You Can Save The Planet. How About After Tea?

You Can Save The Planet.
How About After Tea?
Du kannst den Planeten retten.
Wie wäre es mit heute Nachmittag?
21. Deutscher Perl-Workshop 2019 an der Hochschule München

GWP 2019GWP: Global Warming Potential
GPW: German Perl Workshop / Deutscher Perl-Workshop

GWP 2019GPW: German Perl Workshop / Deutscher Perl-Workshop
GWP: Global Warming Potential
PW

When I Was A Child
● Talk was, the planet was going to the works.

When I Was A Child
● … some time in the future.

When I Was A Child
● There were quite a few ideas...

When I Was A Child
● There were quite a few ideas.
● … that were not put into action.

When I Was A Child
● Ideas… were not realised.
:-(

Problems Of The Future
● Problems of the future are not immediate,
● There always seems to be some time left
● They will be put off until that time…
● They're not going to be addressed until it is
much too late.

40 years later.
● …

40 years later.
● What was thought of as “the future” is now.

Our future will be hot
● What was thought of as “the future” is now.
Average temperature has risen by almost 1°C.
The average temperatures will rise by
● 2,24°C in 2050
● 4.83°C in 2100
source: https://climate-life-events.herokuapp.com/

In The Meantime
● Greenhouse effect is accelerating
(Greenhouse gas concentrations -- logarithmic growth -- make
for warming on an exponential scale.)

In The Meantime
● Temperatures are rising
(Temperatures have risen globally by close to 1°C since 1950
but are now on the steep upward end of an exponential curve.)

In The Meantime
● Polar ice caps are melting:
(Polar ice caps have shrunk by more than 40% since 1980)
Sea levels are rising
(Global sea levels have risen more than 8 cm since 1993)

In The Meantime
● Polar ice caps are melting: Sea levels are rising
● Ocean temperature and
ocean acidity are rising
(“citation needed” here… wait while I look for it...)

In The Meantime
● Ocean temperature and ocean acidity are rising
● More frequent extreme
rain fall, floods &
draughts

In The Meantime
● Ocean temperature and ocean acidity are rising
● More frequent extreme rain fall, floods &
draughts
● Soil acidification, soil degradation and erosion
threaten to diminish food production capabilities

The Greenhouse Effect
So-called Greenhouse Gases effect global
warming. The most prominent ones are:
1. CO2
(think sparkling water, stays in atmosphere 30-95 years)
2. N2
O (think fertilizer, ozone killer, stays in atmosphere 121 years)
3. Methane (think cows farting, stays in atmosphere ~12 years)
CO2
has the greatest impact at the moment.
Let's narrow down on it.
Methane dilemma: the world (except for India) cannot imagine a life worth its beef without any beef.

Greenhouse Effect Explained
When Greenhouse Gases enter the
atmosphere, the reflected heat radiation is kept
inside of it, thus warming the planet.
Some people think that's a hoax.
If you happen to know any of them, there is a
simple experiment to show the greenhouse
effect:

Testing The Greenhouse Effect
There's a simple test you can do at home.
1.Find two identical „empty“ bottles, two corks, and two
thermometers.
2.Make a hole in each the corks, and put the
thermometers in it.
3.Add a little CO2
to only one of the bottles' air content.
Close them with the corks.
4.Now put them side by side under a radiating heat
source. The sun, or a heat lamp.
5.Observe.

Testing The Greenhouse Effect 2
Observations of the simple test:
1.In both bottles, the temperature will be rising.
2.In the bottle containing a little extra CO2
, the
temperature will be rising faster than in the other.
3.After a while, the temperature in the bottles will cease
to rise.
4.In the bottle containing a little extra CO2
, the
temperature will be a few centigrades higher, than in
the one with plain air.

Polar ice caps are melting: Sea levels are rising
Rising sea levels mean...
● The loss of land due to innondations. This
means massive destruction in The Netherlands,
Belgium, Northern Germany and France, in
Bangladesh, the Pacific Islands and to parts of
most coastal cities.
● Lands to live on will be lost, leading to massive
migration.
● Good farmland will be lost, leading to famine,
strife, and possibly wars.

