Prepare yourself mentally, and live your life.
That is the thinker of a Trumper. We have to do better than that.
Not a nice way to grow up. They really think that? I know that some are activists.
Looking ahead to 2050, Americans are pessimistic about many aspects of life in U.S.
Majorities of Americans foresee widening income gaps, tougher financial times for older Americans and intensifying political divisions.www.pewresearch.org
Opinion | To Be Young and Pessimistic in America
Generation Z is lonelier than millennials and more reluctant to embrace the responsibilities and joys of adulthood. Life online seems to be a reason.www.wsj.com
Let me take a stab at quantifying what we're up against. At present, we emit approximately 43B tons of co2 per year. The fastest carbon sequestration system we're currently aware of (or at least able to work with on a large scale) is switchgrass, which is capable of sequestering a rather remarkable amount of co2 in its root system. At peak, about 4.7 tons/acre/year (we'll round to 5 to be generous). In order to offset just our current carbon footprint, we'd need to grow nothing but switchgrass on about 8.3B acres of soil, dredge it up from the dirt, and bury it in a disused mine somewhere. Now, assuming we were even capable of managing the above, we run into a couple of immediate problems with this scheme: for one, the US only has about 900M acres of farmable land, which beyond the absurdity of us halting our growing of all food to reverse climate change, it's still only 10% of the land required for such a scheme. In addition, this just offsets current usage, not reverse climate change. We'd need to double it to turn back the clock at the same rate we've been burning fossil fuels, so another hundred years.
A guy I know says we can sequester (or convert?) with an ocean system. He may not know what he's talking about but he's not stupid at all. He told me he studied this for 10 years. He tours Russia these days with his band, "The Alex Carlin Band," plays ~100 shows/year, in Russia, other places. He's advocating for plankton restoration, thinks it can offset the greenhouse effect:
www.facebook.com
Plankton is great, but unfortunately it'll probably be dramatically culled by ocean acidification. At least switchgrass doesn't depend on environmental conditions that are actively being changed by CC.A guy I know says we can sequester (or convert?) with an ocean system. He may not know what he's talking about but he's not stupid at all. He told me he studied this for 10 years. He tours Russia these days with his band, "The Alex Carlin Band," plays ~100 shows/year, in Russia, other places. He's advocating for plankton restoration, thinks it can offset the greenhouse effect:
Bei Facebook anmelden
Melde dich bei Facebook an, um dich mit deinen Freunden, deiner Familie und Personen, die du kennst, zu verbinden und Inhalte zu teilen.
Edit: There's a comment there by Mike Maung, who I hadn't heard of since the late 1980's. He used to live in the house I'm in right now, we shared the house then with several other people. He was lead guitarist then in a local performing band "The Freaky Executives!" His comment to the Facebook post linked above:
Mike Maung
Yes, few people know phytoplankton is the biggest carbon sink in the global ecosystem
I just sent Mike Maung a friend request!!!
Perhaps regular Americans, but do you have data showing undocumented Americans also consume more than they do in their home countries?
A long time ago I took a look at what it would take to sequester 50PPM of CO2. Allowing rainforests to regrow looked promising via back of the envelope calculations.
Let's say we wanted to reduce CO2 levels by 50PPM. One possible solution is just to simply grow more rainforest.
- 50PPM of CO2 = 0.005% of the mass of of the atmosphere
- CO2 has an atomic mass of 44
- Carbon has an atomic mass of 12 so it makes up 27.3% of the mass of one molecule of CO2 and .0014% of the atmosphere
- The total mean mass of the atmosphere is 5.148x10^18kg
- Total mass of carbon to remove = .0014%x5.148x10^18kg = 7.02x10^10 metric tons of Carbon.
So to remove 50 PPM of CO2 we have to sequester 70.2billion metric tons of Carbon.
According to this study http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/05/31/how-much-carbon-is-stored-in-t/:
dense rainforest stores 175 metric tons of carbon per hectare.
Dividing our 7.02x10^10 tons of carbon by 175 tons/hectare we would need:
- 401 million hectares of new rainforest
- which equals 4.01million km^2
- or increasing the area of the Amazon by 73% spread through the equatorial regions of the world.
A study I was able to find said a significant portion of the rainforest can repopulate in 65 years. So if we got started in the next 20 years we could probably shave 50PPM off our totals by the end of the century.
Couple that with efforts to replace coal and oil with renewables, nuclear efficiency gains and slowing population growth and we could potentially turn our positive warming imbalance into a negative cooling one.
Which should significantly mitigate sea level rise.
That squares well with what I've been reading lately (3x10^12 tonnes of C02 in the atmosphere as of 2007). If we cool the atmosphere, more C02 may be released from the oceans - but the models here are much more complicated and prediction vary widely.
.There's something wrong with calculations somewhere. We emit 43B tons per year, 50ppm couldn't account for only 70B tons. Either the calcs are wrong, or the carbon's being absorbed somewhere else and needs to be dealt with there too.
Based on that math, we need to remove 8B tons x50ppm, so 400B tons. That gets us to around 1990. Another 400B tons get us to around 1950. Note that we also have to halt current usage, or at least make up for the difference each year when we're magically sequestering 400B tons of co2.
The worlds oceans have been absorbing a lot of excess CO2 (as Carbolic Acid).
Right, that's what I was thinking, I just couldn't cite it in my pre-coffee haze.The worlds oceans have been absorbing a lot of excess CO2 (as Carbolic Acid).
