well this is really the philosophical question about risk. Some folks are extremely risk-averse and others are risk-tolerant. If you get on an airplane there is a nonzero probability of dying in an airplane crash, and yet people get on airplanes all the time (and we believe it is basically rational to do so). From a Bayesian standpoint it makes sense to try and articulate our ideas of risk and to think clearly about the subjective probability estimates people (including scientists) bring to the table. You have risk-averse scientists and risk-tolerant scientists. It is important to recognize that subjectivity, especially when discussing policy.
The reason I said business risk is to emphasis taking emotion out of the equation and using data to determine risk and appropriate actions. What you are talking about here (personal risk tolerance and a person skewed view of the world isn't how business see risks, at least successful busn).
I know that when I teach people about environmental issues I regularly cite the the noted scientific journal forbes dot com
carbon sequestration techniques being tested "UK invests over £30 million in large-scale greenhouse gas removal": https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/urai-uio052021.php excerpt: These Greenhouse Gas Removal Demonstrator projects will investigate: Management of peatlands to maximise their greenhouse gas removal potential in farmland near Doncaster, and at upland sites in the South Pennines and in Pwllpeiran, west Wales. Enhanced rock weathering - crushing silicate rocks and spreading the particles at field trial sites on farmland in mid-Wales, Devon and Hertfordshire. Use of biochar, a charcoal-like substance, as a viable method of carbon sequestration. Testing will take place at arable and grassland sites in the Midlands and Wales, a sewage disposal site in Nottinghamshire, former mine sites and railway embankments. Large-scale tree planting, or afforestation, to assess the most effective species and locations for carbon sequestration at sites across the UK, including land owned by the Ministry of Defence, the National Trust and Network Rail. Rapid scale-up of perennial bioenergy crops such as grasses (Miscanthus) and short rotation coppice willow at locations in Lincolnshire and Lancashire. Greenhouse gas removals describe a group of methods that directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere and are designed to complement efforts in emission reductions targeting those sectors which are difficult to decarbonise completely such as heavy industry, agriculture and aviation. more at the link
CO2 Sequestration won't work on a large scale unless you have a fusion reactor. Most of the CO2 created is from the burning of fossil fuels, most of CO2 Sequestration is to negative co2 emitted by small scale emitters such as farms or commercial sites. It's expensive technology currently, it takes a lot of energy, and it takes a lot of storage. But am happy that it is being pursued. We really should be putting more effort into building fission reactors today and investing in building fusion reactors tomorrow.
Interesting -- sounds like a focus on passive removal. All the active techniques seem to take way too much energy, so far. I can actually see a future where some countries work to remove carbon from the atmosphere (like the UK and Germany) while others hurry to release more (like Russia, loving all their new ports and northern access, I assume). I doubt we'll ever achieve truly substantial international cooperation on climate.
true. but similar complaints can be made about things like lithium batteries for electric vehicles https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...te-oil-electric-vehicles-dirty-secret-lithium
"Fish adapt to ocean acidification by modifying gene expression": https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/tuoh-fat052621.php
I was reading about using crushed rock "Enhanced Weathering" for carbon sequestration and it does show promise. While there is a costs to crushing and transporting the basaltic rock that rock is very common and there is a lot of farmland available to distribute it on. Further the crushed rock doesn't affect farming and might even enhance it. https://www.minnpost.com/earth-jour...dEX5qqjwqNbWRthm5vdLjML3tgFnFl_4aAqouEALw_wcB Croplands can suck lots of CO2 from air if treated with crushed rock Since antiquity, farmers have known that volcanic soils yield better crops. “Enhanced weathering” could make them climate buffers, too. Most home gardeners know at a least a bit about soil amendments — how you can make plants grow better by working in compost to fertilize and loosen the loam, maybe some crushed limestone to lower acidity. What if the same principle could be applied, at a massive scale, to take globe-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? What if it could work relatively quickly, compared to other carbon-removal methods, and perhaps even cheaply? While simultaneously improving plant health and crop yields for a world with ever more hunger in its future? And reducing the need for fertilizers and pesticides? This is the bold, if still somewhat blurry, vision outlined in a fascinating paper published last week in the respected journal Nature Plants. Prepared by an international team of scientists, with America’s renowned James Hansen among them, the paper makes a strong conceptual case that significantly reversing CO2 buildup need not require “geoengineering” approaches as elaborate as covering the ocean with wiffle-ball blankets, as expensive as gigantic carbon-sucking sequestration plants, or as risky as creating an artificial cloud layer out of reflective aerosols. There might just be a role, they suggest, for a solution as simple as dirt — in this case, soil with pulverized volcanic rock worked into it, in a