I can imagine a future where perhaps India or China decides to act on their own to this effect, risks be damned.
We know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, in bulk, with super-plentiful olivine. Cutting off emissions and deploying olivine works. Almost anything else ends up doing no net good, at best, and funnels us deeper into the hole.
Soluble iron compounds scattered over the open ocean could help. Any way to get the sulfur hexafluoride and HFCs out of the air would be an important contribution, because even getting CO2 content down to pre-industrial level would not be enough; those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem.
Couple of questions:
- Do we have any estimates yet on how long olivine would take to be effective? - Can we do HFC-capture in a similar way to carbon capture? Would this be more productive?
Of course it would do little good if we continued pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate at the same time.
Getting the SF6 out of the atmosphere is a tougher nut. The present load already accounts for 10% of forcing. There are current efforts to phase out its use, and suck it out of the equipment it is used in.
The HFCs in current use, if all vented, would have as strong an effect as all the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. Collecting it all up and destroying it is a huge responsibility. Probably most that is in cars, window A/C units, and refrigerators will end up vented.
If by big you mean 1/5 of the problem, ok. But that is really not big enough to remove the focus from the other 4/5 And the way those gases work on the long term, in that the amount of them on the atmosphere is proportional to the speed of emission, instead of total emissions makes any change of focus from CO2 actually harmful to solving the problem.
And by the way, half of the non-CO2 emissions are methane, that comes mostly from fossil fuels mining and handling, and 2/3 of the rest are nitrous oxides, that comes almost entirely from fossil fuel burning. So "big" is really, really pushing it.
A source:
Just getting the excess CO2 out is a big enough job, and one responsive enough to known practical measures, that it leaves some time for research on the tails, if we start now.
Nothing about this unfolding disaster is small, or about any measure to counter it.
Well, it gets you >87% of the way, and stabilizes there as long as emissions do not grow. Where going to 97% depends on lots of changes on agriculture, and only the last 3% is about the gases you cite.
Of course, for 100% you will need to cure all the causes. But "87% solved and not getting any worse" does really not sound like an emergency. I maintain that changing any focus away from CO2 is a mistake.
According to EPA, just three companies release the overwhelming bulk of problem fluorine-containing gases today. It is much easier to get three companies to change what they do than to get tens of thousands in line.
In practice, carbon is such a big problem that a solution will only come very slowly. Anything that can be done more quickly has outsize impact.
In particular, the alternative of spreading powdered olivine on cropland will require monitoring. Different sources of olivine have different amounts of nickel and chromium, and the sources with acceptable levels can be favored for that use. Use on beaches and shallows seems to tolerate more. There is no reason to do one but not the other, and dozens of other measures besides.
I see no reason to assume that governments are suddenly going to spend significant parts of GDP on climate engineering if they could not be arsed to spend a tiny fraction of that on mitigation so far :(
So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path.
While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free.
Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change.
We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.
With climate change, once we really start to feel the symptoms it might well be too late to change the trajectory and we might suffer the effects for millenia...
Take COVID. Every government knew it could happen, and the damages to the economy (i.e. cost) it could have, yet none of the countries in the West did anything to prepare for it, and had to foot a much bigger bill in the end than say Taiwan or Japan. Again, because the threat was elusive and didn't feel immediate.
- Humans and the earth will survive in any case, just not in our current form.
"If the Earth can't support seven billion people, then all seven billion of us just have to figure out a way! That's how science works!"
Source? If anything, scientists have been too conservative in their warnings. Time and time again, we see that climate change is going _much_ faster than we anticipated.
Besides, you did not give any for your own affirmations either.
Could we do this with 7 billion people though? Will my children make it to this world? That’s what keeps me up at night.