However its very apparent that there's no way in hell we'll actually stop emissions any time soon. I think that's what has been distorted into "it's too late". It'll take 30+ years at the most optimistic to see significant decreases in CO2 emission which is why some people advocate for geoengineering.

Armchair skeptic: manually removing CO2 is the least dumb way of doing climate engineering. It's possible, it hasn't got nearly the terrible side effects of something like sulfur aerosols, and it can actually produce useable products (although the commercial viability of producing graphite and hydrocarbons from CO2 is... suspect). It's a nice dream though, and a fun counterargument to people saying we will always need coal and oil for steel and plastics. Ultimately of course the amount of carbon exceeds our need for oil/graphite/coke by a factor of several million, even over several millenia.

Here's a data point: If we shoved the entire United States into the ocean and ended this nation as we know it, the reduction in GHG's (greenhouse gases) would be less than 15%, maybe half, if that much. A single massive wild fire emits more GHG's than the entire transportation and energy industry does in an entire year.

See "Emissions by Country" section in this report:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Also,

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full.pdf

The paper explains, paraphrasing, how the issues created by carbon dioxide concentration are irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.

Here's an excellent write-up on the conclusions from extensive experiments by Google:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-re...

From the article:

"We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use." Paraphrasing: If the world converted to 100% renewable energy, CO2 levels would still rise exponentially.

Another point they made:

"Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon."

* geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms

* the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers

* much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production

* geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere

* but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above!

edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse

assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution

another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/ice-stupas-himalaya... comes to mind as a project where there doesn't have to be a "loser". They are trying to replicate the previously naturally occurring process and the water still works it's way through the watershed.

Extreme weather will just be part of the cost of doing business.

In that light, I suppose eventually businesses will want someone to reduce that risk, and will farm the contract out to the most cost effective Option.

BTW the idea I most prefer when it comes to geo engineering - flotillas of little robots spraying water at the poles in order to help create more snow and ice.

But the climate we had in 1800s was not particularly great either. 1/3 of the land surface was still desert, hurricanes and droughts were common too, so the strategy of reducing human population, using only clean energy, etc. won't get us to a much better place.

Of course some ideas are not great, but it doesn't mean that any attempt of improving climate via engineering is automatically bad.

As opposed to getting a project with moving targets, hard to prove results, great optics and massive funding requirements.

I think climate engineering/geo engineering are on the lines of the same ideas as clean coal.

But the good part is, that we live in a world where the system will demand that this be carried out.

I have the feeling that most people desperately try to pretend everything is a static system (so it can be described, once, in a non-time-evolving form, and then called done), and in the few cases it fails, they throw their hands up and say "it's complex, dynamic, beyond human comprehension".

I mean, you could use the same argument against entire modern medicine - someone got sick because they led an unhealthy life style, so it's their fault, but we shouldn't try to heal them because that's "actively meddling with a complex system", which will obviously only make things worse...

Instead of being afraid of touching the climate, we should stop pretending everything around is static and being surprised when it requires more work of us. Yes, climate engineering means continuous work, continuous vigilance. Yes, it will surprise us. But it's normal, and we have to deal with it, just like we deal with every other surprise in life.

Similarly Humanity has been inadvertently geo-engineering the planet.

Modern techniques are here, and they tell us that the best way to treat the patient is not via geo-engineering.

Look my point is cynical and its not about climate science.

MUCH More importantly I am saying that it is the kind of pseudo-science-hope-springs-eternal-last-ditch-effort that people LOVE to support.

Its a product in itself. That is what I am highlighting.

I believe that Climate engineering/geo engineering sits at a special hype junction, a future sweet spot that is going to be irresistible to politicians, media types and lay people who are scared and desperate.

And YES - I hope and keep my mind open to the possibility that we find good tech that helps reduce global temps which is not "pollute less".

This would truly be a magic bullet which would let us continue to grow as we have for so long, while stopping the effects of climate change, and it is something to earnestly hope for.

> Its a product in itself. That is what I am highlighting.

Uh. You're right. Thanks for bringing it up.

Maybe I'm not that cynical, but I agree the "hype juction" exists. I hope we can avoid the outcome you describe, but that's in no way a given thing.

Im cynical but I too hope that geo engineering works- and I would also like to avoid the worse case outcome.

and yes, we may actually have to try geo eng seriously as well to ensure a habitable planet.

Precisely, this is in fact what happens most of the time.

