Climate Remediation General

CALLING ALL ENGINEERS, CHEMISTS, STATISTICIANS, EARTH SCIENTISTS

ITT: We discuss plausible, economically viable solutions to tropospheric warming and ocean acidification.

The two most popular flavors are solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

CDR my be required for curbing ocean pH and the jury is out on iron fertilization. The impact on marine fauna has already been substantial.

Other urls found in this thread:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000446/epdf
technologyreview.com/s/407306/cooling-the-planet/
nature.com/nchem/journal/v1/n1/full/nchem.141.html
forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#5066905d46e2
pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4271
rug.nl/research/ocean-ecosystems/research/publications/artikelen/busscience3192008.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=KqMj3E94BK0
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

-the impact of acidification, that is, not Fe fert.

Either way we need to save the pteropods.

background info

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000446/epdf

last self bump

not brainstorming means letting these QTs down

Robotics engineer reporting in, what do you need?

Nuclear -> heat
Carbonate + heat -> concentrated co2 and base
Water and heat -> hydrogen and oxygen
Hydrogen and co2 -> hydrocarbons
Hydrocarbons -> plastic and fuel
Base -> deacidify oceans
GG

CO2 air capture it is.

How long, do you think, until solar drones capable of continuous flight?

Optimal carbon tax now!

Ok, so all we need to do is reverse entropy then. Gotcha.

easiest method is to plant some trees.

second easiest method is to filter the air somehow with some solar powered method.

technologyreview.com/s/407306/cooling-the-planet/
In light of recent advances in rocketry and propulsion (?) are orbiting mirrors worth revisiting?

The second goal was intended with plankton fertilization but most of the CO2 is re-emitted.

Stop using Fossil Fuels. That'a about the only realistic thing we can do that doesn't involve terraforming / geoengineering on a massive scale with side effects we don't understand. Reduce consumption, reduce human population worldwide. Honestly, we just need another global pandemic, or a massive worldwide war or something to bring balance back, sad as it sounds. There's just too damn many humans, and everyone wants the same standard of living we have in the West, and people aren't just going to stop striving towards that.

That's a horrible idea. Just let them naturally deplete as they will this century with business as usual and you solve the problem permanently. The powers that be love people like you, steaks on the table by choice and consent.

I say we should focus our efforts on making marine environments arable. We can start building algae farms, with genetically engineered algae, for uses as food sources, medical production, and biofuel. These will also act as carbon sinks and potentially help in the buffering effect of the oceans, and potentially soak up some of the carbonic acid in the oceans.

We also need to revamp our energy infrastructure to lower dependence on fossil fuels, focusing mainly on nuclear fission and fusion means to power homes/vehicles. Mass transit is also much easier to work with on electrical systems so we can potentially build our transportation system on electrical means.

I don't think that we'll ever completely remove ourselves from combustion, but there's definitely the potential to focus our hydrocarbon infrastructure on biofuels or even hydrogen.

Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's a sink to produce it and difficult to work with. I would suspect with the number of nuke plants already online and scheduled for construction there is probably 50 years of worthwhile ore to process which is an oil intensive operation in itself. Also the waste is piling up. Fusion? Really? It's always 10 years away.

Solar and wind are a joke, tiny supplements despite the ridiculous media spin around them. Hydro dams are good but then spawning fisheries die. Back to coal is actually the only answer so far to forestall the complete unwinding of modern life as we know it by 2050 or so. Even then much would need to change for the worse starting with a very large natural depopulation, mostly by starvation but better than a botched manual operation by new age self serving and greedy energy dictators.

Wait, plants eat CO2, why is it so bad again?
Won't plants just get bigger?

Create a disease that decimates the human population. Problem solved.

Wow sooooooo hard to do.

LIMITING
FACTORS
GOD
DAMN

nature.com/nchem/journal/v1/n1/full/nchem.141.html

"One of the grand challenges of twenty-first century chemistry is to convert abundant energy-poor molecules to energy-rich molecules using sunlight as the energy source. We need to replace fossil fuels with solar fuels such as hydrogen from water, or methanol from water and carbon dioxide. Solar fuels could be used round the clock, as the chemical energy stored during the day can be converted to mechanical or electrical power both day and night."

partial to the solar fuels route due to having worked on it for several years now. Coupled with carbon sequestration and CO2 reduction, this approach seems the most viable to me at the moment, not to say that wind/hydro/nuclear aren't useful as well

Saved.
Which solar fuels have you worked on?

