Scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2
Environmental scientist Wallace Broecker proposes that the only way to fix global warming is by literally scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere and burying it. A professor at Columbia University, Broecker's written a new book on the subject appropriately titled Fixing Climate. He's also working with a company called Global Research Technologies to develop machines that would remove CO2 from the air on a massive scale. In the new issue of Smithsonian, Broecker talks about why these devices are our best hope. From the interview:
We need something that can be manufactured, like air conditioners or cars, by the millions. Each day, a unit would take about a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere, liquefy it and send it out through pipes to wherever it's going to be stored. The developers are now envisioning a device about 6 to 10 feet in diameter, 50 feet high. It would be like a little silo, in that shape so the wind could blow through it from any direction.Link to Smithsonian interview, Link to buy Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It
CO2 emissions are going up faster than the highest scenarios. Developing nations are going gangbusters using fossil fuels, so they are eclipsing any savings that the rich nations are making. At some point we are going to have to get tough about it. There is going to be a demand to bring the CO2 level back down again because of the environmental damage it's doing. The only way to do that would be with this sort of device.
Aren't those called trees?
Fake. Totally FAKE!
So, how do we power the CO2 scrubbers again?
This was tried by some alien race on Star Trek The Next Generation.
It didn't work for them, therefore it won't work for us.
#3 the sun or wind?
And we can call it "ATMOS!"
The Sontarans might file for copyright violations, though.
I think he's saying that the world isn't going to reduce emissions any time soon. By the time we're ready to do something the only option will be to scrub the atmosphere.
I reserve (the irrational) hope that any minute now a mass precipitation of environmental consciousness will occur and cause the changes in lifestyle necessary to prevent environmental catastrophe.
That or crippling economic collapse.
Never going to happen. Quite apart from the CO2 emissions resulting from the manufacture distribution and operation of these gadgets (they're not going to run off phlogiston, so presumably that means power), who'll pay for it? Hacked up artificial markets for carbon trading are turning out to be ripe for gaming (surprise!) and despite the numbers of people who'll tick the box "Yes, I think AGW is a bad thing", vanishingly few people are prepared to lay down significant cold hard cash to contribute to a solution.
I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that very little that will be done about CO2 until the socioeconomic stressors resulting from warming directly reduce emissions by, er, destroying industrialised society as we know it. We're doomed, I tell you, doooomed!
liquid CO2???? hwha?
How about extract the carbon, bury that, and release the oxygen. At least you won't have to keep it under pressure for all eternity.
...and therein lies the beauty of trees. :)
Artificial photosynthesis. Extract the carbon and release the oxygen. Instead of making cellulose, make carbon fiber solids for lightweight vehicles and the nanotube capacitors to store the power from the ultralight nano-fiber wind turbine blades.
If we're dreaming, let's dream big.
a mass precipitation of environmental consciousness will occur and cause the changes in lifestyle
Well, I have to drive a car to work. Sorry. The commute is just too far to take a bike. I drive a tiny car already. I'm thinking when they make a car get around 60 mpg, I'll switch up. I'm not in a part of the planet where solar would be very viable. And the neighbors probably won't give me a permit for a windmill.
Can't we just build a bunch of nuclear plants, stop burning so much damn coal for electricity, and clean the air that way?
We just need to get McCain (R-Nev) to stop opposing Yucca Flats, Nevada, and we'll be fine. I hear he's going the "international repository" path now.
Um, yeah, also Co2 doesn't have a liquid state. It goes from gas to solid at -78 C. Who is this "environmental scientist?"
#12:
You could move somewhere that doesn't have such a long commute. That's what I did, and I now travel 2 miles rather than 20.
Also, McCain is a Senator from Arizona, not Nevada.
@13: Actually, CO2 does have a liquid state, but under much more pressure than at sea level. Still the idea is pretty preposterous.
@14: I am about to move from a very short commute (2 miles to train station) to a super duper long commute (53 miles one way). Time to buy an electric car.
@GregLondon, #12: a bog-standard VW Golf gets 60mpg today. Over here I just paid £1.22/litre for unleaded petrol, which works out to 1.22 x 4.5==£5.50. Cable is 1.95 so that works out to $10.72 a gallon. Some Americans have enjoyed laughing at us crazy socialist euro environazi types, but having had a lot longer to adapt to the prices the US is only now experiencing for the first time means our cars are rather more fuel efficient.
