Seaweed Farming For CO2 Capture Would Take Up Too Much of the Ocean 99
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: If we're going to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming, experts agree, removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential. That's why, over the past few years, projects focused on growing seaweed to suck CO2 from the air and lock it in the sea have attracted attention -- and significant amounts of funding -- from the US government and private companies including Amazon. The problem: farming enough seaweed to meet climate-change goals may not be feasible after all.
A new study, published today in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, estimates that around a million square kilometers of ocean would need to be farmed in order to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the course of a year. It's not easy to come by that amount of space in places where seaweed grows easily, given all the competing uses along the coastlines, like shipping and fishing. To put that into context, between 2.5 and 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide would need to be captured each year, in addition to dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, to meet climate goals, according to the study's authors.
A variety of scientific models suggest we should be removing anything from 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year to 29 billion tons by 2050 in order to prevent global warming levels from rising past 1. 5C. An 2017 report from the UN estimated that we'd need to remove 10 billion tons annually to stop the planet from warming past 2C by the same date. "The industry is getting ahead of the science," says Isabella Arzeno-Soltero, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, who worked on the project. "Our immediate goal was to see if, given optimal conditions, we can actually achieve the scales of carbon harvests that people are talking about. And the answer is no, not really." [...] Their findings suggest that cultivating enough seaweed to reach these targets is beyond the industry's current capacity, although meeting climate goals will require much more than reliance solely on seaweed.
A new study, published today in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, estimates that around a million square kilometers of ocean would need to be farmed in order to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the course of a year. It's not easy to come by that amount of space in places where seaweed grows easily, given all the competing uses along the coastlines, like shipping and fishing. To put that into context, between 2.5 and 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide would need to be captured each year, in addition to dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, to meet climate goals, according to the study's authors.
A variety of scientific models suggest we should be removing anything from 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year to 29 billion tons by 2050 in order to prevent global warming levels from rising past 1. 5C. An 2017 report from the UN estimated that we'd need to remove 10 billion tons annually to stop the planet from warming past 2C by the same date. "The industry is getting ahead of the science," says Isabella Arzeno-Soltero, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, who worked on the project. "Our immediate goal was to see if, given optimal conditions, we can actually achieve the scales of carbon harvests that people are talking about. And the answer is no, not really." [...] Their findings suggest that cultivating enough seaweed to reach these targets is beyond the industry's current capacity, although meeting climate goals will require much more than reliance solely on seaweed.
Monoculture thinking is bad and dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at it simply from "relying on ONE solution" for the whole kit and kaboodle is likely NEVER going to take care of the whole thing.
However, used IN CONJUNCTION with other methods, it could realistically get us there.
So betting or burning the farm on a single point of failure is cataclysmically moronic.
Re:Monoculture thinking is bad and dumb (Score:4, Informative)
There is a reason behind this single-measure-thinking and it is not what you think. This is actually not about doing anything, but about creating the illusion that we still have good options so the usual assholes do not have to change anything. Basically stepping on the accelerator while the cliff is already in sight. Now, for creating an illusion that there are still nice and cozy measures that do not require any drastic lifestyle changes or the like, pushing simplistic, single solutions works much better. The people this is targeted at cannot do any fact-checking anyways and have no understanding how things actually work.
And with that, the stream of "magic" fake solutions that we got subjected to the past few years suddenly makes a lot of sense.
Re:Monoculture thinking is bad and dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
The really sad part is that most people's lives could get better if we addressed climate change.
In the UK, most homes are poorly insulated. One of the easiest and fastest ways we could reduce out emissions is to simply insulate every building properly. The up-front cost is what prevents most people from doing so. The cost would be a lot lower if the government had teams doing every house, road by road.
Renewable energy is incredibly cheap, at a time when energy prices are rising due to fossil fuels and over-budget, delayed nuclear builds. If the UK went all in on renewable energy, by 2030 we could have really cheap and plentiful electricity. Government borrowing is still relatively cheap, even with the moron tax applied, and borrowing to invest in things that will boost the economy is both sensible and responsible.
