Edit: sorry for the giant fucking wall of text. I do hope this helps some of you guys though. Cheers
Hello it’s your Chapo climatologist here:
None of you are wrong for doomposting about this. We are legit so fucked. We need to SEQUESTER carbon at this point. Emission reduction is obviously good but if we went carbon neutral TOMORROW I don’t think (in my professional opinion) it would be enough on its own to achieve what people think it would. Things will not be fine. We have already baked in several feet of sea level rise at current atmospheric carbon concentrations. We’ve been saying that we had that several feet of sea level rise baked in since pretty much 2000 and literally nobody listened or cared because they just assumed we would have improved by now.
I’ve addressed questions about this before on Chapo and figured I’d answer the most asked few of, “Well what can we do?” And “What can be done?”
You personally? Nothing basically. As we are all likely in agreement here, capitalism and overconsumption are the root of this problem. Without a massive class uprising to overthrow this, I doubt the global consciousness will be coherent enough to have an impact of the powers that be.
On the, “What can be done?” side, luckily you have some of the smartest and most dedicated scientists in the world working on ways to sequester carbon, and the most promising method is accelerating the silicate weathering process which is the most effective tool to combat man made climate change.
For those who don’t want to read or don’t understand, I’ll briefly summarize why this method is important and the most likely candidate:
You may be thinking “oh let’s plant trees” which is good, sure, but consider that we are re-adding carbon which was not actively in the carbon cycle back into it. A mature forest is most times carbon neutral, as carbon output from decaying biological matter is roughly equal to carbon uptake (think about the following: how could forests continue to exist in the first place if they sucked out more carbon from the air than was added to it?)
Now think where we are getting our carbon that we add back to the atmosphere from. We pull it from underground deposits. The beauty of silicate weathering is that it incorporates carbon into rocks, and thus acts as a long term storage vessel when removing carbon from the atmosphere. The big problem though is that this process happens naturally over the course of tens of millions of years as a result of plate tectonics uplifting mountain ranges and these ranges getting weathered (as implied by the name “silicate weathering”).
So now geologists and climatologists are trying to figure out ways to massively accelerate that process, which has only become a remote possibility over the last 15 years.
Of all fields in science, people often don’t realize how young climate science and geology are. We didn’t even know the earth had other layers until less than 100 years ago. We didn’t take our first deep ice core samples until the 1960s. We couldn’t model climates effectively until the 80s. Think of how far we have come in just 60 years. There is a lot to be afraid of, but also a lot of hope to be had. There are tons of people far more intelligent than myself who realize just how dire our situation is and have dedicated their lives to solving these pressing issues.
Hi! Not a climatologist, but plant scientist/ecologist. Can you elaborate more about why tree planting isn’t enough? A mature forest is carbon neutral, yes. Young saplings will fix atmospheric carbon as they grow, though. I have no idea how many you’d have to plant to make a dent in the runaway atmospheric carbon levels - is that the issue? It would also have to be a careful species choice depending on location, with (I’d imagine) a preference for longer-lived species with persistent wood.
I’m not saying afforestation is the solution, but surely it’s one facet of a comprehensive solution?
Think of it like this:
Let’s pretend the natural, completely free of human influence planet has 10 carbon units in the carbon cycle. If something were to burn down trees it does upset the natural balance of atmospheric carbon, but you are simply changing where the carbon is, not the total amount. This might upset the climate temporarily, but the total number of carbon units in circulation is still 10.
Now let’s add human activity to the equation. We are taking carbon that was in long term storage (oil, coal, natural gas) and adding it to the 10 carbon units we had before. So now instead of a total of 10 carbon units either in trees, the atmosphere, etc, we have a total of 13. Ignoring the fact that we can’t just plant or expect lush forests everywhere, the maximum impact they could potentially have us not actually all that great.
If we wanted to biologically sequester carbon, we would have better luck using fertilizers directly into the oceans to force algal blooms which then die and sink. Of course, this has other consequences unfortunately
since you seem to actually know things, is plastic carbon sequestration? this seems like a stupid question cuz obviously nobody is making plastic outta atmospheric carbon but like, is it “good” if petrol already extracted got plastic’d instead of fuel’d???
Well actually this is the first time I’ve ever been asked this and it’s a hilarious question (BUT NOT BECAUSE IT IS BAD OR DUMB) so let’s undress the question a bit:
Is plastic sequestration? Short answer is yes. There are ways to lock the carbon in plastic out of the carbon cycle for a very VERY long time.
Long answer is no, because as far as Im aware nobody is making plastics out of atmospheric carbon, like you said. If they could this is still a good idea on paper, but any long term storage that I can think of for plastic will result in its eventual decay back into carbon.
It is a great question though, because in theory if we could add plastic to deposition environments and make sure it remains contained that could definitely be a form of sequestration but I don’t see it being feasible at current rates of consumption.
Is direct air capture tech like this stuff very inefficient or does it have any real possibility to actually sequester carbon directly? Also what’s your opinion of Planet of the Humans if you’ve watched it? I thought it was weird how intense the backlash was to basically a film that just showed the very real downsides of renewables and pointed out correctly that green capitalism will not work and we can’t just shift everything to renewable and go on as we are right now without significantly addressing overproduction and overconsumption here.