I also drive a car to work, and I also "have no choice" (except to move nearer to my office, which I don't want to do for reasons too tedious to go into); that's fine and all but it's not going to stop the WAIS melting and sea-levels rising 20m, though. It's a textbook tragedy of the commons, and, like those starving & revolting peasants of the 18th century, it seems we'll have to learn the vital importance of a paternalistic interventory regulatory regime the hard way.
So on the off chance this is economical why wouldn't they just strap them to the top of coal plants and save a step?
I definitely have my doubts about his proposed solution. Every chemical step can be accomplished, but the matters of scale and energy make me doubt whether this could ever be used on a global level. Broecker assumes that our total emissions will continue to grow, from the present level of about 29 gigatonnes. The sustainable level is about 5 gigatonnes, so we would need to deploy an enormous array of capture stations, provide them with carbon-absorbing chemicals, process those chemicals once they are exposed, return them to the machines, and bury the CO2. Even if it would be technically possible to do all this, it is not at all clear that doing so would be cheaper or easier than cutting down on total energy usage, while also investing in the development and deployment of renewable power.
Even if climate change could be addressed, a society built on fossil fuels cannot last. The scheme basically assumes unlimited access to hydrocarbon energy, combined with very limited potential for renewables. To explain why, think about the energy chains involved. Broecker repeatedly asserts that it will take only a fraction of the energy from a set quantity of hydrocarbons to absorb and sequester the resultant GHGs. He basically assumes that we will have cheap coal at least for the foreseeable future. There is reason to doubt this. While we will not exhaust oil, gas, or coal by the end of the century, we may approach or pass the point where it takes as much energy to extract and process as it contains. In that case, we would need renewables regardless of whether we had capture capabilities or not.
I wrote a review of this book at:
http://www.sindark.com/2008/06/13/fixing-climate/
I believe there was another study that said even if we had zero carbon emissions, the atmosphere has so much airborne co2 already that global warming would continue for quite some time. So lowering or zero emissions should not be the goal but instead we need negative emission machines must be developed to actively reduce the CO2 in the air at a decent pace.
#13
CO2 does have a liquid state just not at normal atmospheric pressure levels. (anything below 5.1 ATM)
Well at least the issue of co2 and whatnot produced by hydrocarbons will solve itself in the near future. Who's going to be able to afford to drive anywhere in a few years?
Give me a break...
"CO2 emissions are going up faster than the highest scenarios. Developing nations are going gangbusters using fossil fuels, so they are eclipsing any savings that the rich nations are making."
Developing nations are still producing less than 1/6 per capita of co2 emissions that 'rich' nations. When people in 'rich' nations learn how not to pollute more than 6 times the rate of a person in a developing country, then start criticizing the pollution of developing nations.
Before then is just pure hypocrisy.
What would be the volume of all this liquid CO2 to be sequestered?
I have visions of a rather larger scrubber filled with Sodalime (SodaSorb) which I use in my closed circuit rebreather.
We'd need to manufacture ALOT of sodalime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime
"What would be the volume of all this liquid CO2 to be sequestered?"
If this is to be the sole solution, it would take about 25 gigatonnes a year of sequestration just to keep concentrations from rising. If we want to make them fall, more would be required.
For a sense of scale, it would take the equivalent of all our oil extraction infrastructure to sequester one gigatonne of carbon per year, according to Joseph Romm. (http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/4/23/174225/162)
#12: I hadn't heard that about McCain. I did some reading, and it sounds more like "International Suppository." So, some nation is going to accept all of our nuclear waste for a nominal fee. And we're going to transport this waste by train and by ocean freighter. To ship the world's nuclear waste to a single location.
What could go wrong?
And yes. It does sound like trees. And I'm not so sure it's a silly idea, given how fast we seem to cut down the world's forests. Honestly... The planet is sounding more and more like Clarke's RAMA series, paving over that which our survival necessitates.
why can't we just genetically engineer our species to survive on less oxygen?
bog-standard VW Golf gets 60mpg today
A coworker had one. He was always doing repairs on it. Maybe he just had the bad one in the batch.
"why can't we just genetically engineer our species to survive on less oxygen?"
The problem isn't that burning fossil fuels and deforestation are significantly depleting the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Rather, the problem is that the greenhouse gasses we are emitting are causing the planet to absorb more heat from the sun. That, in turn, is causing the temperature to rise.
Higher atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide also cause the ocean to become more acidic, causing harm to marine organisms.
