Getting to a zero carbon future

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by paddoboy, Oct 25, 2016.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Getting to a zero carbon future
    October 17, 2016

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    Credit: pixinoo/iStock
    Avoiding the worst consequences of climate change by reducing global carbon emissions to as close to zero as possible is one of humanity's most pressing challenges. The University of California San Diego has launched the Deep Decarbonization Initiative to do just that. And they plan to do so in the real world—where costs matter.

    The initiative is a collaborative effort of UC San Diego faculty from across campus working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. It embeds the study of modern societies—economics, politics and social organization—within expert technical research on energy systems. The goal is to understand not just how energy systems function, but also how policy and social movements can transform energy and protect the planet.




    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-carbon-future.html#jCp
     
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  3. karenmansker HSIRI Banned

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    Mother Nature provides a homeostatic means to deal with excess CO2. She (Nature) simply sequesters CO2 as limestone in oceans when CO2 exceeds equilibrium values in the atmosphere.
     
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  5. river

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    And of course plant life loves CO2 .
     
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  7. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Yep. Unfortunately that works on a longer scale than will be helpful for humanity.
     
  8. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Looking at the climates of:
    mis 11
    mis 19
    mis 31-33
    etc...
    seem just about as good as the climate gets during this current ice age.

    What is the value of keeping all of that water sequestered as ice?
    This is a water planet and all life forms on this planet are mostly water.(NOT ICE)
     
  9. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    She's having trouble keeping up though.
     
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  10. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    It keeps Miami from being underwater.
    Right. And we have oceans of water for the taking. We will never run out of water.
     
  11. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Do you include drinking water ? I suppose you will irrigate the desert with saltwater and create produce that can tolerate saltwater, But then you going to produce and other death see.
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Nope. I live in San Diego, where we take salt water and turn it into fresh water. 50 million gallons a day. Of course, most places rely on nature's desalinator (evaporation and rain.)
    Are you drunk?
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    So? The various effects of our mishandled CO2 waste now include warming the planet's lower atmosphere at better than a degree C per century - that's not going to grade nicely into some supposedly idyllic past warmer clime, that set in at less than a degree C per millennium. And that's without even considering the methane bomb, or the ocean acidification problem.
     
  14. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Not I am sober , you are at the coast but what will happen in Nevada, New Mexico , Arizona
     
  15. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    New, Space-Based View of Human-Made Carbon Dioxide



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    Human carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning and other sources have been mapped from OCO-2's global dataset. Credit: World Bank/Kim Eun Yeul

    Scientists have produced the first global maps of human emissions of carbon dioxide ever made solely from satellite observations of the greenhouse gas. The maps, based on data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and generated with a new data-processing technique, agree well with inventories of known carbon dioxide emissions.

    No satellite before OCO-2 was capable of measuring carbon dioxide in fine enough detail to allow researchers to create maps of human emissions from the satellite data alone. Instead, earlier maps also incorporated estimates from economic data and modeling results.

    The team of scientists from the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, produced three main maps from OCO-2 data, each centered on one of Earth's highest-emitting regions: the eastern United States, central Europe and East Asia. The maps show widespread carbon dioxide across major urban areas and smaller pockets of high emissions.

    "OCO-2 can even detect smaller, isolated emitting areas like individual cities," said research scientist Janne Hakkarainen, who led the study. "It's a very powerful tool that gives new insight."

    The results appear in a paper titled published Nov. 1 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

    Human emissions of carbon dioxide have grown at a significant rate since the Industrial Revolution, and the greenhouse gas lingers in the atmosphere for a century or more. This means that recent human output is only a tiny part of the total carbon dioxide that OCO-2 records as it looks down toward Earth's surface. "Currently, the background level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million, and human emissions within the past year may add only something like three parts per million to that total," said Hakkarainen. The data-processing challenge, he noted, was to isolate the signature of the recent emissions from the total amount.

    The team's new data-processing technique accounts for seasonal changes in carbon dioxide, the result of plant growth and dormancy, as well as the background carbon dioxide level. To be sure their method was correct, they compared the results with measurements of nitrogen dioxide -- another gas emitted from fossil fuel combustion -- from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument, a Dutch-Finnish instrument on NASA's Aura satellite. OMI and OCO-2 are both in the A-Train satellite constellation, so the two measurements cover the same area of Earth and are separated in time by only 15 minutes.

    The two measurements correlated well, giving the researchers confidence that their new technique produced reliable results.

    Coauthor Johanna Tamminen, head of the atmospheric remote sensing group at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, noted that with its comparison of OCO-2 and OMI data, "The research demonstrates the possibility of analyzing joint satellite observations of carbon dioxide and other gases related to combustion processes to draw out information about the emissions sources."

    OCO-2 Deputy Project Scientist Annmarie Eldering of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said, "We are very pleased to see this research group make use of the OCO-2 data. Their analysis is a great demonstration of discovery with this new dataset." Eldering was not involved in the study.

    NASA uses the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.

    For more information about OCO-2:

    http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/


    News Media Contact

    Alan Buis
    Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
    818-354-0474
    Alan.Buis@jpl.nasa.gov
     
  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Nevada? Their best source is the Colorado River.
    New Mexico? The Rio Grande.
    Arizona? The Gila or Colorado.

    All of these have plenty of water for the surrounding states, provided cities like LA don't siphon it all away.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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  18. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    California currently gets almost 60% of the water in the lower Colorado. Return that 60% to the other states and the other states that use that water (Arizona and Nevada) have over twice what they have now.
     
  19. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Somehow I fave the understanding that the dam in Nevada have a very low level . and the Colorado river is practically dry before enters into Mexico is that true , you live in that corner .
     
  20. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Right. The answer is desalination, which San Diego is starting with. (A secondary answer is recycled water, which we are also using now.)
     
  21. river

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    Is this goal wise ?
     
  22. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    Do you not think it would be? Do you think the problems of global warming will improve if we don't at least strive toward it? Sure, it may end up having little impact, if all the science behind the studies on global warming is somehow incorrect and man really does have no impact. But if the science is wrong, can aiming for a zero-carbon future do us any harm?

    That said, given the next POTUS doesn't believe that man is impacting upon global warming, I think it's safe to say the target is a few more years away than it had been.
     

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