Most of the conversation surrounding climate change has to do with eliminating the release of carbon into the atmosphere. What's less talked about—at least in public forums—is the fact that this won't be enough. Even if we meet all our goals for getting net carbon emissions to zero, there will still be too much CO2 already in the atmosphere. This means that in addition to eliminating new carbon emissions, we have to remove lots of existing CO2 from the atmosphere in order to have any chance of limiting warming to less than 2°C.
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) usually prompts visions of enormous carbon capture plants, which have been under experimental development for decades and seem unlikely to ever work at the scale we need. Far more promising are various forms of ocean-based geoengineering. Today, the National Academy of Sciences released a new report that follows up on previous reports about ways to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the ocean:
To meet climate goals, some form of CDR will likely be needed to remove roughly 10 Gt CO2/yr by mid-century and 20 Gt CO2/yr by the end of the century.
....The ocean holds great potential for uptake and longer-term sequestration of anthropogenic CO2 for several reasons....It is critical that ocean CDR approaches be assessed against the consequences of no action and as one component of a broad and integrated climate mitigation strategy. Without substantial decarbonization, emissions abatement, and potential options such as CDR, atmospheric CO2 growth will continue unabated with associated rising impacts from climate change and ocean acidification, putting marine ecosystems at risk.
The report is nearly 300 pages long and provides considerable detail about six different broad categories of ocean CDR. But this might be the most important part of the report:
Please note the title of the horizontal axis: "Millions." The entire budget they're proposing to investigate every possible strategy is $149 million per year. That's million with an M. It's a rounding error. It's insane that this is even worth discussing. Just do it. Double the budget or triple it, and start doling out the money. If the worst case is that we completely waste a few hundred million dollars a year, we won't even notice it.
Right now, we emit about 35 gigatons of CO2 every year. This is the end result of an enormous global infrastructure dedicated to fossil fuel drilling, shipping, refining, pumping into cars, etc. As a rule of thumb, you can figure that removing CO2 is a project with a similar scale. Think about that. The NAS report estimates that we'll need to remove at least 10 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, which means a global infrastructure about a third the size of the emission infrastructure. That's still enormous beyond comprehension. And it's quite likely something we'll need.
So without even reading the entire report, I'm massively in favor of funding the whole thing and telling the scientific community to get cracking. This is stuff we desperately need to know more about.
Prediction: Greenpeace Hairshirt Left will oppose because it doesn't involve undoing capitalism and modern industrial life
This is exactly right. If you are against geoengineering, you don't really care about climate change. You just want to push your worldview.
In addition to ocean seeding, we should look at enhanced weathering.
https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/2021/04/enhanced-weathering-factsheet/
They'll oppose it because it's likely to have massive negative consequences for ocean life and possibly all life on the planet. But sure, why not roll the dice with the entire planet? I'm sure it will work out great. I trust the lives of every human on the planet to whatever group wants to implement this crazy scheme. Why shouldn't I?
Rob, the "It" that Kevin is proposing is research. Research will subsume multiple topics, including (but not limited to) methods, financial costs, costs to the environment, and potential methods of mitigating both those types of costs over time.
I doubt that Kevin is proposing "rolling the dice." Au contraire, he is proposing (1) study the problem, BEFORE (2) spring into action.
Whatever dude. Research it all you want I guess. No amount of research is going to justify purposefully doing something like this. You can't possibly predict all the consequences anything on this scale.
Well Rob, you can certainly hype your alternative if you like--
"Do nothing; maybe the problem will solve itself."
Or perhaps "Do nothing; after all, what's the problem?"
Or perhaps "Do nothing. At least as long as I'm here do nothing; after I'm gone, our grandchildren can worry about the problem."
Solution: Reduce the human population by at least 90%.
That's the only thing that will work.
Interesting idea. How do you suggest we reduce the human population by 7 billion people?
Genocide?
Nuclear war?
Send them to Mars?
