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Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

nature.com

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Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#51

Post by snewman »

amelius wrote: post #49

I wonder if, instead of scrubbing CO2, it would make sense to increase the other constituents of air, e.g. oxygen, thereby reducing the effective concentration of CO2. What if we ran a giant hydrolysis operation, generating O2 (and letting H2 escape into space or finding some other use for it other than burning it)?

This doesn't work. First of all, you'd still have the same mass of CO2, so the insulating effect wouldn't change. Those molecules would still be there to interfere with infrared radiation trying to escape into space.

Second of all, you're talking about gargantuan quantities of oxygen (or nitrogen, or whatever). CO2 is roughly 1/2500 of the atmosphere, so to achieve a given amount of dilution, you can remove one CO2 molecule or add 2500 other molecules.

Finally, I don't know what the side effects of increasing global air pressure would be, but I'm sure there would be significant effects!

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#52

Post by Robotbeat »

_3u10 wrote: post #33

The report says the total biomass is 1300 tonnes. (1.3x10^3). I think the algae might be less important than the authors are letting on.

Seems to me that darkening the snow would be a much bigger impact than the very small amount of carbon in the algae.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#53

Post by mrfusion »

hummel wrote: post #31
ravenstine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we aren't necessarily doomed if we were willing to actually try anything. No one wants to try nuclear for reals because people are frightened of it and world governments don't have an economic interest in building more nuclear. We don't have an equivalent of an "operation warp speed" for developing next-gen CO2 scrubbing technology. I guess that's just not as cool to people as building tunnels under LA or launc…

I'm working on this direction, with an very specific seaweed that solve this problem now and doesn't need freshwater or fertilizers. If anyone is interested reach me on my profile.

Why seaweed over algae? Hey bonus you could use the waste in cow feed to reduce methane.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#54

Post by mrfusion »

pvaldes wrote: post #48
_3u10 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate species because orcas aren’t endangered so they had to invent a species with 73 members so they could have something to complain about. Look up Southern Resident Orca

> Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate species because orcas aren’t endangered so they had to invent a species with 73 members so they could have something to complain about. Sometimes scientists do genetic analysis and find things, yep. We don't do this because we are drama queens, It just happens that murica has some unique cetacean species and they are experiencing a sharp decline by unclear reason…

So you’re claiming these orcas can’t reproduce with other pods of orcas? Isn’t that the definition of a species?

Not that I’m against helping them but we only have so much energy and focus so other species may need the help more.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#55

Post by mrpopo »

snewman wrote: post #51
amelius wrote: post #49

I wonder if, instead of scrubbing CO2, it would make sense to increase the other constituents of air, e.g. oxygen, thereby reducing the effective concentration of CO2. What if we ran a giant hydrolysis operation, generating O2 (and letting H2 escape into space or finding some other use for it other than burning it)?

This doesn't work. First of all, you'd still have the same mass of CO2, so the insulating effect wouldn't change. Those molecules would still be there to interfere with infrared radiation trying to escape into space. Second of all, you're talking about gargantuan quantities of oxygen (or nitrogen, or whatever). CO2 is roughly 1/2500 of the atmosphere, so to achieve a given amount of dilution, you can remove one CO2 m…

Just adding an incredibly larger amount of gases (the atmosphere is 5.5 * 10^18 kg) in the air doesn't increase global air pressure, it will just make more gases leak into the outer atmosphere over time. I am not sure how long that would take though.

Anyway, as you said, any project that doesn't involve significantly scaling down anthropic GHG emissions and human settlement footprint will have significant effects. Planting trillions of trees will result in dead trees and environments destroyed. CCS at scale will involve ungodly amounts of energy + materials. Algae farming will alter the ocean's biodiversity already affected by warming + acidity + overfishing.

