[geo] Rise and Fall of the Carbon Civilisation - Moriarty, Honnery

[Andrew Lockley]

Poster's note : contains a few dozen references to geoengineering. Preview
text available on link.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JPdsIh4jJSoC=PA198=Rise+and+Fall+of+the+Carbon+Civilisation=en=X_esc=y#v=onepage=geoengineering=false

Rise and Fall of the Carbon Civilisation: Resolving Global Environmental
and Resource Problems

Patrick Moriarty, Damon Honnery
Springer Science & Business Media, 27 Oct 2010 - Science - 218 pages

A vast amount has been written on climate change and what should be our
response. Rise and Fall of the Carbon Civilisation suggests that most of
this literature takes a far too optimistic position regarding the potential
for conventional mitigation solutions to achieve the deep cuts in
greenhouse gases necessary in the limited time frame we have available. In
addition, global environmental problems, as exemplified by climate change,
and global resource problems – such as fossil fuel depletion or fresh water
scarcity – have largely been seen as separate issues. Further, proposals
for solution of these problems often focus at the national level, when the
problems are global. The authors argue that the various challenges the
planet faces are both serious and interconnected. Rise and Fall of the
Carbon Civilisation takes a global perspective in its treatment of various
solutions: • renewable energy; • nuclear energy; • energy efficiency; •
carbon sequestration; and • geo-engineering. It also addresses the
possibility that realistic solutions cannot be achieved until the
fundamentally ethical question of global equity – both across nations today
and also inter-generational – is fully addressed. Such an approach will
also involve reorienting the global economy away from an emphasis on growth
and toward the direct satisfaction of basic human needs for all the Earth’s
people. Rise and Fall of the Carbon Civilisation is aimed at the many
members of the public with an awareness of climate change, but who wish to
find out more about how we need to respond to the challenge. It will also
be of interest to technical professionals, as well as postgraduate students
and researchers, from the environmental and engineering science sectors.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[geo] 6% of global grain for biofuels

[Andrew Lockley]

Poster's note : relevant to BECCS and land use change CDR strategies

http://www.renewablesinternational.net/6-of-global-grain-for-biofuels/150/453/89553/

Biomass
6% of global grain for biofuels

German renewable energy agency AEE argues that there is a lot of leeway for
energy crops. But only if the world stops eating meat, one might add.

In a new press release, the AEE has published the chart below based on the
latest data from the FAO and International Grains Council. It shows that
roughly 44 percent of global grain production in 2015/16 will go to food
production. The second largest share is feedstock for animals at 35
percent. Biofuels only make up six percent, with “other” covering the
remaining 14 percent.

  -
AEE
“In addition to feeding the global population, there is a lot of leeway to
plant energy crops for an environmentally friendly energy supply,” the
press release comments. This statement, however, cannot be read from the
chart, which does not indicate the amount of available land. Assuming that
grain production remains constant, an increase in biofuel production from
grain would only be possible if less fodder were produced for animals. But
then, people would have to eat less meat – whereas, in fact, the global
population is eating more. (Note that the AEE makes no such connection.)

Instead, the AEE draws its conclusion from the rising volume of grain on
stock even as the EU reaches new record levels of wheat exports. Indeed,
global wheat production and the volume on stock do seem to be healthy.
Whether we can produce significantly more amounts of biofuels is a
different question. Certainly, greater meat consumption and greater biofuel
production are conflicting goals in this respect.

Finally, it should be pointed out that not all biofuels come from grain.
Rapeseed falls under the scope of the International Grains Council; palm
oil does not, for instance.

The press release is a contribution to the discussion in Germany on the
conflict between food crops and energy crops. At the moment, the German
government has practically put an end to greater bioenergy production,
largely out of the concern that more energy crops will make food supply
scarcer.

