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The world's carbon-dioxide problem doesn't just affect the atmosphere — the gas is starting to fill our homes, schools, and offices, too.
Indoor levels of the gas are projected to climb so high, in fact, that they could cut people's ability to do complex cognitive tasks in half by the end of the century.
That prediction comes from three scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Pennsylvania, who presented their findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The study is still under peer review but available online in the repository Earth ArXiv.
The findings show that, if global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to rise on their current trajectory, the concentration of CO2 in the air could more than double by 2100. Based on measurements of how humans function in spaces with that much CO2, the scientists warn, we could find ourselves scoring 50% lower on measures of complex thought by the end of the century.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @10:19AM (13 children)
And in most any closed air system with insufficient outdoor air flow. In other words these technologies needed to solve a hypothetical problem in 80 years not only exist but are already commercialized today. This entire "issue" is absurd.
By contrast, people getting dumber is not.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 17 2020, @01:29PM (12 children)
[
CitationQuote needed].No, seriously, investment and TCO numbers or GTFO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @01:58PM (11 children)
1) What was the cost of a computer comparable to today's efficiency 80 years ago?
2) Even with today's tech and manufacturing ability it is "cheap." You could actually make a scrubber yourself with a bit of technical knowledge and ability. There are a whole ton of ways to scrub CO2, but one of the easiest is the Sabatier Reaction. CO2 plus hydrogen = methane + water, reacted at temperatures less than an decent oven is capable of reaching. The reason I put "cheap" in quotes is because the primary purchasers for these things today are government, military, and certain types of high tech industry and development. So what these could be made for at scale, and what they're sold for today are probably going to differ by orders of magnitude.
This really is just increasing evidence that people are using climate change for easy publishing, because this presentation could not be less relevant.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday February 17 2020, @03:34PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 17 2020, @09:24PM (6 children)
What's the cost of controlled fusion today in comparison with 50 years ago?
Future: a time that doesn't happen until it happens.
(until you don't decarbonize your energy sector and add extra capacity to deal with a serious climb on the entropy ladder, any CO2 capture is going to emit more CO2 than it captured)
That hydrogen mate, that one spells energy trouble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @06:30AM (5 children)
No, it doesn't.
For home usage the amount you'd be scrubbing would be negligible. So you could easily generate the necessary amount of hydrogen just using electrolysis. Your air purifier would likely have a water intake similar to a washing machine. This is not complex or expensive.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 18 2020, @06:57AM (4 children)
And that electricity is generated how?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @02:50PM (3 children)
I don't understand what you're trying to allude to.
To answer your question, you'd use whatever conventional method your region happens to use: windmills, natural gas plants, nuclear plants, solar, hydroelectric, etc. Elecrolysis is inefficient of course (perhaps that is your point?) but the amount you're scrubbing on a consumer household/office setting would also be incredibly negligible, even at relatively high concentrations like e.g. 4000ppm. So the efficiency of the reactant is negligible in the overall cost of operation. Another option to make things even more simple is to just buy 3rd party hydrogen which could be produced efficiently using something like steam methane reforming. And that'd also be commercially preferred because companies love themselves some rent.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 19 2020, @01:12AM (2 children)
What I'm trying to say is that, unless you decarbonize the energy production, any "carbon sequestration" scheme is going to worsen the CO2 situation.
See? That's my point: do not use any carbon emitting energy source and it's fine. May be expensive like hell, but it's a solution.
Mate, you are deluded if you think you are going to find cheap solutions to go against the entropy laws. I think you will find that the total energy expenditure to get from "h2o + co2 => methanol" is somewhere in the (high end of) single digit percentage.
On the long run, what's the point of having scrubbed x amount of CO2 from a place, it the environment gets 10 more than that?
Every person emits two tons of carbon dioxide a year through eating [sciencedaily.com].
In the building I'm working, there are easily about 2000 persons.
A quick back-of-the-napkin calculations reveal that for an 8hours/work day, the building should capture and transform (in methanol?) about 3.6 tonnes of CO2 (like in 2000 persons/365/(24/8) * 2 tonnes) to be "human generated carbon neutral".