I got it. Let's send them to the bottom of the ocean. Instead of storing 10 gigatons of CO2 in the oceans every year, let's store 10 gigatons of humans. At 14 humans per ton, my back-of-the-envelope math says that's over 700 million people. In 10 years we'll have reduced the human population by 90% or more. Problem solved!
Meanwhile, enjoy those gas guzzlers while you can.
How it happens is an implementation detail. That it will happen is a certainty.
Humans are not pure CO2. They're 80% water (zero carbon content) and a sizeable fraction of the remainder is bone (calcium phosphate with no carbon content). To accomplish the carbon equivalent of 10 gigatons of CO2, you're going to have to drown the entire world population in one year.
Perhaps your comment reflects a belief that people will never do anything about human caused global warming, therefore what we need is fewer of us. I'm not interested in giving up my spot or asking anyone else to. But this is a problem deserving of serious attention.
There are a number of proven ways to reduce fertility below replacement level. These include reducing poverty, increasing access to contraceptives, and improving healthcare. The most important is improving the education of women. These are all good things to do and not so expensive. I read that $8 billion/yr would pay for contraceptives for every woman in the world that wants them and can't afford them.
Human population growth will end some day. The question is how, when, and at what other costs. Here's a little ripoff from Malthus: Severance's Iron Law of Population: "Sometime long before the mass of living humanity equals the mass of the earth, we will be in serious trouble."
I calculate that if it were possible to continue with population growth at the present rate, we'd be there in 2941 years. We are in serious trouble.
It's partly that, yes, there is no will to do anything substantive. But it's also the fact that we're already well above the steady-state carrying capacity of the planet in terms of resource consumption, and that's with only a small fraction of the human population enjoying a "Western" lifestyle.
Malthus was wrong then, wrong now, and will be wrong and forgotten in 2941 years, by which time humans will most likely number in multitudes beyond our imaginations across multiple planets and star systems. Unless we cease to exist at all -- but it won't be because we've run out of resources but because we let the nuts take control. So don't be a nut.
You're an optimist and, like me, a fan of science fiction. The thing is that there is no physics yet that provides a route to faster than light travel. Perhaps, in a hundred years, we'll have substantial populations living elsewhere in the solar system. That will never be a place for millions per year to emigrate; it will not solve our problems.
We do not have 2941 years. That's a number for an impossible situation; it's a thought experiment. We are already wiping out fisheries and other animals from songbirds to elephants.
Malthus said that populations rise until limited by predation or famine. That's true of rats; unfortunately our limited vision means that's probably going to be true of us. Malthus will get the last laugh.
Solution: Reduce the human population by at least 90%.
No. As Kevin quite rightly points out, even that wouldn't be enough. There's too much legacy C02 in the atmosphere.
We absolutely must look into taking legacy C02 out of the air and storing it elsewhere.
Soylent Green did nothing wrong.
ugh. this is such a stupid, lazy, unserious response. dude.
But sure, why not roll the dice with the entire planet?
What part of
do you not understand?
Kevin's right: we must learn more about CDR. That's what happens when you spend multiple centuries pumping C02 into the air.
I would suggest that "could have massive negative negative consequences" is more accurate than "likely to have massive negative consequences". We simply don't know enough yet to even identify possible negative consequences, much less compute probabilities.
We also don't know that any negative consequences would be worse than the negative consequences of not removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Et voila, the example.
I'm certain that there will be someone, more than one, who does this.
AND, it is quite interesting that this is your first, number one, response. You haven't even said whether you think it's a good idea or a bad one.
I mean, it gives one the impression that you care a lot more about bashing the "hairshirt left" than you care about climate change and coping with its effects. Which fits the paradigm Kevin has switched to over the last year or so.
Lol, Greenpeace is bourgeois idiot. The real problem of capitalism will undo itself. Debt collapse, markets bankruptcies destroying most of the economy. Hmmmmm, the old Semitic ponzi scheme unwinding.
"It’s time to seriously study ocean geoengineering"
I mean what could possibly go wrong? Surely nothing unanticipated could ever result from such a massive project to purposefully alter all of the oceans on the planet.
