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There is no way to get out of this without carbon capture. We already have too much carbon in the atmosphere, even if we reach net zero. And a lot of that extra

There is no way to get out of this without carbon capture. We already have too much carbon in the atmosphere, even if we reach net zero. And a lot of that extra carbon in the system was buried before being pumped up as fossil fuel. Said so, we won't survive the death of the oceans. And that is what is the worst that can happen meddling in scale with them, if even because we don't know yet all the players there. We are still getting surprised by unexpected interactions, new feedback loops, new things and new ways of things going wrong. Could be (existing or emerging) process that reemits that "captured" carbon, so the effort may be short lived or kick back badly. And meddling without knowing the consequences is not (geo)engineering. Most net zero proposals (and this carbon capture "solution") doesn't put in the map severely cutting down extraction, just moving that carbon around the system in a potentially transitory way, and keeping adding new fossil carbon because capturing something will be flagged as a green card to keep business as usual.

bilsbie 4y ago
Why can’t we live with something like 450ppm?
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  It's not about living with xxx ppm, it's about sustainability and pleasantness of the ecology.
  - zosima 4y ago
    How is the ecology more sustainable and pleasant with a different amount of CO2 than 450ppm? What is the optimal concentration of CO2 and why?
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      If you start tinkering with things you aren't sustaining it, you're tinkering with it. Increased in CO2 requires ecological adaptations of organisms living in the oceans, for instance. https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts/ocean-acidification https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co... "Researchers have already discovered severe levels of pteropod shell dissolution in the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica." The optimal concentration for the ecology that we recently had is the CO2 concentration we had a bit before that (as it takes times for effects to be felt). Plus or minus, here or there, depending on other factors such as warming. Forcing the rest of the ecology to try to adapt to increased CO2 levels starts to become really problematic for them when we are also forcing them to try to adapt to things like human-introduced invasives, human-caused habitat destruction and repurposing, population loss due to over-hunting and over-harvesting. It all adds up.
      - bilsbie 4y ago
        Good point about OA. I couldn’t find what the control was in the pteropod study. What are they comparing them against? Also looks like OA isn’t uniformly bad. Some species seem to thrive: https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification-a-risky-shell-game/ https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification-a-r...
        anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > Good point about OA. I couldn’t find what the control was in the pteropod study. What are they comparing them against? No clue. I was just using it as an example. > Also looks like OA isn’t uniformly bad. Some species seem to thrive Sure, that's why the harm is measured in terms of entire ecologies, not individual species.
    - Baeocystin 4y ago
      The optimal is whatever it median value was before industrialization. Not that Earth hasn't had life at a wide range of CO2 levels, but current life had a million+ years to get used to mid-200s PPM, whereas we've gone from that to over 400 in a few decades. Ecologically, that's like hitting a brick wall. The rate of change is too fast.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gmuslera 4y ago
  It is not a photo, it is not a closed room. We are in a system, that have inputs and outputs. With more than GHG (not just CO2) than preindustrial times, the planet keeps more energy of what it receives to the sun. That affects the pretty complex system that is the climate one, in several ways, and triggering several positive feedback loops that makes things even worse (i.e. losing ice over ocean means less albedo, and more energy capture, whatever is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere). And some of those feedback loops even do their own emissions of GHG, like more methane from wetlands, and the one emitted by permafrost thawing, potentially more water vapor that is a strong GHG, and so on. There is a point where the concentration of CO2 is directly harmful for human beings, 450ppm is still far from that. But having too much for too much time put the system on a roll into a direction that we don't want. And we are not decreasing it, but still accelerating the rate at which we emit it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
DennisP 4y ago
We are already meddling with the oceans, by putting more CO2 in them (by way of the atmosphere). The first method described in the article works by directly removing that CO2 from the oceans. It reverse the meddling we've already done. Then it puts the carbon in calcium carbonate, which can lock it up for millennia.
- gmuslera 4y ago
  Millenia like in with trees, that a forest fire can return it to the atmosphere in a whim? How stable are those calcium carbonates regarding how the oceans can change on temperature, acidity or even life, to name just a few factors? And it should be able to address more than this (https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-scale-of-fossil-fuel-production/ https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-scale-of-fossil-fu...) amount of carbon yearly (and that is not the volume of the calcium carbonate, but the source carbon, it could be far bigger). Keeping the fuel underground is the best capture technology. It will keep being safely there unless a suicidal species dig around for retrieving and burning it.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    There's no need to put the calcium carbonate back in the ocean. Calcium carbonate is limestone. The White Cliffs of Dover are limestone, and they've been there for millions of years. Keeping the fuel underground would have been nice. Now the CO2 level is already too high. As you pointed out above, we have to stop emissions and pull CO2 back out of the atmosphere.

bilsbie 4y ago

Why can’t we live with something like 450ppm?

