11 ms·

I love the enthusiasm of people reading this and supporting it, but something we need to understand is the scale of carbon in the atmosphere. We've released mor

by TSiege 5y ago

I love the enthusiasm of people reading this and supporting it, but something we need to understand is the scale of carbon in the atmosphere. We've released more carbon into the air than contained in all the plants alive on earth today, and we're on the path emitting more carbon than contained in all living organisms on the planet. Our climate is on the path to Miocene where temperatures were 3-4C above today's levels. sources: https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/1443890619433246721 https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/144389061943324672... https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-machine-167cf16750dd https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-mac...

nix23 5y ago
Absolutely! We (humans) think we can fix and revert everything what we have done wrong (hint we cannot). I think the idea is potentially harmful, because it give us the relaxation that sometime in the future we can undo it...so why the hurry? Same with species extinction...no hurry we can clone them later..but forgetting that we haven't found all the species that are already extinct.
ivankirigin 5y ago
Soil contains 4X the amount of carbon than in the atmosphere, so while scale is enormous, it isn't impossible. The post goes through numerous sequestration techniques that could reach the scale to sequester 1000B tCO2e
rp1 5y ago
I like to imagine CO2 in solid form (dry ice) to help visualize the scale of the problem. 1) Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. Let's say the average driving American consumes 1.5 gallons of gas a day. That's almost 15 kgs of matter to deal with every day. Imagine instead of it being released as gaseous CO2, it accumulated in your car's trunk as dry ice. After a few days, what would you do with it all? Maybe you'd throw it in your basement or your backyard. After a week or two, all free space in even a large home would be totally occupied with the waste. And this is only for personal travel done by individuals. All transportation (including the transportation of goods) is less than a 3rd of U.S. CO2 emissions. If dealing with the waste of driving on an individual level is so hard, how can we possibly hope to deal with all CO2 emissions? 2) You can also do the same thought experiment with total CO2 emissions per capita, which is currently about 15.25 metric tons per year per person in the U.S. That averages out to 41 kg of CO2 per day. How could you possibly find a way to deal with 41 kg of dry ice per day. Right now, our solution is to happily dump it into the atmosphere, which conveniently carries the CO2 away from us without us needing to worry. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's a tragedy of the commons.
- ximeng 5y ago
  https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2016/02/visualizing-carbon/ https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2016/02/visualizing-car... here is another visualization
- ivankirigin 5y ago
  I like that you're using spatial analogies because it helps drive the point home. I visualized 50B tCO2 here: https://twitter.com/ikirigin/status/1425879839886626826 https://twitter.com/ikirigin/status/1425879839886626826 While it seems enormous, it's a very small fraction of the world.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Every year since ~50 years?
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    Nice graphic, but the ideal scenario would be to find a method that strips the carbon out of the CO2. We're putting about 50 Billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. However, the Atomic weight of carbon is 12 whereas the Atomic weight of Oxygen is 16, and there are 2 oxygen atoms in every CO2 molecule, so 1 ton of pure sequestered carbon is 12+16+16 = 44/12 = 3 & 2/3 tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. 2.27 tons of carbon compacted together makes an approximately 1 meter cube. Of course, that would mean we would have to sequester ~6 billion cubic meters (13.6 billion tons or the equivalent of 4,079 hoover dams in size, probably enough to resurface every highway and road in America 2-3 inches deep) of pure carbon every year to reach carbon neutral, and then we would need to go beyond that to begin to reverse the effects. It would literally be the largest human undertaking in the history of the planet.
- jaggederest 5y ago
  I like the idea of stacking up a lot of 1 meter cubes of pure carbon (graphite, or diamond!) into nice shapes. Each cube is just over 2 metric tons (2266 kg) of carbon, or the equivalent of 8 metric tons of carbon dioxide. 20 cubic kilometers per year is enough to get us back to pre-industrial levels in no time, and build some interesting monuments while we're at it. A roughly 4-kilometer tall pyramid, anyone? Low low price of ~4 trillion dollars each. Casually building pyramids out of the ~57 cubic kilometers of carbon blocks would be pretty neat. Three 4 kilometer tall square based pyramids would do it. They would also be the largest structures ever built by humanity by an order of magnitude. If we did it in Australia, we could employ the entire country twice over, and they would be the 3 new tallest mountains in Down Under (by 1,772m).
robomartin 5y ago
