Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
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Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
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Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#2What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#3much better option than stratospheric aerosol injection, it’s easily reversible
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#4wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass
produce more furniture out of wood,
instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#5Or just burn the huge piles to charcoal (pyrolysis), then you're only storing carbon, and it certainly won't decay. Even use it as a soil enhancer.
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#6wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?
There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way.
Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#7I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2.
Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process
Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical erosion, oxidation, or any kind of natural degradation. Put the silicon carbide in a geologically stable desert and it could keep the carbon out of the carbon cycle until the sun grows hot enough to render the Earth uninhabitable. Continually extract and convert CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans until natural CO2 levels drop near zero and the desert is full of silicon carbide mountain ranges.
As a mere mitigation for AGW, this is a stinker. It requires an order of magnitude more energy and complexity than direct air capture of CO2 (which itself is already too energetically demanding and complex). But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon!
Most actually-buildable doomsday weapons leave numerous survivors behind. Ordinary global nuclear war would barely deplete uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Cockroaches would still survive cobalt salted nuclear warfare at the gigaton scale. Even an army of roving Terminators might eliminate multicellular life yet struggle to locate protozoans.
But I think that Total Carbon Sequestration could end all life, not just the visible-to-the-naked-eye species. All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide. So with a hundred trillion dollar investment in a fully autonomous complex of solar farms, carbon capture facilities, and silicon carbide factories, I believe that we could solve global warming and end all life on Earth. Just like the Earth will do naturally in about a billion years [2] as CO2 levels fall, but up to 10,000 times faster! I'm still working on a funding model and a rationale for why this should be done at all, but some things are inspiring just because they're possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#8wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?
2/3 of the CO2 stored in forest is in the ground, not the trees, it's accumulated when the forest grows and is getting generations of trees.
Cut those trees to do furniture and you'll release all this CO2, do a culture of tree decades after decades and you'll never store it back.
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#9The globe is mostly water. Ocean fertilization make a lot more sense than this for a whole bunch of reasons. The inter-continental sea floor automatically freezes all carbon that goes down there most of it is stored as methane. Just need a fleet of nuclear powered fertilizer ships to kick it off hopefully you get more fish as a result.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#10A structural question comes to mind, if the pipes are arrayed horizontally, how important is it to keep the pipes straight while they're being compressed by metric tons of biomass? Are they at risk of being squished closed? It's too late at night for me to ball park the pressures involved, but it'll be something like an extra atmosphere of pressure every 20 to 30 meters? This thing is over a hundred meters tall?