CO 2 Gets Stoned: Method Turns Harmful Gas into Solid

By Jesse Emspak, Live Science Contributor | June 10, 2016 08:42am ET 1

Researchers have captured carbon dioxide from Iceland's Hellisheidi geothermal power plant and turned it
into a solid.
Credit: Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Engineers have taken a tip from Medusa, it seems. They have stared down the pesky greenhouse gas
carbon dioxide and turned it to stone.
The process they used was not as easy as simply eyeballing the gas, though. Essentially, they relied on a
sped-up version of natural processes to take the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) spewed from a power plant in
Iceland and transform the gas into a solid.
This ability to capture carbon dioxide and store it indefinitely may help curb the levels of heat-trapping
gases in the atmosphere and stem global warming, the researchers noted. [Changing Earth: 7 Ideas to
Geoengineer Our Planet]
"We need to deal with rising carbon emissions," lead study author Juerg Matter, now an associate
professor of geoengineering at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
"This is the ultimate permanent storage — turn them back to stone."

Natural carbon storage

Human-caused global warming occurs mostly because of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and
methane, that get poured into the air by humans burning fossil fuels for energy and other processes. These
gases trap heat before it can escape out into space. Carbon dioxide is the biggest factor in this warming,
scientists have said, because billions of tons of the gas are released every year and it stays in the
atmosphere for long periods of time.
Ordinarily, this gas is drawn out of the atmosphere by plants, which use it for photosynthesis, and a
chemical process called weathering of rocks. This process happens when carbon dioxide and other gases
that dissolve in water form weak acids that then chemically react with minerals in rocks to form other
solids, like clays. However, both of those uptake processes are relatively slow, and they can't keep up with
human output, the study researchers noted.
As such, engineers and other scientists have been working on several efforts to somehow inject the carbon
dioxide into the ground. For instance, carbon dioxide is pumped into the tiny holes, or pores, in
sedimentary rock — the kind laid down by layers of sand, for example, on the ocean floor.
The problem is that the carbon dioxide is a gas, and tends to rise. To keep it underground requires a
placing a layer of less porous rock on top of the porous rock where the gas is stored. The carbon dioxide
will eventually react with the porous rock and turn into a solid, carbonate compound, but that process can
take centuries, if not millennia, according to study co-author Sigurdur Gislason, research professor at the
University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

1
A new way to hide CO 2
The team, led by Juerg Matter, now an associate professor of geoengineering at the University of
Southampton, tried something different. The researchers took the carbon dioxide emitted by a power plant
in Iceland, pressurized it to 25 atmospheres. They then pumped the CO 2 into a borehole that was filled
with water, dissolving the gas and making something like seltzer water. The mixture was then pumped
into a layer of porous, volcanic rock located some 1,640 feet (500 meters) below the surface of the ground.
The rock reacted with the mixture and formed carbonate compounds.

Study co-author Sandra Snaebjornsdottir holds a sample of volcanic rock that is

loaded with solidified carbonate, formed when the researchers pumped carbon
dioxide into the rock.
Credit: Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Essentially, the researchers sped up the weathering of rocks, Gislason told Live Science. Here's how it
works: The carbon dioxide in the water forms carbonic acid, which dissolves the basalts and makes them
more porous. Meanwhile, the carbon and oxygen from the CO 2 make new compounds, largely
magnesium, iron and calcium carbonates, which are solids that can't go anywhere. "Calcium, iron,
magnesium can all form carbonates," Gislason said.
The process is very like what happens naturally, except that when stone — either as mountains or stone
buildings – weathers, it happens as it rains, and rainwater only converts a small amount of carbon at a time.
In addition, because the CO 2 added to the water is under a lot more pressure than it is in the atmosphere,
the concentration of carbonic acid is many times higher than in rainwater, or even in the carbonated water
that people drink.

The study was conducted over a two-year period, noted study co-author Martin Stute, a research scientist
at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. In that time, the team
monitored the water as it percolated through the rock using monitoring stations placed some distance from
the injection site. They detected no CO 2 .
Even though the process requires a lot of water initially, that water can be recycled, because the other
elements in it — the carbon dioxide and the compounds in the rock — are all removed in the reactions that
form the carbonates, said Stute. He added that another advantage is that the water needn't be fresh;
seawater should work just as well, though that hasn't been tried yet.
The next steps will be conducting more experiments and scaling up, the researchers said.