The possibility of leaving the oceans untainted by human presence has already passed. That ship, ahem, has sailed. Ocean composition is changing rapidly because of climate change. There is a bunch of plastic floating around a giant eddy in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So, we already mess up the oceans thoughtlessly. Maybe with some intention we can make things a bit better?
This sounds like some batsh*t insane rationalization to me. Yes I know pollution, overfishing, etc. are major problems. But attempting to turn the ocean into a carbon sucking engine _on purpose_ is a vastly different matter, wouldn't you agree? Your "what the heck, maybe it'll work" mentality is not very convincing to me.
To my knowledge, no one has ever purposefully tried to geoengineer this planet, but please correct me if I'm wrong. You will need the enthusiastic approval of every single country to even think of attempting something like this. Wars have been started for far less. If this sort of thing is what we are left with the we are indeed out of options.
"Purposely tried..." You're absolutely right.
Unfortunately, accidental unintended geoengineering is how we got into this mess. So now we need to pay more attention.
Precisely.
Obviously what one should do is study nothing, insist endless on dismantling modern capitalism, go on and on about the sanctity of the earth etc. - no risks there to compromising the purity of one's opposition.
And doing nothing carries risk, too. Lots of them. We would probably see entire ocean ecosystems die. That seems bad, right?
We are seeing it now, in real time. Go to the mouth of the MS river in July and see the dead fish.
Rob, I guess you need the same answer again:
The way to try to avoid unanticipated consequences is to (1) first study the problem, BEFORE (2) spring into action. The project Kevin is NOT a massive project to alter all the oceans. The project Kevin is proposing is a (relatively large, from a "study" perspective) concerted, coordinated effort to study the alternatives and to try to follow the "ready, aim" process that ought to precede the "fire" command.
Yes, but you see, if it is studied, the studies might suggest doing something in the area of oceanic geoengineering. And of course.... that cannot be allowed to happen... Perhaps not all that unlike refusing to fund studies about gun violence.
+1
The tricky part of oceanic geo-engineering is sealing it up for the long term. You can dump iron into the ocean, get a bloom in algae that will temporarily grab CO2 from the water (which can then get more from the air), but then it dies and releases it back into the ocean.
The best thing would honestly be if we could get a whole ton of Calcium Oxide. Mix that with seawater and it would lock up CO2 into calcium carbonate, then sink the bottom of the ocean floor. But there's not a lot of calcium oxide on Earth in un-reacted form (although there is a ton of it on the surface of the Moon).
A By-The-Way observation about Kevin's post:
Kevin cites an annual CO2 emission of about 35GT. He then follows with an observation that might be slightly misleading: "This is the end result of an enormous global infrastructure dedicated to drilling, refining, shipping, pumping gasoline into cars, etc. "
That little "etc." appears to be part of a sentence about petroleum, but in reality it has to include a whole ginormous global infrastructure that is substantially bigger than the petroleum problem. That's coal. At today's rate of consumption (by burning), the world uses about 5.5GT of petroleum per year and 8GT of coal. Petroleum is thus about 40% of the problem, while coal is about 60%.
Degrowth is automatically rejected as the solution to global warming by subjects of free market ideology.
Or ordinary human beings who don't share Green Left hair-shirt ideology and wish to live in kumbaya communes growing their own ideologically correct organic veggies with the occasional bouts of starvation.
Starvation from global warming is already occurring. The production of surpluses to continue the accrual of assets by the rich has not prevented the consequences of drought and climate change but accelerated them. All human beings, excepting the very rich, will suffer from malnutrition when drought and high temperatures from global warming dominate the temperate zones. The most sensible and environmental way to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and stop the continuation of global warming is degrowth of consumption and extraction.
Incorrect. There would not be too much carbon in the atmosphere. Lazy post.
To whom are you replying, SOG?
Actually, it doesn't matter, you are the lazy one. Look up how much petroleum is burned in the world each year. Then look up how much coal is burned in the world each year. Then, allowing for a small fraction of the weight being hydrogen, calculate how much carbon, in total, is burned.