Relax everyone, the authors idea is entirely impractical but it's a sure bet someone is going to genetically engineer some plants to do the same thing for next to nothing. You'll see cityscapes covered in this plant and problem solved.
Pretty much all the world's current problems will easily be solved by genetic engineering once people get over their entirely irrational fears and old school fundamentalistic prejudices against it.
Actually we already have bamboo which is far superior to trees for sponging up Co2, grows much faster and has many more uses such as being able to supply enough material to build a house from the bamboo grown within the footprint of the house itself.
"bog-standard VW Golf gets 60mpg today"
That's the irony, all these people rushing off to buy hybrid cars that taken over their entire life from manufacture to disposal can't hold a candle in energy efficiency and eco goodness compared to the bog standard hyper efficient small diesel cars already on the road in Europe.
David, this post highlights how dangerously misinformed the whole environmental debate is at the moment, even amongst the professional academics.
You've got people taking research money and inventing stories about how it'll be possible to make machines that sequester CO2 out of the air, and people are lapping it up.
But we can calculate how many megajoules of energy you need to purify a kilo of CO2 from out of the air, It's controlled by the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy of mixing, independent of the specific technology that does the purification, nothing can beat the thermodynamic limit.
You also can calculate how many kilos of CO2 you need to release to generate the megajoules you need to purify your kilo of CO2 from out of the air in the first place.
The numbers simply don't add up.
Broecker is being very misleading to suggest this as a solution to anything. His plan is just incorrect from basic thermodynamic considerations. Really, the conclusion he should draw is that it's impossible to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere without at least doubling our total energy consumption.
If you believe that CO2 is going to cause global warming, then getting this right is vitally important and we can't be buying into any snake-oil scheme like this.
http://withouthotair.blogspot.com/2008/06/last-thing-we-should-talk-about.html
Surviving on less oxygen doesn't require genetic engineering. Ask a Sherpa. Hospital patients with severe anemia do it as well. We used to call it maximizing the efficiency of your hemoglobin. Most people only use a small portion of their lung capacity anyway.
"Environmental scientist Wallace Broecker proposes that the only way to fix global warming is by literally scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere and burying it."
Well I propose that all the energy mankind needs will now be taken fom the sun.
That'll happen just as fast...
Danegeld,
The science of impossibility is a dead end. If man were meant to fly, he would have had wings.
It's probably too late to avoid massive change, but there is a potent process we could use...and it's not an effin' machine, ferchrissakes.
Grow biomass. Pyrolyze biomass, producing carbon-negative biofuel, as well as biochar. Return biochar to soil, sequestering carbon. Rinse and repeat, in a perennial virtuous circle.
By the way, biochar is incredibly stable in soil, and with its microstructure provides vastly increased habitat for soil microorganisms. Quantity and variety of SMOs amounts to pretty much the definition of soil health.
Biofuel, ever-increasing soil health and fertility, a carbon-negative process, and ongoing sequestration. Sound good to you?
I think we should sequester CEO's and scientists from their higher atmosphere, condense their old-fashioned ideas, and bury that instead of CO2.
Well, surviving on less oxygen thru practice is all well and groovy, but what if you're surviving on less oxygen because you're underwater?
Why is it that everybody is fussing over the practicality of this idea, and ignoring the more pressing problem that we don't have any evidence for the claim that removing CO2 from the atmosphere will accomplish anything?
Even if you accept the still-unproven ("probable" is not proof) hypothesis that CO2 emissions cause global warming, that doesn't mean taking it away again will halt or reverse the effect. Flooding a house damages it; draining the water does not fix the damage.
Before we go fooling around with stuff like this, we need to figure out what the heck is actually going on with the climate. Otherwise we will probably cause more harm than good.
FYI for the geek conscious; atmospheric "scrubbing" of this kind was also undertaken by Dr. Doom in the alternative future series Doom 2099 (a part of Marvel's "Marvell 2099" series in the early 90's). It worked pretty well for him, so maybe he knew something that the Star Trek aliens didn't.
I love bamboo. I have several varieties around my fridge box and want more. Timber bamboo for sure.
It invades and chokes out everything else and shades and is messy and impossible to get rid of, but I love bamboo. A bamboo grove is a valuable inheritance to pass on to the next generation in many parts of the world. Perhaps the custom should be spread,
There are plenty of clumping bamboos. No reason for them to be invasive. I have Bambusa oldhamii (to 55'), which actually likes the 120° weather here and tolerates the dry quite well. It sounds like you have a Phyllostachys species.
