UC Berkeley May Have Just Solved Climate Change

You gotta love UC Berkeley. What other college in America can legitimately be credited with both potentially ending the world through nuclear annihilation, and possibly saving the world by producing what may be global warming’s kryptonite?

You’re probably wondering what the fuck I’m talking about, but don’t worry, I’m not here to Al Gore you to death. It’s called “COF-999,” it’s a Carbon Monoxide magnet that will grab all the global warming gas out of the air so it could be pumped into rocks or something like that

“I see the solution to the climate problem right there, in our hands,” said UC Berkeley chemist Omar Yaghi, the study’s senior author, to the SF Standard. If true, COF-999 will join the ranks of giant scientific breakthroughs that have come out of Berkeley, including CRISPR gene editing in 2012. 

Yaghi and his coauthors published a study in the scientific journal “Nature” on Oct. 23 announcing their discovery of an “exceptional material” — a powder that builds on Yaghi’s foundational research and is poised to play a major role in fighting climate change by quite literally sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. 

Three years later, Zhou’s lab drawer is full of tiny tubes with varying shades of yellow powders, each representing an experiment that didn’t work. The drawer is a window into Zhou’s meticulous scientific method, each tube labeled in thin black marker with miniature drawings of chemical structures. 

On the day Zhou tested COF-999 under real-life conditions, the air in Berkeley had around 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Scientists say that keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide below 450 parts per million is necessary for limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Global average atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at 419.3 parts per million in 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I don’t really know what this means, but they do. Zhou passed Berkeley’s air through the yellow powder, and there was no sign of carbon monoxide on the other side.

If you want to read a much more detailed article about this subject, along with interviews with the brilliant Berkeley badasses who did it, click the link. 

If you’re lazy, here’s the TLDR version:

Berkeley may have just beaten global warming. Take that, capitalism! You’re gonna have to come up with a new way to destroy the world. And I’m sure you will. 

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