From NOAA, the approximate breakdown is thus:
Ocean-Atmosphere CO2 Exchange - Science On a Sphere
sos.noaa.gov
Of course, when the excess carbon dioxide is absorb into the oceans, they sink the carbon in a manner that is increasing it's toxicity to a variety of flora and fauna. The temperature rise occurring in "Sunlight" zone of the oceans (top 200m) will cause enormous die off in sea-grasses, etc. A localized high temperature even in the ocean off the coast of Australia** resulted in the release of 9 Billion tons of C02 into the atmosphere. Anyway, the whole atmospheric-oceanic-biological cycle of CO2 generation and consumption seem to be very complicated.
Finally, biological sequestration is an important component of atmosphere CO2 reduction, but, as you rightly point out; it is not not nearly enough to us back to mid-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
** https://www.sciencealert.com/marine-heatwave-releases-insane-amount-of-seagrass-co2
The worlds oceans have been absorbing a lot of excess CO2 (as Carbolic Acid).
From NOAA, the approximate breakdown is thus:
Ocean-Atmosphere CO2 Exchange - Science On a Sphere
sos.noaa.gov
Of course, when the excess carbon dioxide is absorb into the oceans, they sink the carbon in a manner that is increasing it's toxicity to a variety of flora and fauna. The temperature rise occurring in "Sunlight" zone of the oceans (top 200m) will cause enormous die off in sea-grasses, etc. A localized high temperature even in the ocean off the coast of Australia** resulted in the release of 9 Billion tons of C02 into the atmosphere. Anyway, the whole atmospheric-oceanic-biological cycle of CO2 generation and consumption seem to be very complicated.
Finally, biological sequestration is an important component of atmosphere CO2 reduction, but, as you rightly point out; it is not not nearly enough to us back to mid-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
** https://www.sciencealert.com/marine-heatwave-releases-insane-amount-of-seagrass-co2
Don't forget about the latent heat of fusion from ice.There's something wrong with calculations somewhere. We emit 43B tons per year, 50ppm couldn't account for only 70B tons. Either the calcs are wrong, or the carbon's being absorbed somewhere else and needs to be dealt with there too.
We have to not only counteract current usage (43B tons per year) but past usage (43B tons per year, scaling down slowly for ~50, quicker for another ~25, and very quick for another ~125). Growing a rainforest is great, but based on your calculations, we'll sequester two years worth of co2 release in 65 years. Not great. You also aren't really sequestering the carbon, you're just turning it into a tree. Gotta bury it, so then something else can grow in its place and pull another tree's worth of carbon out of the atmosphere. THAT is the hard part. We basically need to rebuild the coal and oil fields underground to return earth to what it was pre-industrial period.
EDIT: Found some more specific numbers.
How many metric tons of CO2 is 1 ppm in our atmosphere?
Answer (1 of 12): 1 ppm of CO2 has a mass of 7.821 billion metric tons. Here’s one way to calculate this. 1 ppm of CO2 is a volumetric measurement and therefore it is appropriate to work with moles rather than tons, and convert at the end. According to the article https://journals.ametsoc.org/...www.quora.com
Based on that math, we need to remove 8B tons x50ppm, so 400B tons. That gets us to around 1990. Another 400B tons get us to around 1950. Note that we also have to halt current usage, or at least make up for the difference each year when we're magically sequestering 400B tons of co2.
You may be right. I just went and redid the analysis using moles and mass fractions to be more accurate. I got roughly 3180Gt of CO2 using older numbers (407ppm vs 415) compared to your link with 3342Gt so the right ball park.There's something wrong with calculations somewhere. We emit 43B tons per year, 50ppm couldn't account for only 70B tons. Either the calcs are wrong, or the carbon's being absorbed somewhere else and needs to be dealt with there too.
We have to not only counteract current usage (43B tons per year) but past usage (43B tons per year, scaling down slowly for ~50, quicker for another ~25, and very quick for another ~125). Growing a rainforest is great, but based on your calculations, we'll sequester two years worth of co2 release in 65 years. Not great. You also aren't really sequestering the carbon, you're just turning it into a tree. Gotta bury it, so then something else can grow in its place and pull another tree's worth of carbon out of the atmosphere. THAT is the hard part. We basically need to rebuild the coal and oil fields underground to return earth to what it was pre-industrial period.
EDIT: Found some more specific numbers.
How many metric tons of CO2 is 1 ppm in our atmosphere?
Answer (1 of 12): 1 ppm of CO2 has a mass of 7.821 billion metric tons. Here’s one way to calculate this. 1 ppm of CO2 is a volumetric measurement and therefore it is appropriate to work with moles rather than tons, and convert at the end. According to the article https://journals.ametsoc.org/...
Based on that math, we need to remove 8B tons x50ppm, so 400B tons. That gets us to around 1990. Another 400B tons get us to around 1950. Note that we also have to halt current usage, or at least make up for the difference each year when we're magically sequestering 400B tons of co2.
Also bear in mind, you have to double the size of an active rainforest, meaning you need what, 50 years of growth before the biomass of the trees and plants actually hits rainforest density for those hectares? Saplings don't have shit for carbon density until they become trees.
Yes. the article I found said more like 65 years of growth. I was making suggestions for CO2 sequestration by 2100 in the thread I pulled it from.
That, at first, was what I was thinking, but, while very efficient, they produce plutonium, so no dice. The fast neutron reactors are also more efficient than PWR, and the reactors produce sub-unranic fissile by-products. These have *much* shorter half lives than the trans-unranic's (1/1000th the half-lives). Here's a good up to data reference video (this guy is great!):
I'm ~200 miles south of there, and it was basically the same. No AC, main floor of house at 88º and upstairs at 110º. Basement which was normally at a pretty consistent 65º got up to 75º (I'm guessing that's because the extreme heat lasted for days)
Facebook
Twitter