Topic
Engineered and natural methods that remove atmospheric CO2 and store it long-term, including mineralization, weathering, and land-based sinks.
UNEP now accepts the overshoot and describes a way back to 1.5C by 2100 that needs global emissions halved by 2035 and then removal running at a scale one outside researcher puts at 100,000 times today's.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishersReality
A Yale-led team writing in Nature argues that crushed limestone spread on farmland across 41 percent of the contiguous United States removes more CO2 than it releases, because the acid it neutralises would have released CO2 anyway.
Reality
A new IIASA-led study allocates a 2C carbon budget to world regions by responsibility and capability, then solves for the cheapest way to satisfy both. The transfers implied run from US$10.1 trillion to US$44.8 trillion.
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The Salk Institute has $18 million from the Bezos Earth Fund to measure in four states' fields what its lab work estimated at one metric ton of carbon dioxide per hectare a year, with the first results due this fall.
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A Science Advances team ran two idealized mitigation scenarios. Southern Ocean uptake weakened and then reversed in both, and in the negative-emissions run the globally averaged flux turned from sink to source in 2154.
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A new model has the world's largest carbon sink turning into a source once concentrations start falling, with two heat-driven feedbacks amplifying the outgassing for centuries after net zero and capping what removal delivers.
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The UN's first overshoot report puts warming at 1.4C now, 1.8C at the optimistic peak and 2.6C on current policy, which turns the climate trade from preventing a breach into paying for the return trip.
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Enhanced rock weathering's problem has always been rate rather than chemistry, and a Nature Biotechnology result attacks the rate directly. The 2.6-fold gain was measured on kilograms of mineral in a flow reactor.
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The 2.6-fold speedup came from deleting the microbe's own off switch. That leaves the hard part of this work to whoever writes the discharge permit for a basin full of it.
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A modified Gluconobacter oxydans releases nickel and cobalt from ultramafic rock while parking carbon in magnesium oxalate, which holds two carbons per magnesium. It is still flask-scale work.
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