This appears to assume that the only way to get the carbonic acid out of the oceans is to wait for it to diffuse out to a CO2-depleted atmosphere. But that's nonsense.
Powdering olivine and broadcasting that to the oceans would work overwhelmingly faster, and end up pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, too. Powdering iron and broadcasting that in the deep ocean would put microbes to work doing the same thing. There is no reason not to do both, not necessarily in the same places. There are certainly other clever avenues I don't know about yet.
Just putting iron compounds at micromolar concentration in jet fuel used on trans-oceanic flights, so the exhaust dust settles to the ocean, would automate a huge iron distribution network at practically no cost. Similarly, for bunker fuel burned in ships.
Probably this or that idea would turn out not to work as well as hoped. You just try something else, then. Wringing your hands and doing nothing is the worst of all alternatives. We already tried that, it already failed.
The thing proponents of megascale geoengineering projects are the unintended consequences. Which is baffling to me considering that the entire issue that we've gotten ourselves into with the industrial revolution is about the unintended consequences of burning fuel and releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere.
Doesn't that mean we're facing unintended consequences whether we do something or we don't?
(I'm not saying that this has to be the solution -- after all, there may be some consequences we determine beforehand that put it out of the running. But worrying about the dangers of a megascale geoengineering project just because it is a megascale geoengineering project, would seem to require our current path to be a known status quo, rather than just another megascale geoengineering project.)
I was just looking for smaller scale iron spreading projects, and apparently this was already done, with mostly positive effects, wikipedia seems to have good info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
There is also fertilization from natural sources of iron and other minerals that we can observe - the sands of Sahara that fly to the Atlantic and the Amazon basin, some vulcanic eruptions had high iron content, etc.
I suppose slowly increasing the scale of iron fertilization experiments could be a good direction.
But you don't understand. If we do a large scale climate control project:
1) we will make some things worse (just like returning to pre-industrial climate would). From roads in France, life in Eastern Europe/Russia, destruction of trade through the "Northwest passage", ... Some 100's of people will freeze to death in Brussels, London and Paris and most of Western Europe every winter once again if climate return to pre-industrial levels.
I wonder if the few thousand I-needed-heat-so-got-a-fire-I-fucked-it-up-and-got-carbon-monoxide-poisoning deaths will return too. On the one hand we don't use coal anymore. On the other hand with enough stupidity (and leaving something bad on top of it) you can still get even an electric heater to give you carbon monoxide poisoning.
2) it's a project done by someone. So someone will have responsibility. Whoever actually acts will be vilified endlessly for the inevitable negative consequences. Such as those people freezing to death.
3) it will have unforeseen consequences. In other words: despite climate "proof" implying models are complete ... they aren't. There will be big surprises.
4) Nature is good and great and Gaia will save us! We are killing people's belief in nature and/or God by fixing problems by interfering in Nature on a large scale. They will fight any and all attempts to interfere at all just for that reason.
5) it won't stop most of the changes underway. We are in an interglacial. Temperature is rising, just way too fast. But it should be rising. Getting CO2 to pre-industrial levels leaves most or all of the changes we've already seen intact. In a practical example, that means every cubic meter a glacier loses is gone until the next ice age. Ice sheets will grow back more, but not to the levels 100 years ago. Pre-industrial climate generally won't make them grow back.
6) what's to stop some countries from using Climate change as a weapon if they control climate change infrastructure?
So it doesn't really matter that we know of many ways to influence and take control of the climate, and that it's becoming ever clearer we want to do so. The problems are political, even psychological, not scientific (although more research into it would help with more options)
The method of pilot projects that are then scaled up is very mature, well understood, and universally applied. It works, way, way, way better than thinking hard.
While there is some truth in your statement, a lot of unintended consequences only show up after considerable time and at scale, and then only if you know where to look.
The original steam engines standing in as a pilot project didn‘t do much to the atmosphere. Billions of combustion engines did.
The great insect apocalypse went almost unnoticed until two decades in and an order of magnitude of change.
Some things are nonlinear (that's kind of what "second order" means). With a pilot project, it's easy to observe things that are O(n), but not so easy to observe things that are O(n^2).
So sure, do a pilot project. Let's make sure that even the first-order stuff works the way we expect. But also think hard about second-order effects. And even after that, continually watch for un-thought-of second-order effects emerging as (and after) you roll it out.
It's not just that it's a megascale project, it's that it's a potentially unstoppable megascale project.
Starting a potentially unstoppable chemical chain reaction to stop another unstoppable chemical chain reaction just seems a bit... dumb to me, you know?
