121–130 of 199 posts
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It doesn't take an unreasonable amount of iron and the sequestering efficiency is 13k:1 C:Fe on a molar basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
Do you mean rather: 1:13k Fe:C From that Wikipedia item, "Each iron atom converted at least 13,000 carbon atoms into algae."
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>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions OK but I think there will be.
How? Unless you get a breakthrough with fusion, I just don’t see us finding the energy to make carbon removal feasible. You either need huge tracts of land to power forests, or massive amounts of energy from another source to do it with tech, and neither of those is going to be the easy fix people believe is coming.
What does success look like in the climate change fight? Is there a point where victory can ever be declared? Is that a "correct" temperature (what is it) or a CO2 PPM number (what's ideal)? When industry and scientists stop lobbying for money to fight it?
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-...
What does success look like in the climate change fight? Is there a point where victory can ever be declared? Is that a "correct" temperature (what is it) or a CO2 PPM number (what's ideal)? When industry and scientists stop lobbying for money to fight it?
I think it's interesting that Homo sapiens evolved during the last ice age where the climate was significantly different than today's climate. We already "won" a major climate change once despite having a level of technology barely better than sharp sticks and pelt cloaks. Instead of defining success based on climate stability itself, I think it makes more sense to define success in terms of what we care about: a thr…
At the same time, the population has been booming to the point that close to half of the humans who ever existed are alive on Earth right now. This is a significant part of the current crisis actually.
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What could possibly go wrong?
Do you have a better plan? There are net positive CCS projects we must complete to bring the planet back from annihilation.
Plenty
* Shut down the fossil fuel industry. Cannot be done in one stroke, but can be done
* Ground the airliners. We actually do not need to travel around the globe in hours.
* Carbon taxes. Well duh!
* Corollary to carbon taxes is "Fee and dividend" - recycle the money as citizen's dividends
* Reform agriculture - Regenerative farming and deepening topsoils
Really not hard to come up with ideas like this, vary hard to implement them in a free society.
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>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions OK but I think there will be.
How? Unless you get a breakthrough with fusion, I just don’t see us finding the energy to make carbon removal feasible. You either need huge tracts of land to power forests, or massive amounts of energy from another source to do it with tech, and neither of those is going to be the easy fix people believe is coming.
I am skeptical of any remedy to climate change that’s not reducing emissions. Whatever you do, be it seaweed, carbon capture or other stuff, would have to be done on an insane scale to make a difference. Who knows what the side effects of growing that much seaweed would be ?
While I agree, how do you recommend we reduce emissions immediately, which is basically when it needs to happen. It seems like largely people just don't care about the environment on a "general global" scale. There are pockets are people/groups/countries that do. But on average people don't. So that leaves really one solution, which is attempting to reduce the amount of existing emissions to stop the rise to some deg…
The issue is not really people. The worst emitters are out of reach from us.
It’s good to make people more conscious of their environmental impact but what good does it really make when what is saved is a minute of energy production by the average Chinese coal power plant.
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The probability that this will end up happening leaves me feeling glad to be mortal.
As in glad you won't live long enough to see it?
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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-...
Greenhouses can have different CO2 levels to the outside, and it's not the only thing that has (or will) increased yield.
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Can’t fertilizer production emission be compartimentalized?
Fertilizer isn't a singular thing or a hivemind. Terrestrial ag fertilizers don't have to be produced by fossil fuels. The Haber–Bosch process used to make ammonium nitrate can be solar powered instead of using methane. Phosphate rock processing could greenified for a green "green" phosphoric acid wet process. Potassium from potash is mostly a passive solar evap process. For seaweed aquaculture, iron sulfate is used…