[Newfie]

Newfie, 7.5+ billion humans is not "failing massively". It is somewhere between "pretty good" and "massively successfull".

That is your opinion. Which you are entitled to. I view it entirely differently, which is my opinion.

[Newfie]

Onlooker,

I was discussing what we SHOULD do.

You are discussing what we WILL do. And I agree with your prediction 100%. And I think we will just muck it up all the more.

[Plantagenet]

China starts large geoengineering research program

china-builds-one-of-the-worlds-largest-geoengineering-research-programs

Good to know China is on the job. If global warming starts to cause real problems in China, they'll be ready to take steps to help China, even if it screws other parts of the world.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

Then we will retaliate, helping the USA and hurting China.

Loose Loose.

[dissident]

The most feasible scheme of injecting SO2 into the stratosphere (at 30 km in the tropics) has he downside that there will be major ozone loss. The sulfate resulting from the SO2 enables heterogeneous chemistry pathways that destroy ozone.

Geoengineering is not a solution. It is a whack the mole symptom "treatment" that generates other problems and at the same time only hides the CO2 problem. That is, you can engineer some radiative offset but the moment you stop the procedure the system gets walloped by massive warming from the greenhouse gases that you did not remove.

Gigantic CO2 scrubbers from some sci-fi story is the only geoengineering that would be worthwhile. Too bad that there is little evidence for such technology being around the corner.

[dohboi]

Nicely put.

The great misfortune is that your wisdom is not widely shared, so it seems pretty certain that some nation, corporation or just a rich fool will implement some such major scheme, almost certainly with dire consequences for some part of the planet's life and the systems that support it.

[onlooker]

And yet we have these boasts of 7 geoengineering solutions to climate change. Perhaps, other posters can explain why none of them are likely to work. Or why one or more could work
https://www.treehugger.com/natural-scie ... hange.html

[dissident]

And yet we have these boasts of 7 geoengineering solutions to climate change. Perhaps, other posters can explain why none of them are likely to work. Or why one or more could work
https://www.treehugger.com/natural-scie ... hange.html

The CO2 scrubber mentioned takes out 1 ton per day and hundreds of millions of them would have to be deployed. Until these devices (which are conceptually trivial) can be scaled to terraforming levels (not so trivial) they are irrelevant.

Iron fertilization only works where there is iron deficiency. That is, arbitrary amounts of positive results cannot be obtained on demand. I have not seen any assessments iron fertilization induced CO2 removal potential around the globe. So this is more clutching at straws.

Reforestation is a good thing, but tell me how realistic is it given that humanity is full bore deforesting the planet.

[onlooker]

Thanks Dissident for interjection of a sober realistic assessment

[farmlad]

Carbon sequestration is done so much more effeciently by biological processes then by machines and chemicals. Just eliminating the millions of hectares of prescribed burning of grassland and savanahs on this planet and instead treating those areas with prescribed high density grazings would sequester millions of tons of carbon every single year into those soils. This would start numerous beneficial processes such as increasing water infiltration and water holding capacity of these soils. It would reduce evaporation rates as well and so increase the amount of living organizims per hectare.

Pie in the sky? Not at all. There are now more than 1 million hectares being managed holistically. https://holisticmanagement.org/

[onlooker]

I like Biochar...it's simple, effective, and natural.

It is something I can do myself. All I have to do is start a fire in a bucket and then choke it out. Spread the biochar in the garden and it's a win/win scenario.

I've been meaning to try this but it's way down the list It would be a good way to get rid of old pallets, except for the nails. But I'm going to need a 55 gallon steel bucket. 200 gallon would be better I like big fires.

I am wondering how much it can be scaled up to really help with CO2

[dohboi]

sooo, farmguy prefers high intensity grazing to burning, yet bah wants biochar, which is what you get from burning...

do they care to duke it out?

as far as i've seen, the grazing folks have some fairly...dubious proponents.

but i'm all for turning over the plains to the bison and their natural predators, and maybe allow some Indian tribes to return to their ancient customs of culling bison once in a while.

[Tanada]

sooo, farmguy prefers high intensity grazing to burning, yet bah wants biochar, which is what you get from burning...

do they care to duke it out?

as far as i've seen, the grazing folks have some fairly...dubious proponents.

but i'm all for turning over the plains to the bison and their natural predators, and maybe allow some Indian tribes to return to their ancient customs of culling bison once in a while.

You are suffering a problem I have seen many people express. That is, you discount the science because you do not like the source. I strive to look at the science objectively to see if it is sound, because making decisions based on the politics of who promotes the science is just advocacy dressed up with buzz words to promote the thing you advocate.

