Bad Samaritans and Bad News

I don't believe there are many sincere climate 'skeptics' still out there. Those who choose to misinform and deceive their listeners are doing so because of a political or economic (read greed) agenda. It disgusts me. They have they turned traitor to the planet and all that lives on it... for purely selfish reasons, or willful ignorance. They are bad Samaritans.


The truth is out there. The situation is worse than predicted. For 150 years we have spewed megaton after megaton of CO2 into our atmosphere. As our understanding evolves we are discovering that all that CO2 has set in motion a set of events that could actually lead to our extinction! The CO2 will remain there for centuries if we let it.


I also find it amusing that there is still stiff opposition to nuclear power. Their main argument is a good one... what do you do with the waste? But what do we do with the waste produced by fossil fuel powered plants? At this point is it any less lethal? If we are to preserve anything close to our current way of life (while helping others achieve it) we must find ways to generate and deliver terawatts of carbon free power within the next decade or two. That will require use of all alternatives, including nuclear.

And we're going to need carbon capture to scrub some of the CO2 our of the atmosphere.

Professor Turney said: “The results here are quite startling and, importantly, they suggest sea levels will rise significantly higher than anticipated and that stabilizing global average temperatures at 2˚C above pre-industrial levels may not be considered a ‘safe’ target as envisaged by the European Union and others.


"The inevitable conclusion is emission targets will have to be lowered further still.”

Exeter scientists publish climate change warning

To add to our woes, peak oil is here or just around the corner.

There may be blood.

The Hard Way

If we fail to elect leaders who are willing to make hard choices reality will eventually step in and do it for us. 


Check out Part 1 - Kurt Cobb on Navigating Collapse (23 minutes) and Part 2 - Kurt Cobb on Alternative Energy & Climate Change (27 minutes) at Resource Insights

Carbon Capture II

To make the CO2 bricks, Belcher and her graduate students modified baker's yeast to express genes that are normally found in sea creatures like abalones, which make hard carbonate shells. Carbon dioxide is bubbled into water, and then combined with mineral ions to make solid carbonate materials. Enzymes in the yeast help the mineralization process.


The process can produce two pounds of carbonate for every pound of captured CO2, according to MIT.

New Process Uses Genetically Modified Yeast to Turn Carbon Dioxide Emissions Into Bricks for Construction

Let's see... we need to pull ~32 gigatonnes per year out of the atmosphere to remain at ~390 ppm... that's 70400000000000 pounds of bricks a year, providing we continue emissions at today's rate.

Related post
Carbon Capture

Carbon Capture

Invisible carbon pumps
A group of oceanic micro-organisms just might prove a surprising ally in the fight against climate change

UNDERSTANDING how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide is crucial to understanding the role of that gas in the climate. It is rather worrying, then, that something profound may be missing from that understanding. But if Jiao Nianzhi of Xiamen University in China is right, it is. For he suggests there is a lot of carbon floating in the oceans that has not previously been noticed. It is in the form of what is known as refractory dissolved organic matter and it has been put there by a hitherto little-regarded group of creatures called aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophic bacteria (AAPB). If Dr Jiao is right, a whole new “sink” for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been discovered.
....
Dr Jiao and his colleagues propose that AAPB, and possibly other, similar microbes, have a predominant role in pumping carbon into a pool of compounds that cannot be turned back into carbon dioxide by living creatures, thereby building up a large reservoir that keeps carbon out of the atmosphere. If that idea is confirmed, it will need to be incorporated into the computer models used to understand the Earth’s carbon cycle and its effect on the climate. But it also raises a more radical thought. The newly discovered microbial carbon pump could provide a novel way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, should that ever be deemed necessary to combat climate change.
...If AAPB could be recruited, they would provide an alternative way of getting the sea to lock up CO2. How that might be done is obscure at the moment, for the organisms are still barely understood. Moreover, there would surely be side-effects to stimulating their activity. Those side-effects, though, might be more bearable than the ones associated with iron seeding. Only further research can find that out.

Climate change is affecting the phytoplantion, which is one component of the AAPB food supply.
Declining algae threatens ocean food chain: study

Since 1950, phytoplankon mass has dropped by about 40 percent, most likely due to the accelerating impact of global warming
, they reported.

So here's a potential forcing, a feedback whatever you want to call it...where the warmer it gets the less effective a key natural carbon capture mechanism becomes.

---

DOE giving $575 million in carbon capture grants

This may save the day

STEP Carbon Capture
New solar-powered process removes CO2 from the air and stores it as solid carbon

So ok, if the above technology is for real (patent applied for) it's not Oh My God We're All Gonna Die time. Personally I think the government should buy this patent, manufacture it, and deploy it.

But sustainability and living in a world with zero population growth is still something we're gonna have to learn to do. We need to get to a place where invading other countries and ignoring the fact that millions of children die of starvation every year... is unthinkable.
Among developed countries, the US appears to be way behind in this cultural evolution.