Slashdot Mirror
Goodbye Global Warming!...Hello Terraforming?
silance writes "Here is an article from Science Daily detailing a new method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale and at normal concentrations. Previous systems require placement near high concentration centers such as power plants, and do not address low-concentration sources (such as internal combustion engines) which are responsible for half of the world's carbon dioxide pollution. The article descibes the technology as scalable to the point of repairing Earth's atmosphere to pre-Industrial-Age levels! Next stop, Mars..." I seem to remember something like this in SimEarth ? - but I'm not going to hold my breath (Ha! I pun!) waiting for this.
When did trees go out of fashion?
Why invest so much money trying to replicate what just about all plants do naturally? I mean, geez, perhaps we will surpass plants' abilities to process Carbon Dioxide, but do you think it will run on water, Carbon Dioxide & dirt?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It would make it easier to get funding.
I managed to get Mars terraformed in SimEarth within 50 years... wonder how quick it'll be able to happen in real life, since there aren't many ice meteors floating around for us to grab...
Then again, it doesn't have to be done all at once. Scientists can start by just terraforming one chunk of Mars, and then build out from there. It would make sense to start near one of the poles, where there's a large concentration of ice; that would definitely make things easier at the start.
-----
Aww, FSCK!
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
OK, this sounds fine and dandy, but if we're vigorously scrubbing our environment of CO2 isn't there to much of a good thing?
I mean, at what low levels of present CO2 is plant life starting to be affected? I would hate to crank up a system like this and see vast forests just dissapearing because of lack of CO2 levels. I assume there have to be some checks to how much we remove, but if profit is as stake, will there really be those checks?
How can they really simulate this to test all the effects on our environment?
We're looking at MASSIVE changes in our environment if they think they can just rollback the air to pre-industrial revoluiton air quality!
As a chemist I can say that the idea of capturing CO2 with CaO on an industrial scale is extremely optimistic.
It will consume huge amounts of energy to convert back and the efficiency will be very low. The figures come out so optimistic only if you forget about the fact that CaO gets covered by Ca carbonate quickly and in the absence of water the diffusion of CO2 to the remaining CaO will slow to a crawl.
Only alternative to this is to disperse the CaO to micron sizes which means emitting insane amounts of dust into the atmosphere. Same is valid for extracting back. Unless you make the CaCO3 granules of micron or less size the energy efficiency in recovering CaO is very low.In either case you either need huge amounts of water or you will pepper with CaCO3 dust everything several thousands miles windward.
This reeks of "reaserch" sponsored by specific global warming villains. Just the mentioning of "there is enough fossil fuels" about says it all. No names mentioned... We know them all...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
a new method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale and at normal concentrations
In the study, the old method called Planting a tree, was found to be too conventional and made the landscape too pleasing to look at.
But seriously, this is a GoodThing(tm).
I'm a 2000 man.
"2 Weeks... euugghhhheuueuueuu.. 2 weeeeekkss..."
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
This is very, very cool. But we should be very, very careful we know what's going on before we start experimenting with terraforming earth.
We'd better watch out... if we've now got terraformers, the next thing you know someone will have kept placing alien monoliths straight onto one protozoa until, lo and behold, "Protozoa have gone sentient!" Now we just have to wait for all those damn nanotech protozoa cities to blast off into orbit...
repairing Earth's atmosphere to pre-Industrial-Age levels!
While I beleive that there is a definite global warming problem and that most people don't understand what that really means... (More severe, chaotic weater, just not hotter weather)
I think that any radical change to the atmosphere should be taken with *EXTREME* caution so as to not make a bad situation worse.
Anyone read Niven's 'Fallen Angels'?
Before the turn of the century, it was not Global Warming that scientists were worried about, but Global Cooling. Several harsh and long winters, some due to violent volcano explosions, had decimated crops and reduced the world's food supply.
Let us not forget that an ice-age will trap valuable freshwater that could otherwise be raining down on crops in the form of glaciers.
Stopping the increase in and even reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses may be a very good thing, especially if it helps reduce the amount of incredibly severe weather caused by global warming.
Reducing it to a set level just because we 'ought to' is not a bright idea.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Hang on, you'd have to cook the stuff to get your lye back as well as pure CO2, wouldn't that require power? Hmmm, lets burn some fossile fuels to get that, we can burn unlimited amounts of fossile fuels now since we can just extract the CO2 from the air again.
Oh, and I've got this model of a perpetum mobile for sale.....
*recalls a scene from the new Time Machine movie remake where the moon gets destroyed* :D
There is no room for mistakes.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
But Quimby promised if he got elected as president he would HELP global warming so that we could turn antartica into a tropic paradise and also we could have all the fried fish we wanted from the gulf of mexico... I voted for him for president, why didnt you?
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Los Alamos enhances global security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction...
:)
Just covering all our bases, I guess
For 20 cents per gallon, you could subsidise a better fuel such as Biodiesel which absorbs more carbon while growing than it emits while being used as fuel.
Also you could plant a lot of trees!!
Wouldn't such an operation require rather a large power budget?
I think the first step in reducing athmospheric CO2 must be to stop the use of fossil fuels for large power plants where clear alternatives (eg, solar/wind/wave/tidal/nuclear) exist.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Oh, I get it. There's no need to cut down fossil fuel emissions or take active measures using existing technologies because this method of CO2 reduction will cure everything. We can continue living our lifestyles unaffected. Woohoo!
I remember when the media latched onto the AIDS epidemic. People abstained because there was no cure. As soon as word got around that some researcher somewhere thought of an idea that could "cure" AIDS, the risky behaviour started again.
n. A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.
So you don't pun, you just make a weak joke. No wonder the yanks have such a downer on puns: They don't know what they are!
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
1. What do they plan on doing with all the calcium carbonate? That stuff isn't going to go away, as opposed to carbon dioxide, which will go away, if not as quickly as we can produce it.
2. Reclaiming the CO2 won't replenish fossil fuels, and if there are no risks in using them anymore, you can be certain there won't be any more legislation calling for restrictions on emissions. Eventually, we will run out.
While this would be a solution for removing atmospheric carbon dioxide, they're still not offering a solution about how to reduce the depletion of our fossil fuels.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
So, in effect, they are using the chemical reaction to create limestone, and then change the limestone back into the original chemical agent using lots of heat, releasing pure CO2 for collection.
They then say that if this was done on a large enough scale, it could reduce CO2 levels.
What I'd like to know is how large is "large enough"? Sounds like to me that for every coal-burning plant, we'd need a CO2 'eating' plant to compensate for the CO2 release.. that is, unless they were integrated. And if they were integrated, it would most certainly just cost us more for our electricity.
This doesn't appear to be very profitable. The company that does this will get lots of CO2, which can be sold to oil companies, as the article states. But is CO2 valuable enough to make a decent profit out of having hundreds of these CO2 extration plants running?
The article also states that the cost of doing this would cost about 20 cents for each gallon of gas used, to reclaim the CO2. Well, for one, gas prices are already very high in some places in the world (Europe comes to mind). But one thing isn't noted: 20 cents a gallon for the millions of gallons of gasolene used every year is a whole crapload of money.
I'm not a CO2 extraction expert (INACO2EE?) but this plan does not seem as economically feasible as the article seems to suggest.
But what about other pollutants. It isn't as if CO2 is the most harmful of fossil fuel products. What about carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, hydrocarbons, and particulates?
Who's gonna pay for these plants to be constructed and operated??
-- Adam
That's a lot of area. If we consider that only a third of the world is developed, use the current estimate of the number of people in the WHOLE world (6,218,162,742/3), That's (trusting my elementary math skillz) 2007 square miles -- A square roughly 45 miles a side.
Of course, if this turns out to be feasible, then we encourage "pollution" by saying that CO2 emissions are a nonissue. What about emissions of NO2 (major smog/low-level ozone contributor)?
And then we start the endless cycle of:
more CO2 -> more "limestone" converters in the dessert-> more CO2 -> more converters -> wash -> rinse -> repeat
Maybe a temporary "fix" at best?
"Don't put a question mark where god puts a period."
and for how long can we sustain the use of fossil-fuels?
You pollute to the extreme, you see something happening... you wait till the last extreme minute and you do another 180 degree extreme solution to repair it.
I mean this is like punching someone's face untill he's almost dead, and then applying bandages until he suffocates and overdosing him with painkillers. yeah, it might work, but there's always going to be permanent damages in the process, you cannot just do something massive on a planetary scale and "think it'll act like this" with no doubts.
How can you tell that you could fix up the atmosphere to pre-industrial age and not suffocate plants (to name one "possible" example) if you cannot even predict weather correctly? how can you talk about a planetary system when you still have a hard time analyzing the data that you took a century to gather and trim?
Of course, applying such a technology let's say, locally (i.e. car exausts, petro-chems, etc) would fix a BIG part of the problem and be more plausible. I just don't trust someone that comes and claim this big. I am all for revolution but in this case we need evolution (that doesn't mean I wouldn't want RAPID evolution), that way we can rollback if there's something going wrong.
my 0.02.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/releases/archiv e/02-028.shtml
the more potent green house gases, like methane, nitrogen compounds, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's)? each of these does exist in the atmosphere in smaller quantities than those of CO2, but they have strong heat-absorbing properties, which may make them a greater threat than CO2. furthermore, they are complementary, in that they each tend to trap a different spectra of thermal radiation.
studies show that in the early 80's a very large rise of these gasses was detected in the atmosphere, and their output has hardly slowed either.
