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Bacteria to Destroy Greenhouse Gases
twivel writes "According to ABC News and this article, scientists are working on creating a bacteria that destroys CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. I wonder what happens if the bacteria works too good?" I thought green slime was vulnerable to fire and crushing weapons, just not edged weapons.
"if the energy we have to put in (in the form of Sunlight) equals the energy we got out of the coal then why not start with a solar plant and forget about the whole roundabout way with the coal? " Because our method of collecting solar energy is less effecient than what the bacteria uses. Photosynthetic ocean bacteria can survive pretty deep; it goes down until there is almost no light at all. Put this stuff in a reasonably dark room (not totally dark obviously) and it will still have enough light to do it's thing; put a solar cell in the same room and you get jack.
I find this all pretty amusing. Essentially what they are proposing is a coal-burning energy plant, which is made zero-emission by using solar-powered algae. And as the point has been made, why not just burn the algae biomass instead of coal, thereby making it a very complex solar powered plant? What's the advantage over photovoltaic technology?
But it's not such a bad idea really. Consider the pros and cons -
Overall: Photovoltaics are probably better in the long run, but using existing coal burning plants on algae biomass, or using this scrubbing technology to at least reduce emissions, could ease the transition and avoid the vexing obstacle of year round 24/7 power production and storage.
That is to say, the idea is flawed. Even if they get green slime to survive at high temperatures, they bring sunlight into the smoke stacks, and they think of something clever to do with the carbon generated, they still can't bring in anywhere near enough sunlight to photosynthesize away all the CO2.
Back to the drawing board. Burning coal is still evil.
We've all seen the movies...we _know_ that the bacteria will evolve. Seriously, though, what happens when it starts eating oxygen in quantities? What kind of biological safe guards can protect from this happening?
Never did too well in biology class, otherwise I'd probably know...
You think Republicans don't drink?
Easy answer. Create another Bacteria to eat the first bacteria
Macka
In other words... "Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things?"
I can see the fnords!
I totally agree. IIRC, volcanoes send out so much CO, CO2 and SO2 (possibly more or maybe not all those gases, I can't remember, but most of them what we consider 'pollution'). These gas emitions totally dwarf what the human race has put into the air, making it register not as much of a 'blip' on things. Anyone with a bit more insight into that care to elucidate?
--
Delphis
if C02 is removed from the atmosphere, an abundance of 02 will remain. this will kill the plants. but we won't care, because 02 gets you high. so we'll all be happy as can be until someone sparks up a cigarette and catches the atmosphere on fire.
ok ok ok, never mind
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Wouldn't reducing industrial emissions be "artificial"? Isn't it only natural to keep doing just what we're doing? Surely any conscious decision to change the situation is artificial. Blah blah blah! All nonsense.
dillie
I'm fully aware that the bacteria in question are unlikely to start the next plague. I was making a play on the previous poster's words. In fact, it sounds like these bacteria are specifically adapted for the hot insides of smoke stacks, so living in a human would probably be too cold for them :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I think the question is whether nature has already been screwed around with once by humanity. If we are causing global warming, then it's our responsibility to do something about that, even if it's just out of a selfish need to retain a global environment that we're well-adapted to.
I don't think anyone is interested in affecting the global climate just to be doing it; the focus is on counterbalancing or rolling back global climatic changes that we have already made or that are under way which we realize in hindsight were undesirable.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That's ridiculous. We don't have accurate temperature data from earlier than the 1800s, and even then the data wasn't collected from a diverse set of locations. So, then, how could we know that "the current Global warming trend is 10 to 100 faster than any previous naturally occurring trend."? The simple answer is, we can't.
We can know about CO2 trends through antarctic ice cores, but we don't really know how closely CO2 correllates with global temperatures. What those CO2 trends do reveal, though, is that a great deal of the carbon dioxide is due to natural causes, such as volcanos.
The usual environmentalist response at this point is to start raving about sulfur dioxiode, CFCs, and water vapor and how they matter more than CO2. If that's the case, then why rant about CO2 in the first place? Speaks volumes to me about how well thought out the environmentalist argument is.
The oil-eating bacteria that were used on the Exxon Valdez spill are naturally occuring - not the product of some scary scientist with bad hair.
Native oil-consuming bacteria occur all over the world. It's just that there usually isn't enough oil around to keep local populations very high.
Like most bacteria, each type requires highly specific conditions (look up the etemology of "specific" and "species") to thrive. Most live in a narrow band of temperatures and require oxygen and light - so they can't live in an oil well.
That being said, it's only a matter of time before someone breeds a "super-bug" that _can_ live in oil wells, and then we can solve this oil addiction once and for all
--Charlie
The doctrine of Microbial Infallibility states that microbes can do anything that humans can, and that they do it faster-better-cheaper.
...man, think I could get some 'blue-green algae' to do my taxes?
\//
It was a reference to Dungeons and Dragons. A good one, too. :)
Now this looks promising something that works but dosn't try to make people slaves to environmentalists.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
No, the answer, of course, is to NOT burn coal. Go nuclear :-)
These aren't bioengineered bugs they are Yellowstone bugs. Already out there in the environment.
On the contrary, it is even worse than the original poster suggested. Where do you think the oil comes from? If is a result of the anaerobic decay of plant matter (a.k.a. sugar). Therefore, it must be a lower free energy state than the original plant matter.
So it would seem that we'd be taking one step forward and two steps backward...
This was a rather entertainingly naive view of the problem (it at all CO2 is a problem...).
The issue is of cource that you will need as much energy to split CO2 into C and O2 as you got from greating CO@ from C and O2 in the first place.
The suggested coal powerplant with solar collectors would, if they can make it work, be just a solar powerplant as the burning of carbon nets zero energy surplus.
This begs the question of if this really is an efficient solar plant?
And what about nighttime? Does your turbines really enjoy beeing cooled and reheated every day, or are you planning to spend energy on storing the CO2 until morning...
"The CO2 is not being transformed back into pure carbon (coal) and oxygen. If the bacteria assembled the carbon atoms from the carbon dioxide back into coal, you'd have a point, but instead they do something entirely different (photosynthesis) with the carbon dioxide."
Sure. They crate sugar of it. That'ts even worse, as the energy contained in that molecule is even higher than for pure carbon.
And when you run out of sunlight (i.e. nighttime) what do these bacteria do? Why, they do the same any photosynthesizing organism do. They burn sugar and creates CO2...
Sorry folks. You can't fight entropy.
Hmmm something about pots and kettles.
:P
Its a basic engineering problem. Yes, total solar influx is many many times greater than total human power usage. So why use coal? Well, how do you actually turn solar energy into something we can use? Solar panels are very expensive, since they are essentially huge LEDs that work in reverse. Also, have you ever tried to use solar powered lights? Seems ill advised, at best. Photosynthesis is much more efficient than steam plants. But nobody has figured out how to make that work to power a server. If you have a suggestion, by all means, let someone know.
On a side note, this is also the idea behind 'biomass fuels.' basically, you use plants to create hydrocarbons and sugars that you then convert to fuel. This produces CO2 and H2O, just like regular combustion (because it IS regular combustion) but since the fuel was created by plants using atmospheric CO2 and H2O, it doesn't raise greenhouse gas levels.
Really what we need to do is get the asteroid mining in gear, so that we can cheaply mass-produce platinum catalysts and other rare-metal products, so that we can build big fusion powered cracking chambers that convert excess CO2 to useful chemicals. Of course, that does kind of require cheap, clean fusion power, too, but hey, whats a little boondoggle among friends, eh?
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
>I'd just be exceptionally concerned about accidently wiping out too much of the greenhouse. Without it, we'd be Mars.
Oh come on. How long do you really think it would take the human race to deliberately pollute the atmosphere?
Drinking will help us plan!
I guess that's pretty clean. Yeah.
If I had a couple barrels of radioactive sludge, heck, I could spread it on my vegetable garden.
--
keete
Or do they just post their immediate knee-jerk response to whatever they THINK the article is about? DUH, people!
OlympicSponsor wrote:
>The problem is where to put it
That one's easy. Just burn it. It all just goes away then...
-RobHood
I'm not an anti-{insert OS} zealot. I just like blowing people's little minds.
But if we get plankton to kill the bacteria...
Then we get rid of the plankton by bringing in...
...
...
...
And finally we bring in monkeys to kill them.
And the monkeys will die in the antarctic winter!
SUCCESS!
---homer simpson
I'm tired of this. The above post obviously didn't read the article - I quote:
Any such artificial attempt to restore equilibrium in a natural system runs the risk of overcorrecting
and then:
The proper course of action with regards to greenhouse gas is to lower our emissions
For everyone who read the article, its clear that the system, which I should add, is still on the drawing board, is about reducing current emissions out of smokestacks... Exactly what the above comment laments our failure to do.
So, to all of slashdot: read the fucking article before you fucking post!
Oh yeah, and read the fucking article before you fucking moderate!
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Bravo (or should I say 'well job'),
I was wondering if someone would be me to it.
Couldn't they use something like that in a catalytic converter for a car?
It's called a plant
it does photosynthesis, invented some 1.000.000.000 years ago
-- Fur is worn by beautiful animals and ugly people
AD&D and basic D&D if I recall right. Green slime was a creature in there that was resistant to certain attack forms.
