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It's been said multiple times that reduction is no longer enough - even a cut to zero won't prevent warming at this point. Geo-engineering to actively reduce carbon is the inevitable conclusion.

I can't be sure without a specific source to refute, but most estimates indicate it's pretty possible to avoid most of the damage by ending emissions. It'll still take the better part of a century to naturally remove the CO2 we have already added, but that would be enough to stop massive climate upheaval.

However its very apparent that there's no way in hell we'll actually stop emissions any time soon. I think that's what has been distorted into "it's too late". It'll take 30+ years at the most optimistic to see significant decreases in CO2 emission which is why some people advocate for geoengineering.

Armchair skeptic: manually removing CO2 is the least dumb way of doing climate engineering. It's possible, it hasn't got nearly the terrible side effects of something like sulfur aerosols, and it can actually produce useable products (although the commercial viability of producing graphite and hydrocarbons from CO2 is... suspect). It's a nice dream though, and a fun counterargument to people saying we will always need coal and oil for steel and plastics. Ultimately of course the amount of carbon exceeds our need for oil/graphite/coke by a factor of several million, even over several millenia.

You are absolutely correct.

Here's a data point: If we shoved the entire United States into the ocean and ended this nation as we know it, the reduction in GHG's (greenhouse gases) would be less than 15%, maybe half, if that much. A single massive wild fire emits more GHG's than the entire transportation and energy industry does in an entire year.

See "Emissions by Country" section in this report:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Also,

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full.pdf

The paper explains, paraphrasing, how the issues created by carbon dioxide concentration are irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.

Here's an excellent write-up on the conclusions from extensive experiments by Google:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-re...

From the article:

"We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use." Paraphrasing: If the world converted to 100% renewable energy, CO2 levels would still rise exponentially.

Another point they made:

"Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon."

to add to your optimism:

* geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms

* the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers

* much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production

* geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere

* but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above!

edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse

assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution

another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification

Here's another one - eventually and soon, there will be a generation who know no other climate And weather than what we leave them with.

Extreme weather will just be part of the cost of doing business.

In that light, I suppose eventually businesses will want someone to reduce that risk, and will farm the contract out to the most cost effective Option.

BTW the idea I most prefer when it comes to geo engineering - flotillas of little robots spraying water at the poles in order to help create more snow and ice.

> for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/ice-stupas-himalaya... comes to mind as a project where there doesn't have to be a "loser". They are trying to replicate the previously naturally occurring process and the water still works it's way through the watershed.

Somewhy climate engineering as a whole gets very negative responses from people who care about environment.

But the climate we had in 1800s was not particularly great either. 1/3 of the land surface was still desert, hurricanes and droughts were common too, so the strategy of reducing human population, using only clean energy, etc. won't get us to a much better place.

Of course some ideas are not great, but it doesn't mean that any attempt of improving climate via engineering is automatically bad.

You will have to forgive me when I cannot fathom how actively meddling with a complex system, which requires a substantial investment by our species in terms of scientists, research departments, universities, government offices - is going to result in a tightly controlled, well predicted result.

As opposed to getting a project with moving targets, hard to prove results, great optics and massive funding requirements.

I think climate engineering/geo engineering are on the lines of the same ideas as clean coal.

But the good part is, that we live in a world where the system will demand that this be carried out.

Climate is a complex, dynamic system, but is not magic.

I have the feeling that most people desperately try to pretend everything is a static system (so it can be described, once, in a non-time-evolving form, and then called done), and in the few cases it fails, they throw their hands up and say "it's complex, dynamic, beyond human comprehension".

I mean, you could use the same argument against entire modern medicine - someone got sick because they led an unhealthy life style, so it's their fault, but we shouldn't try to heal them because that's "actively meddling with a complex system", which will obviously only make things worse...

Instead of being afraid of touching the climate, we should stop pretending everything around is static and being surprised when it requires more work of us. Yes, climate engineering means continuous work, continuous vigilance. Yes, it will surprise us. But it's normal, and we have to deal with it, just like we deal with every other surprise in life.

