Report: Direct removal of carbon dioxide from air likely not viable

Direct Air Capture, or DAC, (1) uses chemicals to absorb carbon dioxide from the open air, (2) concentrates the carbon dioxide, and then (3) stores it safely underground.

So what's wrong with dumping paper to landfill instead of recycling it?

This clearly meets the definition of DAC - (1) the chlorophyll in the leaves is the chemical used (2) manufacture of paper represents the concentration of the carbon in the form of paper fibres (3) dumping the paper in landfill represents storing the CO2 underground.

This is old-tech tried-and-tested carbon sequestration, but unfortunately it's not glamorous or expensive enough to get much interest (not to mention the fact that it flies in the face of what our governments have been preaching for the last 10 years!)

"We humans should not kid ourselves that we can pour all the carbon dioxide we wish into the atmosphere right now and pull it out later at little cost,"

Exactly. CO2 removal is expensive. But don't worry. CO2 is not causing much warming, if any. It was warmer in the 1930's, 1k years ago, 3k years ago, and for most of the last 10k years. Right now we are simply warming slightly from the little ice age, one of the handful of cooler periods since the last ice age. Relax.

Plants do it every day.

So what's wrong with dumping paper to landfill instead of recycling it?

Paper decomposes into methane which is worse than co2. To increase the length of time of sequestration you need to convert the paper (and other wood waste for that matter) into char wich is much longer-lived and doesn't tend to produce methane when and if it does break down. We should actually be intentionally burning down the biggest and oldest forests we can find and then plowing the charred remains into the ground then replanting them if we want to clean up the air. A newly planted and growing forest takes more co2 out of the air than anything besides maybe the ocean. Spraying down massive amounts of insecticide all over the world would be another good way to halt global warming. Insects produce many times more ghg's than humans do, and they produce the really bad ones like methane, in addition to co2. Ants and termites are the two biggest offenders. Besides, they are really a pain on a picnic.

oh, geez. Yeah, good idea, spraying down massive amounts of insecticide all over the world to kill all the global warming insects. No negative impacts from that at all.

This is exactly what scares me about all this Global Warming talk. What else are we going to destroy trying to 'cool down' our planet warmed by evil humans.

oh, geez. Yeah, good idea, spraying down massive amounts of insecticide all over the world to kill all the global warming insects. No negative impacts from that at all.

This is exactly what scares me about all this Global Warming talk. What else are we going to destroy trying to 'cool down' our planet warmed by evil humans.

Uh dude. I think GSwift7 was joking.

oh, geez. Yeah, good idea, spraying down massive amounts of insecticide all over the world to kill all the global warming insects. No negative impacts from that at all.

This is exactly what scares me about all this Global Warming talk. What else are we going to destroy trying to 'cool down' our planet warmed by evil humans.

Uh dude. I think GSwift7 was joking.

Of course he was joking, but there ARE those out there who DO think they can and should 'fix' global warming, NOW!

Oh man, the moron patrol goes nuts. So what was said was: "In essence, the committee found that such a strategy would be far more expensive than simply preventing the emission of the carbon dioxide in the first place." In other words, don't pollute is cheaper than clean up after the fact.

Oh and ahh Green energy is clean.

oh, geez. Yeah, good idea, spraying down massive amounts of insecticide all over the world to kill all the global warming insects. No negative impacts from that at all.

This is exactly what scares me about all this Global Warming talk. What else are we going to destroy trying to 'cool down' our planet warmed by evil humans.

Uh dude. I think GSwift7 was joking.

Of course he was joking, but there ARE those out there who DO think they can and should 'fix' global warming, NOW!

Exactly the religion of man made global warming is the greatest con ever we should round up the hippies and vivesect them to find out what genetic abnormality causes this form of sub human to exist (apart from the fact they are liberalls and vegiterian). Afterall why worry about cleaning the seas land and air when any problems will only come about after we die of old age?

So speaketh St. MarkyMark, high priest of the Wattites spouting out forth bulldust and the true meaning of the deniers gospel.
As he wandered in the wasteland of his mind for 40 days, and yeah, with the patience of (Nut)Job
found the true meaning of the dark side.

Responsible logging practices would help control carbon in the atmosphere in the long term assuming emission reduction efforts are followed in tandem. DAC isn't an impossibility nor is it necessarily expensive, it simply takes far longer periods of time than can be reasonably utilized by fickle political driven industrial systems.

