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The Geoengineering Thread Pt. 2

Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Tue 05 Jun 2018, 12:31:50

I think that you are all being naive. There may or may not be serious side effects to burning FF's. Without any doubts whatsoever, six billion humans will starve if we abandon petroleum-powered mechanized agriculture, and the transport of foodstuffs from distant places.

Nobody has yet convinced me that any AGW/CC consequence is worse than that.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Tue 05 Jun 2018, 16:38:54

KaiserJeep wrote:I think that you are all being naive. There may or may not be serious side effects to burning FF's. Without any doubts whatsoever, six billion humans will starve if we abandon petroleum-powered mechanized agriculture, and the transport of foodstuffs from distant places.

Nobody has yet convinced me that any AGW/CC consequence is worse than that.

But I don't think this thread is about just abandoning burning FF's, which I agree, at least in the short term, would be a disaster. I think it's about mitigating the effects, via technology.

Those are two very different things.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Tue 05 Jun 2018, 16:50:54

ROCKMAN wrote:Newfie - Exactly. Engineers can come up with lots of workable ideas. Such as the most obvious: drastically reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned by consumers. What can be done isn't relevant: what govts/societies are willing to do is.

Completely fair and valid point.

But if viable technologies make it easy and in fact cheaper to do something else, then it's not a big deal to change. In fact, organizations and individuals might change in their own self interest.

So for example, if solar truly gets meaningfully cheaper (via better technology) than burning fossil fuels in a decade or so, switching to solar will occur, simply to save money.

Same story for BEV's, once maintenance costs are factored in.

Some of the ideas in KJ's initial linked story are along the same lines re cost for other ideas. If, for example fuel cells can mitigate 90% of the CO2 created by many power plants cheaply, then that's not a meaningful burden. So doing that might happen. Especially if it helps avoid things like a CO2 tax.

...

So I could be wrong, but I believe the main reason governments and voters have been so strongly resistant to doing anything meaningful thus far is primarily the perceived high cost.

So to me, the real question here is can technology greatly lower that cost (or even turn that cost into savings in some cases)?

By the time we know in, say, a decade, we'll have more data on whether the recent spate of record setting high temperature years globally abates or accelerates. Also on whether SLR is hitting insurance costs meaningfully in places like Florida.

If people wake up enough to realize the costs of warming aren't trivial, that really changes things if the solutions aren't horrendously expensive.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Tue 05 Jun 2018, 16:53:47

There's only one viable technological plan for mitigating the FF apocalypse that I know of. That would be moving off the Earth and into self-sufficient space colonies, safe from the resource squabbles on Earth.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby dohboi » Tue 05 Jun 2018, 20:24:25

p, it just gives him another opportunity to trot out his tired old Frank Sinatra 'Fly Me To The Moon" shtick.

The original is much better! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hxibHJOE5E
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Ibon » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 07:40:28

Newfie wrote:Unfortunately we collectively act as 9 year olds. So it is extreamely unlikely we will do anything helpful.


Being 9 years old is maybe the best of times, old enough to reason, innocent enough to believe in fantasy, relationship with money is in how much candy you can buy and still a couple of years away from those hormones that twist us all up.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Newfie » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 10:12:06

You are correct. I apologize to all 9 year olds!
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Cog » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 14:18:33

Climate change is irrelevant compared to running out of oil. At least as far as humanity's future goes. Although pstarr may be a dope smoking hippie with questionable hygiene, he isn't wrong about the over-riding issue of our time.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Cog » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 14:23:53

I just had the wife buy me some new boxer briefs. They look marvelous on me.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Sys1 » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 15:39:25

Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?


Actually, the technology is available for decades : it's thermonuclear weapons.
After a full scale thermonuclear world war, Earth will be colder than Artic down to Africa.
Nevertheless, food production will be close to 0 and mankind will be replaced by beetles which are quite resistant to radiations and scarce food.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Cog » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 15:40:50

Sagan tried to spread that nonsense about nuclear winter when Saddam set the Kuwait oilfields on fire. Its still nonsense now.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby GHung » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 20:25:15

One Day, Your Car May Run on Fumes—From Power Plants

A Canadian startup is testing a system that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuel for cars and other vehicles.

