From the European Association of Geochemistry | Wally Broeker, the first person to alert the world to Global Warming, has called for atmospheric CO2 to be captured and stored underground. He says that Carbon Capture, combined with limits on fossil fuel emissions, is the best way to avoid global warming getting out of control over the next fifty years. Professor Broeker (Columbia University, New York) made the call during his presentation to the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where 150 scientists are meeting to discuss Carbon Capture and Storage.
He was presenting an analysis which showed that the world has been cooling very slowly, over the last 51 million years, but that human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.
“We have painted ourselves into a tight corner. We can’t reduce our reliance of fossil fuels quickly enough, so we need to look at alternatives.
“One of the best ways to deal with this is likely to be carbon capture – in other words, putting the carbon back where it came from, underground. There has been great progress in capturing carbon from industrial processes, but to really make a difference we need to begin to capture atmospheric CO2. Ideally, we could reach a stage where we could control the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, like you control your central heating. Continually increasing CO2 levels means that we will need to actively manage CO2 levels in the environment, not just stop more being produced. The technology is proven, it just needs to be brought to a stage where it can be implemented.
Wally Broeker was speaking at the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik, where 150 scientists are meeting to discuss how best CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere as part of a programme to reduce global warming.
Meeting co-convener Professor Eric Oelkers (University College London and University of Toulouse) commented:
“Capture is now at a crossroads; we have proven methods to store carbon in the Earth but are limited in our ability to capture this carbon directly from the atmosphere. We are very good at capturing carbon from factories and power stations, but because roughly two-thirds of our carbon originates from disperse sources, implementing direct air capture is key to solving this global challenge”.
The international Carbon Conference takes place in Reykjavik, Iceland, from 25-29 August 2014. Conference website, https://www.or.is/en/projects/international-carbon-conference-2014
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He’ll have to overcome reality though, and the reality is that these schemes have failed, in what was called in the U.K. as “descending into farce” sort of like the Edsel
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Can’t wait for this loon to discover that all of us exhale gas which is 4% CO2. That’s about 40,000 ppm. The neighborhood commissar will be around issuing mandatory collection masks for all members of your household. Non-compliance will be treated harshly. Be warned!
Time to invest in collection masks . With this president & co in power it soon could be a hot item.
The ‘combustion inefficiency’ of a human is about 1.6%, meaning the CO/CO2 ratio is 0.016. Once people are over the shocking fact that we run on carbon and exhale CO2, they will have to deal with the fact that we also exhale significant amounts of toxic carbon monoxide (CO). It is positively harmful to babies, the WHO says, even though those babies are also exhaling CO themselves! There is just no end to the alarm.
The only viable solution to all this pollution is to ban both exhaling and inhaling.
Heh.
Reykjavik, Iceland, in August.
They do pick some of the most beautiful and exotic locations for their “Save The World” conferences.
“Reykjavik, Iceland” … ahh, a new variant of the Gore effect. What could be a volcanic equivalent of a sharknado (volsharknado? snarknado?) is shaping up around Bárðarbunga, at the same time these CO2-shifters (all a bunch of hot air) are nearby.
How about saving time and trouble, and put the alarmists to work in caves (naturally with food, water, and Mr. Ed reruns) keeping them busy, and hopefully productive.
Time to take their pie-in-the-sky-precautionary-principle-pessimism and spend the money elsewhere,
where it will do some good….
Oh, the irony….storm tack to Iceland:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/storm_graphics/AT04/refresh/AL0414W5_NL+gif/203538W5_NL_sm.gif
Isn’t interesting that the same people who want to ban the trivial injection of liquids in fracking want to inject huge amounts of gases into the ground. If fracking is so dangerous how could CO2 sequestration not be a disaster? And it always comes from the mouths of PhDs. Is there anyone with a brain left in academia?
Excellent rhetorical questions. Since the fracking issue is simply ignorant folks getting overwrought about a minor engineering challenge [ensuring good seals around the well head and piping], it’s pretty clear they are asserting a straw man against fracking.
The rent seeking that is involved with the continuous stream of conferences in high end expensive locations is truly annoying. The hypocrisy of bloviators like these telling all of us to suffer as they jet set to locales (on our dollars) to pontificate about our obligation to do what they want because we are damaging earth 100,000 years in the future is an insult and sign that we are held in no regard at all.
the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik
Don’t look now but real close to you, Mama Gaia may just show you what she thinks of storing her CO2 underground by burping up a bunch to be recycled later.
Burping from over and under …. storm track (typoed before…) shows storm hitting Iceland Sunday-ish….leets will probably be on their way home by then….shake, bake, rattle and roll…hope not…
Why would we bury it? What if it turns out we need it back?