Myself I like the idea of seeding the upper atmosphere with reflective dust, to greatly increase the albedo of the planet and reduce the amount of sunlight that gets through. We could not only reverse global warming; the planet could be a lifeless ball of ice in no time!
Ha-ha-ha, I have an evil laugh.
Seriously, what we need is MORE PLANTS and FEWER ANIMALS. Stop eating meat. Carpet-bomb all cattle ranches. Publically impale anyone who cuts down a tree.
Short of that, we're fucked. Guess what, children? We're fucked.
I have a much simpler and cheaper solution. Get rid of the primate infestation that's causing the problem in the first place. Jeez, do I have to do all the work around here?
ANTINIOUS;
Normally I'd agree with you, eg. that I should shut-up spreading negativity. But I think Broecker is provably and unequivocally wrong in this case.
If what he's proposing is feasible, we might as well take his high-efficiency CO2 capturing machine and use it as a component in a perpetual motion machine that concentrates and dilutes CO2 in a closed cycle while generating free energy for ever.
I think a while ago this website hammered the people at STEORN for suggesting they made a perpetual motion machine, but you're writing up CO2 sequestering as if it's sound and logical, when in fact it's in the same category.
Breaking: scientists invent machine that detects whether other scientists machines are legit or not. Eats self. News at 11.
#43. Exactly. now did anyone see my phial of air-borne Ebola?
Atmocean CEO Phil Kithil proposes to use ocean wave-powered pipe-pumps to sequester CO2 and revive the dying fish:
http://cleantech.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/09/05/the-cleantech-show-018-large-scale-ocean-co2-bio-sequestration-interview-with-phil-kithil-ceo-atmocean/
James Lovelock has the same idea (in his 2007 letter to 'Nature'):
'Ocean pipes could help the Earth to cure itself'
Nature 449, 403 (27 September 2007)
SIR — We propose a way to stimulate the Earth's capacity to cure itself, as an emergency treatment for the pathology of global warming.
Measurements of the climate system show that the Earth is fast becoming a hotter planet than anything yet experienced by humans.
Processes that would normally regulate climate are being driven to amplify warming. Such feedbacks, as well as the inertia of the Earth
system — and that of our response — make it doubtful that any of the well intentioned technical or social schemes for carbon dieting will restore the status quo.
What is needed is a fundamental cure. The oceans, which cover more than 70% of the Earth's surface, are a promising place to seek a regulating influence. One approach would be to use free-floating or tethered vertical pipes to increase the mixing of nutrient-rich waters
below the thermocline with the relatively barren waters at the ocean surface. (We acknowledge advice from Armand Neukermans on engineering
aspects of the pipes.) Water pumped up pipes — say, 100 to 200 metres long, 10 metres in diameter and with a one-way flap valve at the lower end for pumping by wave movement — would fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom. This would pump down
carbon dioxide and produce dimethyl sulphide, the precursor of nuclei that form sunlight-reflecting clouds.
Such an approach may fail, perhaps on engineering or economic grounds.And the impact on ocean acidification will need to be taken into
account. But the stakes are so high that we put forward the general concept of
using the Earth system's own energy for amelioration. The removal of 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the air by human endeavour is
beyond our current technological capability. If we can't 'heal the planet' directly, we may be able to help the planet heal itself.
James E. Lovelock*, Chris G. Rapley†
*Green College, University of Oxford,
Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HG, UK
†Science Museum, Exhibition Road,
South Kensington, London SW7 2DD , UK
i know: we could strip the oxygen off and then make DIAMONDS, which we sell. This would offset the cost of the machines. Or we just ask the tooth fairy to take the carbon away.
Yes, appropriate visioning. Ultimately, nature has already demonstrated effective long-term carbon sequestration: coal and oil underground. So let's get cracking on making coal and oil from atmospheric carbon!
Technology got us into this mess, but it's probably the only thing that can get us out of it.
You can't change human nature--well, that's not entirely true, but for some reason a lot of people don't like this particular application of technology--so this kind of approach is probably our best bet.