Carbon Engineering Ltd.’s technique combines several common manufacturing processes and will eventually be able to produce fuel for about $4 a gallon, according to David Keith, a Harvard University professor and co-founder of the company.

With oil prices climbing and U.S. gasoline following suit, that’s a level that could make this alternative fuel competitive. Many companies have developed ways to make fuel from plants, trees, sugarcane waste and other substances instead of petroleum, but the challenge has always been the cost. Carbon Engineering’s technique was developed specifically to address this.

“This isn’t some new clever piece of science or weird chemical we synthesized in some fancy lab,” Keith said in an interview. “The key thing that the company’s done from the beginning is focus on doing this in a way that is industrially scalable.”

The “direct air capture” process starts with common industrial cooling systems and a solution that draws carbon from the air, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Joule. The carbon is combined with hydrogen to make motor fuel, through a technique used at pulp mills. The most expensive part is the electricity used to extract hydrogen from water.

Pilot Plant................

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... atechanged
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 07 Jun 2018, 20:37:14

Sys1 wrote:
Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?


Actually, the technology is available for decades : it's thermonuclear weapons.
After a full scale thermonuclear world war, Earth will be colder than Artic down to Africa.
Nevertheless, food production will be close to 0 and mankind will be replaced by beetles which are quite resistant to radiations and scarce food.

The cure is worse than the disease :lol: :lol:
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Fri 08 Jun 2018, 12:05:32

Cog wrote:Climate change is irrelevant compared to running out of oil. At least as far as humanity's future goes.

In the intermediate term, yes. But hopefully mankind's future runs longer than the next century or even three.

The good news is that despite the denial of the Cassandras, technology does change significantly over time, so the future of, say, 50 years from now can look VERY different re the amount of fossil fuels people need to burn to survive and even prosper, compared to today.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Fri 08 Jun 2018, 12:13:16

GHung wrote:
One Day, Your Car May Run on Fumes—From Power Plants

A Canadian startup is testing a system that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuel for cars and other vehicles.

Carbon Engineering Ltd.’s technique combines several common manufacturing processes and will eventually be able to produce fuel for about $4 a gallon, according to David Keith, a Harvard University professor and co-founder of the company.

With oil prices climbing and U.S. gasoline following suit, that’s a level that could make this alternative fuel competitive. Many companies have developed ways to make fuel from plants, trees, sugarcane waste and other substances instead of petroleum, but the challenge has always been the cost. Carbon Engineering’s technique was developed specifically to address this.

“This isn’t some new clever piece of science or weird chemical we synthesized in some fancy lab,” Keith said in an interview. “The key thing that the company’s done from the beginning is focus on doing this in a way that is industrially scalable.”

The “direct air capture” process starts with common industrial cooling systems and a solution that draws carbon from the air, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Joule. The carbon is combined with hydrogen to make motor fuel, through a technique used at pulp mills. The most expensive part is the electricity used to extract hydrogen from water.

Pilot Plant................

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... atechanged

I saw that on Ars Technia or some such site. That's VERY exciting IF the cost is realistic and IF it can truly be scaled.

If in 50 years we can be 80%+ using clean green tech and for the other 20% of transpo, construction, production, etc. we can be using tech that recycles a huge proportion of the CO2 produces by man made processes (like factories) AND the cost isn't outrageous, that's pretty huge.

The overall figure I saw was that this process cut the cost by a little over 6 fold.

...

Now of course, we have to wait several years or so to see if this can scale beyond the lab and still be practical. (Because claims of companies re such processes are far different than them actually PROVING such claims are valid in a commercially viable setting).
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 08 Jun 2018, 22:19:58

KaiserJeep wrote:
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



KJ as a computer development expert I am sure you are familiar with mathematics as a subject, specifically the case of bifurcated hysteresis.

Climate and weather systems demonstrate that they follow a bifurcated hysteresis flow model when you are putting the numbers in. For those who were not well versed in mathematics you can think of bifurcation being a condition where two graph lines move in parallel like the rails of a train track. When one curves left the second matches its curve and so on. The hysteresis part of the statement means that climate or weather patterns will stay on one track for a long distance worth of conditions. When a changing condition puts force on the system to drive it toward the parallel track it resists for a long time, then suddenly jumps 90 degrees over onto the other track at the same set of conditions.

