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Sucking CO2 From Air Is Cheaper Than Scientists Thought (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: While avoiding the worst dangers of climate change will likely require sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky, prominent scientists have long dismissed such technologies as far too expensive. But a detailed new analysis published today in the journal Joule finds that direct air capture may be practical after all. The study concludes it would cost between $94 and $232 per ton of captured carbon dioxide, if existing technologies were implemented on a commercial scale. One earlier estimate, published in Proceedings of the National Academies, put that figure at more than $1,000 (though the calculations were made on what's known as an avoided-cost basis, which would add about 10 percent to the new study's figures). Crucially, the lowest-cost design, optimized to produce and sell alternative fuels made from the captured carbon dioxide, could already be profitable with existing public policies in certain markets. The higher cost estimates are for plants that would deliver compressed carbon dioxide for permanent underground storage. David Keith, a Harvard physics professor and lead author of the paper, is also the founder of Carbon Engineering, "a Calgary-based startup that has spent the last nine years designing, refining, and testing a direct air capture pilot plant in Squamish, B.C.," reports MIT. "Carbon Engineering plans to combine the carbon captured at its plants with hydrogen to produce carbon-neutral synthetic fuels, a process the pilot facility has already been performing." The company has secured $30 million, but is seeking additional funds to build a larger facility that will begin selling fuels. CNBC notes that Carbon Engineering is owned by several private investors, including Bill Gates.
I love reading stories like this. They best way to protect the environment is to make it profitable to do so. This is absolutely how we win.
I'm still waiting for our too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power....
I remember times when I could ask ANSI C related question at dating chat and I could get instantly at least 5 correct answers ... :-) :-)
Contemporary internet is just ugly reflection of our world
When you engineer a solution that isn't solving the real problem, you typically have to go back and re-engineer a new solution or accept the results of the less than perfect result.
The real problem is we are removing the life that takes the CO2 out of the air.
All we are looking to do is build a machine that replaces life. It will go wrong.
Now you're lucky if you get that on a programming site.........
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Plan 4: Replace desktop computers and server racks with wind powered abacuses
I've done that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
All those ideas were the equivalent of "there's too much litter on the sidewalks, we need to ban production of any product that generates trash", while this is more like "there's too much litter, how about maybe someone go clean up all the litter?"
Just to make the US CO2 neutral! Maybe the Pentagon has some trillions laying around somewhere.
So make the gasoline from solar and come up with a final cost per litre.
Carbon capture for the sake of carbon capture is one thing. On the other hand, fixing the problem of storing solar power is another thing completely.
Remember, remember!
Eternal September,
AOL newbies and bots;
I know of no reason
Why the noob flaming season
Should ever be forgot!
Now that we know how much it should cost to remove CO2 from the sky, we should begin taxing corporations and products that release CO2 in the atmosphere. The money would then be used to pay other corporations to capture CO2 from the atmosphere.
There has been a long history of using environmental capital without consequence and that needs to come to an end if we're going to save this planet.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It'll wind up being way, way, way more than 10%. It is actually likely to work out to between $500-1000 per ton.
Hydrogen gas works for storage http://www.hydrogenhouseproject.org/
If there was only some natural process that did this already for free. Well a fellah can certainly dream...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
At 20kg per year per "mature tree", that's only 50 trees per ton of CO2 per year
The slashdot servers run on a beowulf cluster of wind powered abacuses. You insensitive clod.
I blame Javascript
I might be a bit naive here, but isn't using the captured CO2 as an alternative fuel just going to end up with it in the atmosphere again? I mean the fuel will need to be burned and then it'll go right back where it came from so you end up with the same problem. In my mind the only sustainable solution would be to bury the stuff underground, or somewhere that it can't go back into the atmosphere.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
So according to this study from 2013, we are putting about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year.
Even with this new downwardly-revised estimate, the cost of taking it out again comes to somewhere between 3.7 trillion dollars and 9.2 trillion dollars. Per year. Every year.
It's an interesting piece of research, but don't start celebrating in the streets just yet.
Between $94 and $232 ? I had assumed it be somewhere between $100 and $250. Apparently I was wrong.
