I'm a fan of the Climeworks concept, but the article and the Climeworks website fail to address the obvious question: what's the net sum of CO2 collected to CO2 created in creating the energy needed to power their plants?
You would need 10 Hectares of land to equal one of these machine. Sounds reasonably impressive to me. Even more impressive if the climework "tonne" is 2200 pounds and the bamboo ton is just 1000 pounds.
I find that the idea of "climate engineers" and "geo engineering" has markers which will make it appeal to the same people currently peddling climate denial.
My running bet/prediction is that
1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue,
2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat
3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to the same people they feed all sorts of Denialism.
This will sell well because it has "WE'LL MAKE THE WORLD GREAT AGAIN! WITH HARD WORK AND GUMPTION", and will of course be subsidized by the Government so it will have "JOB CREATION!" written all over it. I could write a satirical Ad for it today, and be assured that its twin will play for real in 20 years.
While this comes across as deeply cynical (it isn't cynical enough), it's based on the debacle that is Environmental Protection, from before I started reading news papers in the 1980s.
The news today may be dominated by what America is doing, but lets not forget that it was and still is a MASSIVE uphill struggle to get people to care for decades.
And I am ignoring the effects of funding into Climate Denialism , and FUD campaigns.
In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment.
In a world where clean coal can be marketed, "Climate Engineering" sounds like an entire industry waiting to be born.
sorry, I wish I had something more optimistic to say.
* geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms
* the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers
* much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production
* geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere
* but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above!
edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse
assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution
another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification
Here's another one - eventually and soon, there will be a generation who know no other climate And weather than what we leave them with.
Extreme weather will just be part of the cost of doing business.
In that light, I suppose eventually businesses will want someone to reduce that risk, and will farm the contract out to the most cost effective Option.
BTW the idea I most prefer when it comes to geo engineering - flotillas of little robots spraying water at the poles in order to help create more snow and ice.
> for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/ice-stupas-himalaya... comes to mind as a project where there doesn't have to be a "loser". They are trying to replicate the previously naturally occurring process and the water still works it's way through the watershed.
In the last few months I have read a few articles on hackernews about converting carbon dioxide into usable fuel. My hope for the future is that we come up with a way to capture and convert carbon dioxide even if doing so requires electricity as this would make renewables cheaper and stop more carbon output.
So be forewarned - spending more energy to clean the system is just adding more heat to the system.
Any solution must somehow be a net negative in the long and medium term - and must also not have complex unpredictable knock on effects.
To give you an idea of how often mankind tries this - before the internet there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, my point being that healthy scepticism and a high bar for evidence are the watchwords.
The one-time energy cost of removal might offset the constant cost of having the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's dependant on the energy cost of removal of course.
there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water
Have been wondering about this sentence since I read it, it seems there must be multiple typos in it for it to make sense...eg "London's docks were so odorous..." (makes a kind of sense, during the Great Stink chemicals were dumped in the sewers to reduce the smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink ... not oil I think though?). Is that the incident you meant?
The warming effect of CO2 is far greater than the waste heat from our energy usage. Nobody is proposing cleanup methods that would require orders of magnitude more energy than civilization currently uses.
That's what plants do, using energy from sunlight. Unfortunately, they aren't very efficient at it. So capturing enough CO2 to make a difference would require too much arable land. Which we need to grow food and stuff. And to let the broader ecosystem do its thing.
I'm sure that we could come up with CO2-capture devices that are far more efficient than plants.[0] But the thing is, plants make copies of themselves ;)
Yes. If the electricity source does not emit any (why would you ever do this with an emitting source?), you get to use liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way.
If you convert it into plastics, it's eventually a bunch of CO2 captured into a landfill.
Somewhy climate engineering as a whole gets very negative responses from people who care about environment.
But the climate we had in 1800s was not particularly great either. 1/3 of the land surface was still desert, hurricanes and droughts were common too, so the strategy of reducing human population, using only clean energy, etc. won't get us to a much better place.
Of course some ideas are not great, but it doesn't mean that any attempt of improving climate via engineering is automatically bad.
You will have to forgive me when I cannot fathom how actively meddling with a complex system, which requires a substantial investment by our species in terms of scientists, research departments, universities, government offices - is going to result in a tightly controlled, well predicted result.
As opposed to getting a project with moving targets, hard to prove results, great optics and massive funding requirements.
I think climate engineering/geo engineering are on the lines of the same ideas as clean coal.
But the good part is, that we live in a world where the system will demand that this be carried out.
Climate is a complex, dynamic system, but is not magic.
I have the feeling that most people desperately try to pretend everything is a static system (so it can be described, once, in a non-time-evolving form, and then called done), and in the few cases it fails, they throw their hands up and say "it's complex, dynamic, beyond human comprehension".
I mean, you could use the same argument against entire modern medicine - someone got sick because they led an unhealthy life style, so it's their fault, but we shouldn't try to heal them because that's "actively meddling with a complex system", which will obviously only make things worse...
Instead of being afraid of touching the climate, we should stop pretending everything around is static and being surprised when it requires more work of us. Yes, climate engineering means continuous work, continuous vigilance. Yes, it will surprise us. But it's normal, and we have to deal with it, just like we deal with every other surprise in life.
Yes. But many more survive where, without interventions, they wouldn't.
Geoengineering, if implemented, will definitely be responsible for some deaths, suffering, and negative environmental changes. But the alternative, doing nothing while on current trajectory, is going to be much worse.
And the first bone setters and medicine men killed a phenomenal amount of people as much as they helped, and solutions were terrible until the modern methods arrived on the scene.
Similarly Humanity has been inadvertently geo-engineering the planet.
Modern techniques are here, and they tell us that the best way to treat the patient is not via geo-engineering.
Look my point is cynical and its not about climate science.
MUCH More importantly I am saying that it is the kind of pseudo-science-hope-springs-eternal-last-ditch-effort that people LOVE to support.
Its a product in itself. That is what I am highlighting.
I believe that Climate engineering/geo engineering sits at a special hype junction, a future sweet spot that is going to be irresistible to politicians, media types and lay people who are scared and desperate.
And YES - I hope and keep my mind open to the possibility that we find good tech that helps reduce global temps which is not "pollute less".
This would truly be a magic bullet which would let us continue to grow as we have for so long, while stopping the effects of climate change, and it is something to earnestly hope for.
"You will have to forgive me when I cannot fathom how actively meddling with a complex system, which requires a substantial investment by our species in terms of scientists, research departments, universities, government offices - is going to result in a tightly controlled, well predicted result."
