Can We Fight Climate Change With Carbon-Absorbing Rocks? (indiatimes.com) 167
The New York Times reports on rocks in the country of Oman that react naturally with carbon dioxide, turning it into stone.
Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale -- admittedly some very big "ifs" -- it could help fight climate change. Rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the Industrial Age. And by turning that CO2 into stone, the rocks in Oman -- or in a number of other places around the world that have similar geological formations -- would ensure that the gas stayed out of the atmosphere forever...
Capturing and storing carbon dioxide, is drawing increased interest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that deploying such technology is essential to efforts to rein in global warming... At a geothermal power plant in Iceland, after several years of experimentation, an energy company is injecting modest amounts of carbon dioxide into volcanic rock, where it becomes mineralized. Dutch researchers have suggested spreading a kind of crushed rock along coastlines to capture CO2. And scientists in Canada and South Africa are studying ways to use mine wastes, called tailings, to do the same thing.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
"Optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilization is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognizes he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives."
Capturing and storing carbon dioxide, is drawing increased interest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that deploying such technology is essential to efforts to rein in global warming... At a geothermal power plant in Iceland, after several years of experimentation, an energy company is injecting modest amounts of carbon dioxide into volcanic rock, where it becomes mineralized. Dutch researchers have suggested spreading a kind of crushed rock along coastlines to capture CO2. And scientists in Canada and South Africa are studying ways to use mine wastes, called tailings, to do the same thing.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
"Optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilization is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognizes he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives."
PLANTS absorb CO2, who needs rocks? (Score:1, Insightful)
Good gravy, this is the silly season for climate warming theories.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Oh don't go screwing them up with common sense. It's not like increasing the forestation and food supplies wouldn't have other beneficial effects.
Re:PLANTS absorb CO2, who needs rocks? (Score:4, Interesting)
... and as soon as those plants die, fungus and bacteria eat the plants and release that same CO2.
The only way that CO2 get stored for very long time frames is indeed in rocks. Typically, that involves the very slow process of sediment accumulating at the bottom of seas and oceans.
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Actually biological processes do sequester carbon on long time scales as not all the carbon is released. Soil gets deeper, lakes fill in with organic matter, sometimes forming peat which then can turn into coal. My understanding is that on geological time scales, about half of carbon is sequestered in rock through weathering and such and half through biological processes.
Short term, speeding up the weathering process may be the most beneficial and it sure wouldn't hurt. Even naturally this happens, during p
Re: PLANTS absorb CO2, who needs rocks? (Score:3)
Coal and fossil fuel deposits of many types are from a time when there were no bacteria to break down cellulose. Ancient trees died and fell and were buried without ever rotting. Things are not the same now as when that "coal" was created.
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And what do you call COAL?
Coal is a type of rock made from accumulating sediments, just as I stated.
As has been pointed out to you, coal may not form at all today. However, even if it did, it would still be a SLOW process.
We're currently on track to burn through half a billion years of coal deposits in less than one thousand years. Our current rate of fossil carbon extraction completely overwhelms any natural processes to sequester it.
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And what do you call COAL?
A type of rock.
You were saying?
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Seems that over geological time scales, half the carbon is absorbed by rock. Think of all the limestone that has been deposited.
Carbon sequestration is important, even ignoring mankind. Volcanoes spit it out, sometimes in large quantities and we have the example of Venus of what happens over billions of years of no sequestration.
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Plants that *didn't* decay - because there was a period of 80 million plus years before bacteria and fungus figured out how to digest the freshly-evolved cellulose.
Plants could be a solution, but it would require figuring out how to permanently increase global biomass - grasslands are supposed to be really good for that, which is why various groups are looking at ways to bring back massive buffalo herds, mastadons, and other megafauna that maintain healthy grasslands.
There's also the option of actually maki
Boomers ruined the planet (Score:2, Troll)
Their parents saved it and the boomers wreaked it....good job jerks.
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They drowned the planet in their filthy spawn.
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They drowned the planet in their filthy spawn.
