Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "How to UNDO Climate Change: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture (BECCS)" video.

  1. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: And if you'd like I'd like to talk to you about these issues. APOLOGIES NOW for what will feel like a lecture. You are quite right about the volume of the CO2 we have emitted. I just downloaded the data for 1940-2022 and that makes for some serious discussion. It took 44 years from 1940 to 1984 to pump 500 Billion tons into the atmosphere. It took only 21 years 2005 for the next 500 Billion tons It took only 15 years 2020 for the next 500 Billion tons making it 1.5 Trillion tons And we'll go past 2 Trillion tons at the current rate around 2033. That of course doesn't include the billions of tons from badly managed coal mines in places like China or what happened pre-1940 or lots of human activities that aren't counted. So the real problem going forward isn't Net-Zero. Its how we get to Net-Subzero and NOT bankrupt the World's economy or destroy modern civilisation getting there. Because if we do either of those things we really will have an apocalypse. FYI - I did my degree in America and we once had a NASA engineer do a special guest lecture on terraforming Mars. He very simply said "It's Impossible" and then explained WHY. He introduced us to 2 subjects I know call planetary mechanics and planetary dynamics. Planetary mechanics are just the raw amounts like we have 2.5 Trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere and it takes X Joules to raise Y cubic kilometers so many degrees. Planetary dynamics are things like gas cycles, water cycles, thermal cycles (like the AMOC). On simple planetary mechanics Mars is impossible to terraform. It ends the discussion when you realise that it takes 178 Trillion tons of air just to make a 1km thick layer of Earth normal air around a body that large. You don't even get to the subject of how to keep it attached to the planet. Its just where do we get that much air in the first place. Here's the problem we have with CO2. I have seen plenty promotion, neutral and debunk videos on both carbon capture & storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC). Even if we could use one of the technical solutions the problem is ENERGY. Where do we simply get enough energy to run those systems? If we did try one of those DAC systems you then have to ask how we process that many cubic kilometers to get at those 400 parts per million of CO2 to extract 2.5 Trillion tons. This is the problem the guy from NASA when trying to explain what he found to other people. The numbers are so large that people can't conceive of what those numbers mean. If the Earths surface is 510,072,000km² then that basically equates to 1/2 Billion cubic kilometers of air just in the first kilometer of 100 above the Earths surface. How does anyone actually think they are going to feed volume that through a bunch of factory built units? How much energy and materials will it take and how much CO2 will be produced building all those units? Sorry the only way it can actually be done is with TREES? The question is how do we convince every person on the planet they have to plant (on average) about 1,000 trees. That's about 8 Trillion trees and we need 1 in 10 to grow to maturity and suck in and CAPTURE about 1.5 tons of CO2 each. Sorry but we are going to have to do things like plant tree lines along very fence line on every farm on the planet. AND YES you make an incredibly important point we just can't go throwing trees in the ground we have to actually do some PLANNING. You can't just throw pine trees into the Sahara, but with the right plan we can plant staggering numbers of date palms, olive trees, cedars and other suitable varieties across all that open space of North Africa. YES we'd have to supply staggering amounts of water until they generate their own weather, but there are low energy options there. I worked on the Ravensthorpe Nickel Project back in the mid 2000s and that has an interesting desal plant. Its NOT reverse osmosis which long term has too high maintenance costs. Because I'd worked on another Wier project they gave me the FAT for the desal plant. Weir called it vapour compression but from memory it was built more like a Multi-stage flash distillation system and may well have combined those 2 technologies. Either way it used only a fraction of the power an RO plant of the same size. The reason such plants aren't used a lot is they can be tricky to start-up and they only have 1 speed (flow rate). You can't just turn them on and off at will like you can RO AND YES I have done RO systems one of which was quite complex. So yes it sound crazy to tell everyone we need to plant 8 Trillion trees. But I am sorry but there is no other feasible way to do it. Everything else either relies on a technology we can't build enough of or a technology we can't power or some ridiculous seeding fantasy of the sky or the oceans. If you look at some of the ideas being proposed for seeding the sky to let in less light or seeding the ocean to have more oceanic algae plankton to consume the C02 are so absurd they are only worth considering to see how absurd they are. Nobody knows if they would work, or how much we'd need let alone what happens if it gets out of control and needs shutting down. We can shut down even the most complex plants we build but how would you shut down the SO2 seeding in the upper atmosphere I have seen proposed? Likewise if the iron seeding of the ocean to promote algae growth goes haywire. What's the contingency for that? As an aerospace engineer placing a giant sun shield out at the L1 Lagrange Point makes better sense. We could build it with louvres and control what heat comes in. You just need to get me something like US$50 Trillion and hand me control of the entire engineering infrastructure of the planet. before you ask if it cost US$200 Billion to build the ISS with a weight of 450t in LEO. What do you think it would cost to build something at L1 that weighs on the order of a million tons and needs constant onsite maintenance to keep it orientated and in position. Plus we'd need a fleet of satellites monitoring the entire Earth's surface at 10m resolution or better to watch the effects. Actually we'll need those whatever we do. That's one of the few things we can do. the question is will we do it to save the planet or watch it die.
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