I bet if we released bacteria that eats plastic, nanomachines that eat co2, and a super ai that controls politics they would Mr. Burns each other to prevent the apocalypse
I think the original was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, though in that one lighting the sky on fire was an accident. After lighting the sky on fire the Navy planned to fix it by nuking the sky (which, again, was *on fire*) and blasting it off into space. The sky. Into space.
This was also the submarine that SeaQuest was based on. They had a shark instead of a dolphin and almost got eaten by a giant octopus and stored nuclear hand grenades in the same area as their food supply. Nuking the sky was the least silly thing in that movie.
...wouldn't darkening the sky heat up the planet rather than cooling it? Shouldn't we brighten the sky with aerosols instead? Get that albedo going?
Depends how it's done.
If the clouds are converting visible light into infrared, then yes, darkening the sky would warm the planet. (Which.. I think this is actually restating the next sentence; it's the absorption and scattering of infrared that would warm, not the light turning into infrared per se)
Also increasing cloud cover could reduce heat loss at night leading to a more insulated and warmer planet.
But hopefully it would be only reflective instead, and only appear darker as less light gets to the surface.
Carbon extraction projects are geo-engineering projects though. There is considerable risk to any tinkering, even to trying to undo what we've already done. Just because we reverse one aspect of a system does not mean it's going to always going to revert in predictable ways.
I agree that mass algae blooms seems an especially bad risk if that gets even a little out of hand.
Definitely, definitely, absolutely do not want to do this anywhere near closed bays, only in the open ocean. Anywhere without sufficient circulation is likely to have nasty eutrophication and create oxygen-free dead zones. The good thing about iron-seeding though is that it's easy to shut off and nature uses it up pretty quickly. Aerosols pumped into the upper atmosphere will be there for years, so if you overshoot, well, sucks to be us I guess.
The thing is, we don't really have any carbon extraction technologies that we know could work other than iron-seeding and planting trees. Anything and everything else is either very small scale or highly speculative.
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thatassemblyguyJanitor of Technical Debt.Registered Userregular
The high temperature in Verkhoyansk, a town in northeast Russia about 260 miles south of the Arctic coast and about 6 miles north of the Arctic Circle, topped out at 38 degrees Celsius, or 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Saturday.
The high temperature in Verkhoyansk, a town in northeast Russia about 260 miles south of the Arctic coast and about 6 miles north of the Arctic Circle, topped out at 38 degrees Celsius, or 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Saturday.
Video posted yesterday, from CNBC, about a commercial carbon capture plant which is going live next year. Caveats: it's backed by some oil companies, but that's also a sort of "well, if they want to continue existing they need to figure something out" proposition, which makes some sense. Bill Gates is also a major backer. So keep in mind, said video should be viewed as propaganda, and take with some salt. If description and math is accurate, the full facility should be pulling a smidge under 871,000 metric tons per year out of the atmosphere, which would mean about ~40,000 such facilities would be needed to match all human emissions from 2017. Video claims operational costs of $94-232 per ton, which is a significant drop from previous estimates, and is getting into the "this might be economically viable" range, particularly if tied to a carbon tax where a subset of the tax was used specifically to remove carbon which had been added. Output is calcium carbonite, so we'd need to figure out what the fuck to DO with that much calcium carbonite (especially in a manner which...you know....doesn't degrade and go back to the atmosphere), so this is only half the problem, but....yeah. Keep in mind taking the most optimistic numbers there ($94/ton), it'd be $3.275 trillion-ish to pull out all the carbon released in 2017. Total world GDP from 2017 was ~81 trillion, give or take, so that's...well, like I said. Getting into the "we might be able to sell people on this" range, if accurate.
Comments in a reddit thread noted that apparently last week two different teams in Japan and Australia announced they'd found ways to cut the energy usage of extraction by about 2/3rds (not sure if it scales), and there may also be progress in different membranes which captures more carbon than current methods, so if those trends hold up, this may be noteworthy.