No, you ornate hexagonal crystals of dihydrogen monoxide are the filthy spawn of our filthy spawn.
Heh... (Score:1)
Ferret
figure out a formula to make (Score:2)
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Cement already does that. The problem is that far more CO2 is produced when making the cement, than what it absorbs again.
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Actually, no.
The extra CO2 is simply in the energy used. Reduce the energy or use a CO2 free source and there you go.
The problem is that cement/concrete pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere extremely slowly. You can bet on a few millennia.
We are doomed, no point in reducing emissions (Score:2)
"Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
From that article:
Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same log
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"Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
From that article:
Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”
Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too. Can it be done without a collapse of civilisation? “I don’t think so,” says Hillman. “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?”
If you live at or around sea level, it's gonna suck eventually.
I think hordes of autonomous drones dropping black pigment on the arctic and Greenland would help a lot of worlds problems seem less important
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This is the sort of sociopath nutcase we used to ignore as a lunatic, but now we treat him like a rational human being. He is a *social scientist*, he knows no more about facts than the bored housewives who cheer such stupidity on "The View" as if they were a collection of Einsteins.
Bloody hell, does *no one* see how divergently crazy they are getting?
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Flying is energy wise, CO2 emissions wise, not that expensive. Only ships and depending on terrain and infrastructure, trains are cheaper.
The problem with flying is the huge amount of flights we have world wide, and the heights in which they exhaust other pollutants.
Suppose you live in Germany and do the old school drive with your family to south Italy (or Portugal or Spain or Greece) in a car, flying is cheaper on all regards: CO2, energy, time, money.
Thanos (Score:1)
Not likely. (Score:2)
Absorption is a fools' game. It has an innate limit and expanding that limit has to be expensive. What we need is catalytic conversion. Something that can turn Carondioxide into something else.
Life would make the most sense. A living thing that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen + hydrocarbons, using nothing more than sunlight and water. Happily, such things already exist, they are called plants.
The trick is to breed/genetically engineer a safe, non-poisonous plant that does it better, quicker, and
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But plants, by themselves have a finite life. They grow, absorbing CO2. And then they die, rotting and releasing it. So plants are carbon neutral over a long term. What we need to to is to interrupt this cycle and remove the sequestered carbon before it is returned as CO2.
Trees make an excellent carbon sink, as long as you can remove them with logging trucks before they die.
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Some of it turns into soil.
Very little. Go into a forest that's been growing for the last 20,000 years, since the last glacial retreat. You can dig through the organic layers* of the soil pretty easily with a hand shovel. So, where did that 20,000 years of carbon accumulation go? When the trees died, fell down and rotted? Some was taken back up by new growth. Not all of the carbon in live trees was pulled out of the atmosphere. The rest was eaten by microbes and expelled back into the atmosphere as CO2.
*Peat bogs are a notable excep
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Biomass does NOT all magically convert back into CO2, that's daft.
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Of course it is not magic. ...
They get decomposed by bacteria.
Dumb ass
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The dumbass is the one that thinks that bacteria convert their entire food into carbondioxide, rather than into more carbon rich bacteria.
Life is the carbon sink. Yes, some will be respirated back into the air, but each and every cycle of breath in, grow, die, traps a little more carbon in hydrocarbon form, rather than releasing it into gas.
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Plant a tree, let it grow 100 years. For sake of argument it weights 100 tonnes. 10'years after it is dead, 99.9999999% of its CO2 is back in the atmosphere. ...
Moron
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But it mostly does, as animals, fungus, and bacteria eat it and "burn" it for energy. Where do you think all the CO2 you exhale comes from?
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Biochar also stops the process, and can be created from much faster-growing plants. Not as profitable though, but it could also be adopted as the end-of-life destination for all that lumber - turning trees into "coal" once you've gotten your use out of them. You could even turn around and sell the crushed biochar as an inert soil additive to boost fertility.
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And we have to harvest that plant and to burry it underground where the coal and oil was that we dug out.