I don't have much hope for the future of humanity. Perhaps the best solution to global warming would be to replace us with something else. I prefer robots, personally, because who has time to wait around for another "intelligent" species to evolve biologically?
or we could assume we have lost and see to it that at least a little of our spawn survives elsewhere
OK, try the AI salvation approach: develop the memory, hardware and software required to upload and transmit some semblance of us. Set up transmitters in orbit or on the moon and infect the neighbouring area with our pattern. If that doesn't bring down the ETs to help us or exterminate us, nothing will.
I hate to sound stupid.....but. Don't plants already do that? Um.....and we don't need to manufacture them. Or power them. In fact, increased C02 in the air helps them grow faster and bigger. Seems like we need to be using more wood in construction thus locking up excess C02. Or does that sound environmentally unfriendly?
#38: Nothing in science is "provable", only increasingly probable.
Understanding the motivations for CO2 reduction is simple, however.
Atmospheric CO2 reflects infrared radiation that would otherwise radiate into space. CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat generated by light heating the ground.
As CO2 is removed from the atmosphere, more heat is radiated into space. This causes, in effect, a global temperature reduction. Some of the consequences of warming are inherently irreversible, (for instance, species extinction), but others (global ocean levels) are tightly tied to temperature, so reducing temperature will restore the previous state.
I have been reading that average temperature is down somewhat during the last few months, despite the apparent continuation of polar melting. I don't know if there is a correlating period of less sun energy aimed at Earth, I'd like to see that info.
I have also been reading that uncontested plant growth seems to be on the rise, perhaps in reaction to the higher atmospheric CO2 content.
I have read other articles that propose sprinkling more pollution into the air to reflect more light away from here, but I do not think adding more pollution to what appears to be a pollution-based problem in the first place as a good direction.
Pleased to see that other people are thinking the same way: for years I've opined that the best way to get rid of the CO2 is through genetically modified plants. We need millions of pencil trees!
Pencil trees are plants that take the CO2 and fix the carbon as graphite, growing pencils.
Admittedly this is going to be bad for pencil and pen manufacturers, but they are not a powerful lobby group.
Then we take the pencils and drop them down mines. CO2 problem fixed.
One side effect is that we end up with a lot of spare oxygen. This isn't necessarily a good thing...
The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere is a heady 21% by volume at the moment. Iron rusts at 21%, but I seem to recall from high-school science that we are only a few percent below the point at which iron would burn. Increasing the percentage of oxygen could have nasty effects!
How to get rid of all that oxygen?
Yes, this is what plants do. The problem is they're not doing it fast enough to keep up with the rate at which people release CO2 made from fossil carbon. The observed rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 indicates an excess of at least ten billion tons of CO2 per year, about 1200 cubic miles of gas. Capturing and burying that much CO2 every year by artificial means is impossible. Our only hope is to start replacing fossil fuels with nuclear, wind, Solar, and other non-fossil energy sources immediately. It may not be too late to prevent the worst catastrophes. The day that the Greenland icecap starts sliding into the sea it *will* be too late.
I'm 53 years old and I like it warm! Let's just leave the CO2 where it is.
I call bullshit on all this 60+ MPG cars. And here's the facts:
1 US gallon = 3.78541178 liter
1 Imperial gallon = 4.54609188 liter
So if we take the 60 MPG (Imperial) VW and convert that to US Gallons we get: 60 x (3.785 / 4.546) = 49.96 MPG (US).
I'm not going to argue that its not an improvement over the ("economical, fuel-efficient") SUVs with their 23 MPG (US) performance. Or the far more popular (as in my neighbour drives one) Suburban with its incredible 11 MPG (US).
But, I used to own a busted up, piece-of-shit, wooden body work, breathes oil, Honda CRX DX (Not the HF, which got 50+ MPG) from 1988 and it regularly performed at 35+ MPG. And it cost a lot less new than a VW.
GMO plankton will be the answer.
#12
It's Yucca Mountain not Yucca Flats. You're probably thinking Rocky Flats, a nuke waste storage area in CO.
As someone in Las Vegas, you guys can keep your nuke waste. How many reactors are in NV btw? None. And why don't we reprocess it instead of burying it forever? And the only reason Nevada was selected as a site, was because we were small, the other two bigger states weaseled out of the study. So we can tell it's been a fair process based on science to put the waste dump here. /sarcasm. Well we're not so small now, and we've got the Senate Majority leader. Lots of luck.
"Flooding a house damages it; draining the water does not fix the damage."
stpd nlgy. you can't begin to fix the house without having drained it first. mrn.
James Hansen has also argued that we've long passed the tipping point.
