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Global Warming Stopped By Adding Lime To Sea
Antiglobalism writes "Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O'Driscoll in SCI's Chemistry & Industry magazine published today."
And then all these fish die because of too much acid in the water! Epic Fale.
Adding ten million square kilometers of lime from Australia's outback to sea water...
...yeah, no chance for any unintended consequences here.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
You know...
Based on the success of introducing the cane toad, tamarisk, the bark beetle, the banana slug, the mongoose, or the brown tree snake!
Any time humans screw something up, the best bet is for humans to go double-or-nothing.
Sure beats efficiency, responsible building practices, responsible reproduction rates, or simply riding a bike to work! Surely, changing the pH, salinity, disolved o2, and turbidity of the oceans will have no unwanted effect.
I know you're trying to be hilarious, but it's Limeade. And it tastes like chalk.
I read TFA, but added that much fruit to water is way more comic than adding blocks of stone.
It's more sensible and cost effective for mankind to use technology to adapt to climate change rather than to try to change the climate. After all, some climate change isn't caused by man and can't be stopped. Witness the last little ice age, and the last ice age before that that glaciated much of the northern hemisphere.
Eventually some idiotic scheme like dumping X in the oceans is going to cause a truly great disaster. We need to stop screwing around with the Earth. Climate science is still in its infancy.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
But what happens when one nation decides this is a great idea while another fervently disagrees? Water doesn't obey boundaries.
Might be like a Margarita.
Then again, it might not.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
In deed this strikes me as the climatological equivalent to the following song: I know an old lady who swallowed a cow, I wonder how she swallowed a cow?! She swallowed the cow to catch the goat, She swallowed the goat to catch the dog, She swallowed the dog to catch the cat, She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, She swallowed the bird to catch the spider, That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her, She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, I don't know why she swallowed the fly, I guess she'll die.
Now, I'm not saying this is a great idea, but I'm getting pretty sick and tired of people bashing scientific findings simply because of who sponsored them. Why is Al Gore's sponsored research any more compelling than Shell's?
Instead of a knee-jerk attack on the messenger, why don't you discuss what's wrong with the research, like every one else ("lime" jokes aside) is doing?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Science ignorance on the rise
I love it when people think they know everything and don't even see if these scientists even considered the issue.
So, correction:
Reader ignorance on the rise.
yeah you read the article that specifically addresses the pH issue /sarcasm
(cough) youdontknowwhatthefuckyouretalkingabout (cough)
That's a lotta limestone.
Which, unless we're going to use carbon-neutral machines to dig out and transport will be a big loss of petrol...
Only on /. does this:
"Remembrances of my chemistry classes tell me this is not practical... "
magically make one person more qualified than dozens of environmental scientists with PhDs.
I feel better knowing that the /. crowd is on the job.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Well, I guess, but we've really swallowed the cow already. Our best available science predicts dire consequences from current and future CO2 levels, so it's reasonable to look for potential fixes that may have other consequences that will need to be studied carefully.
It's certainly good to address the problem at its cause, by releasing less CO2 in the first place, but there are practical limits to reductions and many methods used to reduce CO2 will have their own side effects. Even wind/solar would have SOME negative effects, some of which would likely be unanticipated.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
You give away your bias too easily...
If you really think global warming will kill you all, then any side effects are of secondary concern - go nuclear, kill all the dolphins be damned.
If you think global warming is going to annoy us all, side effects are questions to be answered - go study, weigh the economics, look for good and bad in it.
If global warming is your religion, side effects must be zero - you will not accept any solution not your own.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Global warming is not going to kill us all (thought might make life miserable and kill alot of us), but an unknown side-effect that kills the ocean's algae might.
Slashdot seems to have eaten the arrows in your equations, so here's a try using HTML entities:
CO2 + H2O -> H(+) + HCO3(-)
CaO + H2O -> Ca(2+) + 2 * OH(-)
H(+) + OH(-) -> H2O
Seems Slashdot has something against implementing some form of Unicode (and HTML 4 entity codes), so putting in → (right arrow) or pasting the equivalent character don't work. You'd think they would pass it onto the browser rather than simply deleting them...
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Based on the speed at which the we are progressing through the Kubler-Ross model of grief, the world governments should hit "acceptance" sometime around 2025. Then maybe we'll start hearing some sense out of people.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Unfortunately doing nothing isn't the answer either. Nor is anything that I've seen most of the people suggesting (Suggested alternatives to the polluting vehicles, etc. end up producing their own global warming inducing pollution, either at only a slightly LESS rate than we are now or at the same or higher levels- you just don't have it happening locally...) including the seeding of the oceans with iron filings to produce algal blooms, etc.
