Carbon capture could theoretically work. With VERY heavy use of nuclear power, which the advocates for carbon capture, in my experience, almost always advocate against. And even then, the energy is much better used on other stuff.
you absolutely can recycle some plastics. hdpe, ldpe, eps to name a few. doesnt mean they are good, or we should keep using them. but you are wrong in general
you said it doesnt work- so i pointed out it does in fact work, in the literal sense. if you were implying that it doesnt work economically, then its more complicated. look at some of the eu, they successfully recycle a lot more thanks to more regulation and perhaps subsidies. so, it could work better here in america, if there were more laws as well as incentives. i run a eps (styrofoam) recycling facility btw.
How are we going to deal with already emitted carbon after we transition to a post carbon world? I haven't looked at the latest UN climate change reports but I recall previous ones indicating that carbon capture needs to be part of the mix of solutions to limit us to ~2 degrees warming (now probably 2.3 degrees :/)
Or we can just face reality and start actively controlling the climate (meaning reduce temperature directly without doing what's essentially outlawed by the second law of thermodynamics. Ie. unmixing gases)
Ironically, solar panels do exactly what. Especially on water. Water absorbs 93% of solar radiation. Solar panels aborb 30% to 70%. Global warming (all of it, all 150 years) is about a 0.7% change in albedo, so "bad" (30% absorption 70% reflection) solar planels on water (or concrete, or grass) undo ALL global warming on 90 times their surface area. And you can do better than that. You can just paint 3% of the land area of the planet of 1% of the ocean, and undo global warming.
If the UN climate change panel is not talking about this I assume its probably nonsense. They have been at this for decades before "saving the environment" was even in vogue. Do you have any studies to back this up?
Reflecting sunlight back from space (bubbles in L2 (?) stable orbit), and reflecting sunlight back from high atmosphere (aerosol injection) have both been studied and atmospheric geoengineering has already begun at a tiny tiny scale by independant VC types.
Reflection from ground based surfaces not so much - I suspect the issue is reflection isn't absolute and transfers heat - the oceans reflect back light while warming the ocean surface layer is already part of the dynamic, solar panels and other reflective objects will also heat up and transfer that heat to the lower atmosphere land|sea layer.
That aside, there's some merit in the notion, it should have been looked at and there's likely a paper or three on the subject.
I think you will find the UN position on geo-engineering is quite simple:
1) It will work. Not just the technique suggested above, but a lot of of them.
2) That's bad: it will "normalise" dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and take away power from the climate organisations of the UN, including UNEP.
3) They want it outlawed. Why? Because geoengineering can be so effective that a single decent-size city can counteract all or a significant portion of all global warming.
4) They warn that this will produce large scale unintended consequences. Such as stopping water supplies that depend on glacial melting (and for the first X years (decades?) will actually almost entirely stop glacial melting, which "may" make places like California, the Indus valley and most of inner Mongolia, maybe all of inner China, unliveable. Also it will probably start expanding the sahara again (due to climate change it's shrinking now), which will also destroy communities)
(why? It is not possible to pump large amounts water either upwards, or along long distances. We don't have the power for that. So even if you collect the water desalinated, it can't be used to make those places liveable for anywhere the amounts of people currently living there)
The majority of members advising the UN want it regulated, sure, and that's a sensible position due to unforeseen risks and the fossil fuel industry using a small amount of geoengineering that counters a portion of the problem as an excuse to double down on activity that continues to cause most of the problem.
As you link notes:
In 2019, its attempt to get countries to agree to the development of a governance framework failed as a result of opposition from Donald Trump’s USA and Saudi Arabia – who didn’t want restrictions on geoengineering.
I think we can all agree that nothing could possibly go wrong with Trump and the Saudi's at the throttle caring for the well being of humans across the globe. /s
You can joke about Trump, but he may get elected again. Which means this position won't change, at least for 9 months + let's say 1 year, potentially for 5 years, and we don't know where we'll be then.
> The majority of members advising the UN want it regulated, sure, and that's a sensible position due to unforeseen risks and the fossil fuel industry using a small amount of geoengineering that counters a portion of the problem as an excuse to double down on activity that continues to cause most of the problem.
