If we quit adding carbon to the atmosphere, it won't stop global warming any time soon. That's why people are hoping there are ways to get the extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and that we can put billions of tons of it somewhere safe.
Breaking apart carbon dioxide -- or extracting carbon dioxide from the air -- takes work. Work means energy. It's the reverse of combustion. There's a triple problem here: the technology itself, the disposal, and the energy to do the work.
It's a common saying that you can't unscramble an egg. Once scrambled, the egg proteins won't go back to their raw configuration when they cool, and even if they did, it's impossible to wield a fork in such a way as to separate the yolk from the white. Roomfuls of the latest and greatest laboratory equipment, the best Google algorithms, or even all the king's horses and all the king's men would not unscramble our egg. The mixing and cooking are irreversible processes.
It's a familiar impasse. Can we change the way we see the problem?
Feed our scrambled egg to a hen, and tomorrow she'll lay us a new egg. Her metabolism -- a product of evolution, rather than technology -- will break down the complex scrambled egg molecules into simpler ones and reconstitute them -- with losses, of course -- into a new, raw egg.
For many people, this solution will be less than ideal on a number of counts. Somehow, it's cheating, or it's just a temporary stopgap until we can do it right, with technology. It may be troublesome to patent the process, and the venture capitalists won't be interested. The hen won't win the Nobel. But I want you to notice that we do get success.
The challenging ecological problems we face -- climate change, land degradation, the growing scarcity of food and water, and biodiversity loss -- are like this. We are going to have to learn how to unscramble eggs, using the metabolisms of soil microbes fed by perennial grasses, for example. Our preference for merely technical solutions that often perpetuate or exacerbate the problems is a moral and ethical issue. This preference determines who has money, and who has power. We're infatuated with a stainless-steel prince, but if we want success, we're going to have to kiss some real, live, slimy frogs.
In order to kiss them, we'll have to be able to recognize them. The examples that some of us have collected (managingwholes.com, for example) have only been of interest to a small minority, those who have a basic grasp of how the carbon cycle, the water cycle, solar energy flow, and succession function at the soil surface. If you don't have this grasp, start now.
By enhancing these biospheric processes on a large scale -- and there are proven, practical examples on individual parcels -- we could unscramble the big eggs. The biggest challenge is the widespread belief that it's impossible, or that it's only possible with the right technology.
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
The must-read solutions book by Al Gore
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GRLCowan Posted 11:37 pm
13 May 2008
If we quit adding carbon to the atmosphere, it won't stop global warming any time soon. That's why people are hoping there are ways to get the extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and that we can put billions of tons of it somewhere safe.
That is not a hope but a fact.
... extracting carbon dioxide from the air -- takes work. Work means energy. It's the reverse of combustion. There's a triple problem here: the technology itself, the disposal, and the energy to do the work.
It's a common saying that you can't unscramble an egg. Once scrambled, the egg proteins won't go back to their raw configuration when they cool ...
Similarly, atmospherically dumped CO2 molecules will not herd themselves back to the high concentration they had when they emerged from a pipe. That would be an entropy-reducing process, like an egg's unscrambling itself.
They do, however, concentrate themselves in newborn mineral grains at the surface of grains of mineral silicates such as serpentine (mentioned in the above-linked abstract) and olivine (Google it together with Schuiling), and in so doing, they increase entropy further.
That means the product grains can be stored in a thin layer all over the Earth's surface, or over large parts of it, just like any other inert mineral. They won't let the CO2 go because that would reduce entropy.
Also, the work of pulling the CO2 out of air is done by the CO2 and the mineral themselves. The work of increasing the silicate mineral's surface area, we must do, but it is small compared to the energy we had earlier when we released the CO2: about five percent.
How shall motoring gain nuclear cachet?
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bigTom Posted 12:06 am
14 May 2008
100,000 to millions of years via silicate weathering. A warmer world typically means greater weathering/erosion. The real question is can we artificially increase this process enough to make a real difference. To absorb billions of tons per year, we would need a few KM**3 of newly exposed silicates per year. This is of course is not environmentally benign. I haven't seen any studies on how much free air CO2 we can reasonably sequester by this method.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:43 am
14 May 2008
The key to unscrambling the CO2 from the air is photosynthesis. But methane is 21 times worse as a GHG than CO2.