Any model of atmospheric carbon dioxide which is sufficiently accurate for generating public policy should suffice in predicting the results. After all, the model itself should not care what simulated means are being employed in increasing or reducing the amount of said compound, only its' effect at each concentration level.
there are multiple models modelling aspects of climate, many of which individually need super computer levels of horsepower. So separate models for ocean heating, or air currents etc.
all of which would have to re-work to account for the new entropy being added to the system, and its intended effects.
And this gets further complicated by different methods to change the environment.
Unless a climate scientist corrects me, its not as simple as just plugging in a x=x-c.
And that adds more complexity to the model too, not to mention the change in all the data - before G-eng, after G-eng.
It's been said multiple times that reduction is no longer enough - even a cut to zero won't prevent warming at this point. Geo-engineering to actively reduce carbon is the inevitable conclusion.
I can't be sure without a specific source to refute, but most estimates indicate it's pretty possible to avoid most of the damage by ending emissions. It'll still take the better part of a century to naturally remove the CO2 we have already added, but that would be enough to stop massive climate upheaval.
However its very apparent that there's no way in hell we'll actually stop emissions any time soon. I think that's what has been distorted into "it's too late". It'll take 30+ years at the most optimistic to see significant decreases in CO2 emission which is why some people advocate for geoengineering.
Armchair skeptic: manually removing CO2 is the least dumb way of doing climate engineering. It's possible, it hasn't got nearly the terrible side effects of something like sulfur aerosols, and it can actually produce useable products (although the commercial viability of producing graphite and hydrocarbons from CO2 is... suspect). It's a nice dream though, and a fun counterargument to people saying we will always need coal and oil for steel and plastics. Ultimately of course the amount of carbon exceeds our need for oil/graphite/coke by a factor of several million, even over several millenia.
Here's a data point: If we shoved the entire United States into the ocean and ended this nation as we know it, the reduction in GHG's (greenhouse gases) would be less than 15%, maybe half, if that much. A single massive wild fire emits more GHG's than the entire transportation and energy industry does in an entire year.
See "Emissions by Country" section in this report:
"We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use."
Paraphrasing: If the world converted to 100% renewable energy, CO2 levels would still rise exponentially.
Another point they made:
"Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon."
And what's exactly wrong with that? Assuming that technology works, and it is possible to reverse the environmental damage — why not do just that and keep our life satisfaction? Looks like win-win-win for me.
The egg is already broken. We can stop breaking more eggs by either tying our hands, or e.g. strengthening the eggshells or engineering some other compensatory solutions. We are humans, who are engineers. We don't like our hands tied.
Today we can do nothing without breaking eggs. Non egg-braking technology is on the pipeline, and getting perfect. We will almost certainly switch to it soon. Egg restoring technology is further away, but it does not have to be easier, because we will have mostly stopped breaking eggs when we get there.
You can't undo all the damage. For example coral reefs are gone for a long time once they're dead. It's also unclear whether we haven't set off, or will set off, any feedback mechanisms that make it much harder to revert the climate to preindustrial times, for example because millenia old permafrost released massive amounts of Methane.
OK, let's assume you can't undo what's already done. However, if there is a choice between "let's consume less, shut down production, adapt to a less comfortable lifestyle and be extra careful about the environment, so we won't damage it again" and "let's engineer a process that negates the damage we are already doing, keeping our nice comfortable lifestyle", isn't the second choice more natural and rational?
I'm of course in favor of any solution that allows us to do less damage, but I think it's unlikely that we'll figure something out that allows us to continue burning fossil fuels at the rate we're currently doing. Doing both, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and figuring out methods for undoing what damage we can seems to me to be the best strategy.
No, it means that you shouldn't bet everything on the hypothetical ability to undo any damage and maybe change your behavior so that you do less damage in the first place.
I think a lot of global warming activists/campaigners hate the idea of a technological solution as it won't allow them to tackle things like "global inequality" which they see as important as fixing global warming itself.
Oh don't get me wrong. I think that global warming activists have lost, and that the end goal for the planet is set.
I'm not campaigning, I'm cooking near the fire.
I make assumptions about the world, and in the end I realized the best way for me to hold myself honest, is to make a prediction and then see how it pans out.
This is one of the predictions I am confident enough about that I can moan about it on HN.
I hope I am wrong, that either some technique is actually found where pumping MORE heat into a heat engine makes it cooler, or people ditch the idea.
But this is not about conservation or global warming campaigning. I think the ship has sailed on that one.
> that either some technique is actually found where pumping MORE heat into a heat engine makes it cooler, or people ditch the idea
It's not the waste heat that's killing us. Sure, given enough energy usage, just the generated heat would become a problem for the planet, but we're far from there. Like hundreds of years far, at minimum. Right now we're fighting with the heat insulation we inadvertently wrapped ourselves in.
Or maybe people are just very skeptical of a claim made by a company ran by people trying to make lots of money off of this. Just as they should be skeptical of claims made by oil and coal companies that are making alot of money off the current energy system.
The Industrial Revolution -- and all of the CO2 put in the atmosphere since then - was basically "climate engineering". It was unintended, unplanned climate engineering, but that is what it was. We took a stick and poked at the climate system enough to cause measurable shifts in it (climate change).
Many of the solutions being proposed are simply more thoughtful forms of climate engineering, designed with a better understanding of the system's inputs and outputs.
The law of unintended consequences will play a big part here, because the climate is a terrifyingly complex system. But, at this point, it is reasonable to make assertions about big picture inputs and outputs (eg., more/less CO2 = warmer/cooler global temperatures).
So, climate engineering is something that has been going on for a very long time, even if it was not called that. It will continue being a thing, albeit hopefully in a much more directed and thoughtful way.
What is climate denial? Please define. I hope this is a reference to the debate regarding the magnitude of the climate sensitivity parameter. If not, then what is it? No one of any consequence (least of all, someone like Richard Lindzen) denies that there is such a parameter and that it is central to the climate question. So what value would you go for and why? I guess a climate denialist would say it has a value of zero (denies science as we understand climate at present) but we can conclude that Arrhenius (at '5') went too high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity
So it lies somewhere in between.
I see a lot of people saying "technology will solve it for us, we should do nothing. sure I'll fight climate change - when it's zero cost to do so" as an argument to wait for better batteries, better windpower, better coal power etc. This will be another "wait for the scientists to fix it" item.
> "In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment."
If you want a reason for optimism, eventually those two will more clearly interlinked. The question is whether we can avoid damaging the planet before the survival of humanity depends on doing so.
