
Before you let someone talk you into doing that consider this: Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
- Dr Albert Bartlett
http://www.albartlett.org/arti...
It takes 7 times as much oil energy to bring a slice of toast to your breakfast table as you get from it when you eat it.
Renewable energy is not dense enough to power farm implements or pump water in volumes needed in modern agriculture. Limit the use of oil and you are going to condemn several billion to starve to death. You may be among the unfortunate. But, it almost goes without saying, that the elite who push AGW won't be among those who suffer for their political plans.
Regardless, at the present rate we are consuming oil, if the entire planet were a ball of oil we would burn it up in 400-600 years. Even with horizontal drilling, which is currently making the US the largest oil exporter in the world, we will need to find and produce as much oil in the next ten years as we've used since 1858.
If fusion energy does not come online in the next 10-15 years we are toast.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Life in general, mammals, and primates were doing great before we had polar ice caps. Perhaps we shouldn't listen to "social scientists" about matters of biology and economics.
Or they turn into self-important, selfish pricks who want to achieve their 15 minutes of fame by spreading FUD, as is apparently the case with Dr. Hillman.
Why not plant trees that also rock at absorbing CO2? Once all that ice in Grenland starts melting there will be enough water to water the trees.
So we put the CO2 in the rocks ... can it ever get out again? And if so, when and how? Is this not just a way of delaying the issue, making things good here and now and 'screw the future'? And isn't this just how we got in to this predicament?
It seems like the fact is that CO2 levels are higher. The climate may change because of it. Rather than trying to stop the change why don't we do what we do best and adapt to it? And while we're at it, why not plant more trees not to reverse things but because it would be a good thing, the right thing.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.