Thanks, Ron. Just to expand on your comments on Prof. Fleming's CDR statements at http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/11/09/many_experts_say_technology_cant_fix_climate_change.html
"All the [CDR] plans, however, would likely entail huge costs, the use of dangerous chemicals and uncertain storage prospects, Fleming says. “There are chemical means that would use some very alkaline, harsh chemicals.” GR - Thank goodness most of the earth and ocean is alkaline and hence will eventually absorb and neutralize all of the CO2 we care to emit, no dangerous, harsh chemicals required, and did I say for free? Is is inconceivable that we can safely and cost effectively help Mother Nature speed up her CDR, while we also try to reduce emissions? "He notes that there are also thermodynamic means — kind of the way they make dry ice and they just suck it out and condense it (into a liquid or solid).” But thermodynamic removal and compression techniques, Fleming says, are prohibitively expensive and require the use of large amounts of carbon-producing energy. This is largely due to the increased weight carbon acquires by combining with oxygen during the burning process. A ton of coal, for example, produces more than three tons of carbon dioxide because of the added oxygen load, Fleming says. “To make it really effective you’d have to have about a 30-per-cent increase in world energy use. But it would have to come from renewable (sources), which are not in the offing right now.” Other removal plans would employ membrane filters that are permeable to all the air’s component molecules except carbon. “This seems viable on a small scale, but the question is, as in all these projects: how do you make it a very large and very viable and economically feasible?” Fleming says." GR – Couldn't agree more. Making highly concentrated CO2 from air is a non-starter. It is also unnecessary, see my first point. Mother Nature does 18GT of CDR /yr without making conc CO2, so why should we? "Most plans would see the captured CO2 turned back into a burnable fuel by removing the oxygen component, or have it condensed into a liquid form and pumped into underground caverns or ocean trenches. But the fuel idea would also requite massive energy inputs to crack the molecule into its two elements, and the storage scheme would likely produce leakage." GR - All true, and hence so far irrelevant to cost effective and safe CDR. "Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment. “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.” " GR – Fine, whatever the soil can't handle, thankfully the ocean easily can (and will), especially if the carbon is added in the form of (bi)carbonates or buryable organics, or even Ron's biochar (as long as it sinks). Bottom line: with over half of our CO2 emissions already being removed from the atmosphere each year, wouldn't the logical starting point for a discussion on and criticism of CDR costs, benefits, capacities and ethics be here, rather than on expensive and risky concepts that are entirely engineered from the ground up? Greg Rau From: "Ronal W. Larson" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Monday, November 10, 2014 1:16 PM To: Alan Robock <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, geoengineering <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Cc: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [geo] Article in Toronto Star quoting Jim Fleming and me Alan cc List adding Professor Fleming 1. Interesting news release; thanks. Could you give a cite for your expanded-to-26 list? I found reference to a ppt on your website, which I could download but not open. 2. Although called a “Geoengineering” list, your 20-list is only for SRM. It would be very helpful to know if you or anyone has a similar list for CDR. 3. For those who have not seen Professor Robock’s list of 20, it is available at http://www.atmos.washington.edu/academics/classes/2012Q1/111/20Reasons.pdf 4. Professor Fleming (being cc’d) had this to say below about biochar in the article: “Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment. “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.” 5. Minor objections to the first sentence (“burning” and “burying”), but I hope he or others could provide cites for “not large enough”. For one, a large amount (100 Gt??) of the removed carbon can appear as future additional above-ground biomass (now about 500 Gt C). But also there are numerous citations of anthropogenic removal of perhaps 400 Gt C of soil carbon - that need return. In addition, the 60 Gt C per year in flux is not obviously incapable of adding another 10% or so. Finally there is a similar increased carbon flux potential to biochar from ocean resources - and if some inadvertently returns as char, it is probably even more recalcitrant there. 6. I of course agree with his main thrust here - we need to stop, not capture, “all the capture of industry.” But the two actions can/must be concurrent. Ron Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment. “ Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment. “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.” Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment. “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.” On Nov 10, 2014, at 8:03 AM, Alan Robock <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/11/09/many_experts_say_technology_cant_fix_climate_change.html Many experts say technology can't fix climate change There are several geoengineering schemes for fixing climate change, but so far none seems a sure bet. By: Joseph Hall<http://www.thestar.com/authors.hall_joe.html>News reporter, Published on Sun Nov 09 2014 As scientific proposals go, these might well be labelled pie in the sky. Indeed, most of the atmosphere-altering techniques that have been suggested to combat carbon-induced global warming are more science fantasy than workable fixes, many climate experts say. “I call them Rube Goldberg <http://www.rubegoldberg.com/> ideas,” says James Rodger Fleming, a meteorological historian at Maine’s Colby College, referring to the cartoonist who created designs for gratuitously complex contraptions. “I think it’s a tragic comedy because these people are sincere, but they’re kind of deluded to think that there could be a simple, cheap, technical fix for climate change,” adds Fleming, author of the 2010 book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Yet the idea that geoengineering — the use of technology to alter planet-wide systems — could curb global warming has persisted in a world that seems incapable of addressing the root, carbon-spewing causes of the problem. And it emerged again earlier this month with a brief mention in a United Nations report on the scope and imminent perils of a rapidly warming