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Please "Check In" here to the "A Farewell to Ice" book discussion!

#171: June - Sept. 2020 (Non-Fiction)
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DWill

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Re: Please "Check In" here to the "A Farewell to Ice" book discussion!

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Peter Wadhams doesn't come across as a dangerous radical, does he? As if to underline the part from his talk that you quoted, in the Washington Post yesterday appeared an article by Sir David King and Rick Parnell that makes the same point about the insufficiency of emissions reduction. This is the first time I've seen carbon removal as the central topic in a mainstream publication.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ ... story.html

It's worth pointing out, though, that emission reduction fits nicely with carbon removal and is even essential to CR's success. As Wadhams said, it only makes sense to reduce the amount of new CO2 so that the expensive process of removal can be more effective. As well, CR machinery should be powered by carbon-free energy such as solar or geothermal, or what is the point of doing it? There is some hope that once climate activists understand that carbon removal won't enable us to pollute without worry--because we need at the same time to cut emissions--they will look more positively on CR.

The status of geoengineering is left somewhat vague, in both Wadhams' talk and the David King article. Clearly, there is more comfort with carbon removal. But what about the long time-lag for both massive renewables installation and scaled-up carbon removal technology? We could be adding 3 ppm per year of CO2 to the atmosphere for many years before these technologies can help much.

I don't know about Australia, but in the U.S. I think there's a good chance of moving ahead with CR--if we have a change of administrations!

A different article in the Post, on BP's transition to an alternative energy company, said that in order for the world to get to net-zero by 2050, the largest solar installation in the world will need to be duplicated every two days. Now, that does seem impossible to me. Perhaps that makes carbon removal and geoengineering even more urgent.
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Re: Please "Check In" here to the "A Farewell to Ice" book discussion!

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I agree - this is an extremely important and relevant book, we need to understand better what we are doing to planet earth - this is the inheritance of our children, the future generations.

Actually, it is the requests of young children to adopt a "green culture" and sustain the environment which has popled me to find out more about this book.
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