Yeah, but read between the lines: they don't want it regulated, they want it outlawed, and, at least to a significant extent. They want it outlawed, firstly because if it isn't outlawed their power will disappear. And secondly, because no matter how you change the climate, it'll have the same problem any large infrastructure seems to have. Geoengineering WILL be incredibly good for some regions (who therefore may choose the lone wolf approach), AND will have devastating consequences for other regions. Someone will benefit greatly, someone will suffer.
And, frankly, if we're being honest ... "the West" (Europe/America/Russia/China/Northern Africa... even India) will benefit greatly, if we're honest. Africa and South America, and Indonesia will suffer.
But of course there's the identified problem. A decent-sized city could undo global warming (amplifying it is actually harder) BY ITSELF. Something like London or Paris or New York definitely could do it with the city's budget and land, and maybe even something like Milan would be big enough. Which brings the question: countries like Congo will greatly benefit from stopping global warming. They can, if they want to. What do we do then? Because, ironically, if they stop global warming through geoengineering, it will be a huge problem for "the West".
Is it? Would it be better that the demand for gas was satisfied by exploring and drilling new gas fields rather than using the ones we already have more efficiently?
Apparently that one isn't quite so clear cut. At least in the case of LNG, its greenhouse gas emmissions are pretty awful when you look at how much methane leaks out into the atmosphere (e.g. during processing and transport). At least with coal, it's unlikely to end up in the atmosphere unless its burnt.
Liquefying and transporting natural gas across an ocean by ship seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. But here we are, doing just that.
"Methane (CH4) emissions from coal mining and abandoned coal mines accounted for about 8% of total U.S. methane emissions in 2019. It was the fifth-largest methane-emitting sector"
Thanks for pointing that out. Even if it is depressing that even abandoned coal mines are still contributing to greenhouse gas emmissions. There are thousands of operational coal mines. Probably hundreds of thousands of abandoned ones. How we are ever going to curb climate change is beyond me.
> "How we are ever going to curb climate change is beyond me."
At this point, we're simply not going to "curb climate change", sadly. We've left the lunatics in charge of the asylum for entirely too long, and they've set the place ablaze. All that's left to do now is stand back and watch it burn while the lunatics blame all of us for the fire they started.
It would be better to put less C02 into the atmosphere.
Currently exploration for new fields and exploitation of current fields takes place in parallel, and extraction is continuously increasing.
Global C02 output is still increasing.
It would be better to reduce | stabilise consumption while bringing other renewable resources to peak rather than "greenwashing" LNG fields with falsehoods about carbon capture and offsets.
Yes, I understand the numbers, I have ~ 4 decades in exploration geophysics about the globe.
Your framing suggests that only a solution that does the same thing, i.e. produce X amounts of power is valid. This the core of the climate crisis. As long as we cling to our ways of life this will only get worse. Physics doesn't care about our arguments. As long as we keep using finite resources, it will make the problems worse.
Please carefully re-read what I've written in the parent comment. I do not talk about wishing, nor suggesting we should change. My point was, if we add more CO2, we make the situation worse. Maybe natural gas and carbon capture make the situation worse less fast than before. But they are still making the situation worse. There is no bargaining with physics. These "solutions" also involve mining and manufacturing, which in itself are extractive practices, further advancing the use of limited resources.
As an example, take a serial murderer. Now they say they plan to reduce their murdering from 3 people a month to 1. You argue that is good, full stop. I say it's less bad, but I wouldn't call the new situation good.
> ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic cutaway illustration you requested, showing the system that extracts natural gas from beneath the North Sea, the CO2 removal process, and the CO2 injection into a subsea salt brine cavern.
It’s anti-information really. It distracts the brain and prevents us from better imagining the real facility, or let’s the author imagine they’ve done work instead of actually finding a suitable photo of the facility.
Reminds me of the images on this article from last year, which when they were first posted didn’t even have the clarifying captions they have now:
https://newatlas.com/lifestyle/powdered-beer/
AI is just the next step of the worthless newspaper illustration, before that they used stock images. They know people are more likely to stay on an article which has images so they invent some even if it doesn't make sense.