If we're going to be doing megascale engineering to mitigate our past mistakes with greenhouse gasses we should look towards using something like space-based lenses or mirrors to lower the amount of energy that the Earth receives. We can always turn them off if we decide that we want to.
Space-based mirrors are about the worst imaginable idea. Stratospheric sulfur is almost as bad.
Neither one gets any acid out of the oceans, and instead allows their acidity to continue rising until the entire ocean ecosystem collapses. Then, billions go hungry.
Meanwhile, the moment these shading projects hiccup, e.g. from mass starvation induced global thermonuclear war, temperatures skyrocket to where they would have been, but much more quickly. And then of course there is the starvation and war.
What "unstoppable chemical chain reaction" are you imagining? The exact moment you stop spreading olivine powder, the chemical reaction process stops dead.
Why do billions go hungry? Serious question. Do billions really get the majority of their calories from seafood? I’m probably biased since I won’t eat any seafood, so I’m having a hard time imagining that many people subsisting off of it.
Yes, in many poor coastal areas ( like in Africa and Asia, but not only; many European coastal cities also fall into this) fishing is a main source of employment and calories for the population. Even if you replace the calorie intake, you can't easily replace the employment, so they can't pay for that new food.
There's no meaningful amount of employment in Europe from fishing.
European fishing is done with mega trawlers operated by tiny crews.
It's just a political football generally used by nationalists to further their agenda.
You could ban industrial fishing in the UK or France or Spain and it would have no effect on their economies, just personal tragedy for a few thousand.
For example in the UK, out of 66,000,000 people a tiny 12,000 are professional fishers.
Food production already uses essentially all arable land on the globe. Changing environmental conditions are expected to significantly reduce the amount of arable land fit for agricultural use.
We are already living with unintended consequences, which are getting relentlessly worse. All we need is for the consequences not to be as bad as what we are already getting.
This could work, but all things take time to diffuse through other things, so we might not know the full effect of what we do until quite a long time after it's done.
Vigorously. Stopping human activity is, as noted, insufficient, besides impossible. We need to wind down harmful activity, and drive beneficial activity to a fever pitch.
Then we had better start studying the consequences at small scale, no? Oops, that's been banned. (Perhaps that's an unintended consequence of moralizing science?)
Luckily the US is not bound by the decision. Unluckily, many in the US think that disastrous measures like blocking sunlight are peachy ideas.
But the US could unilaterally adopt an olivine-based program, beneficially, and demonstrate its effectiveness; then countries who have signed that thing could join in. It might need adjustments, such as enriching calcium to replace what the carbon takes down with it, but you learn as you go.
I wish most crises weren't so defeatist. It's a fine line because, you need people to know it's a real problem. But framing it this way makes people say 'whats the point.' 700 years is an eternity, given our lifespans. Put another way, I think it's immensely more useful to frame it in a way humans better relate with. In 20 years, we can do what?
It also completely removes the innovation that humans can achieve. Reminds me of the NY Times saying in 1903 that humans wouldn't fly for at least 1 million years. Glad the Wright brothers and others weren't listening.
False Polyanna-ism is far, far worse than sober rational, scientific assessment!!
Life isn't fair. Life isn't nice.
Mother Nature doesn't give a Frig about humans or you individually. We are expendable and NOT the center of the universe. See George Carlins "The Planet is Fine" because that's reality.
Innovation takes time. 20 years minimum but 90% of all "ideas" NEVER make to reality because they are poorly thought-out "hopium" rather than science or engineering.
Flying is NOTHING like this because this is primary nature rather than technology or engineering. Seriously how is that not clear?!
In terms of technology: look up "entropy" and the energy required to overcome it. CO2 in the air already is at maximal entropy so it takes ENORMOUS amounts of energy to grab at scarce CO2 molecules diluted among a see of N2/O2.
The Gibbs energy of dilution has to be provided to reverse and extract the CO2. The C2/C1 ratio is literally 420 ppm or 420/1,000,000.
This is why the ONLY practical means is to get the CO2 BEFORE it's in the atmosphere. Whatever is already there will take a very long time (700 years apparently - but where are you REALISTICALLY going to the energy for the duration - if you say Green, you are full of shit because you are ignoring the actual supply chains for making that Green technology and whether any of that breaks even, energy-wise).
The most effective solution is plants; it will still take dozens if not hundreds of millennia.
If I found the right equations to use, the entropy from CO2 being diluted into the atmosphere is a bit over 400 joules per gram.
Burning enough carbon to produce a gram of CO2 releases 9000 joules.
So if we assume we have to undo combustion to store CO2, the entropy factor only makes it 5% harder.