If they can do that next step of actually making hydrocarbon fuel from it, then the biggest source of CO2 into the atmosphere, burning oil = turning stored CO2 into atmospheric CO2, goes away.
In other words, the amount of CO2 we put in the atmosphere drops if they can make fuel by pulling CO2 from the air.
Wouldn't it be strange if we actually can store solar power as fuel. Because storing solar energy is another big PITA we have to solve.
Psycho in heaven, angel in hell!
Interesting that you use the word "psycho" . . .
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Every gallon of this fuel is one gallon less of dug-up hydrocarbons, so it does reduce the CO2 we put in the atmosphere by displacing coal/oil/gas.
No, no, no. Slashdot was always about Goat C!
Producing fuel from the harvested CO2 is just delaying the actual release, as the fuel will be burned again and released as CO2 into the atmosphere (I'm sure harvesting is not going to be 100% efficient, so even if you are re-harvesting it, it isn't really a closed loop cycle).
Better would be to harvest CO2 for the production of carbon fibre and nanotech materials, as that would take it out of the loop on a longer term basis, while still having a useful and valuable byproduct (the lack of which is the disadvantage of just burying it). I'm not a tree, nor a chemist, so I don't know how difficult the separation of CO2 to C and O2 is, but it seems obvious that solutions should be aiming in that direction.
Careful with schwartz, or she'll go from suck to blow!
One gallon or fuel from Air+Water+Solar, burned, obtained, burned, obtained, burned obtains..... 1000 times, replace *1000* gallons of fuel dug out of the ground.
It's not just displacing one gallon of fossil fuel with one gallon of green fuel... *each* time its recycled its displace one gallon.
Honestly, Gates has a history of failing to deliver new stuff.... remember the laser zapping Mosquitoes? ... never went anywhere.... I'd like to see Musk involved.
Jim Lee's weathermodificationhistory's web site! Do NOT look his site up (or his 3dclimateviewer site) because you can't handle the truth! Listen to red fang.
Fox Translation: "Scientists Suck"
Table-ized A.I.
Yo momma's CO2 sucking was cheaper than the scientists thought
Think of the plants, what are they going to breath?
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
It will take *at least* as much energy to recapture the CO2 released by fossil fuels as the provided when burned originally (basic 2nd law of thermodynamics). And remember that at most 25% of the original fossil fuel energy was useful, so a conservative estimate would be that any process which recaptures the Co2 releasd orignally back into stable solid sequestered form will take 5-10x the original useful energy released when burning the fossil fuel. And that 5-10x energy will need to also be *zero CO2* emitting energy. Donâ(TM)t let people dazzle us with techno-babble unless they claim the 2nd law of thermodynamics magcally doesnâ(TM)t apply
Uh, there are plenty of hydrogen storage options already in use. What are you? From 1964?
I have a couple of question for those of you in the know. How high is actually this thing going to capture the CO2? And how high is the carbon that produces the glasshouse effect?
It would be weird if we become super-effective capturing CO2 at low hights, and by doing so we starve our plants, and at the same time, fail to make it effective for affecting climate change.
Fuck another copy/pasta troll, what is it with these useless waste of space cunts?
No life? Repressing their gayness? Just assholes? Mentally ill? All of them?
Here's a 3 year old video on a US Navy project doing this same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This Navy project is not new but they have people on the project go around to conventions and such to speak on it. They show good economics, being able to convert CO2 and hydrogen from any natural water source into a liquid fuel for aircraft and other uses. All they need is some funding to ramp this up to something that actually produces fuel for military aircraft.
The largest consumer of fuel in the USA is the US Air Force. The largest air force in the world is the US Air Force. The second largest air force in the world is the US Navy. The third largest air force in the world is the US Marine Corps. If we can get the US military to use the technology that they already have to produce jet fuel then that would be a major win in so many ways.
This idea of carbon neutral fuel production is dependent on a carbon neutral energy source. We have this carbon neutral energy source in nuclear power. The US Navy knows how to operate nuclear power safely. The US Coast Guard is desperate for some new ice breakers, let them have them and make them nuclear powered. Making more nuclear powered US Navy and US Coast Guard surface ships, and this fuel synthesis process to fuel the support aircraft and auxiliary boats, means a big dent in consumed petroleum. Add in some nuclear power on shore to power airports and military bases, and make the fuel for the vehicles that come and go, and that's another big dent in petroleum consumed.