Except the article makes it sound that there's an unlimited amount of fossil fuels. Great, so we can burn all the coal, oil, tar, trees, and whatnot because now we have this incredible CO2 removal system, but the underlying problem of there being only so much dead goopy stuff underground remains. I doubt anybody smart enough to actually do something is reading this (Brains and gov't just don't seem to mix), but on the off chance...
Don't take cough syrup to hide the symptoms, cure the disease itself!
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
Imagine No Restrictions On Fossil-Fuel Usage And No Global Warming
I kind of found this headline a bit disturbing... I hate things like this because they really discourage any responsibilty... It reminds me of all those miracle diets; "Eat all the fatty foods you want and don't gain a pound." Seems like people today just don't want responsibility.
I'm sure it would be a lot better on the planet on a whole if we aimed to reduce emmisions gradually, thus *if* there were any consequences to the environemnt they could probably be dealt with a lot easier than massive forest die-offs or the like.
Of course reducing emissions need some sort of united effort *cough* kyoto *cough*...
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Trees Spend More Time Sequestering Carbon with More CO2 in the Air
says planting trees is a good idea.
We can adjust the atmosphere back to pre-industrial levels?!?
COOL!
I want to go back the the mini Ice Age of the 14th century!
Ohh Ohh! Then lets raise temperatures so that Greenland is LUSH and FERTILE again!
So many things to do, so little time! Lets get cracking!
For anyone not following this bit of madness, Chemtrails are the contrails of jetaircraft that seem to have unusual persistence. The conspiracy folks have had a field day with this, and I remain somewhat skeptical.
One angle on this (see site here) is the speculation that the chemtrails are caused by additives to the jetfuel designed to reduce global warming by reflecting more of the solar radiation into space.
They even cite this US Patent (5003186) as proof of concept.
truely strange stuff.
The thought that someone may already be engineering or terraforming the earth is slightly disturbing.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
We'll never have to learn self-control or willpower, some technology will always bail us out! Yay!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
So instead of letting the CO2 stay as petrolium underground, we pump it up, free it, capture it and use it to pump more?
Okey... Change that to a meter^2/person (so we can use metric, a REAL measuring system. Just like language wars, eh? Guess where I'm from.) Say 500 million people in the developed world (this number depends less on the population than what you call 'devoloped').
500 Mil m^2 = 500 km^2 = square 22 km (36 miles) on a side.
That would be a rather large plant. Construction costs wouldn't be aided by the fact that the article suggests building it in the middle of nowhere. Why do I get the impression that the oil companies would lobby their way out of having to pay for it?
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
Look at who sponsered the research. Isn't it the same guys within the Bush administration who profite from continious exploitation of natural resources?
Isn't it just another atempt to justify Bush's decision "to do nothing that could endanger the groth of our economy"?
Does any independent source actually think this could work?
Didn't anyone ever see "Aliens"?
Don't they know what one of those terraforming plants can do?
Not to mention the kind of business executives who own the plants, the space monsters attracted to them, and the fate of the people who work there.
No thank you. Not on my planet.
Funny you talk about it. i am particulary interested in 'alternative energy'. (Not pseudo-Magnet Motors...). And yesterday I was thinking about Photosynthesis which occurs in plants and some bacteria. My idea has always been that natures way of doing things is way better then our way and that we should learn from it. Well, I am not a chemist, but nature is amazing. IIRC Photosynthesis in plants occur when a photon excites a chlorophylls molecule, which then release an electron and trigger a chain reaction to metabolize h2o and co2 to glucose, which in turn is highly energetic. This glucose can then be used as fuel when 'mixed' with oxygen. So I searched a bit on the web and find this: http://www.nature.com/nsu/991007/991007-3.html
this guy, Darius Kuciauskas, and is team are on an interesting path. They are working on new way of using solar energy by imitating photosynthesis. While I found it clever, I think it might also be a good thing if people were looking a bit more to use the same reaction as found in plants. I don't know what would be the drawback of doing so, but if about all organism run on oxygen/glucose as an energy source, why aren't we looking to use it to? We could mimic natures by creating fuel out of Water/CO2 and release this back as Water CO2 when burning the fuel, thus exactly copying natures way of using solar energy. Anyone whith better knowledge to enlighten me?
I'd rather be sailing...
1. Flying cars (1950s)
2. Personal Planes (1960s)
3. 1/2 the world living peacefully underwater in huge cities like 'atlantis' (1970s)
4. "No one will ever need more than 640k of ram" (1980s)
5. Cold Fusion (no damnit, not from Macromedia!) (since 1940s)
I'm sure we'll all hold our collective breaths for this one!
And didn't they nearly all die? I remember the inhabitants of this world all walked around with inhalers or something to help them breath? In the end, only the miracle of that Q girl saved them all.
Something like that, anyway.
BTW, notice this comes from the DOE, which is a government ageny run by President Oilman Bush, so it's no surprise they are coming up with this far out pseudo science to distract us from demanding a real enviromental policy. Think about it.
Peace, or Not?
The whole article has a gee-whiz-we-can-do-it feel to it. It seems to me that trying to capture CO2 once it's in the atmosphere isn't the best solution. Of course, I'm not an expert...
.20/1.44 = 13.8. I hardly think that's "nomimal."
l
Another thing that caught my attention is this quote:
Cost of the entire process is equivalent to about 20 cents per gallon of gasoline - a nominal cost when one considers the recent price fluctuations at gasoline pumps across the nation, Dubey said.
I filled my tank this weekend at $1.44 per gallon.
For another interesting take on this topic go to:
www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/ecohacking.htm
The article is a couple of years old and I'm not sure how things turned out, but it's still an interesting concept.
A system similiar to this is already done on the large scale in paper making.
Where CaO is slaked to form CaOH2 in water and used to recaustizice Na2CO3 back to HaOH.
The resulting CaCO3 is recovered and converted back to CaO at the cost of a great deal of energy and time in a unit op called a lime kiln.
There is no way this system can work, assuming the same fuel source you'll using more energy then you gain. And don't eventhink of alternative sources for this one, the reaction requires too muh concentrated energy.
Veramocor
They'll be rightly sceptical, because the holes in the theory as presented in this article are big enough for you to drive your SUV through them quite comfortably.
More to the point, how many people want to wager that the energy / motoring lobbies will take this single study and claim it as proof that people can pollute as much as they like, because their children will have the technology to clear up after them?
An averge citizen in developed world generates 12 ton of CO2 per year. Each hectare of forest can hold 200 ton of carbon in its life time. Assume the avg human life is 75 yrs, we need 4.5 hectare (45000 m2) of forest per person. Again assume the total population of the developed world will be 1 billion, we need to plant 45,000,000 km2 of forest, 4.5 times the size of China. Even if we can find enough land, the task is just gigiantic.
(Well, I understand the ocean can absorb a lot of CO2, we also know there are natual forest. But, they are in equilibrium before Industrial Revolution. If our final target is to become "carbon netural", we need to fix all the carbon that we released from fossil fuel.)
It seems obvious to me that cutting back the generation of CO2 is a must no matter what we are going to do next.
Except, say, the non-replenishability of the stuff?
(Yes, that's a word! I define it as such!)
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
other people call it "leaving a potential death trap of a planet for our grand children".
Of course, being a slashdotter, you probably won't get laid, and thus you don't care about the next generations of the species.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Frankly, Mars would be a much better testbed for this kind of thing than our precious Earth!
Changes to atmospheric conditions on Earth ought to be made slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully; but this Quicklime-ade process may be just what we need to tide us over til the hydrogen era.
Under NO circumstances should we just BURN all of our Fossil Fuel! It's too valuable for making plastic and pesticide out of!
Does this scare anyone else, even a little? I mean I'm all for learning to terraform Mars, but Earth? Not everybody can even agree if the warning is a part of a natural cycle or not. Shouldn't those who believe that Man is responsible for the dramatic change in weather really ought to be concerned with the implications of us trying to make a designer atmosphere? Those who don't believe we are responsible for it ought to be concerned because now we're trying. At the very least, lets get another planet oxygenated before we start playing with the only one we've got.
Edd
Probably fighting agains rivers/seas pollution is a better idea, since seaweeds are responsible for 90% of the oxigen production are done by them.
I've heard that NASA spent 2 years developing a pen capable of writing in 0g. The russians used a pencil.
That's exactly the point, don't just start acting, try the simplicity, haven't we learned anything with the fight Windows vs. Unix? Simplicity is much better, try preserving seaweeds instead of build expensive CO2 extractors and planting trees.
Oh, and don't forget about the Hydrogen-cells engine, now a days it can be produced, but due to financial problems it is not as popular as it should be.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
There isn't that much oil left to burn anyway. Of course, when the oil is done, out comes the coal.. Lofty treaties to limit emissions are doomed by the sad fact there are no good alternatives besides nuclear power, and research into those areas is either non-existant (fission) or outright shunned (cold fusion). Anyone who thinks you can replace the per-day energy consumption of the united states with solar panels and windmills needs a crash course on thermodynamics and a hard look at numbers.
