Climeworks and CO2 capture

[brainbomb]

Is this the solution to reversing climate change from man made sources? if every country were to build these mammoth carbon capture centers could we actually save Earth from the impossible problem of too much carbon dioxide emission?

[brainbomb]

The process removes Carbon Dioxide emissions from the air we breathe and converts it to stone or stores it underground for 10,000 years. This seems brilliant.

Source
https://climeworks.com/?utm_source=googleBrand&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=GS-AO-World-en-Brand&utm_term=climeworks&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAACmRAPXrx6C1Z8tpzUio3KuTjaSDW

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

Carbon capture from the air on the scale needed to achieve Paris targets is extremely unlikely.

CO2 is less than a 10th of a percent of the air by volume, the energy and materials required to capture carbon from the air are themselves polluting, and the cost per dollar sequestered is abysmally high compared to the costs of abatement. It's extremely unlikely that this technology could even conceivably scale to sequester billions of tonnes of CO2 even if there were huge advancements in the technology.

A much better use for carbon capture technology right now is to implement it directly on the source of the emissions, especially for extremely emissions-intensive activities like coal-fired power, oil sands refining, etc. This is a helpful way to drastically cut emissions, but it is not something that will result in a net reduction in CO2 concentration.

In general we should all be skeptical of techno-optimist solutions to climate change. Renewables and electrification aren't deploying fast enough and have their own resource constraints and environmental issues. Geoengineering could go wrong in a devastating and irreversible manner. The most reliable path we have to prevent catastrophic warming is to reduce conspicuous carbon-intensive consumption, encourage greater economy-wide energy and materials efficiency, and defend natural carbon sinks.

[thorgold]

There is the further mistake in fixating on CO2 levels alone, as opposed to a holistic reduction in pollutants across the board. It's not JUST CO2 causing greenhouse heating, and the systems that pump out CO2 have other dangerous byproducts that cause problems in their own right.

[BrianBaru]

We would die without CO2. Plants need CO2 to live. Plants produce oxygen. No CO2, no plants, no oxygen, no people.

Climate change is real. Climate has always changed. It is arrogant to think man can change the climate.

Questions:
1. What caused the ice age?
2. Why did it end?
3. What is the "right" level of CO2 in the atmosphere?

[Jamiet99uk]

We would die without CO2. Plants need CO2 to live. Plants produce oxygen. No CO2, no plants, no oxygen, no people.

Climate change is real. Climate has always changed. It is arrogant to think man can change the climate.

Questions:
1. What caused the ice age?
2. Why did it end?
3. What is the "right" level of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Man made climate change has been demonstrated by a wealth of credible studies.

Urgent action is needed to prevent the extinction of a significant proportion of humanity in the next few generations.

Burying your head in the sand is really, really, really fucking stupid.

[brainbomb]

Yes I think that simply claiming nature is going to correct epic level damages done by fossil fuels and coal being gurgled into the atmosphere is a direspectfully moronic opinion to have.

The damage is real, the extent of which man made fuckery has fucked the planet is beyond undeniable. Shame on anyone who services their grandchildren a planet with unlivable conditions. The denial is toxic and stupid.

[brainbomb]

i should add that the planet corrects itself simply by making humans die. And thats the future you get to enjoy regardless

[thorgold]

We would die without CO2. Plants need CO2 to live. Plants produce oxygen. No CO2, no plants, no oxygen, no people.

No one is advocating for the complete removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. Nor would it be possible, as CO2 is generated by natural processes in sufficient degree to sustain life - as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of years that plant life existed without human industry.

1. What caused the ice age?

Which one? There were several, all with various proposed causes. Usually, they were a number of factors which, combined, caused ice formation to temporarily increase to a degree that it triggered a positive feedback loop of more ice coverage -> higher albedo -> lower temperature -> more ice coverage.

The common factor between all ice ages was a significantly reduced global CO2 concentration relative to current levels.

2. Why did it end?

The common factor between the end of all ice ages was a global increase in CO2 and methane concentration. The cause of greenhouse gas buildup was either due to increased volcanic activity (over the course of thousands of years), or algal production of CO2 overcoming other carbon sinks.