Electricity might work for cars and trains but that won't work for boats and planes. A large enough ship can be nuclear powered, and we should embrace that wholeheartedly for military and civilian ships. Planes won't fly without kerosene. We now get kerosene from digging it up from the ground but we can get it from seawater if we just develop the technology and take the problems of digging up petroleum seriously.
I can't take anyone seriously on the threat of global warming if they do not include nuclear power in the solution. They mention this great process of pulling carbon from the air to turn into fuel but say nothing of where the energy to power it comes from. That says a lot to me. They can't bring themselves to admit that nuclear power is necessary to make this viable. The US Navy has no such aversion to nuclear power. We can at least allow the US Navy to develop the technology they have. Like so many things the US military develops it is likely to find its way into the civilian market in time.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Change food production from annuals to perennials as Nature intended.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
I'm not convinced climate alarmists care that much about ecology. "Ecology... Nature is only model we have that has survived climate change with STUN..." @RestorationAgD http://bit.ly/1ohVqpE
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
The scientists are saying "stop throwing your trash on the streets". But everyone else only thinks the alternatives are the only ones you've proposed.
Yeah, this doesn't really make sense as a way to make fuel. It makes much more sense as a way to remove CO2 from the air and put a price tag on doing so. On the other hand, realistically, we aren't going to stop burning portable fuels any time soon, so any that we can get, even inefficiently, by renewables instead of digging more out of the ground seems good... but I doubt the math actually works out on that (i.e. those same renewables could be displacing some coal or natural gas power plants instead; we are not remotely in a situation of having an abundance of accessible renewal energy that we don't know what to do with).
Actually leaves that fall and get buried and become soil ARE a massive net carbon sink, thanks anyway retarded science poseur Bill. You really suck at this stuff, stop blathering idiot.
No, a) the CO2 comes from oil, we pump out from the ocean floor and boil, taking a small portion of it for fuel. None of that needs to happen during recapture.
There's nothing in the second law of thermodynamcis that says your X to Y efficiency is always better than Y to X. Let alone Y to Z (Z =carbon, X = crude oil under the sea floor).
b) assuming the energy comes from solar or renewables, it's carbon neutral immediately after construction is accounted for.
CO2 is not responsible for climate change, stop spreading misinformation and lies. CO2 is a trace gas, present in minute quantities, yet it's a life giving nutrient that life on earth needs and depends on, these suggestions are horrifying and against life itself.
Have you tried warming yourself 2 degrees using back radiation from your own body reemitted by CO2? Try it.
US oil consumption 2017-2018, up 6.3% or 1.2 million barrels per day!
China up 3.8%, India up 10%, globally up 2.5%
Looks like we are hardly at the beginning of a renewables revolution and oil production is increasing worldwide.
Incredible!
No need to worry about CO2 Anymore, because it is "Cheaper Than Scientists Thought".
So cheap, that this 'new' Thought, will be demonstrated... soon... very soon.
Two weeks.. from the looks of it.
Just plant some trees and they will suck CO2 from the atmosphere and change it to green matter.
Turn the captured carbon into diamonds! I didn't know what Rihanna was talking about with "Diamonds in the Sky", but now I get it.
-- Make America hate again!
Buring 100 gallons of gasoline produces about 1 Ton of CO2. So extracting CO2 is about the same cost as buring the gasoline that put it there.
The solution is "stop producing greenhouse gasses, especially CO2", which doesn't require doing any of the "plans" you listed.
Do you mean "catastrophic man-made global warming"? Why didn't you say so?
Oh, it's so when global COOLING occurs, you can claim you were only talking about climate CHANGE, not warming...
Nobody believes this bullshit any more.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
Billions of dollars of taxpayers' money is wasted every year on this fraud, with scumbag 'scientists' pocketing massive salaries for trying to scare the rest of us to death.
This applies to you "In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is."