Ocean temperature and ocean acidity are rising
Rising ocean temperature means…
● More rain in winter. Dry summers.
● More frequent extreme rain fall events (next slide).
● The European continent may eventually cool
dramatically, reducing agricultural productivity,
thus possibly leading to famine.
Rising ocean acidity means…
● The loss of biospheres in the maritime reefs as
reefs will collapse. Fewer fish.

More frequent extreme rain fall, floods & draughts
More frequent extreme rain fall events & floods
mean
● Possible loss of human life
● Loss of agricultural land
● Loss of harvests and probably famine
More frequent draughts mean
● Bad harvests and probably famine

Soil acidification, soil degradation and erosion
Soil acidification, soil degradation and
erosion threaten to diminish food
production capabilities
● This usually leads to famines, migrations
and unrest.

Let’s not stare into the abyss
● No use getting depressed.
● Let’s get out of all that gloom and dark,
● look for something shiny and sexy!

Now on to something shiny and sexy...
Fossil Oil
...

Learn how to win from the oil industry
Jokes aside, there is a lot to learn from
the oil and natural gas industry.
● Geological engineering
● Ingenious chemistry

Finding Oil
When I was a child, I was told and shown in
simple pictures, that
● “fossil oil was found in underground caverns
where it lay as big lakes of oil”.
● Holes would be drilled into those lakes and
water be pumped down under pressure to push
the oil to the surface.
That may have been true enough back then,
but let‘s be a tad more precise.

Oil inside so-called solid rock
● Crude oil actually inhabits tiny wee holes, pores
in the rock.
● So does natural gas that is usually found
alongside with oil.
● It would not stay there, unless it was confined
in space by a geological structure (“trap”) with
an impermeable layer of rock (“seal”).

Geological Dome
Oil (along with other fluids and gases that are lighter
than water) would float upwards to the surface of it‘s
own, if it only could.
It stays underground, where an impermeable layer of
rock in the shape of a dome encloses and keeps it in
the deep.
Prospectors for oil look for geological domes in the
deep of the Earth.

Depleted Oil Fields
Oil resides in the pores of porous rock,
usually some 1 to 4 km below the earth‘s
surface (or the bottom of the sea).
In order to drive it out of those pores,
pressurised water used to be pumped into
these depths.
This technique used to deplete an oil field
yielding about 50% of its oil content.

Get the oil out, leave the CO2
in the ground
When the waste CO2
has done its job to
displace the oil and water from the porous
rock, it stays behind.
The geological dome confines it as it did
with the oil it has displaced.
If all man-made holes are filled again, it will
stay there for tens of thousands of years.

Getting more oil out of the ground
To address the problem of having to leave
half of the oil in the ground, other methods
than using water were pondered.
Then it was discovered that a waste
product, a gas called CO2
performed best
at displacing oil, natural gas and water
from porous rock.

Separate Natural Gas from CO2
Many of the facts about oil reservoirs are
similar to those of natural gas reservoirs.
One thing to note though: When we pump
natural gas from the ground, it comes up
mixed with CO2
.
● Amine solvents allow us to separate the
two gases and store them individually.

Temperatures are rising
While climate has changed through the eons, it
is has remained stable for millions of years.
● Since 1900, the Earth's average temperature
has risen by nearly 1°C.
● The last time the earth saw a similar flooding of
the atmosphere with CO2
was 66 million years
ago.
● The last time, CO2
levels were as high as they
are now, is 3 million years ago.

Global CO2
Emissions
Global Carbon Emissions SVG by Mak Tope, Data by
Marland, G., T.A. Boden, and R. J. Andres. 2007.
Global, Regional, and National CO2 Emissions. In
Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change.
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, United States Department
of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.

Where does the CO2
come from?
● 92% - burning things
● 8% - cement works

… and 8% from cement works
● 50% burning fossil fuel (coal) for heat (→ 4%).
● 50% come from the chalk itself (→ 4%).
So, it is actually 96% burning things and 4%
from chalk...
Cement works?