Both Gislason and Stute noted that the carbon dioxide would need to be transported to pumping sites if
projects like this were built commercially, so the technique probably lends itself best to power plants that
are close to areas with porous basaltic rock. Gislason said that describes many areas with power plants.
"There are opportunities for this in Indonesia, or Japan," he said.
Still, the method offers a possible way to get rid of carbon dioxide quickly and cleanly, he said. "In a sense,
you just mimic nature," Gislason said. "Just speeding up the process."
The study is detailed in the June 10 issue of the journal Science.

2
Global warming – What role does water vapor
really play?
2
Mar 15th, 2013

Scientists say man-made CO 2 causes global warming; climate skeptics insist that water vapor is
responsible. Here’s why both assumptions are true.

Here are the perfect ingredients for a conspiracy theory: water vapor is the most important factor
influencing the greenhouse effect but doesn’t feature on the UN’s list of greenhouse gases responsible for
anthropogenic global warming.

Critics of the idea of man-made global warming love this simple fact and have turned it into one of their
most potent arguments to sabotage decisive climate action.

So why doesn’t the UN’s climate body the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) list water vapor
as a greenhouse gas? It’s because water vapor does not by itself increase temperatures. It amplifies already
occurring warming.

Water vapor’s role in the Earth’s climate system is defined by the very short time it remains in the
atmosphere and actively traps heat. While additional CO 2 from factories or airplanes can remain in the
atmosphere for centuries, extra water vapor will only remain a few days before raining down as water.

The concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is in equilibrium. The atmosphere can only hold more
water vapor if overall temperatures increase. So a small warming effect caused by human CO 2 emissions
will increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

The added water vapor leads to even more warming, thus amplifying the CO 2 warming effect.
Water vapor follows temperature changes, it doesn’t cause or, as climatologists say, ‘force’ them.
As a feedback effect, water vapor is comparable to a car’s turbo charger that increases a motor’s
power.

However, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere changes regionally. While there is virtually no
water vapor above deserts or the Arctic and Antarctic regions, the air above the equator can consist of up
to four percent water vapor.

In humid equatorial regions, where there is already a strong natural greenhouse effect, additional
CO 2 and water vapor have little impact on local climate. The opposite is true in cold, dry places,
which is one reason why warming is much more pronounced in Polar regions.

1
Concentration matters

Regional differences aside, the atmosphere contains on average only 0.4 percent of water vapor and ten
times less CO 2 . This relatively small concentration is another argument often cited to refute the idea of
man-made global warming. How can CO 2 cause rising temperatures, skeptics demand, if it only accounts
for 0.04 percent of the atmosphere?

Again the riddle is solved easily.

Oxygen and nitrogen are the most abundant elements in the Earth’s atmosphere and make up 99 percent of
it. But neither of the two gases traps or emits heat.

This is why water vapor is responsible for most of the natural greenhouse effect. Scientists estimate
that without water vapor average temperatures would be up to 30 degrees Celsius lower. CO 2 , on
the other hand, is responsible for a much smaller but still substantial amount of the natural
warming effect.

If things remain like this, we could continue living on a cozy, warm planet. But too much of a good thing
is often bad. CO 2 levels have increased from 0.028 percent of the atmosphere to about 0.04 percent since
the Industrial Revolution. This has led to a temperature increase of about 0.7 degrees Celsius so far.

About half of this warming could be due to feedback warming from water vapor, estimates the IPCC. But
it would not have happened without the added CO 2 pumped into the atmosphere. CO 2 is the guy robbing
the bank, water vapor is just the getaway driver.

2
Top Physicist Freeman Dyson: Obama Has Picked the ‘Wrong Side’

On Climate Change
3
Nadine Rupp/Getty Images
by James Delingpole13 Oct 2015 1232

The climate models used by alarmist scientists to predict global

warming are getting worse, not better; carbon dioxide does far
more good than harm; and President Obama has backed the
“wrong side” in the war on “climate change.”

So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson (pictured above), the
British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of
Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current
scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery.
How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he
believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.

It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money
is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation.

It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way,
helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the
dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we’d gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for
us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it’s in the air today.

Dyson, himself a longstanding Democrat voter, is especially disappointed by his chosen party’s
unscientific stance on the climate change issue.

It’s very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people’s views on climate change]. I’m 100 per
cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans
took the right side.

Part of the problem, he says, is the Democrats’ conflation of “pollution” (a genuine problem) with
“climate change” (a natural phenomenon quite beyond mankind’s ability to control).