If we assume we don't have to undo combustion to store CO2, then we could use oil to fuel the process and get up to 20 grams captured for each gram produced.
Did I do the math wrong?
Isolating CO2 is really bothersome but as far as I know it's not the raw thermodynamic factors that have the most impact.
What about these startups getting real investment from people like Bill Gates and (soon) Elon Musk? Companies like Carbon Engineering seem to have some method of extracting co2 from the atmosphere using some sort of catalyst I think. They are working on a 1 megaton per year pilot plant. Yes it is peanuts but it is a start.
Maybe the article should have been written as "using technologies we have today scaled to the max, it'll take more than 700 years to get carbon under control" ? I mean, that's how I read it, but not everyone does.
On the flip side, this just goes to show you how much of a scam forest planting based carbon credits are. I've said it before, industrial scale carbon emission takes industrial scale solutions. (planting forests is generally good, but I don't think it balances out a coal plant or any other industry buying credits).
I feel this limitation is where we lose most of the public. For example I am convinced that if we bid the bullet and banned burning fossil fuels starting next January, things would suck in the short term. However, I am also convinced that the progress we'd make in alternative technologies in the next 1-2 years would be unfathomable. I think we underestimate the miracles mankind can do given strong incentives like this. Yet we are afraid to create these incentives because of our low faith in our own ability.
I agree with you on the premise but not on the motives.
People who hold the money/power don't want to lose it. Quick (big) changes are a huge risk to their positions. Hence, we get slow gradual changes instead. It really is that simple to me.
I 100% agree with this view. Its not practical to go cold turkey as people would freeze and starve.
It’s one of the reasons I’m anti-pipeline. I’m generally against anything that makes it easier to get and distribute fossil fuels. Adding friction is an alternative way to internalize the cost of fossil fuels.
"I 100% agree with this view. Its not practical to go cold turkey as people would freeze and starve."
Not sure if I was clear that my view is the opposite of what you are saying. I believe much fewer people would "freezer and starve" than expected because we suddenly would get very, very industries about finding alternative solutions. We would get through a short period that's super super tough but quickly would end up end par or better than our current circumstances. What's more, I believe that it's much easier to go through tough times collectively than individually. This is often true in war and natural disasters and night be true if we go cold turkey, as long as we do it together.
What happens instead is just that people use trucks to move the oil, instead of the more efficient pipelines. That makes it somewhat more expensive, which makes the oil somewhat less useful economically, and therefore somewhat less used. On the other hand, the trucks pollute more than the pipeline would have.
I actually really like this... because it immediately makes me think 'we should work on better technologies.' Versus the original, which makes me think 'why are we even doing this, then.'
We have technologies today to transform CO2 in the ocean directly into calcium carbonate. It's just that this article isn't talking about those, it's talking about removal from the atmosphere
How, exactly, is this defeatist? It's defining the size of the problem. If we don't know what's actually needed to solve the problem, how are we supposed to ever solve it?
I'm also rather unsure what innovation you're imagining here. It's literally a model of ocean acidity based on some tons/year of carbon sequestration. Innovation can make this cheaper, but the model isn't about cost.
This is the go-to response on HN now when it comes to articles related to the environment. It’s general form is: “it’s not what they say, it’s how they say it.”
IOW: nonsensical replies that steer the conversation away from the point being made, intentionally or not.
The size of the problem is known, sure. But the framing is bad. Tell us what we can do to help, in realistic timespans, and where that gets us.
If the answer today is 'nothing', then what would ever get people to care?
As for carbon sequestration, I'm not learned enough on the subject to even guess what's possible, or if the idea of doing it faster is feasible from a scientific standpoint.
Is the moral of the story that we must do carbon capture better, or that we're all screwed?
The article is reporting upon a scientific study. It is up to you to decide what that means, not them. If you choose to act on it by complaining about tone then that is your problem, not theirs. Perhaps instead you yourself should do something, something more productive than complaining about word choices and/or tone, neither of which are helpful in the slightest.
You don’t know that, have no way of knowing that, and have no proof of it. This is simply your opinion, and, like assholes, everyone has one. (And I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, because honestly I have zero expectation that you are arguing in good faith.) All you seem to be interested in, like others before you, is detracting the conversation away from the underlying story. “If only they had approached it differently!” Yet no matter how it is approached the response from those like you is exactly the same.
Not to mention that it doesn’t matter. This article isn’t even a call to action. It is simply dryly stating facts. There is no “come in guys, we can do this!” It instead says “ocean acidification will take hundreds of years to recover.” That’s it.
There is no way to frame this other than clinically. How exactly could it be framed differently? Do tell!