Global warming is the result of a deal with the devil we made for having an industrial society. It's too late to go back now, there's too many people on this planet - 6 billion, or so - and every last one of them wants to live like western europeans and americans.
This sounds like a troll.. but this bitching over Koyoto pisses me off. It won't work. At least Bush has the balls to recognize that, although he hasn't said it outright.
..don't panic
Unfortunately, unlike Sim*, when things go bad you can't start a new game.
Ok, I read the article and I'm wondering where is all the quicklime needed for the process going to come from? Doesn't creating it involve high-temperatures and generate CO2? Where is the energy for creating the quicklime and then running the CO2 extraction process going to come from? Fossil fuels?
Funny how the one system that has been proven to work, costs nothing to maintain, is self-constructing, uses only water and solar energy, and produces valuable products including oxygen as byproducts is never considered by government scientists...TREES.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
A facility of sufficient size could be located in arid regions, since discharged air that is deficient in carbon dioxide could have consequences on nearby plant life.
I would be very nervous about locating such a plant in Texas. Considering the quality of the politicans they have been sending us, do we really want to add the effect of oxygen deprevation on their mental functions?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
You take quicklime--probably finely ground--which is extremely energy intensive to create, run air through it so the carbon dioxide will turn into calcium carbonate, then you heat *that* to turn it back into quicklime and concentrated C02, and sequester the CO2.
Fine. Now, where does the heat come from? Are they planning to burn more fossil fuels to get it?
But wait, I have an idea. Nature has proven that atmospheric CO2 removal can be done with a much lower required input energy--plants do it with only solar power, and give back oxygen, to boot. And our solar cells today are many times more efficient at harvesting solar energy than a plant leaf is. So perhaps, as this technology is perfected, we'll be able to cover the desert with solar cells, providing all the energy we need to eliminate the carbon dioxide that's being emitted by our fossil-fuel power plants. *That* would certainly be efficient!
Last time I checked, weren't we more worried about chemicals like carbon *monoxide*, heavy metals, and other compounds that can't easily be dealt with by good 'ole-fashioned carbon-based lifeforms all too well?
And "enough fossil fuels"...right. This article reeks of propaganda.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Why do I think that this makes as much sense as a car that uses an electric engine driving the back wheels and a generator on the front wheels that keeps the batteries charged?
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Maybe if you pressured Bush to stay in the Kyoto protocol, we could eliminate the problem at the source.
Fact: The USA produces the most CO2 per populi on the planet.
JP
--- Worst tagline ever.
In any case, even if this does work, it'll piss off liberals as much as birth control pisses off conservatives. Idealogues will argue that "evil" behavior (promiscuous fuel use or promiscuous sex, depending on your leanings) will be encourgaed if it looks like we can prevent some of its consequences (global warming, STDs/babies), when in reality, we may be increasing other consequences of those behaviors not covered by the protective mechanism. Some here have already pointed out that this scheme doesn't reduce other greenhouse gasses.
To show my own political biases, this stinks of big oil trying to discourage conservation. Anyone know who funded this?
I believe this came out of a program started by Los Alamos called the Zero Emission Coal Alliance (ZECA), a project to turn coal burning power plants into environmentally friendly plants.
Basically, they combine coal, water and calcium oxide to produce hydrogen, calcium carbonate and ash. Hydrogen is used directly as the source of power (fuel cells.) The byproduct of the fuel cells is water and heat that it uses to separate the calcium carbonate back into calcium oxide with a byproduct of CO2.
The CO2 is then combined with powdered soapstone to create magnesium carbonate. Since magnesium carbonate is inert, it can be disposed of easily.
Apparently this entire process works at something like two times the efficiency of standard coal burning plants and has zero emissions into the air.
More information is available at http://www.zeca.org/
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Ha!
Never again. I just installed the latest build of mozilla {Build ID: 2002031104}
and this post looks more like +1 Funny than troll.
I don't see a single wide page, to hell with you fucking slashcode programmers
and fake ass troll wannabe bitches like -the obviously gay- Kelrc.
Get mozilla, and say BYE BYE to wide pages.
Nuclear power can be safe in practise, very efficient and has a high concentration of power (x amount of plutonium rods vs. y millions of tons of coal or oil)
but the problem in the U.S. is that the fuel can't be recycled. as a measure to counter arms manufacturing or something, they made it illegal to re-enrich the plutonium / uranium once it has been run down in a power plant. This means that once it's used once in the U.S it becomes permenant trash that nobody wants. Nevade is still fighting the Uca mountain dump site. There's no good or safe place to keep all the spend fuel...
No surprise this article came out of a government agency run by the man responsible for pulling the US out of the Kyoto treaty.
Peace, or Not?
What's Koyoto exactly? Maybe if you did the translation yourself it would be acceptable, but the translation for the Kyoto Protocol is widely known.
1. Scientifically confuse the facts on dynamic ballances of gases in the atmosphere, rate of its creation consumption and necessary/resulting climate.
2. Start a worldwide campaign predicting end of the world if nobody brings a solution.
3. Before anybody wakes up from total consternation, announce solution of your own.
4. Legalize solution as an only environmentally sensitive solution.
5. Make a goverment subsidized plant that makes whatever was always produced in the nature naturally.
6. Collect twice money on the product (biomass/ethanol), make more expensive fulel government mandated. Of course, you make it for $0.20/liter, sell for $0.40/liter, and government will get another $0.20/liter that is reasonable $2.40/galon for the consumer.
7. Get tax rebate on byproducts Oxide/Water!
What a splendid idea.
How else can you make money if the Ozone hole was already cashed on and the world end doom frenzy faded?
Petrus
Are we talking atmosphere processing plants like in the film 'Aliens'? I just whipped out the Aliens Colonial Marine Technical Manual by Lee Brimmicobe-Woood, and in the last couple of pages it details how they work (though I am guessing it is made up).
Anyway for those that are interested the plant supposedly worked by heating and ionizing the atmosphere using a high temperature electrical arc. Then to cut a long description short the gas was heated to 5000 K so that it could be broken into it's component atoms, thus oxygen could be derived. While I am no scientist (unless computer science counts) this does sound plausible going on my general knowledge.
aus.music.scrapbook
A Los Alamos-led research team today presented the topic at the 223rd annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Orlando, Fla.
I think the author has been inhaling some subject matter...seeing how they have only been in existence for 124 years.
No, Vern. They just let him in.
It also only gets rid of one pollutant. There are some other pollutants that are quite nasty. Sulphur dioxide is quite often produced by burning impure coal and petroleum. This in turn can lead to the formation of H2SO4 on contact with water. This is reason why "london fogs" of the industrial revolution where quite toxic. Another major pollutant is O3 (ozone), which is a carcinogenic agent among other things.
Nobody suspects the butterfly!
First of all gasoline release more then Carbon
Monoxide.... It also releases Benzene and other
harmfull chemicals. Gee... just extracting carbon
dioxide isn't going to save the world. What a joke.
Global warming? Really? Some people, including me, disagree with all the hype. Check out: http://members.aol.com/iceagenow Yes, I know it's an aol site but he is a respected researcher and has some interesting things to say.
This is really a neat idea, but not necessarily a good one. So they are removing C02 from the air - great! But what about all of the other gases? There are still many other harmful substances being put into the environment because of this.
This isn't a fix for an environmental problem - this is just a band aid. It's not going to the true root of the problem - overuse of fossil fuels. Companies and organizations are putting so much research and effort into using inefficient fossil fuels, but if they were to just spend a fraction of this research money on researching alternative fuels they would come up with a much better solution than this.
It's a classic example of "When all you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail". When all you have is technology, all the problems created by technology only appear to be solvable by technology. It ends up turning into a vicious circle really.
I give merit to the idea, but I foresee it as turning into an excuse for companies to just increase our dependence on fossil fueuls. If this were to be used in conjuncion with alternative energies then I would be all behind it.
Ok, so more CO2 goes into the atomosphere = more plants. Oh no, more plants!
We're not destroying the planet by producing CO2. Heavy metals in drinking water is a problem, as are many other types of polution, but CO2 is simply not any more of a problem than Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO).
Get a clue and stop buying into all of this alarmist crap. Work to stop real forms of pollution. Scientists need funding to continue research. To get funding, you have to prove that you are working on something valuable. What could be more valuable than "I'm trying to find out if we're destroying the planet!" Don't think that these people are not in this for the money any less than any corporation out there.
"Fossil fuel supplies are plentiful, and what will limit the usage of fossil fuels is the potential climatic and ecosystem changes you may see as a result of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere," said Los Alamos researcher Manvendra Dubey.
Oh, yeah, fossil fuel reserves are ENDLESS! There will be there for ever and ever! Amen!
And on top of that, this magic neverending fuel source burns so cleanly that we oly have to worry about the CO2, there aren't any other molecules released after buring fossil fuels, no soot, no nothing!
By all means, lets not waste our time and energy (pun?) with research in renewable energy sources when we have magic petra oleum lying around begging to be burned!
You can't take the sky from me...
Recent studies have shown that the Amazon river outputs an excessive amount of CO2. If that river outputs as much as it does then other rivers can be assumed to also expend CO2.
