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It's absolutely mind blowing that we as humans were able to increase a constituent part of the atmosphere from from 0.028% to 0.04%. Written like that it looks

It's absolutely mind blowing that we as humans were able to increase a constituent part of the atmosphere from from 0.028% to 0.04%. Written like that it looks small but, each part per million of CO2 in the atmosphere represents approximately 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon, or 7.82 gigatonnes of CO2.

foobarbecue 3y ago
Yes. We are extremely powerful and need to learn to harness our power before it's too late.
xyzelement 3y ago
Funny! I read your comment in exactly the reverse way: "2.13 / 7.82 gigatonnes" sounds high. 0.28% to 0.04% sounds absolutely tiny. Maybe THAT's the right way to think about it?
russdill 3y ago
You should see what we've done with land mammals.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
I don't understand how people think Carbon Capture is a solution. Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~1 millimeter of carbon. Globally, we emit about ~13x that per year. That's about equivalent to covering the state of Massachusetts in a foot of carbon. Per year. The entire planet is either the ocean, in use, desert, or already covered in forests. ~33% of the earth is desert. We'd need a decent chunk of that to get ~0% fossil fuel energy. But let's pretend we don't. We'd still need to cover all of that in several feet of carbon to capture all of our emissions. It is not going to happen.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  People think its a solution because its one tool in a toolkit. You are right capture alone won’t solve everything, but I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting as much, and are saying instead its an important complement to other strategies.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    It's really not even a compliment. We could not cover even a thousandth of Texas in ~30 feet of carbon per year. That would only account for ~10% of global emissions. It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Honestly, hope seems like a better strategy and less a waste of time than that. If you really want to discuss it - you should preface very discussion with - "This isn't going to make the slightest difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but hear me out anyway..." Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend like there is any viable alternative from phasing out fossil fuels almost entirely. The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could - much to the younger generations detriment. Economics alone should phase out ~60% of fossil fuel usage by 2050. There is nothing they can do to change that at this point. Unfortunately, depending on the curve - the planet could get way hotter by then. But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
    - caminante 3y ago
      > It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Here's what the IPCC said [0]: > “The technical geological CO2 storage capacity is estimated to be on the order of 1000 gigatonnes of CO2, which is more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C, although the regional availability of geological storage could be a limiting factor.” – SPM, p. 37 IEA said similar [1]. [0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say-about-carbon-capture/ https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say... [1] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-has-vast-capacity-to-store-co2-net-zero-means-we-ll-need-it https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-has-vast-capacity...
    - the_sleaze9 3y ago
