Atmospheric Carbon Removal Wanted

It is now commonly agreed that man-made green house effect is causing major climatic disruption to the world. Unfortunately the politicians and big polluters still remain in the stage of denial. As a result, international agreement is still focusing on limiting the green house gas emission to 'the XXXX year level'. According to climate scientists Ken Caldeira and Damon Matthews, it is not going to be enough.

“Most scientific and policy discussions about avoiding climate change have centered on what emissions would be needed to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” says Caldeira. “But stabilizing greenhouse gases does not equate to a stable climate. We studied what emissions would be needed to stabilize climate in the foreseeable future.”


The scientists investigated how much climate changes as a result of each individual emission of carbon dioxide, and found that each increment of emission leads to another increment of warming. So, if we want to avoid additional warming, we need to avoid additional emissions.

With emissions set to zero in the simulations, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere slowly fell as carbon “sinks” such as the oceans and land vegetation absorbed the gas. Surprisingly, however, the model predicted that global temperatures would remain high for at least 500 years after carbon dioxide emissions ceased. [my emphasis]

It is now time to start thinking of taking some of the carbon back from atmosphere, help nature to repair our damages!