This means that the old "cliche" that combustion engines account for half of all CO2 are total bunk. They need to go back to the chalkboard and figure out just how much mother Earth actually does herself. While man does impact the system we give ourselves far too much credit for just how much an effect we can have.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
A mile is longer than a kilometer .... So there should be fewer of them in a length. A kilometer is approximately 5/8 of a mile. So, the square would be about 13.75 miles on a side.
As there are many environmentalist/socialists intent on destroying the global capitalist economy via greenhouse gas reduction standards (and letting Red China off the hook), there will be many against doing something that actually *fixes* the problem. The good environmentalists, who want a healthy planet *and* a vibrant economy, should do everything possible to support ideas like the CO2 extractor. Humankind was "industrious" enough to create the problem, and thus we can fix it too. Perhaps we'll finally be able to have our cake and eat it too... that is, until the fossil fuels run out.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Am I the only one to find this strange : each time a story talks about taxing cars, taxing fuel or signing the Kyoto protocol (for example) to help solving the global warming problem, a whole lot of people come in and claim that global warming doesn't exist, that it's a natural process, or that G.W. Bush is right not to do anything to solve it. Now that something comes out that might solve the problem by industrial means, everybody seems to find it cool and interesting...
Let's just hope that they are slowly waking up...
JB.
I've seen a couple of highly rated posts here mentioning that everyone should just plant trees and then we wouldn't have this problem. As much as I agree with the sentiment there have been a few studies recently that point to the idea that forests aren't really all that efficient in storing carbon dioxide.
. html
2 36000/236276.stm
Study from this April
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSScience0204/10_carbon-ap
Study from 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_
Also, don't forget that planting vast numbers of trees is something that in many places would be a huge ecological change. Just because they provide lots of nice benefits to people doesn't mean that trees wouldn't kill off native species in areas not currently forested.
Human climate control has been bantered around for some time now. In fact the Global trade in CO2 emissions encourages the idea. The simple fact remains that the existing CO2/O2 global regulations is poorly understood. (The ages of Gaia)
Some more feasible suggestions include the fertilising plankton with the bio-available iron to promote blooms that would mop up a significant amount of CO2 and deposit it on the ocean floor. It is then bound in the sedimentation process.
But despite the ideas there is only one planet and no chance for a f*** up.
I personally subscribe to James Lovelock's Gaia theory of global climate regulation. The climate has controlled itself quite well for the last 3.4 - 4 billion years (with no climate regulation tax or middle management layer!) the real need is to limit our climate impact.
Climate regulation is a dangerous idea steaming from fix-it style engineering ethos.
Enjoy :0)
A pantheist
I heard in a lecture given by Carl Sagan some years ago that the flatulence of cows was the #1 CO2 emission source - fossil fuel was a distance 2nd. Was this/is this true?
Small amounts, but the methane in a fart contributes far more towards global warming than the carbon dioxide does.
It would be neat to have a home unit. Have it use solar panels for power. Instead of generating carbon dioxide for resale, just remove the carbon.
I wouldn't have any idea how something like that would work, but it should be possible. If carbon can join to oxygen with the release of energy, then carbon can be removed from it with the addition of energy.
Using solar energy that would otherwise heat my house and force me to run my A/C higher would be a benefit. Then all we need to do is have the carbon placed in the correct format, such as a gemstone.
Lets take the chemistry a bit further...
Converting the CaCO3 back into CaO will take a minimum of 176kJ/mol CaCO3. (CaCO3 + 176kJ -> CaO + CO2). Not even getting into thermodynamics, it will actually take more energy than that - since it can't be done in anything other than a CO2 atmosphere (since they want to recover the CO2).
But for sake of argument, we will use the 176kJ figure. Now, it will take an enormous amount of HEAT to to release the CO2. How are we going to create this heat? How about fossil fuels!
Let's say we use gasoline to heat the CaCO3 and recover the CO2. Gasoline is nearly the hotest burning fossil fuel. Oxidation(burning) of gasoline follows 2C8H12 + 25O2 -> 16CO2 + 18H2O + 5249kJ.
Wow that's hot! Problem though - we just released 16CO2's in that reaction! No problem, we'll just scrub them out with all the rest of CO2 in the atmosphere (notice this machine is getting more and more complicated as we speak).
The energy required to suck that CO2 that we just produced back into a bottle is going to cost us 2816kJ. Which leaves us with 2433kJ to extract more CO2. Unfortunately, the world isn't perfect and we are assuming 100% efficiency.
What does that mean in the real world you ask? Well, given a 100% efficient blackbox into which we feed gasoline and air:
To extract 1 ton of CO2, we will use about 1/4 ton of gasoline (.255ton), almost a ton of O2 (.894ton), and will produce nearly a half ton of H2O (.402ton).
So for all our time and effort, we just created a larger demand for fossil fuels for a process which not only removes CO2 from the atmosphere, but also a NEARLY EQUAL AMOUNT OF OXYGEN!!!
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
Environmentalists big beaf with SUV's is not necessarily their emissions...its more the lousy fuel efficiency. Cleaning the air is not going to cut down oil usage in any way, shape, or form. Now if you could make an SUV run on an electric motor and generate all of the electricity in central locations, then you might have an argument.
Its alright - he does the maths on those Mars probes....
I do not claim to know as much on the chemical and ecological issues regarding to global warming, but seem to recall something called the kyoto agreement which was effectively killed by the most important contributor of the so-called greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere...
KISS:
... if you and me spent that $160B/year on 'other things', we could launch 4 missions to Mars!, even at a whopping $40B each -- and still pay lots of people to work their jobz (just for M2M rather than FixOrRepairDaily). And that does not include efficiencies that come from scaling... And, oh yeah, that was _every year_! Well enough OT ranting :)
Most cars have a catalytic converter as part of their exhaust stream, right?
Add this kind of contraption to cars and even slight reabsorbtion of CO2 would become very significant.
As well, as a technology slated for mass distribution, the price would drop fast, rather than a humungus plant in the desert, like they mention.
In summary, there could be a _good_ use for all these things called cars. FWIW I hate the love affair with cars we Americans++ have... Very simplistic calculations show me that with 15-20% less _new cars_ each year, there would be, as predicted in the late 60's by '2001:The Movie', moon bases and all that. Why? E.G.: Ford with about 15-20% of the total car market takes in about $US160B / year
So lets hope for new cars that consume CO2 rather than produce it! And if we buy a new car every 4 years rather than every 3, maybe someday in "just 30 years" we'll be able to take a Pan AM space elevator up to orbit to board the Mars Express. Any takers?
(btw my math is simplistic but if you want more details, just ask; I could use more eyes on the bugs)
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
I know when global warming will be solved! It will be solved when the only way to cure global warming becomes the dissolution of the catholic church, promotion of homosexual lifestyle, and vegetarianism. BTW, the chemicals to stop it will only be capable of being made from aborted fetuses. Oh yes, all former or currently Russia/China aligned countries much be made exempt from helping for some curious reason.
Once we develope technology like this and implement it, we'll have no need for trees. Think of all the farms and houses that could be built on forest land once we clear out all the Earth's forest. More room for people to live, more food for people to eat. Seriously people, you need to stop thinking about the 'trees' and 'animals'. The sooner we develope this technology the better. Trees and forest are just havens for enviromental wackos and useless animals. That land would be better served as farmland for crops or grazing land for cattle.
Thermodynamics dictates we can approach to 100% efficiency on that process as much as we like, or we can do it as fast as we like but not both. I don't know temperature differences barely enough to provide sufficient speed translates into ~10% efficiency or ~100% efficiency, but I guess neither do you.
make the SUV run on leaves.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Trees are fine, until they die at which point they normall get eaten by small things that produce C02, or go down to smallow river/see beds and do the same. unleyy you plan to make a huge stockpile of charcoal or somthing trees are more or less useless.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
"...20 cents per gallon of gasoline"...
According to the US DOT Transportation Data Book, in 1999, Americans used 154 _billion_ gallons of gasoline. So, it would only cost 30 billion dollars to scrub CO2 from the air! Think of all the trees we could plant!
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
Do you know where the majority of the photosynthesis occurs in nature ?
:)
Simple, the blue green algae in the ocean.
Why not, (in a BG rich area of the ocean, anchor just such a platform, "bubbling the co2," to a fair depth, by the time it surfaces you should have extracted a good percentage of the dissolved co2.
Using the principals they speak of,using wind as a tranport vector, using area in the ocean, dont have to worry about nearby (surface) plantlife, and creating such a BG rich area would be an amazing boom to localsea life, wonder how feasable a floating shelf 200 square miles is
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Tee hee. From the Biodiesel page:
Among the many advantages of biodiesel fuel: [...] Non-flammable [...]
I'd really like my fuel to burn. You know, for the producing of the energy and the putt-putting of the engine.
Yeah, yeah, I know that they mean you can't douse a hobo with it and toss him a lit match, but it's still funny marketing material.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold.html here's one theory...
IANAEM (I Am Not An English Major) but,
Actually it is a pun.
The phrase, "I'm not going to hold my breath" basically means the same thing as "I'm not going to wait for that"
So in that sense it is a play on words. He means both that he won't wait for that to happen and literally that he won't hold his breath.
