A new way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere | Jennifer Wilcox 

U SUR R A GENIUS

Great!!!

Exactly

I’ve been saying the same thing for years.

But da gubermint says you all will get high on the hemp and become frog people. Trust authority.

Me too 🤣

But with that we can only store the CO2 we put out, which isn't enough. We need to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere that we already put there to go back to the state we want to be in, so we need to work with the diluted CO2.

@Роман Мавроян we should do both. It is absolutely neccessary to deal with the source of the problem, but that's not enough! The concentration that's already in the atmosphere is higher than we'd like to have, so we have to build the infrastructure to take it out NOW, or else we won't have it to start when we reach zero emissions to turn them negative. That would take too long. We need to build both systems at once.

@@midnight8341 But what if we just burn wood, because it apsorbed CO2 before

@@xxmountaindewxx7893 that isn't possible because there are not enough trees in the world to fuel the energy needs for 21. century humanity

Co2 need not be taken out anyway. How dare she attempt to justify stealing it from our air. Plants have evolved to best grow when levels of co2 are double what they are today, this is why grower pump it into greenhouses at 1100ppm, the current atmosphere is 410ppm. What she wants is funding to take out the carbon, and then to be able to sell it to commercial growers that produce our food. I have a much better idea leave it in the air to help the plants that grow outside. There are to many scams like this one, trying to make money off fake global warming. Pollution, pesticides plastics are different from carbon. We breath out 100 time the carbon that we breath in. A tipical bedroom at night might have 2500ppm of carbon just from our breath. This whole hysteria is fake nonsense to make people rich.

I agree. Sadly Brazil and the Philippines aren't just going to ignore that readily available farmland at their front door and the money that can be made from the timber. We must protect the rain forests as they contain the richest diversity of life in the world and provide sustenance and clean air to the rest of the world and like you say, it wouldn't cost money to just let them thrive.

A forest emits as much CO2 as it consumes. Only new forests would help. But they need too much space. You are right that it is a good idea to preserve the rainforest to capture C (carbon).

As she said, we need all the help we can get: preserve the rain forests, reforestation and afforestation. But if we actually want to reduce the overall CO2 levels in the atmosphere _fast_, we need more than that.

rainforests emit alot of co2 too, boreal forests are what we should be looking at

@@yarodin We do not need to do it at all. You have fallen for it. See Dr Patrick Moore or any of the 30,000 scientists who have signed a petition about this. C02 is the basis of life. Its not poisonous. Its used to preserve food. Its used in some keyhole surgery, Its used in greenhouses. We cannot be without it. Clean up everything else, but you are all wasting time on C02. only 0.4% in atmosphere, your brigade has sums wrong.

And millions would starve.

@@johannesswillery7855 how?

If it was cheaper to use alternative sources they would use it now. Also they are not reliable.

The modern society needs gas and fosil fuel to survive whit out them million of people starve to death

In a greenhouse it fine to have extra CO2, but that's because it's a more or less small controlled environment. Out in the atmosphere though on a large scale it absorbs light and converts it to heat reducing the planets albedo (basically it's reflectivity to sunlight) meaning that it, the Earth, heats up. We aren't going to give ourselves CO2 poisoning by buring fossil fuels, that doesn't happen until much higher CO2 consentrations.

Exactly!! We have at the moment around 400ppm of C02, which is historically speaking incredibly low.. It has been 2000, 3000 4000ppm in the earths past. Plants, crops and trees cannot survive and will die if the concentration falls to 150ppm. The concentration of C02 in the hall this lecture was given in, with all the people emmiting C02 as they exhale, was probably around 1800ppm. Plants and crops thrive when the concentration is around this level, and they use less water in photosynthesis too. : )

Marco Janssen look at France

Many people who work in those industries worlwide would loose their job.

so are you gonna put a tree next to every chimney or car exhaust?

This is the answer!

Trees!

bRuH trees will give back Co2 if given too much. you need way more than a forest

@@peachxsncreamgacha567 What?

Meanwhile black locust is growing like weed in certain areas (I seem to remember it can fix nitrogen from the air, that gives it an edge over other trees. Once it decomposes it becomes good compost). As it is invasive in some parts of the U.S. it has to be managed, one could plant other trees instead to have a good mix between native and exotic species - that would be jobs for rural folks that like the outdoors. Black locust makes for excellent fence posts, it does not rot in soil. I think it also grows in AL.