way that mimics natural weathering, and accelerates certain soil-improving benefits that farmers have recognized since antiquity. And the potential contribution to easing the climate problem is impressive. While calculations are still at back-of-the-envelope stage, the research suggests that if two-thirds of the world’s most productive farmland were treated, it could absorb ongoing emissions at a rate equivalent to 10 percent of current CO2 output. The paper’s lead author is David Beerling of the UK’s University of Sheffield, where he directs the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation. In announcing the findings, he said: Just add rainwater Volcanic soils are highly silicate, basalt being a good example of one globally abundant type, and also tend to be rich in calcium and magnesium. Their mineral makeup reacts with the slight acidity in rainwater to draw carbon dioxide out of the air, forming carbonates and bicarbonates. (Those are alkaline substances, so I guess you could think of the process as sort of the chemical reverse of the way sulfide mining mixes waste rock with water to produce polluting acid runoff.) If these alkaline compounds stay in the soil, they become an immediate, long-term carbon sink. But what if they should flow to the ocean, an important though temporary carbon sink which is already experiencing a troubling degree of acidification because of atmospheric CO2? No worries, says the paper. The carbonates and bicarbonates are sufficiently stable to remain undissolved, and keep the carbon locked up, for 100,000 to 1 million years. What would it take to crush and distribute all that rock in a global program of “enhanced weathering”? This is among the practical questions that the paper suggests are worthy of additional inquiry, but it offers some general thoughts and more back-of-the-envelope figuring. Happily, basalt and other silicate rocks are plentiful throughout the world. Unhappily, crushing and transporting them for massive soil amendment would require a lot of energy, much of it from fossil fuels, reducing the efficiency of its carbon recapture by maybe 10 percent, possibly as much as 30 percent. As to cost, the paper says the best estimate right now is between $52 and $480 per ton of recaptured CO2. That compares unfavorably with, say, a bioenergy power plant that captures its own CO2 at a cost of $39 to $100 per ton. But remember, recapture from the atmosphere is way more expensive; 10 times more expensive seems to be a rule of thumb. One Swiss project that’s considered promising sucks CO2 back out of the air at “industrial scale,” which means 900 tons per year, or the equivalent of emissions from 200 cars — at a cost of perhaps $1,000 per ton. Keeping new carbon out of the atmosphere in the first place is always the best idea, the most efficient, the cheapest way to keep global warming from getting worse. Problem is, the evidence increasingly suggests it won’t be sufficient on its own. As Hansen, formerly of NOAA and now at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said of the new paper: “Strategies for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere are now on the research agenda and we need realistic assessment of these strategies, what they might be able to deliver, and what the challenges are.” The urgency of that assessment can hardly be understated, nor the pervasive glumness around our chances. Last week I stumbled on yet another discouraging climate headline, “Sighing, Resigned Climate Scientists Say To Just Enjoy Next 20 Years As Much As You Can,” and failed to recognize it as pitch-perfect satire from The Onion. Agriculture’s climate shadow Agriculture is itself a large contributor of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, by some measures accounting for nearly half of atmospheric carbon, and much attention already focuses on finding ways to reduce those contributions. The Drawdown project organized by Paul Hawken, for example, favors expanded efforts in the practice of “conservation agriculture” and “regenerative agriculture,” which abandon tillage in favor of expanded crop rotation and more use of cover crops. Also, greatly expanded use of compost to return valuable, natural nutrients to the soil while reducing manufacture and application of synthetic fertilizers. And the reason these proposals hold such great potential is the same that supports, I think, a serious investigation of the “enhanced weathering” idea: There’s a whole lot of farming going on, and there always will be. Making cropland better at retaining or recapturing carbon builds on existing efforts and practices already well understood, as the Leverhulme announcement points out: Critically, enhanced rock weathering works together with existing managed croplands. Unlike other carbon removal strategies being considered, it doesn’t compete for land used to grow food or increase the demand for freshwater. Other benefits include reducing the usage of agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, lowering the cost of food production, increasing the profitability of farms and reducing the barriers to uptake by the agricultural sector. Crushed silicate rocks could be applied to any soils, but arable land is the most obvious because it is worked and planted annually. It covers some 12 million square kilometres or 11 per cent of the global land area. Arable farms already apply crushed rock in the form of limestone to reverse acidification of soils caused by farming practices, including the use of fertilizers. Managed croplands, therefore, have the logistical infrastructure, such as the road networks and machinery, needed to undertake this approach at scale. * * * The full paper, “Farming with crops and rocks to address global climate, food and soil security,” can be read here but access is not free for nonsubscribers.
