[Graeme]

Space based lasers proposed to combat climate change

According to a Friday piece on Motherboard, a group of scientists gathered at a geoengineering conference. Two rather radical ideas were proposed to deal with global warming, a theory advanced that human caused CO2 emissions are causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise. The ideas are based on the use of space based lasers, similar to those that were once proposed by President Ronald Reagan as part of his SDI program to provide a shield against Soviet nuclear missile attack.

One idea is to use a space based laser to create clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere. The notion that lasers can create water droplets that in turn can form clouds has been tested in the laboratory. The formation of more clouds would help to reflex sunlight away from the Earth’s surface and thus cool the planet.

The other idea is to use lasers directly to blast greenhouse gases floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus eliminating them directly. This would constitute a brute force method of eliminating greenhouse gasses once they are emitted. One problem is that they might not be in sufficient concentrations to be dealt with effectively in this fashion.One idea is to use a space based laser to create clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere. The notion that lasers can create water droplets that in turn can form clouds has been tested in the laboratory. The formation of more clouds would help to reflex sunlight away from the Earth’s surface and thus cool the planet.

The other idea is to use lasers directly to blast greenhouse gases floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus eliminating them directly. This would constitute a brute force method of eliminating greenhouse gasses once they are emitted. One problem is that they might not be in sufficient concentrations to be dealt with effectively in this fashion.

examiner

[Graeme]

Direct Air Capture Makes Pollution a Cash Cow

Direct air capture (DAC) is the scooping of carbon from the sky. Unlike traditional carbon capture and storage, DAC doesn't try to simply capture carbon from chimneys and factory flues; instead it scoops carbon directly from the atmosphere, no intermediate steps necessary. Better yet, the most sophisticated DAC plants don't even need much electricity to function—they run on excess heat produced by other industrial processes. The temperatures needed to capture a ton of atmospheric carbon dioxide are "less than what is needed to boil your cup of tea," says Graciela Chichilnisky, founder of direct air capture company Global Thermostat.

The CO2 removed from the air by plants like Chichilnisky's has a variety of applications: It can be frozen into dry ice, introduced to greenhouses as plant food, used to carbonate beverages and even injected into oil wells in a process known as "enhanced oil recovery."

"A lot of demand for CO2 is unmet," says Chichilnisky. "In fact there's a market for it that exceeds one trillion dollars per year."

Companies like Chichilnisky's want to profit from this unmet demand, an aggressive example of doing well while doing good. Global Thermostat's pilot plant at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, has been profitable since construction finished, says Chichilnisky: The cost of producing compressed carbon dioxide via direct air capture is "minuscule" compared to compressed CO2's sale price. Now she wants to build plants elsewhere, using the excess heat from power plants and foundries. "If the technology shows the way to be profitable is by cleaning up the atmosphere then this will be the strongest motivation for the world to attack climate change."

So can DAC save the world? Not quite yet.

newsweek

[dohboi]

"Space based lasers proposed to combat climate change"

Not a chance of un-intended consequences coming into play here--nope, not a chance.

[Graeme]

Let's wait and see for the publications from the conference. I can see a scenario where they might be built by the US and/or China as a "defensive" strategy.

[Graeme]

Here is the first news article about the recent geoengineering conference. No details but interesting nevertheless.

Geoengineering - the 'declaration' that never was may cause real harm

It was a great story, writes Andrew Lockley - scientists signing up to a 'Berlin Declaration' imposing an effective 'test ban' on outdoor geoengineering experiments. Except there was no declaration, and scientists never agreed to it. The world's media got it completely wrong, yet the mud will stick - and may cause severe harm in the fight against climate change.

The Climate Engineering Conference 2014 (CEC-14) was recently held to discuss technologies for deliberately counteracting climate change.

These include Solar Radiation Management (SRM), for example, adding sulphates to the stratosphere like a volcano, to reflect sunlight; and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) techniques - such as planting new forests to draw down CO2 from the atmosphere.

