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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."
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
portland cement capable of doing the same thing, (absorb C02) and make all concrete mixing companies use it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Actually, we are all going to die... just not from climate change.
not me. so far so good :)
"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
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.
Dr. Hillman is not a climate scientist. I don't see how he is qualified to make climate predictions.
Table-ized A.I.
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.)
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.
We already know something that captures carbon better than rocks and takes an extremely long time to biodegrade: plastic. Non-biodegradable plastic is an excellent carbon sink whether buried or used to build roads or buildings but suggesting plastic as a solution to global warming sounds nonsensical even though it would likely work better than this.
We can plant more trees. A natural and easy way to absorb carbon. Only drawback are the pesky humans intent on cutting them all down.
Just sequestering in a rock is sort of an odd choice, it's sort of permanent. With trees, you can use them for something and they're renewable. Even fossil fuels were usable. If we could use the sequestered carbon in the rocks for energy purposes, that would be useful.
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.
Hopefully not many people think that only man affects the climate. Really it is like a river, the idea that man is the only thing that affects a rivers flow is stupid as obviously the weather has an affect. It is just as stupid to say that man doesn't affect the river as he dams it, dredges it and paves over the surrounding drainage lands. Anyone of those things can seriously affect the rivers flow. Climate is similar, we're not the only affect but we're a big one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There's a limit to what trees can sequester. There's a limit to how many trees you can plant, trees die and rot releasing most of that carbon back into the system and if you keep harvesting them, eventually the soil runs out of other nutrients that trees require.
Historically, on geological time scales, it seems that half the carbon has been sequestered in plants and half in rocks. This is good as the Earth continuously replenishes the carbon through volcano-ism and it needs removing. Venus is an example of what happens when carbon is not removed from the eco-system over billions of years.
There's also natural feedback mechanisms, more CO2 raises temperatures, causes more evaporation which leads to more rain, more erosion and more natural rock sequestering, and this increases when there are lots of new volcanic rocks. Of course this feedback takes a while to work.
Planting trees is beneficial and the more planted the better in general though I don't know about sacrificing grass lands. But they're not a magic bullet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
If by using them you mean burning them, then yes the carbon escapes now and then, making trees carbon neutral. That doesn't help with carbon from other sources, but at the same time can mitigate some of them, such as burning oil for heat.
On the other hand, you can also use these trees to build houses and other useful structures.
Then that carbon is 'fixed' unless those structures burn down.
True, but there is no silver bullet in the real world. it has to be a combination of solutions.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
Where does this plastic come from?
Petroleum distillates. Which, as we all know includes fossil fuels that no reasonable profit oriented person would put back in the ground.
I would mostly agree except that recycling plastic is not really that efficient or cost effective. Neither is recycling paper. We actually might be better off burying the plastic and paper instead of recycling it. If we stopped recycling all the plastic/paper or converted it into logs and buried it that would be a significant carbon sink that is actually feasible and scalable now. It would also be easy to implement and cost very little. Not recycling sounds strange but if CO2 is the biggest problem it's probably the simplest solution to the problen.
So limit combustion engine's consumptions, offer significant subsidies to insulate buildings, stop illuminating entire regions at night, invest in high speed rail rather than regional air traffic, and end idiotic ideas like extensive farming in water starved areas (California) and propping up megacities in inhospitable areas (such as Las Vegas). But that bit of overall inconvenience will be too much...and currently we are going the other way like more coal burning.
If you don't mind killing off most life in the ocean, maybe you could bio engineer some kind of super algae that would convert the CO2 back to oxygen?
No need to bioengineer a new species. Just scatter nutrient on the surface in a fish-desert part of the ocean, and let blooms of existing natural algae suck up CO2. When the nutrient runs out the algae dies and sinks to the bottom.
The Haida tribe of British Columbia tried this on a small scale and it worked really well, which made liberals hopping mad because the algae took one of their cherished apocalypse scenarios to the bottom along with the algae.
When we do this on a large scale, let’s use the Pacific Gyre, Sinking algae mats might take a lot of our floating plastic down with it.
Recycling paper and plastics is super efficient. How do you come to you bollocks idea it would not be?
The idea to burry paper as carbon sink makes sense on the first glance, nut burying plastics, what would be the sense of that? New plastic would be produced from new raw oil while burning huge amounts of energy to make it, completely pointless.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Utter BS from start to finish. Parent is the thermodynamic equivalent of the "Gorilla Warfare/Navy Seal" copypasta. Only the latter is ironic.
Increase number of tree == increase sequestration.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Um - no.
Volcanoes vent around 200 million tons of fossil carbon per year, while humans release roughly 160 BILLION tons. All the volcanoes combined release only 0.125% as much fossil carbon as we do.
It would take a truly horrifying year of volcanoes, with 1000x the average level of activity, to release as much carbon as we do. And that would only be one year. One year of human emissions isn't a big problem - it's when you string 100 years of steadily increasing emissions together back-to-back that it becomes a problem.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
making new plastic is cheaper than recycling: http://www.businessinsider.com...
And according to this article, paper is actually more cost effective and reduces CO2 more than recycling plastic: https://www.bustle.com/article...