Cheers
I thought part of the issue with pollution (at least in fresh water systems) was that as CO2 increased, the algae levels grew in a huge way and blocked out various things that were needed in the water - light being one - and effectively changed the ph of the water with their CO2 to O2 conversion and this was bad....
but you are talking of bg algae, which I am less familiar with (other than the health nuts think it is a source of much energy and other properties to eat), and also salt water systems... perhaps that makes all the difference.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
"Carbon dioxide gas also can be sold commercially to the petrochemical industry, which uses large quantities of it to extract fossil fuels"
So They're going to accellerate the "harvest" of fossil fuels, thereby increasing the CO2 production, and on and on.
Reminds me of 'dude where's my car?':
(Chinese drive-thru lady)"And Then?"
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Hi!
Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people. There are, as of April 1, 2000, 281,421,906 people in the United States. So we'd need 58,145 acres of quicklime to process CO2 for just the United States.
Quiz: How big is Rhode Island?
Let's just skip the obligatory comparison to the size of the state of Rhode Island--and concede that we're talking about a lot of land. And, oh yeah--we're also talking about a huge amount of quicklime. Which will, of course, need to be replenished all over those tens of thousands of acres. And building a collection system to capture the calcium carbonate from all those tens of thousands of acres wouldn't be child's play, either. And then it has to be processed, and so forth.
This is the kind of government proposal that used to give the Keynesian macro-economics professors a head rush. Just think of the economic multipliers--think of all the jobs created finding and surveying and buying some 60,000 acres of land. Think of all the money spent on massive construction equipment necessary to find, dig, and move 60,000 acres worth of quicklime. Think of all the steel involved in building the equipment necessary to collect all that calcium carbonate. Think of all the steel, electricity, and machinery that will be required to do all this processing. Think of the tens of thousands of jobs we're talking about. Whoopie!
And, oh yeah! Think about the amount of CO2 generated by the electricity used to produce all that steel; and all the CO2 generated by all those cars driven by all those employees, and all those earth-movers scraping depleted quicklime out, and pushing new quicklime back in.
Still with me? Now consider this: there aren't a lot of vacant 60,000 acre tracts of land available in the Washington, D.C. metro area. So a project of this magnitude would require moving all those tens of thousands of people to wherever this (by definition) arid wasteland would be.
This isn't simple, and almost certainly not feasible
Okay, I'm just a simple programmer and part-time college professor. What could I possibly know? It seems pretty clear to me that this announcement wasn't peer-reviewed, or if it was, the peer-review processing happened at a really good office party. The chemistry might be "simple," but the project would not be.
Petroleum is a finite resource. It will run out sooner or later, and there is strong evidence indicating that production will peak in the next few years. We should, of course, do as much as possible to curb pollution. But perhaps it makes sense to invest now in cleaner forms of renewable energy?
Waitaminnit, this is the US... what am I thinking?
Hmmm... wonder where could we put that?
Maybe I'm just turning into a conspiracy theorist, but this looks like it's trying to get people to waste more fuel, and possibly support drilling in more places, such as the oft-contested ANWR.
I don't understand why the US government seems to be so intent on getting people to continue using lots of energy (/me says as he sits in an air-conditioned apartment with numerous computers running constantly..). Okay, I do know -- damn near everyone in the administration came from an oil company. Bush, Cheney, hell, even Condoleeza Rice..
Anyway.. Conserving just a little here and there can do quite a bit, especially since folks here in the US already use the most energy per capita.
I agree with the other comments. Plant a tree (or ten, or a hundred..) Get a slightly smaller car, or at least one with a better engine/transmission. Support biodiesel or other renewable energy sources.
Also, the article doesn't appear to say you can make fuel out of the carbon dioxide -- they just found another way to get a supply for people who already use it (the big one being oil refineries).. So, okay, it allows you to re-use CO2 that gets into the air, rather than just leaving it there. Still, I think trees are probably more efficient at it than this idea (an unscientific quick glance at it, unfortunately).
Somehow, this article just seems to be misplaced optimism..
Why would you want to extract dissolved CO2? The problem we have with CO2 is too much of it is in the atmosphere, not in the ocean. In fact, I read about one solution to our atmospheric CO2 troubles: save it and dissolve it in the ocean. Apparently the ocean can handle many more hundreds of billions of tons. The problem with that is the cost. It would add about 33 percent to the cost of electricity.
The solution doesn't seem on the face of it to be that bright an idea. Firstly fossil fuels are still a FINITE resource (however much there is it still has to be finite). Continuing to remove these resources from the environment is presumably going to end up with more remote and currently protected places being tapped for their fossil fuel wealth.
It also requires energy to convert the Limestone into quicklime (which produces CO2) the produced CO2 is then pumped into the ground! How long before the site is saturated with CO2? The other option mentioned is reacting it with minerals to lock up the CO2. Minerals that presumably have to be mined and moved to the site in question (using more energy) and are a FINITE resource.
Who pays for this. If these plants are government funded, they effectively amount to a subsidy to the oil industry. If they are funded by a tax on fuel, then perhaps a positive side effect would be making alternative (and renewable) forms of energy more competitive with non renewable forms of energy.
Just a few thoughts.
Yes apparently I do. Cars and trucks DO NOT prodcudce 1/2 the CO2 in the world. What people produce is an insignifigant ammount compared to the volcano's and other natural releases in the world.
Now other things like sulphiric acid, carbon monoxide and such can do nasty things. Hell we don't even *know* if what is going on in the world is natural or un-natural. I mean, the reason the ice shelfs in the antartic are melting is because the antartic continent is heating up.
Science is only as good until a new theory comes out.
Om, nomnomnom...
Seriously, the absolute first thing I thought of turns out to be the one they don't address. How much energy does it take to run this thing? All that shuttling rock around and heating will eat up a few joules, that's for sure. In a worst case scenario it'll produce more waste than it captures.
The fundamental value for any energy source is not how much it costs in dollars, but how much it costs in energy. An energy "source" that requires as much or more energy to harvest and use as it produces is not a viable energy source at all. This is a common dodge, which is often hard to measure. For instance the energy it takes to mine uranium is huge - possibly more than you get from using it in your nuke, to say nothing of the plant construction and maintenance. More directly, many photovoltaic cells require 1/2 or more of the energy they capture in their lifetime to produce (however cheaper, newer thin film cells require considerably less, despite their lower conversion efficiencies).
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
carbon dioxide won't kill you.
"Fossil fuel supplies are plentiful, and what will limit the usage of fossil fuels is the potential climatic and ecosystem changes you may see as a result of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere." _plentiful_ hah! Only an environmental irresponsible yankee could have written such a nonsense.
Suck up all CO2 in area inhabited by enemy (probably idealistic but for the purposes of argument assume its possible)
=> plant life dies
=> livestock die
=> enemy has to starve or buy their food from us, if we're at war, we refuse to sell them food
=> Enemy defeated. If we're not at war, our economy goes through the roof as long as nobody objects to us picking on the little guys.
The most prominent sources of CO2 these days are the so-called "scientists" ( read: socialist environmental activist twits ) pedaling this junk.
Want to reduce the rate of CO2 release into the atmosphere? Reduce our reliance on foreign sources of energy and the potential stranglehold on us by OPEC? All we need do is institute a sales tax on all carbon-based motor fuel products increasing by 1% per month for the next 40 years. It's a slow enough increase that will allow our economy to adjust without major upheaval. Of course any politician dim-witted enough to actually propose this solution will be be lucky to avoid being tarred and feathered much less having any chance whatsoever of being reelected.
CO2 is about 370 parts per million (ppm)
while O2 is about 21000 parts per million,
so scrubbing out ALL the CO2 still leaves
20630 parts per million O2.
We just need to seed kudzu in all the oasis we can find in the world's deserts. In 2,000 years the planet would be a rainforest.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
most of the oxygen that we breathe comes from the algea in the ocean and not from the trees. according to discovery, it provides half of what we breathe. impressive isn't it?
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
(1) there is no machine, gizmo, doodad or computer that can magically and painlessly fix global warming. Y'all are going to have to get used to paying the price for petrol as the rest of us: about $7 per (British) gallon.
(2) Terraforming Mars? *sigh*... why is it that so many apparently smart people seem to be trapped at a mental age of 14? Grow up, folks, it's NOT - GOING - TO - HAPPEN.
(3) if anyone wants to put some money on this, mail me or reply below.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Very interesting article, but I am left with the following musings...
1) Science will solve a problem that science got us into; that means another link in the chain of problems. (Lets put more CO2 into the air so we can harvest it and continue carbon based combustion.)
2) The US is staunchly against Kyoto, and now Canada is double tracking on Kyoto, because of "unknown financial impact on the economy" that really means "it will cost too much" where it is "the economy" that has caused the problem.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
It might be that we run out of sea-water (because it boils away) before we run out fossil fuels anyway, if thermal run-off happens...
Welcome to Venus!
Trees are about as efficient for straining out CO2 as horses are at transporting people.
If we didn't replace horses with cars, we wouldn't have to replace trees with this thing.
Besides, trees aren't cutting it at the moment (err, so to speak) and trying to acquire and protect a new forest the size of the United States is harder than finding 60Km^2 in a desert.
Kevin Fox
There is nothing more powerful in chemical conversion than life. Life converts chemicals faster than any acid or agent known to man short of the sun or other nuclear reactions.
Life, however, is subject to a narrow band of habitable conditions. Raise or lower the ph, temperature, gas content of it's growth medium, or food availability and certain forms of life ceace.