So what's wrong with dumping paper to landfill instead of recycling it?

because paper uses a lot of other resources (e.g. loads of fresh water). CO2 is not the only thing to consider here. And when stuff rots on a landfill the CO2^gets released, too (though a lot of stuff in landfills does not rot much)

DAC is not really feasible because you need to put the energy released by the creation of the CO2 in the first place back in in order to capture it. since that release was likely by motors (biological or mechanical) the efficiency was on the order of 30%. So getting it back will require at least 3 times as much energy.

Then there are the dangers of large underground CO2 storage (as long as we're talking storage in gaseous/pressurized form). Ruptures could wipe life in large areas and the integrity of the system would have to be maintained virtually forever. I'm not aware of any technology that is guaranteed to work 100% for that long.

oh, geez. Yeah, good idea

Uh dude. I think GSwift7 was joking

Yes, I was being deliberately absurd. The idea of using some kind of industrial method to remove CO2 from the air isn't any better than what I suggested. However, as SH pointed out, trees are actually very good at soaking up CO2 (and other nasty things too, as a matter of fact) from the air. The thing is, you can't just let the tree grow to maturity, then die and decompose and get eaten by insects on the forest floor. You actually do need to do something with the tree before that happens, like either burn it into char or cut it down and make something long lasting from it. It seems counter-intuitive, but burning a tree actually sequesters CO2. If you look at the remains of a forest fire, all the black stuff on the ground is carbon that was absorbed by plants which will not go back into the atmosphere for a long time. Natural cycles of fire enrich the soil with carbon, which is good.

And the US govt rushes to put out forest fires.

I think it's more accurate to say that they try to control them. Letting the fires burn naturally would be better unless you live or work in the middle of one.

The big hot fires that nature provides are really good for carbon sequestration because they burn so hot that they produce really good char. A really hot fire can even char some of the boimass in the topsoil. That's even better. Of course they temporarily emit some co2 from the burning, but that's more than made up for in a relatively short amount of time when the forst grows back. Fires also temporarily cut down the insect populations, which is also good for ghg control I guess.

As stated above, if you are worried about co2 then it's better to not produce it in the first place. Trying to use some kind of industrial method to remove it from the air isn't something we should count on. It would be like using paper towels to clean up a flood, which is why I joked about pesticides. How about air conditioning for the arctic?lol

So G7, you have finally come about to the conclusion that CO2 needs sequestration? And R2 seems to be in favor of burning all the forests. Hum, we could convert all of the forests to charcoal and bury it. That would sequester tons of CO2. It's kind of the opposite of digging for coal or drilling for oil. Of course if we just stopped using coal, we wouldn't need to burn up forests to make charcoal to bury. Additionally we also need forest for oxygen so I would quit using coal ASAP.

So G7, you have finally come about to the conclusion that CO2 needs sequestration?

I'm not sure about that yet. CO2 is certain to have some effect on global climate, but it isn't the only human climate influence. Some people seem to think that CO2 is the only human factor that is causing climate change, but that certainly is not true. Right now we know that co2 is having, or will have, some effect. We also know that things are changing. What we don't know so much about is how much of the changes we are seeing are really caused by co2 and how much might be caused by other factors, such as land use. Urban expansion is happening at an exponential rate around the globe. Agriculture on ubelievably massive scales with irrigation and fertilization over entire regions. Agriculture also produces more aerosols than our automobiles and industry, and we don't know how they are affecting the climate, so we can't really say how much of climate change is from co2.

continued:

The amount of change that has happened in the past century is a given. It has already happened and we can measure it. Those changes have causes. Some of those causes are from humans. One of those human causes might be co2, but until we can figure out the relative influence of each of the other major cause factors, we can't say for certain how much impact we are seeing from co2. The amount of change is a fixed value. If part of that is from land use, then that is part that wasn't caused by co2. Maybe the thing we need to focus on is co2, but maybe we should really be looking at ways to minimize the footprint of cities or farms. If we really are headed for a disaster, as you fear, then we better make sure we are addressing all of the causes, not just the one that's been researched the most.

Maybe the thing we need to focus on is co2, but maybe we should really be looking at ways to minimize the footprint of cities or farms.

Our land use change is certainly a factor, but more on local scales. If you took all the road surfaces and roof surfaces we've built it sums up to less than 2% of the planet's surface.

Now other major land use changes, like the European deforestation are of significant impact.

Put all your research "points" into nano-tech folks. That could literally solve your perceived CO2 problem overnight.