Well, of course we can perhaps the CO2 level we have right now, then if we would shift all the carbon needs we have to plants, that could work. However that still means we have to cut CO2 production from other means basically down to zero.
Dr. Mayer Hillman's qualifications? (Score:1)
Dr. Hillman is not a climate scientist. I don't see how he is qualified to make climate predictions.
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Of course! (Score:2)
Yes, you can fight climate change with rocks.
You can also fight mental illness with exorcism.
(I give the rock absorption a better chance than the exorcism, but not by all that much.)
Certainly we could... (Score:1)
I've no doubt we 'could' fight it in several ways, but even if every human on the planet did something positive one day of a volcano eruption would do more 'damage' than anything humans can do to the opposite. Not that we should give up, reforestation, advances in science and humanity not contributing to our own downfall are goals worth pursuing, but we better start looking for ways to adapt our selves to a changing environment. Whether we are the cause or not, the world is and always has been changing, and
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Um - no.
Volcanoes vent around 200 million tons of fossil carbon per year, while humans release roughly 160 BILLION tons. All the volcanoes combined release only 0.125% as much fossil carbon as we do.
It would take a truly horrifying year of volcanoes, with 1000x the average level of activity, to release as much carbon as we do. And that would only be one year. One year of human emissions isn't a big problem - it's when you string 100 years of steadily increasing emissions together back-to-back that it bec
Energy balance (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is, CO2 holds the atoms at a very low energy state [wikipedia.org]. So you get energy out of creating CO2, and converting CO2 into a different form usually involves putting in energy. But if that energy came from burning fossil fuels, then the second law of thermodynamics says you're creating more CO2 than you're capturing. So most of these ideas for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere involve putting even more CO2 into the atmosphere to generate the materials used to pull out the CO2.
Whether the goal is reduction of CO2 emissions, or sequestering CO2 already in the atmosphere, the solution is the same - we need to switch away from hydrocarbon-based fuels for energy. This is why decommissioning nuclear plants is extremely short-sighted. You're putting all our eggs in one basket (renewables) and gambling with the future of all life on Earth that we'll be able to develop renewable energy quickly enough before climate change reaches catastrophic levels. Why gamble when we already have a carbon-free energy source which we could ramp up within a decade or two, to provide the energy needed to power all these carbon sequestration strategies? Nuclear doesn't have to be the end-solution. We just need it to buy ourselves more time to develop renewables, then we can slowly phase out nuclear plants and replace them with renewables.
There is one way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere without us having to do anything. Plants do exactly that via photosynthesis. They take the energy from sunlight, break the CO2 up into O2 (released into the atmosphere), and lock the carbon up in a hydrocarbon chain forming sugars, starches, and cellulose. Normally that carbon is released again when the plant dies and bacteria decompose it. If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition, then all we'd have to do is let forests grow, chop them down, seal the wood and bury it, and plant new trees to continue the process.
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Circle of life.
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One has to choose how to sequester carbon so it does not become CO2. The CO2 causing problems now was sequestered as carbon-containing compounds in geological formations containing petroleum and coal. Large amounts are also sequestered in limestone (CaCO3).
Limestone forms from CO2 when the CO2 dissolves in water and forms carbonic acid (just like in your carbonated soft drink) and the carbonic acid finds calcium or magnesium ions, which are found in rocks. The problem with the natural process is that the ca
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Unfortunately the second law of thermodynamics has nothing to do with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] /. post where one is referring to the laws of thermodynamics and is correct.
I still wait for
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> If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition
It's called biochar - burn the wood without oxygen, and it drives off most of the non-carbon components, rendering it biologically stable. As an added bonus when you crush it and mix it into the soil it boosts fertility without being consumed.
The problem is one of scale and motive - we release around 160 billion tons of fossil carbon every year, that's a lot of biomass to grow and carbonize. And it's not going to anywhere be NEARLY as
Chalk (Score:2)
Yep, there's already millions of tonnes of sequested CO2 in rock form in the UK, AKA "the white cliffs of Dover". It's called chalk (calcium carbonate), was made from decaying coccoliths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], and took about 80 million years to form.