It's an interesting comparison, but people do die because of bad medical interventions.

Yes. But many more survive where, without interventions, they wouldn't.

Geoengineering, if implemented, will definitely be responsible for some deaths, suffering, and negative environmental changes. But the alternative, doing nothing while on current trajectory, is going to be much worse.

And the first bone setters and medicine men killed a phenomenal amount of people as much as they helped, and solutions were terrible until the modern methods arrived on the scene.

Similarly Humanity has been inadvertently geo-engineering the planet.

Modern techniques are here, and they tell us that the best way to treat the patient is not via geo-engineering.

Look my point is cynical and its not about climate science.

MUCH More importantly I am saying that it is the kind of pseudo-science-hope-springs-eternal-last-ditch-effort that people LOVE to support.

Its a product in itself. That is what I am highlighting.

I believe that Climate engineering/geo engineering sits at a special hype junction, a future sweet spot that is going to be irresistible to politicians, media types and lay people who are scared and desperate.

And YES - I hope and keep my mind open to the possibility that we find good tech that helps reduce global temps which is not "pollute less".

This would truly be a magic bullet which would let us continue to grow as we have for so long, while stopping the effects of climate change, and it is something to earnestly hope for.

> MUCH More importantly I am saying that it is the kind of pseudo-science-hope-springs-eternal-last-ditch-effort that people LOVE to support.

> Its a product in itself. That is what I am highlighting.

Uh. You're right. Thanks for bringing it up.

Maybe I'm not that cynical, but I agree the "hype juction" exists. I hope we can avoid the outcome you describe, but that's in no way a given thing.

thank you! yes exactly that - a hype junction.

Im cynical but I too hope that geo engineering works- and I would also like to avoid the worse case outcome.

and yes, we may actually have to try geo eng seriously as well to ensure a habitable planet.

>"we shouldn't try to heal them because that's "actively meddling with a complex system", which will obviously only make things worse..."

Precisely, this is in fact what happens most of the time.

It's a good thing we get so many tries!

Why can't we use the climate models?

"You will have to forgive me when I cannot fathom how actively meddling with a complex system, which requires a substantial investment by our species in terms of scientists, research departments, universities, government offices - is going to result in a tightly controlled, well predicted result."

Any model of atmospheric carbon dioxide which is sufficiently accurate for generating public policy should suffice in predicting the results. After all, the model itself should not care what simulated means are being employed in increasing or reducing the amount of said compound, only its' effect at each concentration level.

there are multiple models modelling aspects of climate, many of which individually need super computer levels of horsepower. So separate models for ocean heating, or air currents etc.

all of which would have to re-work to account for the new entropy being added to the system, and its intended effects.

And this gets further complicated by different methods to change the environment.

Unless a climate scientist corrects me, its not as simple as just plugging in a x=x-c.

And that adds more complexity to the model too, not to mention the change in all the data - before G-eng, after G-eng.

Agree 100% that the introduction of climate/geo engineering as a means to offset CO2 emissions will be an enormous reason industry and individuals lose interest in trying to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, it is far too late for even the most amazing reduction in emissions to solve the problem now, so these techniques will be needed.

Just as most folks prefer to medicate their health issues away rather than making lifestyle changes, by the same token we're going to be living in a more and more over-engineered environment, with each "solution" leading to more "unintended consequences".

I see a lot of people saying "technology will solve it for us, we should do nothing. sure I'll fight climate change - when it's zero cost to do so" as an argument to wait for better batteries, better windpower, better coal power etc. This will be another "wait for the scientists to fix it" item.

> "wait for the scientists to fix it [while slashing scientific research budgets]"

I think a lot of global warming activists/campaigners hate the idea of a technological solution as it won't allow them to tackle things like "global inequality" which they see as important as fixing global warming itself.

Oh don't get me wrong. I think that global warming activists have lost, and that the end goal for the planet is set.