Left to it's own devices, life will adapt but maybe not as we would wish. We think of ourselves as intelligent - let us prove it by stopping our meddling with natural processes. Creating manmade forms of removing gasses from the atmosphere will only create more expenses and costs - not to mention byproducts. We need to work WITH nature rather than battling it.
For energy we have the sun. Almost all forms of energy can be traced back to the sun in one form or another. Nature has found a way to convert solar energy into stored energy in the form of sugars. We have found ways of converting solar energy into usable gases which have a net zero effect on pollution - hydrogen/oxygen electrolysis for recombination in a feul cell. Lets develop this technology and avoid the original problem altogether. We could make better or more efficient alcohol or hydrogen burning engines at the very least.
Our very health is dependant on economic considerations. It seems that there isn't much money to be made from fixing the problem - profits are being made treating the symptoms - bottled water and air filtration systems. I guess those who profit feel that they can buy a livable atmosphere and potable water and poison free food while the rest of us suffer and die. What a bleak future we're likely to have - what a promising future we could all have if we just think. Assist or allow nature to fix itself.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Apparently not.
This would save us from global warming if it even existed. Noone has yet to prove that global warming even exists or if we are having "normal" changes in our climate as we cycle. I mean, it's not like we are due for a change, the pole isn't moving or anything:) Plus, there is geological evidence to state that changes like we are experiencing are not unlike what the earth has gone through many times on its own.
I find it comical that such seeming intelligent people can be duped into believing the political agenda of a bunch of left wing extremists. I suppose you don't think we should let kids drink milk either.
No wonder they needed massive fusion reactors. That doesn't sound like a very efficient way to do it.
Since thermodynamics tells us you can't get all the energy back from heating the CO2 that energy would be lost. The only way that it makes sense if if the planet was really cold and the excess heat was useful to the colony and/or directly heating the general area.
They are extracting carbon dioxide, not oxygen. This should have no effect on oxygen levels.
"The calcium carbonate is then heated to yield pure carbon dioxide and quicklime, which is recycled back into the extractor." My question is, where does the heat come from? Nuclear does not seem to be a viable option for waste reasons. Sunlight would not be potent enough. There is not much geothermal energy around - most of it is in state parks. Gasoline and coal may be a good solution for the system! Lets see, take a lake of lime and heat it in a big furnace to take a small amount of carbon from the furnace exhaust. I am no chemist, but this sounds like it would create much more pollution than a factory.
Wired had an article about a year or so ago (can't remember the issue...sorry) about scientists that tried to promote blue green algae growth by dumping iron shavings into the water (iirc... it was something weird)... in an attempt to get the algae to combat global warming.
... the article was a minor one. I believe the article with in the first half of 2001 if anyone wants to check their archives
It failed. Not only did they not grow enough algae to call the experiment a mild success, but there were side effects, i believe they managed to kill off alot of fish.
I know I'm light on the details, but history is full of these kinds of things... someone thinks there is a simple answer to a problem, but their efforts are short-sighted and only create a larger problem (the US gov't has done this a million times).
Unfortunately, I've looked through www.wired.com/wired
perlgolf: the only place where shorter is better
A general heating of the atmosphere may support a great deal more plant life than we have now. Seems like a fairly dangerous experiment, however.
Yes. Once again, I find myself trying to clear up the misconception that global warming = warmer weather. It does not. If anything, expect more blizzards.
Global warming destabilizes the climate. It produces as much colder weather as warm.
I ran into some tourists from Hawaii last summer in the local 7-11. It was 50 degrees out, they were like, wtf, why is it so cold? I said, "Welcome to Boston, the global warming capital of the US."
The weather up here is absurd. Blizzards in May, t-shirt weather in January. Sometimes they alternate by week, sometimes every other day. It's absolute chaos.
Sure, a warmer earth would be great. However, all we understand at this point is that warming it up makes it spin out of control.
If global warming continues, sell your northern property and move south. Global warming will hit the warmer climates last. These Hawaiians, for example, had certainly never experienced it at home, otherwise they wouldn't have been wondering why a summer day could be so cold.
Remember that movie "The Arrival" ? Power-plants, I mean teraform factories.
Btw, you know there's a form of solid methane called Methane Hydrate on the ocean floor?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
CO2 from the atmosphere enters the earh's oceans in the artic. Utimately, the carbon ends up as part of shells in the form of calcium carbonate via the ocean's Carbonic Acid cycle.
I guess nobody takes oceanography in college any more. I remember this from nearly 20 years ago.
Do what we have known forever is our best economical bet: switch to 100% ethonal alchohol.
In HS I did a science project with ethonal. I produced enough alchohol from fermenting garbage to power a small remote control car. The alchohol provided a much higher octain rating than gas, burnt much more cleanly, and kept the engine cleaner.
The main reason that alcohol isn't taken seriously as a fule alternative is because many people make the claim that it is too expensive to produce. That's like saying the PC would never sell because it was too expensive to produce. Alcohol could benefit just as much from mass-production as any other resource. Some conjecture suggests that the natural temperature in the mid-western states would allow construction of massive solar-powered brewing facilities to produce the alcohol from waste grain, third-grade hops and organic garbage. These types of facilities should be capable of producing enough alchohol to fule the majority of the cars in the US: just from waste resources.
But don't expect OPEC and the oil industry to let that happen without tons of lobbying and some mud-slinging.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
If we could construct a device like this on venus. Venus might get a temperature and atmosphere similiar to earth. Then we can go live there.
duh.
stop this techno bullshit and learn from the
ancient ones.
hmm 20 seconds. ok.
one one thousand
two one thousand
three one thousand
four one thousand
five one thousand
six one thousand
seven one thousand
eight one thousand
nine one thousand
ten one thousand
If there is one thing that pisses me off it's the electric car people. How will generating power in a central spot save fuel? There are losses in generating power, transmitting power and storing power for later use. All of which add up to as much or more than a internal combustion engine.
Plus only a pencil neck weenie would rather than an electric motor over a vee-8.
60,000 acres is the size of a moderate wheat ranch in Montana. It's a tiny fraction of the size of the US, and it doesn't have to be centralized. We're talking about facilities comparable in size and complexity to sewage treatment plants, on a per-capita basis. If we can build power plants and the infrastructure to support them, we can certainly build these.
As for the industrial side of getting all that quicklime, that's not a huge endeavor compared to any other kind of mining. We pull so much copper and bauxite and titanium and coal out of the earth that extracting a few million tons of quicklime wouldn't change the scale of the world's mining industry perceptibly.
Would it work? Maybe, maybe not. BUT, the argument against it on size and complexity does not appear valid.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Centralized energy generation is by no means the perfect solution, but it does offer one significant advantage over what we have now. By moving the generation of power out of the cars and into that plants, it is possible to optimize the means of generating electricity for the locale. Thus places which can effectively generate electricity from wind power or solar power can use that rather than fossil fuels.
Of course, the electricity would not have to be generated at the plant. Houses equipped with solar panels, etc could generate their own electricity for their cars.
April 15th, 2034 Dissociated Press
---
New research suggests that the use of CO2 scrubbers in our planet's atmosphere during the past 20 years may indeed have permanently damaged the delicate balance of our environment. Scientists have dubbed this phenomenon "the drafty window effect" and believe it may be the principle cause of Global Cooling. Last week, environmentalists were outraged when the latest satellite data suggested that massive new ice shelves have begun forming in Antarctica. "We need the government to recognize the severity of this situation and take action immediately through an international treaty," one protester commented. Last month, the current Republican administration rejected the Otoyk Treaty, which would have mandated that all CO2 scrubbers be shut down and new fossil-fuel power plants be installed to help increase atmospheric CO2 levels. "There's really no scientific evidence that CO2 scrubbers are having a significant impact on the environment. Harvesting CO2 for landmass creation is a valuable industry that we're not ready to abandon," one official told reporters, "this so called 'global cooling' could all be a natural cycle. We really don't have enough data to say for sure." Some scientists claim that Global Cooling is a temporary phenomenon resulting from a period of reduced solar and seismic activity. "We've known for years that volcanoes are the largest producers of 'drafty window'-insulating gasses," one researcher mentioned. Regardless, it's clear that this debate will continue for some time.
I had no idea that methane was such an active greenhouse gas.
Carbon Dioxide isn't a problem for the planet. It's a problem for the species of life that live on the planet. Some of them aren't bothered much. Some find it an opportunity. Some find it an annoyance. And some find it deadly.
Humans fall in the middle range here. Unfortunately, many of our cities are built at around sea level. Scientific American recently published a rather alarming article about New Orleans. Basically it said that the city was in a shallow bowl at near sea level, and now the height above sea level was small enough, and the barriers to surf were small enough, that we could expect the city to become submerged to a depth of up to 30 feet the next time a hurricane came in from an unfavorable direction. It also listed the efforts that were underway to correct the problem, but to me they looked like the "too little" variety. They aren't (yet) "too little, too late", but things are clearly headed in that direction.
Note that this doesn't threaten the human species. This threatens a bunch of individual people. The only way that the CO2 emission would threaten the human species is if rising sea levels instigated a war for living space. But that doesn't seem impossible. (Still, is it fair to attribute that problem to global warming? Perhaps one should realize that causation just isn't simple, and say that global warming was a contributary factor.)
