Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration — will it kill us all?
Even among the experts, opinions differ. The climate models, which attempt to predict the evolution of a chaotic atmospheric system, will likely always be controversial, but they indicate possible outcomes such as rises in sea level that would inundate the world's most heavily populated regions, a prediction that should give one pause for thought.
Plus, there are two other important and certain outcomes.
One is that as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration rises it progressively impairs human mental function, as demonstrated by recent research by what one must assume are highly competent researchers at Harvard University and one of America's National Laboratories.
The other is that rising atmospheric concentration plays Hell with the biosphere, with effects that include mass species extinctions and, paradoxically, a huge increase in human population as carbon dioxide stimulates agricultural crop yields.
These facts seem now to have been generally accepted, even by major oil companies, with the result that the world is now headed for a broad-ranging set of government mandated actions to slow human-caused carbon dioxide emissions with the aim of achieving zero net emissions by 2050.
Problem is, we will still be left with a hugely elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which will still be working its effects on the world, speeding the melting of glaciers, ice sheets and frozen soils, disrupting ecosystems and still, therefore, causing havoc.
How to respond?
One might simply hope that, in the course time, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would gradually decline to where it was before the industrial revolution and the fossil fuel age. That, however, is a hope sadly to be disappointed. If there were any natural mechanism for lowering the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, the concentration prior to the industrial revolution would already have hit zero, all photosynthetic organisms would have died out, as would the entire animal world, dependent as it is, directly or indirectly, on photosynthetic organisms.
But, in fact, prior to the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were flat at around 270 part per million for hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, prior to the industrial revolution there would have been some sequestration of carbon dioxide, mainly by geological processes. But sequestration was evidently balanced by natural carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere resulting chiefly from volcanic eruptions. So if carbon dioxide concentrations are be reduced to something like the pre-industrial value it will be necessary for humanity to do something.
What to do?
The only answer, apparently, is CCS: carbon capture and storage.
How to capture and store carbon dioxide is a question subject to many lines of research and pilot-scale testing. Here I will consider only whether this approach to lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is economically viable:
First, how much carbon dioxide are we talking about?
Well here's the math:
The surface area of the world is ca 500 million square kilometers, or five trillion square meters.
The mass of the atmosphere is just over ten metric tons per square meter, or around 500 trillion metric tons in total. Of that, the amount of carbon dioxide that, since pre-industrial times, will have been added to the atmosphere by 2050 is:
500 trillion * (600 – 270)/1,000,000 * 1.84/1.24 = 2.45 trillion tons.
That's quite a lot, but there are methods known today for sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide that are estimated to cost less than $100 per ton. Assuming that further research and development reduces that cost by something like a factor of ten, the cost of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to the pre-industrial value will be around twenty-five trillion dollars, or about one quarter of the World's yearly GDP.
So, yes, adjusting the World's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration back to normal, though costly, will be feasible, though depending on technical developments, it may take a few years.
RELATED:
CanSpeccy:
Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Part I: Carbon Dioxide Is Not a Greenhouse Gas
"But, in fact, prior to the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were flat at around 270 part per million for hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, prior to the industrial revolution there would have been some sequestration of carbon dioxide, mainly by geological processes. But sequestration was evidently balanced by natural carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere resulting chiefly from volcanic eruptions. So if carbon dioxide concentrations are be reduced to something like the pre-industrial value it will be necessary for humanity to do something."
ReplyDeleteThis is the heart of your argument.
(1) "atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were flat at around 270 part per million for hundreds of thousands of years.
True, and true also hundreds of thousands of years is an unfathomable amount of time for either humans or the human (Homo sapiens) species itself. Yet in terms of planet earth, so-called geological time, it is not really that long. What was happening in this relatively short amount of time-- a flat CO2 concentration in the atmosphere-- really can't be considered to define the norm or the natural (natural is a very charged word in this context) for the planet, or to provide us a proper scientific context for predicting what will happen and why in the future. This is last is what really matters.
(2) "Yes, prior to the industrial revolution there would have been some sequestration of carbon dioxide, mainly by geological processes."
Yes, but it can't be forgotten how highly complex and variable these geological processes actually are. Some of the most important, for example the deposition of CO2 into calcium carbonate in the oceans, are governed in part by chemical equilibria which also vary according to a variety of conditions, temperature an important one, but only one such.
"What was happening in this relatively short amount of time-- a flat CO2 concentration in the atmosphere-- really can't be considered to define the norm or the natural (natural is a very charged word in this context) for the planet..."
DeleteAbsolutely not, but it is the norm for humanity, the only condition we've known until now. Will we survive a change? Probably, but perhaps not without unpleasant surprises as to the consequences of changing the chemical composition of the air we breath.
"But sequestration was evidently balanced by natural carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere resulting chiefly from volcanic eruptions."
ReplyDeleteYes, during this flat period it was. However on the wider scale of time, there were fantastic magnitudes of spiking for these factors-- no balance or equilibria evident AT ALL. Much more like a chaotic up and down. It must be the carbon cycles are capable of sequestering elements and compounds at much greater capacity than evident in more recent geological time periods. Why, otherwise, would concentrations go up and not flat line at up?
"So if carbon dioxide concentrations are be reduced to something like the pre-industrial value it will be necessary for humanity to do something."
It better be the right thing. Otherwise a lot of time, energy, and diverted resources will have been squandered, for nothing. Worse, that time, energy and diverted resources will not be available for what really needs to be done, if anything. There are serious questions as to whether carbon is the culprit, or if it is, the only culprit. Or if it is the only culprit, what causes these rises is due to the human contribution or can be fixed properly by human interventions.