I had no idea there were editors. I've always assumed that trolls were given totally free reign and that propaganda machines were welcomed...
Obviously the social scientist or whatever he is (I didn't read the article) doesn't know what he is talking about. The CO2 levels in the past have hit closer to 4000 ppm and life flourished. Of course it was life that evolved for the high temperatures of the time and when the CO2 concentration dropped, there was an extinction event and different life flourished.
Eventually (billion years or so) solar caused warming will make the Earth uninhabitable but that is so far in the future that we don't have to consider it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Making new plastic instead if recycling can only be cheaper in money id you have retarded taxes and laws.
It can't be cheaper in energy and CO2 emissions.
You second link is explicitly about cheaper in money. That exactly is why we have recycling laws in the EU, recycling is about protecting the environment and saving resources not about saving money.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Let's be fair - he started it.
Sorry to say that in a US-based site (sorry about the people, not about saying because IMHO it's true), but whatever will be done, it will have to be done in spite of the USA and not counting on the USA.
Let's be honest, it's a troll country. The trolls keep the country from adopting a coherent system of units, from having a more democratic range of parties (there's 2 to "choose from") and from participating in any important global action.
Heck, if destroying the world is aligned with USA interests, we'll have to fight human-caused climate change *and* compensate USA actions devised to promote "US" interests.
My best bet is in France and Germany now, probably with significant help from China and maybe some participation from Russia -- at least, they got the brains, if not the will.
The most important thing is devising a way to get rid of CO2 that can be stopped at will. If O2 rises too much, we're going to have some serious problems, too.
Does anyone know what was the atmosphere composition when man started to be? Or even the Australopithecus?
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.
You probably meant increase the volume of trees. Eventually you will run out of space, or the things trees need that aren't carbon.
The Elections Project notes that there were 251,107,404 people who classify as members of the voting-age population, therefore 115,449,897 of the voting-age population (or 46.3 percent) did not vote.
So 251 million voters, but only 63 million voted for Trump.
Trump: 62,979,636 (46.1%)
Looks like I way overestimated, you only need 25% of people to vote for you to win.
Mod these facts down too if you like.
Everyone knows it's not true if you can hide it, and your snowflake feelings won't get hurt.
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.
If you don't mind killing off most life in the ocean, maybe you could bio engineer some kind of super algae that would convert the CO2 back to oxygen?
No need to bioengineer a new species. Just scatter nutrient on the surface in a fish-desert part of the ocean, and let blooms of existing natural algae suck up CO2. When the nutrient runs out the algae dies and sinks to the bottom.
The Haida tribe of British Columbia tried this on a small scale and it worked really well, which made liberals hopping mad because the algae took one of their cherished apocalypse scenarios to the bottom along with the algae. When we do this on a large scale, let’s use the Pacific Gyre, Sinking algae mats might take a lot of our floating plastic down with it.
Of course they'd mind losing this particular cherished apocalypse scenario. The usual proposed solutions have a tendency to be more interested in being racist and/or classist, with little chance of doing any help for the environment--and no chance of sufficient success to justify the harm they're doing in the name of 'saving the Earth.' (It'd possibly help if you opted to wipe out the political class instead of the poor, but...)
I would suggest actually having some patches where the seabed is not too deep--at the very least, pick spots where kelp can anchor itself--and checking to see if it helps the ocean's ecosystem where it's done. Atmospheric CO2 needs to not be completely eliminated--so you can in fact manage to sequester too much of it--so methods that render it completely inaccessible are not necessarily a Good Idea. If you can use this to set up relatively easily reversible carbon sinks and work on raising fish populations...
Yes, the optimum level of CO2 in the atmosphere is supposedly about 280 ppm. The level now is above 400.
The Sun was also dimmer back then. It's slowly getting brighter. The temperatures would be higher now at 4000ppm than they were then.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Good point that I th0ought of mentioning but considering that we'll probably never see CO2 of 4000 ppm due to volcano-ism slowly slowing down, I didn't bother.
It is actually quite amazing that over billions of years, the temperature has stayed within something like 40K of perfect for life. Sun gets hotter, volcano-ism decreases and such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It's not like I said we should, but we definitely can.
(I tried answering yesterday, but Slashdot went down as I started to compose my reply.) The atmosphere was sampled by snow falling in Antarctica and Greenland in the distant past and preserved as bubbles in the ice. Using volcanic ash layers in the ice, it is possible to date these ice layers. The composition of the Earth's atmosphere at different times in the past is a matter of record, not speculation, back to about 128kyr in Greenland and nearly 800kyr in Antarctica. Work is continuing to get further back in both. Homo sapiens has a fossil record going back to approximately 300kyr, so originated some time before then ; the youngest Australopithecine fossils are a little under 2 million years old, so they became extinct some time after then. So we have no direct evidence for atmospheric composition during their time. But since the biota didn't change much between then and (say) 200kyr ago, it is unlikely to have been much different.
Short version - the only significant changes are in trace gases. The bulk composition is 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen, and 1% argon. The trace gases disappear into the decimal places ; carbon dioxide has changed in historical times from 0.00021% to 0.00041%.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"