That part that is taking time to get out and have people understand is that we can't do a thing about it. Some of the proposals out there are flat-out crazy. The very article you posted has a line that is just plain insane: "This means that to avoid disaster, we must confront capitalism." Sorry, that's a complete joke. Here's the plain and simple truth: If all of humanity left the planet next week, and we took all of our technology and capitalism with us. In other words, Captain Kirk beams all of us up into somewhere in space. Even if we did that, it would still take somewhere in the order of 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2. It is sad to see just how political climate change has become. The data is out there. The studies are out there. The understanding is out there. We need to stop talking about magically capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and start talking about adaptation. That is the only thing we can do. Switch our entire economy to renewable energy? No. That won't fix it. It won't even slow it down. Switch the entire world economy to the most optimal --yet to be invented-- forms of renewables? Nope. That won't fix it. In fact, we already know that, even if we were able to do it, not only would atmospheric CO2 concentration not drop, it would continue to rise. We need to start having conversations about the truth, not the fantasy du jour, which is the endless loop we seem to be locked into. I get why, it has political value. The ignorant masses are driven into a self-righteous state where support for fantasy merchants actually feels like they are "saving the planet". The entire thing is a silly fantasy. Sorry. I have written about this on HN before, complete with sources and data. If interested you can find my comments on multiple threads. As you say, most fail to recognize the scale of the problem. It's a planetary scale issue. Fixing it would require more energy and resources than we could possibly imagine --we might not even have enough on the planet. Even worse, deploying such "solutions" at the scale (energy, materials, etc.) necessary to affect change on a human timeline (decades rather than tens of thousands of years) is far more likely to kill everything on earth than to save the planet. We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly. Basic concept: In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it. Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
- chrisamiller 5y ago
leesec 5y ago
So we shouldn't try because the scale?
- thereisnospork 5y ago
  Fighting an unwinnable battle is rarely a wise allocation of resources.
  - leesec 5y ago
    Extremely defeatist attitude to call mankind's survival an unwinnable battle.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Not fighting the battle is also unwinnable.
- nix23 5y ago
  Stop pumping C02 into the atmosphere and massive reforestation (not directly for binding C02 but to give moisture into the air which gives other plants a chance to grow for them self's and strengthen the ground)...in short, try to reinstate nature as it was, because we little humans cannot do what nature did for millions of years (washing and binding C02 out the atmosphere and into the ground). The point is on "millions" of years. We really went too far and there is nothing we can do to "revers" it, for the first time in ~100 years humans will have to adapt to nature and not the other way around.
- Arnt 5y ago
  No, you misunderstand. Capturing CO₂ from typical atmosphere is a very difficult problem, and it's a big problem too. Talking about that distracts from a problem that's much smaller and more accessible, namely capturing CO₂ from the parts of the atmosphere where there's very much CO₂. The photo shows a number of pipelines that guide CO₂ up and release it. Capturing it at the top of the photo, in the open air, is very much more difficult and expensive than capturing it near the middle, in those big vertical things. https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TfTxDMlqODtgyGkRG6-j9Y-Sv50=/0x0:4814x3562/920x613/filters:focal(2022x1396:2792x2166):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69054702/1231898565.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TfTxDMlqODtgyGkRG6-j9Y-Sv50=... If you start thinking about how to capture it in the middle of the photo, you very quickly also consider other ways of achieving the same goal at the same site. Capturing CO₂ is damned expensive compared to those other ways, and the discussion is a distraction. IMO capturing old CO₂ is necessary (as the article says) but when discussed it's usually contrasted to current emissions rather than old emissions, and it's hopelessly inefficient compared to current emissions. We can't go back in time and avoid old emissions, so avoiding capture isn't IMO possible. For the time being it's irrelevant because there current level of emissions (the highest of all time) presents us with very much to do that's both simpler and cheaper.
oliwarner 5y ago
Gawking at the enormity of the challenge and ultimately never doing anything isn't acceptable though. I'm not saying that's all you're suggesting, and realism is certainly a requirement for working out what we actually need to achieve here, but this enthusiasm is essential. We need it to drive policy in the face of economic penalty and limiting nutritional choice. We need the enthusiasm if we want to be able to tell our kids (and theirs) that we actually tried. It's a balance. "I love the enthusiasm but" might be accurate, but as-is, serves to smother that spark of hope that we need from everybody right now. Don't give up completely on our species.
bambax 5y ago
It's completely hopeless, but kind of funny in a way. We thought humanity would destroy itself with wars, or atomic bombs going off unexpectedly, etc. Instead, what will get us is, essentially, farting.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Unter Schmutzatmosphäre verkackt!
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Hygiene factors. The ultimate technological mechanism.