      > We could not cover even 1/1000th of the US in ~30 feet of carbon per year. We wouldn't ... ? Billions of gallons of crude oil are removed from the earth every year, millions upon millions of tons of stone are mined from the earth every year. I'm misunderstanding how "covering Texas" is a meaningful measure in terms of carbon capture. > It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001% I'm unsure how you've come to this metric or conclusion honestly. > Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend.... The oil industry seems to be interested in pivoting to CCS because it is dependent on pipelines and drilling infrastructure, which is comfortably inside their position at global-scale. The fact that they caused a large portion of the problem is tangential - practically speaking. Blame who you will, we have a problem and there is an army of geological engineers and pipeline experts, etc etc with decades of experience to draw from. > The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could This is myopic and honestly childish > But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think. ......
- reactordev 3y ago
  We’ll just bury it like we do with our heads.
- caminante 3y ago
  You dismiss CCS (solution) by emphasizing the size of the carbon emitted (problem). That's not a complete argument. Do you have a critique of the IPCC's stance that CCS is part of the solution and necessary to decarbonize hard to abate sectors like steel/cement? [0] [0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say-about-carbon-capture/ https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say...
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    Yes - I think in 20 years - we will need far less steel and cement as we have better alternatives, and there will be alternatives to fossil fuels by then for producing steel and cement anyway. In the short term - CC is not a solution - there's too much carbon being emitted and there isn't an economical, scalable solution anyway. We are going to emit what we're going to emit - and no amount of realistic CC is ever going to dent what we've already done by the time the technology is ready.
- civilitty 3y ago
  > I don't understand how people think Carbon Capture is a solution. While the current crop of carbon capture technologies are rather inefficient and useless, once we've got more of a mastery of bioengineering, it's by far the best answer to the long term greenhouse gas problem (not without its risks though). The tens of meters deep peatlands that cover Canada, Russia, and the rainforests of the tropics hold enough biomass to more than triple the planetary CO2 ppm if they were burned. Those peatlands only started forming 18,000 years ago when the glaciers started receding so we have hard evidence that nature is capable of sequestering mind boggling amounts of carbon very quickly. That suggests that if we engineered a system we could do it even faster. It might take us a century to develop the biotech to that point, but long term the solution is on the horizon. If we had the political will now we could get a decent head start by industrializing seaweed, algae, and other fast growing organisms for CO2 capture.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    Where do you think we're getting the space to do any of this? AFAIK, we don't have Canada and Russia sized 1000 foot-deep spaces readily available to store carbon. Technology isn't a problem as far as I'm concerned. Space is. Would love to be proved wrong and have yet another reason to be optimistic about the future.
    - the_sleaze9 3y ago
      Imagine all the corn that gets subsidized in the United States.
    - digging 3y ago
      The best technology that exists is much lower tech than most people think. It's called reforestation. We have lots of space for complex forest ecosystems, and we'd have a lot more if we could start reversing car-dependent suburban sprawl.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
        Reforesting the planet wouldn't even undo 1 year worth of emissions. Then what? And by the way - to eliminate maybe one year's worth of emissions, it'd take a forest ~30 years to grow... And what're we supposed to eat? If we're all just going to starve to death - we don't have to worry about cutting emissions...
- philipkglass 3y ago
  I think that you slipped some decimal places somewhere. The most common allotrope of carbon, graphite, has a density of 2.26 metric tons per cubic meter. Texas has an area of 695,663 square kilometers. Covering Texas with a 1 meter (~3 foot) layer of graphite would consume 659663 * 1000 * 1000 * 2.6 = 1,715,123,800,000 tons (1.7 trillion tons) of carbon. One billion tons of carbon would make a Texas-covering graphite layer about 0.58 millimeters thick.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tzs 3y ago
  > Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~3 feet of carbon That seems high. I get a lot smaller number, but maybe I've messed up some unit conversions. I'm using: 1 ton = 10^3 kg 1 g CO2 = 12/44 g of C (C == carbon, not Celsius) Density of C is 2.2 g/cm^3 1 Texas = 6.95x10^5 km^2 Assuming those are right and I didn't botch any conversions between metric prefixes I get this: 10^9 tons CO2 x 10^3 kg/ton x 10^3 g/kg = 10^15 g CO2 10^15 g CO2 x 12/44 g C/g CO2 = 2.7x10^14 g C 2.7x10^14 g C x 1 cm^3 C/2.2 g C = 1.2x10^14 cm^3 C 6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas x 10^10 cm^2/km^2 = 6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas 1.2x10^14 cm^3 C / (6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas) = 1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C Check: 1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C x 1 km / 10^5 cm = 1.7x10^-7 Texas km C 1.7x10^-7 Texas km C x 6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas = 1.2x10^-1 km^3 C 1.17x10^-1 km^3 C x 10^15 cm^3/km^3 x 2.2 gm C/cm^3 C = 2.57x10^14 gm C 2.57 gm C x 44 gm CO2/12 gm c x 1 ton/10^6 gm = 9.4 x 10^8 ton CO2 = 0.9 gigaton CO2 PS: the above is for 1 gigaton of CO2 since that is what emissions figures usually use. But if you were just talking about after capture and extraction of carbon, multiply the above by 44/12, giving 6.2x10^-2 Texas cm C. PPS: If we took all of the CO2 out of the atmosphere, the amount of carbon would be enough to cover to Texas to about 53 cm.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    Thanks - updated. Not as ridiculous - but still not a solution.
    - tzs 3y ago
      I don't think storage for the captures carbon is really a limit. I think the main limit would be the materials to construct enough carbon capture facilities to do the job. One nice thing about carbon capture is it doesn't matter much where you do it. The atmosphere does a great job of spreading CO2 nearly uniformly. You just need places with sufficient available energy and somewhere to put the carbon. One possibility would be subtropical deserts. They have plenty of sunlight for energy and plenty of land that could be used without displacing many people. Imagine carbon capture facilities that consist of a solar farm for power with the panels mounted a few meters off the ground, and we dump the captured carbon under the panels. As calculated earlier, 1 gigaton of captured CO2 would give enough carbon to cover Texas to a depth of 0.017 cm. There are about 3000 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so if we captured all of it, that would cover Texas to a depth of 51 cm. The 5 largest subtropical deserts have a combined area 22 times as big as Texas. If we covered just 10% of that area in solar farms to power carbon capture with a meter of room under the solar panels we'd have plenty of storage space. At the efficiency of current solar farms and current carbon capture, they would be capturing about 10% more carbon per year than we are currently emitting. Cover 90% of those 5 deserts with such plants and in under a decade we could get back to preindustrial CO2 levels. The big limit that I see on doing this is production of solar panels. At current production rates, covering 10% of the 5 largest subtropical deserts would use about 180 years worth of solar panels. I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.
drak0n1c 3y ago
Wait until you learn about how the evolution of cyanobacteria led to oxygenation of the atmosphere and the mass extinction of most life on Earth.
- LastTrain 3y ago
  Wow. How long did that take?
andrewla 3y ago
The story in many ways is even more subtle than that -- the carbon cycle (both natural and augmented by human activity) generates ~200Gt of carbon annually, and absorbs ~200Gt of carbon. Human activity yields about 6-10Gt annually. So CO2 emissions are increased by about 3% from the natural baseline, but some of this is absorbed by natural increases in carbon sinks. We don't completely understand how the budget works out. https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ is a great summary of some of the more recent work in the area. It's astonishing how poorly we understand this system in the macro.