Not useful, but artistic in nature. A number of magazines used to have illustrators do something similar in cases where there was no appropriate imagery.
Counterpoint: the operators and engineers failed to develop designs which are safe and commercially viable. The actual cost of Nuclear has exceeded all reasonable levels. The continued subsidies would have been much better spent on developing renewables.
France has been getting the majority of its power from nuclear for the last 40 years. The French have such a low carbon footprint that if the entire developed world came down to the French level, the entire developing world could come up to the French level—without increasing CO2 emissions compared to today’s levels.
Yeah, we can spend money “developing renewables” now. But we are basically out of time already. Nuclear is something we could have deployed at the national grid scale 50 years ago, which would’ve been impossible with renewables. Now, anything we do—barring a major advance in carbon capture—will be too little too late.
Even as of 2022, Germany gets only 40% of total power consumption from wind, solar, and hydro. It will take Germany until probably 2030 or so to get to the same place France was at in 1990.
And the French are the only ones doing that. Also, back when France built its nuclear reactors, climate change and CO2 emissions were nothing people considered or where bothered with.
Love it how the only feasible way forward from where we stand now, aka massive investments in renewables of all kinds, is always countered by what we should have done decades ago, usually by die hard nuclear fan boys. Just a very lazy way of argueing with 20/20 hindsight.
Green house gasses and global warming were well understood since the 1970s. In fact, fossil fuel companies did their best to silence their own research showing it on three fronts as I understand it:
1. Promoting a global cooling theory to prime the public with a theory that’s easily discredited so that people think “those scientists don’t know anything”
2. Funding greenpeace and other environmentalist groups that were anti nuclear
3. Funding politicians who promoted an anti nuclear message.
It is a bit of a conspiracy theory to link each individual point together into a narrative, but I believe #1 and #2 are generally known and have evidence for while #3 is probably a conjecture on my part.
Anyway, global warming was a known issue since the 1970s. Heck - I did a report for geography class on how big a problem global warming would be in the mid 90s.
Regardless, I’ll counter and say that nuclear is still cheaper than solar which is about competitive only if you exclude storage. So from that perspective, combined with Whrite’s law, bucket nuclear is still the better investment option. The only challenge is we’ve killed our nuclear manufacturing industry so hard there’s going to be an extra cost to spin it up again.
Basically everything in comment is factually wrong so...
Edit:
Nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar, based on auction prices for projects since 2017 (?). Nuclear net capacity gains are miniscule for decades now, and will for decades. Most new reactors replace old obes. At the same time glovally more wind and solar capacity is installed in a month than nuclear in more than a year (look up the numbers for yourself).
Anti-nuclear movements were a result from Chernobyl, and they were, violently at times, oppossed by govenrments. The reason why not more goes into juclear projects is easy: the ROI is too low.
Nuclear is not more expensive once you factor in storage as that’s required for wind/solar to compete on an even field. Nuclear would also get cheaper if we built more of it.
Nice talking points. And they work, if you ignore realities around nuclear built out or assume the low numbers are due to some kind of conspiracy. And storage, well, you'd be surprise how much storage you actually need in modern grids.
The prices I refer to so, are real world costs and feed prices for real world projects. Unless you believe people calculating those professionally don't know what they do, I hope we can agree that the are correct and can serve as valid basis for comparisons and discusion.
Please show me a single wind/solar installation that has storage priced in. These projects are being priced without storage nor are any that I’m aware of being constructed to supply baseload power precisely because grid scale storage for intermittent renewables is expensive and unsolved. So no, I don’t agree that evaluating the price of non-baseload power projects tells us anything about the costs involved with baseload power plants.
Let me know of a place without baseload generation / with it replaced by renewables. These are interesting claims to make but there’s no existence proof.
Almost every place that goes all in on renewables inevitably uses fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro to backfill the baseload demand (and usually fossil fuels since nuclear has very few projects and hydro is very regional and maxed out wherever practical).
And it's all a fools errand, the environment is known to be susceptible to extra planetary events so it's an utterly brain dead fallacy to assume carbon control has any effect in the long run.
It is a matter of scale and probability. Do volcanoes add GH gases to the atmosphere? They do. We cannot control it with the technology we have. They also only emit about 0.13 to 0.44 gigatons per year, while human activity releases 35 gigatons per year.