I've worked for Harry Gray on some as-of-yet unpublished water oxidation stuff and I've worked elsewhere on homogeneous H2 catalysts

To be honest, I don't think there's any economically feasible way to straight up reverse global warming. Besides strategies for reducing carbon output, one of the important things that needs to be worked on is dealing with the damage it'll cause to the food chain. There's already overfishing in many parts of the world, and the food source for those fish is going to start disappearing (if it hasn't already) with the warming of the earth. Considering the length of time it would take for that ecosystem to recover, I think work needs to be put into somehow satisfying that niche.

The only problem is, whatever you do can still potentially have negative effects. If you could create an invasive sort of species with a temperature tolerance that would keep it stuck in equatorial regions where other species would be dying off anyways due to heat, maybe you could fill it, but I doubt we have the technology to finely tune temperature requirements for a species like that, as good as our genetic engineering may be. And even if we were able to, there wouldn't be the biodiversity that existed before and that entire ecosystem would be under constant threat.

The real solution will probably be to somehow convert a lot of the populations reliant on seafood to agricultural products, and ones they can actually grow near them. That involves convincing some of the most populated parts of the world to completely change their habits, and also reform their economies and production.

>Hydro dams are good but then spawning fisheries die.

At the very least, we can convert a lot of already constructed dams into hydroelectric ones. Any additional damage to the environment is negligible at that point and there's tons (though not sufficient) of untapped energy.

>Hydro dams are good but then spawning fisheries die.
fish ladders etc can mitigate this. it's just a matter of retrofitting or rebuilding old dams and demolishing the ones that aren't doing any good.

Oh you silly fool, we have access to 150 trillion tons of uranium now from the ocean, you need to get this LOL WE ONLY HABE 50 YEARS WORTH OF URANIUM LEFT GUISE bullshit out of your brain

forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#5066905d46e2

pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4271

Shit is fucking cash.

Further, we can burn existing nuclear waste in newer reactors to get power out of it and reduce its volume, or do that cool shit where we put it in diamond and it generates a little bit of power (although I haven't looked into that too much and have heard some skepticism about it)

Nuclear power is awesome and it's a tragic illustration of human irrationality that coal, which kills more people every year than all nuclear disasters and explosions combined,is perfectly fine with most people.

You still have the issue of the large initial energy expenditure to harvest a lot of that uranium. It'll almost certainly involve expending fossil fuels.

I'm a chemical engineering student going into physics for grad and I've met up with a few of my other friends who are also doing chemical engineer, a few whose family members are already in the industry.

We've patented a few ideas that we're going to work on for the next few years but if it works we're probably going to be able to remove a good amount of carbon from the air in a massive and effienct way. It provides a way of climate control and a few more other things, we shall see what happens soon. If the project works, we should be safe to employ this across the country (U.S.) and make a fuckton of money but if not, it's still pretty rad.

We can make up for it by ripping CO2 out of the atmosphere with the excess power of the reactors we build. With the right dedication and a policy rooted in pragmatism, we could get cracking on this and have everything nicely sorted out within less than a century, especially if we start working at fixing the ocean within a decade or two.

We could get our climate back into its nice 2000 year stability within a few generations if we stop being fucking pansies about it and grab this issue by the balls. I hope some smart scientist manages to wake Trump up on this issue and he throws his weight into solving this shit in the american fashion, with sheer overwhelming force. How rad would it be to see 2000 state of the art nuclear plants being built across America? It would be the biggest construction boom in our history, Unemployment would probably go down to like .5 percent.

And we'd get to see those saudi fucks get eaten alive by their people when the world finally gave them the finger and threw this miserable petrodollar bullshit out the window.

God damn it Trump, you could TRULY make America great again with this, full energy independence and the dramatic direct tackling of atmospheric CO2 from 2 directions, sequestration and the abandonment of coal, history would remember him as an eccentric genius.