These technologies would allow us to exercise a degree of direct control over the climate. Unsurprisingly, the potential exercise of this God-like power is highly controversial.

theecologist

Global warming pioneer calls for carbon dioxide to be taken from atmosphere and stored underground

Wally Broeker, the first person to alert the world to global warming, has called for atmospheric CO2 to be captured and stored underground. He says that carbon capture, combined with limits on fossil fuel emissions, is the best way to avoid global warming getting out of control over the next fifty years. Professor Broeker (Columbia University, New York) made the call during his presentation to the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where 150 scientists are meeting to discuss carbon capture and storage.

He was presenting an analysis which showed that the world has been cooling very slowly, over the last 51 million years, but that human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.

"We have painted ourselves into a tight corner. We can't reduce our reliance of fossil fuels quickly enough, so we need to look at alternatives.

"One of the best ways to deal with this is likely to be carbon capture -- in other words, putting the carbon back where it came from, underground. There has been great progress in capturing carbon from industrial processes, but to really make a difference we need to begin to capture atmospheric CO2. Ideally, we could reach a stage where we could control the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, like you control your central heating. Continually increasing CO2 levels means that we will need to actively manage CO2 levels in the environment, not just stop more being produced. The technology is proven, it just needs to be brought to a stage where it can be implemented."

sciencedaily

[Graeme]

The tech breakthrough that will fight climate change

I am writing this from inside a factory, and what I am looking at will change the world.

I am looking out onto a large factory floor; the drone of machines is relatively loud, but soothing, and each person here is wearing a hard hat and safety glasses.

About 15 ft from where I am writing is Isaac, our operations manager. Isaac is standing next to our plastic pellet production line, which he has been overseeing for the past seven hours. What does this line do? On a relatively automated basis, it produces a continuous stream of plastic pellets, and feeds those pellets into large storage boxes. Boxes and boxes of pellets. Isaac is looking down into a box of newly made pellets for inspection. They are still warm from processing, and nearly all identical in size and shape. He has done a terrific job today: hundreds of pounds of plastic made in one shift, almost no losses.

To the untrained eye, this is a plastic production factory. If you look inside any one of the many bags, barrels or sacks in the factory, you will see what look and feel like plastic pellets. If you mould parts from those pellets, as we have many times today, you can create a shape or part that is as strong as any plastic part you have touched before.

But if you take a closer look, what you will see is something different. Inside these boxes are plastic pellets, meaning they can be heated and formed into shapes. But there is something very different about them. While most plastic is made from oil or other fossil fuels, for the first time, this plastic is made by pulling carbon out of air. This is not just plastic: this is carbon-negative plastic ‒ plastic that actually reduces the concentration of carbon in the air ‒ and this is the beginning of something important.

forumblog

[Graeme]

A multi-model geoengineering assessment looks at potential climate effects

Climate geoengineering uses technology to temporarily reduce the effects of climate change by reflecting a small portion of sunlight back to space. As recently reported in Environmental Research Letters, an international team of scientists led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers used the output from climate models to evaluate which regions of the globe might be made "better" or "worse" by such geoengineering.


Researchers from across the United States as well as Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Japan, and Norway used the output from 12 climate models that form part of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, which seeks to understand the climate effects of geoengineering. These models represent different aspects of climate physics in slightly different ways. In the current study, scientists analyzed the simulated amount of geoengineering that would restore temperature and precipitation in 22 populated world regions to preindustrial values without making the climate of any region much worse off.

Climate researchers around the world will continue studying both climate change and the potential impacts of intervening through geoengineering so that governments can make informed decisions about the different options that can be used to address climate change.

phys.org

[Graeme]

Catching greenhouse gases with advanced membranes

Researchers in Japan have engineered a membrane with advanced features capable of removing harmful greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Their findings, published in the British journal Nature Communications, may one day contribute to lower greenhouse gas emissions and cleaner skies.

Greenhouse gases, originating from industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels, blanket the earth and are the culprits behind current global warming woes. The most abundant among them is carbon dioxide, which made up 84% of the United State's greenhouse gases in 2012, and can linger in Earth's atmosphere for up to thousands of years.

