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Extreme Weather Set to Worsen With Climate Change: IPCC
KAMPALA - An increase in heat waves is almost certain, while heavier rainfall, more floods, stronger cyclones, landslides and more intense droughts are likely across the globe this century as the Earth's climate warms, U.N. scientists said on Friday.
An increase in heat waves is almost certain, while heavier rainfall, more floods, stronger cyclones, landslides and more intense droughts are likely across the globe this century as the Earth's climate warms, U.N. scientists said on Friday. (AFP Photo/Ethan Miller) The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urged countries to come up with disaster management plans to adapt to the growing risk of extreme weather events linked to human-induced climate change, in a report released in Uganda on Friday.
The report gives differing probabilities for extreme weather events based on future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, but the thrust is that extreme weather is likely to increase.
"It is virtually certain that increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes ... will occur in the 21st century on the global scale," the IPCC report said.
"It is very likely that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, or heat waves, will increase," it added.
"A 1-in-20 year hottest day is likely to become a 1-in-2 year event by the end of the 21st century in most regions," under one emissions scenario.
An exception is in very high latitudes, it said. Heat waves would likely get hotter by "1 degrees C to 3 degrees C by mid-21st century and by about 2 degrees C to 5 degrees C by late-21st century, depending on region and emissions scenario."
Delegates from nearly 200 countries will meet in South Africa from Nov. 28 for climate talks with the most likely outcome modest steps towards a broader deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change.
CARBON EMISSIONS UP
The United Nations, the International Energy Agency and others say global pledges to curb emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are not enough to prevent the planet heating up beyond 2 degrees Celsius, a threshold scientists say risks an unstable climate in which weather extremes become more common and food production more difficult.
Global carbon emissions rose by a record amount last year, rebounding on the heels of recession.
"It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of heavy rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe," especially in "high latitudes and tropical regions."
For the IPCC, "likely" means a two-thirds chance or more.
It said there was "medium confidence" that this would lead to "increases in local flooding in some regions", but that this could not be determined for river floods, whose causes are complicated.
The report said tropical cyclones were likely to become less frequent or stay the same, but the ones that do form are expected to be nastier.
"Heavy rainfalls associated with tropical cyclones are likely to increase with continued warming. Average tropical cyclone maximum wind speed is likely," the report said.
That, coupled with rising sea levels were a concern for small island states, the report said.
Droughts, perhaps the biggest worry for a world with a surging population to feed, were also expected to worsen.
The global population reached 7 billion last month and is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, according to U.N. figures.
"There is medium confidence that droughts will intensify in the 21st century ... due to reduced precipitation and/or increased evapotranspiration," including in "southern Europe and the Mediterranean region, central Europe, central North America, Central America and Mexico, northeast Brazil and southern Africa."
There is a high chance that landslides would be triggered by shrinking glaciers and permafrost linked to climate change, it said.
(Writing and additional reporting by Tim Cocks; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
135 Comments so far
Show AllNot really surprising that mother nature will seek to find a balance.
Sarcasm deserves sarcasm.
It is really, really reassuring that the IPCC can predict that what is already happening is "likely" to happen!
Like the PR meetings in Copenhagen and Cancun, the meeting in South Africa will be another display of corporate domination and speechified dismal dissolution under the guise of "serious talks."
The IPCC has become a front group for corrupt, manipulating, capital on a global scale.
Yea, expect the M$M to spin the extreme weather we're having, and will have with lots of very long El Ninos and La Ninas, back to back, year after year. They will be said to be unprecedented, but will be a convincing cover for the underlying climate change we have caused. It will keep most people complacent and keep the status going for a while longer, which is the primary purpose for our corporate-government controlled M$M nowadays.
My guess is nothing meaningful will be done and the atmosphere will get warm enough for the methane locked up in the tundra, and the oceans to be released in huge amounts. At that point the temp of the Earth will skyrocket very quickly in a positive feedback loop. It will be a major tipping point for the atmosphere. Methane is over 20 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, so as it gets released it will quickly warm the atmosphere, which will only cause more to be released. This is one theory as to what in the end, caused the greatest mass extinction that the Earth has ever experienced, some 400,000,000 years ago.
Selfishly I hope this all happens after I take my last breath on this speck of a rock we call Earth, but then who knows anything for sure...