According to the President of the United States of America

Climate Change is a Chinese hoax

This thread belongs in /x/

>jury is out on iron fertilization

No it's not, it's already in and the idea's been long dead in science world. Iron fertilization doesn't work on a large scale and not sustainable. Here's a review article on it
rug.nl/research/ocean-ecosystems/research/publications/artikelen/busscience3192008.pdf

Practically it's too expensive, and you need to cover a lot of areas. See pic related, to induce a sea-atmosphere gas exchange you have to deplete the surface waters of DIC (dissolved inorganic carbon), but the DIC get constantly replenished by moving currents. For example in the Southern Ocean, the most ideal place to do iron fertilization the Antarctic Circumpolar Current are 150 Sverdrup (1Sv = 1 million cubic m/s), so you need to constantly be dumping iron to replenish the amount of iron that get washed away by the current.

I dare anyone to cite a peer review study or experiment that says iron fertilization is feasible

You cant remove carbon from the atmospher efficiently, its too diluted.
Not mentioning the huge volumes you need to process, the second Law of thermodynamics fucks you in the ass.
Unless your design uses waste energy its not going to work without a concentrated feed stream.

explain plants

Plants are not efficient. They literally have to expend energy & nutrients for photosynthesis. At some point you're gonna need to pump in fertilizer as the plants can't grow forever.

So what? You can pump energy into a CO2 reduction device and still scrub carbon from the atmosphere. It may not be the most efficient thing in the world but if it works it works

How do you generate the energy? It has to be almost all renewables to offset the carbon sequestration. Say it runs on electricity, and you live in West Virginia where all electricity comes from coal, then doesn't make sense if you burn more carbon than the amount of carbon you're trying to sequester.

This is exactly the problem with corn based biofuel in the US, that it takes more fuel to plow the fields, make the fertilizer than the offset

>Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's a sink to produce it and difficult to work with.
It's difficult to work with, I'll give you that. But an energy sink to work on? Lolno. Have you ever heard of these things called "catalysts"? Well many electrolytic atoms, ions, and molecules can act as a "catalyst" which lowers the energy required for a reaction to occur, thus lowering the energy associated with the reaction itself. See, since the reaction of water into hydrogen and oxygen is typically energy intensive, if you can lower the activation energy, the energy that comes out of its reverse reaction actually can be higher than the catalyzed single reaction. The problem is typical catalysts that work well are expensive rare metals like platinum. I will agree that hydrogen is a bit of an engineering headache, though. Containing a flammable gas is always something to be done carefully if you don't want to be driving the Hindencar.

Renewables aren't a joke, they're actually cost competitive in certain places. I live near the Great Plains, and wind farming is actually done as a means to generate electricity here, due to the amount of wind generated. Before government subsidies it's only a few cents more per kilowatt hour than typical oil/coal power (again, passively utilizing natural resources) and thus it's most definitely not a joke.

Nuclear may be an oil intensive process right now, but much of the oil required in extraction of fissile fuel ores is only needed because of our current infrastructure. Again, biofuel is probably our best mid-term replacement as we work towards better energy infrastructure.

Willing to share how? I'm not looking to steal your research, so just the stuff you've already got a patent out sounds like it might be interesting. Or what's more likely is you're full of shit.

Carbon tax

Seriously, relying a new technology or whatever just moves the problem as has happens many times in history. The root of it is human excessiveness, so a tax and alternative norms will do far more to change things. After all there are many old technologies that address many of these matters far better then the new stuff we got now, and revisting them with our new understaning would be impressive indeed.

Imagine a world where owning a car is not seen as a ticket to freedom and independence but an expensive and dangerous liability. I think you get the idea.

>Imagine a world where owning a car is not seen as a ticket to freedom and independence but an expensive and dangerous liability. I think you get the idea.
Sounds like a shit world.

Why are greenfags always technologically regressive?

>flight
Haha no. It's much more viable to do ground-based and water-surface based, and even then, drones? If you're gonna work with intelligent robotics on the bare front, SIMPLE adaptive devices are the way to go. Solar panels that turn toward the sun, windmills that turn to maximize wind input, and so on. Even then, the investment won't be worth it in most cases.

Geologist here. Clearly you have no idea how much coal there is. We couldn't burn it all in 400 years.

That much would wreck us.

>Why are greenfags always technologically regressive?