Sea-based microorganisms are probably one of the fastest and most economical ways of capturing massive amounts of CO2 but still not fast enough for our predicament. We haven't got 80 million years to reign in global warming before it severely reduces
I like it warm. (Score:2, Troll)
Personally I like warm temperatures. And every single time our earth has experienced a warm period it has been a great time to be a plant or an animal.
And for that matter we are actually in the middle of an ice-age. Yes, look it up, we are basically in an intermission smack dab in the middle of an ice-age. Heating things up taint gonna hurt a thing.
Re:I like it warm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Every single mass extinction has happened when the environment changed too fast for life to adapt. Give polar bears 20,000 years to move and adapt, and they could change from hunting seals on ice flows to climbing trees in tropical rain forests. Give them 200 years and they'll all die. Humans will be up a shit creek as well. Yeah, it's gonna be great if you can grow bananas in Siberia. Not so great if half the world's population dies off from famine.
When you're climbing down a stairwell, you aren't going to get hurt if you jump a few stairs at a time. So, might as well jump off the staircase entirely and save yourself climbing down a hundred feet of stairs. Same logic.
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Regardless how the climate is changing: Siberia will always have an arctic winter of 2 or 3 month arctic night and -30C temperature. Bananas don't survive that.
Perhaps you can breed some crops that benefit from a slightly longer growth period, but thats it.
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Due to climate changing too fast for life to adapt - like I said the first time. Humanity would be fucked if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts or another giant asteroid hits the earth - just because mass extinctions have happened before is no reason to put a gun to our heads and do it ourselves.
You've been insulting your own in
See where denialism comes from, folks? (Score:2)
Swill like Hillman’s article, in which a crabby old misanthrope hopes that the human race will die out along with his own cirrhosis-wracked liver, is what prompts the same reaction that most people have had to the previous string of crabby old misanthropes, from Malcolm Muggeridge to Paul Ehrlich. These people have spent their unhappy lifetimes making wrong predictions, so, the reasoning goes, they have to be wrong about climate.
But they’re wrong about apocalypse, not necessarily about greenhous
Why not trees? (Score:2)
Then we get something which we seem to use a lot of (wood / paper) and it'll release oxygen to boot.
That being said I've seen people, on this very site, claiming that if you grow a tree that is absorbing carbon, when the tree dies it actually slowly releases a lot of this, into the atmosphere, more so than you'd think. What eventually seeps into the ground, hundreds / thousands of years later (?) is very little carbon.
I might be wrong on that quote and he might be wrong on the science, I'm not sure, but l
Give up fossile fuels to "save" the planet? (Score:2)
Before you let someone talk you into doing that consider this: Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
- Dr Albert Bartlett
http://www.albartlett.org/arti... [albartlett.org]
It takes 7 times as much oil energy to bring a slice of toast to your breakfast table as you get from it when you eat it.
Renewable energy is not dense enough to power farm implements or pump water in volumes needed in modern agriculture. Limit the use of oil and you are going to condemn several billion to starve to death.
FUD (Score:2)
Life in general, mammals, and primates were doing great before we had polar ice caps. Perhaps we shouldn't listen to "social scientists" about matters of biology and economics.
Same mistakes over and over and over again (Score:2)
So we put the CO2 in the rocks ... can it ever get out again? And if so, when and how? Is this not just a way of delaying the issue, making things good here and now and 'screw the future'? And isn't this just how we got in to this predicament?
It seems like the fact is that CO2 levels are higher. The climate may change because of it. Rather than trying to stop the change why don't we do what we do best and adapt to it? And while we're at it, why not plant more trees not to reverse things but because it
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why not plant more trees not to reverse things but because it would be a good thing, the right thing.
Unfortunately, the great mass of the "developing world" is doing exactly the opposite, namely clear-cutting jungles to plant crops that absorb little carbon.
Re:More Saganesque woo (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we are all going to die... just not from climate change.