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Burning a gallon of fuel releases 20 pounds of CO2. That means this carbon capture solution would add. one or two bucks to the price of a gallon of gas. It may be a tenable alternative to abandoning fossil fuels.
Climate change is solid science, and the way to stop it in this case is tech.
Climate change denialism is a rejection of science, in favor of greed.
Determining a way for humans to survive it's own self created disasters is not "eco-fascist" nor propaganda.
Back in my day, we paid per hour to use the Internet and thatâ(TM)s the way we liked it!
Founder of startup says his business model is like totally valid and stuff!
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
C3H8
For small countries, especially those with widespread and frequent cloud cover, solar is not an ideal investment.
If you are a small country you are going to import your power one way or another anyway unless you happen to be sitting on top of some massive reserves of oil. Your argument is a strawman. Heck even "big" countries like much of Europe import power from elsewhere (gas from Russia, oil from the middle east, etc) so why would it be any different for solar? You put the panels where they make sense and transmit the power where you need it. Plus even places with frequent cloud cover can find utility in solar panels. They don't have to be operating at peak efficiency to be useful.
Globally, nuclear power currently generates roughly three times as much power as wind and solar combined,
A percentage which is falling daily. Nuclear has a waste problem and a fallout risk. Solar and wind have no such issues. People recognize this and are acting accordingly with their interests. Most would rather live near some solar panels than a fission plant no matter how safe people claim it to be.
Now, it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that I'm comparing subsidies for a single nuclear plant with subsidies for an entire class of generation source,
So let's point out that private insurance will not as a general proposition insure nuclear plants without government guarantees. That is a form of subsidy.
Didn't even read the headline then?
This is a company that thinks they can remove carbon at an industrial scale and turn it into fuel, making planes, ships, cars far more sustainable.
Can you just replace your desktop computer with a wind powered abacus and never post again please?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This seems like a bad joke. According to TFA:
"Crucially, the lowest-cost design, optimized to produce and sell alternative fuels made from the captured carbon dioxide, could already be profitable with existing public policies in certain markets (see “The carbon-capture era may finally be starting”). "
So they are extracting it, converting it to fuel, and reselling it. Wont that put it right back where it came from?
Climate change is solid science, and the way to stop it in this case is tech.
Who are you to decide for me that it should be stopped? Perhaps I want warmer weather. Perhaps I want more foliage and larger crop yields due to increased CO2. Perhaps I want northern Canada, Siberia, Greenland and Antarctica to open up and be usable for agriculture and human habitation. Perhaps I want my property that is 5 miles from the coast to become coastal property.
All we ever hear is "climate change bad, must stop, ugh" but why? Ignore the crazies who claim that a few degrees change in the temperature is going to mean the death of the planet, we've been a whole lot hotter with a whole lot more CO2 in the past and the world was teaming with life so that is hyperbolic bullcrap.
So why shouldn't we want a warmer climate, why shouldn't we want northern areas to become more moderate, more land to open up, more plant life? Let's get real here folks, it amazes me how the supposed environmental climate change zealots don't realize this is all a scam about money and redistribution of wealth.
How much does it cost to buy beach front property in the US today? I imagine the rich folks in West Palm Beach are opposed to rising oceans because it means they lose property. Or what would it mean if the US was suddenly no longer the bread basket of the world because the plains got drier but the Canadian tundra became warm enough for large scale agriculture?
And what happens to so called carbon credits? The airlines are paying a tax now due to the Paris Accord but where does that money go? Supposedly it is to help developing nations switch from fossil fuels. Who is managing that activity, managing that money? Follow the dollars and I bet you'll find plenty of pockets being lined before it gets to these developing nations.
Just search for the carbon credits scam Al Gore tried to get adopted. Companies could pay to offset their carbon footprint in a cap and trade model and that would go to an exchange he was a founder of. Exactly how does that reduce CO2?
Rising temperatures and rising CO2 are not a threat to human existence, we've existed during ice ages and we've existed during hotter periods. We'll be fine. So the only reason for all this b***s*** is money and all of you climate zealots, many of who I bet were also supporters of Occupy Wall Street, are the exact definition of useful idiots that certain politicians and oligarchs are thrilled to lead around by the nose.
