Climate Restoration (cont.)
Working Group I (WGI) examines the physical science underpinning past, present, and future climate change; WGII is responsible for assessing the impacts, adaptation, and vulnerabilities related to climate change; and WGIII focuses on assessing methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.
It is estimated that an average increase of 14 per cent of Earth's population will be exposed to severe heat waves at least once every five years. Increases in heatwaves also mean that severe droughts will happen in many parts of the world, drastically impacting agriculture and increasing water stress in urban areas.
This will cause an increase in "excess deaths" (non-natural causes) associated with heatstroke, starvation, exposure, dehydration, and airborne diseases. It will also trigger conflict in particular hard-hit regions, mainly in the equatorial regions of the planet. Mass migrations will ensue as life becomes too difficult for the location populations.
An essential part of CC and CDR is biomimicry: technology that imitates nature and natural processes. Earth's climate remains stable over time thanks to natural carbon sequestration, where ecological and geological processes have absorbed and reintroduced CO2 into the atmosphere. This has ensured that global temperatures remained within certain parameters over time for aeons.
The Carbon Cycle, as it's known, consists of the following: Carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere by carbon "sinks," which consist of rocks and sediments (forming "carbonates") and living organisms storing it. This carbon is sequestered in the Earth through geological activity, where the convention of tectonic plates places it into the interior.
During periods of volcanic activity along fault lines and "cones" (volcanic islands), this CO2 is re-released into the atmosphere along with other gases - like sulfur dioxide (SO2). Carbon dioxide is also released into the atmosphere through the decay of organic material and respiration (oxygen gas is consumed, CO2 is produced).
This cycle is the result of billions of years of terrestrial evolution and ensures that CO2 levels remain stable. Nothing goes to waste, and there is no excess. However, by consuming fossil fuels (organic matter that broke down and was stored underground), humans have been disrupting this cycle since the industrial era.
Many CC techniques mimic this process by scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere and then sequestering it underground again. Others attempt to use the captured carbon products to enhance agriculture reforestation efforts and restore natural vegetation and greenspaces (known as biosequestration).
Other operations use the captured carbon to generate bioenergy or to create biofuels. In this case, carbon is captured through biomass (algae, cyanobacteria, plants, etc.) which absorbs CO2 through photosynthesis. Heat and energy can be extracted from the biomass through combustion, fermentation, or biochemical processes to generate electricity or create cleaner-burning fuels (biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, etc.)