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MIT Technology Review

10 Aug, 10 tweets, 4 min read

THREAD: The UN’s long-awaited climate report offered a stark reminder that removing massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be essential to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming. But the necessary technologies barely exist. technologyreview.com/2021/08/09/103…

Global temperatures will continue to rise through midcentury no matter what we do at this point, according to the first installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6…

How much hotter it gets, however, will depend on how rapidly we cut emissions and how quickly we scale up ways of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/136…

Climate scientists say we’ll need to do carbon removal, in part, to balance out the emissions sources we still don’t know how to eliminate or clean up, like flights and fertilizer. technologyreview.com/2018/10/30/190…

While carbon removal could gradually ease temperature increases & ocean acidification, it doesn’t magically reverse all climate impacts. It would still take centuries to bring oceans back to the levels around which we’ve built our coastal cities. technologyreview.com/2021/07/08/102…

There could be all but irreversible damage to ice sheets, coral reefs, rain forests, and certain species as well, depending on how much warmer the world gets before we deeply cut emissions and scale up carbon removal. technologyreview.com/2019/08/26/133…

@jtemple

Senior editor for energy @jtemple has written about how we must transform the economy, not halt it, to prevent runaway warming. And we're doing it far, far too slowly today.
technologyreview.com/2021/01/01/101…

And recent rates of change, it would take nearly 400 years to transform our energy system. technologyreview.com/2018/03/14/671…

The good news is there are a variety of ways to remove carbon from the air, and a growing number of research groups and companies are working to develop better, cheaper methods. But we’re falling far behind in a race with very high stakes. technologyreview.com/2021/08/09/103…

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