foobarbecue 3y ago

Yes. We are extremely powerful and need to learn to harness our power before it's too late.

xyzelement 3y ago

Funny! I read your comment in exactly the reverse way: "2.13 / 7.82 gigatonnes" sounds high. 0.28% to 0.04% sounds absolutely tiny. Maybe THAT's the right way to think about it?

russdill 3y ago

You should see what we've done with land mammals.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

I don't understand how people think Carbon Capture is a solution. Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~1 millimeter of carbon. Globally, we emit about ~13x that per year. That's about equivalent to covering the state of Massachusetts in a foot of carbon. Per year. The entire planet is either the ocean, in use, desert, or already covered in forests. ~33% of the earth is desert. We'd need a decent chunk of that to get ~0% fossil fuel energy. But let's pretend we don't. We'd still need to cover all of that in several feet of carbon to capture all of our emissions. It is not going to happen.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
People think its a solution because its one tool in a toolkit. You are right capture alone won’t solve everything, but I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting as much, and are saying instead its an important complement to other strategies.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  It's really not even a compliment. We could not cover even a thousandth of Texas in ~30 feet of carbon per year. That would only account for ~10% of global emissions. It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Honestly, hope seems like a better strategy and less a waste of time than that. If you really want to discuss it - you should preface very discussion with - "This isn't going to make the slightest difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but hear me out anyway..." Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend like there is any viable alternative from phasing out fossil fuels almost entirely. The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could - much to the younger generations detriment. Economics alone should phase out ~60% of fossil fuel usage by 2050. There is nothing they can do to change that at this point. Unfortunately, depending on the curve - the planet could get way hotter by then. But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
  - caminante 3y ago
    > It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Here's what the IPCC said [0]: > “The technical geological CO2 storage capacity is estimated to be on the order of 1000 gigatonnes of CO2, which is more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C, although the regional availability of geological storage could be a limiting factor.” – SPM, p. 37 IEA said similar [1]. [0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say-about-carbon-capture/ https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say... [1] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-has-vast-capacity-to-store-co2-net-zero-means-we-ll-need-it https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-has-vast-capacity...
  - the_sleaze9 3y ago
    > We could not cover even 1/1000th of the US in ~30 feet of carbon per year. We wouldn't ... ? Billions of gallons of crude oil are removed from the earth every year, millions upon millions of tons of stone are mined from the earth every year. I'm misunderstanding how "covering Texas" is a meaningful measure in terms of carbon capture. > It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001% I'm unsure how you've come to this metric or conclusion honestly. > Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend.... The oil industry seems to be interested in pivoting to CCS because it is dependent on pipelines and drilling infrastructure, which is comfortably inside their position at global-scale. The fact that they caused a large portion of the problem is tangential - practically speaking. Blame who you will, we have a problem and there is an army of geological engineers and pipeline experts, etc etc with decades of experience to draw from. > The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could This is myopic and honestly childish > But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think. ......
reactordev 3y ago
We’ll just bury it like we do with our heads.
caminante 3y ago
You dismiss CCS (solution) by emphasizing the size of the carbon emitted (problem). That's not a complete argument. Do you have a critique of the IPCC's stance that CCS is part of the solution and necessary to decarbonize hard to abate sectors like steel/cement? [0] [0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say-about-carbon-capture/ https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say...
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Yes - I think in 20 years - we will need far less steel and cement as we have better alternatives, and there will be alternatives to fossil fuels by then for producing steel and cement anyway. In the short term - CC is not a solution - there's too much carbon being emitted and there isn't an economical, scalable solution anyway. We are going to emit what we're going to emit - and no amount of realistic CC is ever going to dent what we've already done by the time the technology is ready.
civilitty 3y ago
> I don't understand how people think Carbon Capture is a solution. While the current crop of carbon capture technologies are rather inefficient and useless, once we've got more of a mastery of bioengineering, it's by far the best answer to the long term greenhouse gas problem (not without its risks though). The tens of meters deep peatlands that cover Canada, Russia, and the rainforests of the tropics hold enough biomass to more than triple the planetary CO2 ppm if they were burned. Those peatlands only started forming 18,000 years ago when the glaciers started receding so we have hard evidence that nature is capable of sequestering mind boggling amounts of carbon very quickly. That suggests that if we engineered a system we could do it even faster. It might take us a century to develop the biotech to that point, but long term the solution is on the horizon. If we had the political will now we could get a decent head start by industrializing seaweed, algae, and other fast growing organisms for CO2 capture.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Where do you think we're getting the space to do any of this? AFAIK, we don't have Canada and Russia sized 1000 foot-deep spaces readily available to store carbon. Technology isn't a problem as far as I'm concerned. Space is. Would love to be proved wrong and have yet another reason to be optimistic about the future.