"How the fuck to deal with everything we've already released" has been the elephant in the room when discussing reducing emissions, etc, so seeing progress on this front is a good thing.
Video posted yesterday, from CNBC, about a commercial carbon capture plant which is going live next year. Caveats: it's backed by some oil companies, but that's also a sort of "well, if they want to continue existing they need to figure something out" proposition, which makes some sense. Bill Gates is also a major backer. So keep in mind, said video should be viewed as propaganda, and take with some salt. If description and math is accurate, the full facility should be pulling a smidge under 871,000 metric tons per year out of the atmosphere, which would mean about ~40,000 such facilities would be needed to match all human emissions from 2017. Video claims operational costs of $94-232 per ton, which is a significant drop from previous estimates, and is getting into the "this might be economically viable" range, particularly if tied to a carbon tax where a subset of the tax was used specifically to remove carbon which had been added. Output is calcium carbonite, so we'd need to figure out what the fuck to DO with that much calcium carbonite (especially in a manner which...you know....doesn't degrade and go back to the atmosphere), so this is only half the problem, but....yeah. Keep in mind taking the most optimistic numbers there ($94/ton), it'd be $3.275 trillion-ish to pull out all the carbon released in 2017. Total world GDP from 2017 was ~81 trillion, give or take, so that's...well, like I said. Getting into the "we might be able to sell people on this" range, if accurate.
Comments in a reddit thread noted that apparently last week two different teams in Japan and Australia announced they'd found ways to cut the energy usage of extraction by about 2/3rds (not sure if it scales), and there may also be progress in different membranes which captures more carbon than current methods, so if those trends hold up, this may be noteworthy.
"How the fuck to deal with everything we've already released" has been the elephant in the room when discussing reducing emissions, etc, so seeing progress on this front is a good thing.
So 4% of worldwide GDP (this is best case!!) to basically be carbon neutral goin forward...I mean, we can erase 2017, but are we doing anything (besides pandemic sheltering) to take out 2020 too?
I did a lot of gross estimation there too - it's actually more 37,000-ish? facilities needed, so that number should probably be closer to 3 trillion. We're dealing with big numbers, regardless.
Let's say a miracle happened, we built those facilities tomorrow and everything started running and we're paying the money. As we shift to renewables (which these would have the negative consequence of removing some of that urgency, unless it was applied via said carbon tax), each of those facilities removing carbon would still be operating and removing more than was getting emitted.
Put another way: if that 871,000 metric tons is accurate, that one site is the equivalent of almost taking 200,000 (doing another gross rounding here) passenger vehicles off the road, immediately. If every state built 28 of them, it would be the rough equivalent of removing all carbon emissions from all vehicles on the roads in the United States. Let's say they take 2 years to build: that's a FUCKTON faster, and honestly less emission-intensive to accomplish than converting every vehicle to an electric one, and then as all those vehicles do change to being electric ones, the factories keep running and pulling out the excess we've put in over the years.
This isn't remotely a silver bullet. But it's an angle of attack that we haven't been utilizing yet and grossly need, and has potential to scale quickly (governmental funding to build sites distributed across the globe).
e: In the video, they talk about how previous estimates were at the $600/ton range. That was a complete non-starter: roughly a quarter of the world GDP to remove the emissions. Best case scenario, we're down to 1/6th of that, worst case (on the range), to about a third-ish. If the theoretical research posted in those threads is accurate and scales, that may be down to $1 trillion per year best case, and the former best case is now the worst case.
Basically, this is a good thing, and I hope to God that the technology continues progressing.
So they still need to turn it into CO2 and store it underground. It seems like they will need a lot of the calcium precursor chemicals?
Otherwise it looks like they are just going to release it again.
I guess developing the tech in partnership with the oil industry, then when it is more affordable governments could just subsidize CO2 burying.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
I remember some project research into algaes that grow very well in the efforts for capturing carbon from the air but yeah you run into the same problem of where to store all that harvested algae so it doesn't decay and release the carbon all over again.