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You appear to have a reasoned counter-argument based on a deep, analytical, understanding of the situation
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To this, all I have to say is "You first buddy."
There is no reason the planet can't EASILY handle 2x the people we have now, save efficient use of resources and clean energy/environment policy.
The "Depopulate" option is just a lazy cop to "we've failed" because anything else takes EFFORT.
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There is no reason the planet can't EASILY handle 2x the people we have now.
So you will continue to push the excess human angle despite all the evidence to the contrary... and you imagine your feelings make your PoV correct? Really?
Prime example of why we are where we are. Insular, unimaginative, irresponsible, delusional thinking with zero farks to give for the future generations who will have to choke on the results. Kudos. You are a prime example of the species.
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Your "evidence" is a bunch of studies speaking in "confidence levels".
And your confidence levels are based on exactly ZERO MOVEMENT of ANY form of remediation/change by humanity as a whole.
If something changes there, your confidence levels drop into the toilet.
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Sorry, but "people need to die" is the intrinsically wrong opinion.
Not saying that it wouldn't fix some of the problems.
But the mindset behind it is very "Final Solution".
And is NOT the only way to achieve said ends.
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And, if you WERE right. Okay.
NOW WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?
The inherent hypocrisy of your position is quite evident.
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And I thought *I* was a misanthrope.
Shit man...
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until a volcano erupts, or the jet stream shifts, or whatever else. Than you'll be an international charity case. USA will be expected to foot the bill like always.
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This is an excuse for communism.
"We're oppressed! GIVE US MONEY!"
While completely ignoring other larger, and up and coming CO2 producers.
Re: Magical solutions (Score:2)
Thanks for taking your time to lay this all out.
That's indeed exactly what our outlook is, no matter how much money Big Oil throws at marketing and lobbying campaigns. All their greenwashing politics and words are not going to fix anything. On the countrary: decennia of that is what got us into this mess.
One doesn't argue nor negotiate with the laws of nature.
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Extending your analogy.
We are accelerating with the cliff in sight, but we're trying to build a bridge off the end of the cliff. Problem is, it doesn't go anywhere...
And the bridge might just be a mirage anyway.
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Yep, that does fit. Trying band-aids on a fundamental and time-critical problem.
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The people this is targeted at cannot do any fact-checking anyways and have no understanding how things actually work.
But this does not apply to you - you're special.
The simple reality is everyone attitude is someone else should make the sacrifices. The problem is at the very top. The problem is John Kerry and ilk like him who continue to go climate focused events that everyone who isn't an idiot can see have a massive carbon footprint themselves. The problem is banning short haul flights but excluding private jets.. You don't see Al Gore closing off any part of his unnecessarily large home and not cooling the disused por
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Its not that climate change isn't happening or isn't real its that these people are not REALLY serious about solving it, but only about self-enrichment. You are just to stupid to see it.
We need to act to limit the damage of climate change, rather than get side-tracked by other people's hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not an excuse to do nothing. There were some huge hypocrites among abolitionists and suffragists, but very few people would now advocate for slavery or for taking the vote away from women.
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Indeed. But the poster above you is just looking for somebody to blame. For example, he completely without evidence at all assumed I am in some way support these "climate evangelists". I have never done that and I will not start now. But he does desire so much to make that an "us vs. them" question, where, of course, his tribe is not to blame and the other one does everything wrong and has full responsibility for what is happening. And then he admits to being part of the problem. I do not even know how you
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You are rambling. Maybe cut back on the drugs? Incidentally, I have never cheered for any "climate prophet" and I will not start now. I am much more into "lead by example" and what I see there is mostly failure. Well, grab as much as you can, with people like you the world is surely going to burn.
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"This is actually not about doing anything, but about creating the illusion that we still have good options so the usual assholes do not have to change anything."
The only thing we need to do is stop 'developing' nations from industrializing. These heavily overpopulated regions full of coal and dirty industry love to rig the game with a per capita measure for CO2 to create the illusion that some of the greenest nations like the US [despite eating 30% of the global industry bill with MUCH cleaner manufacturin
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That must be the most naive and disconnected statement in this whole discussion so far.
