Climate Change Factoid - How Do We Fix It – Part One? (# 10 of a series)

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Author: Rich Albertson

We may need two fixes. One for the short term, an indispensable step, and the other for the long term, also indispensable but it might not look like it to many of us. First, the short term fix because, if we don't fix this part of climate change there's good reason to doubt we will be here long enough to need the long term fix.

The extra CO2 we have sent up into the atmosphere will not be going elsewhere for thousands of years. That means the CO2 we have added to the atmosphere will stay right where it is, continuing to reflect heat back toward the planet, thereby insuring the already established trend of increasing heat will continue its growth, melting the glaciers and polar caps and causing all of the various aspects of weather to become increasingly extreme. In short, earth's environment approaches outright hostility to human life.

Since there is no natural mechanism in nature that could move the extra CO2 from the atmosphere to somewhere else, at least before it gets too hot for us to live here, we will need to do this work ourselves. There are technologists already at work developing devices called scrubbers which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere. As of now, the technology is still primitive but, right now, the important thing to know about it is that at least in principle, it seems to work.
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Removing the extra CO2 from the atmosphere is only part of the job, probably the easier part. Several years ago I saw a demonstration of the technology where atmosphere, containing CO2, was forced through a solution of sodium hydroxide (lye) and when the air was drawn out of the chamber the CO2 was left behind having bonded chemically to the lye. Since then the technology has taken several additional steps forward. Once removed from the atmosphere, the CO2 must be combined with something that will keep it stable as either a semi-solid or liquid and which prevents it from returning to a gaseous form which would enable its escape to the atmosphere. Simply combining CO2 with freezing water, emulating methane hydrate found in permafrost, which has been successfully sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years, might work. Once in this semi-solid form, the whole mess could be pumped below ground through the same pipes we used for sucking the oil out of the earth into the cavernous expanses left over when the oil was removed. Although this part of the technology is yet to be proven, there, below ground, hopefully, it would remain forever but if some did escape, we would still have our scrubbers in place to do the job again. The procedure of pumping the CO2 underground is called sequestration.

For me, there is something very poetic about us being faced with having to put all of this stuff back where we found it. Why do I feel like my Mom (Mother Earth in this case) has just told me that if I don't clean up my space and put everything back where it was, I won't be allowed to hang around anymore. If you like irony, when the cost of doing this work is fully realized, we may also discover that much, if not all, of the wealth created by the burning of fossil fuels was illusory because it must now be spent putting this stuff back where we found it. What we thought was profit was actually a huge contingent liability that we chose not to recognize back then. Instead we deferred payment of the bill to future generations. A nice little legacy for the kids.

Share:    />And then there's the part I find the most interesting about all of this. Once we think about scrubbing and sequestration for awhile we will suddenly realize that even though the cost will take our breath away, the solution offers a less expensive option than changing everything we do now that contributes to advancing climate change. We could start scrubbing and sequestering and when the level of CO2 returned to pre-industrial levels we could keep some of the scrubbers running to deal with future CO2 emissions. We could continue to burn oil wouldn't that be swell? Check out Factoid #14 - How Do We Fix it - Part Two?, to find out why that may not work, either. (Peer reviewed research, supporting the claims made in this factoid, can be found at the website,)About the Author:

Rich Albertson is a retired lawyer, author, builder, building designer, carpenter and long time amateur naturalist. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Albertson's most recent book (2009), The Sky is the Limit A Brief and Easy Explanation of Climate Change for Present and Future Voters (134pp), is an explanation of the science, economics, politics and a discussion of the future of climate change written for people of average experience. Climate Change Factoids are drawn from the book. His first book (1978), The Bio-Conversion of Waste to Resource (4 Vols, 2624pp), was a treatise on methods for the sustainable management of solid and liquid waste in urban society. More about the Sky is the Limit book can be found at http://www.thecircleworks.org

As a Naturalist, Albertson's primary interest is to understand and then explain the conflicts that result from modern human practices that interfere with the operation of the natural world on a planetary scale.

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