The climate changes, always has, always will. It might have been influenced by dinosaur farts in prehistoric times, humans might be having an impact on it today, don't know, don't care. The world changes, we adapt, always has, always will.
How about you tell me why you think the climate needs to stay exactly one state and one state only, how is that beneficial to the Earth, the animals, the plants or us?
Warmer climate means crazier weather including more intensive hurricanes and tornadoes. Just because you are an as well doesn't care about other people, doesn't mean other people don't. You also can't easily relocate entire state like Florida especially for the less well off. And while some places may become more habital, many more places will be destroyed. Plant and animal life is hard to adjust to such quick changes.
It remains to be seen whether making fuel with captured CO2 and hydrogen will be economical on a large scale on Earth, but I bet it will have niche uses at least.
But developing this technology for use on Earth may assist future Mars exploration.
Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" and related proposals (you don't have to buy into his grand plan to appreciate the value of its components) relies on producing fuel on Mars for return trips, and to power exploratory vehicles, from the carbon dioxide and water that is found there. This would use a nuclear reactor to provide the electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, the first of which would be store cryogenically, the second of which would be converted into methane from the CO2 that makes up most of the Martian atmosphere. which would then also be stored the same way.
Although you can use hydrogen as a rocket fuel directly, it has a couple of big problems - its very low density, and its very low boiling point. It is much harder to store, and to use in a vehicle. The rocket engine performance of methane or propane is quite good and would be much easier to work with.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Plan 4: Replace desktop computers and server racks with wind powered abacuses
I've tried that, but when I try to overclock it by turning up the wind, the wind pushes all the beads to one side of the abacus.
You're mistaking the goal here. The goal isn't to produce energy. Although you could use renewable forms of energy to produce the carbon neutral fuel, it would be far more efficient to just use the renewable energy directly.
The goal is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with the side benefit that you can put the carbon into something usable to offset the cost of doing so.
What's new in this article is that the cost of doing that is a lot lower than originally expected, and with current markets, even profitable.
If each of us planted a tree, it would consume enormous amounts of CO2 over its lifetime, it would produce O2 for us to breathe, and it would look great for many years. Of course this doesn't have the advantage of making some alternative-energy mogul rich.
More people die falling off roofs installing solar than die from anything nuclear on an annual basis.
And no solar installation has rendered a 1000 square mile area permanently uninhabitable. What is your point?
The "fallout risk" is higher in running 1960s-era reactors past their designed lifetime instead of building replacements.
There is no such thing as an industrial scale fission reactor without the risk of contamination. No new reactor designs have eliminated this failure mode. In fact no theoretical fission reactor designs have eliminated the risk either. It's the fatal flaw in the technology and its what scares people. Yes people overreact about it but that should surprise no one since people aren't rational animals. Until we solve that problem (along with the waste problem) nuclear fission is probably not going to become a bigger percentage of our energy portfolio than it already is.
So why don't we make it easier to build replacements that have vastly improved safety systems?
Because we still haven't eliminated the risk of large scale radiation contamination nor have we solved the waste disposal problem. Yes there are better designs out there. No they haven't solved the problem and it's obvious that people are not comfortable with that fact.
The science is interesting on how they made changes to the capture device to make it more efficient. There are too many assumptions in the study. A big one of them is how much profit can be generated from creating synthetic oil from combining captured CO2 with H to create it. The previous study that is referenced where it was $1000 per ton was storing the CO2 after capture which made it more expensive.
I would prefer the raw numbers of how much it costs to go from Air to CO2 as a raw product. Then go about the costs and profits of what can be created or how expensive it would be to store the CO2.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
Climate change denialism may be a rejection of science but that hardly makes ANYTHING under the environment and climate science umbrella "solid" science. Solid science gives accurate answers to 9 decimal places each and every time. Climate science models don't even give consistent accurate results or even agree on outcomes. Just because this science is our best guess doesn't mean our confidence level in it should be high. And really, I know the issue has gotten overly politicized so views are extreme but this particular wing of science and those who support it have been preaching various flavors of doom and gloom for decades to get funding and while the environmental movement is going strong the doom and gloom scenarios thus far have never come to pass.
