As a planet, we have run out of time. We have pumped 1.8 trillion excess tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, about a third of which has been absorbed into the oceans, which has lowered the pH in those waters to the same level as the Permian extinction 250 million years ago.
As atmospheric CO2 converts to carbonic acid in water, it increasingly dissolves the shells of the tiny sea creatures that make up the foundation of the oceanic food chain. Plankton goes extinct, which means everything above it on the food chain also goes extinct. The oceans die. Sad.
How long do we have? It’s already too late. According to Dr. Alex Cannara speaking at TEAC7, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere today will kill the oceans by around 2050, and current projections predict that by then we will be pumping CO2 into the atmosphere three times faster than today. We’re already dead, we just don’t know it yet.
Cannara does leave open one possibility for our planet to survive, but I don’t see how it will happen. Politicians don’t listen much to climate scientists, especially when the message gets in the way of their ambition to enrich themselves. What Cannara proposes is radical even to me, and I’m an enthusiastic supporter of major changes.
Cannara recommends processing gigatons of limestone, separate the CO2 from the lime, then sequestering the CO2 in large basalt caverns. Then you dump gigatons of lime into the oceans, where it would absorb CO2 in the water and settle to the bottom as new limestone.
As you might suspect, this would require massive amounts of energy, and you can’t use carbon-based fuels for this, as it would be hilariously self-defeating. You must use nuclear power for this, coming from literally thousands of new power plants.
Of course, the first couple thousand power plants must be dedicated to remediation. A few thousand more will be needed to replace all carbon-based forms of power generation. The fossil fuel age must end, right now.
Safety issues? Slap yourself in the face, there are no safety issues. We have as a species jumped out of an airplane without a parachute. If somebody offers you an umbrella, you grab it and hope you land on a big pine tree and break several bones, but somehow survive the fall. We can no longer burn the equivalent of 3.6 cubic miles of oil per year...
...and hope to survive until the end of the century. Even if we shut down all the carbon today (please note that wind and solar are a small fraction of what’s needed), we still need a couple thousand nuclear plants built within the next few years just to put all that carbon back in the ground or back into limestone. Otherwise, we’re doomed. If we don’t build the extra plants, our high-tech civilization goes away.
1.8 trillion tons of surplus CO2 has just simplified our choices. Somebody call China and order those first couple thousand Thorium reactors. Don’t worry too much about quality. We need quantity. We need at least 2,000 1 gigawatt power plants, just to run the CO2 sequestration and remediation operations. Then we need a couple thousand more to run our high-tech civilization of over 7 billion humans.
Now, who’s going to tell Pussy Grabber and Putin that their clever scheme to get rich on their Arctic oil bonanza is dooming the planet?
Oh, and of course we have to transform almost all our technologies to match the new paradigm. Maybe you can still have a car, but it will probably be electric.