Just replying to say I did read your reply, and I apologize that I've upset you in my replies. My intent is/was never to distract from the data at hand. I care about the issue greatly, but am not super educated on the topic. I am, admittedly, mostly speaking from how I view this data and presentation, as a layperson. I'm not interested in arguing, so I'll stop on the topic.
> Reminds me of the NY Times saying in 1903 that humans wouldn't fly for at least 1 million years. Glad the Wright brothers and others weren't listening.
The difference is in 1903 the breakthrough technology of human flight was not being depended on as a matter of skirting existential crises.
Both apocalyptic defeatism and procrastinatory techno-optimism are failure modes.
I agree that climate change is horrible for biodiversity [1]. Solutions to life that took millions of years to evolve will die and be forever gone. Tragic, irreplaceable losses. Undoubtably the worst part of climate change.
But I don't think this will be an existential crisis for humans unless we trigger a "clathrate gun" [2] or some other runaway system that kills off the entire food web. Or substantially changes the chemical composition of the atmosphere well beyond periods such as the Mesozoic Era. (There have been vastly different climates and atmospheres throughout Earth's history, but we're adapted to a similar enough environment to survive many of them.)
We have to fight climate change, but I think that the doomsday "existential crisis" attitude is a turnoff to many that you'd attempt to sway. There's a pragmatic sweet spot.
Besides, there are a number of more likely culprits that would kill us before climate change (nuclear war, bioweapons, reverse chiral autotrophs [3], ecoterrorists seeding the world with prions, ...). Or at least things that would stick us in this gravity well until civilization ends.
> was not being depended on as a matter of skirting existential crises.
Life was much bleaker in the early 1900s. Then the Cold War was decades of immediate existential crisis (grade school children practiced getting under their desks for nuclear bombs).
> Both apocalyptic defeatism and procrastinatory techno-optimism are failure modes.
Indeed, praying for technological moonshots to save us is the most vicious tactic of delay for climate change action [1].
The root problem is that we people of the Global North are incapable of looking ourselves in the mirror. The obvious solution is to stop all of the frankly idiotic overconsumption that hasn't increased our well-being in decades and – when no overconsumption means no economic growth – rebuild our economy on equity, instead of feverishly insisting that accumulation of almost all of the wealth to a few people is a the only alternative.
Doesn’t work that way. The way “the West” lives isn’t good for global warming but the way “the East” lives isn’t sustainable either. Just different classes of passenger on the Titanic.
> and rebuild our economy on equity, instead of feverishly insisting that accumulation of almost all of the wealth to a few people is a the only alternative.
Senseless non sequitur. Social ownership doesn’t solve climate change, that’s just a trope from some leftists as a means to couple one issue (climate change) with something completely unrelated (disrupting capitalism). Just look to Norway for an an example of a huge socialist project terrible for climate change (Statoil).
Granted "westerner" was the wrong word: I meant rich nations, which are responsible for almost all of the historical emissions.
"Social ownership doesn’t solve climate change,"
I skipped a few steps there: the reason we can't just stop overconsumption is because that would effectively stop and reverse economic growth. No growth just doesn't work without restructuring the economy.
> It also completely removes the innovation that humans can achieve. Reminds me of the NY Times saying in 1903 that humans wouldn't fly for at least 1 million years. Glad the Wright brothers and others weren't listening.
It's not how I read this. I read it as: this is a massive problems that needs massive attention and innovation.
What is their natural state, when we look at the past 4 billion years or so? We know of several extinction events in the oceans tens of millions of years ago, the oceans always recovered without any (known to me anyway) fixed pH value.
Protecting the environment is short for "protecting the encironment that humans evolved to live in". It's easy to say "look it's just another extinction event" when you're forgetting that you're the one getting extinct.
Early farming practices were associated with increases in topsoil while current mechanized farming practices are associated with decreases in topsoil. Which practices do you think are more likely to serve mankind well over long periods?
Mechanised early farming, a.k.a. robot swarms that can negate the overhead involved in tending to microplots with 2m*2m squares of one particular crop, and three field cycles.
I would tell you to google that question given that this is a thread about protecting the environment, but your username is “Lazy Jones” so I fear such a suggestion may fall on deaf ears.
I'd say the natural state we should aspire to return the environment to is prior to the industrial revolution when we really started messing up the atmospheric CO2 levels.
There may be long term climate changes that man is not part of, but those are negligible across the past 150 years or so.
Yes that seems to be the case, but I'm not sure that actually matters here. The timescales involved mean that there is plenty of time for carbon to move between air and water. The only factor of much importance here would be the overall amount of CO2 removed.