I remember some project research into algaes that grow very well in the efforts for capturing carbon from the air but yeah you run into the same problem of where to store all that harvested algae so it doesn't decay and release the carbon all over again.
In your cereal! It's strange, but I watch Bladerunner 2049, see the guy farming slugs, and i feel hopeful.
Trees. You just fucking plant trees. They run on sunlight and sequester carbon. We can even cut the trees down later to make homes and sequester the carbon for even longer!
And then you stop clear cutting all the jungles! It would be cheaper and more efficient to pay brazil to stop burning the amazon than to do this.
I wonder if you could just bury the algea effectively.
The calcium in that process is part of an industrial closed loop it looks like. You burn the calcium carbonate to get the calcium back and reuse some part of it then store or industrially use the CO2 as a gas.
That is really a capture solution, not a storage solution.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
A tree might sequester 10-20kg CO2/year, to cover our 40 billion tons emissions we would have to plant some 2 trillion trees which would take some 20 million square kilometres, reforesting nearly 15% of all land on the planet
Trees. You just fucking plant trees. They run on sunlight and sequester carbon. We can even cut the trees down later to make homes and sequester the carbon for even longer!
And then you stop clear cutting all the jungles! It would be cheaper and more efficient to pay brazil to stop burning the amazon than to do this.
Well except for the minor matter that currently Brazil would just pocket the money and burn the Amazon down anyway.
Trees. You just fucking plant trees. They run on sunlight and sequester carbon. We can even cut the trees down later to make homes and sequester the carbon for even longer!
And then you stop clear cutting all the jungles! It would be cheaper and more efficient to pay brazil to stop burning the amazon than to do this.
Well except for the minor matter that currently Brazil would just pocket the money and burn the Amazon down anyway.
This is not a hypothetical. Norway is paying Brazil to not cut down the Amazon. Brazil is pocketing the money and destroying the Amazon anyway. (Diplomacy is afoot, but I am not hopeful for an improvement to the situation.)
According to google, about 15 billion tons of Calcium Carbonate is mined a year worldwide, or about 1 billion tons in just the US. Even if this facility did nothing more than stopped that mining, I think that'd be a net good overall.
According to google, about 15 billion tons of Calcium Carbonate is mined a year worldwide, or about 1 billion tons in just the US. Even if this facility did nothing more than stopped that mining, I think that'd be a net good overall.
Still have to get the calcium somewhere..
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
Only concerning thing from that carbon capture plant video that I picked up on is that it's currently being run mostly using power from a natural gas power plant (they plan to run it on 100% renewables... 'eventually'... When?)
Seems a bit ass backwards to start testing it that way, IMO. Especially if it's putting out more carbon to run it than it's capturing, even initially.
Trees. You just fucking plant trees. They run on sunlight and sequester carbon. We can even cut the trees down later to make homes and sequester the carbon for even longer!
And then you stop clear cutting all the jungles! It would be cheaper and more efficient to pay brazil to stop burning the amazon than to do this.
Well except for the minor matter that currently Brazil would just pocket the money and burn the Amazon down anyway.
Well we can't do anything about that.
A war for the Amazon wil lead to faster deforestation.
I did a back of the envelope calculation once that if you magically converted all the excess carbon since 1900 into a diamond it'd be larger than Everest.
Trees. You just fucking plant trees. They run on sunlight and sequester carbon. We can even cut the trees down later to make homes and sequester the carbon for even longer!
And then you stop clear cutting all the jungles! It would be cheaper and more efficient to pay brazil to stop burning the amazon than to do this.
Trees are a part of the long-term solution.
Carbon capture factories are another part, at least for the developed world, especially if we ever want to get to the "removing old carbon from the air" part of this.
could you, like.. grow trees in sibiria? you'd have the added bonus of them freezing again when the warming stops, meaning they basically make their own long term storage..