3. What is the "right" level of CO2 in the atmosphere?

The "right" level is that which is most beneficial to the continued survival of humanity and the systems that support us. Therefore, the "right" level is around what was seen at the start of the Industrial Revolution, because that's the climate that we, our food sources, and our overall ecosphere evolved to survive in.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

It is arrogant to think man can change the climate.

I don't know why you have that intuition.

The natural carbon cycle creates and sequesters about 210 gigatons of CO2 per year. Human activities (mostly fossil fuel burning and deforestation) cause an additional 40 gigatons per year and we sequester very little. That has predictably led to an increase in the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 levels were about 280 parts per million (ppm). As of 2023, they exceed 415 ppm, a level that Earth has not experienced in over 3 million years.

In general, humans are having a massive impact on the natural world. We produce around 380 million tons of plastic annually. Human activities have doubled the natural flow of nitrogen. Humans have altered over 75% of the earth's land surface to some extent (mostly agriculture). The list goes on...

[DarthPorg36]

We would die without CO2. Plants need CO2 to live. Plants produce oxygen. No CO2, no plants, no oxygen, no people.

Climate change is real. Climate has always changed. It is arrogant to think man can change the climate.

Questions:
1. What caused the ice age?
2. Why did it end?
3. What is the "right" level of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Man made climate change has been demonstrated by a wealth of credible studies.

Urgent action is needed to prevent the extinction of a significant proportion of humanity in the next few generations.

Burying your head in the sand is really, really, really fucking stupid.

Exactly. Burying your head in the sand does nothing more than make the problem worse. This is one of those issues where it will hurt to fix, and cost a lot of money, but the longer we wait, the more it will hurt and hurt to fix, and more money, and at a certain point tipping points will forever alter the world (from humanity's point of view). We are choosing to be toddlers, and not fix the problem now.

And will earth eventually fix itself? Yes. How long will that take? Hundreds of millions of years, and by "fixing" I mean possible the worst extinction event seen since the Permian extinction. All life, including humans (unless we go to space which is both risky, unrealistic, and unfeasible with our current technology), will be dead, along with most everything else on the planet. Most life will have to re-evolve. So, want to watch earth fix itself? Live for hundreds of millions of years and watch everybody you've ever loved kick the can and die, or at least live an extremely difficult life.

Climate Change is the biggest world crisis to ever face humanity. If we solve it, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z will be the most loved generations to ever walk the earth. If we fail, our grandchildren will curse our name. I for one, do not want to go down without a fight.

[DiplomacyandWarfare]

Personally, I think the problem inherent in CO2 is energy. We release it in order to produce energy, and it takes far more energy to remove it from the atmosphere. Advances in tech allowing removal of CO2 requiring less energy are good. The main thing here, though, is that we need a clean energy source, something like stabilized nuclear fusion or better solar panels, so that we stop emitting CO2 to produce energy and have energy to put it back into the ground using tech like Climeworks.

One of the other things people seem to be ignoring is that there's a way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in a way that's good for the environment, running entirely off solar energy and being very compact. It's called photosynthesis and the chemical factories are called plants. Although, most of the people on this forum probably haven't touched grass in 3-4 years so...

Anyways my point is that this sort of tech should be developed but we're not ready to use it en masse.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

One of the other things people seem to be ignoring is that there's a way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in a way that's good for the environment, running entirely off solar energy and being very compact. It's called photosynthesis and the chemical factories are called plants.

Unfortunately it's a little more complicated than this.

Plants fix only a tiny amount of carbon in the soil. The rest of the carbon they sequester gets built into their bodies and is nearly all released back to the atmosphere when they die.

A mature forest is nearly carbon neutral. In climate terms, deforestation is mostly bad because it causes a big one-time release when trees are left to rot, not because it's stopping some process of ongoing net sequestration. Of course, there are other reasons why deforestation is undesirable.

Mass reforestation to stop climate change is unfortunately, like direct carbon capture from the air, a pipe dream. We may want to reforest/rewild for other reasons, but it cannot even conceivable make up for the ongoing pollution we dump into the atmosphere.