I think they'll be trying to terraform Mars before congress can agree on managing earth's climate change problem. Those who think Mars sounds like a good option ought to read books about people climbing Mt. Everest, where conditions are far more comfortable for humans than Mars could ever be.
The 1% will try their damnedest to be the ones living on Mars while the 99% on Earth gasps vainly for breathe and dies off.
"lots of very long El Ninos and La Ninas, back to back, year after year"
The El Niño / La Niña cycle is called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. Much of the time, we hear climate attributed to ENSO, but more information is developing all the time on how global warming influences ENSO. It's starting to look like good-bye, El Niño - possibly a permanent La Niña is taking over. This would be very bad for the southwestern drought.
"La Niña causes the Jet Stream to move up to the northern U.S. and southern Canada, and when we have La Niña, the north has cooler, wetter weather than normal, and the south has warmer weather and much below normal precipitation," Dr. Miller said. "El Niño is just the opposite. It's not good for agriculture production on either end of the scale."
Worse, climatologists say that the La Niña pattern has settled in and no significant rains are expected before spring. In fact, there will not be notable precipitation "until we get a significant change in the weather pattern and we get tropical moisture," Dr. Miller said. That may not come until fall 2012 and "they're already talking about La Niña coming back in next fall."
Texas vegetables enduring worst drought in 50 years
Thank you Birdbrain. I laughed out loud when I ran across the word "likely".
Thank you Birdbrain. I laughed out loud when I ran across the word "likely".
It's not really even complicated. When you add more heat-energy to the oceans, it will brew more violent storms, and change weather patterns.
When I was a kid tornados were something that happened in Kansas. Last night here in North Carolina people lost their lives and many more lost property.
Change is never easy, but there comes a point when resistance to change is not merely understandable but criminal.
Breaking News on the Greenhouse Mass Extinction Events - applicable to the present - this is something the IPCC doesn't talk about
Princeton release: Massive volcanoes, meteorite impacts delivered one-two death punch to dinosaurs
Published: Thursday, November 17, 2011 - 15:54 in Paleontology & Archaeology
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/11/17/princeton.release.massive.volcanoes.meteorite.impacts.delivered.one.two.death.punch.dinosaurs
-----------------------------------
I am something of a dedicated amateur on the subject of mass extinctions and impact events.
I actually still have Vincent Courtillot's 1990 article in Scientific American which provided much needed balance at the time, and has proven not only correct, but spectacularly correct, and chillingly correct in that we are attempting to replicate, unknowingly for the vast majority of people on Earth - a greenhouse mass extinction event.
For those with an historical penchant, I will post below the 1990 Scientific American article
"A Volcanic Eruption", by Vincent Courtillot, Scientific American, Oct.1990, pp.85-92
Manysummits
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that link didnt work for me..............
I just tried the link and it worked - here I'll post it again:
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/11/17/princeton.release.massive.volcanoes.meteorite.impacts.delivered.one.two.death.punch.dinosaurs
thanks got it. but in any case we dont need to worry cos theres a new weapon just been tested which will deal with any insurrections from other countries when things get too hot..............Army test in Hawaii launches weapon capable of traveling 5 times the speed of sound
its in the washington post today............................
.
Scientific American holds proprietary rights to article access. This is really galling and happens incredibly frequently with well documented science in all disciplines.
Do yo know of any other source?
Courtillot has a website, Wikipedia has a write-up, etc...
The association in time and space between massive flood basalt provinces and mass extinctions is spectacular, and while this does not constitute evidence in the classical scientific sense, further investigations reveal multiple convergent lines of evidence which place the hypothesis into the realm of 'beyond reasonable doubt.'
For myself, I am utterly convinced that greenhouse mass extinctions are the primary cause of the Big Five Mass Extinctions throughout the Phanerozoic, and that we, in the present time, have become a force of nature powerful enough to replicate in some degree those extraordinary events.
It is even possible that we might temporarily exceed the rate of injection of CO2 into the atmosphere and oceans of any of these events.
I say temporarily because we will run out of fossil fuels relatively soon, in a geologic sense, and in ten thousand years give or take, the Earth will resume its descent into the next ice age.
