Recent changes in the Earth's climate are primarily being driven by the burning of fossil fuels—that is, taking carbon from deep in the Earth, and dumping it into the atmosphere at breakneck speed. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just sort of… put it back?

That’s roughly the idea behind carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Carbon dioxide is captured from the effluent of a large generator, like a coal power plant, and compressed into a supercritical liquid. That liquid is then transported via pipeline to an injection station where it’s pumped deep underground.

But the technique requires some very specific rock formations if we expect the carbon to stay there. Two new studies have looked at how much CO2 we could hope to store, and how that storage may be affected by another process that's booming: fracking.






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Last week, several documents that purportedly came from the Heartland Institute appeared on the Web, laying out the organization's financial efforts to undercut the mainstream understanding of climate science. Although the Heartland admitted that most of the materials were genuine, it claims they had been obtained via deception, and that one of the documents (the most inflammatory) was a fake. Now, a prominent environmental researcher has admitted that he impersonated a Heartland board member in order to obtain the documents, but claims they are all genuine.

Peter Gleick is the founder and current president of the Pacific Institute, where he specializes in research on the water cycle. His research can be provocative—some of it suggested that the US has already passed peak water—but has been considered important enough to get him elected to the National Academies of Science.







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How high are we willing to let the temperature of the planet get? Many governments have signed on to international agreements that would limit greenhouse gas emissions to targets that will keep the Earth from exceeding a 2°C increase over preindustrial levels. However, two studies that came out in recent weeks suggest we're rapidly running out of time to do so. Both suggest we could be locked in to changes above 2°C before the decade is out, and perhaps in as little as five years.

Estimates of future warming are based on a term called the climate sensitivity, which is usually expressed in terms of the expected temperature rise caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. (The impact of each incremental increase goes down as the concentration rises, since there's a greater chance that some other CO2 molecule will have already absorbed a given infrared photon.) The IPCC's best estimate is that the climate sensitivity is about 3°C per doubling, with uncertainties of about a degree in either direction.







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RT @doug_burke: #comic #climatechange

Although it's easy to calculate the impact of additional greenhouse gasses on the temperature, these simple calculations don't capture the potential for feedbacks in the system. The easiest feedback to understand is the ice-albedo response. As temperatures rise, ice melts; that ice normally reflects back most of the sunlight that hits it, so its loss leads to increased absorption of sunlight and hence, a further increase in temperature. Ice is hardly the only feedback, however, so researchers use climate models to try to incorporate as many of these feedbacks as possible.

Unfortunately, there's often disagreement and uncertainty as to how some of the feedbacks operate. In the past week, a couple of papers have come out that address these uncertainties. In one, an author analyzes the impact of clouds on climate, one of the largest uncertainties in current models. In the other paper, the authors argue that past attempts at figuring out the response of plants to climate change have gotten it all wrong.







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