Seems a logical thought yes. Afteral a combustion engine loses a lot of the energy in the burned fuel as heat through it's exhaust. So why not use that heat to capture the CO2 from the exhaust gases. However I'm fairly certain you need a bigger volume to acutally capture the CO2 out of the atmosphere then you could fit into a car. However I don't see why this couldn't be done for power plants or factories.

Why not put a price on pollution and let efficient market forces figure out the best path to reduce it? Here's a plan to do that that is beneficial and bipartisan: cclusa.org/energy-innovation-act

@@PhoenixNL72-DEGA- You don't collect co2 using heat but rather using pumps and chemical arrays that would be roughly the size of a car. You wouldn't be able to capture co2 effectively but if you could, you'd acquire 1 pound of co2 per mile; how are you going to store that and how to get rid of it? Electric cars are much better in every way than gas cars that have no future.

Omnia in numeris we have, it just needs too much space. To collect all CO2 from the United States you would need 20 rainforest. Where exactly do you want to plant them? The whole plan is about getting a similar mechanisms down by landuse and don't consume soil which is good for agriculture. If you have an better idea: run the numbers and show us, I'm interested.

Well played sir. I take my hat off to you.

@@re-verdesiendomexico5188 have you recently looked at the prices per kilo on nuts? It's nuts. You cannot feed a population on these expenses, that's why we don't do it.

@Awakened2Truth - Disciple of Jesus the Christ Well that's your view I suspect you are well into the minority as about 97% of scientists qualified in this field would disagree with you. (but well done with the information you have provided) They would be backed up with an ever increasing amount of data, reports, study's, etc. (Nearly all of this stuff you can find on line though different formats) Many reports and study's done as far back as the 1980's have shown this what is going to happen, and here we are it's happening. I guess the thing that puzzles me is this, If all the things that are required to fix this are implemented we end up with a healthy planet better for all living things, even if global warming is wrong. if on the other hand we do nothing ....................................................................we along with ever other living thing on the planet could be dead. Our planet could just end up looking like mars. unable to support life. So just on the chance that catastrophic global warming is real wouldn't you just get on board. I mean at the end of the day it's going to make no difference to the universe I suppose But i just fell that the stakes are to high To take your view.

@Awakened2Truth - Disciple of Jesus the Christ you give yourself away and belittle your self good luck out there, I suspect your view on intelligence could really be improved somewhat if you used just a little.

I am sorry but i am nt able to understand exactly what you mean. Are you saying CO2 is just a small part on this? Or that these efforts are worthless?

@@srobsonscosta8887 The efforts are more than worthless. And have nothing to do with protecting the environment. Environmental pollution is caused mostly by poor countries with a lack of infrastructure. Like trash/plastic in the oceans. Though microplastic in cosmetic is a problem everywhere. For the different CO2-theories (yes there are more then one or two): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NqLYXVDND5o.html

We would be as cold as Mars if it wasn't for the CO2.

@@mariop8101 Not quite. Water vapor is the main cause. CO2 does not play that big of a role in the atmosphere. Main purpose: Plant food.

Seriously?

About 200 to 300 ppm not 400 ppm

Mike Garber They aren’t going to remove all the CO2

The plants were thriving back when the quantity of CO2 in atmosphere was low then why would they die if we were to bring back CO2 levels back to normal. Just so you know CO2 is an essential gas for many reasons, so it would be disastrous to remove all the CO2 present in atmosphere. The Earth's temperature would go down too much for humans and animals to survive. We just want to bring CO2 levels back to normal, not remove them entirely

@@grav3-jpeg Oops commented to the wrong person, sorry

Why?

@@stesegreto656 I guess the real question is you believe without question?...

Real homework, or some Googling?

And the only realistic way to stop people from exploiting fossils? Making other energy cheaper.

Would it give a solution to the surface heat problem as well? Or only using it 50 kms above the surface?

They are looking for expensive solutions to problems that nature already solved hundreds of years ago.

Sam Airy No one can. It’s literally still an unknown despite all models. Climate is extremely dynamic.

Yet farmers pump in around 1,500 into their greenhouses to increase crops. Earth can benefit from more than 400.

Oceans are the best carbon capturer

And get house plants

@@alegriart And now it's on fire.😟

Wow, for once a perfect simple text!