Manysummits
=======
Michael: The book, "Earth in Upheaval" by Immanuel Velikovsky is the best resource I've ever encountered that looks at the geological changes in a way no other source (I've come upon) does. Whenever he unearths a major portion of Earth's geological record, he shows that such formations challenge conventional theories, or whatever stands in for science's present orthodoxy. Not one established theory manages to explain away all the anomalies that his research exposes. It's deep, but fascinating material.
I haven't read the book Siouxrose, but I am somewhat familiar with Velikovsky
I would suggest he is an unreliable scientific source, although there are often insights to be gained by reading such sources, if done with a very sharp and scientific critical eye.
At present, for a blend of deep past science and modern climatology, I would recommend Peter Ward at the University of Washington, "Under a Green Sky."
Manysummits
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Whenever a source challenges, defies or discredits the established orthodoxy, they are generally regarded as heretics, and thus branded "unscientific." I'm now reading Colin Wilson's "Atlantean Blueprint," and he goes to many nations and meets archaeologists who are not necessarily recognized by Western authorities. Again, the evidence of his research challenges many notions accepted by the scientific community which the mystic Rudolph Steiner defined as "The consensus of mediocre minds."------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As Dr. Robert Mendelson pointed out in his book, "Confessions of a Medical Heretic," the same sort of "Shunning" effect takes place when a medical doctor gravitates away from conventional practices to explore other healing options. They are called quacks and looked down upon by the "priesthood" of medical doctors, most willing to conform to orthodoxy.
I can't say how much is the legacy of the austere church-state conditioning that made questioning authority a DEADLY sin (through the stigma of heretic, an "offense" punishable by death in a way that had to present a massive shock and awe campaign against dissent in that era) and how much it reflects a genuine reflex in many persons to conform to the crowd, but the net effect is the same and it squashes alternatives. A similar syndrome is seen in the way the big energy companies buy out the patents that might lead to saner, greener forms of energy usage.
Power concedes nothing without a struggle; and even among the "cognescenti," power is jealously (or should I say zealously) guarded, so that theories that don't fall into line with those uniformly upheld receive punishing stigmas, and woe unto the authors of unconventional (if well-researched) studies & doctrines.
Siouxrose:
Try this to get spacing:
< p >Talk...< /p >
But do not leave any spaces between the brackets and the p
---------------
I only point out that citing a source such as Velikovsky carries risk.
Let me give you an example:
In the book "Underworld", a book about science by a brilliant man who happens not to be a scientist professionally, ancient sea levels are discussed compellingly.
Since you mention Atlantis, here is some info from this book:
The author recounts from personal historical research that Plato interviewed an Egyptian priest, and from this interview the date of 9,600 BC is derived for the Egyptians historical date for the destruction of Atlantis.
To a geologist familiar with paleoclimatology like myself, this date jumps out, for 9,600 B.C. is within a hundred years of the commonly accepted scientific date for the beginning of the Holocene, or if you prefer, the end of the Pleistocene and the terminal event of the Pleistocene, the Younger Dryas. Sea level rose many meters and very quickly following this date, one of perhaps three very large flooding events, one at approximately 14,000 years ago, one at ~11,700 years ago, and one a few thousand years later.
While I find this interesting, the author investigates further, consulting with professional scientists, and finds a plausible mechanism for the catastrophic and virtually instantaneous destruction of Atlantis, a major earthquake triggered by glacial unloading at the hinge line - Atlantis presumably sitting at exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, in fact, according to the author and to Plato and the Egyptian, offshore of the Straights of Gibraltar.
This is plausible, and very interesting.
But in discussing climate change here and now, I think it imperative to go to great lengths to cite the qualifications and integrity of any source.
Manysummits
=====
Some 333 feet. That is the minimum level the sea levels rose from the height of the last ice age . The vast majority of this happened in the first handful of years rather then a slow and gradual rise as once thought.
Essentially and waters off your coasts less then 333 feet deep was once dry land.
It impossible to conclude that it did not wipe out Civilizations.
From the article,,, ("likely across the globe this (*century*) as the Earth's climate warms, U.N. scientists said on Friday.").
