Climate change Solutions

Question

How can we prevent the earth's average temperature from rising by more than 2 ° C to 2100?

Any detailed answer would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

There are many variables that have driven climate change over the many millions of years of earth's history, and the interactions between those variables are complex. That might seem to make the question confounding, yet there is one variable that stands out in stark contrast to all others over the last 150 to 200 years, and that is atmospheric carbon dioxide. Yes, there are other greenhouse gases, but never before has this particular green house gas risen so rapidly. At the same time, other green house gases have risen only as a consequence of the effects of rising carbon dioxide. So although the solution might entail more than one player, the primary player is carbon dioxide.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels now are 30 per cent higher than when I was a teenager, yes, I am dating myself. Mitigating the effects of climate change will require getting that level back down substantially from where it is now. The most effective way to do that is to put the brakes on what we are doing. In other words, humankind must produce less carbon dioxide. Our input of atmospheric carbon dioxide is approximately 60 times more than what nature produces. Clearly, we are the force of change.

Reducing what we put in is a start, and an essential start. Without that, nothing else matters. But even if that is done (a tall order, I agree), it is also necessary to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Many chemical methods have been proposed, but all of those have the same drawback, thermodynamics. Removing carbon dioxide is a chemical reduction process, and that means it requires energy input. Any process that requires energy input ultimately generates heat, and that is not what we want. Quite the opposite.

So removing carbon dioxide will best be accomplished by good old Mother Nature. Photosynthesis is the one process that we have to sequester carbon dioxide by using energy that comes to us everyday from the sun. We can either use what Mother Nature has given us, and use the plant world to help us out of this, or maybe develop scalable synthetic photosynthesis systems, but still it is the same. We need to harness the power of the sun to save ourselves from getting warmed too much by the sun. Kind of ironic, but true.

For now, we do not have those hoped for synthetic systems, so we better start taking very good care of Mather Nature.