91–100 of 199 posts
Most of the ocean is desert lacking the limiting nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorous and iron. If we can cheaply fertilize large swathes of the ocean with these limiting nutrients in a controlled manner, then this could trigger massive algae blooms that on sinking sequester massive amounts of carbon.
It's a cool idea but I don't see how this is a viable long term solution, even if done at a large scale. Global oil production is on the order of 90M barrels/year, each barrel contains about 300 lbs of oil, so we're currently producing something like 27B lbs (~12B kg) of oil per year. I'm not sure how much of this ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere versus e.g. plastics, but I think it's safe to say we're probably emitt…
It's much worse, this is off by a factor of ~365: that production of ~90M barrels is per day[1]. Global carbon emissions are up to 36 billion tons annually as of 2022[2].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-produc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we bring global CO2 back down to 280 ppm (like it was in the year 1700[1]), then a lot of today's farming methods will have substantially lower yields. Our modern crops need those higher CO2 levels to grow fast[2]. Without other ways to grow more food, people will starve. [1]: https://www.co2levels.org/img/graph_grid.png [2]: https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/images/greenhouse-...
source pls (edit: thanks!)
There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solution and various proposals may even be flirting with ecological disasters of planetary proportions. Anything that expands our footprint in order to mitigate our footprint is a dubious direction. Reminds of an apprentice wizard that panics and invokes a sequence of spells, each one worse than the other. Discussions and thinking around sustainability underestimat…
[1] https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay cool, so what is your timeline for how long will it take to stop humans from being greedy? You realize any solution that is "rich people stop being greedy" is no solution at all?
What do you think nation states are? They’re systems to prevent “most muscular and monstrous man wins everything.” We build such systems all the time and they do appear to be stable. The modern world couldn’t exist without their success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't feel like a question asked in good faith but, 350 is a reasonable ppm target: https://350.org/about/ edit: better link https://mn350.org/understanding350/
I suggest 280 ppm is more akin to "pre industrial" levels, as that was the level about 300 years ago. 350 was the level around 1990, which is thoroughly "after we already messed it up".
There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solution and various proposals may even be flirting with ecological disasters of planetary proportions. Anything that expands our footprint in order to mitigate our footprint is a dubious direction. Reminds of an apprentice wizard that panics and invokes a sequence of spells, each one worse than the other. Discussions and thinking around sustainability underestimat…
>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions OK but I think there will be.
There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solution and various proposals may even be flirting with ecological disasters of planetary proportions. Anything that expands our footprint in order to mitigate our footprint is a dubious direction. Reminds of an apprentice wizard that panics and invokes a sequence of spells, each one worse than the other. Discussions and thinking around sustainability underestimat…
>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions OK but I think there will be.
There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solution and various proposals may even be flirting with ecological disasters of planetary proportions. Anything that expands our footprint in order to mitigate our footprint is a dubious direction. Reminds of an apprentice wizard that panics and invokes a sequence of spells, each one worse than the other. Discussions and thinking around sustainability underestimat…
>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions OK but I think there will be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't care about harvesting it you might want to bioengineer something that will grow on the coast of Namibia and seed it there. This coast pretty much can't be used for anything.
What could possibly go wrong?
There are net positive CCS projects we must complete to bring the planet back from annihilation.