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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) n

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...
    - philipkglass 7y ago
      Originally you said "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." Enhanced silicate weathering is a way to draw down atmospheric CO2 with less energy than went into creating the problem. Still, perhaps it will never be deployed on a large scale if people find the proposal too scary. That's one of the most depressing things about curbing climate change. There are a number of changes that we could have implemented to prevent the problem from getting as bad as it is now. But all of them scared enough people that they didn't go forward on a scale that was large enough, fast enough. That could be fear of physical safety (opposition to nuclear power), fear of unemployment (coal miners against cleaner power sources), fear of lost profits (businesses against carbon taxes)... Since the scale of the problem is vast, the scope and scale of any actual solutions will be vast as well.

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...
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    Originally you said "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." Enhanced silicate weathering is a way to draw down atmospheric CO2 with less energy than went into creating the problem. Still, perhaps it will never be deployed on a large scale if people find the proposal too scary. That's one of the most depressing things about curbing climate change. There are a number of changes that we could have implemented to prevent the problem from getting as bad as it is now. But all of them scared enough people that they didn't go forward on a scale that was large enough, fast enough. That could be fear of physical safety (opposition to nuclear power), fear of unemployment (coal miners against cleaner power sources), fear of lost profits (businesses against carbon taxes)... Since the scale of the problem is vast, the scope and scale of any actual solutions will be vast as well.