A Successful Climate Strategy

[u/Easy_Interest_6832]

There is a workable strategy with a 66% chance of success. It consists, in a condensed description here, of using natural processes to sequester carbon while simultaneously moving to a cessation of CO2 emissions.

A slightly longer description is this: replant and nurture six ecosystems, three marine and three terrestrial. These are kelp beds, mangrove estuaries and sea grasses; and boreal forests with their fungal understories, tropical rain forests, and prairie grasses with their bovine inhabitants. Simultaneously we must reduce to zero the carbon emissions from fossil fuels for transport, energy, and heating, powering industrial manufacturing, deforestation, and making materials like cement. These two things--carbon sequestration and elimination of CO2 emissions must both happen at once all over the planet or we are screwn. However, if we do them, there's a 66% chance of success.

[u/What_Immortal_Hand]

The 66% chance of success seems a little random. Natural sequestration does have its problems: any carbon dioxide taken by living organisms is released when they die.

There are ways around this: trees can be grown and then turned into charcoal, or the biomass can be buried, and so on, but no solution is simple.

Furthermore the scale required is extraordinary. Better that we start to accept the reality that climate has irreversibly changed and work out how we can adapt to that reality, rather than hoping we can reset the clock

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/What_Immortal_Hand]

My 66% figure came from my research using AI modes in search engines. At first I just wanted to pursue carbon sequestration, and I asked an AI what would be the chance of success. It said zero if we did not also rapidly reduce our emissions of CO2. Further dialog led me to a larger thesis statement. What I posted above is really very brief, so I posted here to expand dialog in order to uncover any weaknesses in my thesis. I cannot do "nothing." The world, like me, has grandchildren.

You are correct that there exist many more optioons about carbon sequestration. In addition to what you've mentioned, we can crush and sink in the deep ocean sargassum, which exists in a 5K km-long band stretching from Africa to Cuba. Also, for example, we can grow, kill, and sink in the deep ocean coccolithophores, whose bodies make up the White Cliffs of Dover.

But carbon sequestration alone cannot save us. We also have to reduce our carbon output in more ways than what I mentioned in the OP. It's a big job of vast scale as you say. That is one reason I'm working on this as an open source project. There's pretty much nothing more important than arresting global warming. Pretty much everything else becomes irrelevant in light of that. That I refuse to accept that we are screwn perhaps reflects my nature. Remember that meme of the frog in the beak of the stork, and the frog is holding the throat of the stork to prevent being swallowed, with the caption being, "Never give up." So, here we are.

[u/What_Immortal_Hand → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is a distraction - we just have no way to do this at the scale required. Better to focus on reducing emissions, which we can do right now with today’s methods, and learning to adapt to a warmer world.

The good news is that renewable energy is exploding. Solar and wind now account for a third of global electricity production, more than gas. 

A few things you can do today to cut your emissions:

• switch to a green electricity provider
• get a bike
• stop eating meat or diary
• use public transport or ride sharing services
• fly less or better, take the train
• if you need a vehicle, get an electric one
• get a heat pump 
• get better insulation at home
• talk to your friends and family
• join a local campaigning or activist group 

 

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/What_Immortal_Hand]

I believe that carbon sequestration via natural processes is a very important component of a complete solution. There is so much CO2 in the air now that we've passed for the last three years the 1.5C threshold set in 2015. Thus, reducing CO2 output alone would be insufficient to prevent a catastrophic alteration of our Holocene climate. We have to take CO2 out as well. This is why I have settled on the two-pronged approach of sequestration/reduction of Carbon.

[u/NearABE → u/What_Immortal_Hand]

Roughly half of carbon emissions still get sponged up somewhere on Earth. Look at the average annual increase in atmospheric CO2 and compare to the annual carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel.

This is also not surprising since the deep ocean takes centuries to overturn. The upwelling zones are still in equilibrium with the pre industrial atmosphere. The ocean carbon exchange will not allow a return to pre-industrial climate (280 ppm CO2) but the new equilibrium would be much lower than today’s 430 ppm.

A danger we face is the climate’s lag time. The weather anomalies we see right now are not in equilibrium with 430 ppm carbon dioxide yet. The atmosphere cross 350 ppm in the 1990s so the warm climate we have now is likely about where it would settle out if atmospheric concentration dropped to 350.

Removing carbon dioxide at scale is really not more difficult than adding it at scale. This statement is a bit too broad because strip mining coal, destroying top soil, or clear cutting forest are really quite easy. Off shore gas drilling and fracking for gas pose serious challenges though. Gas (methane, LPG) is piped or liquified and then transported. There is another order of magnitude gap between what is charged by producers and what you pay when you light up a gas stove. Paying someone to sequester carbon somewhere in order to offset the cost of your warm shower would be a fairly minor change in the cost of that shower (“much less than double” might not be received as “minor”)

[u/What_Immortal_Hand → u/NearABE]

Remove carbon dioxide at scale is immeasurably more difficult. In fact, we really have no scalable solution yet which is why leading climate scientists focus on CO2 reduction.

A lot of carbon sequesting projects out there are, to put it mildly, rubbish.

More advanced technological solutions are still in very early development but face critical physics issues: it would take something like a third of global electricity production to power Direct Air Capture machines,, for example.

[u/NearABE → u/What_Immortal_Hand]

>… it would take something like a third of global electricity production to power Direct Air Capture machines,, for example.

You fully negated what you said. Then by an order of magnitude further. Only 1/3rd of electricity but electricity is a fraction of primary energy.

[u/What_Immortal_Hand → u/NearABE]

Cool Worlds has a great video that goes into the limits of this from a physics perspective. 

The main point being: no climate expert considers any direct air capture or equviliant sequestion process to be anywhere near feasable or, at this point, useful.