I'm not campaigning, I'm cooking near the fire.

I make assumptions about the world, and in the end I realized the best way for me to hold myself honest, is to make a prediction and then see how it pans out.

This is one of the predictions I am confident enough about that I can moan about it on HN.

I hope I am wrong, that either some technique is actually found where pumping MORE heat into a heat engine makes it cooler, or people ditch the idea.

But this is not about conservation or global warming campaigning. I think the ship has sailed on that one.

This is just a prediction about a new product.

> that either some technique is actually found where pumping MORE heat into a heat engine makes it cooler, or people ditch the idea

It's not the waste heat that's killing us. Sure, given enough energy usage, just the generated heat would become a problem for the planet, but we're far from there. Like hundreds of years far, at minimum. Right now we're fighting with the heat insulation we inadvertently wrapped ourselves in.

Hey thats a nice distinction, thanks. you arr correct.

This is key. It's not just about global warming, it's about how we solve it.

Some would prefer we get away from carbon-based energy entirely. Global warming is one way to argue for that.

If we find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we can continue to use carbon-based energy and that upsets some people.

Or maybe people are just very skeptical of a claim made by a company ran by people trying to make lots of money off of this. Just as they should be skeptical of claims made by oil and coal companies that are making alot of money off the current energy system.

And what's exactly wrong with that? Assuming that technology works, and it is possible to reverse the environmental damage — why not do just that and keep our life satisfaction? Looks like win-win-win for me.

Oh, you broke an egg. Well, the next guy can probably put it back together. It should be as easy as breaking it, right?

It makes no sense to first burn coal and then try to suck out the 400 PPM CO2 from ambient air. And where are you even going to store it?

The sense is energy extraction.

The egg is already broken. We can stop breaking more eggs by either tying our hands, or e.g. strengthening the eggshells or engineering some other compensatory solutions. We are humans, who are engineers. We don't like our hands tied.

Today we can do nothing without breaking eggs. Non egg-braking technology is on the pipeline, and getting perfect. We will almost certainly switch to it soon. Egg restoring technology is further away, but it does not have to be easier, because we will have mostly stopped breaking eggs when we get there.

You can't undo all the damage. For example coral reefs are gone for a long time once they're dead. It's also unclear whether we haven't set off, or will set off, any feedback mechanisms that make it much harder to revert the climate to preindustrial times, for example because millenia old permafrost released massive amounts of Methane.

OK, let's assume you can't undo what's already done. However, if there is a choice between "let's consume less, shut down production, adapt to a less comfortable lifestyle and be extra careful about the environment, so we won't damage it again" and "let's engineer a process that negates the damage we are already doing, keeping our nice comfortable lifestyle", isn't the second choice more natural and rational?

I'm of course in favor of any solution that allows us to do less damage, but I think it's unlikely that we'll figure something out that allows us to continue burning fossil fuels at the rate we're currently doing. Doing both, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and figuring out methods for undoing what damage we can seems to me to be the best strategy.

Fossil fuels will last quite a long time. CO2, however, seems to be a greater problem.

Nuclear energy has nearly zero carbon footprint, though. With the closed nuclear cycle (breeders) uranium will last for millions of years.

Now you only need to convince everybody that nuclear power isn't literally the devil. And I guess you'll need some taxes to pay for the CO2 scrubbers.

egregiously false dichotomy

You can't undo all the damage.

So? Does that mean you shouldn't try and undo some of the damage?

No, it means that you shouldn't bet everything on the hypothetical ability to undo any damage and maybe change your behavior so that you do less damage in the first place.

The Industrial Revolution -- and all of the CO2 put in the atmosphere since then - was basically "climate engineering". It was unintended, unplanned climate engineering, but that is what it was. We took a stick and poked at the climate system enough to cause measurable shifts in it (climate change).

Many of the solutions being proposed are simply more thoughtful forms of climate engineering, designed with a better understanding of the system's inputs and outputs.