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Biomass as CO2 sequestration makes sense but it's a temporary measure with an upper limit, as the article has pointed out. However, the planet is biologically/ecologically degraded. This means that there are large areas of land & sea that are missing biomass & it would benefit the planet's biodiversity, ecology, & climate to replenish it. What I'm talking about is "re-wilding", i.e. restoring the complex ecosystems of flora & fauna to large areas of what is
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If it's 10 more expensive than some other alternative why use it at all? Research wide, develop narrow.
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Regardless the size of seaweed farm, it will be stupid to have one giant farm in one area to do it, simply cos a single storm in that area will probably end up destroying it all. So best is to have many smaller seaweed farms all over the place so that we don't have all the eggs in one basket.
And yes, we can't depend on just seaweed farming to get us there, we will need multiple avenues of attack, so that even if one method is found to be less efficient, there will some something else to help us get to suffi
Grow seaweed on coasts and harvest it?? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is like saying "Corn farming as a staple food would be impractical if we grew it in flowerpots."
Suppose we seed and supply nutrient to floating, netting weed species in the Pacific gyre and its Atlantic counterpart, the Sargasso Sea? Grow a few million square kilometers of this stuff in two places where the currents keep plants and nutrients together for long enough for it to absorb a few billions of tonnes of carbon. When the seaweed runs out of nutrient it dies and sinks to the bottom at abyssal dept
Re:Grow seaweed on coasts and harvest it?? (Score:5, Insightful)
To cover a million square kilometers of ocean we would need to create a seaweed garden 25 kilometers wide that spanned the entire circumference of the earth. (25 km x 40k km). If you planted seaweed from Alaska to the southern tip of South America (10k km) you would need a garden 100 km wide stretching into the ocean the entire distance.
If you planted the entire Gulf of Mexico in seaweed you would barely reach one million square kilometers and then you would need to set some areas aside for shipping, oil exploration (or not), recreation, and leave enough areas open to sunlight to not kill all the sea life in the gulf.
It's a nice idea on paper but one million square kilometers is a HUGE area to set aside, plant, and manage. The better idea is to cut down on producing CO2, not try to come up with huge projects so we can continue to generate at our current pace.
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(25 km x 40k km)
(10k km)
No concerns about your thesis. As an aside though, kilo-kilometers? I've noticed this trend elsewhere, and once you start seeing it, you can't stop.
To me, it reads as a only-partial adoption of the metric system. Oil change intervals should be listed in megameters, not thousands of kilometers.
/rant
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Nutrients disperse a bit too readily, which is why ocean farming has very low yields. Without additional containment, you're stuck with what's in the water by nature.
In already nutrient dense waters you can of course seed limiting nutrients to trigger blooms more efficiently, but those waters have other inhabitants which would be affected.
Harvest it? (Score:2)
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Don't forget that seaweed can be used effectively as a fertilizer too.
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Re:Harvest it? (Score:4, Informative)
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Eating seaweed produces SHIT, which still contains the majority of the carbon you first put in your mouth.
This bizarre claim is easily disproved. The median dry weight of one days production of fecal matter is 29 g. [nih.gov] If the average daily food consumption is 1800 kCal the dry weight of organic matter you are consuming is about 400 g (carbohydrate and protein, most of the calorie intake, is 4 kCal/g, fat is 8.8 kCal/g). About 93% of the carbon intake was metabolized into CO2.
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I think you just release the CO2 if you eat it, but apart from dumping it in the deep ocean in the hope we'll have better ideas in a couple of hundred years, there is a way to make it into (co2-stable) fertiliser. There's a small UK company doing exactly that: https://www.einnews.com/pr_new... [einnews.com]
The jist of it is that you take the seaweed, magically turn it into biochar and then just spread that out on your fields ready to grow crops. I don't think it entirely replaces a typical fertiliser, but it at least red
Cost per ton removed? (Score:2)
a million square kilometers (Score:5, Insightful)
"a million square kilometers of ocean would need to be farmed in order to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the course of a year"
We burn about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. One billion tons less would be nice, but clearly we are not going to be able to extract anywhere near enough to do what's necessary. We have to seriously reduce emissions ASAP.