Where does the CO2
come from?
● 96% - burning things (92%+4%)
● 4% - chalk

● Chalk is the remainder of the bones of what
once were living things.
● All life on Earth are based on Carbon, that's the
chemical element abbreviated as „C“.
● What's funny about chalk, however we may
want to argue about not burning things, we
cannot do without chalk in cement works.
The aforementioned 4% are not going away.
CO2
in Chalk?

Let's stop burning things!
● We had that figure before. While the 4% from
the chalk cannot be helped…
● What about 96% from burning things?
● Can't we stop burning things?

What are the things we burn?
● Can't we stop burning things?
Things we burn that put CO2
in the atmosphere:
● coal
● petroleum / oil
● biomatter (like wood)
● natural gas.

Where are we emitting CO2
?
We burn Coal, petroleum/oil, biomatter (like
wood) and natural gas for… (% of CO2
emissions)
● Power generation 29.5%
● Industrial processes 20.6% (Cement 4% + 4%, Steel 7%, Rest 5.6%)
● Transportation fuels 19.2%
● Heating our homes 12.9%
● Land use 9.1%
● Fossil fuel handling 8.4%

Use renewable / clean energy?
Can't we simply replace these figures with
renewable / clean energy?
Partly, yes… The biggest chunk was
We are already busy replacing power generation with
renewable and clean energy sources. Since we
cannot yet rely fully on the wind to blow and the water
to flow or the sun to shine all the time, we still need to
burn some natural gas for a while to provide power
security.

Renewable energy facts
Renewable energy
from
● Solar power
● Wind
● Water (hydroelectric)
● Geothermal
● Tidal
● Waves
Compared with fossil
fuel power
● need no fuel
● create no waste
● need less manpower
● safer / fewer accidents
● has become cheaper
than fossil fuel power
in every respect

Renewables are cheap energy
Renewable Energy not only is the better deal,
financially, it is a booming business. Why?
● need no fuel, less manpower
● create no waste, is safer, has fewer accidents
● cheaper than fossil fuel power in every respect
The market for renewable energy has grown
by 10%-60% every year since 2005.

Use renewable / clean energy? 2
Any other of the figures to be replaced with
renewable / clean energy?
Once we get clean power in abundance, we
should also use that to heat our homes.
● Let's add up the numbers:
29.5% + 12.9% = 42.4%

Use renewable / clean energy? 3
A liquid vector for clean energy could be H2
created from clean energy. Then we could use
clean energy for…
and some of the
● Industrial processes 11.0% (Cement 8%*1/2=4%, Steel 7%)
● Let's add up the numbers:
29.5% + 12.9% + 19.2% + 11.0% = 72.6%

Where will we still be emitting CO2
?
We may still have need for… (% of CO2
emissions)
● Industrial processes 20 9.6%(Cement 4% + 4%, Steel 7%, Rest 5.6%)
● Land use 9.1%
● Fossil fuel handling 8.4 2.1% (as 3/4 of it will go away)
● Now let's add up these numbers:
9.6% + 9.1% + 2.1% = 20.8% …isn't that grand?

What a wonderful dream!
Alas, this is not going to happen soon enough.
● We aren‘t anywhere close to get there in time
(before we lose the space to live in).
● If one solution does not cut it on its own,
then we need another one.

Capture CO2
from the atmosphere!
● Why? Instead of emitting CO2
to the
atmosphere, why not capture it from the
atmosphere?
Picture taken from
Climeworks.com website
Yes, that’s a business.

Capture CO2
where we burn things!
Instead of emitting CO2
when we burn things...
why not capture the CO2
instead of releasing it to the atmosphere?

Capture CO2
where we burn things!
Instead of emitting CO2
when we burn things, why not
capture the CO2
instead of releasing it to the atmosphere?
How would we do that?
● Remember slide # 26 where CO2
needed to be
separated from natural gas using amine
solvents?

