But there are several fundamental problems that remain: 1. Storage: CO2 has to be stored safely for an (on human scale) indefinite amount of time. 2. Scale: The amount of CO2 recaptured is gigantic (see other comments). 3. The problem of investment without immediate benefit. On a national level, the money needed to deploy this technology at a large scale is basically "lost" for the immediate future, the (positive) effects will be felt later on. This is similar to the situation right now, where we "only" have to reduce the amount of climate-forcing gases, but cannot be bothered to really weigh in on the problem. 4. Most importantly: this kind of technology is already factored in in current mitigation scenarios. So on top of reducing emissions (close) to 0, deployment of carbon-capturing technology is a prerequisite for remaining inside anything like the 2°C climate change by the end of the century. [2]
So the problem is one of framing for this technology. It is not so much a game-changer but more of a sight of hope that maybe given an heroic effort in emission-reduction, this technology might help to achieve the internationally agreed upon goals for climate-change. Hence it is often seen as a kind of moral hazard, when portrayed as a means to happily keep on emitting.
[1] http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/
[2] e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
- Supposedly CO2 is also a green house gas that helps earth trap some heat from the sun. The link between how much heat CO2 captures based on the concentration is very difficult to find, suggesting that the link is not very strong and propaganda driven "climate science" deliberately doesn't want anyone to know. My guess is that it is very weak at best which is why they supplement the theory with heating will cause water vapor concentration to rise, which is also a green house gas, which will cause snowball effect. This could be tested in a controlled greenhouse but most probably it didn't turn out to be favorable for the propaganda so the research has not been published.
- Climate has been changing throughout the history of the earth and there are no known consistent patterns that we have been able to model which can help us predict anything, not that we have seen working at least. Overall though, it has been cooling and there is no reason that it will not continue to do so in the long run.
- The causal relation between CO2 levels and global temperatures has not only not been established, but it is impossible to establish because of large number of factors affecting it and affecting each other. The best we can get is some kind of correlation but even that hasn't been consistent over time. They keep adding more explanations to anomalies to pretend that they know what is going on but it's obvious that they just don't want to accept it. Max Plank said "Science advances one funeral at a time", but it seems increased life expectancy will keep "climate science" going for a while.
So, yeah some people may be upset that people are touting this solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Showing that temperatures have been relatively steady for a big chunk of human history/prehistory and then suddenly started shooting up right when we started burning mass quantities of fossil fuels seems most relevant to me.
Please refer to the linked graph again. Homo sapiens evolved around 200k years ago. You can see endless spikes during and before that time. Climate has been relatively "steady" for ~10k years after it recovered from an ice age. If the latest is due to "human activities", what about all the countless spikes which have occurred forever?
Anyways, the fact of the matter is, all the climate studies have shown us is that climate is very unpredictable. All of the predictions based on various modeling of historical climate data have failed. And the reason is simple. The climate system is too chaotic. A butterfly flapping its wings can lead to a hurricane... or not, but nobody can predict it based on the observation of the butterfly or all the events in all parts of the world for that matter. Even if we had those data points of all butterflies flapping wings and all koalas farting, it would be impossible to compute what would happen in a very long time from now (a year or decades or centuries). Anyone who tells you otherwise is a snake oil salesman and it's pathetic to see reasonable people fall for this nonsense.
The reason it is still popular despite easy debunking is because why people fall for this has nothing to do with science. There was negligible data and climate models in the 70s and 80s but there was no less enthusiasm in people who wanted to shut down big corporations for "harming the environment". All of the "science" people reference now came very recently and not without organized effort to "prove" that it is the case while silencing and threatening anyone who disagrees by using ecoterrorist organizations and political slamming.
The main idea behind the religious following of climate change narrative comes from the fact that certain people are rich and they somehow should be doing something bad to be that rich, and being rich is bad so they should be departed of their money. That is all there is to it.