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Here's those numbers in text:
To address each in turn. We're stuck with the highways & cities as they stand now, tearing everything down and rebuilding it overnight for better efficiency won't happen. It's a good long term goal. In the meantime we need to help people reduce their travel-based CO2 emission
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All good suggestions. The primary obstacle in government for implementing all of that is the GOP. The IRA had to be pushed through over their unanimous objections, and we aren't likely to see any other significant legislation along those lines for years. I don't think its going to be enough.
Stop looking for magic solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
We urgently need to produce much less CO2, nothing else will cut it. Yes, that means quite a bit less wealth. Get over it. The alternatives are much, much, much worse.
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I have to ask: have you noticed how seamlessly the fossil fuel shills transitioned from, "Global Warming is a lie" to, "It's too late to stop Global Warming, we'll just have to adapt"?
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They are fighting a retreating battle and they have had time to prepare for about 50 years (when _they_ knew reliably what was coming and decided to let it happen in order to increase their profits). Of course, they have a long-term, media strategy so that is no surprise at all.
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They are fighting a retreating battle and they have had time to prepare for about 50 years
It is worse than that. They didn't just prepare for 50 years, they actively funded organizations [environmen...ogress.org] to delay practical solutions that have existed since 50 years. We could be much more prepared for climate change had we not been hampered by people like amimojo or you, who fought and still fight against nuclear industry since 50 years.
_they_ knew reliably what was coming and decided to let it happen in order to increase their profits
_You_ knew reliably what was coming, and decided to let it happen because of your ideological distrust of nuclear. You (as you are german), decided to keep extracting and burning
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We could be much more prepared for climate change had we not been hampered by people like amimojo or you, who fought and still fight against nuclear industry since 50 years.
The nuclear reactors of 30 or even 20 years ago were garbage nobody should ever have built. Meanwhile solar has been viable since the late seventies, when panels could repay their energy investment in 7 years or less and would last 20 years or more.
You may not even realize that your actions and your comments on slashdot are driven by the fossil fuels companies strategy, and that you are a mere pawn in that strategy.
You're too dumb to know you're describing yourself. The same companies profit from building fossil fuel plants and from building nuclear plants — the so-called "power companies".
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Any arguments to support such a bold claim?
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The nuclear reactors of 30 or even 20 years ago were garbage nobody should ever have built.
Those reactors provided low-cost energy to France and its neighboring countries (net exporter for 50 years, except for 2022), and allowed France to be one of the first country to emit less than 50g CO2eq/kWh since the 70s. Meanwhile, Germany has been one of the main emitter in Europe, since the 70s. Even today, with all its renewables and 500 billions of investment, they emit ~1/4th of the CO2 of the European union. Thanks to the coal and lignite mining and burning they keep doing.
when panels could repay their energy investment in 7 years or less and would last 20 years or more.
You should stop spreading
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I cannot even express how despicable and repulsive people like you are. Can you do anything but lying? I doubt that very much.
The nuclear industry has not failed because some people were opposed. It has failed because it could not get the tech to work at reasonable cost and their crap blew up a number of times in a fashion they said could not happen and that has caused extreme cost. Nuclear energy has _failed_ on an engineering level. Despite countless billions invested. It has failed everywhere. Germany, y
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I cannot even express how despicable and repulsive people like you are.
Try me.
Can you do anything but lying?
Funny how you are the one spreading lies and fear mongering, and hate it when people oppose it with actual science.
And then there is complete scum like you that lies, lies and lies again to shift the blame away from what is really happening and to cover up for your own stupidity.
What is happening is simple: we (collectively) emit too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The only way to reduce that is to stop burning fossil fuels (and eat less meat, but that's another topic), and:
- electrify existing fossil fuels usage where possible
- increase the availability of low-CO2 emitting energy source
The main low-CO2 emitting energy sources are: nuclear, hydro, solar, wi
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There has never been a nuclear plant built on time, on budget, that delivered electricity at the promised rate.