Agree 100% that the introduction of climate/geo engineering as a means to offset CO2 emissions will be an enormous reason industry and individuals lose interest in trying to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, it is far too late for even the most amazing reduction in emissions to solve the problem now, so these techniques will be needed.
Just as most folks prefer to medicate their health issues away rather than making lifestyle changes, by the same token we're going to be living in a more and more over-engineered environment, with each "solution" leading to more "unintended consequences".
I wonder how much use CO2 extracted from the air has. Greenhouse CO2 supplementation sounds interesting but I assume there are cheaper ways to produce CO2 already.
Presumably, most of the captured CO2 eventually ends up back in the atmosphere anyway - either through leakage, or eventual decomposition of the greenhouse plants being grown.
But it's still a net gain if the CO2 would otherwise have come from fossil-derived sources?
Some work has been done on mineralising extracted CO2, ending-up with a stable form that doesn't return to the atmosphere. For example: "... use electrolysis or heat to split common salt, sodium chloride, into hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, then react the soda with the carbon dioxide to make bicarbonate." [1]
The obvious question is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way. Either way its just a fix: we need to stop putting the CO2 into the atmosphere in the first place.
These sorts of ideas are in a weird place. To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts.
ATM, the debate is (1)"is the carbon-climate problem real?" and (2) "If so, how do we reduce carbon emissions?". "Climate Engineering" would complicate 2 a lot, probably splitting political support.
Politically, they open the door to continued or increased carbon emmissions today. They let us avoid addressing the "root cause." This is all regardless of timelines or progress. Just the existence of the idea in public debate might be enough to swing the opinion balance.
I imagine there are some who would ideally like to keep geoengineering as a quite Plan B so as not to disturb current efforts, but that's not really possible.
Overall, I think these ideas (if actually viable) will inevitably enter the discourse in the long term. We are already engineering in some sense. We have models and targets for both carbon and temperature. IE, we want to take control (to a small extent) of the climate. That's engineering, and engineers always look for more tools eventually.
There is no debate and no climate scientist sees this as a threat.
Reduction is needed but it won't cut it its too late for natural carbon sequestering at its normal pace.
People who work on reduction also often work on sequestering and if not do not see these efforts as a threat to any of their work.
> To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts.
This is sad. People thinking like this are actively sabotaging their own efforts and dreams.
It's like a boat with a hole in it. You desperately need to stop the inflow of water (limiting emissions), but you could also use some way to pump out the water that's already in the boat (geoengineering). Because, 1) it's not the inflow that ultimately kills you, it's what has accumulated, and 2) pumping out gives you more time to fix the inflow.
We need the plan B now. We also need plans C, D and E.
What worries me though, is the "human playing god" magical thinking crowd will latch onto geoengineering efforts and gain popular support, the way anti-GMO and anti-vaccine groups did.
Humanity is amazing at preventing itself from solving problems.
Reduction efforts have lost. Deniers have successfully turned global warming into an issue of identity politics, not of science. Once something is within the realm of identity politics, there's no going back.
We should continue to shout loudly that reduction is needed, but we need a Plan B asap. Counting on politics to turn in our favor is a losing cause.
> Working around the clock, each capture plant can vacuum about 50 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere a year, Wurzbacher says.
For a comparison the per capita CO₂ emissions per capita in the US are 20 tons. With an average household size of 2.58 you would need one of those plants + CO₂ storage facilities per household.
There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere.
Some of the resistance to action on climate change comes from the notion that the cost is unknown, which in turn stems from the fact, that to date there was no scalable way to undo the emissions.
Now that a way has been demonstrated emitters can choose whether they want to reduce their emissions or undo them(assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place). I believe most will go with the former option until it stops being economical.
Yes! Pricing is a key step to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An invitation for entrepreneurs hop on board. How much does a ton of carbon dioxide sell for? Can I pull it out cheaper?
Reducing emissions is necessary but not sufficient. Even if fossil fuel emissions stopped 100% tomorrow, we would still have an issue: 403 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We must develop tech to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The ideal outputs are economically-priced carbon-products without subsidy.
The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them.
The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. But unless we're starting from some kind of reasonable estimate of the cost of the damage, however approximate, it can't be right to say that these guys are setting the price on atmospheric CO2.
> The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large.
This is what I'm getting at. There's resistance because we're not giving any specific numbers, only saying that they're "probably very high". This is far from a convincing argument.
With this technology we can instead say: "Ok, so clearing a tonne of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere is going to cost $X. These are going to be your additional expenses in the foreseeable future."
The idea is to price CO2 emissions by the cost of CO2 scrubbing. Then a law would be set in place requiring measurement of CO2 emissions - CO2 scrubbed, which is then multiplied by industry median cost of scrubbing, which would be then taxed.
> The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them.
That's correct. that's why parent poster said "assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place". The cost of enduring the damage would be fines and/or jail time.
> There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere.
Just for fun: Humans have added ~1 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over 200 years, taking atmospheric CO2 from 275 to 407 ppm by volume. Ongoing emissions are around 36 billion tonnes (2015).
Climeworks apparently costs $600/tonne of CO2[1], with 10 year goal of $100/tonne (although skeptics estimate it really costs closer to $1,000, but I see no reason to believe them either). So the total cost would be $100 trillion to $1 quadrillion dollars to reverse climate change (this would be about a 50% overestimate since ~30% of emissions are anti-greenhouse aerosols), and the ongoing cost would be $3.6 trillion to $36 trillion. Over 80 years that would come to $4.85-$48.5 trillion annually, while the nominal GDP is currently just under $80 trillion. So 6% to 62% of annual GDP.
The total cost to transition the entire world to solar power including all heat, industrial and burning oil would be <$40 trillion, for reference. NB that's a very high level estimate with error ~= 50%
That's a great back-of-the-envelope calculation. Main takeaway is that it is probably solveable, but only by government-scale efforts (philanthropy can't cover it).
The real problem is that it costs a lot and captialism shows no quarterly gains for preserving humanity. The best bet would be to have an international contribution agreement that ties something like defense spending to CO2 reduction. Fat chance of that happening, but it could really improve two situations at once.
> Main takeaway is that it is probably solveable, but only by government-scale efforts (philanthropy can't cover it).
Well... Technically possible, yeah. One of the more expensive projects the US has ever done is the Apollo project, which was a bit over $20 billion annually in todays money, or .1% of GDP. Even building the nuclear arsenal was only $100 billion annually. So as a country the best we've managed is .5% of GDP, against the much more politically actionable threat of the USSR. A 1-2 order of magnitude increase over that is pretty unlikely.