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Actually, we are all going to die... just not from climate change.
not me. so far so good :)
Re: They are all doing it wrong (Score:2)
Hence the approach should have been on the bacteria level --- Put a stop to the bacteria which decompose carbon-based carcasses (animal and plants), or at the very least, SLOW THEM DOWN so that the carbon deposit inside the carcasses don't get to be release so fast into the air.
We already know something that captures carbon better than rocks and takes an extremely long time to biodegrade: plastic. Non-biodegradable plastic is an excellent carbon sink whether buried or used to build roads or buildings but suggesting plastic as a solution to global warming sounds nonsensical even though it would likely work better than this.
Re: They are all doing it wrong (Score:2)
Where does this plastic come from?
Petroleum distillates. Which, as we all know includes fossil fuels that no reasonable profit oriented person would put back in the ground.
I would mostly agree except that recycling plastic is not really that efficient or cost effective. Neither is recycling paper. We actually might be better off burying the plastic and paper instead of recycling it. If we stopped recycling all the plastic/paper or converted it into logs and buried it that would be a significant carbon sink that is actually feasible and scalable now. It would also be easy to implement and cost very little. Not recycling sounds strange but if CO2 is the biggest problem i
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Recycling paper and plastics is super efficient. How do you come to you bollocks idea it would not be?
The idea to burry paper as carbon sink makes sense on the first glance, nut burying plastics, what would be the sense of that? New plastic would be produced from new raw oil while burning huge amounts of energy to make it, completely pointless.
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making new plastic is cheaper than recycling: http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
And according to this article, paper is actually more cost effective and reduces CO2 more than recycling plastic: https://www.bustle.com/article... [bustle.com]
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Making new plastic instead if recycling can only be cheaper in money id you have retarded taxes and laws.
It can't be cheaper in energy and CO2 emissions.
You second link is explicitly about cheaper in money. That exactly is why we have recycling laws in the EU, recycling is about protecting the environment and saving resources not about saving money.
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we can fight climate change by emitting less CO2. And that's the only way we can fight it.
That's simply not true. The best, long term solution is definitely to stop, or least reduce, CO2 emissions. However, we have a legacy of what we have already emitted and for the forseeable future we are still going to be emitting sizeable amounts of CO2. Hence, capturing and trapping the CO2 we have already emitted plus what we are going to emit is a very sensible way to fight climate change if we can do it.
What we should definitely NOT do is listen to a 86 year old social scientist making apocalyptic predictions which are unsupported by real science.
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The social scientist is telling you that if you get people to believe that we have all royally fucked up, and that we have to change our behaviors now in order to keep this planet habitable for our kids and grandkids...
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
There are maybe 1500 volcanoes that are known to have been active in the past 10,000 years. There are 1,200,000,000 motor vehicles in the world that operate day after day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Year after year.
Nobody says they don't contribute to climate change, but volcanoes do not contribute to man-made climate change. But you change the things you can. You stop digging. You do what you can, instead of being paralyzed by the things you can't fix immediately.
Gotta be honest with you, bro: your "logic" is for shit.
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There are maybe 1500 volcanoes that are known to have been active in the past 10,000 years. There are 1,200,000,000 motor vehicles in the world that operate day after day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Year after year.
Nobody says they don't contribute to climate change, but volcanoes do not contribute to man-made climate change. But you change the things you can. You stop digging. You do what you can, instead of being paralyzed by the things you can't fix immediately.
Gotta be honest with you, bro: your "logic" is for shit.
The USGS says that there are about 1,500 volcanoes in the world, but you've overlooked a VERY large source of gaseous emissions, submarine volcanoes ("smokers"), of which it is estimated that there are over 1 million. Those facts are not the correct paradigm to use when evaluating "man made" CO2. The ONLY paradigm to use is the annual coal, oil and gas consumption. Using those figures there is little guessing. They have been computed to be 29 gigatons per year. Compare that to the 750 gigatons of CO
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It's not the 2000 calories you eat a day that will make you fa
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There are maybe 1500 volcanoes that are known to have been active in the past 10,000 years.
