Christian Castillo/staff reporter
A new prototype machine that is very big can suck up all the CO2 that is in the air. CO2 or carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that stops heat from escaping the earth which will lead to earth starting to warm up and this is called climate change.
Prototype is one of the different types of meanings to describe an early testing version of an object or machine.
The amount of carbon dioxide that there is in the air changes depending on what season it is, in the fall and winter there is more carbon dioxide because plants normally suck up the carbon dioxide, but they cannot do that in the colder weathers if they die or decay.
In the spring and summer the plants are able to take in more carbon dioxide because there are more of them in the warmer weathers.
In Squamish, British Columbia the DAC or direct air capture is the name that was given to the new machine which can suck out the carbon dioxide and it just looks like a giant version of an air conditioner according to the BBC news.
Direct air capture means the process of capturing carbon dioxide.
The DAC can suck up carbon dioxide in any direction by using multiple of its big spinning fans, but it is going to take a lot more than just the DAC to get rid of a lot of the carbon dioxide says the BBC news.
The BBC news says that if people want the world to not go through a very bad increase in climate change than they would need to do other things than just use DAC.
Like planting a forest or by removing 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year all the way up to the year 2050 and then people are going to need to double it to 20 gigatons from 2050 to 2100 if they want to limit the temperature increase to 1.5c.
Gigatons means billions and it is the word used to describe the amounts of carbon dioxide that is trapped in the air.
The fast company says that the Direct air capture was started by a company called climeworks. Climeworks is a Switzerland company that was founded by two German founders Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher.
The company works on projects that would help to keep on finding new and better ways to make machines that would be able to suck out or get rid of the carbon dioxide from the air.
Wurzbacher said on the fastcompany that it would take a few thousands of the direct air capture machines to have any progress at lowering the temperature to 1.5c by the end of the year 2100.
Chris field director of the Stanford woods institute also told the fast company that “we really only have less than 20 years left at current emission rates to have a good chance of lifting emissions to less than 2c”.
In the end to reduce the carbon dioxide people would need to make a lot of the direct air capture machines to limit the temperature to 1.5c.
So recently Elon musk CEO of tesla and SpaceX pledged $100m and Microsoft, United airlines and ExxonMobil invested Billion dollars into the development of new carbon capture technologies according to the BBC news.
Sources
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