It's time to acknowledge that the Earth doesn't owe us a couple of large cars per household, exotic foods, meat BBQs and regular plane trips.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#56

Post by monocasa »

mrfusion wrote: post #54
pvaldes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate species because orcas aren’t endangered so they had to invent a species with 73 members so they could have something to complain about. Sometimes scientists do genetic analysis and find things, yep. We don't do this because we are drama queens, It just happens that murica has some unique cetacean species and they are experiencing a sharp decline by unclear reason…

So you’re claiming these orcas can’t reproduce with other pods of orcas? Isn’t that the definition of a species? Not that I’m against helping them but we only have so much energy and focus so other species may need the help more.

Ligers are generally fertile, but tigers and lions are different species.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#57

Post by detaro »

_3u10 wrote: post #37
xyzzyz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking of algae, we're not turning wasteland into algae farming ponds and developing more useful algae because, well, I don't really know. One of the reasons is that, according to many environmental activists, there is no such thing as “wasteland” that you could develop with minimal loss to environment. This is not a theoretical concern: read up on Ivanpah solar power plant, built in the middle of the literal des…

Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate species because orcas aren’t endangered so they had to invent a species with 73 members so they could have something to complain about. Look up Southern Resident Orca

They haven't. It's a population of Orcas, even Canadian government sources explicitly label it as being Orcinus orca (i.e. Orcas, no special biological species).

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#58

Post by snewman »

mrpopo wrote: post #55
snewman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't work. First of all, you'd still have the same mass of CO2, so the insulating effect wouldn't change. Those molecules would still be there to interfere with infrared radiation trying to escape into space. Second of all, you're talking about gargantuan quantities of oxygen (or nitrogen, or whatever). CO2 is roughly 1/2500 of the atmosphere, so to achieve a given amount of dilution, you can remove one CO2 m…

Just adding an incredibly larger amount of gases (the atmosphere is 5.5 * 10^18 kg) in the air doesn't increase global air pressure, it will just make more gases leak into the outer atmosphere over time. I am not sure how long that would take though. Anyway, as you said, any project that doesn't involve significantly scaling down anthropic GHG emissions and human settlement footprint will have significant effects. Pl…

Air pressure, a few details aside, must be equal to the weight of the air molecules sitting above the spot where you are measuring it. If we add more gas to the atmosphere, sea level air pressure must increase. One way to think about it: the weight of the additional gas smooches down on the existing atmosphere, compressing it and thus increasing the pressure.

Of course all of this is academic in any event; addressing climate change by diluting the CO2 is a nice attempt at out-of-the-box thinking but it's not actually plausible.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#59

Post by burnished »

dang wrote: post #47
burnished wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop the word 'green', its an interesting descriptor but accuracy wouldn't be lost in the same way (I believe).

That's a good idea. I dropped 'terrestrial' instead, because I'm not sure where else the carbon sink would be. (Submitted title was "Remote sensing shows Antarctic green snow algae is important terran carbon sink".)

Oh, honestly that's way better for the reason you specified. Nice.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#60

Post by shawn-butler »

ahevia wrote: post #30
shawn-butler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 100% clear that carbon doesn’t persist in the soil. It’s make believe unsupported by any evidence

No that’s just not true. Carbon does persist in soil. For how long is a very different question. Once Soil Organic Carbon is converted to Microbial Organic Matter it is much more robust. But the threats that climate change bring also threaten the stability of land ecosystems (drought, increased forest fires, etc) which will release the carbon stored in the soil. So we shouldn’t rely on soil alone to sequester carbon(…

Sorry you're just wrong or focussing on a topic not the one at hand. Of course SOC is good for soil health. But for sequestration over any meaningful time frame you need to go below plow depth.

For further reading the best long term study of which I am aware on SOC via cover cropping (and that's all that we are interested in here is long-term) over 19 years found actual losses of carbon not gains at the soil depths that are important. [0]

... If we only measured soil C in the top 30 cm, we would have assumed an increase in total soil C increased with WCC alone, whereas in reality significant losses in SOC occurred when considering the 2 m soil profile. Ignoring the subsoil carbon dynamics in deeper layers of soil fails to recognize potential opportunities for soil C sequestration, and may lead to false conclusions about the impact of management practices on C sequestration....

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14762

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