Species that can't move for one reason or another (e.g., they are in a preserve, and surrounded by people), or which are sensitive to the amount of CO2 around (e.g., coral reefs that are more soluble in a more acidic ocean) are more directly threatened. Species that can move north (or south) are less threatened. They can adapt by moving to a new location.
The earth has often been warmer in the past than it is now. But the life on the planet is adapted to the current climate. Changes will cause a lot of stress, and numerous deaths both directly and indirectly. So it's not minor, either.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hey! I represent that remark!
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
ChooseClimate.ORG has a article that reviews many alternative climate engineering approaches for either removing CO2, or perhaps more intriguing, reducing the amount of sunlight that gets to planet's surface.
The article reviews an otherwise unrelated strategy that also involve using quicklime, but notes that burning the fuel needed for quickening the lime produces almost as much CO2 as the lime is able to absorb.
I think this system will only work if the CO2 absorbent material is produced in way thast doesn't produce any signitficant amount of additional CO2, for example using either nuclear energy, or waste heate from another process, to convert the lime, or finding a material that takes solar energy to produce a CO2 absorber (wait a minute, we already something that does that, its called photosynthesis).
Work for Change & GET PAID!
You see, during winter the roads become icy and slippery, so salt is poured on the roads (because the salt disolves into the ice and lowers the melting temperature). Also, a lot of sand is poured on the roads at intersections to add a little more grit and traction.
Therefore, when you drive on Minnesota roads in the winter, your tires spray a lovely mixture of salt-water, snow, slush, sand, and gravel all over the underbody of your car. Then when you park, this rust cocktail remains frozen against the frame and body until you get around to washing it.
Under these conditions, a car that is not properly rustproofed will usually last about 6-8 years, tops. Mufflers and exhaust systems go much quicker. You gotta replace those every couple of years around here.
As for the practicallity of replacing an engine... My last car was worth a little under $2000 when the engine blew out. (It was hail-damaged or it would have been closer to $3000). Replacing the engine would have cost me about $1500, assuming I could find a rebuilt engine that fit. Puting that $1500 engine into a sub-$2000 car (which had 160,000 miles on it) was not a sensible thing to do, because it still had the original transmission (so that would probably need replacing within the next year or two, costing at least another $1000). So after 11 years of use (good rust-proofing), I finally replaced it. I donated it to a local school and bought a brand new vehicle. (I bought the last one new, too. Only way to go, if you can afford it. Cars get safer and more efficient every year, so the latest model is always the best one to get. Also, no previous owner means I will know exactly how well the car has been treated for its entire life.) I intend to drive this one into the ground as well.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I used blast furnace slag (magnesium and calcium sulphides and oxides, mostly) and reacted it a 6-tank vessel I built in my garage. I knew about this thing at Los Alamos and thought it was the coolest thing ever that I was doing the same research as the guys that built the first nuke.
-Cruz
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
"(such as internal combustion engines) which are responsible for half of the world's carbon dioxide pollution"
Baloney. PROVE IT, offer SOME proof, don't just say BS like that. Non-facts stated as facts are becoming more common.
I wish when people spewed this BS, that they'd also mention that true sciencists don't agree with the doom and gloom scare tactics preferred by extreme environmentalists.
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
Wired had an article about a year or so ago . . .
Here's a link to the WIRED Article. The experiment you're talking about was called the Southern Ocean iron release experiment [SOIREE].
Some additional information on this strategy can be found here and here.
The problem behind any algae based solution is A) get enough nutrients to algae (thus the iron), and B) get the algae to sink to sea bottom where the CO2 won't just be released back into the atmosphere when the algae decomposes. The problem with this experiment was that A) worked, but B) wasn't addressed.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
When I said extracted, I meant the Blue Green Algae should have extracted,
Yes I am thinking I want to PUT the Co2 into the Water and the Algae will "extract" much of it for its own uses (reproduction its air, etc)
I dont want to pull it out of the ocean youre right that wouldnt make sense, I wan the Algae to extract it (or most of it)
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
For 20 cents per gallon, you could subsidise a better fuel such as Biodiesel [biodiesel.com] which absorbs more carbon while growing than it emits while being used as fuel.
In fact the Diesel engine was originally develooped to burn renewable fuels such as vegitable oil - mainly in response to shortages of crude oil in wartime due to lack of local oil resources plus blockades.
Diesels can also use the byproduct fats and used oils from food processing that are no longer suitable for human consumption. THAT's not a food/fuel tradeoff.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people.
They're talking one square yard of SURFACE area, not a square yard of GROUND. (Unless the engineers are dumb enough just to let the quicklime lie around and scrape it up with bulldozers for recycling.)
You can STACK it - trays in rooms in floors in skyscrapers. You can GRIND IT UP into powder to get LOTS of surface area in a tiny volume, then put a massive volume inside a container.
Three-D has LOTS more surface than Two-D, as much more as you want.
It's time to think INSIDE a box.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The real question is why people stick around in an area with a food shortage? ... Why not just move the people out of there? ... Is there something I'm missing here?
Yes.
There are already people living and working in the areas with food. A sudden influx of starving foreigners who really "will work for food" depresses the labor market and their standard of living - quite possibly down to that of the starving immigrants, or even lower.
So there is resistance to such migrations by the people in the "area with food" - or land or whatever. This can be very violent, even if the people in the moved-to area are of the same race, culture, and citizenship. (Read the history of the "dust bowl" in the US for an example.) When the immigrants are NOT clones of those already there it gets worse, to the point of genocide.)
Examples of this abound, even in the US. (Consider the treatment of the Irish Ptoato-Famine immigrants, especially in the West - or their effect on the Indian population.) The US is able to absorb immigrants now without major wars resulting - but only because of its massive surplusses of food and goods. Yet even here there are repercussions and conflict.
But to really understand the violence invovled, recall that all the "colonialist genocides of indigineous people" are the result of just such migrations as you propose as a solution to a short-term (decades) resource shortage.
In the most visible current example of how migration can lead to cofilict the migration was over land for establishing, and then securing, a state, rather than food. But you can still see in the Israel/Palestine conflict the result, after only half a century, of a migration for resource acquisition.
Isn't it better to try to figure out how to grow food, or make something to trade for food, where the starving people currently live? Even if it means they're dependent on charity until they get their infrastructure bootstrapped?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Plants actually switch over to metabolizing oxygen in to CO2 at night, so that over a 24 hr cycle, plants do very little to change CO2 to oxygen, except for any energy stored.
The vast majority of O2, IIRC, comes from microorganisms in the ocean. So if CO2 is building up, we may be polluting the oceans too much, or the little buggers may just not be able to keep up.
My problem is how the machine was presented. They said something to the effect of "Trap CO2 with lime, heat lime to let out and bottle, repeat." The energy to heat the lime has to come from somewhere, where will it come from? If they burn anything for that energy, they'll operate at a loss (guaranteed). Solar? Wind? On site nuclear reactor? How are they going to minimize the loss of lime as the thing operates? Just engineering concerns, I suppose, but there are lots of things that are possible except for "engineering concerns."
BlackGriffen
I don't think anyone was recording the atmospheric carbon levels back before the industrial age. I may be wrong though.
Biodiesel sounds okay, but GreaseCar is already here! The solution is not one system but a variety of smaller solutions. Moderation in all things.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
while this is great news, will similar techniques work on other pollutants such as carbon monoxide and partially-combusted hydrocarbons? even though we all learned in high school chemistry that combustion of a hydrocarbon produces CO2 and water, this is not the full picture. Most combustion reactions are not complete combustions so that the products are lower hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide and other ugly things in addition to CO2 and water. If CO2 is the big greenhouse gas, this is a great thing for the environment, but it is only a partial step toward "repairing the earth's atmosphere to pre-industrial-age levels" since there are many [harmful] impurities in the air besides CO2.
...when Vinny is interrogating some redneck and asking him to identify 'these little green things blocking your view.' Yes, TREES, people! Are these scientists slightly more-educated versions of this hick? Have they never heard of trees? Why waste money and time on complex, esoteric technological solutions when simply planting trees will work? I laugh at all these yuppie suburbanites who have manicured lawns and spend so much time and money. Why not revert the land to its natural state? Replace the grass with trees and shrubberies. Not only is it more environmentally friendly (less water, no pesticides or herbicides, more CO2 extraction), but it also takes negligible effort to maintain! What is this American obsession with having a sprawling lawn? It's silly. I'd much prefer to see a house in a wooded, natural setting than one in the middle of a denuded lot with a couple of loblolly pine-trees planted as a token gesture.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Hi everybody! ... ... ...) which need some more energy. Also, this minerals are rare to find (mainly metalic mining) and usually hard to extract and process. Not a good idea at all.
I'm a mining engineer (earth engineer's, one of my teachers used to say). Please, forgive me for my dreadful english, as i'm not a native speaker.
This clearly is an intent to mislead the average non tech/science people into the stupid belief that always a solution exists, so we have nothing to bother and can continue with our wasteful [western] way of life.
Have a look at the good comment made by arivanov before, he makes a good point on the chemical process.
They want to appear like they have made a great invent/discovery, but everybody with a very basic chemical knowledge knows what happens when CaO is left in the open air
Milestone (CaCO3=CaO+CO2) is a natural stone, made from the skeletons of marine biota at other geological era, so it contains CO2 captured from the atmosphere in the (far) past.