What other factors? Solar variation accounts for a much smaller change over the span of the decades long solar cycle. The total solar output hitting the Earth doesn't really change. What does change is how much of that heat is retained.
What other extra planetary events are you referring to? Meteorites? The numbers look high, but the total mass (~15000 tons/yr) is miniscule compared to what volcanos produce.
Are you talking about any other specific "extra planetary event" that affects the climate?
Look mate, we can't even stop the economy blowing up every 10 years, and that's just a human construct. If you think that these morons can some how control the climate i really don't know what to say.
It boils down to a simple problem with two avenues of action.
Look mate, your car has always been oxidising. What do you think is more achievable, putting out the fire I set or just adapting?
What? No, of course you're not allowed to try more than one.
Honestly all those non-arson factors that cause oxidation means it's pretty brain dead to assume me setting a fire had anything to do with it. You're probably just going to have to live with all your stuff being on fire, just a hazard of living in a oxygen-having environment.
So are you arguing that it is impossible to reduce our civilization's GHG output, or that reducing it doesn't make a difference?
If the latter, well, I don't know what to tell you. I showed you the numbers. Not sure what else I can do.
If the former, that is a matter of opinion. Humanity has overcome problems before, and it is my opinion that we will solve this one too.
> It boils down to a simple problem with two avenues of action.
That is a false dichotomy. Depending on how things play out, it can also be a blend of the two.
> Which to you think is honestly achievable?
Both? We are already changing things at an accelerating rate and will continue to do so. Fossil fuels are getting increasingly phased out. It won't happen overnight, but it is happening. There is already exponential adoption of solar (and hopefully nuclear in the coming years) way beyond estimates from just a decade ago.
Yes, humanity will adapt. But it also gets a lot easier to adapt if we reduce how much we are making it worse.
What part of your anatomy did you pull that silly strawman from?
But I do assert the the current change in global climate parameters as observed over the past 50 years are overwhelmingly due in toto to human activity driven changes to the atmosphere.
I catagorically reject that extra planetary changes account for more than a tiny percentage of those changes.
I catagorically reject that changes in heat from the core has had any significant effect during that time period.
* effective carbon capture, a theorectical notion of which no examples have yet been demonstrated, and
* performative aka theatrical carbon capture as demonstrated at scale by several LNG companies to date.
It's sensible to oppose ineffectual carbon capture that achieves nothing of substance that is used for appearance, for excusing more of the same old fossil fuel usage expansion, and for pimping for carbon credit tax cuts.
I agree that effective, at scale, carbon capture is highly desirable.
CC sounds like plastic recycling. A pseudo-solution to maintain the status quo that will take decades for us to realize it does not work.
What might also happen is some sort of "risk compensation": the fossil fuel industry, politicians, and regulators will relax their stance against fossil fuel extraction because "CC takes the CO2 off the atmosphere" - like they did with plastics - and when we notice it, the net emission of CO2 per year will never decrease.
A good way is to put in on bio powered power plants. So you grow trees etc in dedicated areas, which remove co2 from the air. You harvest it for centrally burning for energy and co2 capture. In the meantime you grow new trees etc at the harvest locations. Do this at scale. It makes money, energy and results in a net co2 loss.
Obviously you can also make systems to do direct air capture, but that is much more expensive, you'll need wind turbines because of low co2 density in air, and it won't make money. So just using trees on large areas is probably hard to beat.
Where is the land going to come from? You either use wilderness or agricultural land. The latter will need to be replaced so will end up taking wilderness anyway. No net win and probably a huge net loss.
On top of that wood burning is highly polluting in other ways.
This article desperately needs an editor. Non sequiturs, sentence fragments, and a lack of citations all make this difficult to read and believe.
I’m skeptical of many carbon capture solutions, but this presentation isn’t doing itself any favors. It shouldn’t cite generalized articles, or articles from the same website. It should be citing facts and studies.
Sorry, I don't get the point about Equinor. It (a) extracts gas and (b) captures CO2. The reasoning goes like, since using the gas obtained by (a) releases much more CO2 than how much is saved by (b), then it's not worth doing (b). Am I the only one to see the fallacy in this way of thinking?
