„Trump Forest—a global reforestation project aiming to offset President Trump’s anti-climate policies—has reached 1 million trees after thousands of pledges from around the world. Trump Forest was launched just under a year ago after POTUS announced he was pulling the U.S. from the Paris agreement.“
„Farming crops with crushed rocks could help to improve global food security and capture CO2 from the atmosphere, a new study has found. The pioneering research by scientists at the University of Sheffield together with international colleagues suggests that adding fast-reacting silicate rocks to croplands could capture CO2 and give increased protection from pests and diseases while restoring soil structure and fertility.“
Beerling, David J.; Leake, Jonathan R.; Long, Stephen P.; Scholes, Julie D.; Ton, Jurriaan; Nelson, Paul N. et al. (2018): Farming with crops and rocks to address global climate, food and soil security. In Nature Plants 327, p.[nbsp]810. DOI: 10.1038/s41477-018-0108-y.
„Managed croplands worldwide are already equipped for frequent rock dust additions to soils, making rapid adoption at scale feasible, and the potential benefits could generate financial incentives for widespread adoption in the agricultural sector. However, there are still obstacles to be surmounted. Audited field-scale assessments of the efficacy of CO2 capture are urgently required together with detailed environmental monitoring. A cost-effective way to meet the rock requirements for CO2 removal must be found, possibly involving the recycling of silicate waste materials. Finally, issues of public perception, trust and acceptance must also be addressed.“
„Geoengineering programmes that inject aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the planet may harm wildlife. That’s according to a team of scientists from the US, whose new study suggests that suddenly starting or stopping geoengineering programmes may prevent species from successfully tracking changes in climate.“
„Achieving the Paris Agreement goals of keeping global warming to “well below” 2C, or to 1.5C, above pre-industrial levels will require rapid decarbonisation of human society. But national commitments to rein in greenhouse gas emissions are currently insufficient to meet these agreed limits. It is increasingly likely that “negative emissions”, or “carbon dioxide removal”, technologies will be needed to take up the slack.“
„The report states that NETs should not be relied upon later in the century to compensate for failure to mitigate emissions now. Not only do the NETs investigated in the report fail to reach the level of carbon removal predicted in some climate scenarios, the time taken between researching new technologies and successfully implementing them will take decades. If NETs are seen as a viable solution to climate change, they could influence policy makers to focus on these rather than to prioritise the more urgent need to curb emissions.“
„In a recent GRIST article, Eric Holthaus describes a devil’s bargain we have already made. The competition between the cooling, reflective particles created in burning fossil fuel and the warming effects of carbon dioxide created in burning those same fuels will end, in favor of the warming CO2, as we move to clean technologies. Listen in as we discuss this new challenge.“
„Paul Stoy, an ecologist at MSU, paces in front of whiteboards in a powder blue shirt and jeans as he describes how a landscape already dominated by agriculture could be transformed yet again by a different green revolution: vast plantations of crops, sown to sop up carbon dioxide (CO2) from the sky. „We have this new energy economy that’s necessary to avoid dangerous climate change, but how is that going to look on the ground?“ he asks.“
„Pumping aerosols into the stratosphere may buy us more time, but it’s no substitute for cutting carbon emissions—and we still don’t know enough to do it responsibly.“
Longer German article on CE in general.
