Hi Alex:

Mitigation of climate change is a very wide topic.

You have to better focus your question, do you want to mitigate the impact of climate change on natural phenomena such as precipitation, wind, temperature?

Or are you interested in the impact of climate change on agriculture or on marine biology? Or are you interested in studying the impact of climate change on human health?

Once you focus the aim of your research in to a specific topic then you have to study the way climate impacts the physical system, this is achieved by way of mathematical models. The next step is then mitigate this impact through appropriate techniques depending on the system.

An example of a study of climate change on a physical phenomena, in this case wind speed, is here:

Cechet R.P., Sanabria L.A., Yang T., Arthur W.C., Wang C.H. and Wang X.

An assessment of severe wind hazard and risk for Queensland’s Sunshine Coast region.  Proc. of the International Congress on Modelling and Simulation MODSIM2011. Perth, Dec. 12-16, 2011.

Hope this helps,

Augusto

The impacts of climate change vary wildly from place to place, and through different time scales.  If you are living in Europe, where climate change will decrease crop yield and increase flooding, finding ways to grow your own food and live in a well drained area would be ways of mitigating the effects for yourself.  If you're living in an area where droughts are expected to be more severe, planting trees with deep roots would be good for the whole community.

There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to mitigation methods. They are dependant on scale, time horizon, what you have now, and what you'll have in that future.  Where I live, freezing rain is going to be far more common, and snow less common, in the future.  Maybe I would want to move closer to my work or find ways of working from home for several days at a time. 

well my aim relates to  clarifying how fossil fuel  consumption at the urban level tends  to increase while mitigation meausures are being delivered and proliferated. i feel that understanding this co-evolution of consumption and mitigation, as a cause and effect relation,  can help us understand the way that human populations activity  can be better organised against climate change through using alternative means as a way of  transitioning  fom economic growth to sustainable development and secondly if transition can be made through low energy  development pathways.

i hope that you can  give me more feedback on this issue as a start,

No discussion of climate change makes much sense without talking energy policy at exactly the same time.

I would add, Kenneth, that the Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) of all of these technologies are questionable.  Right now the EROI of Tarsand is 6:1, Uranium is between 5 and 10:1, conventional oil is 17:1, coal is up to 40:1 (but is highly polluting), etc.  Spending some of the energy to sequester waste CO2 drops the values meaningfully.  If it costs 10% of the available energy to store the carbon, then coal goes from 40:1 (2.5% of the total energy goes into the processes to run the system) to 8:1 (12.5% of the total energy goes into those processes).

The Roman Empire had an EROI of about 17:1 at its' height, and about 9:1 at its' collapse.  Unless we're a whole lot smarter than the Romans (no clear indication of that to date) then we're going to be in really rough shape when nuclear and tarsand are the best we can do.

After about 2042, when the world reaches Peak Fossil Carbon, no increases in GNP are available as a result of increases in fossil energy consumption.  We won't be able to hide bad management behind rapid economic growth.

I would suggest that climate change is a result of utilizing resources and producing wastes faster than the sources and sinks can recover.  Thus it is a symptom, not actually the disease.  We spend altogether too much focus on the symptom, rather than addressing the underlying problem, and in that regard, I agree with Kenneth.

In 30 years, we won't be relying on fossil fuels to create economic activity to maintain our quality of life, so we can make the shift away from the declining resource now, and save the world some ecological stress in the process.  Or, we can wait for the real cost of energy to increase at 10% per year until the economy collapses under the strain.  The pollution will seriously affect our ability to live on the planet due to significant changes in where human populations can be supported.  60 to 70 million ecological migrants (not just climate change, but also soil loss, eutrification, and other forms of pollution) on a planetary basis won't be an unreasonable estimate, each year (since the ones that move are likely to be moving just far enough to get enough food and water, so they'll be resettled several times).

I'm not really good at waiting...

Nuclear power suffers from very little development has been done in the latest 2-3 decades. It has fallen behind in costs compared to wind, sun and gas turbines.  It appears that most of the new plants under construction struggle with costs exceeding wind turbines. 

https://www.ecowatch.com/westinghouse-nuclear-2469123144.html?utm_source=EcoWatch+List&utm_campaign=3ae99ba68c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49c7d43dc9-3ae99ba68c-86116018

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/11/solar-and-wind-cheaper-than-new-nuclear-by-the-time-hinkley-is-built

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-cost-of-wind-power-coal-nuclear-natural-gas/

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/07/05/new-wind-solar-lower-greenhouse-gas-emissions-cost-less-keeping-aging-nuclear-power-plants-running/

http://www.mining.com/wind-power-equivalent-six-nuclear-power-plants-swedish-storm/

Mitigative measures for climate change is mainly a administrative issue which has to be dealt at international level. But as an individual citizen contribution can be made by each of us on a daily basis by adopting best practices by reducing emissions by opting public transport systems, using solar power for cooking and heating. As a researcher, we can contribute more by innovations in the field of renewable energy.

Answer to this question may be related to change in land use pattern. A detailed investigation into correlation between changes in land use and climate for past 5 decades might give a glimpse into actual cause. And hence may help in planning mitigative measures.

Is there a source for the about 80 years prediction?

Since half of emitted CO2 currently are taken up by the oceans and biomass we will experience decreasing CO2 concentrations already from the point we cut our emissions to half of the current level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_cycle.jpg

The references I linked indicate the market is concerned with the actual costs on the open marked. Scandinavia has a spot marked for electricity in which the hydropower, gas and coal plants supply electricity in low wind periods and save fuel/water on other days. Over the next few years the few remaining coal plants will be converted to biomass and with a bit longer timeline biogas gradually replace the gas from the North Sea.

I don't disagree that the German energy policy is a disaster. They planned to use nuclear for base load, but since the Fukushima's nuclear disaster their politicians decided to close the plants without having replacement production capacity. Now they import expensive gas (fine for variable demand) to cower base load. Adding to this the have installed a lot of photovoltaic beck then it wasn't cost competitive and avoided to build transfer lines to other countries to prevent competition with their to expensive photovoltaic electricity.

Essentially I believe nuclear is the only solution for some countries that doesn't have sufficient hydropower, sun and wind but it is a huge problem that the technology development is so slow. The Thorium reactors seems very interesting but they are really needed now not in 10-20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

I didn't know India is taking this up. It seems a fine match that Thorium reactors (I heard) can be small units and India is suffering from a very weak electricity infrastructure.

Almost, but not entirely mission impossible.  Climate change is a symptom of too much pollution.  Decreasing pollution has been shown pretty much everywhere to increase employment and decrease energy and resource costs.  US ecological footprint has shrunk rapidly in the last 10 years, faster than the culture can adapt to, and that is ultimately what stops us from fixing the problem quickly.  

But solar can't really replace all of the energy coming from fossil carbon.  Show me a solar panel that uses only solar energy in it's manufacture.  Of course, the obvious answer is plant life, so we know it is entirely possible.  But we don't do it, because fossil carbon is still so cheap and easy to use.

Even if we convert all of our deserts into solar panel farms, we won't be able to replace all of the fossil carbon.  But we don't really have to - the faster we replace fossil carbon, the longer the remains will last.  If we are consuming 7% of reserves every year, and the reserves are declining, then the renewables (likely not agriculture based, but possible in some locations) have to replace the difference between improvements in efficiency and the loss of production.  And then we would have fossil carbon available forever.