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Not only would this not be a problem for many decades even if carbon capture is wildly successful, but releasing carbon into the air is much, much easier than p

Not only would this not be a problem for many decades even if carbon capture is wildly successful, but releasing carbon into the air is much, much easier than pulling it back out. If that were not true, we would not be facing the catastrophe that is ahead of us. You could literally just burn old coal mines or something if in some far-flung future the nefarious carbon-capturers were somehow sucking down too much. We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved.

dfee 8y ago
I don't think you understood my comment was about how people respond to incentives. Anyway, I'm particularly interested in this remark you made: > We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved. Is "100 years' worth" a unit of measure of CO2 I'm unfamiliar with? Are you saying that the industrial revolution was only 100 years ago? Is this the "actual quantities involved" you were referring to?
- notabee 8y ago
  I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were inexperienced with searching the internet for information. Here's some handy links with some numbers: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-2015.pdf https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-20... "The total cumulative emissions for 1870–2014 are 545 ± 55 GtC. These emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (230 ± 5 GtC based on atmospheric measurements in ice cores of 288 ppm (Sect. “Global atmospheric CO2 growth rate estimates”; Joos and Spahni, 2008) and recent direct measurements of 397.2 ppm; Dlugokencky and Tans, 2014), ocean (155 ± 20 GtC using Khatiwala et al., 2013, prior to 1959 and Table 8 otherwise), and land (160 ± 60 GtC by the difference)" Estimates may vary on what to count as the start of the industrial revolution, but the internet indicates that it started in Britain around 1760. It did not spread much from there until 1840 or so. Here's a quantity emitted into the atmosphere since 1870: 230 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC). That's 230,000,000,000 tonnes. Not carbon dioxide, just the carbon itself. Multiply that by 3.67 for weight of CO2 gas: 844,100,000,000 tonnes CO2. Note that this is metric tonnes, so 2,204.6 pounds per tonne for us in metric-challenged countries. This is just legacy CO2 without counting other greenhouse gases, starting from a few decades after the industrial revolution went global to close to present day. We're adding around 10 GtC (36.7 GtC CO2) every year to that total recently. I used this calculator, though I had to remove the commas from the number because there seems to be a character limit. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... So let's take one of the measures from there. It said that that much CO2 could be absorbed by 994,228,504,122 acres of U.S. forest in a year. Let's try that out. There are 57,308,738 square miles of land surface area on Earth (habitable and non-habitable). Multiply that by 640 to get 36,677,592,320 acres. Alright, subtract the entire land surface area of Earth, whether we could grow trees on it or not, from the number of acres of trees we'd need to capture that carbon in a year: 994,228,504,122 - 36,677,592,320 = 957,550,911,802. That's a lot left over. How many planet Earths' worth of land area would we need to clear that much CO2 with just trees in a year then? 27.10 Earths. Okay, well that's easy then. We just need to somehow blanket the entire Earth including mountains, deserts, etc. with trees for 27 years to remove the CO2 backlog! So easy, right? Except we're also adding to that number constantly. So if we just assume for the sake of argument that this man-made carbon capture works as well as blanketing the entire land surface area in trees, and we somehow started at scale immediately, it would take 27 years to get back to baseline. (Let's put aside that there would be 27 * 3.9 = 105 GtC additional in the atmosphere to deal with if emissions were flat, and pray that the land and ocean would keep absorbing the rest) I guess if you're really worried about them overshooting that mark, you can go ahead and panic now about that, and not about the massive surplus of carbon we've got hanging around trapping the sun's heat. Oh, and I didn't even get into methane or N2O, which are also heating things up. I know it takes time and energy to google things (each search is about 0.2 grams of CO2 emitted equivalent) but I believe in your ability to do so.

dfee 8y ago

I don't think you understood my comment was about how people respond to incentives. Anyway, I'm particularly interested in this remark you made: > We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved. Is "100 years' worth" a unit of measure of CO2 I'm unfamiliar with? Are you saying that the industrial revolution was only 100 years ago? Is this the "actual quantities involved" you were referring to?

notabee 8y ago
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were inexperienced with searching the internet for information. Here's some handy links with some numbers: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-2015.pdf https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-20... "The total cumulative emissions for 1870–2014 are 545 ± 55 GtC. These emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (230 ± 5 GtC based on atmospheric measurements in ice cores of 288 ppm (Sect. “Global atmospheric CO2 growth rate estimates”; Joos and Spahni, 2008) and recent direct measurements of 397.2 ppm; Dlugokencky and Tans, 2014), ocean (155 ± 20 GtC using Khatiwala et al., 2013, prior to 1959 and Table 8 otherwise), and land (160 ± 60 GtC by the difference)" Estimates may vary on what to count as the start of the industrial revolution, but the internet indicates that it started in Britain around 1760. It did not spread much from there until 1840 or so. Here's a quantity emitted into the atmosphere since 1870: 230 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC). That's 230,000,000,000 tonnes. Not carbon dioxide, just the carbon itself. Multiply that by 3.67 for weight of CO2 gas: 844,100,000,000 tonnes CO2. Note that this is metric tonnes, so 2,204.6 pounds per tonne for us in metric-challenged countries. This is just legacy CO2 without counting other greenhouse gases, starting from a few decades after the industrial revolution went global to close to present day. We're adding around 10 GtC (36.7 GtC CO2) every year to that total recently. I used this calculator, though I had to remove the commas from the number because there seems to be a character limit. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... So let's take one of the measures from there. It said that that much CO2 could be absorbed by 994,228,504,122 acres of U.S. forest in a year. Let's try that out. There are 57,308,738 square miles of land surface area on Earth (habitable and non-habitable). Multiply that by 640 to get 36,677,592,320 acres. Alright, subtract the entire land surface area of Earth, whether we could grow trees on it or not, from the number of acres of trees we'd need to capture that carbon in a year: 994,228,504,122 - 36,677,592,320 = 957,550,911,802. That's a lot left over. How many planet Earths' worth of land area would we need to clear that much CO2 with just trees in a year then? 27.10 Earths. Okay, well that's easy then. We just need to somehow blanket the entire Earth including mountains, deserts, etc. with trees for 27 years to remove the CO2 backlog! So easy, right? Except we're also adding to that number constantly. So if we just assume for the sake of argument that this man-made carbon capture works as well as blanketing the entire land surface area in trees, and we somehow started at scale immediately, it would take 27 years to get back to baseline. (Let's put aside that there would be 27 * 3.9 = 105 GtC additional in the atmosphere to deal with if emissions were flat, and pray that the land and ocean would keep absorbing the rest) I guess if you're really worried about them overshooting that mark, you can go ahead and panic now about that, and not about the massive surplus of carbon we've got hanging around trapping the sun's heat. Oh, and I didn't even get into methane or N2O, which are also heating things up. I know it takes time and energy to google things (each search is about 0.2 grams of CO2 emitted equivalent) but I believe in your ability to do so.