"many of who I bet were also supporters of Occupy Wall Street"
.001%, by all means, keep paying me interest, having to borrow it back, and paying interest to me on that interest in a massive debt cycle while being too dumb to realize you outnumber me a 1000-to-1 and could erase that debt without impacting any significant number of people negatively. If you aren't in the 0.001% you must have somehow been duped into looking out for someone elses self interest. Here is a hint, if you and a thousand of your friends find yourselfs picking cotton, kill the guy with the whip, don't give two shits about his investment and plight, trust me it is the right plan.
Okay, you had to me here. This, the complaint about wealth redistribution... the only reason to be opposed to these things if you are in the tiny fraction hoarding wealth at the expense of everyone else. I'd be all for it as well if I were one of the top
Bullshit. Climate change is not science. They rely on computer models to predict the future effects of added CO2. There have been no experiments performed that prove the accuracy of their models. Additionally, the official annual global temperatures are not scientific. They announce the temperature to within a tenth of a degree, completely ignoring the fact that they have thermometers recording the temperature in less than 1 tenth of 1% of the entire surface of the planet. That's not solid science.
I'd rather live near a nuke plant and far, far away from any large grid scale solar installations. I don't want to deal with any of the heavy metals that would leach off of the panels, no matter how slowly they leach.
Got any other imaginary scary things about solar you'd like to make up? The computer you are using to type this drivel has the same dangerous stuff in it that your strawman argument has.
As for the waste problem with nuclear, it's a solved problem.
No it isn't. Your own arguments admit as much. Nuclear waste is a manageable problem but definitely not a solved one. If it was a solved problem we wouldn't have so bloody much of the stuff.
We have reactor designs that could burn the "spent fuel" for power generation, but since they will produce fissionable "weapons grade" isotopes that can be extracted we can't build them.
QED it isn't a solved problem.
We have reactor designs that can burn the fuel down a such a low radiation risk that a guy could literally shovel accidental fuel spills up into a wheelbarrow with little risk of radiation related health issue... providing he isn't exposed for long times / too often.
We have no proven designs that do anything of the sort. There are a few proposed and unproven reactor designs that are probably worth considering that may help with the problem if they prove practical and can get funded but they are little more than proposals at this point. I'm not aware of any reactor design that does not produce some amount of high level radioactive waste and/or undesirable byproducts.
This is all true. Keep in mind that the pilot plant is running in British Columbia, where cheap carbon neutral power is available from hydroelectric sources. As long as you have to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere, the news about the economics is good. But it is probably better to use the electricity directly for end uses than to have to chase all the CO2 around afterwards.
This does open up some interesting markets for locations that have abundant power available. If some sort of global payment system could compensate the people running the scrubbers, people could burn fossil fuels wherever they want and send the check for cleanup to Canada. Of course, increased hydro power demand will be met by Indians (First Nation) by cries of "Muh fish!"
Have gnu, will travel.
a weird weather year this year. The volcano eruptions shooting tons of ash into the atmosphere may demonstrate how insignificant we are compared to what moma earth can do in a blink.
including more intensive hurricanes and tornadoes
Funny that isn't the conclusion from NOAA.
In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic. While one of our modeling studies projects a large (~100%) increase in Atlantic category 4-5 hurricanes over the 21st century, we estimate that such an increase would not be detectable until the latter half of the century, and we still have only low confidence that such an increase will occur in the Atlantic basin, based on an updated survey of subsequent modeling studies by our and other groups.
Therefore, we conclude that despite statistical correlations between SST and Atlantic hurricane activity in recent decades, it is premature to conclude that human activity–and particularly greenhouse warming–has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity. (“Detectable” here means the change is large enough to be distinguishable from the variability due to natural causes.) However, human activity may have already caused some some changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observation limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
But hey, what does NOAA know about climate science.
"Solid science gives accurate answers to 9 decimal places each and every time."
Ummm....
You know, everyone seems to be such gods-be-damned fanboys about GMO crops, so how about we get these companies to develop a plant whose sole purpose is two-fold: (1) Grow and spread like weeds, and (2) Suck up and sequester CO2, and return us nice clean O2?
