Goodbye Global Warming!...Hello Terraforming? 466
silance writes "Here is an article from Science Daily detailing a new method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale and at normal concentrations. Previous systems require placement near high concentration centers such as power plants, and do not address low-concentration sources (such as internal combustion engines) which are responsible for half of the world's carbon dioxide pollution. The article descibes the technology as scalable to the point of repairing Earth's atmosphere to pre-Industrial-Age levels! Next stop, Mars..." I seem to remember something like this in SimEarth ? - but I'm not going to hold my breath (Ha! I pun!) waiting for this.
Related story (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The figures are extremely optimistic (Score:2, Informative)
I do agree with you about the amount of energy required to convert the CaCO3 back to CaO, I wonder if that will be from renewable sources that do not produce CO2?
Or not (Score:1, Informative)
Re: What about photosynthesis? (Score:1, Informative)
this guy, Darius Kuciauskas, and is team are on an interesting path. They are working on new way of using solar energy by imitating photosynthesis. While I found it clever, I think it might also be a good thing if people were looking a bit more to use the same reaction as found in plants. I don't know what would be the drawback of doing so, but if about all organism run on oxygen/glucose as an energy source, why aren't we looking to use it to? We could mimic natures by creating fuel out of Water/CO2 and release this back as Water CO2 when burning the fuel, thus exactly copying natures way of using solar energy. Anyone whith better knowledge to enlighten me?
Re:What about trees? (Score:2, Informative)
Trees has breathing, too.
And the balance from the trees are near zero.
The most part of CO2 -> O2 is done by phitoplankton in oceans.
Re:Preserve the seaweeds (Score:2, Informative)
Not really. Some pen manufacturer invented and produced the pen at their own cost, and offered it to NASA.
Oceans gobbling up more carbon dioxide (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, so more CO2 goes into the atomosphere = more plants. Oh no, more plants! [cnn.com]
We're not destroying the planet by producing CO2. Heavy metals in drinking water is a problem, as are many other types of polution, but CO2 is simply not any more of a problem than Dihydrogen Monoxide [dhmo.org] (DHMO).
Get a clue and stop buying into all of this alarmist crap. Work to stop real forms of pollution. Scientists need funding to continue research. To get funding, you have to prove that you are working on something valuable. What could be more valuable than "I'm trying to find out if we're destroying the planet!" Don't think that these people are not in this for the money any less than any corporation out there.
Re:other solutions? (Score:3, Informative)
We've had this conversation before. The idea that there's a world food shortage is a misconception. In fact, there's a fairly significant annual food surplus. Some of the surplus food is stockpiled, while some is just lost.
People starve because there is a local food shortage where they live. We could get our (where "our" refers to anybody who lives where there's a food surplus, like here in the US) surplus food to them if only it weren't for the excessive cost of fuel.
Full circle.
Trees are carbon banks (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Preserve the seaweeds (Score:3, Informative)
Cite that 90%.
I've heard that NASA spent 2 years developing a pen capable of writing in 0g. The russians used a pencil. Cite that 90%.
A lot of people have heard that. It's wrong [snopes2.com].
That's exactly the point, don't just start acting, try the simplicity, haven't we learned anything with the fight Windows vs. Unix?
What does Win v. *nix have to do with removing CO2 from the atmosphere?
In case you missed it, Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide is rising exponentially [vision.net.au], seaweed is limited in where it can grow, and growth is held in balance with the animals the eat it. Oh, something interesting [utampa.edu] about seaweed.
Simplicity is much better, try preserving seaweeds instead of build expensive CO2 extractors and planting trees.
Nature is NOT simple. Have a look at how simple glucose metabolism [ucsd.edu] is, and then consider it's one of the most basic processes for the majority of animal life.
Oh, and don't forget about the Hydrogen-cells engine, now a days it can be produced, but due to financial problems it is not as popular as it should be.
It's called a "fuel cell", and it's not extremely simple [utcfuelcells.com], either.
I'll give you credit and say, "There's one more troll sated."
woof.
I'll bet his answer to the Middle East situation is situation is, "If you guys would simply stop fighting, everyone will be happier."