So if an amount of methane eqivalent to 5% of our CO2 emissions, could be eliminated, the human carbon footprint would go to zero. Offset by the methane emission prevented.
But as you say, just getting to zero won't stop GHG climate change. By using the methane (from biogas digestors running on manure, garbage, sewage, and waste biomass) to backup a renewable power grid powering geo heat exchange heating/cooling (36% of GHG comes from heating/cooling buildings) and plugin hybrid vehicles; most CO2 emissions can be eliminated. That sends GHG on a downward trend.
Then by using organic fertilizer from the biodigestion process the carbon sink activity of farm land can be restored, photosynthesis will then "unscrmble" the atmosphere. Prairie stores 1.8 tons of CO2 per year per acre.
It all starts with recycling waste with biodigestion. A well understood, profitable process. Subsidizing distributed generation using farm biogas and using it as a tractor, train, and truck fuel could get us past the 5% figure in a few years.
It's the quickest techno fix available. Branson ought to award his prize today, to a foundation that applies the 25 million prize for GHG elimination to actual projects around the world.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Tasermons Partner Posted 3:07 am
14 May 2008
...okay, so maybe it's not so easy * wink *.
But it doesn't require a massive new investment in technology to help correct our mistakes and get the Earth to absorb a few additional billion tons of GHGs that it would be doin' naturally if it weren't for our mistakes. these things can be mostly done with the tech we have now, just requires a little bit of initiative, is all.
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pmaier Posted 3:45 am
14 May 2008
Making fire undoubtedly was a major reason we as humans are still here, but since we now are burning up all organic matter sequestered over millions of years, shouldn't we change directions and find other ways to satisfy our need for energy and isn't it time we start using all our knowledge we as humans have acquired over all these years?
Some may say that there is no such solution, but why is it that we refuse to look at how nature of millions of years has flourished, by autotrophic life creating organic matter, by using photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, while heterotrophic life takes this organic matter to release the energy it needs and return the oxygen and hydrogen back to water.
So why nature already has a hydrogen based energy cycle, why can we imitate nature by using our knowledge? Some will claim that it will take too much energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, as electricity is required. The energy provided by the sun through photosynthesis is already plenty for all autotrophic life on this planet to flourish, but as long as we can not replicate photosynthesize yet on large scale, there are much more ways we can use the huge exchange of energy between the sun and the earth, that are not explored, mainly because we are still acting like the cavemen who found out how to make fire.
When looking for alternative energy, we should adhere to two criteria:
1. It should not have a major impact on our biosphere.
2. The source should be stored, so it is only used when we need it.
If we apply these criteria to what is presently going on, hardly any will meet them and do not represent any major change in direction we are going, although some can be easily adjusted.
May be we have not reached to point that we all can not see the cliff yet? Or may be the lame who is leading the blind is not seeing the cliff yet or does not want the blind to see it?
If fish only could talk!
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katakanadian Posted 4:52 am
14 May 2008
I looked at the abstract you linked:
The global scale of these mining activities has a sequestration capacity on the order of 100 million tonnes of carbon per year.
It may have some potential as a 'wedge' but it's nowhere near a solution as its capacity appears to be less than 2% of current CO2 emissions. Mining is very environmentally destructive so we don't want to increase it more than necessary. Mining resources, like fossil fuels, are finite so we will eventually have less material to mine not more which means that we would have to rip up enormous volumes of land for no benefit (e.g. gold, iron, uranium) except CO2 sequestration and we would have to keep ripping up more land decade after decade. What price for carbon would be necessary to make mining for carbon credits only worthwhile? Also as far as I understand, this weathering process doesn't deal with CH4 which will be a growing contributor to GCC as permafrost melts.
