Monday, November 3, 2014

The IPCC's New Report and Geoengineering


The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a UN sponsored organization made up of thousands of scientists from around the world that have been investigating and reporting on climate change since 1988.  

The IPCC has done a superb job of reporting on the progress of global climate change and in providing a clearinghouse for scientific models of future global change.   In 2006 the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize.

On November 2, 2014, a new IPCC report was released. This IPCC report, for the first time, clearly lays the blame on human CO2 emission for global warming. The IPCC says that global warming is now “unequivocal” and that evidence that global warming is human caused is now “clear.” The IPCC and UN head Ban Ki Moon both call on governments around the world to reduce their CO2 emissions to avoid the dire effects of future greenhouse warming.

Interestingly, the IPCC report strongly backs development of improved technologies for Carbon capture and storage (CCS), and it assumes that CCS will play a huge role in reducing CO2 emissions in the future. CCS is mainly targeted at capturing CO2 from smokestacks at coal-fired power plants and other sites that emit CO2.

The CO2 Antarctic Pumpdown (CAP) geoengineering concept I am proposing could be undertaken as a supplement to CO2 reductions due to CCS systems installed at powerplants. No matter how extensive the network of CCS systems becomes, it will never be able to capture all the CO2 emitted from individual cars, homes, and other localized sources. The CAP could play a role in capturing and storing some of the massive CO2 flux to the atmosphere that is never going to be captured by the proposed CSS systems
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