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Or we could focus on emitting less CO2. Those articles make CO2 séquestration seem like a saver bu themselves, but they won’t be useful if we don’t get our actu

Or we could focus on emitting less CO2. Those articles make CO2 séquestration seem like a saver bu themselves, but they won’t be useful if we don’t get our actual emissions to close-to-zero.

walkingolof 7y ago
Its not an either or proposition anymore, that ship has sailed, we need quickly to lower the CO2 emissions, yes, but we should also think about sequestration in all forms, trees etc.
nickparker 7y ago
Agreed. I also don't like this article mixing gigatons and millions of tons. Feels like preying on people who don't get SI units... "136 million tons of capacity by 2040" is 0.136 gigatons, 1/400th of our current emissions. This technology will help us handle the very last, most difficult to decarbonize parts of our industrial civilization. It's nowhere near effective enough to do anything more than that.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  Our world current emissions are 54 gigatons / year? Yikes. I thought we were at 35-40, my numbers must be out of date. edit: still can't find evidence for >50. Latest numbers I see are 37.1 from 2018. Can you link a source?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 7y ago
That ship sailed long ago. India, China, and Africa are going to blow out the remaining carbon budget regardless of what America and Europe do to reduce emissions.
godelski 7y ago
We need to get our emissions to zero. But we can't control other countries (though we need to put pressure). The us isn't even a third of global emissions. So while making the US carbon neutral, we aren't even close to solving the problem. We HAVE to be negative. There's another big reason to be negative as well. Even if total global emissions went to 0 (ZERO!) the planet would still warm. There's a feedback loop. We've warmed enough that we are melting a lot of ice that contains carbon, which gets released into the ocean and atmosphere. We have no choice but to go negative, and we need to encourage as many other countries to do so as well.
pier25 7y ago
Reaching zero emissions is just a start. We need to reach strong negative emissions in the next 2-3 decades. Consider the following points: 1) Climate lag. There is a 40 year delay between emissions and effects on the climate so the effects we are now seeing are from the emissions from the late 70s early 80s. We have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than between 1850 and 1980. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today we have a huge climatic bill ahead of us in the next 40 years. https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Dela... 2) Self sustaining climatic systems commonly called feedbacks. These systems once triggered will keep affecting the climate even if we reach zero emissions. Eg: melting of Arctic ice, permafrost methane, etc. https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedbacks-are-so-bad https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedba... 3) There are currently 405ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere which will remain there for centuries and will keep having an effect on the climate unless we remove it. From the last IPCC report: > There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere. 4) It is usually stated that we are at about 1ºC of warming right now, but until recently the cooling effects of aerosols in the atmosphere were not well understood. A recent paper from 2019 showed that it's likely there is a lot more cooling going on and we could already be at about 2ºC of warming. This would mean we are in a much more difficult position than commonly believed. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.h...

Or we could focus on emitting less CO2. Those articles make CO2 séquestration seem like a saver bu themselves, but they won’t be useful if we don’t get our actual emissions to close-to-zero.

walkingolof 7y ago

Its not an either or proposition anymore, that ship has sailed, we need quickly to lower the CO2 emissions, yes, but we should also think about sequestration in all forms, trees etc.

nickparker 7y ago

Agreed. I also don't like this article mixing gigatons and millions of tons. Feels like preying on people who don't get SI units... "136 million tons of capacity by 2040" is 0.136 gigatons, 1/400th of our current emissions. This technology will help us handle the very last, most difficult to decarbonize parts of our industrial civilization. It's nowhere near effective enough to do anything more than that.

tunesmith 7y ago
Our world current emissions are 54 gigatons / year? Yikes. I thought we were at 35-40, my numbers must be out of date. edit: still can't find evidence for >50. Latest numbers I see are 37.1 from 2018. Can you link a source?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 7y ago

That ship sailed long ago. India, China, and Africa are going to blow out the remaining carbon budget regardless of what America and Europe do to reduce emissions.

godelski 7y ago

We need to get our emissions to zero. But we can't control other countries (though we need to put pressure). The us isn't even a third of global emissions. So while making the US carbon neutral, we aren't even close to solving the problem. We HAVE to be negative. There's another big reason to be negative as well. Even if total global emissions went to 0 (ZERO!) the planet would still warm. There's a feedback loop. We've warmed enough that we are melting a lot of ice that contains carbon, which gets released into the ocean and atmosphere. We have no choice but to go negative, and we need to encourage as many other countries to do so as well.

pier25 7y ago

Reaching zero emissions is just a start. We need to reach strong negative emissions in the next 2-3 decades. Consider the following points: 1) Climate lag. There is a 40 year delay between emissions and effects on the climate so the effects we are now seeing are from the emissions from the late 70s early 80s. We have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than between 1850 and 1980. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today we have a huge climatic bill ahead of us in the next 40 years. https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Dela... 2) Self sustaining climatic systems commonly called feedbacks. These systems once triggered will keep affecting the climate even if we reach zero emissions. Eg: melting of Arctic ice, permafrost methane, etc. https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedbacks-are-so-bad https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedba... 3) There are currently 405ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere which will remain there for centuries and will keep having an effect on the climate unless we remove it. From the last IPCC report: > There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere. 4) It is usually stated that we are at about 1ºC of warming right now, but until recently the cooling effects of aerosols in the atmosphere were not well understood. A recent paper from 2019 showed that it's likely there is a lot more cooling going on and we could already be at about 2ºC of warming. This would mean we are in a much more difficult position than commonly believed. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.h...