How silly! Let's just collect all the extra CO2 and use it to fix the atmosphere on Mars! A few green plants, some CO2, and ...who cares about all that radiation. Then we have a whole NEW planet to screw up!
Surely somebody's thought of that already...... There is a certain similarity to the proposals to use Hydrogen as a miracle energy source (It comes from Water! And only produces Water as its waste product!), mistaking it for an energy storage and transport mechanism like electricity or steam.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Ice-9 (in Vonnegut-land) was a seed crystal o' ice that existed at, well... warmer temperatures, turning all potable water into ice. Sorry for the spoiler there, but the book's (Cat's Cradle) still really good. Honest.
Not saying ice can't have other forms, but the ice-plus and ice-minus that I'm speaking of are (get this) bacteria that cause the seeding of ice; ice-plus and ice-minus cause the raising and lowering of effective freezing points, respectively. Other seeded forms of ice are all nice and well, but a bacteria that can effectively cause fluctuations in freezing point? Damn, that's some sexy tech. Also, really, really scary.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
See also: ice-plus and ice-minus.
I thought it was BS, too... scary, scary stuff. At least the FDA outlawed its use on agriculture, much to the chagrin of orange farmers.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Dean
Damn, have to type faster next time!
Anybody see MI-2 (I know you have)
For there to be a hero, we must have a villian...and so the super virus was born.
I guess the human intellect can't be contained from it's own curiosity and inventiveness. Sometimes I do wonder when we are going to invent something that will overtake us and be our downfall.
Like Windows...
Cats Cradle
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
sorry, but do you really think CO2 fixing bacteria can compete with natural plant life in terms of total volume of CO2 fixed? and furthermore, even if you answered yes to that question, is that such a good idea? higher carbon dioxide levels mean bigger crop yields.
oh, by the way... just because carbon dioxide levels are rising and the earth is supposedly on a warming trend does not mean that it is a reversible process. global climate control is out of reach.
alternatively, if we ran internal combustion engines on optimized burn methane or propane turbine it would be possible to vent the exhaust into an underground sewerlike system for CO2 removal in cities and such... that would really be a breath of fresh air...
I thought way back when the Earth was still largely volcanic and there was a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere we had wonder bacterium known as cyanobacteria (aka blue-green algae) that did a good amount of work converting CO2 to breathable O2. I'm not sure if these bacterium directly changed the CO2 in the atmosphere but I know their chemical actions were to be responsible for a lot of the convertion to breathable O2. If I am wrong please correct me as this is what I remember from school from quite a few years back. :D
.--bagel--.---------------.
| aim: | bagel is back |
| icq: | 158450 |
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
bacteria photosynthesize CO2 into hydrocarbons, sugars, etc. and store some energy. they die and become coal.
you burn the coal and change the hydrocarbons, sugars, etc. into CO2, and release the stored energy.
now, you worry about the CO2 so you bring in some bacteria to photosynthesize it.
you get some bacteria (alive now!) with hydrocarbons, sugars, etc. and stored energy.
you're right back where you started though! in the process you've invented the biological solar panel!
like water vapor.
What was the slime bit a reference to? Obvously a RPG, but I didn't catch it.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I think someone already patented the idea... If I remember right, its called "Algae"... Must be an acronym for something...
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
First of all, that trend is not recent.
Second of all, you say "they" like all the scientists in the world are doing this experiment. There are a lot of scientist working on providing us with altenative energy sources, from hot fusion to cold fusion.
sorry, its just a peeve of mine when a small group does something(right or wrong) and then the whole scientific community gets dumped on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Bacteria are being used on oil spills already. There was a very interesting group of articles (in 1988 I think) in the National Geographic regarding reclaimation processes using naturally occuring algae, bacterium, even ragweed to eat paint, gasoline fumes from aquifers and leeching lead from the soil. If anyone finds a link to those stories, let me know as I've been looking for my back issues and can't find it.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Yeah, but biological systems are really tough to control. Plan and result aren't always the same thing. Whenever we monkey with something, there are unintended consequences. That's what I'm afraid of here.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
You forget the light part of the equation - you add more energy in the form of light. By adding energy, the mass increases again. This is of cource not free energy - but we have this sun, you see...
... but you're right in that coal-plants don't burn the coal 100% efficiently, producing toxic by-products and such.
Unfortunatley the bacteria do not produce coal (nor do they produce pure carbon), but the sugars could be used to produce animal fodder. - And yes, that would release the CO_2 again... (and here's a funny idea:) But it would decrease the demand for grain, which (at least in Europe) would not result in decreased production because the EU buys all the surplus to keep the prices high. Thus the carbon will be locked up in EU's "mountain of grain" :-)
New eco-freak slogan: Stop Global Warming! Sew bacteria to your underwear!
Takes the gas (yes, I know) out of that South Park episode.
As an atheist, the only faith I have is in mankind. Correction, had faith.
"Even if the did get out, bacteria don't survive well in the atmosphere, they need a warm wet environment."
Actually there's an article in this month's Discover Mag that reports the discovery of bacteria that live in the clouds. They have their own natural antifreeze.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
If you'd actually read the article, you might have realized that the system described therein is WITHIN the power plant, acting effectively as a filter that reduces the emissions of the plant...NOT a bacteria released into the wild that will eat CO2 already in the atmosphere. In fact, it's a bacteria that already exists in nature, not something being engineered.
Next time, read first and critique second.
Trees come standard with:
carbon dioxide to oxygen converter, wood grain body molding, swing mounts(mounting kit not included), sun shades, and Roots®.
Optional packages:
- Fruit package (local climate may vary, see dealer for inventory)
- Pine package (not available with fruit package)
That's exactally the idea! This is a plan to reduce emissions from smokestacks. This is not a plan to release evil bacteria into the atmosphere!
--Chris
I'm right :).
Global warming A) doesn't exist and B) what we see is natural. There is actually no scientific proof we are causing the increase in temperature. Just because the trend is larger than any in history does not mean we are causing it. The earth has gone through numerous heating and cooling phases in its life (heard of the ice age?), and this looks to be no different.
Yes, I have heard of the ice age. I studied it rather extensively in college (I'm interested in paleontolgy). As I said in my previous post, no other warming trend that we know of has been this rapid. This trend is 10 to 100 times faster than any in the past, not the historical past, but the past that we can measure through deep core ice sample and the like, out to about 800,000 years ago. The general trend of a glacial/inter-glacial period is to have a rapid cooling followed by a slow warming. What we are seeing now is a rapid warming, the oposite of what the historical record shows.
The POSSIBILITY of damage is there, and that doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate, but it DOES mean we shouldn't do anything about it unless we can prove we're doing something. We're worrying about screwing up the planet, but our solutions (since we have no proof we're causing anything) could be just as dangerous (or more so) than what we think is causing the problems.
All that's being proposed here is to reduce the output of CO2 into the atmosphere by reducing the output from smokestacks. I can conceve of no reason why this would be dangerous. The bacteria are naturally occurring and they are being kept in a controled environment. This is not a proposal to release anything into the atmosphere, merely to reduce the unnatural emissions of smokestacks. Unless you would like to argue that smokestacks are part of some non-man made trend.
--Chris
huh? The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago or so. Homo sapiens evolved about 100,000 years ago. And in anycase, what does it matter. We are seeing a trend that is unprecedented in 800,000 years. Given what we know about CO2 (see below) its pretty safe to assume that man made CO2 is the cause.
There could be other reasons why the temperature is rising so fast besides CO2.
Such as...?
As I said, if we were actually causing the problem, why hasn't a single scientist tried to reproduce this same scenario in a lab? There have been no experiments to prove anything.
Unfortunately, replicating the earth's climate would take a lab the size of the earth and a lot of time. None-the-less there have been many experiments. Its been experimentally shown that CO2 traps heat. There is a strong correlation between the rise of CO2 levels and the rise of temperature since the industrial revolution. These two facts alone strongly sugest CO2 as a causative force behind the modern warming trend.
--Chris
--Chris
Our scientists can work at this as much as they want, but without some form of worldwide consent I assume we wouldn't deploy it. Also, what about the religions which don't believe in tampering with the eco system? will they have a say in all of this?
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
What happens at night? Does this mean we will only be producing the bad stuff at night? And I am sure this has been mentioned before, what about the other byproducts of Photosynthesis? I mean, won't these things want to grow larger and larger, and eventually CLOG the smokestack? At least with that, you can use the byproduct as fertilizer.. (right?.. I am pretty sure anyhow, as long as there are no trace sulfurs or anything to contaminate it, algae would make a good fertilizer if it were dead)
Jay
"What's this script do? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep Hint for the answer: not everyth
This solution gets its beauty because it is such a very simple, natural solution to a human problem.
Cyanobacteria does, indeed, have a passion for CO2, and what's more important it can survive in the blistering temperatures of gases streaming out of a coal-fired furnace.
It's wonderful to see that one of our problems with coal power plants may be solved using a relatively inexpensive natural method, producing oxygen to boot. However, coal combustion is a very messy business indeed, and the products of it are far from just CO2. Carbon monoxide (CO) as well as other toxins are produced in coal combustion. These are far more harmful than CO2. The main issue with CO2 is that of global warming, but it is not as toxic as CO.