Hell, global defense spending in 2016 was only 1.6 trillion.
Wouldnt it be cheaper to first capture CO_2 from the output of coal plants and other industries where it is in concentrated form? Also, economies of scale. Once we bring those down,we would still have to deal with decentralized sources like cars(electric cars and renewables can help), container ships, and the meat industry.
Do they have plans to remove Methane and NOx.
Methane emissions have increased and we are seeing weather changes. One shouldn't forget CO2 is also needed in the atmosphere.
Methane goes away pretty quickly on its own, so that's less pressing. CO2 is needed in the atmosphere, but not nearly as much as we have. Pre-industrial levels were 30% lower than current levels.
wow - <sarcasm>This technology is the future</sarcasm> - as per the article each plant sequesters about 11 Cars worth of CO2 each year.
Since there are currently about 1.015 billion motor vehicles (lets assume those are cars) we would only need 93 million of these things - how much energy do they use and can they suck more CO2 running them causes?
For some reason I thought the runaway in temps will come from water vapor from melting permafrost, which is starting now. In other words, the CO2 ship has sailed, no?
dumb question: say they take xxxx tons from somewhere in Switzerland. How long does it take for the air to mix with the rest so the co2 is averaged worldwide?
This looks like a great thing. The state can tax emissions and force emitters to pay such carbon gathering companies to become carbon neutral. You release xxxxx tons a years, show that you sequestered at least the same or pay a tax.
You could also have a Bill Gates type donate all his money to a such company. Or the government can fund them. If this works, it's just a matter of cash and we have it /can find it.
I visited NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii last month. It's one of the key global sites where carbon dioxide is monitored. The scientist giving the tour answered this, and I believe it was on the order of a few weeks for mixing to occur.
That is a nice link (showing global CO2 estimates in 2006). It illustrates how turbulence mixes the atmosphere at global scales.
The video mentions that better measurements will result from the OCO-2 mission, which launched in the meantime and has been measuring CO2 in ~3km^2 footprints across the globe since 2014. A result is:
which shows vertically-resolved CO2. Both videos make it clear that CO2 is generally well-mixed both horizontally and vertically in the atmosphere, with the exception of Northern vs Southern hemisphere. I believe CO2 emissions from China, for example, take on the order of a week to propagate across the Pacific and reach the Western US.
There are basically two approaches to geo-engineering, and they both have unpredictable consequences:
* reflect sunlight back into space through "albedo modification", either by spraying sulfates high in the stratosphere to mimic a volcano, or by conducting cloud whitening. complication: it will affect precipitation patterns, and allows the CO2 buildup to continue, meaning a sudden cessation would produce wrenching warming. it also does not slow ocean acidification.
* suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. also known as carbon sequestration. That's what Climeworks is doing, but their method is not the only approach. What they've built is a kind of chemical tree. Another approach is to create algae blooms by seeding the ocean with iron filings, since iron is often the limiting parameter to algal growth. algae: the amazon of the sea. a joker named Russ George dumped a tanker of iron into the northern Pacific a few years ago to show this could be effective, but his experiment was poorly designed. carbon sequestration does not address the underlying cause. but we are losing the battle against the underlying cause, which is basically our addiction to economic growth driven by fossil fuels, and existing carbon in the atmosphere will continue to warm the planet for many decades to come, even we switch entirely to clean energy today. so it's likely that humanity will have to combine carbon sequestration with clean energy to avert even worse climate change.
I'm sure a LOT of people would be interested in volunteering for that and while the military is not fighting people they could be fighting climate change, with trees!
There's not enough room to plant that many trees. There have been studies on just how much it would take, and it would have a huge impact on food production and biodiversity.
Meanwhile, worldwide we're losing trees to deforestation, drought, forest fires, disease, etc.
I'm not saying trees can't be part of the solution, they should be, but we can't "just" plant trees.
The total amount of CO2 we have added to the atmosphere is ~1 trillion tonnes[1], or 280 billion tonnes of carbon. That's roughly equal or at least similar to the mass of all of the carbon in plant and animal life on land. Obviously it's impossible to double the amount of plants, animals and bacteria on land.
If you add in oceanic biomass, we'd only have to increase biomass by 25% overall. This is is still practically impossible and we are at a historic loss of biomass and biodiversity. Ocean acidification also makes this impossible.
The scale of global warming is entirely beyond planting trees or anything else. There are 3000 tonnes of CO2 in the air for every person on earth.
At the scale we'd need to turn things around, land is a significant limiting factor. I saw a study in Nature a couple years ago saying we could manage a gigatonne/year of carbon sequestration from biochar without major impacts on biodiversity and food production, which is pretty good but not sufficient on its own.
People seem upset that this is working? Maybe because this provides a solution to the problem that doesn't mean we have to fundamentally change society, or bring down the 1st world, or say that "America was the bad guy to ignore all the EU regulations".
The technology presented here is not a paradigm shift, it is merely another way of capturing CO2. What is remarkably about it (compared to other, known techs is that it does not require an enormous amount of biomass. But by their own admission it is no really cheap technology: <100$ for 1t of CO2. [1]
But there are several fundamental problems that remain:
1. Storage: CO2 has to be stored safely for an (on human scale) indefinite amount of time.
2. Scale: The amount of CO2 recaptured is gigantic (see other comments).
3. The problem of investment without immediate benefit. On a national level, the money needed to deploy this technology at a large scale is basically "lost" for the immediate future, the (positive) effects will be felt later on. This is similar to the situation right now, where we "only" have to reduce the amount of climate-forcing gases, but cannot be bothered to really weigh in on the problem.
4. Most importantly: this kind of technology is already factored in in current mitigation scenarios. So on top of reducing emissions (close) to 0, deployment of carbon-capturing technology is a prerequisite for remaining inside anything like the 2°C climate change by the end of the century. [2]
So the problem is one of framing for this technology. It is not so much a game-changer but more of a sight of hope that maybe given an heroic effort in emission-reduction, this technology might help to achieve the internationally agreed upon goals for climate-change. Hence it is often seen as a kind of moral hazard, when portrayed as a means to happily keep on emitting.
- CO2 is plant food. Indoor growers supplement CO2 levels up to 1500 ppm (after which they say that there is not much return) to enhance growth. There is no reason to remove it from the atmosphere.
