Archives par mot-clé : CO2 sequestration

New Study: Antarctic Sea Ice Completed Half Its Deglacial Retreat 1000s Of Years Before CO2 Began Rising

by K. Richard, Nov 16, 2023 in NotricksZone


The timing of the dramatic Antarctic sea ice decline during the last deglaciation suggests solar forcing and sea ice retreat “instigated” century-scale climate warming and atmospheric CO2 change. This would appear to challenge the perception CO2 plays a causal role in glacial-interglacial sea ice and climate changes.

From ~21,000 to 19,500 years ago, when CO2 was thought to have been at its lowest point in the Quaternary ice age (~180 ppm), the sea ice surrounding East and West Antarctica completed 50% of its eventual deglaciation-era decline (Sadatzki et al., 2023).

“[I]ndependent lines of evidence supporting that early sea ice and surface ocean changes in the Southern Ocean initiated as early as ~19.5 ka ago (with signs of summer sea ice retreat in our reconstruction as early as ~21 ka ago) and thus (at least) about 2 ka before major deglacial changes in global ocean circulation, climate, and atmospheric CO2.”

The increase in 65°S insolation during these millennia was deemed sufficient to drive this magnitude of sea ice retreat.

“This early increase in local integrated summer insolation at 65°S, which is independent of the longitude, may have thus provided enough energy to initiate melting of the near-perennial sea ice cover in late glacial.”

A breakthrough discovery in carbon capture conversion for ethylene production

by University of Illinois Chicago, Sep 9, 2022 in ScienceDaily


A team of researchers led by Meenesh Singh at University of Illinois Chicago has discovered a way to convert 100% of carbon dioxide captured from industrial exhaust into ethylene, a key building block for plastic products.

Their findings are published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

While researchers have been exploring the possibility of converting carbon dioxide to ethylene for more than a decade, the UIC team’s approach is the first to achieve nearly 100% utilization of carbon dioxide to produce hydrocarbons. Their system uses electrolysis to transform captured carbon dioxide gas into high purity ethylene, with other carbon-based fuels and oxygen as byproducts.

The process can convert up to 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide into 1 metric ton of ethylene, recycling almost all carbon dioxide captured. Because the system runs on electricity, the use of renewable energy can make the process carbon negative.

Three Decades of Mangrove Forest Biomass Change in NSW, Australia

by Lamont et al. , 2020 in CO2Science


Time and again climate alarmists have used computer models to claim that rising CO2 and rising temperatures should be negatively impacting various ecosystems, including forests. Given that these two parameters have supposedly reached unprecedented heights in modern history, reason suggests that this hypothesis of ecosystem decline should be presently evident in observational data. But is it?

Thanks to the work of Lamont et al. (2020) this question can be answered — at least for a mangrove forest ecosystem in New South Wales, Australia.

What the five Australian researchers did in their study was to examine the biomass change of two mangrove forest sites over the period 1989-2018. The two sites included a tall gallery forest composed of Avicennia marina (i.e., Site 1) and an interior, higher elevation, stunted mixed community of A. marina and Aegiceras corniculatum (i.e., Site 2). Data originally gathered in a 1989 survey were compared with new data obtained by Lamont et al. in 2018 and thereafter analyzed for possible trends.

Results of the analysis are summarized in the figure below, showing large gains in both aboveground and below ground biomass between the two survey dates at both mangrove forest sites. Of particular note is “a greater than seven-fold increase in mean aboveground biomass” at Site 2, and “a six-fold and 12-fold increase [in total below-ground root mass] at Site 1 and Site 2, respectively.” Such large biomass increases, not surprisingly, were estimated by the authors to have contributed to large gains in carbon sequestration. In extrapolating such gains to the entire New South Wales region, they estimate mangrove forests have sequestered “at least about 1.8 Tg C” over the past 70 years.

The above findings represent incredible growth benefits reaped by mangrove forest ecosystems during a time of rising atmospheric CO2 and rising temperature, which findings are pretty much the opposite of the doom and gloom predictions offered by climate alarmists.