The world is not a simple place, despite being filled with simple people.
Can we check the math and the geography? (Score:4, Informative)
Hi!
Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people. There are, as of April 1, 2000, 281,421,906 people in the United States. So we'd need 58,145 acres of quicklime to process CO2 for just the United States.
Quiz: How big is Rhode Island?
Let's just skip the obligatory comparison to the size of the state of Rhode Island--and concede that we're talking about a lot of land. And, oh yeah--we're also talking about a huge amount of quicklime. Which will, of course, need to be replenished all over those tens of thousands of acres. And building a collection system to capture the calcium carbonate from all those tens of thousands of acres wouldn't be child's play, either. And then it has to be processed, and so forth.
This is the kind of government proposal that used to give the Keynesian macro-economics professors a head rush. Just think of the economic multipliers--think of all the jobs created finding and surveying and buying some 60,000 acres of land. Think of all the money spent on massive construction equipment necessary to find, dig, and move 60,000 acres worth of quicklime. Think of all the steel involved in building the equipment necessary to collect all that calcium carbonate. Think of all the steel, electricity, and machinery that will be required to do all this processing. Think of the tens of thousands of jobs we're talking about. Whoopie!
And, oh yeah! Think about the amount of CO2 generated by the electricity used to produce all that steel; and all the CO2 generated by all those cars driven by all those employees, and all those earth-movers scraping depleted quicklime out, and pushing new quicklime back in.
Still with me? Now consider this: there aren't a lot of vacant 60,000 acre tracts of land available in the Washington, D.C. metro area. So a project of this magnitude would require moving all those tens of thousands of people to wherever this (by definition) arid wasteland would be.
This isn't simple, and almost certainly not feasible
Okay, I'm just a simple programmer and part-time college [desales.edu] professor. What could I possibly know? It seems pretty clear to me that this announcement wasn't peer-reviewed, or if it was, the peer-review processing happened at a really good office party. The chemistry might be "simple," but the project would not be.
Re:Can we check the math and the geography? (Score:3, Informative)
776,960 acres if i did my math right... so less than one tenth of a state you could drop on wyoming without anyone noticing. And it doesn't really have to be one huge facility...
--
Benjamin Coates
Life terraformed the earth. (Score:3, Informative)
Life, however, is subject to a narrow band of habitable conditions. Raise or lower the ph, temperature, gas content of it's growth medium, or food availability and certain forms of life ceace.
Left to it's own devices, life will adapt but maybe not as we would wish. We think of ourselves as intelligent - let us prove it by stopping our meddling with natural processes. Creating manmade forms of removing gasses from the atmosphere will only create more expenses and costs - not to mention byproducts. We need to work WITH nature rather than battling it.
For energy we have the sun. Almost all forms of energy can be traced back to the sun in one form or another. Nature has found a way to convert solar energy into stored energy in the form of sugars. We have found ways of converting solar energy into usable gases which have a net zero effect on pollution - hydrogen/oxygen electrolysis for recombination in a feul cell. Lets develop this technology and avoid the original problem altogether. We could make better or more efficient alcohol or hydrogen burning engines at the very least.
Our very health is dependant on economic considerations. It seems that there isn't much money to be made from fixing the problem - profits are being made treating the symptoms - bottled water and air filtration systems. I guess those who profit feel that they can buy a livable atmosphere and potable water and poison free food while the rest of us suffer and die. What a bleak future we're likely to have - what a promising future we could all have if we just think. Assist or allow nature to fix itself.
Re:What about trees? (Score:3, Informative)
"I read that there are more trees now than 30 years ago through careful management"
I've seen a fair number of replanted areas, and number of trees is not really the issue. The trees I've seen were pathetic toothpicks compared to the trees removed. They were overdense, and tended to break during winter freezes or high winds. You couldn't use them for lumber (well, you might get one 2x4 from each, and I suppose you could chip them), because they're too small. If these are the trees you've read about, then we haven't yet replaced any of what we've taken. It's not clear to me that these overdense tree plantings will ever resemble the forests they replace.
-Paul Komarek