The amount of water in Lake Mead at the Hoover Dam is at record low levels as below average rain and snow in the Rockies the last two decades has greatly reduced the amount of water in the Colorado river. That along with increased demand on water in the Southwest. https://news.yahoo.com/hoover-dam-symbol-modern-west-181316884.html Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage Ian James, Arizona Republic Sun, June 6, 2021, 2:20 PM·17 min read BOULDER CITY, Nevada — Hoover Dam towers more than 700 feet above Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada state line, holding back the waters of the Colorado River. On top of the dam, where visitors peer down the graceful white arc of its face, one of its art deco-style towers is adorned with a work of art that memorializes the purposes of the dam. In five relief sculptures by Oskar Hansen, muscular men are shown gripping a boat’s wheel, harvesting an armful of wheat, standing beside cascading water and lifting a heavy weight overhead. With the concrete figures are words that encapsulate why the dam was built, as laid out in a 1928 law: FLOOD CONTROL, NAVIGATION, IRRIGATION, WATER STORAGE and POWER. Eighty-six years after its completion in 1935, the infrastructure at Hoover Dam continues doing what it was designed to do: holding water and sending it coursing through intake tunnels, spinning turbines and generating electricity. But the rules for managing the river and dividing up its water — which were laid down nearly a century ago starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact and which have repeatedly been tweaked — are now facing the greatest strains since the dam was built. - ADVERTISEMENT - The effects of years of severe drought and temperatures pushed higher by climate change are strikingly visible along Lake Mead’s retreating shorelines near Las Vegas, where the growing “bathtub ring” of whitish minerals coats the rocky desert slopes. Since 2000, the water level in Lake Mead, which is the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam and holds the title of the largest reservoir in the country, has dropped about 140 feet. It is now just 37% full, headed for a first-ever official shortage and sinking toward its lowest levels since it was filled. One of the West's driest 22-year periods in centuries is colliding with the river's chronic overuse. As the reservoir falls toward record lows, its decline threatens the water supplies of cities and farmlands, and reveals how the system of managing water in the desert Southwest faces growing risks. Water levels expected to fall below federal threshold this summer Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation leads a team of engineers and hydrologists who plan water releases from Hoover Dam, as well as Davis and Parker dams downstream, sending flows that travel through pipelines and canals to Phoenix, Los Angeles and farmlands in the U.S. and Mexico that produce crops such as hay, cotton, grapes and lettuce. Bernardo’s team also sets power generation goals and produces a monthly report with the latest projections of how reservoir levels will likely change over the next 24 months. Lately, each month’s report has brought worsening numbers. Predicted water-level declines have grown as estimates of inflows into Lake Powell, the upstream reservoir, have shrunk due to extremely parched conditions across the upper watershed in the Rocky Mountains, where much of the river’s flow originates as melting snow. “Unfortunately, due to how dry things have been,” Bernardo says, “what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping.” And that will mean less water flowing into Lake Mead for the rest of the year. The past 12 months have been among the driest on record across the Colorado River Basin. Inflows into Lake Powell from April through July are estimated to be just 26% of the long-term average, and that’s leading to rapid declines in both Powell and Mead, the two largest pieces of the river's water-storage system. More at link.
I wouldn't say that's a comparable analogy due to simply the scale of the problem. Also the energy dynamics involved is significantly different for CO2 sequestration and used lithium batteries. With Batteries, once the scale gets there, the cost goes down. With CO2, it's the opposite as the incremental cost will go up with scale.
Not a great time to invest in Las Vegas suburban real estate. (Well, unless you were flipping, arguably no time in the last many years was a good time for that.)
Every business in the world consumes petroleum products. This is not what is driving climate change by the way.
environmentalism is a pretense for marxists to exert control over every facet of your behavior climate change is perfect for this, because a butterfly flapping its wings impacts the climate the pandemic is a close cousin of this, a pretense to seize immense "emergency" power (climate change is also cast as an urgent emergency) Fossil fuels improve the quality of life of everyone on the planet. They are plentiful, easy to transport and store, and energy dense. Nothing comes close. The benefits of fossil fuels to humanity far outweigh any warming they cause (and warming has benefits to humans and the planet as well). Climate scaremongers never acknowledge the benefits, only the costs. And they rarely practice what they preach (North Face being a good example), because they can't go without those benefits.