Sorry for the mistake, but it'd be more accurate to say Hansen's suggested we may have passed the tipping point (while stressing the uncertainty of that sort of forecasting).
yeah,we've probably passed the tipping point. We are in the shit. Thing is, the way humans do things, we have to pretend we're still in control to get ANY damage control done at all - just to give the remnants a bit of a chance. Look up the Plague of Athens and see how people behaved.
I read that article and figured that he's arguing for machines because it's something that can be manufactured. Which means that someone can make a profit off of it. Which means that someone might actually get behind making this happen.
Not that I'm super pessimistic about what people will do to save the world... but perhaps if oil companies could team up with car manufacturers and make these, it would actually happen. (Unlike all those other technologies that keep getting squashed by big business because they would steal their profits.)
Onward to Mars!
What could possibly go wrong?
Sounds like about as hard to store and get rid of as nuclear waste. Maybe we can put it all in Nevada.
Passed the tipping point of what? the earth getting 10 degrees hotter? oh noes! humanity would be forever ruined if 80 years from now it where 10 degrees hotter!
Sure it wouldn't be good, but it's not the end of the world, just the end of the world as we know it :P and besides the earths gone through ice ages before, why not go through a hot age? I sided with the reds in the mars trilogy anyway...
If you're really worried about the world, rally to get your government to tax CO2, and make sure they don't subsidize it at the same time (*cough* unnamed presidential candidate *cough*)
Well if the plants weren't so laaaazy about locking up the carbon for us. Come on plants, get to work! Let's see some hustle out there!
Spoon,
The earth has gone through ice ages and the like before......with 5% of its current population. Slight difference.
Yucca Mountain Yucca Mountain Yucca Mountain.
Yeah, I'm all for Yucca Mountains.
you guys can keep your nuke waste. How many reactors are in NV btw? None.
Well, that's not how governments work. I mean, I've never broken a law, but I still pay for police. I don't have kids, but I still pay property taxes. I've never collected welfare, or social security, and so forth, and so on. But I pay for it.
So you can just drop that argument.
And why don't we reprocess it instead of burying it forever?
Probably something to do with having radioactively hot material with crazy half lives hanging around and no way to do much about it.
Radioactive decay is a nuclear reaction, not a chemical reaction. I don't think you can make it just stop being radioactive. Or maybe I missed something about half lives.
And the only reason Nevada was selected as a site, was because we were small
Oh good grief. The only reason? Say, didn't you guys have above ground nuclear tests out your way, back in the day? Isn't there a test site of over a thousand square miles of federal land somewhere nearby?
Antinous,
The earths population also didn't have the ability to put a man on the moon at the time, or nuclear reactors, or giant machines 10x bigger then the average persons home that rips coal out of the ground, airplanes (we have metal 'machines' that can f'n fly man!), medicine, modern agriculture, the understanding that the world is an oblique spheroid, hot showers, or even the ability to flush poo down a pipe that makes it so you don't ever see the it again...
having only 5% of the population might seem like a major difference until you factor in toilets and then showers, then it doesn't seem so bad, and all the rest is cake... not that I want it to be 10 degrees hotter outside when I'm turning 110 which is why I support taxing CO2 emissions to make things more efficient, you know, real change, not silly dreams while we sit in a tub of warm water that took a bunch of coal to heat up, surrounded by candles thinking about how screwed we are.
surfed through Fellini's Roma the other night. The scene where they are burrowing a traffic tunnel and bust through into a two thousand year old Roman villa. The walls are iridescent with beautiful frescos that perfectly capture all the faces past of those who lived there before, from the low to the mighty, the old, the children, the beautiful, the grotesque... In a few moments after they climb through the breach in the ancient wall, the modern air rushing into the entombed time capsule of vibrant Roman life begins to act on the pigments of the frescos - they pale and freckle and then fade into nothing...lost forever.
Disclaimer: I have a PhD in physics, but it's not in nuclear physics.
Greglondon,
First of all, McCain supports the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, and, as has been pointed out by others, is R-Az not R-Nv. Perhaps you're confusing him with Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nv, who is opposed to Yucca.
"Spent" nuclear fuel actually still contains a significant amount of fissile material (unused U-235 plus other fissile isotopes). The fuel becomes "spent" not because it's all used up, but because it contains too many contaminants that would interfere with the nuclear reaction (i.e., so-called "nuclear poisons"). By reprocessing the fuel, you get much more energy out of the same amount of original fuel, plus you have a smaller volume of waste. Furthermore, the waste can (to a degree) be separated by isotope half-life, so that the short-lived elements can be temporarily stored until safe, leaving only a small amount of long-lived waste that requires long-term storage.