Our land use change is certainly a factor, but more on local scales. If you took all the road surfaces and roof surfaces we've built it sums up to less than 2% of the planet's surface

If you look at photographs of the Earth from space at night time you get a better idea of the scale of urbanization. However, why would anyone assume that 2% isn't enough to make a difference in global temperature and then turn around and claim that manmade co2 does (+200 ppm = 0.02%). I was really talking about larger scale land use changes than roads and buildings though. Forestry, agriculture, man made lakes, watershed modifications, draining swamps, irrigating deserts. Each of those may be local or regional (however I think you underestimate the range of those effects. Agricultural aerosols, for example, can be transported nearly two thousand miles on the wind) but if you sum them all up then you certainly have global scale changes.

Like a school girl seeing a PONY for the first time: OMG! G7 your a greeny!. And that implies you left of center and OMG; R2 is going to hate your guts.

Ok, kidding aside. I fly a lot. Ever since I was a very young kid and alway across country. It is amazing how much people have blocked off and urbanized every corner of the world. Urbinzation has changed earth. And that is effecting climate no doubt. If R2 would give in, and QC would give in an recognize we have a catastrophic problem with our atmosphere,
maybe we can make a change.

So G7, you have finally come about to the conclusion that CO2 needs sequestration? And R2 seems to be in favor of burning all the forests. Hum, we could convert all of the forests to charcoal and bury it. That would sequester tons of CO2. It's kind of the opposite of digging for coal or drilling for oil. Of course if we just stopped using coal, we wouldn't need to burn up forests to make charcoal to bury. Additionally we also need forest for oxygen so I would quit using coal ASAP.

Oil consumption is just as bad as coal if not much worse. Geothermal is pretty bad to, it releases amounts of stored substances from the ground.

The solution is to change how we live. Only then we can move forward. We have to leave this capitalist elite system.

To Howhot:

I'm not sure it's accurate to say that we have a catastrophic problem. We have some issues to deal with in some regions, but the changes are going to happen so gradually that it shouldn't be hard to adapt. If we can adapt to very sudden changes that have huge impacts, like global banking problems, tsunami or a war, then climate change should be easy to deal with.

The other area where I disagree with the AGW concensus is when they place 100% of blame on co2. co2 is only partly responsible for the changes we've seen in the past century. If we ignore the other causes then we can't decide whether we can or should try to fix them. We also can't priortize between the various causes if we don't figure out the relative magnitude of change from each cause. If land use is the bigges issue then fixing co2 won't have much effect and we will have wasted time and money.

The solution is to change how we live. Only then we can move forward. We have to leave this capitalist elite system.

Who is stopping you from changing the way you live?
Turn off your electricity, your running water, your heat, etc. and return to the simple life.

It is amazing how much people have blocked off and urbanized every corner of the world.

You must not have flown that much. There are vast regions of the earth that are mostly uninhabited.

If you look at photographs of the Earth from space at night time you get a better idea of the scale of urbanization.

Light travels far further and is diffused through the atmosphere. It appears that we've covered the entire planet when in reality the majority of the image is diffused light from concentrated points. If land use change, in regards to asphalt and concrete were so drastic it would be seen from space during the day.

However, why would anyone assume that 2% isn't enough to make a difference in global temperature and then turn around and claim that manmade co2 does (+200 ppm = 0.02%).

Well that isn't my stance. Land use change is primarily a measure of albedo, where as a change in atmosphere is a change in content. The two work in conjunction but, to widely different affect. Land use change is also constrained to a two dimensional impact whilst CO2 concentration affect volumes of air.

Light travels far further and is diffused through the atmosphere.

The following page from NASA Goddard has a map where they corected for the bloom effect you are talking about.

http://science.na...15nov_1/

Note: that's ten year old data.

Well, there is something called the "Scientific Method" that has been used to deduce that GLOBAL rise in temperature is caused by rising CO2 levels, and that rise correlates perfectly with human productivity and development. Global Warming is man made and that is a fact. It's a by product of mans use of fossil fuel for energy. It's been growing since the 1800 since coal heated home in England.

G7, R2. Don't be stupid. You will drag down the rest of earth in to stupidness advocating anti-AGW nonsense! Be productive, support cheap Solar, Wind, Algae, Hydro, Geothermal. Anything but what we are doing.

Global Warming is man made and that is a fact.

actually, it's a theory.

GLOBAL rise in temperature is caused by rising CO2 levels, and that rise correlates perfectly with human productivity and development

Any climatologist will tell you that only part of the warming is caused by co2, and the size of that part is still uncertain. The exact size of warming caused by co2 accounts for the range of model predictions. They do multiple model runs with different settings for the "forcing" of co2. If you would like to read up a little on the subject, I can suggest some very good sources. NOAA-NCDC and IPCC both have some fairly easy to read summaries of how the science is done.