So let us play along as if the whole theory was right and that humans need to produce less carbon dioxide. But producing less CO2 is no longer enough according to some scientists. So we need to reduce it. CO2 levels in the atmosphere have reached 400 parts per million, when compared to around 300 ppm in other decades. The fact is, we also need to figure out how to remove some of the CO2 that’s already out there. As a short-term solution, a young passionate child climate activist Greta Thunberg suggests we plant more trees. It’s a lovely idea. Who doesn't like trees? While R&D labs struggle to come up with viable carbon-capture technologies, we already have this “magic machine,” as her video says, that “sucks carbon out of the air, cost very little, and builds itself.” And we don't need to wait for craven politicians to get on board. I really want to believe in this. What if every person on Earth took it upon themselves to plant a tree. One treetop per child. Just how much carbon dioxide could we hope to scrub out of the atmosphere? Would it help reverse climate change? Let’s do the math! Carbon Content of a Tree I’m going to walk through a rough estimation. This is a good way to approach policy questions on a first cut; if the results are promising, you can always loop back and do a more sophisticated analysis. So to start, let’s figure out how much carbon a single tree can hold. Imagine a generic tree. Since I live in Quebec, I’m picturing a pine (though we have some other species as well). The pine is nice because it has a tractable shape-it's basically just a long skinny cylinder (ignoring the branches). I’ll say it has a diameter (d) of 1.5 meters and a height (h) of 15 meters. I can just plug those values into the formula for the volume of a cylinder to get the amount of wood my tree contains. This gives me 106 cubic meters of wood. To convert this to mass, I’m going to assume a wood density (ρ) of 500 kilograms per cubic meter, which is half the density of water. The mass of my generic tree would then be: Mass equals rho times volume, which equals rho times the product of pie distance squared and height all divided by 4. That works out to 53,000 kilograms per tree. But how much of that is carbon? Trees are made of many different elements, like hydrogen and nitrogen, but let’s say it’s about half carbon. At least that's an estimate that agrees with Wikipedia. So the mass of carbon would be 0.5 times the mass of the tree, or 26,500 kg. Simple! Counting Up the Atoms So far so good. But to talk about atmospheric concentration, what we really need to know is the number of carbon dioxide molecules eliminated. Since each CO2 molecule contains one carbon atom, I need to convert the carbon mass of a tree to numbers. This is where Avogadro's number comes into play, with a value of around 6.022 x 1023 particles per mole. And one mole of carbon has a mass of about 12 grams. That gives us the number of carbon atoms (n) per tree: Then, since everybody plants a tree, and assuming they’re all the same, the total amount of captured carbon atoms (N) would just be that number times 7.5 billion, the population of Earth. We're not done yet. We still need to find out how this changes the total concentration of CO2 in the air. For that, we need to estimate the total mass of Earth's atmosphere .... well, that’s kind of daunting. What do physicists do in such situations? We Google it. I get a value of 5 x 1018 kilograms (from Wikipedia). So, to find the concentration in ppm, I need the molar mass of air. Air is 99 percent nitrogen and oxygen; a weighted average of their masses gives an air molar mass of 28.97 grams per mole. With that, I can calculate the number of air molecules. This uses the same formula as above for n, so I just built it into my computation code. The Grand Result Starting CO2 Concentration = 400 ppm CO2 with 1 Tree per Person = 376.003 ppm Damn. That sucks. Even with 7.5 BILLION trees, it makes only a tiny dent in the carbon dioxide level. Yes, we made a lot of assumptions, and some of them are obviously wrong-but they’re not crazy-wrong. For example, we simplified by saying the trees are all the same. But allowing them to be different wouldn’t change the result if our generic tree is a good middle-of-the-pack average. The real question is whether our model is biased in one direction or the other. One obvious bias is that we assumed away branches. (I'm trying to picture a poor village smithy standing under a non-spreading chestnut tree …) But how much more carbon would we trap with branches? Twenty percent? Even if it doubles the reduction, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 still rounds off to 400 ppm. How about one more quick estimation. If everyone planted a tree, how much land would that require? Let's say they’re planted in a square grid, 5 meters apart, so that each tree takes up an area of 25 square meters. With 7.5 billion trees, that requires 1.8 x 1011 square meters of land, or 72,000 square miles. That's roughly the size of North Dakota. Oh, for comparison, the Amazon rain forest has an area of 2.1 million square miles.

Planting trees aren't a solution to the problem, trees absorb CO2 when they grow that is true, but once a tree grows old and die all that CO2 it's used to grow with will be released in to the atmosphere once more, planting trees isn't a solution that will help in any serious way.

Atmospheric CO2 is not a problem.

@juscurious The corruption is what you say and more. I look at the CO2 scare, cultural marxism, the wars, the genocides, the dumbing down of education, the consolidation of the national News media, all of it, is working towards one goal, global government.