I'm sure you give the same credence to this as you do to the rest of NOAA's findings about climate change.
Not true. Not all solid and liquid forms of carbon contain as much energy as gasoline or methane. Take the naive approach of just adsorbing CO2 from the air (this is the hard part that the paper showed can be cost effective) and compressing it. A carbon mole of liquid CO2 contains far less energy than a carbon mole of methane.
Before this study, full cycle sequestration was seen as impractical, but given the greater concentrating efficiency here it's perfectly possible to pull methane from the ground, burn it, capture the CO2, compress it to liquid, and pipe it back into the earth about a kilometer where it will be held stable by the pressure for millions of years just like oil is. And all of this with a net positive energy output.
The study concludes it would cost between $94 and $232 per ton of captured carbon dioxide.
Can this be done at home and used to recharge my SodaStream carbonators? Will I need an adapter? How many 14.5 oz carbonators will I need to hold one ton of CO2?
Did you miss the part where nuclear reached 100 GW of installed capacity in 1970s and where solar reached the same in the 2010s? Nuclear had a forty year headstart - and forty more years of subsidies of course. "Why not subsidize nuclear power so we can develop the technology until it is cheaper than coal?" Well, what the hell were they doing those forty years? Apparently they should have already reached that point by now. Oh, but they didn't. Are you going to give them forty more years?
They were fighting nuisance lawsuits that stopped/slowed construction.
Research was defunded by politicians wanting to get the votes of "environmentalists".
Various environmentalist leaders now recognize they were wrong in impeding nuclear.
And there is a second benefit you and many others fail to consider. Modern reactor designs do more than produce electricity. They also clean up nuclear waste by consuming some of that old waste as fuel. The benefits of this cleanup need to be part of the calculation.
History suggests that those 1960s era nuclear plants were not so safe
Actually US coal has released more radiation into the environment than US nuclear.
And back then there was no plan for dealing with waste, it was something we (as in people living in 2020) were supposed to have solved with magic new technology.
Its not magic when the scientists understand the process but the engineers have not yet built the machines. By the way, we've built reactors that do consume old nuclear waste as fuel.
Perhaps there is a reason why nuclear turned out to be expensive.
The decades of lawsuits from "environmental" groups, the interference of politicians catering to the "environmentalists"? Some of the environmentalist leaders now admit that this hindrance of nuclear was a mistake, that nuclear is part of the non-fossil fuels solution we need to address global warming.
Don't forget the environmental impact of the batteries that will be needed to store power for when the sun isn't shining, or the wind not blowing (or blowing too hard), or time shifting its use (ex charging the car at night when rates are lower).
Maybe - there's an awful lot of illegal logging in rainforests though - and I really doubt those loggers replant.
I think you may be confusing loggers with the farmers and ranchers who are converting rainforest to agricultural lands.
Please share them. I don't have any issue with real science coming up with real findings and I don't have any issue with those findings showing a potential increase in temperature or CO2 levels because I don't believe the climate is meant to be stagnant and I don't believe the changes will destroy the planet. So I'm always happy to read real science on the matter.
Not really, most people side with rich people because they believe maybe one day they will win the lottery and be rich too.
Stop trying to extract and store CO2. Storing CO2 is expensive and allows for the possibility of it getting released into the atmosphere again (e.g.: due to catastrophic failure).
Break it down to C and O2, release the O2 back into the atmosphere and use the C in graphene operations.
Big Giant Orange Head sucks plenty, just use him to power the system. He's expensive by ordinary wage standards but that is the wrong way to look at it.
BGOH should be thought of as a terrestrial geo-engineering solution. He will suck, he will blow, and he's a renewable resource! Just feed him (food, ego, porn stars, whatever). In the realm of terraforming the planet he's downright cheap.
Making lemonaid out of lemons here!
Electric vehicles aren't cheap to operate because they're more energy efficient. They use nearly as much energy as ICE vehicles.
That is actually not true, electric cars are much more efficient because they don't need to run accessories (like alternators) or even transmissions in some cases. Even when running off of coal, that energy is typically created at peak efficiency.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, taking all of the factors that you mentioned into play, a 2012 Nissan Leaf emits 226 grams of CO2 per mile in my zip code. Average emissions are 381 grams of CO2 per mile in my zip code. Try it for yourself.