  - the_sleaze9 3y ago
    Imagine all the corn that gets subsidized in the United States.
  - digging 3y ago
    The best technology that exists is much lower tech than most people think. It's called reforestation. We have lots of space for complex forest ecosystems, and we'd have a lot more if we could start reversing car-dependent suburban sprawl.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
      Reforesting the planet wouldn't even undo 1 year worth of emissions. Then what? And by the way - to eliminate maybe one year's worth of emissions, it'd take a forest ~30 years to grow... And what're we supposed to eat? If we're all just going to starve to death - we don't have to worry about cutting emissions...
philipkglass 3y ago
I think that you slipped some decimal places somewhere. The most common allotrope of carbon, graphite, has a density of 2.26 metric tons per cubic meter. Texas has an area of 695,663 square kilometers. Covering Texas with a 1 meter (~3 foot) layer of graphite would consume 659663 * 1000 * 1000 * 2.6 = 1,715,123,800,000 tons (1.7 trillion tons) of carbon. One billion tons of carbon would make a Texas-covering graphite layer about 0.58 millimeters thick.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tzs 3y ago
> Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~3 feet of carbon That seems high. I get a lot smaller number, but maybe I've messed up some unit conversions. I'm using: 1 ton = 10^3 kg 1 g CO2 = 12/44 g of C (C == carbon, not Celsius) Density of C is 2.2 g/cm^3 1 Texas = 6.95x10^5 km^2 Assuming those are right and I didn't botch any conversions between metric prefixes I get this: 10^9 tons CO2 x 10^3 kg/ton x 10^3 g/kg = 10^15 g CO2 10^15 g CO2 x 12/44 g C/g CO2 = 2.7x10^14 g C 2.7x10^14 g C x 1 cm^3 C/2.2 g C = 1.2x10^14 cm^3 C 6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas x 10^10 cm^2/km^2 = 6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas 1.2x10^14 cm^3 C / (6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas) = 1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C Check: 1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C x 1 km / 10^5 cm = 1.7x10^-7 Texas km C 1.7x10^-7 Texas km C x 6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas = 1.2x10^-1 km^3 C 1.17x10^-1 km^3 C x 10^15 cm^3/km^3 x 2.2 gm C/cm^3 C = 2.57x10^14 gm C 2.57 gm C x 44 gm CO2/12 gm c x 1 ton/10^6 gm = 9.4 x 10^8 ton CO2 = 0.9 gigaton CO2 PS: the above is for 1 gigaton of CO2 since that is what emissions figures usually use. But if you were just talking about after capture and extraction of carbon, multiply the above by 44/12, giving 6.2x10^-2 Texas cm C. PPS: If we took all of the CO2 out of the atmosphere, the amount of carbon would be enough to cover to Texas to about 53 cm.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Thanks - updated. Not as ridiculous - but still not a solution.
  - tzs 3y ago
    I don't think storage for the captures carbon is really a limit. I think the main limit would be the materials to construct enough carbon capture facilities to do the job. One nice thing about carbon capture is it doesn't matter much where you do it. The atmosphere does a great job of spreading CO2 nearly uniformly. You just need places with sufficient available energy and somewhere to put the carbon. One possibility would be subtropical deserts. They have plenty of sunlight for energy and plenty of land that could be used without displacing many people. Imagine carbon capture facilities that consist of a solar farm for power with the panels mounted a few meters off the ground, and we dump the captured carbon under the panels. As calculated earlier, 1 gigaton of captured CO2 would give enough carbon to cover Texas to a depth of 0.017 cm. There are about 3000 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so if we captured all of it, that would cover Texas to a depth of 51 cm. The 5 largest subtropical deserts have a combined area 22 times as big as Texas. If we covered just 10% of that area in solar farms to power carbon capture with a meter of room under the solar panels we'd have plenty of storage space. At the efficiency of current solar farms and current carbon capture, they would be capturing about 10% more carbon per year than we are currently emitting. Cover 90% of those 5 deserts with such plants and in under a decade we could get back to preindustrial CO2 levels. The big limit that I see on doing this is production of solar panels. At current production rates, covering 10% of the 5 largest subtropical deserts would use about 180 years worth of solar panels. I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.

drak0n1c 3y ago

Wait until you learn about how the evolution of cyanobacteria led to oxygenation of the atmosphere and the mass extinction of most life on Earth.

LastTrain 3y ago
Wow. How long did that take?

andrewla 3y ago

The story in many ways is even more subtle than that -- the carbon cycle (both natural and augmented by human activity) generates ~200Gt of carbon annually, and absorbs ~200Gt of carbon. Human activity yields about 6-10Gt annually. So CO2 emissions are increased by about 3% from the natural baseline, but some of this is absorbed by natural increases in carbon sinks. We don't completely understand how the budget works out. https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ is a great summary of some of the more recent work in the area. It's astonishing how poorly we understand this system in the macro.