How to store excess CO2 underground?

Nuclear waste need to be stored in special container to avoid contamination of the environment. Co2 level is rising in the atmosphere at a rate of about 2 molecules per million. CO2 emitted from thermal power plants and industrial areas through chimneys should be more amenable for storage. Today 25% of total world wide co2 emission is due to thermal power plants. The number is expected to double in the next decade. Everyone is aware of consequences of co2 in the atmosphere. Co2 absorption in sea acidifying sea water etc. In order to have equilibrium in CO2 cycle enough green cover is required. Less green land mass means excess co2 in the atmosphere and more G.W. resulting climatic change, melting of polar ice, raising sea level which may destroy civilization. Thinking all the consequences some how co2 needs to be curbed or stored underground.

How do the dual effects of greenhouse gases on the ocean (warming and acidification) interact with local stressors (overfishing and pollution) to reduce ecosystem services and cause extinctions?

The ocean covers 70% of the planet, yet the dual impacts of greenhouse gases are typically ignored – e.g. solutions designed to reduce heating without reducing CO2 concentrations ignore the threat posed by acidification. Moreover, we know little about the synergies between local and global stressors, and how reducing the former might buy us time to deal with the latter.

What are the institutional, technological, and analytical requirements for monitoring biocarbon stocks and for distinguishing between changes in the stocks from “natural” drivers, general global socio-economic drivers, specific economic decision drivers (i.e. indirect land use change), and ecosystem specific management efforts to sequester biocarbon?

Biocarbon stocks are critical to the carbon cycle and climate change. Biocarbon stocks change in different places due to different combinations of drivers: social and natural, current and historic, direct and indirect. Determining whether we are making any headway in maintaining and enhancing biocarbon stocks will require considerable monitoring of the stocks, monitoring and analysis of the drivers, and credible models of how the drivers interact to affect biocarbon stocks.

Hopes for providing economic incentives for enhancing biocarbon stocks, especially if done through private markets as offsets in a cap and trade system, will require scientifically-informed public oversight to avoid creating fictitious assets that do nothing to mitigate climate change while having the potential to destabilize the economy with the acknowledgment of their fictitious nature. Non-market international agreements to manage biocarbon will also require scientifically-informed public oversight to assure national efforts are effective and agreements have meaning. If the institutional and technological requirements of managing biocarbon and determining the drivers of change are prohibitive, then there is a stronger reason to reduce fossil hydrocarbon combustion more quickly and directly reduce other socio-economic drivers of biocarbon stock change.

How will climate change effect the major Cycles of Carbon, Nitrogen and Sulphur and what kind of feedback on organism level is expected?

The increase of C02 has major consequences for plant growth (mainly positive) but can have drastic effects in oceans (reduction of pH). Only little is known about how the other cycles (Nitrogen/Sulphur) are effected by the increase of CO2.

How can we make use of global warming to generate energy in the future?

As reported some where by the year 2030 if carbon dioxide reaches twice is pre-industrial level, global temperature would be 1.5 degree to 5 degrees C higher than that of today. This means more solar heat available on the earth. Is it possible to use this potential radiated heat from CO2,O3,CH4 and CFC,s etc.and increased solar heat to generate solar power stations all over the world in the next couple of decades?

To what extent does agriculturally based activities affect carbon dioxide emissions nationally, regionally, and globally?

The question is aimed at offering solutions to the major issues of deforestation, use of agrochemicals and other agro-based activities associated with CO2 emissions. Although the rural poor developing countries may pose a threat since they do more of deforestation, while producers of agrochemicals may also promote their use.

A similar question to the one asking if its safe to store CO2 underground but taking into account how it might effect processes within the Earth: Is there a danger of CCS trapping heat within the Earth and changing the processes that occur within the Earth?

Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are governed by the processes within the earth. I would not like to have these processes changed so there are more volcanic eruptions and earthquakes happening. It will probly be hard to moniter how much heat could be trapped within the Earth though. Are there any records that people can get a sence of whats normal for the mantle from?

Does silicate weathering, the hypothesized feedback mechanism for stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concentrations on geologic time scales, demonstrably increase with the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations?

Over then next 50-100 years, while atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase, we are in the unique position to test whether the silicate weathering feedback mechanism exerts the hypothesized control on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The groundwork for answering this question has to be laid now to be able to track the response of the “critical zone” (biotic and abiotic weathering and erosion processes, including land-to-sea transport of weathering products) to changing global environmental conditions. One of the challenges is to distinguish the “natural” response of the Earth System from ongoing anthropogenic modifications of this system.

How is the climate changing and why?

The global mean temperature in 2008 was the lowest since about 2000. Given that there is continual heating of the planet, referred to as radiative forcing, by accelerating increases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses due to human activities, why isn’t the temperature continuing to go up? The stock answer is that natural variability plays a key role and there was a major La Niña event early in 2008, but this does not answer the question of where the energy has gone. Was it compensated for temporarily by changes in clouds or aerosols, or other changes in atmospheric circulation that allowed more radiation to escape to space? Was it because a lot of heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? Was it because the La Niña led to a change in tropical ocean currents and rearranged the configuration of ocean heat? Perhaps all of these things are going on? It turns out we can’t answer these definitively. Observations and attribution studies are inadequate. Has global warming really slowed or not?

How will natural and human controls on the atmospheric CO2 concentration operate under the influence of changing climate and changing society in the next 100 years?

We can budget the sources and sinks for carbon for the past 30 years, with increasing confidence over time (Global Carbon Project, 2009). However, we do not have a solid understanding of the mechanisms responsible for variability and change in the natural sinks; nor for potentially dramatic releases of CO2 from permafrost or methane clathrates. We have even less understanding of the societal controls on the CO2 source (beyond a basic need for energy), and thus we do not have a good basis to predict or to control emissions.