I think we should just build a huge freezer in Antarctica. It is almost cold enough there to freeze CO2 into dry ice, so with only a small amount of energy to power the freezer and cool a feew more degrees, we could store gobs of CO2 as dry ice. Energy to be supplied of course by a nuclear reactor so as not to generate any CO2 emissions running it. Then, if it turns out we’ve made a mistake by taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere, we can just turn the freezer off.
The above is my idea and any use if it by government, private or other organizations is strictly prohibited without first obtaining a license to do so from me. Bidding for use of this idea begins at $1 Billion and will be open until such time as I make the decision to accept a bid, regardless of time frame involved.
If you want to save the $1 billion plus the cost of the freezer and nuclear plant, you may opt for just planting trees as several people above have suggested, but foolishly failed to assert their intellectual property rights when expressing the idea. Now anyone who wants to plant a tree to sequester CO2 can, for free. You could even use the wood to build housing for the poor all over the world, thereby sequestering CO2 and providing shelter for the homeless at the same time.
😉
I forgot to add, that the trees for houses for the poor idea does have one drawback in that if it turns out that we need the CO2 back, we’d have to burn all the poor people’s houses. This makes my freezer idea vastly superior and well worth the $1 Billion dollar opening bid price.
Yep – as PM Tony Abbott says, if you are worried about CO2, plant trees. And, being one of the founders of the Australian Green Corps project, he knows whereof he speaks. IIRC standard for GC volunteers was something like 200 trees per person per day? Provides employment, but holds no attraction for the gravy trainers.
Trouble is that you will produce co2 running the freezer. Isn’t life a b——d.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
The irony is, in their zeal to fix a problem which never really existed, they would create one far larger with the probable removal of far too much CO2 from the atmosphere – that is, if this far-fetched scheme was even remotely plausible.
Another one who need a muzzle and a suicide pill.
Wow! How on Earth did this make it through moderation? Surely on par with this comment: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/perlwitzcomment_dead.png
If anything needs to be done with CO2 its use not capture. What needs to happen is CCU (Carbon Capture and Use) not CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage). Best place to use CO2 is in greenhouses. Just attach the big pipe from chimneys and feed it into greenhouses where nice big tomatoes can be grown.
The U.S. petroleum industry has been producing and re-injecting CO2 from naturally occurring CO2 gas field reservoirs into oil reservoirs during secondary recovery operations for over thirty years. They’re not common, but two of the largest are located in Texas and Colorado and pipelined to various secondary oil recovery operations.
No doubt, for the right price, the greedy oil maggots can open the wells to the atmosphere if it gets too hot. /sarc.
Isn’t there a large one being built in Mississippi? I read about some boondoggle thereabouts that plans to run a combined cycle power station then sell/pipe the CO2 to wells.
Really a 100,000 year corner is tight?
Welcome to Wally world.
Hey! Under the right circumstances, not such a bad idea. In fact, very excellent science. Let’s build a system to extract and store twice man’s emissions, say 12 GtC/yr. That will change the sign of man’s contributions, and that has to mitigate the fears of the policymakers, i.e., the Obamas and the Gore-likes. “Global warming”, meaning AGW, will be twice gone.
And in a year, we will have sequestered 12 GtC. That’s 1.6% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, fully two times over man’s emissions, and 0.03% of what’s in the ocean. AR4, Fig. 7.3.
A year will be plenty, and we’ll find that – oh, oh! – there’s no significant change in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. That ought to convince enough policymakers that man has had, and can have, no effect on the natural fluxes of CO2, which are due to Henry’s Law (not used by the IPCC), and not the Industrial Revolution (used by the IPCC).
The experiment should have been cheaper, and a heck of a lot more humane, than continuing the shutdown of the US economy in pursuit of votes from the left/illiterate coalition, and of the nonsense in the guise of science.
‘Ideally, we could reach a stage where we could control the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, like you control your central heating.’
Heh, let’s aim big. None of this small fry stuff. Let’s change the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. I’d say move it out about a couple hundred thousand miles and then the sun’s energy reaching us will be diminished enough to counteract any warming from CO2. You got a problem with that?
“Global warming pioneer calls for CO2 to be taken from atmosphere and stored underground”
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She’s been doing that for millions of years.
For free.
There already is a solar powered Carbon Capture device and it’s free low maintenance it’s called a tree
Wally Broeker WOW really.
This guy is almost as smart as the congressman who suggested to many people on one side of an island could tip it over.
Remember him.
does this dumb $!# even have the slightest clue that sequestration of C02 requires energy.
Where do you think we will get that from.
A coal fired plant.
Oh I digress.
Listen Mr Wally word.
We need c02 the more the better.
This is a green gas not a green house gas.
Our lives and the lives of every living thing on earth depend on it.
I would like to see 1000 ppm.
Thats not just me either.
Water vapor makes up 99.9percent of the green house gas on earth.