There is something strange, from my perspective, on the fixation with this or that pollutant and environmental issue, almost as if they are subject to fashion, or fad. This is especially strange remembering the key insight, back when we were supposedly unenlightened and unconcerned, was the idea of the earth as an extraordinarily complex system or integrated and interlinking elements, relationships, and feed backs which couldn't be treated satisfactorily in isolation.
Our way of life has been madly destructive to the planet, in one way or the other, since the dawning of the human species, though to point this out is not to note the enormous, unbelievable level of destruction we've achieved since the Industrial Revolution. How to reverse this is a political question, which I believe will require a complete worldwide commitment to scientific research, and be guided by it, but will not be to leave the reigns of power to a technocratic "elite" or to environmentalists who use fear and appear to not flinch resorting to what I categorize as fascist tactics (we know best what's happening and what's best for everyone else, so when we tell you how to live your life, that's because if you don't, you'll murder the biosphere).
"There is something strange, from my perspective, on the fixation with this or that pollutant and environmental issue, almost as if they are subject to fashion..." Not in the case of CO2. Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) predicted global warming as the result of fossil fuel combustion in a journal article dated 1896.
DeleteIt's true we hear less about the ozone hole than formerly, but then in accordance with the Montreal convention production and release to the atmosphere of the CFCs mainly responsible has been greatly reduced, hence no need for further concern.
Note: some of the environmentalist political use of global warming parallels their political use of Covid19.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Covid19, I have wondered if part of it is that the plutocrats got frustrated when global warming, the war on terrorism, and so on, failed to scare the bejesus sufficiently to get full compliance under plutocratic command and control. I've also wondered if Covid19 is part extremely bad flu season and part response to plutocrats' fear of the realities of climate change.
I'm sitting in my bedroom in my boxers, as usual, around ten o'clock on a Monday morning and just marveling at the tranquil, peaceful tone of my town. I do not remember Monday mornings this quiet and blissful since childhood.
There's little traffic. For a short period of around morning rush hour, I could hear a bit of the old rumble, but now there's almost none and from time to time there is none. (I hear a buzz from an airplane just as I was about to say there was none.)
Now get this: back when I was concerned about what to do about global warming and whether elites, such as Al Gore, could be taken seriously, someone mentioned to me that if the elites were serious there were several steps they could take almost at the click of a finger. With the internet, many and maybe even most people would no longer need to commute to and from work-- they could work from home, sometimes exclusively. Automobile exhaust is among the largest carbon contributors, and automobiles are mostly used to convey people to work and back. There's very little, if any, infrastructural build-out to make this happen. Additionally, there's an advantage to business owners, large and small, to be unburdened of renting and leasing space. It's an enormous advantage.
Now, sure enough, click of the fingers, multitudes of people are working from home. I believe this is going to stay in place even when and if folks could go back to their offices.
This is long winded. I am sincerely interested in what you think.
Yes, we are in a period of intensified class conflict. The upper classes have never loved the common people, but they have always needed them: in pre-industrial times the mass of mankind toiled in the fields thereby generating not only food for themselves but a small surplus upon which the elite lived.
DeleteDuring the industrial era, the mass of mankind was needed to operate the industrial machine and, as necessary, to lay down their lives as participants in wars of mass mobilization.
But common labor is increasingly superfluous. The only common folk the elites want are domestic servants, prostitutes and techies to run an ever increasingly mechanized industrial system.
Given the superfluity of common labor, the elite are determined to drive down wages as the bargaining position of labor declines. That means mass offshoring of jobs from the West to the low-wage Rest, while automating as much as possible of the work that cannot be off-shored.
The only common folk the Western elites seem to want now are prostitutes, domestic servants and techies to design and build the ever more automated industrial systems that provide what remain of decently paid jobs in the West.
In the elite view, the rest of the population should just hurry up and die. Hence the anti-reproductive message of sex "education" and the pro-perv. post-Christian morality of the West.
As for the techies, better to bring in a bunch of H1b visa guys than encourage the natives to reproduce and get a decent education. And for what remains of unskilled work, illegal immigrants beat native Americans on cost.
Anxiety about climate change and Covid19 are certainly being used to drive elite interests. These anxieties also motivate elites, who dream of a return to a more natural world, a world where there are plenty of ten-thousand-acre private estates, or ten-thousand-square-mile private estates, and where the air and water are unpolluted. And the means to those ends is depopulation.
And here's another use the rich have for the poor: Meet the super-rich ‘... injecting teenagers’ BLOOD to stay young
Delete"And the means to those ends is depopulation."
ReplyDeleteYes, and I wonder how much longer before people begin to realize the rat hole they've been led down. Probably when they begin to starve. That won't be too much longer in many places in the world. In the U.S., it might begin after the elections in November.
I live about a mile from the University of Alaska, and often walk there. On both sides of the road are small restaurants catering to the university crowd. Just this week all of them have closed, as if there was some sort of electrical line connecting them and someone threw the off switch.
I think, when they weren't explicitly shut down, they were not receiving a sustainable level of business to make a profit, were probably losing money, and have now decided to cut the rate of loss for the time being, on the off hope the banks won't call their mortgages or force bankruptcy and we do get back to the way it used to be before Covid19.
This kind of attrition is building, and any last strength of the populace grows less by the day and week. It is absolutely heart-rending to witness.
Have you seen any concern in the mass media for the little guy who owns a small restaurant, has slowly built a clientele and niche, and now, through no fault of his own, is belly up? I haven't.
On top of that is, not only lack of concern, but the contemptuousness of the "leaders" and "elite", including the, can you believe it, moral righteousness of the "elites" and their minions for such people who complain, portraying them as selfish and begrudging to sacrifice for the greater good.
I totally agree with you about the motives of the rich, as you describe above and elsewhere.