This Century??? .... Always the scientists couch the facts, fearing to be looked upon as "Chicken Little"... With such words as "by the end of the century,,, or within a 100 years",,,, when they should be warning, "by next summer or within the next three to five years we will have unbelieveable damaging weather all around the globe, far worse than what we have witnessed during the past two years"
This continual type of discussing the dire effects of global warming is one major reason nothing productive is being done to reverse what we have done to our atmosphere.... "We have until the the year 2100 to reduce our atmospheric Co2 level to 350 ppm."___ No!!! __ We have to take some firm and dramatic action NOW,,, world wide to reduce the atmospheric Co2 level.
Stop playing word games with a deadly ticking time bomb and tell it like it is.
but if they tell it like it is (k.p.) then the sheeple will panic cos they wont be able to watch their crummy game shows etc............merry xmas!!!!
I've been on the global warming/climate change "bandwagon" now for 25 or 30 years.
The IPCC keeps stating old news.
CO2 emissions are still increasing.
Population keeps increasing. Dramatically.
Politicians......LOL.......a handful of rational people in a large group of whores.
The media........even CD is completely focused on the "Occupy" movement. And the single most important issue of our lives warrants a single article rehashing old news. The rest of the media is in a witch hunt to fix blame for child molesters in football.
This weekend I'm staying in and cleaning my guns while I enjoy some good old NFL football. TV powered by solar panels and batteries by the way. And I think I'll roast some elk meat. And drink some homemade beer.
Prepare yourselves. The collapse is coming. I'm sure gonna miss football.
right glb. i was walking around the (empty) shopping malls here in southern europe last week and it was so depressing..................the stupid expensive things on sale that are worse than useless to anyone unless you have money to burn. enjoy your beer...................i have to buy mine but its cheap.
Hi coco,,, good to see you here again.... We have until 2015 before the Arctic is ice free all summer long and that's when the fit hits the shan.
You are so right ~glb~.
So are the previous posts by the first four commenters here...The first four unless some GW denier steps in and replies to them.
I wonder if there was an incoming massive asteroid the size of Giabralter due to hit Earth within three years if that news would be buried by our 'astute' MSN?
Actually the Professinal GW Deniers who work for some of the 1%ers have managed to cause so much doubt and skepticism about the truth of global warming that for so many of the world's leaders it is not a serious issue and after all, we have until the end of the century. .
What needs to be done is obvious enough to a lot of people, definitely an overwhelming majority on CD, but how you can influence society do it is absolutely not (and this isn't a first in history, although probably the most important one so far (I say "probably", but if there's something even more important than this, well, we're so fucked)). OWS may be the biggest possibility for change at this moment in time, even though it's not a particularly big one :-/ It's not like most people here don't see this problem. And no one wants even more delay. It's just that there are no realistic ways to change or even influence this stuff, apart from mass action in the rich West, especially the US, and only OWS shows any promise at this point. I think the best that can be done is to grab that chance and help them :-/
If only our governments and industry would do what is stated in the video link below, we MIGHT have a snowball's chance in hell of making it through the now guaranteed hell we are entering.
http://www.heatisonline.org/video.cfm
Otherwise, it's over for us. Our inability to keep our toxic products from being recycled into healthy products did us in. NIMBY only works until you run out of yard.
It Is Just Beginning
As of 2011:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=10&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=1995&year2=2011&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Oh-oh!
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urged countries to come up with disaster management plans to adapt to the growing risk of extreme weather events linked to human-induced climate change, in a report released in Uganda on Friday.
a bit too late methinks.......................
Just like in the movies, those who are in the position to do anything about the climate change always wait until it's too late. Only good that will come of it is that they'll be the losers along with the rest of us who've tried to make a difference in our own puny ways.
Nahh, they'll be all right. And the rich parts of the world will be more all right than the poor ones. The US and Europe will not be as fucked as most of the rest of the world. We are *not* in this together. Some people are in much, much deeper shit.
Nope, ~Atomsk~ it will get everybody. The last humans alive might be those in the orbiting space station.
o_O What is the global warming effect that will get everybody? What will happen that will wipe out all humans equally at the same time? As far as I know, the Southern hemisphere will have much bigger and longer lasting problems than the North.
I didn't say all at once ~Atomsk~, that is possible however, but not likely.. I mean global warming and dramatic climate changes will effect (everybody) and not just the Northern Hemisphere... Global is global... I will reply at the end of the comments where there is more url space.