Capture CO2
where we burn things! 2
● Amine solvents work well for separating CO2
from other gases, too.
This is already in production in about two score of
modern power plants, and a handful steel works and
cement works, for example:
● Boundary Dam facility in Saskatchewan, Canada: the
world's first power station with CCS (Carbon Capture and
Storage)
● Petra Nova facility in Texas, USA, the largest power
station with CCS

Where to store the captured CO2
?
Remember slides # 24 and # 25?
● The oil industry already stores CO2
underground as a side-effect of prospecting oil.
It has been done happily since the late 1960es.
A fact worth remembering when politicians
prattle about Carbon Storage being an
experimental and unsafe technology.

Where to store the captured CO2
?
● More than 10 billion tons of CO2
are released to
the atmosphere every year. The storage
capacity of all the known oil fields in the world
is not near sufficient for that.
● The search for yet unknown geological dome
structures needs to continue.
● Aquifiers exist around geological domes. They
will be able to store much more CO2
then
geological domes alone, and not release it for
around thousand years.

Todo
A green transformation of the planet is…
● neither happening fast enough
● nor is it happening all by itself
● it needs you.

This Planet Needs You:
● If you get a job in the oil industry, learn about
Carbon Storage
● ... in Energy production, specialise in
development of renewable energy
● ... in fossil fuel burning, push carbon capture
forward
● plan new facilities with CO2
neutral technology
● renewing a facility, add carbon neutral tech
● invest money in renewable technologies and
talk about it

Paris Agreement 2015

Paris Agreement 2015: 1.5°C warming
The 195 signing nations and the EU
● promised to keep global warming below
1.5°C of warming.
● Committed to verifiable actions to reach
the 1.5°C goal.

Unfortunately, they had been working
based on inaccurate data, and the “1.5°C”
goal is more likely a “2°C and then
some” goal.

goal is more likely a “2°C and then some”
goal.
4 years later, as we speak, most
countries are well behind their
committed schedule on their promised
road.

goal is more likely a “2°C and then some”
goal.
4 years later, as we speak, most countries
are well behind their committed schedule
on their promised road.
Germany … has not even started yet.

17 Sustainable Development Goals
<>

17 Sustainable Development Goals 2
186 Countries have committed to the SDGs
● So has your country.
● The requirements contained in 17 SDGs should
have been made national law.
● Not complying – not reaching the goals will
lead to penalty payments.
● Western Democracies usually create incentive
through subsidised development and tax
reductions.

Your Politicians Need You:
Politicians need reminders
● Tell your politicians they won’t be elected
unless they support positive climate change

15 March 2019: Climate Strike
● Remember
Greta Thunberg
at #cop24?
● Students and
pupils will strike
for climate
change
awareness on
15 March 2019.
Greta Thunberg 2018
(cropped) Jan Ainal CC BY-
SA 4.0

Your Kids Need You:
Support your kids in voicing they need a
working planet they can live on:
● Support world-wide school children and student
strike on 15 March 2019

Links
● Anthroposcene - Human impact on the environment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_enviro
nment
● Climate Change in Your Lifetime https://climate-life-
events.herokuapp.com/
● Germanwatch Climate Risk Index
https://germanwatch.org/de/14638
● Global Warming Potential (GWP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

Links 2
● Greenhouse Gas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
● Mauna Loa: Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/graph.html
● The Carbon Cycle
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle
● European entrepreneurs want to remove carbon from the air at
prices cheap enough to matter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-business
● Carbon capture and storage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage

Links 3
● Paris Agreement 2015 at #cop21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
● 17 Sustainable Development Goals
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/
● Please watch Greta Thunberg at #cop24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFkQSGyeCWg
● School strike for climate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate

Sören Laird Sörries
● Linux (1991...), Perl (1998...)
● German Perl Workshops (2000...)
● Frankfurt.pm (~2001...)
● 3 kids, 2 cats, and a pony
Clean Power Professional (Imperial College, 2019)
● Communication
● Cloud Architecture
● Cybersecurity
● Data Science

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