The obviously incorrect assertion you are making is one of the things that makes "skeptics" go bonkers. If you actually listen to your own sources, in stead of making stuff up, you'll get people like me to listen to you more.

Well that isn't my stance. Land use change is primarily a measure of albedo, where as a change in atmosphere is a change in content

That's only partly true. As we've seen with the loss of the glacier on Mt Kilamonjaro, the effects of land use are not limited to albedo and are not trivial. The effects of changing the concentrations/composition of gases and aerosols near ground level can have a profound effect on regional climate, especially with industrial scale agriculture. Have you ever driven through a rural area when the farmers are tilling their fields after harvest? If you are in a relatively flat area you can see the vast dust clouds reaching high into the sky from miles away. In urban areas manmade heat output is significant too. Waterways that are warmed from industrial waste water, hundreds of thousands of airconditioners, automobiles, etc. You think irrigation is trivial but I've seen studies that say it isn't. Why is it so hard to say that co2 isn't the only player

Global Warming is man made and that is a fact.

According to experimental results just released from CERN, galactic cosmic rays have a huge effect on aerosols, cloud seeds, and cloud formation. In fact, their results seem to indicate that if you subtract the influence of cosmic rays from the climate signal, there isn't enough left to show any statistically significant change at all. And that means that human climate change is a myth. Once again though, I am always suspect of new studies that contradict all the other studies ever done.

I wonder if physorg will publish the new CERN statement?

back on topic...

There's an interesting statement on Watt's web site from a guy who is producing a direct air capture system. He was interviewed for the above article, but since the above people refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement they didn't get the full picture. The guy says that his company can do DAC for 1/10th the cost of the systems above and there's a photo of a pilot plant sized system. Here's the linkage:

http://wattsupwit...-of-co2/

Oh dear Gswift7, you should really stop taking notice of the prophet Watt and his school of little wattites. Do you have a link to the actual results from CERN, or are you just taking the info from Watts, which, when you look at it, find that the source is no other than Nigel Calder author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.
CERN themselves actually say that the effects of cloud formation are poorly understood (presumably thats why experiments on this are being carried out!), certainly no mention of"climate change is a myth"!
Despite observations showing Svenmarks' theory is dead and buried the lunatic fringe still try to salvage something from the ashes....

Here's a link to the original piece:

http://physicswor...ia/45950

The interview is done by Physicsworld wich is a website run by the Institute of Physics. The speaker is an actual CERN particle physicist by the name of Jasper Kirkby. He states that the idea for the experiment did come from Calder/Svenmark, and that theory is still credible enough that they attained 9 million euros to do a test of the theory at CERN (they don't mention the 9 mil in the video but you can look that up elsewhere like I did). You have to listen to the video to get the details. It's only about 7 minutes long. Near the end he says that they observed a large effect, and have been able to quantify it.

The full study results don't come out till later this Summer or Fall, but it looks like Svenmark's theory is correct. Bad news for the IPCC if that's the case. We will see.

...yep..and nothing about 'Global warming myth'! Svenmark's theory is correct? How? There has been absolutely no link between solar activity and global temperatures since the 1970's!

lol, you have misquoted me two times now, and even your two quotes don't match each other. I was being deliberately over-dramatic, just for fun, but what I said was in regard to human climate change, not climate change or global warming in general. I also included the magic word "if".

Interestingly though, I just saw another study along these exact same lines. The new one was just released in Geophysical Research Letters. Svensmark was a coauthor and they used the biggest accelerator in Denmark to run their experiment. They are still working on how big the impact is in the real world, but they are also claiming that they have observed with 100% certainty that cosmic rays cause ionization which leads to aerosol creation. Two groups reaching the same observation at the same time is interesting. The really big question is still unanswered though; How large is the effect in the real world? If it's 1% change in cloud cover, that's huge.

so much for your previous statement that Svensmark was proven wrong. Yeah, go ahead and try to salvage something from the ashes of your belief that his theory was dead and burried. Lunatic fringe, huh? Nice one.

For some reason the journal web page is broken, but here's a link:

http://www.agu.or...36.shtml

I assume they'll fix the page eventually.

Aside from our usual debates, there's an interesting side story here, if you read between the lines.

The CERN team released an early statement, months before final publication, at a point where they are not ready to present their final results. Then just the NEXT day, another team doing the EXACT SAME experiment gets published in GRL. Interesting, huh? The politics of science at work, as teams compete to be the first to publish and therefor get credit for results. This could even turn out to be a landmark finding, so it's not trivial who gets credit. It sounds to me like the CERN team is working on a much more quantitative analysis versus the Danish team who was only looking for yes/no cause and effect.

p.s.

wanna place any bets on whether the new Svensmark study or the interview from CERN will make it onto physorg? The silence is deafening.