- Supposedly CO2 is also a green house gas that helps earth trap some heat from the sun. The link between how much heat CO2 captures based on the concentration is very difficult to find, suggesting that the link is not very strong and propaganda driven "climate science" deliberately doesn't want anyone to know. My guess is that it is very weak at best which is why they supplement the theory with heating will cause water vapor concentration to rise, which is also a green house gas, which will cause snowball effect. This could be tested in a controlled greenhouse but most probably it didn't turn out to be favorable for the propaganda so the research has not been published.
- Climate has been changing throughout the history of the earth and there are no known consistent patterns that we have been able to model which can help us predict anything, not that we have seen working at least. Overall though, it has been cooling and there is no reason that it will not continue to do so in the long run.
- The causal relation between CO2 levels and global temperatures has not only not been established, but it is impossible to establish because of large number of factors affecting it and affecting each other. The best we can get is some kind of correlation but even that hasn't been consistent over time. They keep adding more explanations to anomalies to pretend that they know what is going on but it's obvious that they just don't want to accept it. Max Plank said "Science advances one funeral at a time", but it seems increased life expectancy will keep "climate science" going for a while.
So, yeah some people may be upset that people are touting this solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
A single chart can't possibly explain the entirety of climate change. I was just addressing your points that climate change in the past is like what we're seeing now and that the current trend is cooling.
What do you think is the correct staring point? Obviously if you go back far enough the earth was just a hot ball of lava, and temperatures have been below that ever since.
Showing that temperatures have been relatively steady for a big chunk of human history/prehistory and then suddenly started shooting up right when we started burning mass quantities of fossil fuels seems most relevant to me.
>relatively steady for a big chunk of human history/prehistory
Please refer to the linked graph again. Homo sapiens evolved around 200k years ago. You can see endless spikes during and before that time. Climate has been relatively "steady" for ~10k years after it recovered from an ice age. If the latest is due to "human activities", what about all the countless spikes which have occurred forever?
The current data is the only recorded data that we have which is why we can see it fine grained enough to know how "fast" it is. All the previous temperatures are speculations and it is impossible to know if the rise and fall has been this fast or way much faster.
Anyways, the fact of the matter is, all the climate studies have shown us is that climate is very unpredictable. All of the predictions based on various modeling of historical climate data have failed. And the reason is simple. The climate system is too chaotic. A butterfly flapping its wings can lead to a hurricane... or not, but nobody can predict it based on the observation of the butterfly or all the events in all parts of the world for that matter. Even if we had those data points of all butterflies flapping wings and all koalas farting, it would be impossible to compute what would happen in a very long time from now (a year or decades or centuries). Anyone who tells you otherwise is a snake oil salesman and it's pathetic to see reasonable people fall for this nonsense.
The reason it is still popular despite easy debunking is because why people fall for this has nothing to do with science. There was negligible data and climate models in the 70s and 80s but there was no less enthusiasm in people who wanted to shut down big corporations for "harming the environment". All of the "science" people reference now came very recently and not without organized effort to "prove" that it is the case while silencing and threatening anyone who disagrees by using ecoterrorist organizations and political slamming.
The main idea behind the religious following of climate change narrative comes from the fact that certain people are rich and they somehow should be doing something bad to be that rich, and being rich is bad so they should be departed of their money. That is all there is to it.
Each capture plant takes 50 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year. We are putting roughly 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. That's only 800 million capture plants needed, or roughly 44 million customers similar to the one they have lined up (using 900 tons per year).
Every little bit helps, and I'm glad they are making money doing this, but it's not a viable solution to the problem as a whole. They also didn't say what powers the turbines in their capture plants.
I've always imagined blimps floating around and filtering our air above all the major cities and places where air pollution/CO2 density is worst. Does anyone have any reasoning as to why this isn't really being done?
The magnitude of the emissions. We are putting tens of billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year. Even assuming the filtering process is very efficient (net-carbon negative) where do we store that in the blimp? How many blimps would we need?
As a thought experiment - look at the average car - a Toyota Camry for example. That car emits 206 grams per kilometer. Over the course of the car's lifetime (about 200 thousand kilometers or so) that's 41 thousand kilograms of CO2. For one family car.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 71.9 ms ] threadhttp://inesad.edu.bo/developmentroast/2013/05/what-can-bambo...
You would need 10 Hectares of land to equal one of these machine. Sounds reasonably impressive to me. Even more impressive if the climework "tonne" is 2200 pounds and the bamboo ton is just 1000 pounds.
My running bet/prediction is that
1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue,
2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat
3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to the same people they feed all sorts of Denialism.
This will sell well because it has "WE'LL MAKE THE WORLD GREAT AGAIN! WITH HARD WORK AND GUMPTION", and will of course be subsidized by the Government so it will have "JOB CREATION!" written all over it. I could write a satirical Ad for it today, and be assured that its twin will play for real in 20 years.
While this comes across as deeply cynical (it isn't cynical enough), it's based on the debacle that is Environmental Protection, from before I started reading news papers in the 1980s.
The news today may be dominated by what America is doing, but lets not forget that it was and still is a MASSIVE uphill struggle to get people to care for decades.
And I am ignoring the effects of funding into Climate Denialism , and FUD campaigns.
In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment.
In a world where clean coal can be marketed, "Climate Engineering" sounds like an entire industry waiting to be born.
sorry, I wish I had something more optimistic to say.
* geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms
* the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers
* much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production
* geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere
* but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above!
edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse
assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution
another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification
Extreme weather will just be part of the cost of doing business.
In that light, I suppose eventually businesses will want someone to reduce that risk, and will farm the contract out to the most cost effective Option.
BTW the idea I most prefer when it comes to geo engineering - flotillas of little robots spraying water at the poles in order to help create more snow and ice.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/ice-stupas-himalaya... comes to mind as a project where there doesn't have to be a "loser". They are trying to replicate the previously naturally occurring process and the water still works it's way through the watershed.
Any solution must somehow be a net negative in the long and medium term - and must also not have complex unpredictable knock on effects.
To give you an idea of how often mankind tries this - before the internet there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, my point being that healthy scepticism and a high bar for evidence are the watchwords.
Our environment built itself out of eons of incremental changes using self replicating systems using the entirety of habitable surface area.
I think its extremely unlikely that there will be a single one time way of removing carbon from the air (I'd bet on it).
So we will be left with constant and continuous systems cleaning the air.
Instead of not mucking it up in the first place.
----
You should also consider that the moment people start selling Geo engineering, they will also sell permission to keep doing what we are doing.
