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Over the last several years researchers have said that the Amazon is on the verge of transforming from a crucial storehouse for heat-trapping gasses to a source of them, a dangerous shift that could destabilize the atmosphere of the planet.
Now, after years of painstaking and inventive research, they have definitively measured that shift.
In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of researchers led by scientists from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, reported results from measuring carbon concentrations in columns of air above the Amazon. They found that the massive continental-size swath of tropical forest is releasing more carbon dioxide than it accumulates or stores, thanks to deforestation and fires.
“There is no doubt that the Amazon is a source,” said Luciana Gatti, the lead author of the study.
Journal Reference:
Luciana V. Gatti, Luana S. Basso, John B. Miller, et al. Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @06:55PM (8 children)
The only solution is to ignore it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Socrastotle on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:27PM (7 children)
Sometimes trying to solve something, when a solution is ultimately intractable (with the sort of means you're pursuing) is worse than doing nothing.
COVID was a demonstration of the effects of shutting down the world economy. We drove dramatically less than ever before, international shipping stalled out, international airflight was down to negligible levels. And much more. And the net result? About a 5% decline in emissions. Keep in mind this is not a permanent annual 5% decline, but just a one-off year over year 5% decline. If we don't do everything we did last year (and then some thanks to development, population growth, etc) then we'll completely relinquish that 5%. You're just not going to make progress on climate change with social changes. All you end up doing is creating a dystopia with an ever more divided population, while empowering every single charlatan who can use language or persuasion furthering "the cause" to empower and/or enrich themselves.
Technological solutions, by contrast, do exist and are viable. People seem to not have understood the relevance of the recently publicized [bbc.com] Scottish CO2 capture experiment. That facility is only a proof of concept, yet even at just it's scale, if you deployed one of those factories every 5000 square kilometers, net human emissions would be zero. Scale it up and you can ultimately negate our emissions with far fewer large factories. Capturing CO2 is not an especially complex process. All that factory is, is basically a giant vacuum to suck in air that then performs the relatively simple chemical process to extract the CO2.
The idea is in no way revolutionary. The basic scientific principles and ideas are simple, and various researchers have demonstrated a wide array of different capture ideas with no reason to expect it to be in any way whatsoever insurmountable. And the cool thing about CO2 capture is that, if desired, you can even *reverse* human emissions by producing net negative emissions. The one and only thing that's missing is the economic will. So it's weird, we see these politicians so happy to claim that the "Real cost" of CO2 emissions are in the trillions of dollars, yet remiss to spend even a tiny fraction of that to actually solve the problem. It's almost as if they don't particularly care about solving the problem, except by promoting solutions that would empower themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @08:07PM (1 child)
You need to find a way for Al Gore to make some money off this Scottish CO2 thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @08:29PM
Al is out of luck. His distant cousin, Magnus MacGore has the market sewed up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @09:43PM
C'mon now, you say that like it's a bug rather than a feature.
As for the carbon-capture plants, the one thing missing from the article you linked is any mention of the power required to operate the plant, and what percentage of the plant's capability is spend canceling the increased carbon from generating that power.
The engineer in me says it doesn't much matter (as long as it's less than 100%), since an ongoing power sink that can be increased or decreased at will is beneficial on its own -- that lets us scale up efficient base generation and solar/wind, and use an overbuilt array of carbon plants as virtual storage, spinning them up during power surpluses, and down during deficits, so long as the longterm average carbon extraction is what it needs to be.
But the student of reality says any such scheme will eventually end up with someone figuring out how to get away with running the carbon plants less and less to make up for inadequate generation.
If you're serious about it, you probably need a regulatory structure where a company cannot sell electricity from a carbon-emitting power plant unless they are simultaneously operating carbon plants extracting the power plant's carbon output (with a multiplier to account for untracked carbon emissions and/or reversing historical emissions). If one of your carbon plants shut down, and you can't spin up another to compensate, you have to reduce your power generation proportionally and take it up the wallet until you fix it.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Monday July 19 2021, @05:16AM
It's been a dystopia for quite a while. The industrial facilities and power plants are what's dumping the vast majority of the CO2. The basic equipment we use to create modern society. I suspect we will need equally massive processes to pull any significant amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Things will have to get much worse before we implement large scale carbon sinks. It's just not profitable.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday July 19 2021, @11:53AM (1 child)
Wolfram, what is the area of Earth divided by 5000 km2?
102013
That's quite a lot really.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday July 19 2021, @01:35PM
I was referring to land area. You could probably set these up in the Pacific, but maintenance might be tricky. It's about 30k in total.
The reason I think 1 per 5000km^2 is informative is because 30,000 sounds like a large number until you realize how incredibly sparse it is relative to the land area of the world. And this is at a proof of concept type scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @02:26PM
hahaha, a 5% decline. i wonder which outfit measured that... or was it more along the line of: 5% less of burnable carbon was SOLD. anything "off the book" would not factor in.
you see we cannot realistically directly measue carbon pollution; it's just PR marketted that way. what we mist certainly are keeping very very precise tabs on is how much was sold BEFORE it was burned (once and once only).
so good luck sticking a co2 measuring IOT in every tailpipe on the planet.
btw, "limit carbon pollution" really means "we are limiting what you can sell to burn". in other words, we are suggesting very very strongly for you to hord it for an expanded guaranteed market dependancy on you (which we will guarantee to you by also using the word " energy usage limitation and conviniently totally ignoring and not supporting alternative energy sourced).