111–117 of 117 posts
I’ll pass. The About page is not very helpful either. It says very little about the author except this:
> Like most people, I use AI “for research”, but I impose fairly strict limits to make sure I don’t use AI “for writing”.
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What does DAC stand for in this context? My brain is stuck on Digital-Analog Converter and I'm pretty sure we aren't talking about using those, but if so I'm even more fascinated by this discussion
I'm guessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture That said, it seems intrinsically wrong-headed to me, a kind of trojan-horse technology for getting everyone else to spend money cleaning up the mess the polluter keeps spilling out into the commons. Every dollar spent trying to extract low-concentration CO2 from ambient atmosphere is probably better-spent trying to grab it from a high-concentration sourc…
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Carbon capture is already done at scale because CO2 is commercially valuable. The proposed carbon storage is permanent in the form of carbonates. This is a variant of the Solvay process used to make washing powder. Chalk cliffs were once the shells of sea creatures. That's a whole load of sequestered carbon right there.
I was under the impression that commercial CO₂ was produced by mining chalk.
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Forests and grasslands are critical for the climate because of the carbon they lock away. So long as the plants stay alive, they store carbon in the cellulose structures of roots and stems. Conserving these ecosystems is less about their daily respiration and more about keeping existing carbon out of the atmosphere. It's a defensive strategy. Not "carbon capture" per se but more "avoid loosing the carbon we've alread…
This is true but I have to admit I despise the reductionism inherent in arguments for valuing forests in this way. There are so many important ecosystem services played by forests and "wildlife" that is missed when focusing solely on carbon sink capacity. Not to mention the rights of nature itself to exist. We would be dealing with so many more diseases if it weren't for vultures, opossums, etc. Our soils would not h…
The myopic focus on carbon is an easy trap to fall into; it's the quantifiable part of the system. In this world, that which gets measured gets managed.
I would hope we'd conserve these ecosystems because of a deeply-held spiritual connection to life. Or at least a realization of the value they provide to humanity by simply existing. But carbon remains the objective metric by which conservation interacts with the financial market.
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There's definitely quite a lot of scientific support, e.g. see this review paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2018.08.059 I'm open to the possibility that this is wrong, but as far as I can tell, the conventional scientific view is that high-CO2 environments are somewhat bad (although not catastrophic, even at 8000 ppm).
This looks like a good review, and it definitely pertains to your effort here. Although the authors play up the positivity of their conclusions a bit (which is useful if they want to continue the research), they are also honest about the limitations of the material they cite. Many positive correlations are cited, but nearly every paragraph is laden with caveats. Here are a few pulled at random: > However, the relatio…
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Forests do net sequester carbon. But if you want to really sock away the carbon you harvest the trees and pyrolize it. It will give you energy (heat) you can use and elemental carbon (biochar). You could bury that a few feet under or innoculate it with microorganisms and work it into fields. Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it.
> Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it. And what is the scale that global climate change works on? Trees do jack shit for carbon on the scale that is important.
The US alone has ~1 billion acres of forest land and could produce a lot more if needed. Over 35 years, we could remove 50 billion tons * 25-40%. Basically enough to offset a years worth of emissions during those years.
It's not enough, but it would be a significant amount of carbon removed. Combined with other efforts, we could put a lot of carbon back in the soil.