I used to live in Japan and I saw the countless ruined hillsides that supplied cement, gravel, and rock for construction. I shudder to think of increasing that destruction by even 10x which would still deal with only a small fraction of CO2 emissions.
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bigTom Posted 11:41 am
14 May 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 1:43 pm
14 May 2008
The massive amount of CO2 in the atmosphere compared to methane would of course make CO2 forcing much greater over the whole atmosphere. But what about comparing total human GHG release, the real catastrophic additional GHG, with human caused methane release? We only need to overcome the human addition to GHG, not the whole forcing effect of all the CO2. Don't want earth getting too chilly!
Do you have a link explaining this difference? I have a notion that total methane release due to manure and fertilizer run off is grossly underestimated. Methane release from the manure itself is a minor amount compared to the run off combining with wetland biomass in a 30 to 1 carbon (biomass) to nitrogen (manure) ratio.
This maybe part of the problem with present climate models. Do they leave out a lot of methane release from modern chemical agriculture and manure run off?
The mistaken notion that biomass based fuel is carbon neutral is still widespread. I wonder if fallacy is at the root of underestimating manure emissions? Those who believe in this faulty carbon cycle notion could view manure methane as carbon neutral?
Thanks for the first response to my crazy notion of canceling the human carbon footprint by curtailing methane with biogas digestors. I'll look for some figures on this, it might be the first flaw in my wacky plan. hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 2:03 pm
14 May 2008
"Methane is an attractive target for manipulation because its atmospheric residence time is only about 10 years (13), although perturbations to its sources and sinks excite other modes with longer time constants (14). A great deal is known about the major sources of atmospheric methane (15) such as rice paddies, ruminant animals, landfills, and natural gas handling, and there is evidence that methane emissions can be suppressed. For example, Sass et al. (16) have shown that water management such as mid-year draining can reduce methane emissions from rice fields while not reducing crop yields, and McCrabb et al. (17) have suppressed methane production in Brahman cattle without affecting animal growth; indeed, the animals required slightly less food to achieve the same weight gains as control animals. The technique incorporates a novel antimethanogenic compound into the feed, a technique that could be used while animals reside in feedlots (mostly in advanced countries). Before actually trying to manipulate rice fields or animal feeds, however, we must estimate the potential quantitative benefits and convince farmers and ranchers to permit the interventions. There are also confounding factors. For example, methane emissions from rice are generally largest when fresh organic matter is added to the soil before planting (18), yet there are large differences between fields and some preconditioning of the organic matter changes the results, such as with green manure (19). Similarly, although CH4 emissions from landfills can be reduced, they are difficult to quantify (20), and long-closed landfills may emit as much methane as open landfills (21), thus making it difficult for us to identify and manipulate them. Overall, one must realize that to reduce methane emmissions by 30% would require decreasing anthropogenic sources by nearly 50% (15), a difficult task."
Still not sure how the anthropogenic totals compare, methane to CO2
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 2:18 pm
14 May 2008
"Continued increases in CO2 amounts, for example from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm to 560 ppm, would lead to Q = 4.3 W/m2 [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (8)]. Estimates of future forcing that included future growth of atmospheric CFCs and rapid CH4 increases led to greenhouse-gas-induced forcings of 4-9 W/m2 by the year 2050 (5). A dramatic example was the demonstration (9) that if CFC usage had continued to grow at 1970s' rates, their radiative forcing alone would have exceeded that caused by CO2 by the early 1990s."
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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hapa Posted 8:32 pm
14 May 2008
the end is nigh, but so's the beginning, so, 's'ok.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:34 am
15 May 2008
I wonder what that total amount is for planet earth, from domesticated animals and farming, like rice. All that rice straw could be mown and biodigested. Collecting the biogas to offset carbon emissions and generate clean electric poweer backup for a renewable grid.
The organic fertilizer could be put back into the rice bed, substituting for GHG intensive chemical fertilizer.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 3:10 am
15 May 2008
If it turns out that the conspicuous consumption and relentless hoarding of the rich, the famous and the powerful are evidence of unsustainable lifestyles, what is the human community to do differently? Perhaps necessary change is in the offing.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
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