Now fuck off, shill.
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There has never been a nuclear plant built on time, on budget, that delivered electricity at the promised rate.
Must be nice to live in an imaginary world.
Nuclear plants from France built in the 70s-80s were on time, on budget, and delivered electricity at the promised rate for over 50 years, to France and to its neighbors who preferred to keep burning coal and lignite. They built ~50 of them (talking about reactor units).
Nuclear plants from China are on time, on budget, and deliver electricity at the promised rate. They have ~50 of them, 20 in construction as we speak, and aim for 150 more online by 2035.
We could go
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You lying scumbags always have an excuse. Even the concept of accountability is foreign to you.
You were instructed to fuck off. Kindly do so.
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You lying scumbags always have an excuse. Even the concept of accountability is foreign to you.
You were instructed to fuck off. Kindly do so.
So, to sum up our discussion:
- you present an assertation, without citing any source
- I present you with several counter-examples, invalidating your initial assertion
- your next instinct is to start insulting people
That will surely add to your credibility, please go on.
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You present bullshit, lies and disinformation, which honest people are expected to spend time and effort debunking. In the on-line community, we call this "trolling". I avoid engaging with trolls, except in a way that points out their attempts with minimal effort and maximum amusement.
Hoping you will now fuck off,
I remain, etc., etc.
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You present bullshit, lies and disinformation, which honest people are expected to spend time and effort debunking.
You do realize you are the one spreading bullshit and lies, without sources, whereas I spent time and efforts debunking it, and provided you with sources. Of couse, you didn't like it, hence your last few comments.
. In the on-line community, we call this "trolling".
There is no "we" here. You are alone in your basement, posting troll comments on slashdot.
Hoping you will now fuck off,
I remain, etc., etc.
Come on, you can be a bit more original than that. Try again.
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Well said!
Re: Stop looking for magic solutions (Score:2)
On the countrary. Over 30y there have been predictions with error margings, ranging from "optimistic" to "worst case scenario."
In hindsight, time on time again we've managed to overshoot the worst case predictions. It's safe to extrapolate and to say that our current predictions, as always, are severe underestimations of the actual situation.
How's the weather, by the way?
Re:Stop looking for magic solutions (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, that means quite a bit less wealth. Get over it.
Does it though? Is it less wealthy to build solar panels and buy EVs? Less wealthy to develop electric trucks for transport and shift to passenger train rather than plane? Less wealthy to build plants producing SAF, hydrogen electrolyers, shutting down SMRs, switching to arc smeltering, build newer more efficient power plants?
We can do a lot to reduce our emissions without reducing wealth. Quite the opposite, several countries realise wealth will be owned by those who demonstrate an ability to not change lives while reducing CO2 and are heavily investing in green solutions as a result.
We gotta get it out of our heads that comfortable life and emission reduction are mutually exclusive.
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We gotta get it out of our heads that comfortable life and emission reduction are mutually exclusive.
Exactly. We need to get it out of our heads that laws of physics may apply. Let's put our heads in the sand a bit more.
Just as an example: thinking that the solution to transportation is to replace all ICE by EVs is just stupid. There won't be enough materials for that (not in the timeframe that matters), there won't be enough electricity for that (we would need to produce 2-3x more electricity if we were to electrify our fossil fuels usages)...
What will and is happening is less people traveling and people
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Don't underestimate human capacity for production, it's what got us into this mess afterall. Shifting production to all EV/fuel-cell in 10 years will cause some suffering and a lot of new strip mines but technologically/econimally it's just a question of resource allocation. We could do it without starving, just requires high levels of mobilization.
Finding a political way is the hard part.
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We also do need to do some things that some people will consider decreasing wealth.
For example, reducing the size of vehicles. Currently trucks are the big sellers, with some companies basically not making cars anymore, and those trucks have got big. Simply by most using the smallest car that works for them instead of a huge truck would reduce emissions by quite a bit. Yet to many, those giant trucks are a sign of wealth and having to use a small car instead is a sign of reducing wealth.
Housing is similar,
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For example, reducing the size of vehicles.