I despise many of the hypocrites who jumped on the global warming bandwagon, but I get past that by looking at the science. Others should strive to do the same. I think plans to attempt geoengineering are a very bad idea because humans are too arrogant and the system far too complex to have success without many negative side effects that in my estimation have a great risk of exceeding the rewards.

[dohboi]

??

I was just pointing out that two poster proposed two approaches that seemed to contradict each other, yet they didn't seem to notice it. I was hoping they would unpack their arguments a bit more to see if they could be resolved.

It is true that Allan Savory's past includes some rather...unsavory episodes ...

But his 'science' is even worse : http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food ... _have.html

But maybe it is you who want so hard to believe things that confirm your own values that you dismiss actual scientific review of a sleezy promoters claims??

Here's the link to the scientific review, in case you had any trouble finding it in that article:

https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index ... 1560/10833

The take away:

Our review of findings from African studies on short-duration grazing including the "Charter Trials" shows a very high similarity to those from North America sum-marized by Holechek et al. (2000).

We could find no definite evidence in the African studies that short-duration grazing involving 5 or more paddocks will accelerate plant succession compared to more simple grazing systems...

If you think that everyone else is blinded by prejudice, but you alone of all humanity seem to have escaped its clutches, please see my comment on your statement in the other thread.

[onlooker]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 87806.html

Future technology ‘cannot rescue’ mankind from climate change, say experts

[KaiserJeep]

Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?
By The Editors of IEEE Spectrum
Do you believe that climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy that does little more than create jobs for scientists while crippling businesses with pointless regulation? Or, quite the contrary, are you convinced that climate change is the biggest crisis confronting the planet, uniquely capable of wreaking havoc on a scale not seen in recorded history?

Many of you are probably in one camp or the other. No doubt some of you will tell us how disappointed/angry/outraged you are that we (a) gave credence to this nonsense or (b) failed to convey the true urgency of the situation. We welcome your thoughts.

In crafting this issue, we steered clear of attempting to change hearts and minds. Your views on climate change aren’t likely to be altered by a magazine article, or even two dozen magazine articles. Rather, this issue grew out of a few simple observations. One is that massive R&D programs are now under way all over the world to develop and deploy the technologies and infrastructures that will help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Governments, corporations, philanthropies, and universities are spending billions of dollars on these efforts. Is this money being spent wisely?

That question brings us to the next observation: The magnitude of the challenge is eye-poppingly huge. In 2009, representatives of industrialized nations met in Copenhagen and agreed on the advisability of preventing global average temperatures from rising more than 2 °C above their preindustrial levels. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) declared that doing so would require cutting greenhouse gas emissions 40 to 70 percent from 2010 levels by midcentury. These targets then guided the Paris Agreement (2), in 2015.

Even before Paris, Bill Gates had declared his belief that only a series of “energy miracles” could make meaningful progress in reducing greenhouse gases (3).

That got us thinking: What might those “miracles” be? If they were going to enable substantial cuts within a couple of decades, they would have to be in laboratories now.

So we started looking around for these miracles. We focused on three of the largest greenhouse-gas-emitting categories: electricity, transportation, and food and agriculture. We considered dozens of promising projects and programs. Eventually we settled on the 10 projects described in this issue (and two others covered on our website).

We picked most of these projects because they seemed to hold unusual promise relative to the attention they were getting. And we threw in a couple for, well, the opposite reason. Our reporters went to see these activities firsthand, fanning out to sites in Japan; Iceland; Hungary; Germany; the Netherlands; Columbus, N.M.; Schenectady, N.Y.; LaPorte, Texas; Cambridge, Mass.; and Bellevue, Wash. They trooped up and down vertical farms. They flew in electric airplanes. They viewed entirely new microorganisms—genetically engineered with the help of robots—growing in shiny steel fermentation chambers. An algae-growing tank burbled quietly in our mid-Manhattan offices, sprouting the makings for a green-breakfast taste test.

After six months, we had soaked up some of the best thinking on the use of tech to cut carbon emissions. But what did it all suggest collectively? Could these projects, and others like them, make a real difference? We put these questions to our columnist Vaclav Smil, a renowned energy economist, who responded with an essay (4). Without stealing Smil’s thunder, let’s just say that they don’t call them “miracles” for nothing.

The entire June 2018 issue: https://spectrum.ieee.org/
References:
(1) http://www.climatecentral.org/news/major-greenhouse-gas-reductions-needed-to-curtail-climate-change-ipcc-17300
(2) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/what-is-the-paris-agreement-on-climate-change/
(3) https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Energy-Miracles
(4) https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-critical-look-at-claims-for-green-technologies