1
China and India rely on coal to keep growing, so they’ll clearly be burning coal in huge amounts. They
need that to get rich. Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal,
so the discussion is quite pointless.

At the same time, coal is very unpleasant stuff, and there are problems with coal quite apart from climate.
I remember in England when we burned coal, everything was filthy. It was really bad, and that’s the way
it is now in China, but you can clean that up as we did in England. It takes a certain amount of political
willpower, and that takes time. Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and
the other cannot, and the public doesn’t understand that.

The short-to-medium term solution to the pollution problem, he argues, is the replacement of coal with
much-maligned shale gas, whose rejection by much of Europe he finds unfathomable and
counter-productive.

As far as the next 50 years are concerned, there are two main forces of energy, which are coal and shale
gas. Emissions have been going down in the US while they’ve going up in Europe, and that’s because of
shale gas. It’s only half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal. China may in fact be able to develop shale
gas on a big scale and that means they burn a lot less coal.

It seems complete madness to prohibit shale gas. You wondered if climate change is an Anglophone
preoccupation. Well, France is even more dogmatic than Britain about shale gas!

Dyson, 91, has enjoyed a long, distinguished career as a physicist, mathematician and public intellectual,
showing promise as early as the age of five when he calculated the number of atoms in the sun. During
World War II, he worked at the Operation Research Section of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command,
before moving to the US where Robert Oppenheimer awarded him a permanent post at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton. He also worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, looking at the climate
system 25 years ago, before it became a hot political issue.

The dangers of carbon dioxide, he believes, have been much overrated. In a foreword to a report for The
Global Warming Policy Foundation by Indur Goklany called Carbon Dioxide: The Good News, – as
reported here at Breitbart – he says:

To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects
of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly
harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly
outweigh the possible damage.

I consider myself an unprejudiced person and to me these facts are obvious. But the same facts are not
obvious to the majority of scientists and politicians who consider carbon dioxide to be evil and dangerous.
The people who are supposed to be experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the
people who are blind to the evidence.

2
He likens the “climate change” issue to some of the other “irrational beliefs” promoted through history
“by famous thinkers and adopted by loyal disciples.”

Sometimes, as in the use of bleeding as a treatment for various diseases, irrational belief did harm to a
large number of human victims. George Washington was one of the victims. Other irrational beliefs, such
as the phlogiston theory of burning or the Aristotelian cosmology of circular celestial motions, only did
harm by delaying the careful examination of nature. In all these cases, we see a community of people
happily united in a false belief that brought leaders and followers together. Anyone who questioned the
prevailing belief would upset the peace of the community.

Dyson’s refusal ever to accommodate himself with the modish notions of the hour may explain why,
unlike some of his less distinguished and brilliant contemporaries over the years, he has never been
awarded a Nobel Prize.

He concludes:

“I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37
years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.”

3
Global warming is changing how the world WOBBLES:
NASA study says melting ice sheets are changing Earth's weight distribution -
and has even caused the North Pole to move
By MARK PRIGG FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 18:55 GMT, 8 April 2016 | UPDATED: 14:11 GMT, 11 April 2016
4
Global warming is shifting the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis, a new Nasa study has concluded.

Melting ice sheets - especially in Greenland - are changing the distribution of weight on Earth. That has
caused both the North Pole and the wobble, which is called polar motion, to change course, according to a
study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. Earth does not always spin on an axis running
through its poles. Instead, it wobbles irregularly over time, drifting toward North America throughout
most of the 20th Century (green arrow). That direction has changed drastically due to changes in water
mass on Earth.

WHY PLANETS WOBBLE

Although a desktop globe always spins smoothly around the axis running through its north and south poles,
a real planet wobbles.
Earth's spin axis drifts slowly around the poles; the farthest away it has wobbled since observations began
is 37 feet (12 meters).
These wobbles don't affect our daily life, but they must be taken into account to get accurate results from
GPS, Earth-observing satellites and observatories on the ground.

Scientists and navigators have been accurately measuring the true pole and polar motion since 1899 and
for almost the entire 20th century they migrated a bit toward Canada. But that has changed with this
century and now it's moving toward England, said study lead author Surendra Adhikari at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Lab.

