CARBON DRAWDOWN - CLIMATE SAVIOUR OR HUBRISTIC PIPE DREAM

Using so-called Negative Emissions Technologies to suck carbon dioxide from the air at a scale that will bring about meaningful reductions would be a prodigious task

Estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution range up to 2.5 trillion tonnes. If we stopped emitting today, this would slowly be scrubbed from the atmosphere by ocean absorption and by chemical weathering of silicate rocks. It would take hundreds of thousands of years for all the carbon dioxide we have added to the air to be naturally removed, and for atmospheric levels of the gas to be rewilded back to normal levels for an interglacial period.