This makes it sound like there's no downside to reprocessing, which isn't true. My understanding is that it was President Carter who made the decision not to pursue reprocessing. Now, Carter wasn't an idiot--he was trained as a Navy sub nuclear engineer, after all. The reason he was opposed was because the technology to reprocess for civilian energy production is more or less the same as for making nuclear weapons, and he was concerned about nuclear proliferation.
That was about three decades ago, and times have changed. The nuclear proliferation horse is out of the barn (e.g., Pakistan, Iran, North Korea...), and our need for clean energy is much greater. It's time to re-consider reprocessing.
A "middle ground" solution is to store used fuel in medium-term storage, and then either move it to long term after a few decades (when it's cooled off substantially), or reprocess it, depending on our needs.
and since mistakes never happen and materials never fail early and accidents do not occur it is best to make as much waste as possible to store away.
Haven't we been through this already? Maybe I am just having a deja vu moment. After much debate, the conclusion will be that we can't do thermodynamically better than a tree. It's solar powered, converts carbon to a solid form and guards it against decay with fire resistant bark, self-healing properties, and phytochemical defenses. See
http://www.slideshare.net/guestf419ee/debunking-myths-about-forest-carbon-and-global-warming/
yeah,but we've fucked things up so badly trees are too slow to help save our sorry asses
OMG this guy is a genius. Brilliant con-artistry. "...by the millions." Someone's got tax-funded dollars signs in his eyes.
It is inevitable that con artists of all stripes will try to cash in on this (don't say anything Takuan) and some with political clout WILL, but that just makes it more important to do the research on sequestration, and that's hard to do when not all your natural allies are on your side.
#9 greglondon and #11 pox, the only problem with removing the oxygen from the CO2 leaving only carbon, is that it takes even more energy.
Solar-powered CO2 scrubbers could be put in deserts and two things would not be problems:
1) You wouldn't need long transmission lines.
2) They would operate unevenly in day vs. night, summer vs. winter, cloudy vs. clear.
Dude, that's IT: Google should put it's next server monolith in the middle of a desert, solar-powered, with only a fiber cable back to civilization.
They could call it ReptilePlex.
In the article Broecker himself says, "One has to figure out a clever way to do this without using a lot of energy."
Well, DUH!
Gosh darn those pesky laws of thermodynamics. They sure are inconvenient.
So his plan basically is:
1. Build carbon-sequestering devices.
2. ?
3. Profit! Er, solve global warming!
Heck, algae that produce oil sound more likely. But that's not saying much.
I live in a place that has sunshine 360 days per year. The number of buildings with solar panels is under 1%. The southwestern US could provide enough solar power to run the whole country. But we don't. Complaining is easier.
#84, Exactly. It's like saying
"We can reverse global warming if we all just left the fridge door open!" *
(* except for the radiator on the back of the fridge and the heat generated at the power station. we'll work on that if you fund us...)
#85, The numbers show that the amount of renewable power we'd need to drive sequestering is comparable to the total amount of power we derive from non-renewable sources.
To concentrate a gas costs:
U = R T ln (C_2 / C_1) per mole.
C_1 = 1 (~ pure CO2 for storage)
C_2 = 385 * 10^-6 (385 parts per million CO2)
R = 8.31 Joules / Kelvin / mole
T = 300 K
put the numbers in. The environmental debate is a debate about numbers. some things are going to work, others aren't.
If we can drive sequestering using only renewable energy, by definition we have more than enough renewable energy to eliminate the need to burn coal / petrol.
Complaining is necessary when the solutions aren't going to work. Action is necessary to get a working solution.
The subject of air pollution scrubbing machines was covered to hilarious effect in the 1978 French film comedy ''La Zizanie'', starring Louis de Funés and Annie Girardot.
Anybody who's seen that movie will know that those machines are not the solution.
#21 slightly demented statement. Everyone should do all they can, because in the end we will all roast. Developing or not.
are these guys on the level? Does anyone know? If it's a scam, I'll personally kill them all.
http://www.nanosolar.com/
Its a shame that these debates degenerate into arguments about nuclear energy/waste.
Also the guy isn't trying to de-compose the CO2 back into Carbon and Oxygen which we've already established is thermodynamic nonsense (except for bamboo and trees).
