this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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The nation's first commercial carbon sequestration plant is in Illinois. It leaks. (grist.org)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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But if CCS operations leak, they can pose significant risks to water resources. That’s because pressurized CO2 stored underground can escape or propel brine trapped in the saline reservoirs typically used for permanent storage. The leaks can lead to heavy metal contamination and potentially lower pH levels, all of which can make drinking water undrinkable. This is what bothers critics of carbon capture who worry that it’s solving one problem by creating another.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Trees don't permently sequester carbon. A forest is a bunch of bound up stuff, but since fungi can now digest trees when they die they don't become coal anymore.

So unless you want to make the surface of the earth rainforest somehow you would need to bury trees in a sealed sterile mine or something. Or you could just do that directly.

Carbon capture is kinda dumb though, coal and oil are what ideally captured carbon looks like. We should focus on not digging that up and burning it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sure...but let's expand. Those trees then become paper towels and such. Processing would need to be done with electric stuff and not petrol based machines. There would be a cost to create said industrial equipment in pollution I'm sure.

Let's invent new ways to use the wood. It would likely be weak fibers if fast growing so they'd need to be processed and pressed. What is disposable products like paper towels get composted and used for (other vague processes) - any methane generation can be collected for the methane to then be burned (I know, but at least it's not fossil fuel extraction) for processes that still need burnable fuel.

Any compost that can be used for fertilizing new tree growth goes back into the cycle.

The Plants may still be beneficial to exist, but augment with the plants. Let's start reforestation? Especially on land with abundant fresh water.

As a side-note, an episode of an old TV show SeaQuest in the 1990s always stuck with me, I think it was the (mediocre) 2035 reboot where there were giant carbon scrubbing towers on the shoreline. It stuck with me way back then and I had hoped we'd never see it. But. Yay, here we are. /s

Lots of holes I'm sure, but, seems worth trying? Not an expert obv.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Look I understand you're trying to be positive but this doesn't work. It's not really viable for me to put more effort into explaining why each specific thing doesn't work but take e.g. paper towels, well they rot. Unless you pack them up in an environment which they can't rot in. Like a sealed mineshaft, which you could just pump co2 into. In either case you're filling an empty coal mine with low density coal while using energy that could go to something with exponential payoffs like sustainable power infrastructure.

Protecting greenspace is good, reforestation is good and has all sorts of positive effects from stabilisation of local temperature to cleaning the air of pollutants. It is not however a solution to climate change. There is only one, and it is not burning fossil fuels. It is completely impractical to reverse the damage we have already done. We have added 0.02% of the atmosphere's mass in co2, that is 1.E17 kg or a hundred million billion kilograms.