Umm... you were saying "incredibly negligible"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @06:19AM (1 child)
I think you have the wrong mental image your mind here. Here [nasa.gov] is a paper from NASA on their development of a Sabatier reactor used on the ISS. There's an image in Figure 3. The 12ml reactor described there was determined to be sufficient for 3.5-7 people. That excludes the heating of course, but the optimal temps are as low as 250C - comparable to the temp a regular oven can get to. And you're not heating an oven, but merely the reactor. The amount of energy you need to operate this is, again, mostly negligible. I think when people hear the word reactor they kind of jump to nuclear scale type visualizations. This one is a little bit more simple! ;-)
Beyond this, that paper describes a reactor intended for use in space. Obviously in space there is practically 0 leakage. On Earth the vast majority of the CO2 we exhale ends up leaking outside of our buildings. And the amount we exhale is what you're after - which is not what that paper you linked to was measuring. We exhale around 1kg per day. The exact amount leaked out is going to depend on the building, ventilation, ambient CO2 levels, etc.. but suffice to say that such a reactor that can support 3.5-7 people in space could support *far* more on Earth.
Finally you're conflating two different issues. Scrubbing can be used to clean our atmosphere itself (and in my opinion is the route we will go - which is why I find most of the climate hysteria, well - hysterical) but that is a radically different issue than indoor scrubbing to safe levels. Indoor scrubbing can be achieved using relatively simple technology at a low energy and price cost. Outdoor scrubbing by contrast is going to be large scale and things such as a Sabatier process would not even be desirable - since you'd now have megatons of another greenhouse gas.
This [cell.com] paper describes one extremely promising outdoor scrubbing technique which converts atmospheric CO2 to pickling lime (calcium hydroxide) at a cost as low as $94 per ton. That's current emissions completely nulled out at a cost of ~37 billion (tons) * $94 = $3.4 trillion, less than 4% of the world GDP. And once said infrastructure is in place, costs would radically decline. Anyhow, we won't be doing anything like that for decades and the price will plummet even further due to both technological and economic gains. We'll probably end up solving climate change, if it ultimately needs solving, for something like a 0.05% global GDP cost. Science, fuck yeah!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 19 2020, @08:15AM
You'll be very wrong in your assessment if you look only at the last stage.
For example
you'll have to show me a way to produce slacked lime (calcium hydroxide) that does *not* create CO2 first.
This given that the most common form of calcium mineral on Earth that allows resonable cheap calcium "extraction" is the carbonate.
Calcium phosphate (the matter of your bones) are rarer (easy to understand why - given a chance, will leach the phosphate group and will replace it with carbonate) and the rest of "calcium-X-silicates" are fucking hard to separate (energy-wise, that silicate is really a bitch when it comes to let the calcium go).
Obviously, your implicit assumption is that the CO2 level outside is low enough to allow, as the first line of defense, replacing the air inside with the a lower CO2 concentration and start from there.
You are making some assumption somewhere that cannot be true. Check them again.
Were the "the amount of energy you need to operate this is, again, mostly negligible" be true, we would have heard the technology being deployed en-mass as not only carbon scrubbers but also as "renewable energy storage for times when wind doesn't blow and the Sun doesn't shine" - that's would be such a double-whammy that the "dyno-juice energy barons" (Koch brothers among them) would be happy to use.
Unfortunately those pesky laws of thermodynamics vetoes it.
If that was true, the ISS itself would not rely on CO2 scrubbing [nasa.gov] and dumping it overboard [nasa.gov]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Monday February 17 2020, @09:26PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @06:53AM
There are two big issues with your comment, but I want to hit on a general one first since it's a common thing people mistake. In 1908 the average cost of a Model T was about $850. Unfortunately I can only find inflation calculators from 1913 and beyond, which would put it at $22,000 in modern dollars - should be in that ballpark in any case. So, wow - it cost just about as much as a modern car one, such as yourself, might think. There's one big catch. And its the benefit of a growing economy. What was the average wage in 1908? It was a couple of dimes per hour, and around $300 per year. So a new car cost around 2.83 years of salary. Today the median personal income for fulltime work is is about $48,500 [bls.gov] per year, substantially more if you consider the average. So earnings adjusted, you're looking at a cost of $137,255 for a new car in 1908.
Inflation does not account for economic gains. The reason even poor people can live like kings today, relative to times past, is in part due to reduced real costs but also in part due to increased overall wealth.
Okay, but there's also a more specific issue here. Everything you're listing there had hit *mass market* commercialization. That was the secret to the Model T's "low" price. I listed computers for a specific reason. For most of their early life, they were not mass market - they were purchased primarily by military, governments, and some high tech industries. That's the exact same with carbon removal systems today. When you have limited markets like this, prices are stupidly high. See what's happening to the space industry today as we gradually segue from the military/government/high tech industries to the mass market.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday February 18 2020, @12:54AM
No way you'll get an orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency like computers. Many of these processes already run near (much less than an order of magnitude off) their thermodynamic limit.
You need to get relatively pure CO2 (rather than small amounts of CO2 in a nasty nitrogen/oxygen mix). That means most of the actual scrubbing will be done by some other process.