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Warning: I am not a climate scientist. However, I have to disagree that humanity has to leave the planet, or that it's impossible to fix. I will agree that it

by magduf 7y ago

Warning: I am not a climate scientist. However, I have to disagree that humanity has to leave the planet, or that it's impossible to fix. I will agree that it's very unlikely to be fixed or mitigated to a decent amount before disaster happens, but that's because of politics and human stupidity, not because it's not possible. More CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't have to equal higher average global temperatures. CO2 holds in energy from the Sun. So the answer is simple: decrease the amount of sunlight. There's already ideas of how to do this, such as "solar shades". Basically, put a bunch of things in orbit that block some of the Sun's light, so less of it strikes the atmosphere. Now, even with the higher levels of CO2, less energy is entering the system that will be retained by the greenhouse effect. Of course, planetary engineering ideas like this are megaprojects and would require huge amounts of money to do, and probably international coordination, which seems unlikely given the terrible state of world politics at the moment.

zekrioca 7y ago
In the article mentioned by parent comment, they suggest extracting CO2 from atmosphere and storing it somewhere safe. There is (at time of article's writing) no technology capable of doing so. I guess it is would be "safer" than creating a "solar shade"? I am not a climate scientist either..
- robomartin 7y ago
  The questions nobody answers when it comes to all of these so-called solutions are: How much energy will this require? How will we generate it? Will generating that energy produce CO2 or other problems? What resources are we going to need (chemicals, etc.)? How are we going to extract or produce them? How much energy is that going to require? How are we going to produce that energy? Will generating that energy produce CO2 or other problems? Conservation of Energy is an ass. It does not care one bit. Which means we can't solve a problem with less energy than what went into creating it in the first place. A common misconception is that humanity added a bunch of CO2 in a couple of hundred years. That's not true. It took millions, if not billions of years. Sure, in therms of use using petroleum, yeah, we did it in a couple of centuries. However, the reality of this fuel is that it took billions of years to create. THAT is what we burned; billions of years of stored energy. That was the other revelation I had during my research. We are looking at this with the wrong time scale. In a couple of hundred years we burned millions or billions of years worth of stored energy. And to clean-up that mess you need far more energy than what it took to produce the mess in the first place. Imagine how many trees, plants, animals and solar energy went into creating the petroleum we burned. That's the start of the scale of the problem we are trying to fix. In other words, we can't fix it. Not without making a much larger mess.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    In a couple of hundred years we burned millions or billions of years worth of stored energy. And to clean-up that mess you need far more energy than what it took to produce the mess in the first place. That would be true if the only way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere were to run "combustion in reverse" to turn carbon dioxide back into hydrocarbons. That is not the only way, though. Enhanced silicate weathering is attractive because it turns atmospheric CO2 into chemically stable condensed phase compounds, without the huge thermodynamic cost of reversing combustion. The energy cost of enhanced silicate weathering (though still large in absolute terms) is greatly reduced compared to combustion-reversal because it's just accelerating the kinetics of a thermodynamically favorable natural process. MgSiO3 + CO2 => MgCO3 + SiO2 This is a sketch of the geological carbon cycle [1], the same thing that eventually (100,000 years from now) would remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere. The idea is to accelerate the drawdown by pulverizing silicates so the above surface-area-limited reaction goes faster. See e.g. "Enhanced weathering strategies for stabilizingclimate and averting ocean acidification" https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/nclimate2882.pdf https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/... [1] "The Global Carbon Cycle: Geological Processes" Section 3.6 http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Wallman.pdf http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Wallman.pdf
    - robomartin 7y ago
      In my research of the domain I did come across this. It is one of the scariest proposals out there. These people risk causing irreversible damage to the oceans and all life within them. It's hubris to think we can do something like that and actually control it at a planetary scale. Also, refer back to my questions about the energy and resources required to do this, to do anything. While you are right in that the process is not combustion in reverse, the reality of the matter is that it much worse than that. Massively worse. We haven't even gone to the other elephant in the room: Australia. I hope someone eventually publishes an honest accounting of the CO2 that was released into the atmosphere through these fires. My guess is it easily negates decades of clean energy and other mitigation technologies. I didn't get into it in my original comments. There are two questions everyone should ask when looking at the 800,000 year CO2 concentration chart: 1) How/why did CO2 levels rise? 2) How/why did CO2 levels drop? These are fundamental questions anyone with a science background should ask almost immediately. The answers, at a basic level, are simple: 1) Massive continental scale fires burning for thousands of years. Remember, no fire dropping helicopters. 