Once the system has hopped from one track to the other it will stay on that track going back and forth just like before until a considerable perturbation causes it to jump back to the first track. You can see this behavior for yourself if you look at the major glaciation climate record. Conditions pass the perturbation threshold and suddenly ice sheets start growing and expanding away from both geographic poles even though conditions from year to year are nearly identical. The tiny change that caused the climate to jump from a minor glaciation condition like we have today to a major glaciation condition where the ice sheets were a couple kilometers thick where I am currently sitting 20,000 ybp is indistinct in the geological record. For weather you can map the same thing in clouds that are precipitating or not with nearly indistinguishable conditions. A cloud formation will go from wet mist to rapid precipitation almost instantly over a wide geographic area as some crucial threshold is crossed, then just as suddenly cease when conditions shift back far enough.

The thing most people seem to have a hard time with is the knowledge that the perturbation once it sets of the track jump requires an opposite perturbation of at least the same order of magnitude to cause the climate or weather to jump back to the first track. If this were not so then the rain cloud would suddenly downpour for a few seconds or minutes and then relieved of a few percent of its stored moisture it would stop raining. This however is not what happens, once the rain starts falling the cloud doesn't just give up 1% or 5% of its moisture, it loses more like 40% and sometimes as much as 60% before the perturbation in the other direction is strong enough to halt the precipitation. In the same vein if you look at the climate record during the major glaciation of the most recent cycle you can see period on a 21,000 and 44,000 cycle and 100,000 year cycle plus others that all interacted in such ways that global temperatures actually fluctuated significantly, without ever quite breaking through into a minor glaciation cycle. Then enough of the cycles lined up close enough together after about 105,000 years of major glaciation to break through the perturbation threshold and dump us into the current minor glaciation track.

Point being, if humans manage to perturb the climate enough to hop us over to the next parallel track, the one where the northern hemisphere is nearly ice free while the Antarctic glaciation is reduced about 30% from where it stands today, the counter perturbation to put us back into the current minor glaciation is not an easy fix. think of it like this, if we hop tracks at 450 ppmv CO2 simply returning to 425 ppmv will not drop us back into minor glaciation climate track. The fact of the matter is the northern hemisphere stayed almost ice free all the way down to around 315 ppmv when the Miocene transitioned into the Pliocene and suddenly ice started appearing in the Northern Hemisphere on the 100,000 year cycle. Even then the ice was mostly seasonal for another few million years until CO2 fell low enough to cause the transition into the Pleistocene at which point ice became permanent glacial formations in northern Greenland that would from time to time spread out in a major glaciation to cover most land north of 41 degrees latitude where moisture was adequate.

IOW if we manage to flip the climate to the next track warmer it will take an extremely large reduction in solar energy input or greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to perturb us back. Even worse, if you push that hard a simple miscalculation might cause us to skip the track we are on now and jump two tracks to the major glaciation status.

Can technology reverse climate change? With enough energy, time and effort you can change the climate. However if we have already survived the climate jumping from the minor glaciation track to the minor southern hemisphere semi tropical northern hemisphere track would any of the surviving people actually have the energy, time and extra effort to risk perturbing the earth back to say 1980 conditions? If you are a survivor after the transition you are going to be very busy the first few years/decades just surviving and figuring out how to sustain that survival strategy. Does anyone realistically expect people who are struggling to keep their version of civilization viable to be willing to expend the time/money/effort to transition back? Even if that is the case, do you honestly think a large majority of the survivors would be in favor of such a plan?
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Re: Global Warming / Climate Changes Pt. 20

Unread postby Plantagenet » Tue 11 Sep 2018, 20:07:23

Sys1 wrote:What will be quite funny is when big coal or Donald Trump will say we must throw fossil fuels dust in the atmosphere faster "to save the planet" (tm) from GW.


Putting dust or microspheres or sulphuric aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet is already being tested by scientists who claim they can "geoengineer" the planet to counteract global warming.

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