Not a botanist, but I would assume that the Siberian soil is pretty nutrient-poor, especially for large trees?
There are plenty of trees that can grow in Siberia. Spruce, larch, and pine all grow pretty plentifully in poor soils there. And a lot of the river systems can support birch colonies.
I did a back of the envelope calculation once that if you magically converted all the excess carbon since 1900 into a diamond it'd be larger than Everest.
The large pine forests that circle the artic even capture more carbon and produce more oxygen than the Amazon does.
Amnnd they're on fire.
...yes. This happens to all forests on occasion. It's only a problem right now because of the lack of regeneration. Most forest systems are only healthy when they have wildfires blow through them every few years.
I think the other issue is that the parts of siberia (or alaska, canada, etc) that can support trees already have taiga forests on them. You could make a decent argument about the pros and cons of rewilding arctic grasslands and tundra but even if you bring back the wooly mammoth and rhinos somehow to make a mammoth steppe you still are going to have a steppe - tree growth will be limited.
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I see you have seen Season 5 of Eureka.
And if you haven't, you should. Eureka, with Colin Ferguson, is awesome.
Was a can of Hope.
This was also the submarine that SeaQuest was based on. They had a shark instead of a dolphin and almost got eaten by a giant octopus and stored nuclear hand grenades in the same area as their food supply. Nuking the sky was the least silly thing in that movie.
It would dim the surface by reduced solar radiation reaching the surface. It would brighten Earth as seen from space.
Depends how it's done.
If the clouds are converting visible light into infrared, then yes, darkening the sky would warm the planet. (Which.. I think this is actually restating the next sentence; it's the absorption and scattering of infrared that would warm, not the light turning into infrared per se)
Also increasing cloud cover could reduce heat loss at night leading to a more insulated and warmer planet.
But hopefully it would be only reflective instead, and only appear darker as less light gets to the surface.
Definitely, definitely, absolutely do not want to do this anywhere near closed bays, only in the open ocean. Anywhere without sufficient circulation is likely to have nasty eutrophication and create oxygen-free dead zones. The good thing about iron-seeding though is that it's easy to shut off and nature uses it up pretty quickly. Aerosols pumped into the upper atmosphere will be there for years, so if you overshoot, well, sucks to be us I guess.
The thing is, we don't really have any carbon extraction technologies that we know could work other than iron-seeding and planting trees. Anything and everything else is either very small scale or highly speculative.
https://weather.com/news/climate/news/2020-06-21-siberia-russia-100-degrees-heat-record-arctic
Cool. Cool, Cool, Cool.
Or rather, not.
Which is the problem.
Video posted yesterday, from CNBC, about a commercial carbon capture plant which is going live next year. Caveats: it's backed by some oil companies, but that's also a sort of "well, if they want to continue existing they need to figure something out" proposition, which makes some sense. Bill Gates is also a major backer. So keep in mind, said video should be viewed as propaganda, and take with some salt. If description and math is accurate, the full facility should be pulling a smidge under 871,000 metric tons per year out of the atmosphere, which would mean about ~40,000 such facilities would be needed to match all human emissions from 2017. Video claims operational costs of $94-232 per ton, which is a significant drop from previous estimates, and is getting into the "this might be economically viable" range, particularly if tied to a carbon tax where a subset of the tax was used specifically to remove carbon which had been added. Output is calcium carbonite, so we'd need to figure out what the fuck to DO with that much calcium carbonite (especially in a manner which...you know....doesn't degrade and go back to the atmosphere), so this is only half the problem, but....yeah. Keep in mind taking the most optimistic numbers there ($94/ton), it'd be $3.275 trillion-ish to pull out all the carbon released in 2017. Total world GDP from 2017 was ~81 trillion, give or take, so that's...well, like I said. Getting into the "we might be able to sell people on this" range, if accurate.