Another thing the article didn't mention was the effectiveness of the trial demonstrations. Also, a real-life test must be done to determine if the method is actually significantly beneficial to the environment, or more hassle than another clean-up method.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
oh yeah...we have too much CO2 so we should try to clean it up. That makes sense...but why do we have too much CO2? (All together now) WE'RE CUTTING DOWN ALL OUR TREES AND BURNING ALL OUR PETROLIUM. Fix the cause, not the symptom. Duh.
"If you're not having fun right now, you're wasting your time."
of a book called Ill Wind, by Kevin J. Anderson. Its about a bacteria designed to eat oil after a spill, and it gets out of hand and destroys anything made with petroleum products (plastics, gasoline in cars, lubricant in guns and machinery, insulators on some wires). The rest of the book is about the sort of post-apocalyptic world that results.
Sounds like we could have a parallel to Ice-9, from Breakfast of Champions.
For those who haven't read it, Ice-9 was a chemical agent developed so that Marines wouldn't have to walk through mud - it solidified the water in the mud, so they could pass over it, not through it. Problem was, Ice-9 worked too well - one application of the stuff would freeze the entire planet via chain reaction, killing everything.
Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. We seem to have a very short sight when it comes to emerging technologies, and this could have globalkilling possibilities. I hope their QA department knows what they're doing : )
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
If this works, you'd have to handle millions of tons of biomass that would be generated by the bacteria. What do you do with that? Ideally you could burn it to reduce the demand for fossil fuels. Theoretically, you could convert a coal plant to "recycle" the bacterial carbon and supplement it with much smaller amounts of coal than are currently consumed. Just a thought...
no no no, it needs to be CH3CH2OH
man can never have too much of that.....
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
If you read the article, you'll see that the bacteria used isn't bio-engineered. It's taking a strain of a very common algae, one that's adapted to higher heat levels, and using it just like nature does.
Essentially they're using plants to clean the air, just like many of us have plants in our homes.
Every time there's an oil spill, someone pipes up about the oil-eating bacteria, only to be shot down by the argument that they could run amok and consume the world oil supply.
However, this idea seems a bit more well-conceived: microbes are kept directly in the smokestack and are fed a steady stream of food. I assume these algae/bacteria can't exist floating around in the sky, so it seems like they will stay-put in the smokestacks.
It also sounds like that the right bugs won't survive at less than 130 C (or F?) which means if they managed to escape, they would die.
Hmmmmm, sad though... what are the chances of the current administration proposing a carbon tax? Not bloody likely. I doubt plants would proactively apply this new technology under self-imposed enviromental regulation.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
microbe into the atmosphere
Read (reread) the article. It will not be released into the atmosphere, it will exist inside a scrubber, and if it does escape, it can only live @ 130 degrees C (assuming they choose the right bug).
That sounds pretty safe.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Finally someone who understands that our over bloated feeling of self importance as a race, is not only unjustfied, but dangerous as well.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
I haven't cleaned my fridge in months. under the old pizza boxes and half empty coke bottles, I am sure there is a new strain of plague, green slime is a given.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Except they are already in the environment, just like tons of other bacteria, which are all mutating w/o any help from us. And I have noticed that none of them have yet to completely wipe the earth clean of life (in the last few billion years at least).
releasing? read the article, it's simply putting a nartual organisim in their plants, they arent making anything
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
You might want to read the article before you post a comment. They aren't talking about releasing this into the air. They want to create bioreactors that exist inside the smokestacks of power plants like current scrubber technology. Except these bioreactors scrub the CO2 out of the emissions which is too expensive using current chemical scrubbers.
Also these bacteria aren't generically engineered. They already exist in nature.
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
If we took all the corn grown today in the US and converted it to ethanol to power engines, it would only be enough energy for our tractors and fertilizer. To fuel our automotive fleet, we would have to cover the entire US with corn and somehow get the same productivity as we do in today's corn belt. And for every bushel of corn produced, we lose two bushels of topsoil, so its not a truly renewable resource. Maybe growing trees and producing methanol instead would be more efficient in terms of energy and soil loss, but it still wouldn't support a large population living high on the hog.
We are living on the accumulated bio-capital of millions of years, and when it is gone, the burst bubble will redefine civilization (if it still exists). Until then, enjoy the party!!
Not to worry, it's yeast that create the CO2 that carbonates your beer and champagne.
So don't go knocking the kingdom Plantae buddy!
"No one will smell that."
Plants have been doing this for millenia. Algae in the sea have been doing this for eons. Personally I dont think we need any "new" species doing what can be done already. If we focus on using what we already have wisely, we should have no reason to "create" new/better ones.
I think it is very haughty of us to presume that we know what is better for the world. Why don't we develop ways to better take advantage of those species already present? Estuaries and coral reefs are some of the most productive biological systems on the planet, and also two of the most fragile. The amount of carbon fixed by those sytems rivals the other sytems combined (including rainforests). But we as humans don't care much for them. We instead try to come up with systems suited to our needs when we should be figuring out how to protect the systems we already have.
"No one will smell that."
however, introducing a natural bacteria into an artificial environment may cause it to adapt and change to the differing environmental conditions. In which case if it adapts and changes, it could just as easily run amok as do good.
Not all bacteria are identical. Most are, genetically, more different than animals and euglenae.
Haven't you all read 3001, or the Diamond Age?
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Okay, here's how it works: During the day, the plant takes in water and CO2 and uses sunlight to make C6H12O6 (glucose) and oxygen. Then at night, the tree takes in oxygen from the air and combines it with the glucose for energy overnight. The only place carbon is taken out of the cycle is when it's saved up within the plant as sugars/starches.
To recap:
Day: 6CO2 + 6H2O --> C6H12O6 + 6O2
Night: 6O2 + C6H12O6 --> 6CO2 + 6H2O
The reason plants give off extra O2 is because they don't use all of the glucose.
Quoth the zombie, braaaaaaaains
Step 1. Find volume of sphere the size of earth + 50km (include the meaningful portion of the atmosphere)
Step 2. Find volume of earth, subract from value determined in Step 1.
Step 3. Find mass of C02 contained in determined volume. To to this, you need to calculate the mass of the atmosphere within the volume. At STP (sea level, 273K) there is 1mol per 22.4L. About 0.05% of this is CO2. So you get 1mol of CO2 for every 448L of atomosphere (I'm aware I'm ignoring the atmospheric pressure gradient, but I also lopped off about 50km of sky, call it even :)
Step 4. realize that value determined in step 3 is a shockingly large number.
During the course of writing this I got curious. here are the numbers. * Radius of earth is 6378km. * 1 mol of CO2 masses 44g * Radius of sphere is (4/3)(pi)r^3
Step1. ((4/3)(3.14)(6378000 + 50000)^3) = 1,111,837,835,182,613,504,000m^3
Step 2. 1,111,837,835,182,613,504,000m^3 - ((4/3)(3.14)(6378000 )^3)= 25,634,650,198,092,080,000m^3 = 25,634,650,198,092,080,000L
Step 3. 25,634,650,198,092,080,000L / 448 = 57,220,201,335,026,964mol = 2,517,688,858,741,186,828g = 2,517,688,858,741,187kg = 2,517,688,858,741 tonnes Step 4. Gunga.
I actually expected worse, and that is probably an overestimate, CO2 composition is actually less than 0.05% and the gradient is pretty steep as the altidude increases. Even still, how much bacteria do you need to make a signifiant dent in 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2?
Side note for the americans: a tonne is a METRIC ton, which equates to 2200lb, which makes it about 2.75 billion tons instead, lucky you.
This "system" (as you inexplicably quote) is not even remotely a perpetual motion machine. How does putting something back the way it was violate the laws of thermodynamics? You still have to add energy in the process.
They're merely taking advantage of an otherwise unusable source of energy--the sun--to break the chemical bonds.
The only certainty is entropy.
Please read the article. It talks about implementing a system with naturally occurring bacteria inside power plant smokestacks .
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Zodiac is very good. Maybe the most accessible of Stephenson's works.
If you read the article, though, the guy is looking for naturally occurring bacteria that will eat CO2, and a system that will let them live in power plant smokestacks. This is not talking about genetic mods.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Everyone remember about that story where they introduced birds to get rid of the bugs, and the snakes to get rid of the birds, and then they were SOL cause they had a snake infestation? When will people learn that mucking with nature as the primary goal can only lead to worse things? mfkap
This article reminded me of the Matrix, in which the baddies used humans because they produced a net GAIN in energy, even after feeding them food, qater, and air. Hmm.
Let's engineer this bug to be heat and pressure resistant and also have a taste for H2SO4 and let's go...
T-E-R-A-F-O-R-M V-E-N-U-S !-!-!-!
Double Dibbs on the South Pole!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Global warming didn't start with the industrial revolution. It didn't start with the internal combustion engine. It wasn't invented by Al Gore. The current period of global warming started 18,000 years ago at the end of the 100,000 year long Pleistocene Ice Age.
There isn't even an indication that the climate is getting warm by the standards of the last thousand years. There was a thriving Norse farming community in Greenland during the first half of the last millennium. The earth entered a period of colder temperatures and they died out.