Countries all over the world are looking to reduce their carbon dioxide footprint. However, carbon dioxide is essentially a waste product with little immediate commercial value and large treatment costs. Therefore, new low-cost technologies are sorely needed to incentivize greenhouse gas capture by industry.

Easan Sivaniah—an associate professor at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS)—led an international team of researchers from iCeMS and the University of Cambridge to create an advanced membrane capable of rapidly separating gases.

The membrane they worked on, referred to as PIM-1, is "typically embedded with a network of channels and cavities less than 2 nm in diameter that can trap gases of interest once they enter," said Qilei Song, who was involved in the study. "The only problem is that their intrinsic properties make them rather flimsy and their starting selectivity is weak."

To overcome PIM-1's weaknesses, Sivaniah's team heated PIM-1 at temperatures ranging from 120 to 450 °C in the presence of oxygen, a process referred to as thermal oxidation. "Oxygen, under high temperatures, chemically reacts with PIM-1 to reinforce the strength of channels while controlling the size of so-called gate openings leading into the cavities, which allows for higher selectivity," said Song.

phys.org

[Graeme]

As humans become more and more desperate, this crazy idea seems almost an inevitable eventually.

The Unbelievably Cheap $10 Billion Plan to Stop Climate Change With Airplanes

The global aviation industry accounted for 12% of all transportation-related emissions in 2013. That statistic has pushed The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA ) to rally the industry around new efficiency and sustainability efforts. But what if airplanes carrying payloads inspired by volcanoes held the key to stopping global climate change in its tracks? One pioneering scientist not only thinks it's possible, but given the plan's relatively low annual price tag of just $10 billion, thinks there's a chance that a country -- or perhaps an industry or individual company -- will attempt the geoengineering project in our lifetime.

How would it work?
Atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira took an interest to geoengineering, or planet hacking, well before any other climate scientist would dare associate themselves with such crazy ideas. Caldeira began much the same way, actually, only taking the field on to disprove its feasibility. However, no matter how many variables he included in his models, they were all proven to be quite realistic. Fourteen years later those crazy ideas have formed into a buzzing field littered with well-respected climate scientists.


Humans cannot control volcanos (yet), but we can produce massive quantities of pure sulfate aerosols and deposit them into the stratosphere with high-altitude airplanes or balloons. The idea sounds a bit wild, but it's quite plausible. Several studies have estimated that the costs to deploy 1-5 million MT of aerosols 18-30 kilometers above the surface would range from $5 billion to $10 billion annually. That's much cheaper than the $2 trillion estimated annual price tag for efforts aimed at halving carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

New high-altitude airplanes would have to be created, but companies dedicated to the Industrial Internet of Things (powered by drones and automation) could design systems capable of taking off, depositing material, landing, refueling, and monitoring progress without much human interaction. General Electric Company (NYSE: GE ) believes that the Industrial Internet could add $10 trillion to $15 trillion to the global economy by 2035 and is putting its money where its mouth is right now. Perhaps solar geoengineering will make its way into the innovative company's portfolio sooner rather than later.

fool

[dohboi]

Ummm, airplanes are one of the causes of climate change.

Yes, they could spray all sorts of nasty shit, but...oh, never mind.

This is a hammer we have, so we will treat the problem as a nail.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Graeme]

Hope nobody is "fool"ish enough to do this. There must be a better way. DAC?

[Graeme]

What the McKinsey GHG Abatement Curve Tells us About CDR

The CDR field has begun to emerge out of relative obscurity recently as scientists have grown more confident that we will need to remove carbon from the atmosphere to prevent climate change. But CDR is not a new concept. In fact, there are a handful of CDR approaches that have been hiding in plain sight.

Take the following supply curve of GHG abatement options that the consultancy McKinsey has prepared.

The approaches highlighted in orange are all CDR techniques. So what does this chart tell us?

CDR isn’t new. McKinsey first produced this widely distributed chart in 2007. While CDR might not have been a concept that was widely known at the time, this chart shows that many CDR techniques were clearly on the radar of climate change analysts.

CDR is relatively inexpensive. The handful of CDR abatement options considered here all are expected to cost less than 20 Euros / tCO2 by 2030 (note: this chart shows estimates for McKinsey’s expected cost/potential of different GHG abatement options in 2030 — not actual costs/potential as they stand today).

