All of the "climate engineering interventions" people keep trotting out that don't actually remove carbon from the air end up making things radically, disastrously worse.
We know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, in bulk, with super-plentiful olivine. Cutting off emissions and deploying olivine works. Almost anything else ends up doing no net good, at best, and funnels us deeper into the hole.
Soluble iron compounds scattered over the open ocean could help. Any way to get the sulfur hexafluoride and HFCs out of the air would be an important contribution, because even getting CO2 content down to pre-industrial level would not be enough; those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem.
I have no idea why this has been down-voted. Sure, it's a strong opinion but that's what HN is all about.
Couple of questions:
- Do we have any estimates yet on how long olivine would take to be effective?
- Can we do HFC-capture in a similar way to carbon capture? Would this be more productive?
The CO2 capture capacity of olivine is well understood. You just need to get enough of it out there, wet, stirred, and exposed to air or surface water, i.e. on beaches. It will take many millions of tons, but we have that, or access to it.
Of course it would do little good if we continued pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate at the same time.
Getting the SF6 out of the atmosphere is a tougher nut. The present load already accounts for 10% of forcing. There are current efforts to phase out its use, and suck it out of the equipment it is used in.
The HFCs in current use, if all vented, would have as strong an effect as all the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. Collecting it all up and destroying it is a huge responsibility. Probably most that is in cars, window A/C units, and refrigerators will end up vented.
> those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem.
If by big you mean 1/5 of the problem, ok. But that is really not big enough to remove the focus from the other 4/5 And the way those gases work on the long term, in that the amount of them on the atmosphere is proportional to the speed of emission, instead of total emissions makes any change of focus from CO2 actually harmful to solving the problem.
And by the way, half of the non-CO2 emissions are methane, that comes mostly from fossil fuels mining and handling, and 2/3 of the rest are nitrous oxides, that comes almost entirely from fossil fuel burning. So "big" is really, really pushing it.
Big, meaning that even eliminating all of the excess CO2, would not get us back to the pre-industrial heat-forcing condition. We have reasons not to want to take CO2 concentration below that point, but to want forcing to reach that point.
Just getting the excess CO2 out is a big enough job, and one responsive enough to known practical measures, that it leaves some time for research on the tails, if we start now.
Nothing about this unfolding disaster is small, or about any measure to counter it.
> Big, meaning that even eliminating all of the excess CO2
Well, it gets you >87% of the way, and stabilizes there as long as emissions do not grow. Where going to 97% depends on lots of changes on agriculture, and only the last 3% is about the gases you cite.
Of course, for 100% you will need to cure all the causes. But "87% solved and not getting any worse" does really not sound like an emergency. I maintain that changing any focus away from CO2 is a mistake.
It is fortunate that you are not in charge of efforts to replace use of SF6 in current high-voltage electrical equipment; or to phase out HFCs, and to ensure that the HFCs replaced or in decommissioned equipment are destroyed safely. Each person working on those has more effect than any thousand working on carbon. But we also need all those thousands working on carbon.
According to EPA, just three companies release the overwhelming bulk of problem fluorine-containing gases today. It is much easier to get three companies to change what they do than to get tens of thousands in line.
In practice, carbon is such a big problem that a solution will only come very slowly. Anything that can be done more quickly has outsize impact.
Nickel is a concern, but seems not to make the the whole idea untenable.
In particular, the alternative of spreading powdered olivine on cropland will require monitoring. Different sources of olivine have different amounts of nickel and chromium, and the sources with acceptable levels can be favored for that use. Use on beaches and shallows seems to tolerate more. There is no reason to do one but not the other, and dozens of other measures besides.
We know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, in bulk, with super-plentiful olivine. Cutting off emissions and deploying olivine works. Almost anything else ends up doing no net good, at best, and funnels us deeper into the hole.
Soluble iron compounds scattered over the open ocean could help. Any way to get the sulfur hexafluoride and HFCs out of the air would be an important contribution, because even getting CO2 content down to pre-industrial level would not be enough; those other manufactured gasses trap heat thousands or tens of thousands of times better than CO2 does, and are already a big part of the Problem.