So the solution seems to be to spend more on cleaning the air, and allowing us to pollute it further at the same time.
In such a scenario I see things going MORE wrong, with unanticipated effects going on to create more damage.
Have been wondering about this sentence since I read it, it seems there must be multiple typos in it for it to make sense...eg "London's docks were so odorous..." (makes a kind of sense, during the Great Stink chemicals were dumped in the sewers to reduce the smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink ... not oil I think though?). Is that the incident you meant?
I'm sure that we could come up with CO2-capture devices that are far more efficient than plants.[0] But the thing is, plants make copies of themselves ;)
0) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13237
If you convert it into plastics, it's eventually a bunch of CO2 captured into a landfill.
But the climate we had in 1800s was not particularly great either. 1/3 of the land surface was still desert, hurricanes and droughts were common too, so the strategy of reducing human population, using only clean energy, etc. won't get us to a much better place.
Of course some ideas are not great, but it doesn't mean that any attempt of improving climate via engineering is automatically bad.
As opposed to getting a project with moving targets, hard to prove results, great optics and massive funding requirements.
I think climate engineering/geo engineering are on the lines of the same ideas as clean coal.
But the good part is, that we live in a world where the system will demand that this be carried out.
I have the feeling that most people desperately try to pretend everything is a static system (so it can be described, once, in a non-time-evolving form, and then called done), and in the few cases it fails, they throw their hands up and say "it's complex, dynamic, beyond human comprehension".
I mean, you could use the same argument against entire modern medicine - someone got sick because they led an unhealthy life style, so it's their fault, but we shouldn't try to heal them because that's "actively meddling with a complex system", which will obviously only make things worse...
Instead of being afraid of touching the climate, we should stop pretending everything around is static and being surprised when it requires more work of us. Yes, climate engineering means continuous work, continuous vigilance. Yes, it will surprise us. But it's normal, and we have to deal with it, just like we deal with every other surprise in life.
Geoengineering, if implemented, will definitely be responsible for some deaths, suffering, and negative environmental changes. But the alternative, doing nothing while on current trajectory, is going to be much worse.
Similarly Humanity has been inadvertently geo-engineering the planet.
Modern techniques are here, and they tell us that the best way to treat the patient is not via geo-engineering.
Look my point is cynical and its not about climate science.
MUCH More importantly I am saying that it is the kind of pseudo-science-hope-springs-eternal-last-ditch-effort that people LOVE to support.
Its a product in itself. That is what I am highlighting.
I believe that Climate engineering/geo engineering sits at a special hype junction, a future sweet spot that is going to be irresistible to politicians, media types and lay people who are scared and desperate.
And YES - I hope and keep my mind open to the possibility that we find good tech that helps reduce global temps which is not "pollute less".
This would truly be a magic bullet which would let us continue to grow as we have for so long, while stopping the effects of climate change, and it is something to earnestly hope for.
> Its a product in itself. That is what I am highlighting.
Uh. You're right. Thanks for bringing it up.
Maybe I'm not that cynical, but I agree the "hype juction" exists. I hope we can avoid the outcome you describe, but that's in no way a given thing.
Im cynical but I too hope that geo engineering works- and I would also like to avoid the worse case outcome.
and yes, we may actually have to try geo eng seriously as well to ensure a habitable planet.
Precisely, this is in fact what happens most of the time.
Any model of atmospheric carbon dioxide which is sufficiently accurate for generating public policy should suffice in predicting the results. After all, the model itself should not care what simulated means are being employed in increasing or reducing the amount of said compound, only its' effect at each concentration level.
all of which would have to re-work to account for the new entropy being added to the system, and its intended effects.
And this gets further complicated by different methods to change the environment.
Unless a climate scientist corrects me, its not as simple as just plugging in a x=x-c.
And that adds more complexity to the model too, not to mention the change in all the data - before G-eng, after G-eng.
However its very apparent that there's no way in hell we'll actually stop emissions any time soon. I think that's what has been distorted into "it's too late". It'll take 30+ years at the most optimistic to see significant decreases in CO2 emission which is why some people advocate for geoengineering.
Armchair skeptic: manually removing CO2 is the least dumb way of doing climate engineering. It's possible, it hasn't got nearly the terrible side effects of something like sulfur aerosols, and it can actually produce useable products (although the commercial viability of producing graphite and hydrocarbons from CO2 is... suspect). It's a nice dream though, and a fun counterargument to people saying we will always need coal and oil for steel and plastics. Ultimately of course the amount of carbon exceeds our need for oil/graphite/coke by a factor of several million, even over several millenia.
Here's a data point: If we shoved the entire United States into the ocean and ended this nation as we know it, the reduction in GHG's (greenhouse gases) would be less than 15%, maybe half, if that much. A single massive wild fire emits more GHG's than the entire transportation and energy industry does in an entire year.
See "Emissions by Country" section in this report:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Also,
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full.pdf
The paper explains, paraphrasing, how the issues created by carbon dioxide concentration are irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.
Here's an excellent write-up on the conclusions from extensive experiments by Google:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-re...
From the article:
"We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use." Paraphrasing: If the world converted to 100% renewable energy, CO2 levels would still rise exponentially.
Another point they made:
"Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon."
https://climatecolab.org/contests/2017/carbon-pricing/c/prop...
https://github.com/DennisBPeterson/Climatecoin
I presented an earlier version at MIT's Solve:Fuel conference:
https://solve.mit.edu/articles/check-out-our-solve-challenge...
It makes no sense to first burn coal and then try to suck out the 400 PPM CO2 from ambient air. And where are you even going to store it?
Nuclear energy has nearly zero carbon footprint, though. With the closed nuclear cycle (breeders) uranium will last for millions of years.
So? Does that mean you shouldn't try and undo some of the damage?
I'm not campaigning, I'm cooking near the fire.
I make assumptions about the world, and in the end I realized the best way for me to hold myself honest, is to make a prediction and then see how it pans out.
This is one of the predictions I am confident enough about that I can moan about it on HN.
I hope I am wrong, that either some technique is actually found where pumping MORE heat into a heat engine makes it cooler, or people ditch the idea.
But this is not about conservation or global warming campaigning. I think the ship has sailed on that one.
This is just a prediction about a new product.
It's not the waste heat that's killing us. Sure, given enough energy usage, just the generated heat would become a problem for the planet, but we're far from there. Like hundreds of years far, at minimum. Right now we're fighting with the heat insulation we inadvertently wrapped ourselves in.
Some would prefer we get away from carbon-based energy entirely. Global warming is one way to argue for that.