If the global warming theories have any substance at all then we should be encouraging the production of greenhouse gases.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
CaCO3(s) -> Ca+(aq) + CO3-(aq) (dissociation)
CO2(g) + H20(l) -> H+(aq) + HCO3-(aq) (carbonic acid)
HCO3-(aq) -> H+(aq) + CO3-(aq) (second part of carbonic acid)
-Karl /dos]# file msdos.sys
[root@kgutwin
[root@kgutwin
msdos.sys: fsav (linux) virus (17518-87)
I'm not an expert in Chaos Theory, but I do believe that it's impossible to recreate the atmosphere of the earth in a lab. If we can't predict if it will rain two days from now, how can we predict the results of pumping X amount of extra greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We could never have enough data about the system.
Personally, I think the best solution is to stop polluting (which, incidentally, is what the article is about). I don't think we should try to fix the environment. Just stop fsckin' it up and let it sort itself out.
I don't think anybody really is trying to fix anything on any sort of grand scale. Most environmental effort these days is in prevention as far as I can tell.
$ finger #timmy
$ finger #timmy
invalid use of finger
now how does that line from the Matrix go again, somethng about we dont know much but we know it was us that blackend the sky
the big problem you have with any ideas like this is control. How do you control something like this on a global scale?.. I assume they intend to do something like release it into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of co2, but co2 is nessisary for life on the surface (plants create oxygen from co2, you know the whole thing). If this were to get out of control (very likely), we'd be faced with even a greater problem. And if you look at upper atmosphere radiation levels and just think about how many mutations bateria can go through, it's an insane idea.
I guess Soylent Green won't be people anymore with all that perfectly good plankton/slime laying around...
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
1) Seal up all the entrances to a big hole in the ground.
2) Pump the slime into the hole.
3) Decomposition produces heat and pressure
Now you have some options:
A) Put a turbine at one of the openings and use the heat and pressure to produce energy. Funnel the escaping CO2 into an algae farm. Loop to step two above...
B) Let the heat and pressure produce oil (contrary to popular belief, it doesn't take millions of years), then pump the oil out and refine it. Get 2 uses of the carbon instead of one and in the process, convert coal to oil. But because we are 'making' oil, we don't have pump new stuff out of the ground in the OPEC nations and thus we are actually reducing carbon output.
Oh, they drink. But they're restricted to 'sophisticated' drinks like matinis and anything 'on the rocks'. Beer is strictly taboo, and champagne is limited to those times when they want to cut loose a bit.
CO2 carbonates beer and champagne, it makes plants grow, particularly kind plants.
I see this as a Republican plot, creating bacteria that will nullify all my favorite vices.
I like hoeing. - In the garden, anywhere!
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(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
Any one remember Outpost 2, yeah the sequel to overly hyped Outpost 1, where instead of FMV cutscenes, they had a long novel... well, if you played the game and actually read the "novel", you will understand what happens when bacteria reproduce at a hypergeometric rate...
Look, greenhouse gases are nothing new. Global warming is nothing new. The earth has been going through phases of warming and cooling for the past couple billion years. It's part of the natural order of things. It's more than natural. It's necessary.
Without these periods of climate flux, we'd have none of the genetic and biological diversity you see among organisms. The world would atrophy -- there'd be little intense selective pressure, and the next time a an asteroid collides with the earth, we'd be unprepared. We'd have forgotten how to select.
It's time to stop pretending that humans are the saviors of the planet. We're not. We're just one species among millions. We're not even the most populous or prevalent. Heck, there are countless species we haven't even discovered yet. Why are we so arrogant?
If the planet wants to warm, if nature has decreed that global warming shall occur, then who are we to stop it? Sure, we might suffer if the world is a few degrees warmer, but why should we change the direction of an entire biosphere just because of our own preference? As if our own preference were the deciding factor. That's human arrogance.
There are better things to spend our time and effort on. Human catastrophes caused by human agencies surround us everyday. Let's work on those before we start trying to play Deity.
Read the rest of this comment...
The Sun is not a perpetual source of energy, but for all intents and purposes on our scale, it is a good approximation of it.
You have a point. It would be better to use solar power as far as greenhouse effect is concerned. (Overall, I believe nuclear might be cleaner because building solar cells and covering the landscape with them isn't too environment-friendly either.)
However, in our case, it's too late; the coal (and oil, and whatever) has already been burned. We have to take that carbon back, or let Mother Nature take care of that, but stop emitting more of it...
However, once they have scrubbed all that extra CO2 from the atmosphere and they're all dead, what do we do with them? Burn them, bury them? They'll be decomposed one way or the other. What do they become then, especially all the carbon they've been storing all that time? Eventually CO2. Oh, wait...
All right, maybe I'm a little pessimistic; after all, that's how oil formed in the first place (with plants instead of bacteria), isn't it? Still, better not make mistakes when the time comes to get rid of them.
Answer: the Sahara Desert. Evidently, dust from the Sahara is carried on the jetstream to the ocean, where the trace iron boosts the nutrient content of the waters, increasing the amount of plankton on the very bottom of the food chain, which we eventually benefit from in the form of salmon and other tasty treats.
Well, how does that solve global warming? Well, when the plankton die, they fall to the ocean floor, locking up CO2. There are also large 'deserts' of the ocean where there aren't these plankton because they lack the needed nutrients. So, some people have come up with a plan for fertilizing these parts of the ocean with iron dust, sequestering carbon dioxide, as well as possibly creating new fishing grounds, for all I know.
From the sound of the article, it sounds like they're going ahead with experiments in this vein already. Don't know if the consequences will be all or even mostly beneficial, but what the heck, gotta try something, eh?
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
Untrue.
While humans, pigs, and whatever else -do- exhale carbon, they do not exhale it all. You may have noticed that there is a significant amount of carbon in the average human.
Additionally, perhaps more-importantly:
Your argument seems to be that locking the carbon underground in COAL is somehow a superior state of affairs to locking it underground in BACTERIA, a claim that confuses me, but perhaps there is some justification I don't know
(Cue response)
Kudzu.
Can I grow them in my nose, so they get rid of the CO2 I exhale?
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The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
No kidding. And if you do it the other way around (fix CO2 then burn) your bio options are opened up. Let's see... Oooh, oooh! Let's GROW CORN (or soybeans or...)!! Burn the biomass, or distill it into alcohol and burn it!!! wait a second... Ack! No coal plant. No coal plant industry. Forget that idea... ok, let's just stick with the messy stack-scrubber thingy.
Somebody takes Crichton a little too seriously.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
What new species? They are specifically looking for an existing species that can do the job.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
Plus manufacture and disposal of solar cells has a really nasty effect on the environment. Bacteria are much more environmentally friendly.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
thats a good point, but it really doesnt apply in this case. this is not an engineered bacteria, this is a natural one found in the wild.. it already exists and already cleans up waste, we're just going to put it to use in places that need it. besides im positive that in ANY case such testing procedure as you described would be implmented.
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
No, I'm not saying this proposal is necessarily bad in anyway. In fact, I can see no harm coming from this except for a possible mutation of the bacteria but that would at most hurt the factory.
All I'm saying is that we really have no proof we're causing anything. I agree the trend is faster than what we have studied from the past, but we've (as a species) also never been alive during one of these temperature cycles. There could be other reasons why the temperature is rising so fast besides CO2. As I said, if we were actually causing the problem, why hasn't a single scientist tried to reproduce this same scenario in a lab? There have been no experiments to prove anything. All we have proven is that the earth is heating up faster. So what? That's meaningless without some kind of evidence as to the cause. We are throwing out proposals to solve problems we don't know the cause of. This particular solution doesn't appear to have an ill-effects, but what happens when we come up with one that might? The save the planet mentality is a bit out of hand. Yes we should try to save it, but let's find the cause before we find a solution.
And I know how dangerous a line we are walking. I'm a bit of an astronomy buff and it's rather scary to know how a relatively small temperature increase will end up turning Earth in Venus. As such, I would like to see proof of cause before we fix something. Otherwise, our fixes might end up doing what we fear the damage is currently doing.
Khyron
You're wrong. Global warming A) doesn't exist and B) what we see is natural. There is actually no scientific proof we are causing the increase in temperature. Just because the trend is larger than any in history does not mean we are causing it. The earth has gone through numerous heating and cooling phases in its life (heard of the ice age?), and this looks to be no different. Remember the stink that was raised about the hole in the ozone layer? Hrm, it's closing. Lookie there. The fact is, people are releasing "facts" about the atmosphere that aren't facts at all. We have no proof we're causing any damage. The POSSIBILITY of damage is there, and that doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate, but it DOES mean we shouldn't do anything about it unless we can prove we're doing something. We're worrying about screwing up the planet, but our solutions (since we have no proof we're causing anything) could be just as dangerous (or more so) than what we think is causing the problems.