by TSiege 5y ago

nix23 5y ago

Absolutely! We (humans) think we can fix and revert everything what we have done wrong (hint we cannot). I think the idea is potentially harmful, because it give us the relaxation that sometime in the future we can undo it...so why the hurry? Same with species extinction...no hurry we can clone them later..but forgetting that we haven't found all the species that are already extinct.

ivankirigin 5y ago

Soil contains 4X the amount of carbon than in the atmosphere, so while scale is enormous, it isn't impossible. The post goes through numerous sequestration techniques that could reach the scale to sequester 1000B tCO2e

rp1 5y ago

I like to imagine CO2 in solid form (dry ice) to help visualize the scale of the problem. 1) Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. Let's say the average driving American consumes 1.5 gallons of gas a day. That's almost 15 kgs of matter to deal with every day. Imagine instead of it being released as gaseous CO2, it accumulated in your car's trunk as dry ice. After a few days, what would you do with it all? Maybe you'd throw it in your basement or your backyard. After a week or two, all free space in even a large home would be totally occupied with the waste. And this is only for personal travel done by individuals. All transportation (including the transportation of goods) is less than a 3rd of U.S. CO2 emissions. If dealing with the waste of driving on an individual level is so hard, how can we possibly hope to deal with all CO2 emissions? 2) You can also do the same thought experiment with total CO2 emissions per capita, which is currently about 15.25 metric tons per year per person in the U.S. That averages out to 41 kg of CO2 per day. How could you possibly find a way to deal with 41 kg of dry ice per day. Right now, our solution is to happily dump it into the atmosphere, which conveniently carries the CO2 away from us without us needing to worry. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's a tragedy of the commons.

ximeng 5y ago
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2016/02/visualizing-carbon/ https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2016/02/visualizing-car... here is another visualization
ivankirigin 5y ago
I like that you're using spatial analogies because it helps drive the point home. I visualized 50B tCO2 here: https://twitter.com/ikirigin/status/1425879839886626826 https://twitter.com/ikirigin/status/1425879839886626826 While it seems enormous, it's a very small fraction of the world.
- nix23 5y ago
  Every year since ~50 years?
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Nice graphic, but the ideal scenario would be to find a method that strips the carbon out of the CO2. We're putting about 50 Billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. However, the Atomic weight of carbon is 12 whereas the Atomic weight of Oxygen is 16, and there are 2 oxygen atoms in every CO2 molecule, so 1 ton of pure sequestered carbon is 12+16+16 = 44/12 = 3 & 2/3 tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. 2.27 tons of carbon compacted together makes an approximately 1 meter cube. Of course, that would mean we would have to sequester ~6 billion cubic meters (13.6 billion tons or the equivalent of 4,079 hoover dams in size, probably enough to resurface every highway and road in America 2-3 inches deep) of pure carbon every year to reach carbon neutral, and then we would need to go beyond that to begin to reverse the effects. It would literally be the largest human undertaking in the history of the planet.
jaggederest 5y ago
I like the idea of stacking up a lot of 1 meter cubes of pure carbon (graphite, or diamond!) into nice shapes. Each cube is just over 2 metric tons (2266 kg) of carbon, or the equivalent of 8 metric tons of carbon dioxide. 20 cubic kilometers per year is enough to get us back to pre-industrial levels in no time, and build some interesting monuments while we're at it. A roughly 4-kilometer tall pyramid, anyone? Low low price of ~4 trillion dollars each. Casually building pyramids out of the ~57 cubic kilometers of carbon blocks would be pretty neat. Three 4 kilometer tall square based pyramids would do it. They would also be the largest structures ever built by humanity by an order of magnitude. If we did it in Australia, we could employ the entire country twice over, and they would be the 3 new tallest mountains in Down Under (by 1,772m).