world. That Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report<http://www.ipcc.ch/>, which seemed to despair of an emissions-lowering solution being achieved — laid out in broad terms the types of technical fixes currently being studied to help mitigate climate catastrophe. First among these proposed geoengineering solutions is solar radiation management, or SRM, which would involve millions of tons of sulphur dioxide (SO2) being pumped into the stratosphere every year to create sun-blocking clouds high above the Earth’s surface. Anyone Canadian who remembers the unusually frigid summer of 1992, caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines a year earlier, grasps the cooling effects that tons of stratospheric SO2 can have on the planet. And because such natural occurrences show the temperature-lowering potential of the rotten-smelling substance, seeding the stratosphere with it has gained the most currency among the geoengineering crowd. One method put forward for getting the rotten-smelling stuff into the stratosphere could well have been conceived by warped cartoonist Goldberg. “You could make a tower up into the stratosphere, with a hose along the side” says Alan Robock, a top meteorologist at New Jersey’s Rutgers University who has long studied SRM concepts. The trouble is that any stratosphere-reaching tower built in the tropics, where the SO2 would have to be injected for proper global dispersal, would need to be at least 18 kilometres high. Other stratospheric seeding suggestions include filling balloons with the cheap and readily available gas — it’s routinely extracted from petroleum products — and popping them when they get up there. But Robock says “the most obvious way to go” would be to fly airplanes up and then spray SO2 into the stratosphere. Once up there, the sulphur dioxide particles would react with water molecules and form thin clouds of sulphuric acid droplets that could encircle the Earth and reflect heating sunlight back into space. Placing the cloud in the stratosphere is a must as the droplets last about a year there while they fall within a week in the lower troposphere. Still, the clouds, which would rain sulphuric acid back down on the Earth’s polar regions, would require frequent replenishment, with about 5 million tons of SO2 being needed each year to maintain their reflective capacity, Robock says. Due to uncertainties about the droplet sizes that would be produced by SO2 cloud-seeding, no one is certain how much cooling the technique would create. “We don’t know how thick a cloud we could actually make and how much cooling there would be,” Robock says. Though he’s devoted much of his career to studying sun-blocking proposals, Robock is in no way convinced of their merits. “I have a list of 26 reasons why I think this might be a bad idea,” he says. Chief among these is that the cooling produced by SRM would be uneven around the globe, with the greatest temperature drops being seen in the tropics. “And so if you wanted to stop the ice sheets from melting . . . you’d have to overcool the tropics.” The scheme would also produce droughts in heavily populated areas of the world such as the Indian subcontinent, he says. “Another thing on my list is unexpected consequences. I mean, we don’t know what the risks would be. We only know about one planet in the entire universe that sustains intelligent life. Do we want to risk this one planet on this technological fix?” Though SRM thinking still centres on sulfates as the best cloud-seeding compounds, some are now looking at manufactured nanoparticles to send into the stratosphere, meteorological historian Fleming says. “There’s some talk about designer particles . . . but I don’t know of any production stream, and that would make it much more expensive.” The second major proposed geoengineering strategy to combat global warming is based on carbon dioxide (CO2) removal. This could take place either at large sources of CO2 such as power plants or from the air itself, where even at today’s climate- threatening levels, it exists in low concentrations of about 400 parts per million. Know variously as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), there are several strategies being discussed. All the plans, however, would likely entail huge costs, the use of dangerous chemicals and uncertain storage prospects, Fleming says. “There are chemical means that would use some very alkaline, harsh chemicals.” He notes that there are also thermodynamic means — kind of the way they make dry ice and they just suck it out and condense it (into a liquid or solid).” But thermodynamic removal and compression techniques, Fleming says, are prohibitively expensive and require the use of large amounts of carbon-producing energy. This is largely due to the increased weight carbon acquires by combining with oxygen during the burning process. A ton of coal, for example, produces more than three tons of carbon dioxide because of the added oxygen load, Fleming says. “To make it really effective you’d have to have about a 30-per-cent increase in world energy use. But it would have to come from renewable (sources), which are not in the offing right now.” Other removal plans would employ membrane filters that are permeable to all the air’s component molecules except carbon. “This seems viable on a small scale, but the question is, as in all these projects: how do you make it a very large and very viable and economically feasible?” Fleming says. Most plans would see the captured CO2 turned back into a burnable fuel by removing the oxygen component, or have it condensed into a liquid form and pumped into underground caverns or ocean trenches. But the fuel idea would also requite massive energy inputs to crack the molecule into its two elements, and the storage scheme would likely produce leakage. Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment. “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.” Climate altering schemes go back to at least 1841, when pioneering U.S. meteorologist James Pollard Espy<http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/James_Pollard_Espy.aspx> published a rather ruinous proposal. “He observed that oftentimes it rained after giant fires,” Fleming says. “So he thought, well, maybe we can stimulate artificial rains by lighting the Appalachian forests all the way down the east coast of the U.S. and then the westerly winds would bring the rains across the eastern seaboard.” -- Alan Robock Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor Editor, Reviews of Geophysics Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751 Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644 14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock http://twitter.com/AlanRobock Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. 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