(Craig Morris / @PPchef)

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[geo] It's time to look seriously at sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere - Vox

[Andrew Lockley]

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/13/8949701/carbon-removal

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

It's time to look seriously at sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere
Updated by Brad Plumer on July 13, 2015, 2:10 p.m. ET @bradplumer
b...@vox.com

If you ask climate modelers how humanity can avoid severe global warming —
say, 2°C or more — most will say we need to do two big things. First, we'll
need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by the end of
the century. Second, since we've been so tardy in making those cuts, we'll
also need to figure out how to pull some carbon dioxide back out of the
atmosphere.

And that's ... a problem. We at least have some notion of how to cut
emissions. But sucking carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere? At the
massive scale likely needed? No one really has a clue how to do that. It's
a huge, embarrassing blind spot in climate policy.


If we're too slow in cutting emissions, we may need to remove some CO2 from
the atmosphere. But how?? (UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2014)

The IPCC has estimated that, to stay below 2°C of warming, we'll need to
zero out our emissions and start removing between 2 and 10 gigatons of CO2
from the atmosphere each year by 2050. For perspective, all of the world's
forests and soils put together currently remove just 3.3 gigatons of CO2
each year. So imagine doubling or tripling that. Planting more trees could
help, but we'll need sweeping new carbon-removal techniques on top of that.

Right now, we have only crude ideas of what that might entail. Perhaps we
could harvest trees sustainably, burn them for energy, and bury the
resulting emissions underground — a technology known as bioenergy with
carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) that, in theory, is
carbon-negative. Or we could try to boost the carbon-absorbing capacity of
soil. Or we could deploy giant machines to suck CO2 out of the air (known
as "direct air capture"). But we don't yet know if these ideas are
feasible. And surprisingly few people are even working on this.

That's where Noah Deich comes in. A former clean tech consultant, he
noticed that hardly any industry groups or policymakers seemed to be
focused on developing techniques that scientists have deemed crucial for
saving the planet. So he recently launched the Center for Carbon Removal,
with the aim of bringing together scientists, industry, and policymakers
and figuring out whether there's a viable path for removing lots of CO2
from the air.

I called Deich to talk a bit more about carbon removal. He says we're still
in the very early stages of figuring out what works and what doesn't. "No
one," he notes, "has the answer right now." It's possible nothing will
work. But we need to start figuring that out soon — or tackling climate
change could prove vastly more difficult than we think.

(http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/research-programmes/stranded-assets/Stranded%20Carbon%20Assets%20and%20NETs%20-%2006.02.15.pdf;>Caldecott
et al, 2015)
Some of the most widely-discussed ideas for "negative emissions".
(Caldecott et al, 2015)

Brad Plumer: What's the basic case for paying more attention to carbon
removal?

Noah Deich: There are two pieces. One is that it looks very critical for
avoiding significant global warming. If we are unable to stay within our
emission budgets, there’s no way to stay below 2°C without negative
emissions.

Second, more broadly, there are lot of negative emission systems out there
that seem to be good sustainable opportunities for sustainable
developments. There are a number of carbon-removal techniques in
agriculture that lead to increased soil fertility and water retention in
addition to carbon sequestration. I think we haven’t really thought about
all these different opportunities today — so if we expand from just
thinking about mitigation and adaptation to also thinking about carbon
removal, that starts to unlock a lot of potential.

BP: When you look at the IPCC's big report, its climate models suggest we
need staggering amounts of bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration
(BECCS) to avoid 2°C of warming — removing between 2 and 10 gigatons of CO2
a year from the atmosphere by 2050. Is that even remotely realistic? Can it
even be done sustainably?

ND: The way I interpret those models, they're saying we'll need some
portfolio of net negative emissions. We don’t necessarily know what
technology will get us there. It could be BECCS. But we could also have a
breakthrough in direct air capture or agricultural techniques that help
sequester carbon in soils that can reduce the need for BECCS.