No the real concern I have here is that the guy wants to compress the CO2 into a liquid and stash it somewhere and my problem with that is the risk of it getting out. When this undeground lake of CO2 finds a way out to atmosphere it will decompress and flood the surroundings with a suffocating pool of CO2 just like that lake in Africa did.
OK here's a slightly radical suggestion - think globally, act locally - start by sending your newpaper to the tip rather that recycling it (carbon sequestration)
algae works quite well, but with all the dead spots cropping up in the oceans, who knows
so what about trees? with the money invested in these machines that also use up energy by producing the machines in the first place why not reforest areas maybe try to push back deserts with trees stop cutting trees in the amazon and in middle afrika - you know all solutions that would give you more benefits on top of getting rid of the co2. Its rediculus that technology is supposed to mimic what nature does itself much better. Just ask the 800 year old oak trees in the back of my garden with their massive crowns they take in 10 times as much co2 as these machines ever could and they work over 700 years without repair or the need for spare parts. The hype about these "co2" washers leaves me absolutely baffled when the solution is much much easier and more readely available and might even improve live for lots of people - oh wait I know what it is - nobody is making tonshit money directly off off carbon capturing trees.
I am leery of projects that propose sucking CO2 from the air and then burying it either on the ocean floor or underground since it inevitably leeches out and acidifies the soil or the water. Higher PH means dead wildlife. Coral reefs and crustaceans are dying right now in part because of the rise in acidity of the oceans. Natural alternatives, like iron seeding and tree planting are better since algae and plant-life convert the carbon into a form that won't chemically bond with the environment and cause more damage.
I suggest we relax and use a little reasoning and observation. If, as James Hansen of Nasa warns we're already past the "tipping point" then why don't we see runaway increases? Instead we see cooling as the result of some percieved reverse oscillation in the southern ocean...Hmmmm....sounds to me like one of the counter balancing negative feedback loops which all the most dire global warming alarmists seem to ignore. There will be more and more of them, as well, as they are an unpredictable but inevitable part of the process, just as the increased carbon uptake by plants that we're seeing around the world. Plants like it a little on the arm and CO2 rich side of things...and you may recall we use plants for food and fuel...so in many ways, this global warming thing is working out OK...and where it looks threatening, such as along coastal areas; well, those areas are going to sink anyway as we build on alluvium on the coasts and it is slowly de-watering as part of its natural pattern of geological subsidence. It's way past time we spend that proposed 45trillion to address global warming on re-evisioning and re-building the worlds standard for urban infrastructrue so it stops adding to the already disaterous effects of human activity. We need cities built to withstand from flooding whether its from the far more likely tsunami from eathquake or bollide impact, we need vertical urban farms (it's silly to use perfectly delightfull habitat to grow lettuce we eat in the city when verticle farms do it better) and we need a fully functioning land and ocean ecosystem that can really produce to a fuller capacity instead of the damaged system which is on wobbly knees right now (as a result of past management short-sightedness, ignorance and greed)...none of it having to do with this obsessive/paranoid vision of Earth experiencing "runaway climate warmth" turning us into some sort of Venus. What utterly fearmongering claptrap.Let's begin paying attention to the genuine challenges our planet and species faces based on what we know has happened and will happen again...and it's not "runaway climate change due to CO2". Seriously, overpopulation, disease, natural catastrophes like mega-volcanoes and asteroid impacts, those are the real concerns we should be addressing.
what we need is a way of converting CO2 into energy. if plants can do it, why can't we?
Hmmm, why do I not feel his motives are necessarily pure...
1. Claim the world is doomed because of C02 and we need a solution.
2. Raise tons of capital/grants for long-shot technology to save the world.
3. Sell goofy new technology to someone, somewhere.
4. Profit.
@85 Antinous
Currently, solar panels are generally not cost-effective even with 75% government subsidies. The other major problem with solar is the state of the silicon commodities market. A big increase in the demand of solar panels could drive up prices enormously, making them increasingly less cost-effective (not to mention the effect on microprocessors). The economics simply don't work, and it isn't because of evil building owners.
@38 "Flooding a house damages it; draining the water does not fix the damage."
Draining the water is the first step to fixing the problem; I've never heard of anyone with a flooded house say, "This so-called theory of draining a flooded house is just that, and there's no proof that draining my house will help things. For all I know, leaving the water in there will make the house better."