AAS Study Projects 4C Global Temperature Increase By As Early As 2064, As Late As 2095

[hatrack]

A collaborative research team from China has published a new analysis that shows the Earth's climate would increase by 4 °C, compared to pre-industrial levels, before the end of 21st century.

To understand the severity of this, consider the Paris Agreement (https://unfccc.int/process/the-paris-agreement/what-is-the-paris-agreement) of the United Nations. It's a global effort to prevent an increase of 2°C. Nearly every country on the planet--the United States is the only country to withdraw--has agreed to work to prevent the catastrophic effects of two degrees of warming.

The researchers published their analysis projecting a doubling of that increase in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-018-7160-4 ) on May 18, 2018.

"A great many record-breaking heat events, heavy floods, and extreme droughts would occur if global warming crosses the 4 °C level, with respect to the preindustrial period," said Dabang Jiang, a senior researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "The temperature increase would cause severe threats to ecosystems, human systems, and associated societies and economies."

EDIT

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/ioap-ect052318.php

[NNadir]

1. The paper is written by Chinese scientists and the asshole in chief says climate change is...

...a Chinese conspiracy.

I don't see why anyone would worry in any case, since the world will be 2,584% powered by so called "renewable energy" by 2064 or 2084 or 2030 or 15 years from from now, I forget which.

[StevieM]

2. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on a question I have been asking lately.

What do you recommend for the parts of energy economy other than electricity? What do you recommend we do about replacing fossil fuels for transportation, space and water heating and industry&manufacturing?

[NNadir]

3. I recently gave my thoughts on that briefly, here:

The demise of the ICE is another one of those popular beliefs that is not connected with reality.

The Olah paper linked in the quick response above, the idea of a anthropogenic carbon cycle, would be as close to nirvana as I could personally imagine, not that there really is nirvana.

I'm sure I've written about DME, dimethyl ether, all over the internet, but I don't have time to dig up those posts.

The most thermodynamically feasible, and more importantly clean, way to make it would be by hydrogenation of carbon dioxide using thermochemically produced hydrogen cycles or thermochemical carbon dioxide splitting cycles coupled with the water gas shift reaction to make hydrogen, the latter being responsible for 99% of the hydrogen generated on this planet today, albeit, regrettably, with the heat to drive the reaction and the carbon monoxide coming from dangerous natural gas, or, even worse, but still practiced, dangerous coal.

I've studied lots of nuclear driven thermochemical cycles over the years and tend to favor those that can conceivably made continuous processes, since batch processes are never as economic as continuous processes. I've had lots and lots of chemical engineering ideas built around this subject, and hopefully my son will get up to speed on his engineering skills before I die so these ideas will not die with me.

As it happens, just today, I came across yet another paper on this topic, in the current issue of one of my favorite and most read journals: Hydrogenation of CO2 to Dimethyl Ether over Brønsted Acidic PdZn Catalysts (Hasliza Bahruji et al Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 2018, 57 (20), pp 6821–6829.) I feel like I've read hundreds of similar papers over the years. The question is not whether we can make the stuff cleanly; clearly we can. The question is where does one get clean hydrogen. Again, from my perspective clean hydrogen can only be made using nuclear energy at high temperatures.