How many seconds, minutes, hours, days, or years will carbon capture restore?

On atmospheric carbon removal: Express it in time

1️⃣ It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of CO₂. What if we talked about CO₂ removal (CDR) like a time machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes*)?

*ignoring the hysteresis in the relationship between CO₂ and climate change impacts. pic.twitter.com/LgDlVNxziQ

— David Ho (@_david_ho_) February 3, 2022

2️⃣ So if global CO₂ emissions is 38.9 GtCO₂/yr, and the Climeworks Orca plant removes 4000 tCO₂/yr, it's a time machine that takes us back 3 seconds every year. pic.twitter.com/qKqlIMGMue

— David Ho (@_david_ho_) February 3, 2022

3️⃣ This idea came to mind when I saw a talk by @mathieu_mongin where he spoke about adding alkalinity to decrease ocean acidification on the Great Barrier Reef to take it back to conditions of the past.

— David Ho (@_david_ho_) February 3, 2022

4️⃣ When we look at things this way, once again, it's hard to see how stopping CO₂ emissions isn't easier.https://t.co/joIlpM8LQU

— David Ho (@_david_ho_) February 3, 2022

Permanent sequestration of 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year for four years is impressive, but when you see that it’s a time machine that takes us back 1 minute and 21 seconds each year, it’s really not enough. https://t.co/q9pnasnFbO

— David Ho (@_david_ho_) March 17, 2022

Great minds. Large numbers are hard to relate to, whereas everyone experiences time so it makes sense to contextualize large numbers that way.

— David Ho (@_david_ho_) April 12, 2023

Study shows support for carbon removal but great concern over solar manipulation by Ulrich von Lampe, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) gGmbH, Phys.org, October 30, 2023

As of 2024, Germany isn't hitting its emissions targets, but is proposing to be a leader in carbon removal.

See this:

"In the 1990s, hope – coupled with doubt – was the fossil fuel industry’s antidote to the precautionary principle, the sensible idea that some problems had such dire implications that humanity should err on the side of caution even if the science was not completely settled. When George Bush was president, he was initially so concerned by the impact of fossil fuels on the climate that he looked into regulating the oil industry. But he backed away from this on the grounds that future generations would probably develop new technologies to solve the problem. Call that dumb, call that wishful thinking, or call that hope, the result was the same: no action.

That once again looks to be the temptation of Britain’s Labour government in promising £22bn for carbon capture and storage projects. This technology is supposed to catch greenhouse gas emissions before they can enter the atmosphere. But it is incredibly expensive, has never worked at the necessary scale and, until now, has largely been a ruse for the petroleum industry to continue pumping."

— Jonathan Watts, Would abandoning false hope help us to tackle the climate crisis?, The Guardian, Oct 24, 2024