If we find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we can continue to use carbon-based energy and that upsets some people.
Many of the solutions being proposed are simply more thoughtful forms of climate engineering, designed with a better understanding of the system's inputs and outputs.
The law of unintended consequences will play a big part here, because the climate is a terrifyingly complex system. But, at this point, it is reasonable to make assertions about big picture inputs and outputs (eg., more/less CO2 = warmer/cooler global temperatures).
So, climate engineering is something that has been going on for a very long time, even if it was not called that. It will continue being a thing, albeit hopefully in a much more directed and thoughtful way.
If you want a reason for optimism, eventually those two will more clearly interlinked. The question is whether we can avoid damaging the planet before the survival of humanity depends on doing so.
Just as most folks prefer to medicate their health issues away rather than making lifestyle changes, by the same token we're going to be living in a more and more over-engineered environment, with each "solution" leading to more "unintended consequences".
Didn't realize that was so unusual in Switzerland.
But it's still a net gain if the CO2 would otherwise have come from fossil-derived sources?
The obvious question is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way. Either way its just a fix: we need to stop putting the CO2 into the atmosphere in the first place.
[1] https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/25-april-2011/solid-as-...
Wind, PV and waves can be employed for this. You don't need a constant supply and can control capture rate to match available energy.
For many uses, renewables like these are already perfect.
ATM, the debate is (1)"is the carbon-climate problem real?" and (2) "If so, how do we reduce carbon emissions?". "Climate Engineering" would complicate 2 a lot, probably splitting political support.
Politically, they open the door to continued or increased carbon emmissions today. They let us avoid addressing the "root cause." This is all regardless of timelines or progress. Just the existence of the idea in public debate might be enough to swing the opinion balance.
I imagine there are some who would ideally like to keep geoengineering as a quite Plan B so as not to disturb current efforts, but that's not really possible.
Overall, I think these ideas (if actually viable) will inevitably enter the discourse in the long term. We are already engineering in some sense. We have models and targets for both carbon and temperature. IE, we want to take control (to a small extent) of the climate. That's engineering, and engineers always look for more tools eventually.
This is sad. People thinking like this are actively sabotaging their own efforts and dreams.
It's like a boat with a hole in it. You desperately need to stop the inflow of water (limiting emissions), but you could also use some way to pump out the water that's already in the boat (geoengineering). Because, 1) it's not the inflow that ultimately kills you, it's what has accumulated, and 2) pumping out gives you more time to fix the inflow.
We need the plan B now. We also need plans C, D and E.
What worries me though, is the "human playing god" magical thinking crowd will latch onto geoengineering efforts and gain popular support, the way anti-GMO and anti-vaccine groups did.
Humanity is amazing at preventing itself from solving problems.
We should continue to shout loudly that reduction is needed, but we need a Plan B asap. Counting on politics to turn in our favor is a losing cause.
For a comparison the per capita CO₂ emissions per capita in the US are 20 tons. With an average household size of 2.58 you would need one of those plants + CO₂ storage facilities per household.
Some of the resistance to action on climate change comes from the notion that the cost is unknown, which in turn stems from the fact, that to date there was no scalable way to undo the emissions.
Now that a way has been demonstrated emitters can choose whether they want to reduce their emissions or undo them(assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place). I believe most will go with the former option until it stops being economical.
Reducing emissions is necessary but not sufficient. Even if fossil fuel emissions stopped 100% tomorrow, we would still have an issue: 403 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We must develop tech to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The ideal outputs are economically-priced carbon-products without subsidy.
The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. But unless we're starting from some kind of reasonable estimate of the cost of the damage, however approximate, it can't be right to say that these guys are setting the price on atmospheric CO2.
This is what I'm getting at. There's resistance because we're not giving any specific numbers, only saying that they're "probably very high". This is far from a convincing argument.
With this technology we can instead say: "Ok, so clearing a tonne of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere is going to cost $X. These are going to be your additional expenses in the foreseeable future."
That's correct. that's why parent poster said "assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place". The cost of enduring the damage would be fines and/or jail time.
Just for fun: Humans have added ~1 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over 200 years, taking atmospheric CO2 from 275 to 407 ppm by volume. Ongoing emissions are around 36 billion tonnes (2015).
Climeworks apparently costs $600/tonne of CO2[1], with 10 year goal of $100/tonne (although skeptics estimate it really costs closer to $1,000, but I see no reason to believe them either). So the total cost would be $100 trillion to $1 quadrillion dollars to reverse climate change (this would be about a 50% overestimate since ~30% of emissions are anti-greenhouse aerosols), and the ongoing cost would be $3.6 trillion to $36 trillion. Over 80 years that would come to $4.85-$48.5 trillion annually, while the nominal GDP is currently just under $80 trillion. So 6% to 62% of annual GDP.
The total cost to transition the entire world to solar power including all heat, industrial and burning oil would be <$40 trillion, for reference. NB that's a very high level estimate with error ~= 50%
[1]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-capture-1-g...
The real problem is that it costs a lot and captialism shows no quarterly gains for preserving humanity. The best bet would be to have an international contribution agreement that ties something like defense spending to CO2 reduction. Fat chance of that happening, but it could really improve two situations at once.
Well... Technically possible, yeah. One of the more expensive projects the US has ever done is the Apollo project, which was a bit over $20 billion annually in todays money, or .1% of GDP. Even building the nuclear arsenal was only $100 billion annually. So as a country the best we've managed is .5% of GDP, against the much more politically actionable threat of the USSR. A 1-2 order of magnitude increase over that is pretty unlikely.
Hell, global defense spending in 2016 was only 1.6 trillion.
Would be relevant to get Climeworks' perspective on the question of point source vs atmospheric carbon dioxide.
This looks like a great thing. The state can tax emissions and force emitters to pay such carbon gathering companies to become carbon neutral. You release xxxxx tons a years, show that you sequestered at least the same or pay a tax.
You could also have a Bill Gates type donate all his money to a such company. Or the government can fund them. If this works, it's just a matter of cash and we have it /can find it.
I visited NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii last month. It's one of the key global sites where carbon dioxide is monitored. The scientist giving the tour answered this, and I believe it was on the order of a few weeks for mixing to occur.
Here's a visualization that starts to answer your question: https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-comp...
I would love a more detailed answer to this question as well.