Comments in a reddit thread noted that apparently last week two different teams in Japan and Australia announced they'd found ways to cut the energy usage of extraction by about 2/3rds (not sure if it scales), and there may also be progress in different membranes which captures more carbon than current methods, so if those trends hold up, this may be noteworthy.
"How the fuck to deal with everything we've already released" has been the elephant in the room when discussing reducing emissions, etc, so seeing progress on this front is a good thing.
So 4% of worldwide GDP (this is best case!!) to basically be carbon neutral goin forward...I mean, we can erase 2017, but are we doing anything (besides pandemic sheltering) to take out 2020 too?
Let's say a miracle happened, we built those facilities tomorrow and everything started running and we're paying the money. As we shift to renewables (which these would have the negative consequence of removing some of that urgency, unless it was applied via said carbon tax), each of those facilities removing carbon would still be operating and removing more than was getting emitted.
Put another way: if that 871,000 metric tons is accurate, that one site is the equivalent of almost taking 200,000 (doing another gross rounding here) passenger vehicles off the road, immediately. If every state built 28 of them, it would be the rough equivalent of removing all carbon emissions from all vehicles on the roads in the United States. Let's say they take 2 years to build: that's a FUCKTON faster, and honestly less emission-intensive to accomplish than converting every vehicle to an electric one, and then as all those vehicles do change to being electric ones, the factories keep running and pulling out the excess we've put in over the years.
This isn't remotely a silver bullet. But it's an angle of attack that we haven't been utilizing yet and grossly need, and has potential to scale quickly (governmental funding to build sites distributed across the globe).
e: In the video, they talk about how previous estimates were at the $600/ton range. That was a complete non-starter: roughly a quarter of the world GDP to remove the emissions. Best case scenario, we're down to 1/6th of that, worst case (on the range), to about a third-ish. If the theoretical research posted in those threads is accurate and scales, that may be down to $1 trillion per year best case, and the former best case is now the worst case.
Basically, this is a good thing, and I hope to God that the technology continues progressing.
Otherwise it looks like they are just going to release it again.
I guess developing the tech in partnership with the oil industry, then when it is more affordable governments could just subsidize CO2 burying.
In your cereal! It's strange, but I watch Bladerunner 2049, see the guy farming slugs, and i feel hopeful.
Efficient carbon capture/storage is another.
I do wonder if calcium supply becomes limiting at some point (most calcium is already in the form of CaCO3).
And then you stop clear cutting all the jungles! It would be cheaper and more efficient to pay brazil to stop burning the amazon than to do this.
The calcium in that process is part of an industrial closed loop it looks like. You burn the calcium carbonate to get the calcium back and reuse some part of it then store or industrially use the CO2 as a gas.
That is really a capture solution, not a storage solution.
Well except for the minor matter that currently Brazil would just pocket the money and burn the Amazon down anyway.
This is not a hypothetical. Norway is paying Brazil to not cut down the Amazon. Brazil is pocketing the money and destroying the Amazon anyway. (Diplomacy is afoot, but I am not hopeful for an improvement to the situation.)
Still have to get the calcium somewhere..
Seems a bit ass backwards to start testing it that way, IMO. Especially if it's putting out more carbon to run it than it's capturing, even initially.
Well we can't do anything about that.
A war for the Amazon wil lead to faster deforestation.
Trees are a part of the long-term solution.
Carbon capture factories are another part, at least for the developed world, especially if we ever want to get to the "removing old carbon from the air" part of this.
This is why we reintroduce megafauna to poop on and trample their poop into the soil
There are plenty of trees that can grow in Siberia. Spruce, larch, and pine all grow pretty plentifully in poor soils there. And a lot of the river systems can support birch colonies.
<tahani>Can I.... can I have it?</tahani>
Amnnd they're on fire.
...yes. This happens to all forests on occasion. It's only a problem right now because of the lack of regeneration. Most forest systems are only healthy when they have wildfires blow through them every few years.