Yes, and if you have no idea what the average amount of CO2 emitted per eruption is plus the average frequency of eruptions then you have no way to know whether volcanoes out emit cars no matter how many cars there are or how frequently they are used. You might "feel" that 1.2 billion cars is enough to out emit volcanoes but if someone else feels it is not then whose feelings matter? The right answer is neither: what matters is the truth which you find by going out and measuring the relevant quantities you
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As I've already said, sometimes it only takes a little bit to put a system out of balance. If your tires capacity if 35 psi, and you put in 40 and you get a blowout, is it the fault of the 35 or the additional 5? You can have a system that with little input goes from stable to chaotic. You can introduce perturbation up to a point and one tiny bit more and everything goes crazy. It's non-linear.
We don't have control over volcanoes. The volcanoes were there before humans and will be there after. We hav
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As I've already said, sometimes it only takes a little bit to put a system out of balance....You can introduce perturbation up to a point and one tiny bit more and everything goes crazy. It's non-linear.
The keywords being "sometimes" and "up to a point". Your "logic" is that non-linear systems exist and they may have a breaking point, therefore, the climate must be a non-linear system that is close to its breaking point. You could have made the exact same argument back when the first humans tamed fire and argued that this man-made carbon was going push the climate past its tipping point. Several tens of thousands of years later and we know that this did not happen.
That's why you are wrong: your argumen
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Wow, you just changed the conversation to fit your argument. Where did I mention "extinction of life" or any "doomsday scenario"?
If your end of this discussion is evidence of your use of logic
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Wow, you just changed the conversation to fit your argument. Where did I mention "extinction of life" or any "doomsday scenario"?
No, I did not change the conversation at all! Did you actually bother to even read what the 86-year-old social scientist that you are defending so vigorously with your "logic" wrote? It's right there in the summary, you do not need to even RTFA:
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet,...
If you actually read the Guardian article he goes on in more detail. That's why I was saying that we should not listen to this idiot and that's the person you were using "logic" to defend and arguing that we should listen to! Next time it might be a good idea to fi
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I don't read the articles. Where do you think you are, Foreign Affairs?
I was responding to arglebargle's comment when you butted in.
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I'm a Nobel winning physicist and expert in sensing bullshit and fallacious appeals to authority.
If you're such an expert in complex systems, why couldn't you figure out how to create a Slashdot account?
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
First Google result:
> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world's volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
That puts volcanoes' total annual contribution at less than 1% of the CO2 produced just by cars - which are themselves only 15% of man-made fossil CO2 emissions. So only 0.125% of human production.
Forest fires are a somewhat separate issue - globally they're estimated to release fully half as much CO2 as human fossil fuel consumption, but it's CO2 that was already in the ecological carbon cycle, which is immense but more-or-less stable (at least until temperatures tilt far enough that thawing permafrost, etc. starts releasing long-term eco-sequestered carbon). Fire's are primarily a problem when the land is then developed (construction or farming) rather than allowed to return to a similarly carbon-rich ecology so that the CO2 can be reabsorbed. Think of it as floating a water-pump fountain in a swimming pool - it circulates a lot of water, but it's all water that was already there' so the pool doesn't get any fuller. Fossil carbon is like turning on a much smaller garden hose - it's not much in comparison, but it's adding water that wasn't there before, so the water level begins to climb slowly but steadily.
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How about 26 listed here: https://agwobserver.wordpress.... [wordpress.com]
In addition the physics chemistry is well known and can be derived.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes they have - it's very a simple experiment that's been done to death. It's what started scientists being aware that there was a potential problem back in the days when "computer" was still a human occupation. Take two identical glass jars with thermometers in them, fill one with ambient air, add some extra CO2 to the other, seal them up, and put them under a lamp. The CO2-enriched jar will always warm faster, with the difference depending on just how much CO2 was added.