@@ThekiBoran Right, the problem is everyone and everything else you can name except the fossil fuel industry which wants to keep making a buck until everyone is dead.

Funny Joke.

America doesnt have so much money, it has so much debt. Its not just sitting around for us to use, its loaned, through bonds. The failing tax system doesnt nearly provide enough money to sustain the massively inefficient systems the goverment places to meet the demands of voters. No, the original commenter is onto something. If you want a solution thats actually implementable, it needs to be cheap and it needs to produce something thats profitable at the end. No one wants another cash sink.

You can't get as big of a government grant for planting trees

Protect prairies and oceans. They are larger carbon sinks than forests

@@gregbrown1311 plankton and algae are great but contribute to Co2 when they decompose or get eaten. There is no free dinner, we need Co2 capture both natural and man made

@@gregbrown1311 Maybe his point should be that if you don't cut down trees and let them decompose slowly on the forest floor, they don't turn into CO2 so fast and actually can stay within the soil structure for centuries.

tree requires other things though, water and lots and lots of space

It should be removed at source, the emission shouldn't be released into the atmosphere unless X percentage of CO2 has been removed first somehow.. easier said than done I'm sure

Amen. but then energy industry would have to pay. They get Dr. Wilcox to convince you to pay for it, via the vastly less efficient Direct Air Capture. Disgusting waste she should be ashamed.

God has algae and corals too

God created humans too.

God created apes but they turned unexpectadly into humans

Let's go back to stone age. No cars. Use electric cars. No more use of oil for vehicles. Make less population so less exhaling of carbon dioxide. Use horses and carriages, it is more fun to ride with animals. No use plastics. Let's make a cause. Stop thinking about business and competitions in business.

You can't use vertical farming, as it isn't viable with all the energy you'd need to just light up your plants and aforrestation doesn't work, because with that we'd need more land area than there is on this planet. We need to capture the CO2 somehow and store it safely. I would suggest building massive algae farms out on the oceans, drying the algae and burning them without oxygen to produce ash. From that you can extract the metals they needed for survival for another round and turn all the carbon into one big block that you can simply let sink to the ocean floor, like a big brick.

They are doing just that in Japan. It's still prototype phase, but even so they produce 12,000 heads of lettuce a day. And they use specific red&blue spectrum LED lights. Plants actually waste most of the energy they receive from the sun. Everything below infrared and above blue isn't used at all and most infrared. Everything between red and blue is mostly not used(As the linked article about NASA research below shows)e. They also don't need full daylight brightness to grow at all. So they need a lot less light intensity then we ourselves need. But as the Japanese experiments show. Using just Red&Blue LED lighting works just fine. And according to an article I found it uses just 40 watts of power to provide lights for a 9 meter diameter growth wheel with many growbeds in it.(The amount of power used by an old low power incandescent light bulb) ( www.cropscience.bayer.com/en/stories/2016/from-the-cities-and-into-the-skies-the-rise-of-the-vertical-farm ). An added bonus is that they use only a fraction of the water that is used for the same amount of crops in a conventional farm. And they also only use a fraction of the electricity of conventional greenhouses for the same crop yield. Article on NASA Research: advancedledlights.com/blog/technology/nasa-research-optimum-light-wavelengths-plant-growth/

@@midnight8341 The light is called "the sun"

@@TheBaconWizard you can't light a vertical farm just by sunlight, that would mean building a skyscraper-sized building not just with a steel-glass fassade, but with all of the structural elements made from translucent materials just for plants (good luck getting that financed somehow) and you'd need more than that one building per city, even if you produce year round. So you need artificial lighting at least 16/24 and if you slap solar cells on your glass roof, that blocks sunlight your plants need that you then have to replace with more artificial lighting. And with current solar technology and lighting conditions, that won't cut it.

I'm here to save the world. The 100 M are just my tool

You have raised a good point. The so-called greenhouse gases have maintained the Earth’s temperature at an average of 16C to sustain life as we know it. There is a case for renewable energy but if we interfere with nature we do so at our own peril.

At the beginning she just said that the CO2 is a trace gas with the concentration of 0.04%, that's just a little more than twice the concentration of the neon gas in the air.

Hows it going

A new way to remove CO2. I thought they would say everybody breath in at once. It's a matter of timing.

@@grindupBaker or everybody stop breathing......

Remove CO2 and ALL plants will DIE !!! CO2 level should be like 1200 ppm, no joke!

That only works if you grow trees then cut and bury them so they turn into coal that nobody is ever allowed to mine.