Now remember, that doesn't yet tell you how much CO2 is put out. Remember that CO2 is composed of 12 units of C weight for each 32 units of O weight. So the weight of CO2 created by the consumption is 3.66 times the weight of the carbon burned.
When that comes out too HIGH, then you have to remember that not all the carbon is being burned to CO2; some is being burned to CO. So the number that Kevin cited is, in fact, highly accurate.
You're not really much of an engineer, are you?
"You're not really much of an engineer, are you?"
It's a racist, semi-illiterate troll. It leaves its droppings to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
CO, like methane, is thermodynamically unstable. If CO is released into the atmosphere, it oxidizes to CO2 in a fairly short time.
SpadesofGrey is also known as 'scrollover'.
Certainly the need for rapid decarbonization means CDR technology should be funded and accelerated.
That is a completely different matter than saying we should store 10 Gt CO2 / year in the oceans. Oceans might be one of many options for carbon storage, but the damage to the overall health of the Earth could be as great as the current practice of pumping CO2 by the gigaton into the atmosphere. We do the next generation no favors if all we do is relocate the carbon problem to another part of the ecosphere. Ultimately, we need to decarbonize our energy infrastructure, and the shift to renewables ought to be the major focus of climate policy.
None of this is "bioengineering," as I understand the word. That's something else altogether.
Well, it wasn't "bioengineering" being mentioned, it was "geoengineering."
But that's really a minor quibble with your last short paragraph. My main disagreement is with your leap to "let's just stop creating CO2." Yes, that's a good objective for a major focus of climate policy, but lacking the ability to compress the whole climate policy transition from centuries into months, we ALSO need to address what we must do with the waste product we keep producing at a ginormous rate.
Can't solve the problem completely? The treatment of problems and their solution as "all or nothing" has been a reason why problems so frequently don't get mitigated.
Yes, I wrote "bio..." and meant "geo...." Thanks for the catch.
What I also wrote (and meant to write) was "the shift to renewables ought to be the major focus of climate policy." I never said "let's just stop creating CO2" or that shifting to renewables is the only thing we can do. Why are you implying that I'm guilty of "all or nothing" thinking? Especially when my first sentence said "CDR technology should be funded and accelerated"?
I'm not sure we should be counting on ocean storage as a major part of the solution, and I'm highly skeptical of geoengineering, but I do believe we need a multipronged approach to battling the climate challenge.
I read somewhere a while back that the oceans lost a lot of their carbon absorbing capability when we nearly wiped out most large whale species over the course of the 19th-20th centuries. Whale feces are very high in iron, which helps to trap oceanic carbon (not being a chemist, I'm not sure what the exact process is here...). There is research underway to see if we might not "refertilize" the ocean with this iron compound (I think what "ocean fertilization" in Kevin's graph refers to). It's apparently a game changer if it can be scaled up to replicate the level of whale shit floating around the world's oceans 200 years ago!
Human engineering is now filling the oceans up with carbon based plastics. This may be the pinnacle of geoengineering this species can accomplish. Perhaps only the imminent dumping of Fukushima tritium into the Pacific could exceed it. However, if the total assets of all fossil fuel firms and their bankers were seized and used to discover and mobilize a nontoxic form of CDR, then perhaps a technology could be developed.
Geotherapy not geoengineering, please. Geotherapy is the use of existing ecosystems to repair the damage our species, homo sap sap (that sap!), has done. It has many ancillary benefits and few if any unintended consequences. It can be deployed now, globally, in almost any place and usually costs much less than geoengineering solutions. For instance, seagrasses can sequester 15-35 times the carbon terrestrial plants can.
All the best resources I know of on geotherapy are available at https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/3/29/2023540/-Geotherapy-Not-Geoengineering-Please
I wouldn't.
I'd be dumping hundreds of billions into speeding up fusion research and getting more people invested into gaining expertise in fusion, particularly manufacturing of specialized fuel and parts.
