That’s the moral of the story for all climate control: don’t produce bad stuff, if you have to try to get rid of it as close as possible (temporally and spatially) to the source because once it’s diluted in the atmosphere it becomes insanely more difficult.
Global CO2 levels are at 450 parts per million meaning you need to actively filter 2,222 parts of air to get to one measly CO2 molecule in the wild. It’s horrible inefficient (expensive and slow). But if you don’t produce the CO2 or if you tackle it right then and there at the site of production where it is at much higher concentrations, you still have a chance.
If you want to filter plastic out of the ocean, you want to filter it out of the input stream, where it's concentrated, not out of the end product of diluting the input stream with the entire ocean.
Interestingly, the wikipedia article on the Patch is headlined by a disclaiming of a very similar mistake:
> Despite the common public perception of the patch existing as giant islands of floating garbage, its low density (4 particles per cubic metre (3.1/cu yd)) prevents detection by satellite imagery, or even by casual boaters or divers in the area.
> So, why not produce a bunch of OH? Because OH has a half life of less than a second. Hmm.
These two statements seem to contradict? If the chemokinetics of OH generation is less than a second, then how can it be used up in the atmosphere?
Assuming the <1 second kinetic is correct, there must be a dynamic equilibrium producing it in the atmosphere to begin with. In such a case OH is not truly being used up in any real sense. It's whatever that generates OH is being used up, and that can be artificially boosted.
In that <1 second, the OH can react with methane or CO. The more CO in the atmosphere, the more likely it will find the OH before the methane.
It is like throwing breadcrumbs to ducks and geese. The more ducks in the pond, the less crumbs the geese will get.
Methane levels don't impact OH levels (it is always consumed immediately). OH generation levels can impact methane levels. CO levels can compete with methane for OH as is it generated.
You are correct that OH radicals regenerate, but more methane => "breakdown capacity" becomes overwhelmed.
This is known as zeroth order kinetics, similar to alcohol metabolism. Drinking 2 beers = 3 hours until sobriety; 4 beers = 6 hours. Your liver has a fixed capacity, so drinking twice as much doesn't double the metabolic rate.
I'll add that you're also entirely correct: if there's some long lived chemical that catalyzes OH formation, sending that up instead might be a good remedy IMO. If there's no collateral toxicity...
It definitely is in some contexts. It's often cited in CO2 equivalent over time. Methane start off to be something like 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Then as it decays to CO2 its impact is that of CO2 but time has to be accounted for. So for every ton of methane, you can estimate an equivalent CO2 tonnage over then next, say, 50 years.
A quick search for methane co2 equivalent reveals a site claiming methane has 25 times more global warming potential than CO2 over 100 years.
https://ghginstitute.org/2010/07/13/what-is-different-about-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone
"Ozone reacts directly with some hydrocarbons such as aldehydes and thus begins their removal from the air, but the products are themselves key components of smog. Ozone photolysis by UV light leads to production of the hydroxyl radical HO• and this plays a part in the removal of hydrocarbons from the air, but is also the first step in the creation of components of smog such as peroxyacyl nitrates, which can be powerful eye irritants. The atmospheric lifetime of tropospheric ozone is about 22 days; its main removal mechanisms are being deposited to the ground, the above-mentioned reaction giving HO•, and by reactions with OH and the peroxy radical HO2•."
Making more ozone is quite easy: take a UV-C disinfection lamp as used for an aquarium, and pump air through it.
At some concentration, the ozone itself could be hazardous, and it would be messy to clean up the soot from the smog as it falls.
I do wonder whether a little more surface ozone might help to make more hydroxyl to speed up the cleanup effort, especially if paired with a HEPA filter.
Also the following statement surprisingly lacks any mention of anything related to atmospheric or earth scientists:
>We seek funding for a world-first trial in Australian waters under scientific supervision, in cooperation with the marine biology community and with industries including insurance, fishing, tourism, energy and shipping.
If you look at the “official” plans, they all rely on the emergence of magical new technologies. So we’d better start testing even the less promising approaches. Shotgun strategies are needed.
Of course, at the moment, many are seeking to ban research science in this area because it is viewed as morally dangerous [1].
[1] https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/01/17/climate-scientis...
I myself am an atmospheric chemist and no one has banned me from doing scientic research.
If no one is upset with your particular atmospheric research, maybe you aren’t ambitious enough. Just kidding— I’d love to know what you are working on.
I guess you mean "we all know that almost no current government has the political courage to do what is necessary so that we decarbonize in time".
Or " we all know that we don't have the fortitude to do to do what is necessary so that we decarbonize in time". => that version is better if governments do what their public opinion is willing to do.
To fight in the WWI and WII, the most advanced economies of those times turned in less than two years into war economies, where more than 50% of the GDP was directed to the war effort.
True for Germany, France, the UK plus, for WWII, the USA, the USSR, Japan.
The Apollo program amounted during the 60s to 4% of the US GDP, just for the political sake of keeping up with the USSR.
If we considered - as we should - the dereliction of climate and the on-going massive reduction of biodiversity as an existential threat, we would act accordingly.
We can decarbonize in time. But we don't want to "look up", e.g. to listen to the Science.
Australia is having huge fires and large floods every year now - but still elect a government in denial of the causes.
In the USA, the natural disasters are rising sharply in frequency and magnitude (current drought in the West, hurricanes etc).
Etc etc.
When it will become unbearable, we will at last act accordingly. The solutions are there already.
There are many breakthroughs (batteries for example, to store surplus of renewables energies so that it can be used at will when necessary). Far many more would occur if we invested money in research and R&D.
We ought not to bet on a hypothetical magic bullet. Not that we shouldn't fund those research. Startups with small odds to succeeded easily raise VC money since a success would offer a huge ROI.
But the trap is to bet the future of the world on a hypothetical magic bullet when the solutions already exist. We just don't want to do what necessary to implement them.
The USA, Canada, Australia for example emit 3 times more CO2 than France per inhabitant. However, the loss of biodiversity is as fast (and maybe higher) in France (which governments do very little to tackle gashouse emissions).
Let me know what you think of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/25/magazine/vacl...
Haven't we done enough harm yet?
It seems like a lot of people conflate "out of control" with "I don't understand it".
You know exactly what the topic is an you are pretending not to - for some reason.
There is limited OH in the atmosphere. As a result, more methane “uses up” the OH. That means that increased methane in the atmosphere results in increased lifetimes of methane. The reason carbon monoxide (CO) has three times the warming potential of CO2 is because CO uses OH, increasing methane!
So, why not produce a bunch of OH? Because OH has a half life of less than a second. Hmm.
However, aerosolized plant terpenes (such as produced by wetlands) are a natural source of OH in the atmosphere.
Interesting. Perhaps this should change the calculation of the carbon credits due to terpene generating biomes (above and beyond the carbon sequestered by the plants). Or, maybe we could mass produce terpenes to clean out atmospheric methane (e.g., after a pipeline leak or something).
Anyone know more?