This is an audio long read from nature.

In this episode, three ways to cool Earth by pulling carbon from the sky.

Written by Jeff Tollifson and read by me, Benjamin Thompson.

Sometime in the next several months, a team of US scientists plans to pour a solution of

antacid into the waves off the coast of Massachusetts. Using boats, boys, and autonomous gliders,

the scientists will track changes in water chemistry that should allow this tiny patch of the Atlantic

ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the sky than it normally would. The 10 million US-dollar

experiment, dubbed Loch Ness, aims to test one prominent strategy to reverse global warming

by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Doing so will be neither cheap nor easy. But with the world looking likely to blow past the

temperature targets laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, a growing number of

scientists and policy specialists say that carbon removal will be necessary

later this century if humanity is to achieve its long-term climate goals.

Governments, utility companies and hundreds of startup organizations around the globe

and now investing billions of dollars into carbon removal strategies that take

three broad approaches, sucking carbon directly from the air, altering the oceans to absorb more

carbon than normal, and enhancing carbon removal on land. In the United States, for example,

companies are planning to build several large-scale,

direct-air capture facilities that scrub CO2 out of thin air. And in Europe, power companies

are developing a strategy that captures carbon emissions from bioenergy plants that burn wood chips, straw and other plant-based materials.

The captured CO2 will then be pumped into the ground beneath the North Sea.

Many companies are already selling voluntary carbon removal credits to organisations such as Microsoft

...