100% of solar radiation will eventually escape back to space - that's not a question or the whole planet would eventually melt. The question is how long the heat takes to escape, and what that does to the temperature. Every single molecule of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere slows that down slightly by absorbing outbound infrared heat photons and re-emitting them in a random direction - which means half the time they get sent back down to Earth. It's sort of like adding more blankets on a cold night: 100% of your body heat is still escaping into the room, but it's doing so more slowly, so the temperature of the blankets near you stays higher. Even tossing a single thin sheet on top of the pile will make you slightly warmer.
Meanwhile most atmospheric gasses like nitrogen (~78%), oxygen (~21%) and argon (~1%) are transparent to IR (heat) - it passes through them like they weren't there, so for the purposes of global warming they may as well not be there, they have no direct effect on heat retention. You may notice that those three alone add up to 100% - all the trace gasses combined amount to a rounding error, about 0.04%. But if it weren't for them, our planet would be a frozen ball of ice. And of the remaining trace gasses, CO2 accounts for 93.4%. It IS the stable greenhouse gas - double it, as we have, and we roughly double the number of blankets wrapped around the Earth.
Well, except for one other greenhouse gas: water. Water is where things get complicated. It's hard to measure, since its presence is constantly changing with the weather, but varies between about 0.001% and 5% (around 2% in your average rain cloud). It's the more active and unpredictable feedback system. But the average amount in the air remains fairly constant from year to year so long as the global temperature remains fairly constant. But as anyone who has lived by a large body of water can tell you - in general, the hotter it gets, the greater the absolute humidity becomes. So if global temperatures rise, the amount of water vapor in the air can be reasonably be assumed to increase a little as well, accelerating the heating. Of course water can also forms clouds, which reflect some of the incoming sunlight before it ever becomes heat, but also reflect heat leaving the ground much more effectively. So things get a lot more complicated.
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Swing an
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In case you're serious - the jars are only there to keep the air samples from mixing with the surrounding air so that you can perform a meaningful experiment. We have something that has the same containing effect on the Earth's atmosphere - it's called gravity, perhaps you've heard of it.
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If the atmosphere were opaque to IR radiation an IR photo of the Earth would be black. It is not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Very little of the atmosphere is blocking IR radiation.
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Nobody said the atmosphere was opaque to IR - in fact I SPECIFICALLY said "100% of solar radiation will eventually escape back to space", and thermal IR is how it's going to get out.
Greenhouse gasses don't block IR, they scatter it. And the more scattering, the longer it takes a photon leaving the Earth's surface to finally escape from the upper atmosphere. Which in turn slows the normal cooling process and causes the temperature to increase.
Notice the one thing you CAN'T see in your video: the planet's s
CO2 is the only source of climate change ? (Score:1, Flamebait)
You see that's why people give short shrift to elaborate and expensive plans to "Fight" climate change. If you think CO2, or mankind in general is the only thing that affects the climate, you're just ignorant and not credible.
Re:CO2 is the only source of climate change ? (Score:4, Informative)
Hopefully not many people think that only man affects the climate. Really it is like a river, the idea that man is the only thing that affects a rivers flow is stupid as obviously the weather has an affect. It is just as stupid to say that man doesn't affect the river as he dams it, dredges it and paves over the surrounding drainage lands. Anyone of those things can seriously affect the rivers flow. Climate is similar, we're not the only affect but we're a big one.
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Obviously the social scientist or whatever he is (I didn't read the article) doesn't know what he is talking about. The CO2 levels in the past have hit closer to 4000 ppm and life flourished. Of course it was life that evolved for the high temperatures of the time and when the CO2 concentration dropped, there was an extinction event and different life flourished.
Eventually (billion years or so) solar caused warming will make the Earth uninhabitable but that is so far in the future that we don't have to cons
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The Sun was also dimmer back then. It's slowly getting brighter. The temperatures would be higher now at 4000ppm than they were then.
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Good point that I th0ought of mentioning but considering that we'll probably never see CO2 of 4000 ppm due to volcano-ism slowly slowing down, I didn't bother.