'The recent shift from the 20th-century direction is very dramatic,' Adhikari said.
Although a desktop globe always spins smoothly around the axis running through its north and south poles,
a real planet wobbles. Earth's spin axis drifts slowly around the poles; the farthest away it has wobbled
since observations began is 37 feet (12 meters). These wobbles don't affect our daily life, but they must be
taken into account to get accurate results from GPS, Earth-observing satellites and observatories on the
ground. Around the year 2000, Earth's spin axis took an abrupt turn toward the east and is now drifting
almost twice as fast as before, at a rate of almost 7 inches (17 centimeters) a year.

'It's no longer moving toward Hudson Bay, but instead toward the British Isles,' said Adhikari.

Adhikari and Ivins' calculations showed that the changes in Greenland alone do not generate the gigantic
amount of energy needed to pull the spin axis as far as it has shifted. In the Southern Hemisphere, ice mass
loss from West Antarctica is pulling, and ice mass gain in East Antarctica is pushing, Earth's spin axis in
the same direction that Greenland is pulling it from the north, but the combined effect is still not enough to
explain the speedup and new direction. Something east of Greenland has to be exerting an additional pull.

1
Before about 2000, Earth's spin axis was drifting toward Canada (green arrow, left globe). JPL scientists
calculated the effect of changes in water mass in different regions (center globe) in pulling the direction of
drift eastward and speeding the rate (right globe). The researchers found the answer in Eurasia. 'The bulk
of the answer is a deficit of water in Eurasia: the Indian subcontinent and the Caspian Sea area,' Adhikari
said.

The discovery raises the possibility that the 115-year record of east-west wobbles in Earth's spin axis may,
in fact, be a remarkably good record of changes in land water storage.

'That could tell us something about past climate -- whether the intensity of drought or wetness has
amplified over time, and in which locations,' said Adhikari.

While scientists say the shift is harmless, it is meaningful. Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences at
the University of Arizona who wasn't part of the study, said 'this highlights how real and profoundly large
an impact humans are having on the planet.'

Since 2003, Greenland has lost on average more than 600 trillion pounds of ice a year and that affects the
way the Earth wobbles in a manner similar to a figure skater lifting one leg while spinning, said NASA
scientist Eirk Ivins, the study's co-author. Ivins said he likes to think of it as a billion trucks each year
dumping ice out of Greenland.

On top of that, West Antarctica loses 275 trillion pounds of ice and East Antarctica gains about 165 trillion
pounds of ice yearly, helping tilt the wobble further, Ivins said.

They all combine to pull polar motion toward the east, Adhikari said.

Jianli Chen, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas' Center for Space Research, first
attributed the pole shift to climate change in 2013 and he said this new study takes his work a step further.

'There is nothing to worry about,' said Chen, who wasn't part of the NASA study.

'It is just another interesting effect of climate change.'

2
Earth Gets Greener as Globe Gets Hotter
5
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | April 27, 2016 05:37pm ET

The surface area of the Earth covered by leafy green vegetation has increased dramatically over the last
several decades, thanks to excess carbon emissions. But the green shoots aren't necessarily a good thing;
they are harbingers of more worrisome impacts of climate change, like sea level rise and glacier met.
Credit: Boston University/R. Myneni

The excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has created a greener planet, a new NASA study shows.

Around the world, areas that were once icebound, barren or sandy are now covered in green foliage. All
told, carbon emissions have fueled greening in an area about twice the size of the continental United
States between 1982 and 2009, according to the study.

While lush forests and verdant fields may sound like a good thing, the landscape transformation could
have long-term, unforeseen consequences, the researchers say.

The radical greening "has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the
climate system," lead author Zaichun Zhu, a researcher from Peking University in Beijing, said in a
statement. [Video: See Global Warming Make Earth Greener]

Fuel for plants

Green leafy flora make up 32 percent of Earth's surface area. All of those plants use carbon dioxide and
sunlight to make sugars to grow — a process called photosynthesis. Past studies have shown that carbon
dioxide increases plant growth by increasing the rate of photosynthesis.
Other research has shown that plants are one of the main absorbers of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Human
activities, such as driving cars and burning coal for energy, account for about 10 billion tons of carbon

1
dioxide emissions per year, and half of this CO 2 is stored in plants.

"While our study did not address the connection between greening and carbon storage in plants, other
studies have reported an increasing carbon sink on land since the 1980s, which is entirely consistent with
the idea of a greening Earth," said study co-author Shilong Piao, of the College of Urban and
Environmental Sciences at Peking University.