The supply of CDR techniques is potentially quite large. The techniques considered by McKinsey are able to provide around 5 tCO2 per year, which could provide a significant fraction of the likely demand for CDR, as shown in the chart below:

theenergycollective

[dohboi]

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/cana ... lant-18136

World’s First Carbon Capture Power Plant Switches On

Sooooo, this is the technology that is now an abso-f'n-lute necessity for a survivable world and so far the whole entire global industrial system has been able to cough up exactly...

...

...(crickets...)

ONE of them.

Well, then. All is well. We can all sleep secure that the great overlord has put all aright and eternal happiness will soon follow...

[Graeme]

New ‘Slurry’ Could Make Carbon Capture More Efficient

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is costly and complex, but technology is being developed that could make it happen on a broad scale, scientists say.

A team of scientists from California, Switzerland and China think they have developed a technology using a special “slurry” that will make CCS more efficient and cost-effective, they wrote in a study published Thursday in Nature Communications and led by Berend Smit, director of the Energy Center at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Capturing carbon usually happens in one of two ways. Most often, liquids are used to absorb the carbon dioxide, but the process is expensive and extremely energy intensive because the liquid has to be boiled as part of the process.

A less expensive process uses a solid powder that will bond to carbon dioxide at a power plant. That powder has to be transported to a site to be stored, which can be an engineering challenge, the study says.

A more effective solution is a mixture of a solid and a liquid using chemicals that could more easily absorb the CO2 than the solid powder and liquids used most commonly today, the study says.

A slurry couples the low-cost and efficiency of the powder with the benefits of the liquid method of capturing carbon without requiring large amounts of energy, the study says.


“It remains the case that a carbon tax of some kind would be necessary to stimulate large-scale implementation of CCS technology, at least until production of oil and gas naturally becomes much more expensive due to increasingly challenging and expensive extraction technology,” Kelemen, who wasn’t involved in the new study, said. “Most climate scientists would agree that ‘natural’ increases in fossil fuel cost will come too late to avoid very damaging climate change.”

climatecentral

[Graeme]

Storing greenhouse gas underground—for a million years

When Canada switched on its Boundary Dam power plant earlier this month, it signaled a new front in the war against climate change. The commercial turbine burns coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, but it traps nearly all the resulting carbon dioxide underground before it reaches the atmosphere. Part of this greenhouse gas is pumped into porous, water-bearing underground rock layers. Now, a new study provides the first field evidence that CO2 can be stored safely for a million years in these saline aquifers, assuaging worries that the gas might escape back into the atmosphere.

“It's a very comprehensive piece of work,” says geochemist Stuart Gilfillan of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. “The approach is very novel.”

There have been several attempts to capture the carbon dioxide released by the world’s 7000-plus coal-fired plants. Pilot projects in Algeria, Japan, and Norway indicate that CO2 can be stored in underground geologic formations such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep coal seams, and saline aquifers. In the United States, saline aquifers are believed to have the largest capacity for CO2 storage, with potential sites spread out across the country, and several in western states such as Colorado also host large coal power plants. CO2 pumped into these formations are sealed under impermeable cap rocks, where it gradually dissolves into the salty water and mineralizes. Some researchers suggest the aquifers have enough capacity to store a century’s worth of emissions from America’s coal-fired plants, but others worry the gas can leak back into the air through fractures too small to detect.

To resolve the dilemma, geoscientists need to know how long it takes for the trapped CO2 to dissolve. The faster the CO2 dissolves and mineralizes, the less risk that it would leak back into the atmosphere. But determining the rate of dissolution is no easy feat. Lab simulations suggest that the sealed gas could completely dissolve over 10,000 years, a process too slow to be tested empirically.

So computational geoscientist Marc Hesse of the University of Texas, Austin, and colleagues turned to a natural lab: the Bravo Dome gas field in New Mexico, one of the world's largest natural CO2 reservoirs. Ancient volcanic activities there have pumped the gas into a saline aquifer 700 meters underground. Since the 1980s, oil companies have drilled hundreds of wells there to extract the gas for enhanced oil recovery, leaving a wealth of data on the site’s geology and CO2 storage.