"Capturing" carbon into fuel to be released back is not exactly capturing, maybe it could be called buffering. A lot of the Net Zero proposal "compensates" to keep extracting oil/coal/gas with generating new fuels in this way, but it is not about reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at all. If it were to stop extracting fossil fuel at least it could had some meaning, but with this kind of environmental policies the fossil fuel will stop to be extracted by the time the wells run dry.
Same goes with using planting trees as carbon capture, in a world where climate is going haywire (so drought, heat waves and other things that promotes massive forest fires becomes increasingly more common) that is carbon that could be released back any time.
The most effective carbon capture energy is to keep buried fossil carbon that way. It has been in that form for hundreds of millions of years, at least until some not so smart apes decided to destabilize with it the ecosystem where they live in just a century.
You seem to assume that they capture CO2 from atmosphere and somehow inject it into the fuel (gas) that they sell. It's not what TFA talks about, though. It's exactly the opposite:
> Carbon dioxide is stripped from natural gas with amine solvents and is deposited in a saline formation.
Carbon capture is about sequestration of public funding through subsidies and burying it deep, deep inside the bank accounts of big polluting companies, where tax collectors will never find them.
71 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadAlmost everything (>95%) is a fraud and the people running the show know it. They should be in jail.
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
Ironically, solar panels do exactly what. Especially on water. Water absorbs 93% of solar radiation. Solar panels aborb 30% to 70%. Global warming (all of it, all 150 years) is about a 0.7% change in albedo, so "bad" (30% absorption 70% reflection) solar planels on water (or concrete, or grass) undo ALL global warming on 90 times their surface area. And you can do better than that. You can just paint 3% of the land area of the planet of 1% of the ocean, and undo global warming.
Reflection from ground based surfaces not so much - I suspect the issue is reflection isn't absolute and transfers heat - the oceans reflect back light while warming the ocean surface layer is already part of the dynamic, solar panels and other reflective objects will also heat up and transfer that heat to the lower atmosphere land|sea layer.
That aside, there's some merit in the notion, it should have been looked at and there's likely a paper or three on the subject.
1) It will work. Not just the technique suggested above, but a lot of of them.
2) That's bad: it will "normalise" dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and take away power from the climate organisations of the UN, including UNEP.
3) They want it outlawed. Why? Because geoengineering can be so effective that a single decent-size city can counteract all or a significant portion of all global warming.
4) They warn that this will produce large scale unintended consequences. Such as stopping water supplies that depend on glacial melting (and for the first X years (decades?) will actually almost entirely stop glacial melting, which "may" make places like California, the Indus valley and most of inner Mongolia, maybe all of inner China, unliveable. Also it will probably start expanding the sahara again (due to climate change it's shrinking now), which will also destroy communities)
(why? It is not possible to pump large amounts water either upwards, or along long distances. We don't have the power for that. So even if you collect the water desalinated, it can't be used to make those places liveable for anywhere the amounts of people currently living there)
Recent example of UN position of the matter: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/02/15/switzerland-pro...
As you link notes:
I think we can all agree that nothing could possibly go wrong with Trump and the Saudi's at the throttle caring for the well being of humans across the globe. /s> The majority of members advising the UN want it regulated, sure, and that's a sensible position due to unforeseen risks and the fossil fuel industry using a small amount of geoengineering that counters a portion of the problem as an excuse to double down on activity that continues to cause most of the problem.
Yeah, but read between the lines: they don't want it regulated, they want it outlawed, and, at least to a significant extent. They want it outlawed, firstly because if it isn't outlawed their power will disappear. And secondly, because no matter how you change the climate, it'll have the same problem any large infrastructure seems to have. Geoengineering WILL be incredibly good for some regions (who therefore may choose the lone wolf approach), AND will have devastating consequences for other regions. Someone will benefit greatly, someone will suffer.
And, frankly, if we're being honest ... "the West" (Europe/America/Russia/China/Northern Africa... even India) will benefit greatly, if we're honest. Africa and South America, and Indonesia will suffer.