2) Storms, rain, water, hurricanes and, yes, trees and vegetation growing over thousands of years. So, stuff burned for approximately 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and stuff grew and rain fell for about 50,000 years to capture the CO2 that was created. The bottom line is that anyone claiming that we can do 1000x better than if humanity left the planet they are going to have to explain, in great detail, how it is that they know Zeus so intimately that he will grant them magical powers. And I don't think this is an understatement at all. BTW, the only intelligent proposal I've seen is to plan trees like our lives depend on it. Seriously. Simple tech. We know how it works. We know what it does. And, if we have the water, we know how to grow them. This won't solve the problem any faster but it is likely to make things better. All we have to do is figure out how to prevent our massive new forests from burning, because, in that cases, once again, we will have made the problem een worse. Here's an article on that one: https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-climate-change.html https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-clim...
robomartin 7y ago
You misunderstood. I didn't say we have to leave the planet. What I am exposing in the data is that we know how atmospheric CO2 would decrease if we did (and took all of our toys with us). The answer is simple: We cannot fix this. Because any attempt would require energy and resources beyond planetary scale. Which means we are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix it. I am not a climate scientist either. I am, however, an engineer, and I have a pretty solid handle on Physics. Conservation of Energy alone says we cannot fix this. BTW, by "fix this" I mean, any faster than the natural rate of about 50,000 years for a reduction of 100ppm. If you take the time to read the Google paper I linked you'll find the statement that sent me on a path to truly try to understand this many years ago. They said, paraphrasing: "Even if we convert all energy generation on the entire planet to the most optimal forms of renewable energy, not only will we not see atmospheric CO2 levels decline or level-off, they will continue to rise exponentially". This was a conclusion exactly opposite what the researchers went into this "knowing". I appreciate they were honest enough to publish this and actually expose just how confused we've become about this concept of saving the planet. It simply isn't going to happen. Not in a generation, not in a hundred, not even in a thousand. You see, it's that pesky bit of data: 50,000 years for a reduction of 100 ppm. Without humanity. This means that if humans stay on the planet, even if population growth stopped, and we magically --because it would require magic-- became carbon neutral, it would still take at least 50,000 years to drop 100 ppm, or, more than likely, 100,000 or 200,000, pick a number. This is equivalent to trying to remove smoke from your kitchen with a small fan while you continue to burn the food you are cooking on the frying pan. You just can't do it. You have to stop cooking and then wait for the small fan do do the job over a couple of hours. If you want it done faster you have to stop cooking and use a much larger fan (more energy). If you, on the other hand, continue to burn your food and install a bigger fan, you may or may not clear the smoke. If you do, it will likely take just as long or longer. This isn't difficult stuff to understand. It's actually the most common sense science I've seen in a long time. The graphs tell a story. All we have to do is see it, read it and understand it.
- magduf 7y ago
  The entire problem with your logic is that you're assuming that humans will not and cannot do anything at all to change carbon levels, aside from relying on natural processes. That's completely ridiculous. Any attempt to fix the problem has to involve artificial actions: carbon sequestration, solar shades, etc. Your entire mentality is "it took X years for nature to do this, so it'll take X years to undo it by natural processes, and oh yeah, we have to actually undo it so everything goes back exactly the way it was, instead of just making the end result satisfactory". This isn't helpful at all. As I pointed out before, we can reduce the amount of sunlight using solar shades; we don't actually need CO2 levels to go back to pre-industrial levels. We just need to prevent the temperature from rising so much, while we figure out how to deal with the CO2. >This is equivalent to trying to remove smoke from your kitchen with a small fan while you continue to burn the food you are cooking on the frying pan. You just can't do it. Yes, you really can. With a fan powerful enough, and a vent hood, you absolutely can. It really doesn't take that much, and it depends on how much smoke you're producing, but you seem to think you need a turbojet engine to clear the air in a small kitchen from a small cooking fire, and you really don't. >If you want it done faster you have to stop cooking and use a much larger fan (more energy). Here's the part you're not getting. The amount of energy you need to run a vent fan isn't anywhere near the amount of energy unleashed by your cooking fire. Even better, if you constrain the air supply, the fire burns itself out quickly, or at least is prevented from producing as much smoke. >It's actually the most common sense science I've seen in a long time. I've noticed that people who throw around the term "common sense" a lot do so because they really don't understand things very well, and think their intuitive understanding suffices, when in fact it doesn't.