Even so, the fact that CO2 stayed locked up underground for so long at Bravo Dome despite ongoing industrial drilling should allay concerns about potential leakage, Hesse says. Carbon capture and storage “can work, if you do it in the right place,” he says. “[This is] an enormous amount of CO2 that has sat there, for all we can tell, very peacefully for more than a million years.”

sciencemag

[Graeme]

Soft geoengineering could mitigate change

The American soil scientist Rattan Lal and others argue that restoring vegetation on degraded lands and increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) on existing farmland has the potential to sequester sufficient CO2 to substantially mitigate climate change if done on a large scale. This form of "soft geoengineering" is a safe, win-win solution, since land restoration and soil improvement also restore watersheds, foster biodiversity, improve productivity and assist with rural poverty reduction.

The potential to reduce climate change by sequestering atmospheric C02 in soil and vegetation is huge.

Photosynthesis converts 112 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 into biomass annually. (By comparison, only nine billion tons of carbon emissions are produced from fossil fuel combustion.) However, almost all of the CO2 synthesized by plants is returned back to the atmosphere through plant and soil respiration.

According to Lal, if 10 per cent of what plants photosynthesize annually - about 11 billion tons - could be retained in the biosphere, it would be possible to balance the global carbon budget, halting climate change.

Lal explains that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from fossil-fuel combustion and land-use changes has increased by 30 per cent since 1750, resulting in gradual global warming. Since the Industrial Revolution, global emissions of carbon are estimated at around 270 billion tons due to fossil-fuel combustion and about 136 billion tons due to land-use change and soil cultivation.

Emissions due to land-use change include those from deforestation, biomass burning, conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture, drainage of wetlands and soil cultivation. Depletion of the SOC pool has contributed around 78 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Some cultivated soils have lost one-half to two-thirds of the original SOC.

The depletion of SOC is accentuated by soil degradation and exacerbated by land misuse and soil mismanagement.

Soil is the third-largest carbon sink after oceans and fossil fuels. Soil contains 4.5 times the sequestration capacity of all vegetation (including trees) and 3.3 times that of the atmosphere.

While Rattan Lal estimates that 10 to 20 per cent of annual greenhouse gas emissions could be removed each year by sequestering carbon in cultivated land, a study by the Rodale Institute was more optimistic. It states, "multiple research efforts verify that practical organic agriculture if practised on the planet's 3.5 billion tillable acres, could sequester nearly 40 per cent of our current CO2 emissions."

thestarphoenix

[Graeme]

Does CDR Provide 'Moral Hazard' for Avoiding Deep Decarbonization of our Economy?

No. But the fact that some environmentalists question the value of developing Carbon Dioxide Removal (“CDR”) approaches for this very reason merits greater analysis. The “moral hazard” argument against CDR goes something like this: CDR could be a “Trojan horse” that fossil fuel interests will use to delay rapid decarbonization of the economy, as these fossil interests could use the prospect of cost-effective, proven, scaleable CDR technologies as an excuse for continuing to burn fossil fuels today (on the grounds that at some point in the future we’ll have the CDR techniques to remove these present-day emissions).

The key problem with this “moral hazard” argument is the hypothesis that “cost-effective, proven, scaleable CDR solutions” are poised to proliferate at greater rates than GHG emission mitigation technologies (such as renewable energy and energy efficiency) that are required to decarbonize our economy. Today, CDR solutions remain largely in their infancy. Installed bio-CCS plants can be counted on one hand, for example, and not a single commercial-scale Direct Air Capture project has been built to date. Renewable energy, however, has had a considerable head start on CDR technologies on reducing costs. Take solar PV systems as an example. As the chart below shows, solar PV panels have dropped in cost from over $75/W to under $0.75/W over the past four decades.


This cost reduction in the price of solar PV panels happens to be exactly what economic theory would predict. Learning curve models show that that costs of energy technologies come down in a predictable fashion as cumulative installed capacity increases. The graph below shows learning curve estimates for a range of energy technologies.