Khyron
I almost agree with you 100% percent, but there is one thing I think you leave out in your argument. What if WE are causing the increase/decrease in temperature? What if our emissions are causing this temperature change? The odd thing about this is there is NO proof we are causing any damage whatsoever. Reports that are released are opinions and not scientic fact. It's amazing how people will rally around jibberish like that. Still, there is still the question of whether or not we are causing it. If we are, I should think we'd be able to reproduce what we see (and our potential soultions) in a controlled laboratory. It's odd that we haven't been able to or haven't tried. This makes us look like we're running around without a clue. I would like to see some real evidence that we're causing any of the problems were seeing (with the temperature anyway). Unless that is proved, finding a way to solve the problem is a waste of time, money, and is dangerous (if implemented).
Still, I think this bacteria is not going up into the atmosphere but into manufacturing plants, and I see no problems in reducing our pollution even if we aren't causing global warming/cooling.
Khyron
"Unfortunately, replicating the earth's climate would take a lab the size of the earth and a lot of time."
I'm not saying replicate the earth's atmosphere. Scientists are saying that O3 (ozone) is being broken down by harmful poplutants, yet they can't replicate this in a lab? The same goes for testing for global warming. Who says you have to replicate the earth's atmosphere? All they have to do is prove that the more CO2 in a given environment causes more heat to be trapped. That's not that hard to accomplish and is an important step in proving the correlation. So why hasn't it been done? They can pretty easily make a model of earth's atmosphere and test their theories but they aren't doing so. Such reckless abandonment is what worries me. As I have said many times, we could very well be causing the temperature increase but we have no evidence because the "experts" aren't bothering to prove it via experiments. I don't know how you think, but that's a pretty important step in proving a theory to me. It might take some time, but they'd also a better understanding of what their dealing with.
Why is it so hard to see that we can't just go try to fix things without finding the cause? Especially since it isn't that hard (relatively speaking) to simulate. I'm all for saving the planet, but I'm not for trying methods to save the planet that have no scientific testing behind them.
Luckily, most of the efforts have been directed towards preventing more pollution which is a good thing. What happens when they turn their attentions towards trying to clean up the mess already up there? Not saying they will, but who's to say they won't? If we don't start questioning their data and demanding scientific proof now, why would they feel the need to do it later? Scientists are supposed to be about proof, not speculation. At this point, all we have is strong speculation. No proof.
Khyron
iff you can scrape the bacteria, dump it somewhere, and not have it die and release all it's carbon as CO2. Again, sounds like it's going to be very difficult to find a bacteria that can do photosynthesis on such a large scale, and then just get dumped somewhere without simply releasing all the CO2 you just trapped. However, he did say it would probably take about 4 years to get a prototype working.
Not putting carbon into the air isn't a bad solution, but if we can catch it in the stack, then it's not making it to the air. Of course, this does nothing to solve the whole shrtage of fossil fuels problem, but that's a whole 'nother issue...
the article suggests they live on some sort of screen in the stack itself. The bug in "Zodiac" could spread freely throughout the water, which is why it was so dangeroues. I get the impression this would be confined to the factory stack, and could not go airborne. They definitely need some careful impact studies though.
As long as it doesn't become a science fiction horror story, I think it's a grand idea. Though it does raise a few questions, like what kind of waste do these bacteria produce, and what happens when they run out of C02 up there? I suppose we'd just have to keep supplying it, instead of investing in cleaner sources of energy.
If the bugs require the exotic environment to survive, then if they are released either accidentally or deliberately, then they would die. In this case, that might mean finding slime that dies at lower temperatures, enclosing the smokestack, and maintaining the 130 degree temperatures that the algae needs to thrive. If they escape, they die.
This does not necessarily resolve the problems related to mutation of the original strain; but if the mutation required is significant, then perhaps it will delay the issues sufficiently that our clean-up capabilities improve enough to handle a relatively specific danger.
Look, mass extinctions are nothing new. The earth has been going through phases of extinction for the past couple billion years. It's part of the natural order of things. It's more than natural. It's necessary.
Without these periods of extinction, we'd have none of the genetic and biological diversity you see among organisms. The world would atrophy -- there'd be little intense selective pressure, and the next time a an asteroid collides with the earth, we'd be unprepared. We'd have forgotten how to select.
It's time to stop pretending that humans are the saviors of the planet. We're not. We're just one species among millions. We're not even the most populous or prevalent. Heck, there are countless species we haven't even discovered yet. Why are we so arrogant?
If the planet wants to die, if nature has decreed that another mass extinction shall occur, then who are we to stop it? Sure, we might suffer if we die too, but why should we change the direction of an entire biosphere just because of our own preference? As if our own preference were the deciding factor. That's human arrogance.
There are better things to spend our time and effort on. Human catastrophes caused by human agencies surround us everyday. Let's work on those before we start trying to play Deity.
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Satire aside, the point I'm trying to make is that not everything that's natural is good. But it's true that we still shouldn't try to mess with nature, because we don't understand it, and risk screwing things up even more.
As to global warming, the problem is that the current warming trend does NOT appear to be one of the natural warming cycles (or at least not completely), but that it is at least partially, possibly largely, caused by humans. Caused by our burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon into the atmosphere that, prior to the industrial revolution remained locked undergound and out of the ecosystem. We have done damage. We certainly should try to control the damage as much as we can.
"...Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
The whole thing will only work when there's enough daylight, anyway. I guess they'll just have to switch them off at night :) (during which time, of course, the bacteria will happily be burning off their sugars and releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere).
Way to go.
"...Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
I have the same question about carbon-banking in general. You plant a forest, and you lock up some carbon for a couple of dozen years. But then those trees mature, and are harvested, or get burnt down in a forest fire, or fall over and simply rot away. Eventually all that carbon is just released.
There was an article in Wired magazine a couple of months ago, about fertilizing anomalously dead areas of the world's oceans. IIRC the world's oceans have areas full of oxygen, and short of nutrients, and then there are deeper, colder layers full of nutrients and short of oxygen. Where the deep cold currents are forced to upwell, like at the Grand Banks, you get areas full of life.
The hero of the Wired story had found some areas of the ocean that _should_ have had more biological activity. He wondered whether those parts of the ocean lacked some essential mineral. If so, he figured that we could lock up carbon on a much more long-lasting basis. IIRC he had an experimental project to fertilize these dead patches with Iron. If the project was successful then microscopic marine life would lock up calcium carbonate in their little exoskeletons, die, then fall the bottom of the ocean.
I think if you read the article a little more closely you will see that they searched for these bacteria in hot-springs and geysers, where the ambient temperature was over 130 degrees. They needed to search for them in these unusual environments because they don't survive under more normal conditions.
There are bacteria around for that matter that eat sulfer as well as C02. A problem with this approach though is you'd end up with higher volumes of algae produced than coal used. I guess you could just bury the algae. It'll become coal again in a few hundred million years.
Now if they could get the carbon to come out as diamond, they'd have people interested in cleaning up the environment!
Not really. Diamond is popular because Debeer's has a monopoly on it, and so they have a vested interest in keeping the prices artificially high. they make sure hollywood can get plenty of diamonds cheaply, so that it looks like the rich love diamonds. They lock most diamonds up in their vaults so that supply goes down.
Open up their vaults and sell all those diamonds, and poor people would find diamons cheaper then a coat at the local good will.
But consider this - we also act on that system, and our interferences can and will be regulated by the system.
Since Gaia isn't real merciful or discriminate when it comes time to do a little regulating, perhaps we should reduce the need for self-regulation, rather than crying 'Damn the torpedoes' and getting our energy via the cheapest means available.
I'd rather not be indiscriminately killed off during a self-regulation incident.
Thanks anyway.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
No need to stack the barrels of dead bacteria. It can be used to make cattle feed, fertilizer, a myriad of things. You could even simply burn it as fuel for the powerplant. The plant would thus become a neat partial solar plant, light from the sun (at least I assume) is used to make new fuel.
The CO2 has to be dissolved in water for the bacteria to metabolise it. A normal smoke stack ejects the CO2 into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming, before it dissolves in the oceans and is eaten by algae.
By bubbling it through a large artificial lake, a part of the CO2 might, at least by day be converted back into useful biomass.
But you are right, the USA could contribute a lot more by reducing energy consumption. American industry (and other parts of society) use so much more energy per productivity than other industrialised nations because political pressure has always managed to keep energy prices low. In Europe and Japan, where energy was expensive, the industry had no choice but to invest heavily in increasing energy efficiency.
The majority of our oxygen is NOT made by plants. Especially not by forests on land (they are in equilibrium, and produce as much CO2 as they break down)
Most of our oxygen is already produced by bacteria and other single celled algae in the top 10 meters of our oceans.
The reason why we have such an incredibly low CO2 concentration in our atmosphere (a fraction of a percent) is because these algae have optimised this process (called photosynthesis) to perfection over the estimated 3 billion years that they have existed.
The only difference is that if you run the emission of a smoke stack through a bubble bath of cyano bacteria, the CO2 gets fixed before it enters the atmosphere, and not after, which is good, because CO2 emissions apparently cause their 'harm' by changing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Change is evil and scary after all.
Other factors are the changing energy emission from the sun. Two Danish scientists demonstrated that a change in solar activity had caused most (but not all) of the temperature rise over the last century (I cba to find a link).
The theory of CO2-caused global warming is not just disputed by hardline-creationists (who assume the earth must have been created as it is now and cannot change) and other crackpots.