That isn't an example of decreasing wealth. That's just people conforming to a marketing idea of bigger is better. Just market the idea that smaller is better (like they did in much of Europe) and a shift will happen over time without any thought that size = wealth when it does not.
Economic wealth != what marketing departments tell you to believe today.
Housing is similar, most of the new housing I see is huge, and the room is unneeded, yet having to live in a small house means decreased wealth to many.
And this one is at odds with the debate. A large house isn't directly linked to CO2 output. In fact I would argue that the higher wealth house is the one wit
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Yes, marketing is the reason for big is better and a sign of wealth, there's still a lot of people who currently consider it a sign of wealth and currently will resist any change. Changing the marketing could help but the car companies will resist as the profit is in bigger.
As for houses, you're comparing old vs new, new small houses can also be very efficient.
Have to consider manufacturing results in a good portion of CO2 output along with other negatives, even with houses
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"Global passenger traffic is forecast to reach 92% (or 8.4 billion passengers) of 2019 levels in 2023.
The baseline projections for global passenger traffic indicate that the industry will recover to 2019 levels by 2024, driven mainly by domestic travel."
https://aci.aero/2023/02/22/wh... [aci.aero]
Looks like next to no one is interested in giving up air travel, everyone else is supposed to cut back, not them. And since commercial air travel is barely 100 years old, we know it is an unnecessary luxury. Therefore it shou
diatom (Score:1)
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Can we just farm diatom instead? These won't interfere with ships.
What? Of course not! That'd actually *work*, and we can't have that!
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I'm with you on this one. More CO2 means more O2.
The earth had significantly higher CO2 levels in the past than it has now.
I say we just let the natural plants thrive and green the place up. Maybe we can even see the return of mega fauna in the geologically near future.
Is that really impossible? (Score:2)
A million square kilometers is 1000 kilometers square. That's not huge compared to an ocean. To do that whole thing, 13 billion tonnes, would take a bit more than 3000 kilometers by 4000 kilometers. That would fit in any of the major oceans quite well.
And a huge seaweed farm would provide homes and breeding grounds for lots of fish, and shipping lanes are just gaps in whatever structure you make.
The impossible thing is actually constructing millions of square kilometers of anything. But space has never been
Sigh (Score:3)
Last Sunday, an actual educated man told me that we should just ban CO2, and pull it all out of the atmosphere so it would stop over heating the planet.
He refused to believe me when I told him that CO2 is a critical part of our existence on earth. Without it, the average temperature of the whole planet would be below freezing.
Strange thing is I see that sort of thinking all over the place.
Some facts:
CO2 in our atmosphere is critical to life as we know it.
We have de-sequestered huge amounts of CO2 with our use of fuels like coal and petroleum.
The damage has largely been done.
Attempts to temporarily take CO2 out of the atmosphere tend to involve processes that will wreck ecosystems, like ironing the oceans or this plant seaweed everywhere nonsense. So let's say this actually works - what happens if it works too well?
Even planting trees - always a good idea - is carbon neutral at best, unless we mechanically sequester the trees after harvest.
Riddle me this - what is the correct level of CO2 in the atmosphere? We have created a problem. A too-rapid de-sequestering has made for some instability in weather. trying to re-sequester it will quite likely make it worse. We are going on a roller coaster ride at this point, and it has started. Despite "tipping points" that are always in the future, I'm almost certain we are a couple decades beyond the tipping point - we done went and tipped it already.
So what to do? What we need to do is to use renewables and develop and keep using them whenever possible. Fossil fuels won't last forever, and that's a fact. We need to get ready for a post-fossil fuel world. We've changed the world, and trying to go back to what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution is a pipe dream, or if we make it the main thrust of humanity, it might work too well.
We need to educate people in facts rather than have them in opposing camps. Yes, the injection of politics into radiative forcing is quite frankly, direct evidence of lack of understanding.
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Last Sunday, an actual educated man told me that we should just ban CO2, and pull it all out of the atmosphere so it would stop over heating the planet.