But of course there's the identified problem. A decent-sized city could undo global warming (amplifying it is actually harder) BY ITSELF. Something like London or Paris or New York definitely could do it with the city's budget and land, and maybe even something like Milan would be big enough. Which brings the question: countries like Congo will greatly benefit from stopping global warming. They can, if they want to. What do we do then? Because, ironically, if they stop global warming through geoengineering, it will be a huge problem for "the West".
It's actually good that the arsonist put some of the matches back.
Liquefying and transporting natural gas across an ocean by ship seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. But here we are, doing just that.
"Methane (CH4) emissions from coal mining and abandoned coal mines accounted for about 8% of total U.S. methane emissions in 2019. It was the fifth-largest methane-emitting sector"
https://www.epa.gov/cmop/about-coal-mine-methane
At this point, we're simply not going to "curb climate change", sadly. We've left the lunatics in charge of the asylum for entirely too long, and they've set the place ablaze. All that's left to do now is stand back and watch it burn while the lunatics blame all of us for the fire they started.
Currently exploration for new fields and exploitation of current fields takes place in parallel, and extraction is continuously increasing.
Global C02 output is still increasing.
It would be better to reduce | stabilise consumption while bringing other renewable resources to peak rather than "greenwashing" LNG fields with falsehoods about carbon capture and offsets.
Yes, I understand the numbers, I have ~ 4 decades in exploration geophysics about the globe.
Exhausted of your type. Other people care too. Just not to the point we're delusional
Natural gas producer capture carbon good. Sorry that breaks you.
The delusional part is wishing we'd forgo gas and coal and just explain to people the power is out for the planet.
As an example, take a serial murderer. Now they say they plan to reduce their murdering from 3 people a month to 1. You argue that is good, full stop. I say it's less bad, but I wouldn't call the new situation good.
> ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic cutaway illustration you requested, showing the system that extracts natural gas from beneath the North Sea, the CO2 removal process, and the CO2 injection into a subsea salt brine cavern.
How useful is this illustration?
Reminds me of the images on this article from last year, which when they were first posted didn’t even have the clarifying captions they have now: https://newatlas.com/lifestyle/powdered-beer/
Yeah, we can spend money “developing renewables” now. But we are basically out of time already. Nuclear is something we could have deployed at the national grid scale 50 years ago, which would’ve been impossible with renewables. Now, anything we do—barring a major advance in carbon capture—will be too little too late.
Even as of 2022, Germany gets only 40% of total power consumption from wind, solar, and hydro. It will take Germany until probably 2030 or so to get to the same place France was at in 1990.
Love it how the only feasible way forward from where we stand now, aka massive investments in renewables of all kinds, is always countered by what we should have done decades ago, usually by die hard nuclear fan boys. Just a very lazy way of argueing with 20/20 hindsight.
1. Promoting a global cooling theory to prime the public with a theory that’s easily discredited so that people think “those scientists don’t know anything”
2. Funding greenpeace and other environmentalist groups that were anti nuclear
3. Funding politicians who promoted an anti nuclear message.
It is a bit of a conspiracy theory to link each individual point together into a narrative, but I believe #1 and #2 are generally known and have evidence for while #3 is probably a conjecture on my part.
Anyway, global warming was a known issue since the 1970s. Heck - I did a report for geography class on how big a problem global warming would be in the mid 90s.
Regardless, I’ll counter and say that nuclear is still cheaper than solar which is about competitive only if you exclude storage. So from that perspective, combined with Whrite’s law, bucket nuclear is still the better investment option. The only challenge is we’ve killed our nuclear manufacturing industry so hard there’s going to be an extra cost to spin it up again.
Edit:
Nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar, based on auction prices for projects since 2017 (?). Nuclear net capacity gains are miniscule for decades now, and will for decades. Most new reactors replace old obes. At the same time glovally more wind and solar capacity is installed in a month than nuclear in more than a year (look up the numbers for yourself).
Anti-nuclear movements were a result from Chernobyl, and they were, violently at times, oppossed by govenrments. The reason why not more goes into juclear projects is easy: the ROI is too low.
The prices I refer to so, are real world costs and feed prices for real world projects. Unless you believe people calculating those professionally don't know what they do, I hope we can agree that the are correct and can serve as valid basis for comparisons and discusion.