The radiation band which is absorbed by atmospheric CO2 is already absorbed for just about 100%. It is dwarved by the absorbtion by for instance water (oceans, clouds). It is therefor not by default undisputable that more CO2 will lead to more absorbtion. Covering your umbrella with plastic does not nessessarily help keep you dryer.
I'm no longer as convinced as I used to be that CO2 is unjustly blamed, but I still have strong doubts.
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I thought this sounded too well to be true.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...instead of fixing all the pollutants that are causing an increase in greenhouse gases, we're gonna unbalance things more by introducing this into the environment...
People need to read that little phrase. The idea is to clean up the emissions from the stacks, not to remove it from the high atmosphere. They make the point that it can survive in the high temp conditions of the stack. This is just another bubble through style filter for cleaning up unnatural emissions. The carbon can be precipitated and the oxygen released.
Now if they could get the carbon to come out as diamond, they'd have people interested in cleaning up the environment!
You could do better than solar cells, even if bacteria don't match the %30 efficiency (I think that's the record) of the very best cells availabile in laboratories. Solar cells are expensive, and they require replacement every few years.
Bacteria are cheap, and they replicate themselves. This is the same old story. The less efficient solution is usually the cheaper one to implement. The good part is that the inefficiency doesn't waste a particularly scarce fuel like gasoline, and the inefficiency doesn't cause more pollutants to be produced. We've moved that inefficiency to the sweet spot where we can afford it - sunlight is free.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I've got news for you; the first time Og solved a problem by hitting it with a rock, that was technology.
It was also the first "kinetic adjustment", known by some as "percussive maintainance".
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You still have a very viable, and mroe efficient anyway coal plant working, and now, you add some bacteria and mirrors, and you get some raw material back, as well as cleaner emissions. There is no efficiency loss, you are just adding free sunlight.
The "loss" is the effort, resources, and sheer space required to build and maintain the several *square kilometres* of mirrors that this would require. My argument is that if you're going to this much trouble and expense, you might as well build a photoelectric or photothermal power plant instead of a coal-and-mirrors plant (less effort for the same amount of power).
This is *not* a "free addition" to an existing plant. The cost of the addition will be comparable to the cost of the plant itself.
Coal is not carbon. It is a hydrocarbon. Those carbon-hydrogen bonds contain a lot of energy. The bacteria use light and the CO2 to create carbon (not a hydrocarbon). So basically you're converting CO2 gas and light via bacteria to C (soot) and O2 and keeping the carbon out of the atmosphere.
Actually, coal is largely carbon, if I recall correctly. Natural gas, oil and tar are hydrocarbons.
Either way, a fossil fuel plant burns its fuel fairly completely. A hydrocarbon will give you CO2 and water out. There are no CH bonds for the bacteria to draw energy from (which would still require oxidation).
Fossil fuel plants will produce soot, but not very much of it compared to the amount of fuel that they process. Soot is, after all, fuel that can still be burned.
They're using SUNLIGHT! You know, the BIG BALL OF INCANDESCENT GAS THAT BURNS BRIGHTLY! It ain't goin' anywhere for awhile, and it's esentially FREE!
Sunlight doesn't magically route itself to the smokestack. The proposed project would use mirrors to divert it.
Enough sunlight has to come into the stack to convert all of the plant's oxidized carbon back into non-oxidized carbon. This represents about a third of the energy throughput of a fossil fuel plant, even if it's burning something rich in hydrogen.
Because bacteria have pretty lousy energy conversion efficiency, you'd probably be better off just building an equivalent area of solar panels instead of your mirrors and coal plant to produce power. You'll need to use at least this much area in mirrors already. This is what the original poster was talking about.
Humanity has been "Playing God®" since the day it decided to pick up some innocent, natural rocks and force them into unnatural shapes, and later into unnatural unions with sticks and vines.
There is no such thing as "playing god" (well, except maybe in this context). What you are really objecting to here is scientists "playing Human", because they have some extremely effective tools for doing so.
Certainly, any intentional, major environmental change needs to be very carefully considered. What I think is "kinda scary" is the way a chorus of panicked "AIIIEEE!!! Playing God®!" rises up in response to people merely thinking about things like this.
Thinking is always good, even if Doing may not be.
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Famous last words:
Like people? :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
As far as I can see, all this story does is point out that Federal bureaucrats fund programs completely without technical review.
Nah, they just put a picture of a Playmate on the cover of the proposal and run it by a Congressman. Maybe it's not a technical review, but it's a review of sorts.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Is there a way to moderate a post as "stupid" or "ignorant"?
See this article in Scientific American (from 1996). Yes, there is such a thing as Ice-9 (actually Ice-IX), but it doesn't have the properties of the substance in the Vonnegut book.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Perhaps we need a "+1 Simpsons" moderation type... :)
Let's remember the complaints about sea levels rising that have been coming from South Pacific islands. If you look at Scientific American, March 2001, pg 47, note the comment about Bond/Lighgow-Bertelloni studing the sinking of the Indonesian area. Gee, if you're on an island which is sinking...of course the water level gets higher. Oddly, the IPCC estimates of "sea level rising" think that this area will have less sea level rise than the geology indicates.
...is that it tends to be promoted by lunatics and thereby lose its credibility.
Global warming makes sense in very simple terms: more CO_2 in greenhouse means a hotter greenhouse, so at first glance it should work that way on a planet. Of course, in the real world then you have to consider natural climate drift, the plants that absorb CO_2, and all sorts of other factors. We don't know all those other factors, so of course we don't know for sure what releasing CO_2 at the current rate will do. It's a big, tricky problem and "scientists" who act as if it's solved are impostors.
To put that in short form: I agree about the doubts expressed (though I'm skeptical about the conspiracy; "scientists" have been confidently wrong too often in the past for me to just assume a conspiracy is needed).
However, I imagine a lot of people skimmed this message (that I am replying to) and thought "Hmm, a creationist thinks that global warming is a leftist conspiracy. What a crackpot!" and moved on, disregarding any evidence presented, and subconsciously blacklisting future suggestions that global warming is less than scientific fact.
Whether you are a creationist, or just found the creationist site interesting or amusing, it hurts the case for skepticism about global warming to link to a site which criticizes evolution while criticizing the science behind global warming.
This isn't meant as criticism or a suggestion, just an observation. I wonder how many reasonable ideas get dismissed because they're promoted by people primarily identified by the unreasonable ideas they hold.
(incidentally, the linked creationist website was full of really bad logic; I'm not 100% percent convinced that evolution is correct (for that matter, I occasionally wonder if I'm a brain in a jar living a simulation... I'm 100% certain of no physical fact), but if it's not then our world was certainly created by a trickster god because there is no rational explanation for such things as ancient fossils without an alien intelligence playing a huge prank on us. Arguments that He did such a sloppy job that we can catch him at it are contrived and unconvincing.)
---
Karma casino, place your bets!
Of course, there's no real objective and credible evidence that global warming even exists. The "science" backing this is nonexistent and the entire IPCC report is a political, rather than a scientific, initiative strongly tainted with radical politics.
Check out http://www.globalwarming.org to at least understand what's going on before you fall for the global warming catastrophists' "the sky is falling" line...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Let's see: you take carbon (coal) and oxygen (air) and run a chemical reaction to give you carbon dioxide and energy. Then you add a bacterium and light and get back (Ta Da!) carbon and oxygen.
Either this takes more power for the light than you get from the power plant, or you have a perpetual motion machine. And if your light source (sunlight?) actually does provide more power than the plant produces, why bother with coal?
As far as I can see, all this story does is point out that Federal bureaucrats fund programs completely without technical review.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Great!
I'd just be exceptionally concerned about accidently wiping out too much of the greenhouse. Without it, we'd be Mars.
"What's the temperature outside, bobby?"
"Um... according to our kelva-meter, 200K... so -73C? If I wear my enviro-suit, can I go out and play? It's above -100!"
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Use it for pig-slop, or sell it as a special additive to smooties from Jamba Juice, or scatter it onto tundra, or use it as a fertilizer component, or whatever.
All of these uses amount to burning them (metabolism is the same reaction, but slower), which will release exactly the same amount of CO2 to the atmosphere that were taken out.
It all boils down to that those carbon atoms have to end up somewhere.
It's gonna keep piling up, you know.
And if anyone eats it, it goes back to CO2 + stuff.
According to you photosynthesis cannot remove CO2 without using sugar, or something.
When a plant splits up the CO2, it gets rid of the O2, which it has no use for, and uses the C to build plant material, such as wood, leafs etc. The plant does not remove any more CO2 from the air than what is accounted for by the carbon atoms in the plant itself.
When the plant dies and gets eaten, the C recombines with O2 and is back in the atmosphere as CO2.
why don't we have an atmosphere full of CO2?
Because over the billions of years, large amounts of CO2 have been turned into plants, who instead of being eaten for different reasons ended up underground, and turned into oil.
Also, a huge part of it is bound in the existing set of living plants. If all plants were to die and get eaten or burned, a huge one time addition of CO2 to the atmosphere would occur.
The other useful byproduct is TREE.
In this case, the other product pretty much has to be more green slime.