@@sidharthafocus rebuilding soil also sequesters co2, you can even use biochar to rebuild soil and sequester carbon

Frey Faust - It just seems extremely unlikely that the thinking that went into the organization of the Paris agreement could have been got wrong by so many countries, many of which depend on CO2 releasing fuels. I think they’d all rather the issue just went away. Something serious enough to get this many countries talking just seems so unlikely to be a hoax, even if some scientists misbehaved.

@@marktomasetti8642 except that there is zero proof that humans are driving a warming trend in climate change. This century's rate of warming is very mild compared to other periods. Co2 is a vital, life supporting gas with a tiny radiation absorption spectrum. It makes up less than one percent of the atmosphere. During many of the periods when life was flourishing on this planet, the atmospheric co2 content was thousands of ppm, rather than only a few hundred as it is today. There are recent periods when co2 was lower and temperatures were much higher than they are today: 1911 and 1936 for example, several decades before humans started contributing to co2 through industry. It is patently ridiculous to pretend that co2 is the climate driver. Not to mention 30 years of failed predictions by politicians and scientists on the take from the climate tax bonanza.

Frey Faust - Whether humans are causing climate change or not doesn’t matter. All that matters are, (1) is it happening, and (2) is it going to be a problem for humans. If both of those are true, we really ought to save ourselves as much difficulty as we can. Another large organization which is very concerned about climate change is the US department of defense. They’re concern is that the large migrations likely to occur due to loss of sea coasts and loss of farmable land may lead to national security threats. These are very hard-headed people who deal with real threats every day. Some of your facts seem off. This is from NASA: “As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.” (earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php). Also, the industrial revolution started in the late 1700’s with coal in common use since the 1800’s and there is a hockey-stick like jump in temperatures in vero that period. We keep losing huge chunks of Arctic and Antarctic ice to the point where new shipping lanes are open. The warmest weather temperatures since we’ve been recording them (maybe 150 years) have been in the past ten years. A rather broad array of intelligent and dedicated people say we need to look at this. I doubt that less well-informed people such as you or me could have much to add to the discussion.

www.justfacts.com/globalwarming.asp the climate has always changed. It will always be a problem. Your facts are off. NASA scientists are not to b trusted at this point. The hockey stick is an outright hoax. The warming trend at the start if this interglacial ice age was 111 times the current rate, more than 2.5k years ago, and not a smokestack in sight. 1911 was much hotter than the present, and co2 was.low, that is a fact.

Frey Faust - “The climate has always changed, it will always be a problem.” That’s just not good thinking. Yes, the climate has changed for 4 billion years, but it doesn’t always threaten human life as it is now expected to do. I’m not clear about the cause of the current climate change, as I said, it’s not important, it could be CO2 or something else. Whatever the cause, the consequences look bad for humanity. Can we agree that matters that threaten large chunks of the human race ought to be looked at? Especially ones that may take a long time to address - it won’t help to find out in 2050 that we should have started making corrections in the year 2000. I don’t know anything about justfacts.com, but below are the hottest ten years in recorded history from NOAA (I’m not sure if the table will paste correctly). The only one NOT after 2000 is 1998. 1911 is not mentioned. Nine out of the 10 are in the past 15 years. Top 10 warmest years (NOAA) (1880-2018) Rank Year Anomaly °C Anomaly °F 1 2016 0.94 1.69 2 2015 0.90 1.62 3 2017 0.84 1.51 4 2018 0.77 1.39 5 2014 0.74 1.33 6 2010 0.70 1.26 7 2013 0.66 1.19 8 2005 0.65 1.17 9 2009 0.64 1.15 10 1998 0.63 1.13

Bro it is very diff to detect a carbon molecule

Actually it hasn't been developed any process that reduces CO2 to hydrocarbons or something as trees do. A lot of catalysts, with a molecular structure similar to chlorophyll, have been made to try to simulate the photosynthesis process, but without success.

1 acre of trees produce enough oxygen for 12 humans. 1 acre of grass produces enough oxygen for 70 humans. What grows easier and faster

yeah but they dont use all the CO2 at once.

@@kraft3344able I doubt it sequesters as much carbondioxide, though, which is the point of it all??

@@youdontfoolmebro no it doesn't sequester CO2. It breaks it down during photosynthesis. Uses carbon stores what it doesn't use and release oxygen into the air for us to breath. Didn't you take science in highschool. Are you that ignorant or just being a troll. Go head drink some more liberal kool-aid