Almost every place that goes all in on renewables inevitably uses fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro to backfill the baseload demand (and usually fossil fuels since nuclear has very few projects and hydro is very regional and maxed out wherever practical).
What other factors? Solar variation accounts for a much smaller change over the span of the decades long solar cycle. The total solar output hitting the Earth doesn't really change. What does change is how much of that heat is retained.
What other extra planetary events are you referring to? Meteorites? The numbers look high, but the total mass (~15000 tons/yr) is miniscule compared to what volcanos produce.
Are you talking about any other specific "extra planetary event" that affects the climate?
It boils down to a simple problem with two avenues of action.
Problem: climate will change, it always has.
Solution A: control the climate.
Solution B: adapt.
Which to you think is honestly achievable?
What? No, of course you're not allowed to try more than one.
Honestly all those non-arson factors that cause oxidation means it's pretty brain dead to assume me setting a fire had anything to do with it. You're probably just going to have to live with all your stuff being on fire, just a hazard of living in a oxygen-having environment.
At this rate, we're going to kill each other fighting for scarcer resources, and the rest of us the planet's going to finish off.
But hey, I'm sure you know better than all the morons.
If the latter, well, I don't know what to tell you. I showed you the numbers. Not sure what else I can do.
If the former, that is a matter of opinion. Humanity has overcome problems before, and it is my opinion that we will solve this one too.
> It boils down to a simple problem with two avenues of action.
That is a false dichotomy. Depending on how things play out, it can also be a blend of the two.
> Which to you think is honestly achievable?
Both? We are already changing things at an accelerating rate and will continue to do so. Fossil fuels are getting increasingly phased out. It won't happen overnight, but it is happening. There is already exponential adoption of solar (and hopefully nuclear in the coming years) way beyond estimates from just a decade ago.
Yes, humanity will adapt. But it also gets a lot easier to adapt if we reduce how much we are making it worse.
What part of your anatomy did you pull that silly strawman from?
But I do assert the the current change in global climate parameters as observed over the past 50 years are overwhelmingly due in toto to human activity driven changes to the atmosphere.
I catagorically reject that extra planetary changes account for more than a tiny percentage of those changes.
I catagorically reject that changes in heat from the core has had any significant effect during that time period.
* effective carbon capture, a theorectical notion of which no examples have yet been demonstrated, and
* performative aka theatrical carbon capture as demonstrated at scale by several LNG companies to date.
It's sensible to oppose ineffectual carbon capture that achieves nothing of substance that is used for appearance, for excusing more of the same old fossil fuel usage expansion, and for pimping for carbon credit tax cuts.
I agree that effective, at scale, carbon capture is highly desirable.
I look forward to seeing some in practice.
What might also happen is some sort of "risk compensation": the fossil fuel industry, politicians, and regulators will relax their stance against fossil fuel extraction because "CC takes the CO2 off the atmosphere" - like they did with plastics - and when we notice it, the net emission of CO2 per year will never decrease.
Those are real dangers.
Keep the oil in the ground.
I think you would have to use email, strangely enough. Try hn@ycombinator.com
Obviously you can also make systems to do direct air capture, but that is much more expensive, you'll need wind turbines because of low co2 density in air, and it won't make money. So just using trees on large areas is probably hard to beat.
On top of that wood burning is highly polluting in other ways.
I’m skeptical of many carbon capture solutions, but this presentation isn’t doing itself any favors. It shouldn’t cite generalized articles, or articles from the same website. It should be citing facts and studies.
Same goes with using planting trees as carbon capture, in a world where climate is going haywire (so drought, heat waves and other things that promotes massive forest fires becomes increasingly more common) that is carbon that could be released back any time.
The most effective carbon capture energy is to keep buried fossil carbon that way. It has been in that form for hundreds of millions of years, at least until some not so smart apes decided to destabilize with it the ecosystem where they live in just a century.
You seem to assume that they capture CO2 from atmosphere and somehow inject it into the fuel (gas) that they sell. It's not what TFA talks about, though. It's exactly the opposite:
> Carbon dioxide is stripped from natural gas with amine solvents and is deposited in a saline formation.