They cant possibly be well educated if they think some amount of CO2 isnt a natural part of the atmosphere. Every single person who took junior high science class had a lesson on the fact that CO2 makes up part of our atmosphere and that plants use that as "food". You're talking to an absurdly ignorant person on the subject of anything regarding our atmosphere and then making extrapolations based on that.
The rest of your post is just defeatist "we dont know how to solve this problem properly now and at 100
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Last Sunday, an actual educated man told me that we should just ban CO2, and pull it all out of the atmosphere so it would stop over heating the planet.
They cant possibly be well educated if they think some amount of CO2 isnt a natural part of the atmosphere.
Dude has a Master's degree, so he isn't stupid.
You see, there is so much bullshit spread around, and it is naive to think it only comes from the far right.
The rest of your post is just defeatist "we dont know how to solve this problem properly now and at 100% so we never will". We have lots of ways to chip away at the problem already and those options are quite likely to increase as we invest resources into the problem.
The ideas we see floating around, like injecting aerosols into the atmosphere aren't intelligent, although the acid rain will wash off buildings.
Or mining immense amounts of iron to place in the oceans in an attempt to recreate ancient ocean chemistry - you do know what that would do to most oceanic life, I hope.
Or planting every available squar
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Dude has a Master's degree, so he isn't stupid.
You see, there is so much bullshit spread around, and it is naive to think it only comes from the far right.
Sorry but the idea that a masters degree equals intelligence is what's bullshit. A masters degree means that an individual put forth the considerable amount of work necessary to earn one in a very specific subject and while being intelligent helps it is not requisite. If your story is true then it is a perfect illustration of this fact as this person most assuredly would have learned about CO2 being part of our atmosphere many times over while going to any American public school.
After that, all your attempt
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They cant possibly be well educated if they think some amount of CO2 isnt a natural part of the atmosphere. Every single person who took junior high science class had a lesson on the fact that CO2 makes up part of our atmosphere and that plants use that as "food".
If you were taught that CO2 is food, no, Glucose is the food that is created by the interactions of ATP and NADPH. CO2 and H2O are precursors to the carbohydrate production that is the food. If that sounds odd to you, other animals use that plant contained glucose as food as well. Just sayin' I'll be interested if you can provide the citations that CO@ is specifically the actual "food" If it is, so is H2O, because both are involved in the process of creating glucose.
You're talking to an absurdly ignorant person on the subject of anything regarding our atmosphere and then making extrapolations based on that.
I know - I am right now as well. Lot's
Nothing is Too Good for Giaia (Score:1)
You must be sacrifice to appease HER.
Re: (Score:2)
The real situation is that if we ignore Her needs long enough, she does the executions.
Suggestion: (Score:3)
There's a 3,000 square miles "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico where agricultural runoff has caused so much algae growth that the dead and decaying plant material has hoovered up all the available oxygen.
Instead of growing *more* seaweed, maybe we could capture that waste biomatter and sequester that instead? I like the idea of helping two different problems simultaneously.
Would edible seawees work? (Score:2)
Would culinary seaweeds that people already eat and that food processors already use suck CO2 out of the air as well?
Even if it is not enough, perhaps promoting culinary seaweeds can HELP solve more than one problem at a time.
Re: (Score:2)
Growing seaweed only helps if you sequester it somewhere where it won't decompose rapidly, like the bottom of the ocean.
Growing and eating it will just release the C02 it has absorbed back into the environment.
gravest danger of global warming (Score:2, Interesting)
The gravest danger of global warming comes from those who aim to stop it.
Over-fished (Score:1)
> It's not easy to come by that amount of space in places where seaweed grows easily, given all the competing uses along the coastlines, like shipping and fishing.
The oceans are already over-fished. Reserving more spots for seaweed farms thus may help with 2 problems.
It's not all just about CO2 (Score:2)
Giant kelp shades the ocean underneath, so it could help reduce ocean temperatures. It is also used to create all kinds of products that help in agriculture, supplement human nutrition, creates a safe zone for fish (you can't fish in a kelp forest!), and more. So it may not be as helpful with CO2 but it has so many other advantages it's still worth doing.