The law of unintended consequences will play a big part here, because the climate is a terrifyingly complex system. But, at this point, it is reasonable to make assertions about big picture inputs and outputs (eg., more/less CO2 = warmer/cooler global temperatures).

So, climate engineering is something that has been going on for a very long time, even if it was not called that. It will continue being a thing, albeit hopefully in a much more directed and thoughtful way.

What is climate denial? Please define. I hope this is a reference to the debate regarding the magnitude of the climate sensitivity parameter. If not, then what is it? No one of any consequence (least of all, someone like Richard Lindzen) denies that there is such a parameter and that it is central to the climate question. So what value would you go for and why? I guess a climate denialist would say it has a value of zero (denies science as we understand climate at present) but we can conclude that Arrhenius (at '5') went too high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity So it lies somewhere in between.

what about a GeoCoin where you create the coin by paying someone to suck up carbon dioxide?

Working on it:

https://climatecolab.org/contests/2017/carbon-pricing/c/prop...

https://github.com/DennisBPeterson/Climatecoin

I presented an earlier version at MIT's Solve:Fuel conference:

https://solve.mit.edu/articles/check-out-our-solve-challenge...

In the last few months I have read a few articles on hackernews about converting carbon dioxide into usable fuel. My hope for the future is that we come up with a way to capture and convert carbon dioxide even if doing so requires electricity as this would make renewables cheaper and stop more carbon output.

So be forewarned - spending more energy to clean the system is just adding more heat to the system.

Any solution must somehow be a net negative in the long and medium term - and must also not have complex unpredictable knock on effects.

To give you an idea of how often mankind tries this - before the internet there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water.

Hindsight is of course 20/20, my point being that healthy scepticism and a high bar for evidence are the watchwords.

The one-time energy cost of removal might offset the constant cost of having the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's dependant on the energy cost of removal of course.

Right, but a one time energy cost of removal?

Our environment built itself out of eons of incremental changes using self replicating systems using the entirety of habitable surface area.

I think its extremely unlikely that there will be a single one time way of removing carbon from the air (I'd bet on it).

So we will be left with constant and continuous systems cleaning the air.

Instead of not mucking it up in the first place.

----

You should also consider that the moment people start selling Geo engineering, they will also sell permission to keep doing what we are doing.

So the solution seems to be to spend more on cleaning the air, and allowing us to pollute it further at the same time.

In such a scenario I see things going MORE wrong, with unanticipated effects going on to create more damage.

There are sequestration methods today like storing CO2 in rocks: https://www.or.is/english/carbfix-project

Can we do it at the enormous scale we'd need to in order to offset the enormous amount of oil, coal, and gas we've burnt, though?

I have no insight into it. For sure it is easier to not burn the carbon instead of having to filter it from the atmosphere.

there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water

Have been wondering about this sentence since I read it, it seems there must be multiple typos in it for it to make sense...eg "London's docks were so odorous..." (makes a kind of sense, during the Great Stink chemicals were dumped in the sewers to reduce the smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink ... not oil I think though?). Is that the incident you meant?

oh dear. I meant Fog.

The warming effect of CO2 is far greater than the waste heat from our energy usage. Nobody is proposing cleanup methods that would require orders of magnitude more energy than civilization currently uses.

That's what plants do, using energy from sunlight. Unfortunately, they aren't very efficient at it. So capturing enough CO2 to make a difference would require too much arable land. Which we need to grow food and stuff. And to let the broader ecosystem do its thing.

I'm sure that we could come up with CO2-capture devices that are far more efficient than plants.[0] But the thing is, plants make copies of themselves ;)

0) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13237

But converting it to "useful fuel" just means that the fuel will be burned and converted back to CO2, no?

Yes. If the electricity source does not emit any (why would you ever do this with an emitting source?), you get to use liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way.

If you convert it into plastics, it's eventually a bunch of CO2 captured into a landfill.

> "In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment."

If you want a reason for optimism, eventually those two will more clearly interlinked. The question is whether we can avoid damaging the planet before the survival of humanity depends on doing so.