The "best" IPCC AR6 climate scenario assumes currently nonexistent carbon removal technology and linear growth in said nonexistent carbon removal efficiency as the nonexistent technology "matures"
The "best" IPCC AR6 climate scenario assumes currently nonexistent carbon removal technology and linear growth in said nonexistent carbon removal efficiency as the nonexistent technology "matures"
A friend here sent me this post to comment on so your friendly hexbear geologist/climatologist is back!
This is a good post and graph but I would like to add that it is not true that carbon removal technology and processes do not exist. We already have and understand THE key process which we will use to sequester carbon (long term, if we ever actually start doing so in the first place at large scale). I’m so confident this will be the process humanity uses that I would bet my life on it.
The only issue we have is expediting this specific geochem process.
So are you more optimistic than most here when it comes to fighting climate change then?
No lol I’m even more depressed because I know if we had the funding for it we could almost certainly address this and be on the course to carbon sequestration in 20 ish years
Can you comment on the impact of the ocean acidification and its negative impact on biological production of CaCO3? Also, any thoughts on ways in which biological functions could be leveraged (or even modified) to speed up the process? (Synthetic biology is a longtime fascination of mine.)
Seeding the southern sea with iron to induce rapid blooms seems to be the most promising in terms of long term biological storage. Obviously replanting our forests as well but a mature forest is typically carbon neutral rather than carbon negative
In regards to ocean acidification yeah we are in pretty rough shape but that’s not my area of expertise
wow I REALLY expected this to be a link to pig poop balls
I also have background in Earth science. Sure silicate weathering can drawdown atmospheric CO2, but not at the scale necessary, or envisaged on the SSP1-1.5. All the silicate rocks on earth's surface takes out 0.13 Pg C/yr. Humans are releasing 15 PgC/yr. You need a carbon sequestration plants/facilities that remove 100x more C than all exposed silicate rocks on Earth's surface, and somehow find the energy to power the sequestration facility(ies) that is not emitting extra C to the atm
Yeah that’s why it’s still a bit far away in terms of until wide scale utility. We don’t need to remove more than 100x the amount, we need to accelerate the rate of carbon uptake 100 times which sounds daunting but in no way is not possible given our current understanding of how the geochemical process actually works.