So the question then becomes what to do with all the green slime that's filling up your power station. If you just throw it out, it'll die, rot and convert back to CO2.
Pretty clueless scheme...
Your knee-jerk, anti-innovation, unfounded fears are the reason millions of children each year go blind, even though it could be prevented by the widespread adoption of golden rice.
Caution is not free. Caution would say that we should never have built cars, because they harm the environment. Caution would say that we should not have built the internet, because we may become reliant on something that is unreliable. Caution will damn us to whatever technology is tried and true, destroy innovation, and plunge us back into the dark ages.
This message is not intended to be funny.
I'm sure some of you have read the book "Zodiac", by Neil Stephenson. In it, a scientist creates a wonder bacteria, that lives on waste and produces harmless material. However, they, shall we say, messed up, and ended up creating a killer bacteria that does just the opposite. Before releasing this wonder microbe into the atmosphere we should really make sure that it works, and in a nice BIG, yet controlled environment, not something the size of a household fishtank. I for one would prefer to be able to breath the air without wearing a detoxifying filter.
I am !amused.
Besides, there's no evidence that current CO2 levels are much higher than prehistorical levels. And besides, global warming is probably a good thing, since it increases arable land area, providing a place for more plants to be grown, thus reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
And furthermore, Gaia is adaptable. If Gaia's temperature increases, more clouds form, reflecting more of the sun's heat away from Gaia, thus reducing the temperature. This is a self-healing system, folks, and no amount of human intervention or hubris has, or can, change the system more drastically than it already has been changed many times before humans had anything to do with it.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
reminds me of ice 9 from that vonnegut book...
Good point. Sorry about the tone of the initial reply.
/can/ live, it's /already/ living.
In this case, given that the bacteria thrives best in high temperatures (130 F), and they're going to some lengths to create a growing environment for it, I don't think escape is a serious threat. It doesn't sound like THIS STRAIN of the bacteria could survive in the environment outside the plant.
Of coursem there are other strains. And admittedly, overproliferation of algae is a problem in some ecosystems ('algae bloom'). However, my understanding is that this general type of bacteria is one of the most common in the world - it probably exists in one form or another in just about every body of fresh water. You find green algae EVERYWHERE. There's very little risk of introducing it into a new environment that's not prepared for it. Anywhere it
--Sean
"Let's see: you take carbon (coal) and oxygen (air) and run a chemical reaction to give you carbon dioxide and energy. Then you add a bacterium and light and get back (Ta Da!) carbon and oxygen."
First of all, there's nothing wrong with this equation - except that you left out the concept of losing mass to energy creation. Since so much energy is contained in mass - it makes sense that you would be able to keep converting your material back and forth and getting energy; it's just that the material shrinks a la everything else in the world, ie: not free energy.
Secondly, in any chemical reaction - there are always other compounds produced from reactions in some amount, some are completely unstable and break down into something else, some aren't... ie: you would also get, Carbon monoxide, Cyanide... and a slew of other carbon-something compounds; just in smaller amounts, so mass is lost that way.
I agree with you 100%, why not just use the solar power and not the plant - well because the solar power can not at this time be converted well into direct useable energy. In a very real way, this will utilize solar power if the recombinant carbon could be used again.
unfortunately your entire argument is flawed in that carbon in fact does not combust. To combine stable C2 with oxygen you need to actually add energy to break it apart and have it recombine with oxygen. I do believe the energy required is more than the energy gained by the fusion of C and O2. As these guys note, "the basis for most coals, is a large, carbon-based molecule that makes up 30 percent of vascular plants such as trees.". Coal is made up of carbon based molecules and not carbon itself.
This is why when you have a fire, you are left with black ash that does not burn; Carbon.
Ace
Agreed. However, remember Earth Science 101? The earth's original atmosphere had no O2, only CO2. Where did all the C go over millions of years? Not petroleum, but into rocks. Limestone (CaCO3) is a fantastic sink for CO2. If we could find an efficient way to convert the CO2 into limestone or another inert mineral, we could prevent further accumulations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
If we were really out to get rid of CO2 in the atmosphere, we would grow millions of tons of vegetation and plankton in shallow inland seas and then bury the material under sediment before it could decompose. Then we would just have to remember not to dig it up a couple of million years later and set it all on fire... Doh.
Quoted from article:
"I wonder what happens if the bacteria works too good?"
Well, that's pretty simple to answer.
Bacteria consumes CO2 to turn it into oxygen and sugars.
CO2 not available for plants anymore. Plants die.
Government scraps all emissions testing programs, forces automakers to put carburetors and Kettering points back into cars, and then encourages everyone to buy SUVs.
Excess oxygen in air means that simply yawning can create drug-like euphoria. Yawning is banned, probably by the Republicans of such open-minded and fun-loving states as Mississippi and Alabama, and punishable by long jail terms. A criminal element springs up, which allows people to yawn - for a price. Starbucks shares skyrocket due to growth from law-abiding non-yawning citizens. Employers hire only people who are blood-tested to show high caffeine, because they're obviously not yawners; civil rights groups outraged.
With no grass and trees and stuff for the PETA-people to eat, they starve; while McDonalds takes over the market selling burgers made from genetically engineered cattle which chow down on the bacteria.
Lighting a cigarette becomes significantly more hazardous than it already is. Driving your Kettering-point-equipped Lincoln Navigator while smoking is now impossible, due to incandescence of the glowing ember being reflected off the inside of the windshield.
In short, probably not as much as you would expect.
[grin]
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
"Limestone (CaCO3) is a fantastic sink for CO2. If we could find an efficient way to convert the CO2 into limestone or another inert mineral..."
CaCO3 is aka calcium carbonate. So here's what we do:
1) Drink a glass of milk to get a good deposit of calcium on your upper lip ("got calcium?")
2) Breathe normally
CO2 in the air on the way out of your mouth/nose combines with the Ca on your lip to create CaCO2. The extra O is left as an exercise for the student.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
First, they use it on smokestacks, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
... poof!
Well, that went fine they say.
Second, they decide to let it loose in low-income apartment buildings and prisons (since the latter comprise 40 percent of US housing by this time) in the smokestacks of the coal furnaces.
But, they ruled out the other materials in the smokestack. We get biogenetic adaptation of a living organism and
Now we've got furnaces breeding little fire devils. And once they see those BSD commercials, they create their own little mobile fireballs to explore outside the smokestacks and find Open Source (which is what they call Heaven (or H.ll if you'd rather)).
Naturally, they take great glee in poking their little pitchforks into Windows 2010 boxen and frying out the OS, replacing it with their own.
Now look what you've done!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
"I don't think that will work, and I don't think it's something we should do," says Cooksey. "We have no idea what the consequences of injecting CO2 into the ocean would be. Many scientists are violently opposed to it."
Does the recent trend in science of "playing God" frighten anyone else? This is seriously large scale, with a possible catastrophic outcome. This might sound trollish, but haven't they though of eliminating the source of the excess CO2, as opposed to dealing with the byproducts?
I see no mention of any "other greenhouse gases" in the article. The article states that the cyanobacteria feasts solely on carbon dioxide.
-- Maciek
The problem with CO2 isn't how to get it out of the air. The problem is where to put it (especially the carbon, since we'd like to keep the oxygen around) once it IS out of the air.
This is a non-problem, of all the worries human society on this planet has, "what to do with cyanobacteria or cyanoalgae" is not one of them. Use it for pig-slop, or sell it as a special additive to smooties from Jamba Juice, or scatter it onto tundra, or use it as a fertilizer component, or whatever.
My point is, that the bacteria/algae are not a pollutant, at worst they are a non-toxic waste-product, at best it's a marketable product. Digging Carbon out of the ground isn't problematic for the atmosphere unless you pulverize and oxidize it.
as far as re-release of their carbon goes, that would mean that the sugars in the bacteria had been consumed by some animal (or, technically, the bacteria itself) and I don't think of that as a "bad thing". I don't think the world is suffering from an excess of food products...
We dug up the carbon from the ground, why not just put it back there! It didn't seem to hurt anything for the million years it was down there forming coal, why should it harm anything if we put it back?
The CO2 is not being transformed back into pure carbon (coal) and oxygen. If the bacteria assembled the carbon atoms from the carbon dioxide back into coal, you'd have a point, but instead they do something entirely different (photosynthesis) with the carbon dioxide. I tend to agree that finding a bacterium that can do photosynthesis on such a large scale sounds difficult, but it wouldn't violate any conservation principles (Energy or "Matter").
So provided they aren't looking to change the genetic structure of this creature, and attempt to provide it an environment it is used to living in, hopefully the chances of rapid mutation/evolution should be small. After all, if they are already feeding off of CO2 and thriving by the billions out in nature, there doesn't seem to any detrimental effects upon the environment currently due to them.
Of course, if exposure to radically new chemicals and waste allows for a increased chance of mutation (since they've most likely never been exposed to the crap they potentially might be), we could have a problem. Especially if the bateria adapts to survive and proliferate at normal temperatures. I suspect it still needs some medium to grow in, but if it were to become airborne, there could be the (hopefully very small) probability of them consuming CO2 right out of the atmosphere. This could lead to impacting vegetation growth...and if our vegetation cannot survive, we ourselves could have a big problem (ie: lack of O2, food sources, etc).