Because you don't understand the point

what is your solution then?

youtube.com/watch?v=KqMj3E94BK0

That's exactly the point of most such faggots.
>stop breeding
>use less energy
>AC, cars, planes, anything energy intensive is the devil incarnate
It's a legacy from times when all energy was fossil fuel provided, "evil" one. It's a view that demonises energy use itself instead of the source.

We transit from less ecologically friendly devices to more friendly, more efficient ones. I really fail to see how a solar powered tesla is worse than making a car an unaffordable luxury. You are asking for an abolishment of useful tech, tech that built the world in which we can afford to care for environment in the first place, for a minor decrease in emissions.

...

>write a dumb post
>call myself a faggot
Who would do that anyways

Not that guy, but what about 10-20 years from now, assuming we have ultralight solar panels? If the transport method itself makes economic sense, what's wrong with having a couple square meters of foldable solar panels on a drone? Even being limited with daylight, they travel pretty much in straight lines, using no fuel. As long as it has enough battery life (I assume batteries will become lighter too by then) to land and take off with folded panels I really can't see the issue.

I think solar power is looking very promising. Despite the fact that it produces a very small percentage of electricity today, it's growth over the past couple of decades has fit an exponential curve, similar to other products that are dependent on technical advances (think cell phones,personal computers). Some people predict that it will take over within the next 12 years, but personally I think that is a little ambitious and it will take longer than that. However, it will only become cheaper and cheaper to produce.

Let's assume they are free. They still can't replace fossil fuels and nuclear without MASSIVE storage orders of magnitude larger than anything we can build today and afaik it isn't increasing anywhere near exponentially.

>come to a remediation technology thread
>one post says fuck "new technology or whatever"
>immediately after "Why are greenfags always technologically regressive?"
>mfw

Fair point, but let's face it, how many greenfags are optimistic about technology solving climate change? Completely anecdotal, but I very rarely see anyone except myself talking about remediation and putting more money into research into various promising methods. Vast majority is, for a lack of a better, less disgusting expression, anti-energy. "We can't fix anything while maintaining and increasing our life standard and only way to stop it is to make ourselves suffer without cars, heating, warm water and transportation" is the point I see much, much more often. It's almost masochistic and it doesn't sit with me well. I'm sure you understand, check out my points here

>Well many electrolytic atoms, ions, and molecules can act as a "catalyst" which lowers the energy required for a reaction to occur, thus lowering the energy associated with the reaction itself
are you mentally deficient? catalysts do NOT lower the energy (technically, change in Gibbs free energy, ΔG) of a reaction. that would violate so many principles of thermodynamics! no, catalysts just lower the ACTIVATION energy of a reaction, which is energy you put in and then get back. the total energy consumed or released by the reaction remains constant.
pic related, you walnut.

>if you can lower the activation energy, the energy that comes out of its reverse reaction actually can be higher than the catalyzed single reaction
FREE ENERGY LOL
this is what brainlets who took one year of chem in high school actually believe, I guess.

You just gave me an idea.
Plants consume CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. What if we genetically engineer a species that prioritizes carbon-fixation over other metabolic processes, so much so that it wouldn't survive in nature. Is such a thing even possible?

The funny thing about tech is it takes many forms.
Low tech can be far more advanced than you realize.

Yes, because we use way too much energy.

So far as I have seen only advanced nuclear could meet such insanely high demand, but that has other issues, ironically nuclear waste being a very small one relatively speaking.

Thus useing less to to get satifactory results makes the more sense.

Unless you got some better ideas on how to meet such high demends.

You can stop deforesting lands to create more carbon sinks, stop using so many cars and consuming so much beef to reduce the amount of waste and your carbon footprint.

Really the conversation is about mitigating damage rather than "reversing" a process that went beyond its tipping point years ago.

I'm optimistic about emergent tech. That said, the American standard of consumption is unsustainable and must change. We've set a bad example for developing economies.

The move toward austerity doesn't have to hurt, but painless economic restructuring isn't something humans are historically good at. I recommend watching pic. related in defense of minimalism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

The storage you ding dong

Can carbon-neutral solar fuels (eg hydrogen) replace fossil fuels? Nanomachines son.

I'm not sure about replacing but I think solar fuels will be augmented by wind, nuclear, hydroelectric, and other technologies to diminish fossil fuel use