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
It's not about living with xxx ppm, it's about sustainability and pleasantness of the ecology.
- zosima 4y ago
  How is the ecology more sustainable and pleasant with a different amount of CO2 than 450ppm? What is the optimal concentration of CO2 and why?
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    If you start tinkering with things you aren't sustaining it, you're tinkering with it. Increased in CO2 requires ecological adaptations of organisms living in the oceans, for instance. https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts/ocean-acidification https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co... "Researchers have already discovered severe levels of pteropod shell dissolution in the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica." The optimal concentration for the ecology that we recently had is the CO2 concentration we had a bit before that (as it takes times for effects to be felt). Plus or minus, here or there, depending on other factors such as warming. Forcing the rest of the ecology to try to adapt to increased CO2 levels starts to become really problematic for them when we are also forcing them to try to adapt to things like human-introduced invasives, human-caused habitat destruction and repurposing, population loss due to over-hunting and over-harvesting. It all adds up.
    - bilsbie 4y ago
      Good point about OA. I couldn’t find what the control was in the pteropod study. What are they comparing them against? Also looks like OA isn’t uniformly bad. Some species seem to thrive: https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification-a-risky-shell-game/ https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification-a-r...
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > Good point about OA. I couldn’t find what the control was in the pteropod study. What are they comparing them against? No clue. I was just using it as an example. > Also looks like OA isn’t uniformly bad. Some species seem to thrive Sure, that's why the harm is measured in terms of entire ecologies, not individual species.
  - Baeocystin 4y ago
    The optimal is whatever it median value was before industrialization. Not that Earth hasn't had life at a wide range of CO2 levels, but current life had a million+ years to get used to mid-200s PPM, whereas we've gone from that to over 400 in a few decades. Ecologically, that's like hitting a brick wall. The rate of change is too fast.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gmuslera 4y ago
It is not a photo, it is not a closed room. We are in a system, that have inputs and outputs. With more than GHG (not just CO2) than preindustrial times, the planet keeps more energy of what it receives to the sun. That affects the pretty complex system that is the climate one, in several ways, and triggering several positive feedback loops that makes things even worse (i.e. losing ice over ocean means less albedo, and more energy capture, whatever is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere). And some of those feedback loops even do their own emissions of GHG, like more methane from wetlands, and the one emitted by permafrost thawing, potentially more water vapor that is a strong GHG, and so on. There is a point where the concentration of CO2 is directly harmful for human beings, 450ppm is still far from that. But having too much for too much time put the system on a roll into a direction that we don't want. And we are not decreasing it, but still accelerating the rate at which we emit it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

DennisP 4y ago

We are already meddling with the oceans, by putting more CO2 in them (by way of the atmosphere). The first method described in the article works by directly removing that CO2 from the oceans. It reverse the meddling we've already done. Then it puts the carbon in calcium carbonate, which can lock it up for millennia.

gmuslera 4y ago
Millenia like in with trees, that a forest fire can return it to the atmosphere in a whim? How stable are those calcium carbonates regarding how the oceans can change on temperature, acidity or even life, to name just a few factors? And it should be able to address more than this (https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-scale-of-fossil-fuel-production/ https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-scale-of-fossil-fu...) amount of carbon yearly (and that is not the volume of the calcium carbonate, but the source carbon, it could be far bigger). Keeping the fuel underground is the best capture technology. It will keep being safely there unless a suicidal species dig around for retrieving and burning it.
- DennisP 4y ago
  There's no need to put the calcium carbonate back in the ocean. Calcium carbonate is limestone. The White Cliffs of Dover are limestone, and they've been there for millions of years. Keeping the fuel underground would have been nice. Now the CO2 level is already too high. As you pointed out above, we have to stop emissions and pull CO2 back out of the atmosphere.