Wrong Wayne. Atomsk is right. The changes are NOT going to be uniform. If there is higher water level and higher temperature, that is going to mean more water in the air for rain, some places are going to get wetter. Only the low-lying areas are going to be inundated. Diseases that get a foothold are going to effect the poor countries MUCH more than the rich countries. Also the global north has what amounts to virgin land to move into in the far north which will become more and more temperate. They don't have those choices in Africa or South America or most of Asia. Catastrophe for the poor? Absolutely. Kiss Kirabati and Niue goodbye. Catastrophe for the North? Not so much.
"Catastrophe for the poor? Absolutely. Kiss Kirabati and Niue goodbye. Catastrophe for the North? Not so much."
More correct would be: Catastrophe for the North? Not as quickly.
I do believe I have been mis-understood John... I am talking about (*runaway*) global warming and the catastrophic (*global*) result.. If we don't have some fast action to prevent it,,,, it is going to happen.
That is (*everyplace*) on the planet we will experience dramatic climate changes such as we haven't dreamed of, along with rising sea levels of over 20 feet and then soon after, over 80 feet, etc ... See my post at the end of the comments.
Let's cut to the chase.
We are way over 350 ppm CO2 and accelerating right into the Pliocene, and there is no reasonable prospect that this will change anytime soon.
There is probably no natural way to reverse the damage built into this scenario - not if we slow the CO2 emissions, not if we reforest, not if we adopt best agricultural practice everywhere etc...
We need those CO2 air capture devices, millions of them, ASAP, and they had better work.
Manysummits
========
"We need those CO2 air capture" May I suggest we ask Rush Limbaugh to inhale deeply then launch him into outer space...
Ha Ha Ha haaaahhhaa!!!! That was great.... I needed that.. I have so much to say that I don't know where to start....this time.....because if anyone cares to look back, I have been mentioning how important it is to "just stop" spewing this crap into the air... just stop industrial society...... as fast as can be done, with the least harm.... we may not stop all the shit... but we may be able to get it to correct down the line, so that our great grand children can exist... even though us, our kids and our grandchildren will be living in a completely dfiffernt world than we have been used to.... to me... as I said in the past.. two years or so... we need to get on the ball.... do I think we will......hell no...... I just hope we do....The more I read authors like Derrick Jensen the more I just can't believe what we have done to our selves and how we have been duped.....
There are no CO2 air-capture devices. The idea of machines that cound process the entire earths atmosphere and scrub it of CO2 is science fantasy. Besides the daunting technical details, the 2nd law of thermodynamics dictates that the energy required to power such a machine would far exceed the total chemical energy prodiced by all the furnaces and IC engines over the 200 or so years of putting the CO2 in the atmosphere to begin with. So, maybe when He-3 fusion or matter-antimatter energy production is prefected, such an atmosphere scrubbing scheme would be possible.
The only thing that will work is to stop emitting the stuff, combined with possible schemes like ocean fertilization and tree planting to increase natural carbon storage.
And while the EU is making some efforts, in the US, any hope of action is not even on the radar. Fossil fuel production will continue to increase on schedule, personal car-miles driven are acclerating everywhere as desperate multiple-job working populace in dysfunctional suburban and small-town wastelands must drive single-occupant cars even more the poorer they get; public transportation service continues to be slashed, and big McMansions continue to go up.
I used to think that individual effort and visible example could make low carbon living "fashionable". But after 15 years of effort on my part, and seeing no one else making the least effort themselves, I realize that I have been pretty naive.
The resouluteness that USAns are marching to disaster is quit stunning to watch.
I just read Fixing the Climate by Wallace S. Broecker (as told to Robert Kunzig - Broecker is in the third person, but it's really his book). Broecker is a climate science pioneer, a pre-eminent authority on Paleoclimate. My reading of his message in this book is "Since it's impossible to do anything about emissions growth, our only hope is open-air carbon capture." That's an irresponsible message imho, coming very close to "We can continue with emissions growth, and use carbon capture to repair the atmosphere."
I can understand the development of carbon capture technology, but only in the context of phasing out carbon emissions, not as a justification for business-as-usual. People like Broecker's colleague Klaus Lackner light up my bullshit detector when they create the impression that carbon capture is just around the corner.
It isn't. Carbon emissions are 300 times more concentrated in the smokestack of a power plant, and nobody has successfully demonstrated a feasible means of removing carbon from such a point source, let alone from open air.
