Sunday, 2 April 2023

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

As the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has all the brightest and best environmental scientists on it, when it speaks regarding Climate Change it should be taken heed of and they are warning that humanity is on thin ice and to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to do 'everything, everywhere, all at once'.
Obviously they mean measures to reduce the amount of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere but to also suck out as much as we can of the CO2 we have already foolishly released and set the Globe towards a rise of between 2.4C and 2.8C.
Earlier this year, a report by researchers at the University of Oxford calculated that each year we pump around 36.6 billion tonnes of COs into the atmosphere and the best the current removal techniques we have remove 2 billion tonnes, or 5% of that emitted which shows that we really have to ramp up our efforts.
Techniques currently on the table for large scale increases include Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) which involves capturing and storing underground the Carbon at source before it is released, Direct Air Capture (DAC) which pulls CO2 directly out of the air and again stores it underground and Ocean Alkalinisation which involves adding alkaline materials to the ocean to increase the amount of CO2 it can take in.
Experts consider the CDR and DAC solutions would require enormous areas of land and the CDR method  doesn’t actually remove any CO2 from the atmosphere, it only prevents more emissions from going into the atmosphere in the first place and ocean alkalisation is far too risky for the marine environment and think it may not even work anyway.
The experts seem to be looking towards a mix of CDR to stop us stupidly making the situation worse and DAC to at least try and draw back some of CO2 we have released already and are urging increasing numbers of facilities around the world as what we currently have is woefully far below what is needed.
We do seem to be entering a phase, after decades of procrastination and head in the sand politics from our Global leaders, where we not only have to stop polluting our Planet but undo the damage using unknown and untried methods on a large scale.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You consider it a political issue?