So what does this mean for the “moral hazard” argument against developing CDR solutions?

For this “moral hazard” argument to be valid, we would have to believe that CDR approaches will be able to not only catch up to other renewable technologies in cost within a short-time frame, but then continue to reduce costs more quickly. Otherwise, renewable technologies will continue their inevitable march down their cost curve, and will continue displacing fossil sources in our energy mix.

theenergycollective

[Graeme]

Is Climate Change Reversible? Can Regenerative Agriculture Farming Solve the Climate Crisis?

The Role of Sequestering CO2 in Agriculture

So the BIG QUESTION: How does the CO2 from the air get sequestered? Dr. Christine Jones, one of the world's leading carbon-cycle scientists, describes the "liquid carbon pathway" -- a process whereby plants absorb the CO2 from the air, break it down via photosynthesis into carbon and oxygen, and then combine the carbon with hydrogen from water to create sugars, hence "liquid carbon." This liquid carbon flows out through the roots into the soil where it is stored and able to be reused by nature. The oxygen, as we know, is released for us to breathe, yet another example of nature in its balanced state.

So what is it about regenerative agriculture farming? It's all about our soil. A healthy soil will comprise high levels or carbon rich organic matter. Healthy soil, in fact, relies on carbon to promote healthy plant growth. During photosynthesis, plants draw carbon down from the atmosphere -- in the form of CO2 -- to use in the creation of sugars and starches, for bartering with microorganisms in the soil, for nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. This is part of nature natural living system, where nothing is wasted; everything is re-used in the cycle of life.

Andre Leu, President of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, states:
We are not talking about inventing some new untested technology like 'carbon capture' that requires billions of dollars of investment and years of testing. We are talking about upscaling current existing good practices used by organic farmers. This is the cheapest solution. All that is needed, is training and good technical assistance to farmers. With a fraction of the billions of dollars earmarked for the current suite of untested technologies, we could easily help all farmers transition to organic methods in a few short years and reverse climate change.

huffingtonpost

[dohboi]

Sorry, G, but a number of recent articles aren't very kind to some major geo-engineering schemes (I did find it interesting that your article above argued for CO2 removal technologies not being a moral hazard because they are essentially non-existent and are therefore totally useless!!)

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-1 ... al-warming

Geoengineering Doesn’t Provide ‘Magic Bullet’ for Global Warming

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ate-change

Reflecting sunlight into space has terrifying consequences, say scientists

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30197085

Geo-engineering: Climate fixes 'could harm billions'

[Graeme]

Yes, I agree. This issue has been thoroughly examined recently, and although it will be a disaster to implement, it still is being keep in the background as a last resort in case we still pursue BAU.

Could geoengineering make climate change worse?

Geoengineering – which sometimes seems to be the despairing climate scientist’s Plan B – simply won’t work.

It won’t offer a quick fix to the planet’s burden of global warming, and it will be difficult to convince anybody that it could work at all.

Geoengineering is any deliberate, large-scale intervention in the workings of the climate machine that might offer a way of containing global warming. The accent is on the word deliberate.

Humans are already “engineering” the climate just by continuously adding carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels, but the climate change that will follow is an unhappy consequence, not a deliberate plan.

Since governments have been either slow, or very slow, to agree on systematic plans to drastically reduce dependence on fossil fuels, researchers have in the last decade or so begun to propose ways in which deliberate steps might counter global warming.

Problems

They have suggested darkening the skies with deliberate discharges of sulphate aerosols to block incoming radiation.

They have proposed “seeding” the ocean with iron to encourage photosynthesis and increase carbon uptake by phytoplankton, they have suggested brightening the clouds by spraying salt particles into them to make them more reflective.

Now British researchers have taken a long hard look at three aspects of geoengineering research and arrived at a bleak conclusion: it would just be better not to emit greenhouse gases on a prodigal scale.



The British scientists don’t dismiss geoengineering outright. That is because if, under the notorious “business-as-usual” scenario, nations go on burning fossil fuels, then by 2100 the consequences could be catastrophic.

rtcc