(I visited the Mauna Loa Ovservatory because of our open source project to track carbon dioxide worldwide: https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby http://carbondoomsday.com)
The video mentions that better measurements will result from the OCO-2 mission, which launched in the meantime and has been measuring CO2 in ~3km^2 footprints across the globe since 2014. A result is:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4514
which shows vertically-resolved CO2. Both videos make it clear that CO2 is generally well-mixed both horizontally and vertically in the atmosphere, with the exception of Northern vs Southern hemisphere. I believe CO2 emissions from China, for example, take on the order of a week to propagate across the Pacific and reach the Western US.
* reflect sunlight back into space through "albedo modification", either by spraying sulfates high in the stratosphere to mimic a volcano, or by conducting cloud whitening. complication: it will affect precipitation patterns, and allows the CO2 buildup to continue, meaning a sudden cessation would produce wrenching warming. it also does not slow ocean acidification.
* suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. also known as carbon sequestration. That's what Climeworks is doing, but their method is not the only approach. What they've built is a kind of chemical tree. Another approach is to create algae blooms by seeding the ocean with iron filings, since iron is often the limiting parameter to algal growth. algae: the amazon of the sea. a joker named Russ George dumped a tanker of iron into the northern Pacific a few years ago to show this could be effective, but his experiment was poorly designed. carbon sequestration does not address the underlying cause. but we are losing the battle against the underlying cause, which is basically our addiction to economic growth driven by fossil fuels, and existing carbon in the atmosphere will continue to warm the planet for many decades to come, even we switch entirely to clean energy today. so it's likely that humanity will have to combine carbon sequestration with clean energy to avert even worse climate change.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/geoengineerin...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170724105044.h...
http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/iron-dumping-leaves-geoe...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/re-engi...
I'm sure a LOT of people would be interested in volunteering for that and while the military is not fighting people they could be fighting climate change, with trees!
Meanwhile, worldwide we're losing trees to deforestation, drought, forest fires, disease, etc.
I'm not saying trees can't be part of the solution, they should be, but we can't "just" plant trees.
If you add in oceanic biomass, we'd only have to increase biomass by 25% overall. This is is still practically impossible and we are at a historic loss of biomass and biodiversity. Ocean acidification also makes this impossible.
The scale of global warming is entirely beyond planting trees or anything else. There are 3000 tonnes of CO2 in the air for every person on earth.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...
And then from [https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions]:
> Global carbon (C) emissions from fossil fuel use were 9.795 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2014 (or 35.9 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide).
This doesn't seem like a great solution to me.
But there are several fundamental problems that remain: 1. Storage: CO2 has to be stored safely for an (on human scale) indefinite amount of time. 2. Scale: The amount of CO2 recaptured is gigantic (see other comments). 3. The problem of investment without immediate benefit. On a national level, the money needed to deploy this technology at a large scale is basically "lost" for the immediate future, the (positive) effects will be felt later on. This is similar to the situation right now, where we "only" have to reduce the amount of climate-forcing gases, but cannot be bothered to really weigh in on the problem. 4. Most importantly: this kind of technology is already factored in in current mitigation scenarios. So on top of reducing emissions (close) to 0, deployment of carbon-capturing technology is a prerequisite for remaining inside anything like the 2°C climate change by the end of the century. [2]
So the problem is one of framing for this technology. It is not so much a game-changer but more of a sight of hope that maybe given an heroic effort in emission-reduction, this technology might help to achieve the internationally agreed upon goals for climate-change. Hence it is often seen as a kind of moral hazard, when portrayed as a means to happily keep on emitting.
[1] http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/
[2] e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
- Supposedly CO2 is also a green house gas that helps earth trap some heat from the sun. The link between how much heat CO2 captures based on the concentration is very difficult to find, suggesting that the link is not very strong and propaganda driven "climate science" deliberately doesn't want anyone to know. My guess is that it is very weak at best which is why they supplement the theory with heating will cause water vapor concentration to rise, which is also a green house gas, which will cause snowball effect. This could be tested in a controlled greenhouse but most probably it didn't turn out to be favorable for the propaganda so the research has not been published.
- Climate has been changing throughout the history of the earth and there are no known consistent patterns that we have been able to model which can help us predict anything, not that we have seen working at least. Overall though, it has been cooling and there is no reason that it will not continue to do so in the long run.
- The causal relation between CO2 levels and global temperatures has not only not been established, but it is impossible to establish because of large number of factors affecting it and affecting each other. The best we can get is some kind of correlation but even that hasn't been consistent over time. They keep adding more explanations to anomalies to pretend that they know what is going on but it's obvious that they just don't want to accept it. Max Plank said "Science advances one funeral at a time", but it seems increased life expectancy will keep "climate science" going for a while.
So, yeah some people may be upset that people are touting this solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Showing that temperatures have been relatively steady for a big chunk of human history/prehistory and then suddenly started shooting up right when we started burning mass quantities of fossil fuels seems most relevant to me.
Please refer to the linked graph again. Homo sapiens evolved around 200k years ago. You can see endless spikes during and before that time. Climate has been relatively "steady" for ~10k years after it recovered from an ice age. If the latest is due to "human activities", what about all the countless spikes which have occurred forever?
Anyways, the fact of the matter is, all the climate studies have shown us is that climate is very unpredictable. All of the predictions based on various modeling of historical climate data have failed. And the reason is simple. The climate system is too chaotic. A butterfly flapping its wings can lead to a hurricane... or not, but nobody can predict it based on the observation of the butterfly or all the events in all parts of the world for that matter. Even if we had those data points of all butterflies flapping wings and all koalas farting, it would be impossible to compute what would happen in a very long time from now (a year or decades or centuries). Anyone who tells you otherwise is a snake oil salesman and it's pathetic to see reasonable people fall for this nonsense.
The reason it is still popular despite easy debunking is because why people fall for this has nothing to do with science. There was negligible data and climate models in the 70s and 80s but there was no less enthusiasm in people who wanted to shut down big corporations for "harming the environment". All of the "science" people reference now came very recently and not without organized effort to "prove" that it is the case while silencing and threatening anyone who disagrees by using ecoterrorist organizations and political slamming.
The main idea behind the religious following of climate change narrative comes from the fact that certain people are rich and they somehow should be doing something bad to be that rich, and being rich is bad so they should be departed of their money. That is all there is to it.
Every little bit helps, and I'm glad they are making money doing this, but it's not a viable solution to the problem as a whole. They also didn't say what powers the turbines in their capture plants.
As a thought experiment - look at the average car - a Toyota Camry for example. That car emits 206 grams per kilometer. Over the course of the car's lifetime (about 200 thousand kilometers or so) that's 41 thousand kilograms of CO2. For one family car.