The little bit of c02 or methane is a joke in its ability to do ANYTHING global warming wise.
just a side note.
and I ask this question.
if you had a football stadium filled with 100000 people and gave each a sign to hold up at half time representing the gases of the atmosphere.
you would hand out how many signs that said c02 on them.
well my friends it would be 40 out of 100000.
if you had all hold up the signs and panned around to count the c02 you would be very hard pressed to even find a few.
I hope this puts it in perspective.
Remember the only thing left to tax is the air and that is the agenda nothing more.
Dave
What we need is lots of trees and beavers. A single beaver can cut down 200 trees a year.
Didn’t do a lot of research on this but…
..” the leading cause of death among beavers is getting hit by a tree they just cut down.”
Didn’t do any research on this but “a single tree can cut down 200 beavers….” 🙂
(sorry…)
In defense of Edsel Ford his car did do what it was designed to do; move people. Looks might have been improved on a wee little bit, but it did not require “infinite money” to make it work,
Cheers, Kevin.
“Wally Broeker, the first person to alert the world to Global Warming”
The person has neither an english nor a German wikipedia page. Must be a legend in his own mind.
This person OTOH http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Schwab
has mentioned Global Warming through CO2 in his book Der Tanz mit dem Teufel (The dance with the devil) in 1958. The German original can be found on the Internet. In the book, CO2-induced Global Warming is one of the devices that the devil mentions with which he wants to destroy humanity. Amongst many other schemes. Schwab was an Ur-Green and member of the original Green party of Germany which ran the country for 12 years.
The name seems to have been misspelled:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Smith_Broecker
Thanks.
First guy etc….Ha ha ha ha.
This guy is either a narcissist or suffers from Munchhausen Syndrome. Seriously nuts!
Time to pull a Spanish Shuffle. Buy anthracite coal for about $40 a short ton at the mine, take it ten miles down the road, pour it into an old quarry pit, collect a carbon sequestration credit fee of $160 or so per metric tonne of carbon.
But unlike the solar panel trick, this one gets more profitable. For the next round, you “strip mine” the loose coal, then move it a quarter mile to the neighboring pit for more sequestration. Five years later, move it back again.
Then after the global cooling sets in and everyone is desperate for energy and forgets about sequestration, you can sell the coal for ten times what you paid for it. Feel free to keep some for your own use, it’s paid for.
Brilliant.
“calls for CO2 to be taken from atmosphere and stored underground” …. Don’t plants already DO that???
What kind of professor is he. Certainly not an engineer.
We may have to wait until CAGW pioneers are stored under the ground before sanity can resurface.
Broecker simply blows me away. You might want to have a gander at his 1998 stimulus:
THE END OF THE PRESENT INTERGLACIAL: HOW AND WHEN?
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~jortiz/paleoceanography/broecker.pdf
“(1) Were previous intervals of peak interglaciation terminated by abrupt global coolings?
(2) How close are we to the end of the present interval of peak interglaciation?
(3) Will the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases alter the natural sequence of events?”
On Broecker’s first point, subsequent research suggests that glacial inceptions can occur in as little as 70 years. As far as I can tell Broecker has not addressed this since his 1998 “stimulus”.
Ditto on point 2. Continuing research pretty much suggests that the Holocene has probably shot its wad and we now live in the Anthropocene extension of the Holocene interglacial. I do not see where Dr. Broecker has returned to or resolved this question anywhere. Are we to assume that the Holocene would just have continued to run blithely along, forever, were it not for our AGW disturbance?
Broecker’s most recent emanations would seem to suggest that there is no longer a concern related to the length of the Holocene. His point 3 answer is that “the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases” will alter the natural sequence of events. Up.
I simply cannot tell you how relieved I am to know, Dr. Broecker, that even though “peak intervals of interglaciation” have indeed been terminated by abrupt coolings, we needn’t worry about that happening to the Holocene. Because if we hadn’t warmed it up at its half-precession cycle age, the Holocene would just run on and on and on…..
It is also quite the relief to know that we are nowhere close to “the end of the present interval of peak interglaciation” because if that were in any way true “the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases [might] alter the natural sequence of events” and end-up extending the Holocene. This is impossible, of course, because the Holocene was never going to end in the first place, right?
/sarc off
Dr. Broecker, if I can give you any advice whatsoever, you should stay away from pretzel logic. If that entails staying away from pretzels altogether, so be it.
Meanwhile enjoy the end extreme interglacial………………while it lasts 🙂
Wally has gone bonkers in his old age. He used to say that within 1000 years the earth would adapt to the extra carbon dioxide humans injected into the air. Now he’s worried about our effect on the next 100,000 years, ie late in the next ice age glaciation?
Too many years of drinking his own carbonated Kool-Aid, I guess.
All I can do is agree.