Not your normal AC.
Basically you didnt read the article.
Cyanobacteria already produce the majority of our oxygen. There are unbelievable, unmeasurably large quantities of them in the upper few meters of our oceans. They form a significant fraction of all bio mass on earth. I wouldn't be surprised if they formed the majority of all biomass, but I'm not sure about that. Cyano bacteria are the very reason why our atmosphere contains so little CO2 and so much oxygen.
The 'harm' CO2 is said to cause is not through toxicity, not even because of it's infra red absorbing qualities. What people are worried about is a CHANGING CO2 concentration.
By running the emissions of smokestacks through a bubblebath with cyano bacteria, the CO2 is fixed by these algae before it enters the atmosphere, instead of first having to enter the atmosphere, and then the ocean before it is fixed. Thus the CO2 doesn't change the concentration in the atmosphere.
Also, remember how we reduce water pollution by treating sewage and other point sources - it goes into variants on ponds or vats full of bacteria that eat up the nutrients and outgrow the bad bacteria. This isn't much different. Then there's all the stuff that gets eaten by bugs, big bugs, little bugs, smaller bugs that eat them, fungi, molds, and the rest of the organic gucky stuff that makes up the food chain and carbon cycles.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The solution is very simple. You burn the plants that you're growing in your power plant to generate electricity! Instead of digging up coal, removing carbon from the ground and putting it into the air, you use a comparatively closed cycle of taking carbon out of the air and then putting it back in. Essentially you've moved to an indirect solar power system; you're storing solar energy in the form of biomass. Biomass isn't a particuarly popular form of generation these days (except as a way of also disposing of unwanted plant matter, which is essentially the problem that you're proposing) but it does have the wonderful property of combining the energy density of fossil fuels with the non-greenhouse causing properties of other renewable energy sources. You can bet it's going to get more popular over time.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Great as long as it stays within the plant. Complicated systems are unpredictable and EXTREMELY difficult to contain. If you concentrate large amounts of this bacteria, and an accident occurs and some get out, the problem is difficult to fix. It's great in theory, but I don't trust anybody's ability to maintain a system like that indefinitely. (Think a certain power plant in Russia... and a mistake here wouldn't be so easy to detect) Biological systems can be worse than nuclear power - they keep reproducing. And you don't have to engineer a bacteria in order for it to cause trouble - accidently introducing a large number of natural bacteria can also cause trouble. Especially if the larger numbers means the odds for mutation go up dramatically.
The critique is not of the theory, but the virtual impossibility of safe implimentation. Sorry, I wasn't terribly clear before. In this game, good theory and safe implimentation are both needed for an idea to be worth serious consideration. If it can be done, I'm all for it. It is a clever idea.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
You are aware that the current Global warming trend is 10 to 100 faster than any previous naturally occurring trend. And that this trend is a result of a large increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere due to human interference. Global warming is *not* a natural event. And even if it were I think that we have a right (and as we caused it a responsibility) to stop it. Don't remember the exact statistic but something like 90% of the populuation of the earth lives with in 50 vertical meters of the sea. We have to stop global warming to avoid displacing all these people (though admitedly sea level rise is only projected at a few meters, but still enough to displace millions). If there were an asteroid heading towards earth would it be "human arrogance" to want to stop it and save the lives of millions? I certainly don't think so.
And Bruce Willis clearly agrees with me :)
--Chris
A bacterium that is really dangerous and tending to spread all over everywhere? One that monopolises the natural world?
Oh, so it's sorta like Microsoft and Microsoft Outlook then?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Sometimes I think we watch too much Star Trek (or, more likely, Star Trek, specifically, ST:NG reflects something that I don't like about our culture). Anyway, have you ever noticed that a ridiculously large proportion of ST:NG episodes feature some conflict that is resolved by Mr. LaForge saying something like "maybe, if we reverse the polarity on the field generator..." or Dr. Crusher saying "maybe, if we alter the microbes' DNA..."
My point is (and this is perhaps not so directly applicable to the article, but is reminiscent, anyway): Why is it that we so often look for technology to provide a quick fix for what is really a very complex and difficult social problem? Obviously, it's the easy way out, but does it really work? Think about all the various technical schemes for locking down copyrighted content that we have been discussing lately.
If we can come up with some technical way to reduce the CO2 output of smokestacks, then great. However, I still worry that unless we (and particularly we Americans) wake up and take up the difficult task of addressing all the causes of our massive CO2 output, this new method of scrubbing CO2 is not going to be enough.
Anyway, go cyanobacteria, because every little bit helps.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If any body bothered to follow the link, the following would be obvious. It isn't a genetically engineered bug, it is a naturally occuring cyanobacter (aka 'blue-green algae' or 'green bacteria'). Now on to the meat of the article.
The doctrine of Microbial Infallibility states that microbes can do anything that humans can, and that they do it faster-better-cheaper. But the idea that we put a bioreactor inside a smokestack or factory probably won't be practical. Sunlight is a limiting factor that they try to overcome using mirrors and light pipes. Light will still probably be a limiting factor as it will take a fairly large volume/surface area of green bacteria to slurp up the thousands of tons of CO2 that pass through a smokestack daily. Also, nutrients like N-P-K will be needed in large amounts to fix so much carbon. This will require lots of fossil fuel to fix the nitrogen, and will speed the depletion of limited phosphate resources. And what will they do with the tons of muck that are produced every day - it will probably concentrate more of the Mercury and Cadmium than Carbon.
While the idea is thought provoking, it is an idea that may cost more than its worth. There are a lot of green plants on Earth that have dampened the build-up of CO2, but cant stop it in the face of the growing hordes of industrial humans. This idea doesn't make too much sense to ecologists - even though green bacteria can grow exponentially and soak up lots of gas, they probably need to be coddled, or they would be doing it already!!
We have bacteria here that photosynthesise. Their carbon source is the atmosphere, their energy source is sunlight.
Why not bypass the middleman (the coal fired powerstation) altogether: grow the bacteria, and harvest them as the carbon source for your power station? You'd have solar power without the need for photovoltaic cells (which are inefficient - and photovoltaic cells take more energy to make than they will ever produce in their lifetime) and the energy source can be stored in a convenient form (the harvested bacteria could be stored in tanks).
There has been some research a bit like this in the past - using pond-scum to power diesel engines. Apparently, you can design a diesel-cycle engine that'll run quite happily on dried pond scum. This effectively gives you a renewable source of energy for your engine.
You'll still need quite large amounts of land to produce enough bacteria or pond-scum, but if you've ever driven through Wyoming or the desert southwest (which has plenty of sunlight, an important ingredient) the land's there.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"[Photosynthesis] provides organisms that convert the gas through photosynthesis into useful byproducts, like oxygen."
The other useful byproduct is TREE. CO2 is Carbon plus Oxygen (2 of them). Photosyntesis releases the O, leaving the C behind inside the tree. Since I can't imagine they want things growing inside these smokestacks, I have to wonder where the C is going to go.
The problem with CO2 isn't how to get it out of the air. The problem is where to put it (especially the carbon, since we'd like to keep the oxygen around) once it IS out of the air. All that carbon used to be locked up inside plants/animals (some living, some dead--like coal and oil). I suppose they could scrape the bacteria off every few weeks and put it in an oil barrel, but where do we stack the barrels? Put 'em underground to turn into oil next year?
How about a better idea: stop putting carbon INTO the air?
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Why does everyone here start with the assumption that global warming is even real? There is *very* credible evidence that there is no such effect, and a number of scientists have stated as much, but they're not getting the big megaphone from the UN and radical "environmental" groups.
Radical leftist "scientists" and their computer models have been known to intentionally lie to us before: witness the laughable computer predictions of the original 1970 Earth Day and the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" fiasco which assured us with certainty that we would be completely out of oil, gas, copper, zinc, gold, and tin by now. Oh, and the pollution was supposed to be killing us off in the midst of the massive famines that have never happened. In fact, we now have more of all the resources listed above at our disposal than we had then, pollution is sharply down, and food production is at all-time record levels.
A few links that point this out the fallacy of global warming:
A good BBC article with coverage of some reasonable scientific dissent
A good overview of this from Reason magazine
Another article exposing the political as opposes to scientific basis of the IPCC report.
http://www.globalwarming.org is the source of these and other links exposing the truth about global warming, which is quite simply that there's no credible evidence that it even exists, and that the global warming crowd employs some of the worst science ever seen so long as it fits their political agenda.
It never ceases to amaze me that the numerous self-proclaimed libertarians on Slashdot are so willing to cede their liberty to a politically motivated cabal far more dangerous to our society than the RIAA or the MPAA could ever be. Wake up and pay attention to the things that really matter, and will impact your real freedoms in the future in ways that are truly Orwellian...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Any such artificial attempt to restore equilibrium in a natural system runs the risk of overcorrecting and causing more trouble than originally existed. In any complex system such as the atmosphere, the law of unintended consequences is pretty much guaranteed to rear it's ugly head. The proper course of action with regards to greenhouse gas is to lower our emissions and let nature clean out the excesses through natural processes. Unfortunately, that's a long term approach that requires our inconvenience, and therefore not possible until crisis occurs.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org