One measure of the floundering nature of carbon capture schemes can be simply assessed by anyone who cares to visit the website of Klaus Lackner's company, Kilimanjaro Energy (formerly Global Research Technologies), where the latest press release is more than a year old. The other prominent carbon capture firm is David Keith's Carbon Engineering, which also has yet to stage a demonstration, though its website is more up to date.
The chemical tricks available to remove CO2 from the air are well known. The problem lies in devising a means of removal which uses less energy than what created the emissions in the first place. The American Physical Society, which is well aware of Keith's and Lackner's work, recently completed an excellent report called Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals (pdf) confirming the educated impression of many that DAC is years off.
Free-air carbon capture is speculative science fiction anyway. It would be like filtering the dispersed cigar smoke from a room, putting back into a solid or liquid form about the same volume as the cigar, amd dong it on a time scale far shorter than it took for the cigar to be smoked, with an amount or energy comparable to what a burning cigar produces.
It's easy enough if you ask a Maxwell demon for help :-)
Your thermodynamic argument is persuasive, but the American Physical Society apparently disagrees regarding the ultimate impossibility of DAC (direct air capture).
From the executive summary of the report linked above:
It is likely that the full cost of the benchmark DAC system scaled to capture six million metric tons of CO2 per year would be much higher than alternative strategies providing equivalent decarbonized electricity. As a result, even if costs fall significantly, coherent CO2 mitigation would result in the deployment of DAC only after nearly all significant point sources of fossil CO2 emissions are eliminated, either by substitution of non-fossil alternatives or by capture of nearly
all of their CO2 emissions.
Nonetheless, DAC is one of a small number of strategies that might allow the world someday to lower the atmospheric concentration of CO2. The wide-open science and engineering issues that will determine ultimate feasibility and competitiveness involve alternative strategies for moving the air and alternative chemical routes to sorption and regeneration.
Ultimate judgments about the future role for DAC and its future cost are necessarily constrained by the scarcity of experimental results for DAC systems. No demonstration or pilot-scale DAC system has yet been deployed anywhere on earth, and it is entirely possible that no DAC concept under discussion today or yet to be invented will actually succeed in practice.
That last phrase in bold (my emphasis) indicates that the APS seriously entertains the possibility that DAC is impossible. The thermodynamic argument you advance has not been refuted. You could be right.
Of course it won't, as it's not completely impossible, so it would be clearly incorrect to say so. But what you quote seems to me to be as close as scientific principles permit to saying it's impossible in practice. So this looks just like general scientific caution to me, although I may be wrong.
"That last phrase in bold (my emphasis) indicates that the APS seriously entertains the possibility that DAC is impossible."
I don't think it's easy for any scientist to say "A is not possible" (although there exist a few things that few scientists would hesitate to declare impossible), hence the structure of the sentence. If they seriously entertain the possibility that it is impossible, it must be pretty damn near impossible anyway.
It's an interesting report. Keith and Lackner have their various patents and intellectual property to hype for their investors, so they have to pretend they've discovered a super-secret key to unlock thermodynamic paradoxes. But the APS report examines a benchmark system which uses sodium hydroxide the same way everyone else does.
Though the energy tradeoffs don't work, APS proceeds with a few openly optimistic assumptions in order to put some kind of a price on DAC, which they estimate at $600 per tonne. That works out to around $5.25 per gallon of gasoline, and does not include the cost of securely sequestering mind-boggling quantities of CO2.
Well I was just saying that saying something was "impossible" is a pretty strong statement in science and even normal scientific caution would justify the wording. I haven't read the report yet though.
Frankly, I don't like these money-based estimates. $600? $5.25 per gallon? I don't even know what this means tbh. Or rather, I think this actually means nothing at all when you consider the actual real world scale of the problem. Even worse: this makes it look as if the problem was solvable with spending money on it, independent of other problems. The more important questions are: how much energy and material resources do you need to get the CO2 the burning of a gallon of gasoline in a car engine produces? Do we have that kind of energy? Can we produce that kind of energy without burning fossil fuels (directly or indirectly)? etc etc. Afaics it's possible to construct a system of prices and subsidies so that this becomes worth doing for the market even with a negative energy and CO2 balance (this is what's happening with a lot of biofuel production btw).