It is actually quite amazing that over billions of years, the temperature has stayed within something like 40K of perfect for life. Sun gets hotter, volcano-ism decreases and such.
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We can plant more trees. A natural and easy way to absorb carbon. Only drawback are the pesky humans intent on cutting them all down.
Just sequestering in a rock is sort of an odd choice, it's sort of permanent. With trees, you can use them for something and they're renewable. Even fossil fuels were usable. If we could use the sequestered carbon in the rocks for energy purposes, that would be useful.
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There's a limit to what trees can sequester. There's a limit to how many trees you can plant, trees die and rot releasing most of that carbon back into the system and if you keep harvesting them, eventually the soil runs out of other nutrients that trees require.
Historically, on geological time scales, it seems that half the carbon has been sequestered in plants and half in rocks. This is good as the Earth continuously replenishes the carbon through volcano-ism and it needs removing. Venus is an example of
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On the other hand, you can also use these trees to build houses and other useful structures.
Then that carbon is 'fixed' unless those structures burn down.
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Increase number of tree == increase sequestration.
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If you don't mind killing off most life in the ocean, maybe you could bio engineer some kind of super algae that would convert the CO2 back to oxygen?
No need to bioengineer a new species. Just scatter nutrient on the surface in a fish-desert part of the ocean, and let blooms of existing natural algae suck up CO2. When the nutrient runs out the algae dies and sinks to the bottom.
The Haida tribe of British Columbia tried this on a small scale and it worked really well, which made liberals hopping mad because the algae took one of their cherished apocalypse scenarios to the bottom along with the algae.
When we do this on a large scale, let’s use the Pa
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If you don't mind killing off most life in the ocean, maybe you could bio engineer some kind of super algae that would convert the CO2 back to oxygen?
No need to bioengineer a new species. Just scatter nutrient on the surface in a fish-desert part of the ocean, and let blooms of existing natural algae suck up CO2. When the nutrient runs out the algae dies and sinks to the bottom.
The Haida tribe of British Columbia tried this on a small scale and it worked really well, which made liberals hopping mad because the algae took one of their cherished apocalypse scenarios to the bottom along with the algae. When we do this on a large scale, let’s use the Pacific Gyre, Sinking algae mats might take a lot of our floating plastic down with it.
Of course they'd mind losing this particular cherished apocalypse scenario. The usual proposed solutions have a tendency to be more interested in being racist and/or classist, with little chance of doing any help for the environment--and no chance of sufficient success to justify the harm they're doing in the name of 'saving the Earth.' (It'd possibly help if you opted to wipe out the political class instead of the poor, but...)
I would suggest actually having some patches where the seabed is not too deep-
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Yes, the optimum level of CO2 in the atmosphere is supposedly about 280 ppm. The level now is above 400.
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Sorry to say that in a US-based site (sorry about the people, not about saying because IMHO it's true), but whatever will be done, it will have to be done in spite of the USA and not counting on the USA.
Let's be honest, it's a troll country. The trolls keep the country from adopting a coherent system of units, from having a more democratic range of parties (there's 2 to "choose from") and from participating in any important global action.
Heck, if destroying the world is aligned with USA interests, we'll hav
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(I tried answering yesterday, but Slashdot went down as I started to compose my reply.) The atmosphere was sampled by snow falling in Antarctica and Greenland in the distant past and preserved as bubbles in the ice. Using volcanic ash layers in the ice, it is possible to date these ice layers. The composition of the Earth's atmosphere at different times in the past is a matter of record, not speculation
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The Elections Project notes that there were 251,107,404 people who classify as members of the voting-age population, therefore 115,449,897 of the voting-age population (or 46.3 percent) did not vote.
So 251 million voters, but only 63 million [dailywire.com] voted for Trump.
Trump: 62,979,636 (46.1%)
Looks like I way overestimated, you only need 25% of people to vote for you to win.
Mod these facts down too if you like.
Everyone knows it's not true if you can hide it, and your snowflake feelings won't get hurt.
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Re: more leftist spam (Score:2)