There might be some small time savings removing it directly from the ocean, but at 700 years out even 25 gigatons a year of carbon removal was insufficient. Given that kind of time scale, a few years earlier or later wouldn't matter.
Yeah I wondered the same thing. I suspect that it has a part to play at least. There are a lot (LOT) of pretty pure magnesium/iron silicate minerals in the crust (olivine) that can be ground up and reacted with co2 dissolved in seawater to give magnesium/iron carbonate. Check these folks out: https://www.projectvesta.org/
TLDR: Uses electrolysis to extract calcium and magnesium from ocean water, which can then be used to extract carbon from atmosphere. Happy by product is hydrogen.
Question: This is similar to the desalination systems, right? Can future infrastructure do both?
One plausible scenario is to have off shore wind and solar farms powering these devices. Drop the limestone into the ocean. Pipe fresh (treated) water back to shore. Bottle up the H2 for collection.
What could be easier?
[0] It KILLS ME when articles omit meta data like timestamps, bylines, links to legislation being discussed, etc.
I actually did see the word "atmosphere" in there before I wrote this, believe it or not. But my confusion still stands and is "does this change if the CO2 is extracted directly from the ocean?" I think the article could be much more explicit in this regard... It seems like this study is specifically about the time it will take to for CO2 dissolved in the ocean to evaporate out into an atmosphere which has had CO2 removed, but I can't tell because of how it's worded.
This means this is ripe for innovation that is an order of magnitude improvement. Which means there’s significant startup profit to be made from innovating and bringing this down to 70 years.
The first is something much more extreme than "yikes!"
The second is that this news -- as other commenters have noted -- means that there will be plenty of startup opportunities related to climate change. We are already seeing the initial phases of revolutions in food, power, and transportation technologies. Just today I discovered a startup building a radically more efficient small airplane. [https://www.ottoaviation.com] The 700+ years number will likely fall, and the question is by how much.
But the technological solutions will only get us so far, which brings me to the third thing:
35 generations seems daunting. Especially because urgent problems usually go hand in hand with fixes that get applied quickly. Climate change however is an urgent problem with long-term implications and long-term solutions. At the same time, the culture(s) of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Straight Islander people the oldest continuous cultures are estimated to be ~ 200 - 250 generations old. In other words, though 35 generations is formidable, it is not unheard of -- certain spas and hotels in Japan have been operating for longer than that. And perhaps we should somehow set a target for ten generations, and see how much progress we can make in that time.
Doesn’t sound “aggressive” all. Sounds like an incredibly defeatist “wait” approach instead. Doomers love these articles though so I suppose that’s why this is taken at face value.m
> They imagined two scenarios – one where five gigatonnes of carbon is removed every year, which is equivalent to around half of our total annual emissions, and another where 25 gigatonnes of carbon is removed.
Simply adding finely powdered limestone to the ocean will help buffer CO2, increasing pH. Many gigatonnes of limestone would be needed, but there is an enormous amount available.
The time-constants of climate are extremely long. The whole "we must change by 2030 or we all die" meme is summarily stupid in context of the REALITY of these time-constants.
How did anyone not know this? Especially if they are so serious and knowledgeable about "climate change". Well, when it's actually religion and ideology rather than science, that's usually what happens.
Grow more plants in the ocean? Restore corals? If you remove all the CO2, how will the plants survive? Do we know the balance? Why is CO2 vilified so much?
A good goal, but probably too tiny to matter much.
> If you remove all the CO2, how will the plants survive?
Nobody wants to remove "all the CO2".
> Do we know the balance?
Not in exact detail, but getting closer to 1900 levels would be good.
> Why is CO2 vilified so much?
Seriously? You ask this in 2021? Because it changes the weather and those rapid changes cause extinctions and habitability problems. Including killing corals.
Dumb (probably) question: Do phytoplankton in the ocean consume CO2 in the same way that land plants do? If so, does the increased dissolved CO2 cause them to grow faster?
"The Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations."
Powdering olivine and broadcasting that to the oceans would work overwhelmingly faster, and end up pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, too. Powdering iron and broadcasting that in the deep ocean would put microbes to work doing the same thing. There is no reason not to do both, not necessarily in the same places. There are certainly other clever avenues I don't know about yet.
Just putting iron compounds at micromolar concentration in jet fuel used on trans-oceanic flights, so the exhaust dust settles to the ocean, would automate a huge iron distribution network at practically no cost. Similarly, for bunker fuel burned in ships.
Probably this or that idea would turn out not to work as well as hoped. You just try something else, then. Wringing your hands and doing nothing is the worst of all alternatives. We already tried that, it already failed.