If CO2 were removed from the air...

Kez

Just looking for people's thoughts on something.

If CO2 were removed from the air, back to levels of 230 ppm or thereabouts, would the temperature begin falling? (assuming methane and everything else remained the same)

If "NO" then what level of CO2 ppm will be required for the temparature to begin falling?

Lore

thylacine · Heavy Crude Joined: Jan 19, 2006 Posts: 122

Maybe we'll discover, in centuries to come, that we were teetering on the brink of the next ice age and the only thing that saved us for a few years was our inadvertent heating of the climate.

We have embarked on a 250 year (since industrialisation) grand experiment with the earth and its climate. For 90% of that time we were blissfully unaware that that is what we were doing.

Now we are faced with a system with so many variables (sunlight, CO2, methane, ocean currents, solid water, liquid water, water vapour, feedback loops etc etc) that it boggles the mind. The reality is that this is another problem like Peak Oil - we will only know for sure what it was all about in hindsight.

Building machines to suck CO2 out of the air and put it out of harms way is - in my opinion - a waste of time. 95% of Tibetans agree with me.

Lore

Ignorance is bliss, until it gets really hot.

Modern man has been given a great gift from the sciences we've developed. For the first time in our history we are able to make meaningful predictions upon the future effects of our actions. Some would also say this is a curse. With knowledge comes responsibility, no excuses that we didn't know.

Many would rather we stayed ignorant. Unfortunately PO & GW are not problems that are best viewed in hindsight. By then it will be far too late.

There is a good commentary here about how people rationalize climate change. LINK

Kez

thylacine · Heavy Crude Joined: Jan 19, 2006 Posts: 122

[quote]
Many would rather we stayed ignorant. Unfortunately PO & GW are not problems that are best viewed in hindsight. By then it will be far too late.

Yes, I think it's great that we have the science and technology to investigate our problems and can model and extrapolate/predict how they may play out physically. Our big problem is that the real wild card in all this is ourselves and particularly how we will react en masse to more stressed living. That Human Factor is harder to predict.

Also, how do you know it's not already too late? We might, in history, be at that "oh crap" moment - like Wile E. Coyote, having run off the cliff, legs still running, looks down, gulps and waves bye bye.

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1472

I think we are past the Wile E. Coyote point, but being (collectively) more stupid than that clever critter, as we fall, we still think everything is fine.

Looking down would not only cause panic, but cause us to realize that the only thing that will prevent future absolute disaster is the very immediate pain of reaching out to try to grab onto what ever scrub is protruding from the cliff zipping past us. And even with the pain that will inflict, there is no guarantee of preventing the worst.

So the majority--and definitely the power elite--prefer to insist that the fact that we have not hit the ground yet proves that everything is wonderful.

Or is this extending your analogy too far?

Dohboi

"There is hope, but not for us." Kafka

Chaparral

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1472

It is looking more and more likely that we have already passed certain tipping points and triggered some feed back loops--there is probably no putting this genie back in the bottle.

True though this may be, even though we may have started the globe roling downhill toward some new steady state (whose precise nature and scale we cannot tell--we can't really see where the bottom of the slope is), still it behooves us not to conintue pushing it yet faster down the slope.

Any reductions we make will probably lessen the likelihood of the worst-case scenarios becoming reality. But really, we've waited to long. We need something like 90-95% reductions in fossil fule use (reductions actually achieved domestically during WWII, btw), but we're still pulling safely sequestered carbon out of the ground (oil, gas, coal) and spewing it into the air at enormous and increasing rates.

It's really idiotic to talk about sequestration while we are still engaged in this monumental and catastrophic withdrawal of already-sequestered carbon.

Plantagenet

The Greenhouse Effect in the earth's atmosphere operates in "real time"....i.e. the gases efficently trap thermal radication being emitted from the earth....as humans add more CO2 to the atmosphere it captures more heat......thats why the planet is warming up.

If we could somehow remove excess CO2, methane, and other anthropogenic gases from the atmosphere the global temperature should theoretically respond by cooling very quickly...

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1472

I repeat:

It's really idiotic to talk about sequestration while we are still engaged in this monumental and catastrophic withdrawal of already-sequestered carbon.

The current world economy, in emiting the huge quatities of green house gasses that it does, is essentially like a man pouring gasoline over our heads with one hand while playing with matches with the other. When some one (folks warning about the dangers of global warming) comes along and points out that this is, well, rather risky behavior, the technofantasist world economy says, "Don't worry, I'm working on a plan to mop up a bit of the gasoline with this rag and throw it away," all the time pouring yet more gas on himself and playing ever more vigorously with matches.

How hard is it to see that we have to stop pouring the gasoline (GHGs) before we start thinking about mopping it up.

Believe me, plantagenet, I've caught myself concocting similar schemes, and aparently many scientists are quite excited about various ways to bury CO2. But I have concluded that at this point it is profoundly wrong headed to plunge into seqestration schemes while still spewing ever increasing amounts of CO2.

And it is likely to be hugely counterproductive, in fact, given the human tendency to view such plans as proof that science has once again come to the rescue, so we don't have to change anything about how big our cars and jets are and how far and frequently we drive and fly them.

eric_b · Last edited by eric_b on Thu Apr 12, 2007 5:23 pm; edited 1 time in total

eric_b

joewp

Plantagenet