Despite all of the warnings from the world’s best climate scientists, most of us continue living our lives without a clue as to the violent severity of the unfolding tragedy that is climate change. It is hard to imagine saving ourselves when at best, we tackle the problem with only small incremental steps. We ignore scientific evidence of a rapidly changing climate at our peril, and yet, that is what humanity chooses to do.
Scott K. Johnson, of ars Technica reports on a new European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) report which looks at the outlook for CO2 removal. It is not remotely optimistic.
Instead, the authors state that negative emission technologies (NETs) offer only “limited realistic potential” to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and not at the gigaton scale envisioned in climate scenarios.
The analysis is well known to everyone who has paid even a little attention: the world hasn’t yet done enough to lessen the impacts of climate change. The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report included greenhouse gas emissions scenarios that could limit global warming to two degrees Celsius or less, but we’re not even close to a trajectory that would achieve any of them.
But there’s something about those two-degrees scenarios you may not know, which climate scientists have been talking a lot about recently. Those scenarios involved a substantial deployment of technologies to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Without those technologies, we’re even further from sufficient emissions cuts.
The question is, can we ramp up research and development of technology to remove CO2 in time? The report looked at “reforestation, soil management, plankton fertilization, industrial CO2 capture plants, biofuels with emissions injected underground for storage, and even the boosting of bedrock weathering reactions”.
In the two-degrees emissions scenarios, these techniques have to start soaking up at least 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year around 2050 in order to offset our continued emissions. If we bank on that future offset, but it fails to materialize, we will find that it’s too late to cut our emissions and limit global warming to two degrees Celsius.
At least theoretically, these techniques could be combined to remove 11 billion tons or more each year, but the practical limits could well be lower than that. Biofuel crops, for example, probably can’t reach their full potential because of competition for land with food crops.
We should be throwing everything we have to radically reduce CO2 levels from the atmosphere. Tick-Tock.
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