First, you have to get a good amount of milestone per plant, so the natural place is near some place where the rock comes to surface. This means that you can't simply place the plant anywhere, the geology must be the right one.
Mining the milestone takes some amount of energy, and to be processed, it must be reduced to a given granulometry (size of grain), which takes some more energy. Let's concede that, since it will be reutilised, we only will need an initial amount of milestone (and energy) to get started.
The only way to get CaO (quicklime) is heating milestone, usually in big rotative ovens, so a good amount of energy is needed, and all the CO2 captured in the milestone will be freed, plus the CO2 from the fuel needed. The CaO will react again with the air's CO2 and we will repeat the cycle.
They suggest injecting the CO2 underground or reacting it with minerals, but
To inject it you need a porous rock, able to retain the gas, and only some places are geologically suitable, mainly old oil wells, so you also will have the infrastructure. Note that pumping the CO2 will need high pressures and some more energy to add to the balance. This geological storage will also become filled eventually, but other technological problems will arise before, meaning that you will be able to use only a (small) percentage of the available rock porosity.
Reacting the CO2 with minerals is much more unpracticable, since very few minerals are able to react chemically with CO2 (behaves as a very weak acid), and they'll do only under very special conditions (you'll need fine granularity, heat
As spotted before by arivanov, you'll need to make the CO2+CaO reaction in a wet enviroment, which is unsuitable in a dry desert (the low humidity will take away the water if you not use a lot of energy to recover it), or making the reaction in dry, will require to reduce the the CaO to a very fine dust, which is very dangerous (it is chemically agressive), expensive, and must be mixed with a great flux of air, so, if do in open air, you will have a great area polluted with CaO (and workers will have to stay into hermetic suits), or you'll need a big reactor where the air must flow and the dust must be recovered at the other end (needing a lot of energy to move the air and a lot more to recover the dust)
Also, keep in mind that the eficiency will be lower as there are less CO2 in the local area where the plant is, so better choose an open and windy area, in high lands or near the sea.
It seems they have discovered the wheel, but a square one! Not a very eficient way to roll.
Now we all know what happens when atmospheric processors are brought online- ancient alien eggs get discovered by The Company and nearly everyone dies.
Not exactly an earth-friendly solution.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
didn't they do something like this on Apollo 13 with the cover of a notebook, a plastic bag, and a sock?
I see that the chemists describe a method of extracting purer CO2, not tackling global warming. No one could seriously say that you could get all the quicklime needed to bind the billions and billions of tons of excessive carbon in the atmosphere. And how do you produce quicklime? Heat it up. How? Burning more fossil fuels. There ain't such a thing as a free lunch.
The chemistry involved can be not only understood, but predicted by high school kids. Carbon dioxide is the "ground state" for freely floating carbon in this oxygen-rich atmosphere. Study the electron structure of carbon and you will understand why. Burning carbon gives energy, so you need energy to reverse the reaction.
Then, replying to the heading. "Imagine No Restrictions On Fossil-Fuel Usage And No Global Warming". Horrrribly stupid. The journalist forgets that burning fossil fuels does not result in CO2 only.
First, the most vicious ingredients in the smoke are the microparticles. No matter what you do to the smoke-poisoned air - filter it, use activated sludge, afterburn it - there is always some microparticle emission. Microparticles cause asthma and other lung problems. Millions of people die because of microparticles.
The second substance is radon. Whenever you dig the bedrock, some radon will be emitted. There is about 2 kg of radon in the atmosphere and 160 tons in the ground. 2 kg sounds like nothing, but remember that it's highly radioactive and its effect can be clearly seen in lung cancer statistics. It's the second most common cause of lung cancer, smoking being the first. A well-functioning nuclear plant radiates 0.0004 mSv/h, but a coal power plant gives 0.003 mSv/h, or 7.5 times more! (Distance of 50 km. Chem. Matters.)
I was actually working at Los Alamos last summer and attended a talk by one of the people forming this research group.
The ultimate goal is to make gasoline and other hydrocarbon fuels out of the stuff. In principle, you take carbon dioxide, water and an energy source (solar power, wind power etc), and you can make gasoline. The technology exists to do this, but it is still too rudimentary to be effective. The advantage of this over the typical solar power etc is that electricity cannot be stored or transported as efficiently as a liquid fuel.
I'm seeing a lot of people in this thread misunderstanding the goal they have with the CO2. I attended a talk given by one of the people who was starting this research group last summer, so I've got a fairly good idea what they are after:
The goal is to take lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Then using solar power or other such source, create electricity. Add water. Do a lot of chemistry stuff, and out comes gasoline. In principle, everything can be done well enough for it to be cost-effective (I think 20 cents a gallon was the quote in the article). In practice, it's still in the research phase.
If it works, we get hydrocarbon fuels (e.g., gasoline) without adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
We run air over calcium oxide, which absorbs CO2 and turns into calcium carbonate. We then heat the calcium carbonate to turn it back into calcium oxide and CO2. Now we react the CO2 with something to take it out of the actmsphere. Like, say, calcium oxide.
How do we make calcium oxide in the first place? Heat calcium carbonate to drive off the CO2.
Looks to me like the greenhouse gas version of perpetual motion.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
The other alternative being: do nothing. Even if this technology was absolutely 100% free I would still be skeptical of using it to reduce CO2-emissions. Why? Simply because I think our CO2-emissions are the best thing that has happened to the global ecosystems in a long time. CO2 is good for us, not bad. During the glacial periods of Earth (i.e. most of the time lately) the CO2 level gets so low (180 ppm) that plants are very close to being starved to death. Plants do not like this, last time I checked. They like lots and lots of CO2 so that they can grow vigorously. The historically low CO2-levels on Earth is the main reason that we have deserts. Had the CO2-level been 10 times greater than today, Sahara would be a green oasis. And those nasty cold winters would up north would have been a lot more pleasent. Onar.
As I see it, this is a huge step forward in a plantless society. We can stop growing plants, and thus live entirely on soilent green.
While very messy by comparison, wouldn't it be useful to develop CO2 hungry algae and pump air through that? A fast CO2 to cellulose producer would allow us to quickly generate protein -- through fish or four legged methane factories.
The CO2 doesn't seem very valuable on it's own. I shudder at one of the suggestions -- that we bury it. Putting gas in a landfill? Unless we contain it for a while to make mushrooms...
Just one example: In 1989: Total CO2 Emissions from Illinois cement production was 1,345,950 tons[short tons]. The Space Shuttle can transport a max. of 29 (metric) tons into orbit. I guess you can all calculate how many starts it would need to ship all this CO2 to Mars. (AFAIK to terraform Mars we'd need much more CO2 than that anyways).
Maybe we can come back to that plan when we can beam CO2 to Mars ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Which it was. In Alien, they had to go out in spacesuits and it was blizzard like conditions. I don't remember how cold, but I don't think all the condesate was water. Some was the higher-temp gases.
I don't read AC A human right
"there are significant amount of people in the industrialized world who live significantly below the poverty line, and are at real risk of starvation."
Define please "significant" and "poverty line."
I'll help - and I'm not here to agree or disagree with you, just to provide real links.
First, "significant." Here's a link to the Food Research and Action Center and some hunger and poverty stats. If 3% is "significant" to you, then 3% of US households experience hunger. There is more information on the site that can either be used for your argument or against it. One line that struck me, "While starvation seldom occurs in this country, children and adults do go hungry and chronic mild undernutrition does occur when financial resources are low."
That's "chronic mild undernutrition." To me, that is not "risk of starvation," but your interpretation of the damn lies...I mean statistics...may vary.
Now, "poverty line." Did you know that the U.S. poverty level changes year to year, family to family and is different for 2 out of 50 states? And it can be as low as around $8,000 per year or as high as $30,000 per year, depending upon family size. Which is scary, because according to that chart, I only make twice the poverty level for my family size.
Here's the deal. We hear a lot of buzzwords these days and we hear broad generalizations like "significant" and "real risk." And much of what is presented to us on the evening news is pre-digested and edited down to 3 minute tid-bits.
And in the end, we find that we're simply not that poor in industrialized nations. We find that the people who need resources aren't getting them because of lack of education or because those resources are otherwised blocked by outside sources (poverty and starvation in a war zone.) Not because the resources themselves aren't available.
Now, about prices going up...is that the word of an economist or just a thought from someone who buys a loaf of Wonder every couple of weeks? And how much is "up?" 3%? 4%? 50%? What if the price of a loaf of bread does go up 50% because they're using grain for fuel? Will some people stop buying bread? (At $3 for a loaf of bread, I'd stop buying or cut back.) *Then* what happens to the price? Hmmm..
Things to think about. The simplistic stuff you read on the CNN homepage doesn't nearly cover the real world.
This is old hat. The <A HREF="http://magnet.consortia.org.il/ConSolar/Sab<nobr>i<wbr></wbr></nobr> n/Zas/Zas3.html">Israeli solar chimney</A> is built high rather than wide, and on top of reducing CO2, also generates electricity! Check it out.
I have always found it funny that if you put all the wired letters in a boll and shake a bit, eventually you'll come up with weird. I'm sure they tough about it too when they were looking for their website name!