I think the key here is we need to analyze all those different
opportunities and start to say which ones work, which ones have potential,
and which ones don’t make sense for us to invest in because they won't be
sustainable or won't get to scale. Right now we don't even have enough data
to figure that out. We don’t have enough field trials or even basic
science. Here in the United States, we have a single BECCS plant — 

Re: [geo] Could we slow the flow in the Drake passage to reduce the circumpolar current and winds around Anctartica? And what would the effect be?

[John Nissen]

Hi Brian,

I believe the ice is thickening over most of Antarctica, as ozone (a
powerful greenhouse gas) is reduced in the "ozone hole", cooling the region
and creating a strong vortex.  Sea ice is growing.  The opposite is
happening in the Arctic, with rapid warming, sea ice retreating, and vortex
weakening and wandering.

But some parts of Antarctica, around the West Antarctic Peninsular, are
warming.  I believe this is due to warmer water arriving - possibly the
water from Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known
as the ocean conveyor [1].  AMOC is driven by cold saline water dropping to
the bottom of the ocean in the Arctic.  This bottom water flows southwards
and emerges, a hundred or more years later, as middle water around WAIS.

I speculate that, as the Gulf Stream has gradually warmed during and since
the industrial revolution, the bottom water has gradually warmed.  This
warmer bottom water is now beginning to emerge at the base of glaciers from
the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).

But this is speculation based on my own research.  Does anybody have a
better idea of what's happening?

Cheers, John

[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation#/media/File:Conveyor_belt.svg


On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 9:59 PM, Brian White 
wrote:

> Hi,  John,  yeah,  you might be right. about the ice mass loss.  But there
> is also ice buildup.  Antarctica is extremely cold with extremely low
> precipitation.If the current was slowed a little bit,  the associated
> winds might dampen a tiny bit.  If that let  humid winds  get to Antarctica
> on a slightly more regular basis than now, ice build up might increase
> substantially.  I'm not talking about blocking the circumpolar current,
> just slowing the cold salty part of it.  Even if the slowing is by a tiny
> amount,  the warmth generated as the current swirls, down current of the
> cables can cause real change  and the mixing of upper and lower water and
> salty and fresh water can have a catalytic effect  in the southern
> Atlantic. It might take 500  years to slow the current substantially,  but
> applying the "brake" like this should open up the anctartic to either
> warming and melting or warming and a huge increase in the ice deposition
> rate.  If  a few hundred years of massive ice deposition came prior to
> eventual melting, it might give the people of the world time to evacuate
> the low lying areas of the planet in an orderly fashion. And also slow the
> warming transition phase quite a lot too.
>
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 1:09 PM, John Nissen 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Brian,
>>
>> My first thought was that you must be mad to even consider such an idea.
>> But actually there is an acute problem with warm ocean currents melting
>> away at the terminations of Antarctic glaciers and causing accelerated ice
>> mass loss "beyond a tipping point" for some glaciers.  If we could mix the
>> colder currents with warmer currents, this might slow the ice mass loss.
>>
>> Cheers, John
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 8:29 AM, Brian White 
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> 
>>> The drake passage is around 800 km wide and if the current in the
>>> southern half of the passage was slowed (even slightly) the Antarctic
>>> continent could be released from its splendid isolation.  If a series of
>>> anchors with wire ropes 2 km long held up by some sort of buoy (4 or 8
>>> thousand of them)  were dropped from the Antarctic side, they would slow
>>> the freezing current somewhat and create eddies as the current passes
>>> them.  The eddies would warm the water and this would reduce the extreme
>>> temperature differences that cause the winds. Very gradually, we could stop
>>> the freezing current and the winds that keeps it separate from the rest of
>>> the climate of the earth.   What happens then?   Will the continent melt or
>>> will the extra water vapor mean more ice there? Will the southern ozone
>>> hole fill?  (It is big because it is so cold).
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfSJigmL8kI
>>>
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>>> Groups "geoengineering" group.
>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
>>> an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
>>> To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com.
>>> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering.
>>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at