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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Many recent discussions around the unfolding global warming catastrophe have asked, "What can we do?" Besides the obvious, Climeworks now has a scheme to let average people pay to bury carbon: https://www.climeworks.com/. I've signed up but have no information beyond the articles I've read about the company: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-busin....

It seems we're past the point where reducing emissions will be enough, and to the point where we need to reverse atmospheric CO2, now.

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I agree, I think geoengineering is unavoidable. As far as geoengineering projects go, this one looks like the most feasible and safe so far:

https://projectvesta.org/

Could you elaborate? Enhanced Weathering is questionable on many levels. Have you compared it to other approaches?

Why is enhanced weathering questionable? I don't really know much about it, but I was under the impression that carbon absorption by weathered silicates will have a dramatic impact on the planet over the very long term[1]. Is enhanced weathering just too slow, or is there more to it than that?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

I've only compared it to sulphur dioxide and the risks look fewer. The other benefit of enhanced weathering with olivine distributed in energetic waters is that it removes CO2 from the ocean (letting the ocean act as a carbon sink for the atmosphere).

I'm interested in learning more about research into enhanced weathering, could you provide some recommendations?

I‘ve come to the conclusion that planting trees is probably the best strategy in the short term. While there‘s obviously limited space to continue that forever without advanced strategies such as BECCS, it’s a super safe and extremely scalable option (drones!) with lots of other benefits that would give us a massive head start for the next 10-20 years until we figure out how to scale CO2 capture.

I agree we should also plant trees and cultivate forests however that won't help fix our oceans.

The reason why I like the olivine weathering proposal is that it weathers co2 out of the ocean and uses the ocean as a carbon sink. This way you remove co2 from the both the atmosphere and ocean (if you weather enough of it).

Thanks for sharing this, I wonder why more projects like this aren't under way already?

Sounds like the time to seriously start to consider these kinds of projects is now.

Given our disastrous track record with any sort of environmental engineering, I don't think this is a good pandora's box to open.

Also, any plausible form of geoengineering still requires carbon emissions to be reduced to 0 as soon as possible. Since that is known to be within our technical capacities, and known to be safe, it still seems like the first step that we must dedicate our energies to.

As long as our CO2 emissions still grow every year, it's much more cost effective to work on that rather than remove some tiny part of it afterwards.

Climate change catastrophe has been exaggerated for over 30 yr now

UN predicted catastrophe in 1989

https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

The IPCC predictions tend to be too conservative:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43e8yp/the-uns-devastatin...

It's just that "catastrophic" changes meaning over time. Permafrost melting on a massive scale? Catastrophic prediction thirty years ago, just another item in the news today. Losing almost all coral reefs? Today it's just something we can't prevent anymore.

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