In August of this year, a team at Lawrence Livermore managed to get 5x more power generated than what the fuel capsules had absorbed. However, it was still less than what they had expended to generate the x-ray lasers they'd used. This marks a very important breakthrough and it was a very tiny setup whose main function is testing of nuclear weapons, not fusion research.
I'm sick and tired of naysayers bitching cynically about fusion. The US government spends less annually on fusion research than Exxon alone spends annually on R&D. It's time to flip the paradigm.
We definitely should research fusion power--but I wouldn't place any bets on it being practical any time soon.
We could do a lot, right now, to end our use of fossil fuels with existing technology. The fight has to be to roll that out. More research is great, and should be done, but that shouldn't stop us from going all electric now and using renewables.
When the question arises "what method should we use to address climate change", my answer tends to be "all of them". The scale of the problem is enormous; we can do lots of things, none of which by itself is a complete solution, and possibly get a complete solution from the sum of all the various approaches. So yes, pursue fusion research, but also pursue geoengineering, and wave power, and improvements in efficiency and reductions in cost of solar cells, wind turbines, and energy storage technologies. Do it ALL.
There was a recent article in Nature that Ed Yong wrote about:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/whaling-whales-food-krill-iron/620604/
Basically, whales fed on krill in the Southern Oceans. Why was there enough krill for them back in the day, and not now? Simple, the whales themselves were effectively fertilizing those oceans with iron. Whaling killed off that feedback loop.
Fertilizing those oceans will cause more growth, but that won't be enough to "re-wild" them unless whale populations grow by a lot too.
I'm "kinda" with Kevin on this.
He's proposing STUDIES - not implementation of any one particular facet.
It should be funded. Fusion should be funded. Electric vehicles should be subsidized. Wind and solar power should be pushed real hard
After awhile all these little things add up
The problem is that here in the US the population has stabilized and started to drift down, but the world as a whole is still expanding - and carbon is a global problem NOT a US only problem. Should we do it because we historically have emitted more carbon than the rest of the world? I say yes but make no mistake, other countries will have to pitch in to help save the planet.
The bad news is that certain things we try to do now may impact our ability to help poor countries. I think of plastics and producing, storing, shipping and distributing food throughout the world. Plastics make the food last longer because the storage is air tight. Whats used to make plastics? Coal and oil. What is floating around in our oceans? Plastics. I thought recycling was the answer - nope. Not enough demand for recycled plastic products so the industry collapsed. I thought incineration of the trash could help. Nope uses fuel and emits carbon. Is the answer paper wrap? Nope results in too many trees cut down.
But a little spending on R&D into this would not hurt and may lead to a breakthrough. Who knows?
And I'm just worried about the 20k it looks like it'll cost to add a heat-pump to my house. Seems a bit much for a heater, if you ask me,
Start researching it now and in 30-40 years our AI system will have enough information to know if it is feasible. And that is when we will be really, really desperate for solutions.
Knowledge growth is on a double exponential curve in many areas but not this. More data is needed.
I suspect the low dollar amounts are at least in part due to the strong probability that all these ideas are unrealistic.
"Electrochemical processes" will need electricity--which we also need for our new fleet of electric cars and multiple other places to substitute for fossil fuels.
"Ocean alkalinity enhancement": If you alkalinize something you have to acidify something else, the net result is likely to be zero; on the scale necessary you won't be able to create containment for the acid produced.
The only idea that may work is growing seaweed--the equivalent of planting trees on land. Even then: Where does all this seaweed go at the end? What will it do to the overall chemistry of the ocean water? Also: To grow more seaweed will likely require fertilizers--which have a history of causing disasters in bodies of water of all sizes.
5 cent summary:
CO2 in the oceans = acidification = end of plankton = end of oceanic life except for jellyfish
From the New Yorker in 2006
https://staff.washington.edu/hodin/pdf/DarkeningSea.pdf
Humans are not pure CO2. They're 80% water (zero carbon content) and a sizeable fraction of the remainder is bone (calcium phosphate with no carbon content). To accomplish the carbon equivalent of 10 gigatons of CO2, you're going to have to drown the entire world population in one year.