However, it wasn't clear whether the greening seen in satellite data over recent years could be explained
by the sky-high CO 2 concentrations in the atmosphere (the highest the planet has seen in 500,000
years). After all, rainfall, sunlight, nitrogen in the soil and land-use changes also affect how well plants
grow.

To isolate the causes of planetary greening, researchers from around the world analyzed satellite data
collected by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments. They then
created mathematical models and computer simulations to isolate how each of these variables would be
predicted to influence greening. By comparing the models and the satellite data, the team concluded that
about 70 percent of the greening could be attributed to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, the
researchers reported Monday (April 25) in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"The second most important driver is nitrogen, at 9 percent. So we see what an outsized role CO 2 plays in
this process," said study co-author Ranga Myneni, an earth and environmental scientist at Boston
University.

Warming still worrisome

While green shoots may be good, excess CO 2 emissions also bring a host of more worrisome
consequences, such as global warming, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and more dangerous weather,
according to accumulating research.

What's more, the greening may be a temporary change.

"Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the
fertilization effect diminishes over time," said Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of
Climate and Environmental Sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience,Facebook & Google+.
Original article on Live Science.

2
Secret World of Primeval Rivers Lies Beneath
Greenland Glacier 6
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | July 5, 2016 11:25am ET

A secret network of rivers was recently discovered

beneath the Jakobsvahn Isbrae glacier in
Greenland. The primeval river network is mostly
dry, but water may still flow through the riverbeds
along the margins of the ice, researchers believe.
Credit: Cooper et al, 2016

A network of ancient rivers lies frozen in time beneath one of Greenland's largest glaciers, new
research reveals.

The subglacial river network, which threads through much of Greenland's landmass and looks, from
above, like the tiny nerve fibers radiating from a brain cell, may have influenced the fast-moving
Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier over the past few million years.

"The channels seem to be instrumental in controlling the location and form of the Jakobshavn ice
stream — and seem to show a clear influence on the onset of fast flow in this region," study
co-author Michael Cooper, a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Bristol in the
United Kingdom, told Live Science. "Without the channels present underneath, the glacier may not
exist in its current location or orientation." [See Images of Greenland's Gorgeous Glaciers]
Fast-moving glacier
The Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier in Greenland is the world's fastest glacier; it races toward the sea at
the breakneck pace of 11 miles (17 kilometers) per year. The speedy glacier is dumping huge
amounts of ice into the sea and is Greenland's main contributor to sea level rise, raising levels about
1 millimeter (0.04 inches) between 2000 and 2010, researchers previously told Live Science.
Climate scientists have zeroed in on this fast-moving glacier in recent years because it may be a
harbinger of climate change to come. It is melting quickly: The glacier has lost more than 9,000
gigatons of ice since 1900, according to a 2015 study in the journal Nature.

1
A secret world, locked in ice

As part of the effort to characterize Jakobshavn, Cooper and his colleagues used ice-penetrating
radar to peer beneath the massive hunk of ice and analyze the height of the bedrock below.

The radar revealed a secret world, frozen in ice. Beneath Jakobshavn lies a stunning landscape of
jaw-dropping canyons, some of which are roughly the size of the Grand Canyon; dramatic ravines;
and a lacework of mountain streams. By analyzing the shape of the valleys and canyons beneath the
ice, the team determined that these features were likely formed by rivers cutting the rock away over
time, rather than by the glacier.

"The shape of the valleys was V-shaped, rather than U-shaped; the flow network had a dendritic or
tree-like structure; and the long profiles showed a smooth, concave-up shape," Cooper told Live
Science. These are good clues that the channel system was carved by rivers, not glaciers, he added.

Thus, the landscape must have formed at least 3.5 million years ago, prior to the ice sheet's
formation. At that time, the area may have been much warmer and home to forests and shrubland,
Cooper said.

"I imagine the landscape would have been home to a lot of life," Cooper said.

The glacier has had two effects. Near the interior, where the ice is the thickest, it has preserved the
primeval landscape. At the edges, glacial ice has deepened some of the canyons through erosion,
Cooper said.

The network of rivers that lies beneath the ice is now mostly dry, but some water does still flow.

"Near the margins, toward the outlet glacier, Jakobshavn Isbrae, the channels may well have water
flowing through, as part of the modern-day subglacial drainage system," meaning water is seeping
from the ice's surface to the bottom of the glacier, flowing along the edges of the ice-sheet bottom,
he said.

Original article on Live Science.