Geoengineering, if implemented, will definitely be responsible for some deaths, suffering, and negative environmental changes. But the alternative, doing nothing while on current trajectory, is going to be much worse.

Any model of atmospheric carbon dioxide which is sufficiently accurate for generating public policy should suffice in predicting the results. After all, the model itself should not care what simulated means are being employed in increasing or reducing the amount of said compound, only its' effect at each concentration level.

all of which would have to re-work to account for the new entropy being added to the system, and its intended effects.

And this gets further complicated by different methods to change the environment.

Unless a climate scientist corrects me, its not as simple as just plugging in a x=x-c.

And that adds more complexity to the model too, not to mention the change in all the data - before G-eng, after G-eng.

Just as most folks prefer to medicate their health issues away rather than making lifestyle changes, by the same token we're going to be living in a more and more over-engineered environment, with each "solution" leading to more "unintended consequences".

I'm not campaigning, I'm cooking near the fire.

I make assumptions about the world, and in the end I realized the best way for me to hold myself honest, is to make a prediction and then see how it pans out.

This is one of the predictions I am confident enough about that I can moan about it on HN.

I hope I am wrong, that either some technique is actually found where pumping MORE heat into a heat engine makes it cooler, or people ditch the idea.

But this is not about conservation or global warming campaigning. I think the ship has sailed on that one.

This is just a prediction about a new product.

It's not the waste heat that's killing us. Sure, given enough energy usage, just the generated heat would become a problem for the planet, but we're far from there. Like hundreds of years far, at minimum. Right now we're fighting with the heat insulation we inadvertently wrapped ourselves in.

Some would prefer we get away from carbon-based energy entirely. Global warming is one way to argue for that.

If we find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we can continue to use carbon-based energy and that upsets some people.

Nuclear energy has nearly zero carbon footprint, though. With the closed nuclear cycle (breeders) uranium will last for millions of years.

So? Does that mean you shouldn't try and undo some of the damage?

It makes no sense to first burn coal and then try to suck out the 400 PPM CO2 from ambient air. And where are you even going to store it?

Many of the solutions being proposed are simply more thoughtful forms of climate engineering, designed with a better understanding of the system's inputs and outputs.

The law of unintended consequences will play a big part here, because the climate is a terrifyingly complex system. But, at this point, it is reasonable to make assertions about big picture inputs and outputs (eg., more/less CO2 = warmer/cooler global temperatures).

So, climate engineering is something that has been going on for a very long time, even if it was not called that. It will continue being a thing, albeit hopefully in a much more directed and thoughtful way.

https://climatecolab.org/contests/2017/carbon-pricing/c/prop...

https://github.com/DennisBPeterson/Climatecoin

I presented an earlier version at MIT's Solve:Fuel conference:

https://solve.mit.edu/articles/check-out-our-solve-challenge...

Any solution must somehow be a net negative in the long and medium term - and must also not have complex unpredictable knock on effects.

To give you an idea of how often mankind tries this - before the internet there was a time where london's dogs were so Onerous they felt that it would be a good idea to pour oil over the water.

Hindsight is of course 20/20, my point being that healthy scepticism and a high bar for evidence are the watchwords.

Have been wondering about this sentence since I read it, it seems there must be multiple typos in it for it to make sense...eg "London's docks were so odorous..." (makes a kind of sense, during the Great Stink chemicals were dumped in the sewers to reduce the smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink ... not oil I think though?). Is that the incident you meant?

Our environment built itself out of eons of incremental changes using self replicating systems using the entirety of habitable surface area.

I think its extremely unlikely that there will be a single one time way of removing carbon from the air (I'd bet on it).

So we will be left with constant and continuous systems cleaning the air.

Instead of not mucking it up in the first place.

----

You should also consider that the moment people start selling Geo engineering, they will also sell permission to keep doing what we are doing.

So the solution seems to be to spend more on cleaning the air, and allowing us to pollute it further at the same time.

In such a scenario I see things going MORE wrong, with unanticipated effects going on to create more damage.

I'm sure that we could come up with CO2-capture devices that are far more efficient than plants.[0] But the thing is, plants make copies of themselves ;)

0) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13237

If you convert it into plastics, it's eventually a bunch of CO2 captured into a landfill.

If you want a reason for optimism, eventually those two will more clearly interlinked. The question is whether we can avoid damaging the planet before the survival of humanity depends on doing so.