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Don't overshoot: why carbon dioxide removal will achieve too little, too late. [View all]
This a Nature Editorial: Don’t overshoot: why carbon dioxide removal will achieve too little, too late.
Subtitle:
Many climate scenarios bake in a temperature overshoot before technologies are used to scrub the atmosphere clean of emissions. Emerging science says that is probably a fool’s errand.
I have not been shy about stating that we are already at "too little, too late." Even if we were to fully embrace the only technology that will actually address, in any way, the extreme global heating we are now observing, nuclear energy - this after decades of mindless demonization driven by selective attention - it would take decades to build the large number of reactors that might save what is left to save and restore what can be restored.
I'm not sure that the full editorial is open to the public, so here are some excerpts:
The caption:
A row of people stand and raise holding hands at the COP21 Climate Conference in Paris
Jubilation over reaching an agreement on climate-change measures has turned to concern about the practicalities of making them work.Credit: Jonathan Raa/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty
Jubilation over reaching an agreement on climate-change measures has turned to concern about the practicalities of making them work.Credit: Jonathan Raa/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty
Excerpts:
That photograph: the one taken in Paris in December 2015, showing beaming world leaders with linked hands held overhead, celebrating their agreement to work together to stop anthropogenic climate change. It marked a turning point in international climate policy. After more than two decades of disagreements, the world had finally united, both in recognizing the threat of global warming and in pledging to take action. But what action means in practical terms has always been unclear. At the time, researchers shared with Nature their doubts about the feasibility of achieving the goal to keep the rise in global temperatures “well below 2 °C”, while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 °C.
Scientists had good reason to be sceptical. Under most plausible scenarios, average temperatures will overshoot the 1.5 °C target — a fact that was confirmed in a 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report suggests that, to extract enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring the temperature rise below the limit, methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere — yet to be tested at scale — will be needed. Scientists had other unanswered questions, too: what will happen while temperatures are above the threshold? How hard will it be to reverse the rising mercury in our thermometers?...
Scientists had good reason to be sceptical. Under most plausible scenarios, average temperatures will overshoot the 1.5 °C target — a fact that was confirmed in a 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report suggests that, to extract enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring the temperature rise below the limit, methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere — yet to be tested at scale — will be needed. Scientists had other unanswered questions, too: what will happen while temperatures are above the threshold? How hard will it be to reverse the rising mercury in our thermometers?...
The first link in this text is titled "Is the 2 °C world a fantasy?" The second link is from an IPCC report stating that there is little or no evidence that we will hold the temperature rise to 1.5 °C.
In response to the question in the first title, "Is the 2 °C world a fantasy?" it seems so; there is no apparent change from the reactionary fantasy that so called "renewable energy" will save the day, despite the fact that there is no evidence it has done, is doing, or will do so. No amount of reality will stop the squandering trillions on this quasi-religious faith based public affectation.
Another excerpt on the scale required:
...It’s not that carbon-removal methods don’t work. Some do. The simplest is, of course, planting trees. More-complex measures include extracting carbon directly from the atmosphere. But as Schleussner and his colleagues estimate, up to 400 gigatonnes of carbon would need to be removed from the atmosphere by 2100 to limit warming to 1.5 °C, assuming current emissions trajectories continue. In emissions terms, that is equivalent to running the US energy industry in reverse for around 80 years...
Planting trees, of course, assumes that there will be water to grow them, and that they won't burn up and catch fire, or be blown apart by mega storms, which is in fact what they are doing under the extreme global heating event now well underway.
...Even assuming that removing that amount of carbon is feasible, some Earth systems will probably not be restored to their previous equilibrium. Some changes, such as rising oceans, shifting ecosystems and regional climate change, are likely to endure, and will have lasting impacts on agriculture, and other industries. There is “no expectation of immediate reversibility after overshoot”, the authors argue. For many people, the climate that they will experience after overshoot will not be what they had experienced before it — even if global mean surface temperatures return to levels before the overshoot.
Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming
Moreover, higher temperatures, even for a brief period, increase the risk of hitting tipping points that could kick the Earth system, or parts of it, into a completely new state, a conclusion underscored in an August study in Nature Communications by Annika Högner at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Tessa Möller at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria (T. Möller et al. Nature Commun. 15, 6192; 2024) and their colleagues...
Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming
Moreover, higher temperatures, even for a brief period, increase the risk of hitting tipping points that could kick the Earth system, or parts of it, into a completely new state, a conclusion underscored in an August study in Nature Communications by Annika Högner at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Tessa Möller at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria (T. Möller et al. Nature Commun. 15, 6192; 2024) and their colleagues...
After extensively studying the issue over the years, I have convinced myself that CO2 removal is just at the edge of feasibility, for example, under certain nuclear powered regimes involving air based Brayton cycles, not that anyone cares what I think, except, perhaps my son. However the question is where to put the carbon once it's removed. I note, with some measure of terror, that reducing carbon dioxide to elemental carbon requires all the primary energy released by burning fossil fuels to be generated all over again, and then adding some more to account for the entropy of mixing.
We have dumped all the responsibility for so doing on future generations, generations who will live in a ruined extremely damaged world.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
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