by magduf 7y ago

zekrioca 7y ago

In the article mentioned by parent comment, they suggest extracting CO2 from atmosphere and storing it somewhere safe. There is (at time of article's writing) no technology capable of doing so. I guess it is would be "safer" than creating a "solar shade"? I am not a climate scientist either..

robomartin 7y ago
The questions nobody answers when it comes to all of these so-called solutions are: How much energy will this require? How will we generate it? Will generating that energy produce CO2 or other problems? What resources are we going to need (chemicals, etc.)? How are we going to extract or produce them? How much energy is that going to require? How are we going to produce that energy? Will generating that energy produce CO2 or other problems? Conservation of Energy is an ass. It does not care one bit. Which means we can't solve a problem with less energy than what went into creating it in the first place. A common misconception is that humanity added a bunch of CO2 in a couple of hundred years. That's not true. It took millions, if not billions of years. Sure, in therms of use using petroleum, yeah, we did it in a couple of centuries. However, the reality of this fuel is that it took billions of years to create. THAT is what we burned; billions of years of stored energy. That was the other revelation I had during my research. We are looking at this with the wrong time scale. In a couple of hundred years we burned millions or billions of years worth of stored energy. And to clean-up that mess you need far more energy than what it took to produce the mess in the first place. Imagine how many trees, plants, animals and solar energy went into creating the petroleum we burned. That's the start of the scale of the problem we are trying to fix. In other words, we can't fix it. Not without making a much larger mess.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  In a couple of hundred years we burned millions or billions of years worth of stored energy. And to clean-up that mess you need far more energy than what it took to produce the mess in the first place. That would be true if the only way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere were to run "combustion in reverse" to turn carbon dioxide back into hydrocarbons. That is not the only way, though. Enhanced silicate weathering is attractive because it turns atmospheric CO2 into chemically stable condensed phase compounds, without the huge thermodynamic cost of reversing combustion. The energy cost of enhanced silicate weathering (though still large in absolute terms) is greatly reduced compared to combustion-reversal because it's just accelerating the kinetics of a thermodynamically favorable natural process. MgSiO3 + CO2 => MgCO3 + SiO2 This is a sketch of the geological carbon cycle [1], the same thing that eventually (100,000 years from now) would remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere. The idea is to accelerate the drawdown by pulverizing silicates so the above surface-area-limited reaction goes faster. See e.g. "Enhanced weathering strategies for stabilizingclimate and averting ocean acidification" https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/nclimate2882.pdf https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/... [1] "The Global Carbon Cycle: Geological Processes" Section 3.6 http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Wallman.pdf http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Wallman.pdf
  - robomartin 7y ago
    In my research of the domain I did come across this. It is one of the scariest proposals out there. These people risk causing irreversible damage to the oceans and all life within them. It's hubris to think we can do something like that and actually control it at a planetary scale. Also, refer back to my questions about the energy and resources required to do this, to do anything. While you are right in that the process is not combustion in reverse, the reality of the matter is that it much worse than that. Massively worse. We haven't even gone to the other elephant in the room: Australia. I hope someone eventually publishes an honest accounting of the CO2 that was released into the atmosphere through these fires. My guess is it easily negates decades of clean energy and other mitigation technologies. I didn't get into it in my original comments. There are two questions everyone should ask when looking at the 800,000 year CO2 concentration chart: 1) How/why did CO2 levels rise? 2) How/why did CO2 levels drop? These are fundamental questions anyone with a science background should ask almost immediately. The answers, at a basic level, are simple: 1) Massive continental scale fires burning for thousands of years. Remember, no fire dropping helicopters. 2) Storms, rain, water, hurricanes and, yes, trees and vegetation growing over thousands of years. So, stuff burned for approximately 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and stuff grew and rain fell for about 50,000 years to capture the CO2 that was created. The bottom line is that anyone claiming that we can do 1000x better than if humanity left the planet they are going to have to explain, in great detail, how it is that they know Zeus so intimately that he will grant them magical powers. And I don't think this is an understatement at all. BTW, the only intelligent proposal I've seen is to plan trees like our lives depend on it. Seriously. Simple tech. We know how it works. We know what it does. And, if we have the water, we know how to grow them. This won't solve the problem any faster but it is likely to make things better. All we have to do is figure out how to prevent our massive new forests from burning, because, in that cases, once again, we will have made the problem een worse. Here's an article on that one: https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-climate-change.html https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-clim...