With that said, what is easier to change to emit less CO2, Hundreds of power plants, or millions of cars?
Climate change is solid science, and the way to stop it in this case is tech.
Climate change denialism is a rejection of science, in favor of greed.
Determining a way for humans to survive it's own self created disasters is not "eco-fascist" nor propaganda.
If it's solid science, why do they keep calling it a consensus? They can't prove CO2 has anything to do with warming and you know it, or should. I can show by showing you the historical records that CO2 follows warming, doesn't cause it. That's because of increased biological activity. This isn't hard.
Greed is charging for "carbon credits" and walking away with the money, which is exactly what they're doing. It's a scam.
|But, the way science works is that whatever the best theory we have at the moment has to be our working hypothesis.
Sure, climate science by the very nature of what is being studied is overly complex and chaotic, and will probably never approach 'real' physics levels of certainty.
But if the best theory we have at this time says we are fucked, then we should dedicate a lot of brainpower and resources to slightly unfuck ourselves.
Sure! Also give some resources to people investigating if we really are as fucked as the prevailing theories predict, just in case.
But unless someone comes up with better, more consistent models of climate fuckery, we should believe the 'mainstream' science, and take it as truth.
" Solid science gives accurate answers to 9 decimal places each and every time. "
Clearly you do not know what science is. Nothing real world gives "correct" answers to 9 places every single time. Accounting may count some cash the same every time but that isn't science. About the closest you can get to such repeatable results in science is when measuring simple physical properties. Properties like the spectral response of co2 in a gas mixture. You know...the basis of climate change science.
When operating out to 9 figures it is common to use statistical methods to derive a value.
Not really, most people side with rich people because they believe maybe one day they will win the lottery and be rich too.
People have also been sold a line of bullshit about how hard work is rewarded. If that were true, Africa would be full of female billionaires. The single strongest correlation with financial success is the economic status of your parents. As it turns out, opportunity is the single most important factor, far beyond how much work you're willing or able to do. But as long as people believe that it's their fault if they're not wildly successful, they'll support the system that's taking advantage of them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
CO2 is relatively easy to get rid of, but we have pollution, which is impacting everybody's health, to deal with, and it is much harder to get rid of.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Sigh... Another case of linking citation with cherry picking your own. Here's the complete NOAA summary. Note that, yes, they do not indeed yet observe detectable changes in ATLANTIC while seeing an emerging trend in PACIFIC. But nowhere in this article refute the link between global warming and tropical cyclones globally.
"Sea level rise–which very likely has a substantial human contribution to the global mean observed rise according to IPCC AR5–should be causing higher storm surge levels for tropical cyclones that do occur, all else assumed equal.
Tropical cyclone rainfall rates will likely increase in the future due to anthropogenic warming and accompanying increase in atmospheric moisture content. Models project an increase on the order of 10-15% for rainfall rates averaged within about 100 km of the storm for a 2 degree Celsius global warming scenario.
Tropical cyclone intensities globally will likely increase on average (by 1 to 10% according to model projections for a 2 degree Celsius global warming). This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.
There are better than even odds that anthropogenic warming over the next century will lead to an increase in the occurrence of very intense tropical cyclones globally–an increase that would be substantially larger in percentage terms than the 1-10% increase in the average storm intensity. This increase in intense storm occurrence is projected despite a likely decrease (or little change) in the global numbers of all tropical cyclones. However, there is at present only low confidence that such an increase in very intense storms will occur in the Atlantic basin.
In terms of detection and attribution, much less is known about hurricane/tropical cyclone activity changes, compared to global temperature. In the northwest Pacific basin, there is emerging evidence for a detectable poleward shift in the latitude of maximum intensity of tropical cyclones, with a tentative link to anthropogenic warming. In the Atlantic, it is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on hurricane activity. Reduced aerosol forcing since the 1970s probably contributed to the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since then, but the amount of contribution, relative to natural variability, remains uncertain. Human activities may have already caused other changes in tropical cyclone activity that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural variability, or due to observational limitations."