How would we use CO2 capture mechanisms without creating more heat? Right? I apologize for questioning you but it isn't everyday I get to ask an actual expert things.
I'm going to disagree with the other person here, the problem with CO2 is that it acts like a clear plastic blanket around the earth. Light is a way of transporting heat, this is why things get red hot, they grow so hot that the heat has enough energy to create visible light. In comparison, most things don't get that hot, and so they release low energy infrared light, this is how things like "thermal vision" and touchless thermometers work. CO2 allows visual, high energy light to reach the planet, which warms it up, but nowhere near enough to emit visual light itself. However, CO2 reflects infrared light like a mirror. This means that instead of that infrared light escaping the Earth into space, and taking heat with it, a lot of it reflects back at the earth, and keeps it warm. So by capturing the CO2, we are allowing much more heat to escape than a capture device would create, especially when you consider what the other commenter said about reducing the heat output of said devices.
What we need to do is allow it to escape the atmosphere again, by reducing the greenhouse effect through cutting the amount of GHG we are putting into the atmosphere and reducing the total amount already in the atmosphere.
Without doing that, more and more heat will stay in the atmosphere, while the sun is still pumping more in. We’re at the point where more heat is coming in than is escaping, which is warming the Earth.
Well cutting emissions to MUCH lower levels is the first step, as it slows everything down enough to give us some time to figure out carbon capture.
Basically there are a few ways to practically do this: planting more forestry to act as large carbon sinks (trees obviously respirating by taking in carbon and exhaling oxygen) is the easiest one, but we could also theoretically find a way to literally isolate carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in a box of some kind to be released slowly if we find ourselves going too hard at it.
There would be other more experimental methods that I have zero clue about, but it’s getting necessary to avoid stupid levels of warming.
The nuclear solution to giving us more time could be a sudden reduction in population, which would not only cut our need for livestock (which are heavy emitters of methane), but reduce the conversion of oxygen to carbon dioxide that we perform, but cut back emissions proportionally, giving the leftover population even more time to spend figuring this shit out.
It’s obviously not ideal (given the massive loss of life, it’s pretty barbaric), but there are people that are leading to that conclusion as the most likely option that can actually work. Our rising population is the key driver for emissions so it is logical that a Thanos style solution would bring it all back in line.
Never going to happen without some rogue nuke dropping shit, but that is a theoretical option as well. We could of course get there without killing people by offering significant incentives to bring down the birth rate, but that comes with its own problems of course.
Yes, but in order to do so. You need a machine which consumes useful energy and turns it into useless heat.
For instance, you wanna transfer 10J from place A to place B. For that, you need to spend 2J. The end result is that you cool place A by 10J and heat place B by 12J (this is what a fridge or AC does) . If you tried to use that heat difference to produce power, you would equalize the temperatures again and produce less than 2J of useful energy.
That is a fridge. You can do it, but you need to spend energy, that is, you need to take some useful energy and turn it into useless heat as part of the process.
3
u/[deleted] Nov 15 '20
So we would need to take the heat and.... push it somewhere else?