robomartin 7y ago

You misunderstood. I didn't say we have to leave the planet. What I am exposing in the data is that we know how atmospheric CO2 would decrease if we did (and took all of our toys with us). The answer is simple: We cannot fix this. Because any attempt would require energy and resources beyond planetary scale. Which means we are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix it. I am not a climate scientist either. I am, however, an engineer, and I have a pretty solid handle on Physics. Conservation of Energy alone says we cannot fix this. BTW, by "fix this" I mean, any faster than the natural rate of about 50,000 years for a reduction of 100ppm. If you take the time to read the Google paper I linked you'll find the statement that sent me on a path to truly try to understand this many years ago. They said, paraphrasing: "Even if we convert all energy generation on the entire planet to the most optimal forms of renewable energy, not only will we not see atmospheric CO2 levels decline or level-off, they will continue to rise exponentially". This was a conclusion exactly opposite what the researchers went into this "knowing". I appreciate they were honest enough to publish this and actually expose just how confused we've become about this concept of saving the planet. It simply isn't going to happen. Not in a generation, not in a hundred, not even in a thousand. You see, it's that pesky bit of data: 50,000 years for a reduction of 100 ppm. Without humanity. This means that if humans stay on the planet, even if population growth stopped, and we magically --because it would require magic-- became carbon neutral, it would still take at least 50,000 years to drop 100 ppm, or, more than likely, 100,000 or 200,000, pick a number. This is equivalent to trying to remove smoke from your kitchen with a small fan while you continue to burn the food you are cooking on the frying pan. You just can't do it. You have to stop cooking and then wait for the small fan do do the job over a couple of hours. If you want it done faster you have to stop cooking and use a much larger fan (more energy). If you, on the other hand, continue to burn your food and install a bigger fan, you may or may not clear the smoke. If you do, it will likely take just as long or longer. This isn't difficult stuff to understand. It's actually the most common sense science I've seen in a long time. The graphs tell a story. All we have to do is see it, read it and understand it.

magduf 7y ago
The entire problem with your logic is that you're assuming that humans will not and cannot do anything at all to change carbon levels, aside from relying on natural processes. That's completely ridiculous. Any attempt to fix the problem has to involve artificial actions: carbon sequestration, solar shades, etc. Your entire mentality is "it took X years for nature to do this, so it'll take X years to undo it by natural processes, and oh yeah, we have to actually undo it so everything goes back exactly the way it was, instead of just making the end result satisfactory". This isn't helpful at all. As I pointed out before, we can reduce the amount of sunlight using solar shades; we don't actually need CO2 levels to go back to pre-industrial levels. We just need to prevent the temperature from rising so much, while we figure out how to deal with the CO2. >This is equivalent to trying to remove smoke from your kitchen with a small fan while you continue to burn the food you are cooking on the frying pan. You just can't do it. Yes, you really can. With a fan powerful enough, and a vent hood, you absolutely can. It really doesn't take that much, and it depends on how much smoke you're producing, but you seem to think you need a turbojet engine to clear the air in a small kitchen from a small cooking fire, and you really don't. >If you want it done faster you have to stop cooking and use a much larger fan (more energy). Here's the part you're not getting. The amount of energy you need to run a vent fan isn't anywhere near the amount of energy unleashed by your cooking fire. Even better, if you constrain the air supply, the fire burns itself out quickly, or at least is prevented from producing as much smoke. >It's actually the most common sense science I've seen in a long time. I've noticed that people who throw around the term "common sense" a lot do so because they really don't understand things very well, and think their intuitive understanding suffices, when in fact it doesn't.