robomartin 5y ago

That part that is taking time to get out and have people understand is that we can't do a thing about it. Some of the proposals out there are flat-out crazy. The very article you posted has a line that is just plain insane: "This means that to avoid disaster, we must confront capitalism." Sorry, that's a complete joke. Here's the plain and simple truth: If all of humanity left the planet next week, and we took all of our technology and capitalism with us. In other words, Captain Kirk beams all of us up into somewhere in space. Even if we did that, it would still take somewhere in the order of 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2. It is sad to see just how political climate change has become. The data is out there. The studies are out there. The understanding is out there. We need to stop talking about magically capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and start talking about adaptation. That is the only thing we can do. Switch our entire economy to renewable energy? No. That won't fix it. It won't even slow it down. Switch the entire world economy to the most optimal --yet to be invented-- forms of renewables? Nope. That won't fix it. In fact, we already know that, even if we were able to do it, not only would atmospheric CO2 concentration not drop, it would continue to rise. We need to start having conversations about the truth, not the fantasy du jour, which is the endless loop we seem to be locked into. I get why, it has political value. The ignorant masses are driven into a self-righteous state where support for fantasy merchants actually feels like they are "saving the planet". The entire thing is a silly fantasy. Sorry. I have written about this on HN before, complete with sources and data. If interested you can find my comments on multiple threads. As you say, most fail to recognize the scale of the problem. It's a planetary scale issue. Fixing it would require more energy and resources than we could possibly imagine --we might not even have enough on the planet. Even worse, deploying such "solutions" at the scale (energy, materials, etc.) necessary to affect change on a human timeline (decades rather than tens of thousands of years) is far more likely to kill everything on earth than to save the planet. We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly. Basic concept: In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it. Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.

chrisamiller 5y ago

leesec 5y ago

So we shouldn't try because the scale?

thereisnospork 5y ago
Fighting an unwinnable battle is rarely a wise allocation of resources.
- leesec 5y ago
  Extremely defeatist attitude to call mankind's survival an unwinnable battle.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Not fighting the battle is also unwinnable.
nix23 5y ago
Stop pumping C02 into the atmosphere and massive reforestation (not directly for binding C02 but to give moisture into the air which gives other plants a chance to grow for them self's and strengthen the ground)...in short, try to reinstate nature as it was, because we little humans cannot do what nature did for millions of years (washing and binding C02 out the atmosphere and into the ground). The point is on "millions" of years. We really went too far and there is nothing we can do to "revers" it, for the first time in ~100 years humans will have to adapt to nature and not the other way around.
Arnt 5y ago
No, you misunderstand. Capturing CO₂ from typical atmosphere is a very difficult problem, and it's a big problem too. Talking about that distracts from a problem that's much smaller and more accessible, namely capturing CO₂ from the parts of the atmosphere where there's very much CO₂. The photo shows a number of pipelines that guide CO₂ up and release it. Capturing it at the top of the photo, in the open air, is very much more difficult and expensive than capturing it near the middle, in those big vertical things. https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TfTxDMlqODtgyGkRG6-j9Y-Sv50=/0x0:4814x3562/920x613/filters:focal(2022x1396:2792x2166):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69054702/1231898565.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TfTxDMlqODtgyGkRG6-j9Y-Sv50=... If you start thinking about how to capture it in the middle of the photo, you very quickly also consider other ways of achieving the same goal at the same site. Capturing CO₂ is damned expensive compared to those other ways, and the discussion is a distraction. IMO capturing old CO₂ is necessary (as the article says) but when discussed it's usually contrasted to current emissions rather than old emissions, and it's hopelessly inefficient compared to current emissions. We can't go back in time and avoid old emissions, so avoiding capture isn't IMO possible. For the time being it's irrelevant because there current level of emissions (the highest of all time) presents us with very much to do that's both simpler and cheaper.

oliwarner 5y ago

Gawking at the enormity of the challenge and ultimately never doing anything isn't acceptable though. I'm not saying that's all you're suggesting, and realism is certainly a requirement for working out what we actually need to achieve here, but this enthusiasm is essential. We need it to drive policy in the face of economic penalty and limiting nutritional choice. We need the enthusiasm if we want to be able to tell our kids (and theirs) that we actually tried. It's a balance. "I love the enthusiasm but" might be accurate, but as-is, serves to smother that spark of hope that we need from everybody right now. Don't give up completely on our species.

bambax 5y ago

It's completely hopeless, but kind of funny in a way. We thought humanity would destroy itself with wars, or atomic bombs going off unexpectedly, etc. Instead, what will get us is, essentially, farting.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Unter Schmutzatmosphäre verkackt!
dredmorbius 5y ago
Hygiene factors. The ultimate technological mechanism.