...and you still miss THE point! The proponents that say Svenmark's theory proves there is another mechanism to explain global warming rather than AGW have shown to be TOTALLY incorrect. In case you didn't get it first time, there is NO link between solar activity and the global temperature increases since the 1970's....none..it is an ex-theory,
..it has ceased to be..it has turned up it's mortal coil...it's snuffed it..

Uh, don't you think that somebody should actually investigate it before you claim that there's no link? Since it's a newly discovered mechanism, the lack of data does not indicate that there is a lack of physical evidence, it just means that we haven't looked for it yet. It's like DNA evidence at a crime scene prior to the discovery of DNA. Just because we didn't know it existed, that doesn't mean it's not there. Now that we know what to look for, we can actually look for ways to measure the effect and decide if what you say is true or not. I say that we don't know yet. That's what science is about. These people are saying that cosmic rays definitely create clouds. It must have SOME effect on climate. The question is whether that effect is big enough to be detectable or not. Just because you don't see a linear correlation in the past 30 years, that doesn't mean there isn't a correlation. If we are able to quantify the effect of cosmic rays, then we can better constrain other effects.

continued:

If the lack of a continuous, uninterupted trend directly linking cosmic rays to climate is enough to disqualify the theory, then the present break in the trend of global warming is enough to disqualify the co2 theory. That's obviously nonsense though. Climate is non-linear and chaotic on short and medium time scales, and maybe even on long time scales. There are a number of first order forcings that interact with one another as well as feedback loops and before you can single out any of the first order forcings as a direct cause of a change, you must first rule out the influence of all the other forcings. Combinations of forcings can produce positively reinforcing or negative cancelling effects on each other too. To say that cosmic rays have an effect does not mean that co2 does not have an effect. It just means that there's a part we don't understand yet. It means that our assumptions need to be modified.

If you are unable to name any other first order forcing besides co2 then you really need to sit down and think about that for a few minutes. There are several first order forcings on climate besides co2, and some of them are known to be way larger in magnitude than co2. If cosmic rays do have a noticable effect on climate then we have one more first order forcing to add to the list. That doesn't mean that the global temperature is a slave to the cosmic ray flux. lol. You warmists are really funny sometimes. You just have this tunnel vision that seems to allow only co2 as a climate forcing. It's like some kind of strange selective blindness, and any time another forcing is mentioned you get all bent out of shape and uncomfortable, like it hurts your feelings or something. Jeez, calm down a bit.

Until we can explain the start/end of ice ages, there's some big piece we don't have yet. The science continues.

Damn G7, Just cover your ears and sing "LA,LA,LA". The build up of CO2 by mankind burning fossil fuel in it's development beginning in the Industrial age in 1800, has sent out climate into a historically un-natural state.

The Warmists aren't funny. Just very freaking concerned, while you are not.

GeeesusSwift7- There IS NO correlation between solar activity and temperatures since the 1970's, Svenmarks theory is NOT a driver in global warming! No one has said that CO2 is the only forcer, you love making stuff up don't you.
Face it, you've been rumbled...get over it and get a life...or at least provide some evidence that solar activity and global temperature show correlation since the 1970's...oh wait YOU CAN"T!!

GeeesusSwift7- There IS NO correlation between solar activity and temperatures since the 1970's

Yeah, but there was a perfect correlation before that. So, I GUESS there's something other than solar activity that drives climate cycles. Wow, imagine that. More than one thing drives climate. Care to explain what the climate has been following since the 70's? With the past decade failing to follow the predictions of the co2 doomsayers, it certainly can't just be co2. Oh, unless you're willing to say that there are natural variations which can hid a trend for a short period of time (which I believe is true). So, co2 might be having exactly the predicted effect, or things might be worse than predicted, or it might be a big hoax. If we don't find any other major climate influences besides the ones we already know about in the next 20 years, I will be VERY surprised.

Svensmark has an s in the middle, if you care, but I'm the last one to complain about spelling here.

Yeah, but there was a perfect correlation before that. So, I GUESS there's something other than solar activity that drives climate cycles.

Ask any credible scientist, they will tell you.

Svensmark has an s in the middle, if you care, but I'm the last one to complain about spelling here.

You're doing a good job of it!

G7, G7, G7... Seriously? Are you that out of touch?