While I'm not 100% on board with this, on the first reading, it's the first relatively "sane" thing that someone's suggested so far about the "global warming problem"- which is not to say I think we need to do it right away or that this is the sole answer.
And, for the record, we've been doing the old saw about the lady or the Simpson's gag since the earlier days of man. Just being on this earth, we cause a disruption like no other... I don't see us doing any less anytime soon, I'm afraid.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hey. This is not global warming, this is ocean acidification. The rise in CO2 in the last two centuries coincides exactly with the burning of fossil fuel. The acidification, which will kill of corals and other shellfish is an easily derived consequence of rising CO2.
If you want to dispute the effect of CO2 on climate, fine. I disagree with you, but there are valid questions. There are no valid questions on ocean acidification.
Umm...RTFA!
The lime is being added to REDUCE the acidification of the ocean which will then better absorbe CO2...which will return the ocean to the current acidity and rate of CO2 absorption. The excess CO2 will generally precipitate out, collect on the bottom and form...lime stone.
I saw no plan addressing the sequestering of VAST quantities of CO2 produced in the 'manufacture' of the Lime (not to mention what mineral/surface owner is going to allow the refrigeration/compression/storage of VAST quantities of CO2 in their terrestrial strata if they even are porous and isolated enough to 'store' high-pressure CO2), nor the plan for the infrastructure *for the VAST energy needs* TO sequester the liberated CO2 from the Limestone, nor a mention of a PLAN on how to TRANSPORT the VAST quantities of Lime produced, nor a CO2-free Plan on the extraction/quarrying of the limestone source rock and its transport before it becomes lime.
...I mean "Climate Change"... (Sorry, I missed the 'new directive from HQ' to change out the buzz terms).
Running around with your arms waving in the air and yelling "Change!, Change!, Change!!!", does NOT make it a PLAN.
I want to see the *actual numbers*, the real logistics, and the bottom line cost in "Dollars per Gigaton of CO2 sequestered" in the ocean (less the total amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere in the manufacture, transportation/distribution, and extraction of Lime *AND* the energy production needed to power this proposed CONCEPT.
And, oh yes, and WHO THE HELL PAYS FOR IT? I Smell the scent of *Heavy Taxation* for the funding...
It may just well be cheaper to relocate our coastal cities and deal with higher oceanic levels...
Plus, think of the positives to "Global Warming"... er, uh, um... ya,
Plus, think of the positives to "Climate Change", It could really free up lots of new real estate in Alaska and Asia, not to mention Greenland and the Antarctic...
Me thinks this is akin to sausage making... tastes good, looks good all covered with kraut, but you don't want to know how its made...
What you're saying is that the release of carbon dioxide was not the cause of past global warming. It does not follow that the release of carbon dioxide cannot be the cause of global warming this time. If you show up to work late ten times in a row because of bad traffic, it does not mean that the eleventh time you're late it cannot be because your car didn't start. It looks like you could benefit from learning more about science.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Coral growth depends on enough calcium in the water and enough oxygen for the coral to breath. Right now, they are suffering from acidic water (largely caused by CO2), a lack of calcium (because it's reacting with the acidic water), dead zones with not enough oxygen, and no way put more CO2 into the water through respiration because it's saturated. Giving them calcium to absorb, raising the pH of the water, and lowering the CO2 levels will help the coral so long as it's not overdone and doesn't kill off some other important part of the food chain.
Everywhere else, nature kills the OLD... only in "land management" do the idiots kill the young.
So your contentions are that these thousands-of-years-old trees only exist because of man, and nature would have taken care of them long ago, despite their having living thousands of years without "land management" and only "nature." Ok, do you see the logical fallacy here?
And if you think CO2 regulation is the only function that trees fulfill, well that's just wrong.
I'm sure strip mining half of the land surface to get the lime won't have much of an impact.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
This warming we are experiencing now is due at least in part to humans creating CO2 by burning fossil fuels, not from CO2 naturally being released. We caused a significant increase in CO2 concentrations and CO2 has been known to absorb IR radition for over 100 years. Don't talk to me about CO2 lag, sunspots, or cosmic rays - show me the science that proves you can increase the concentration of a strong IR absorbing molecule (CO2) and not increase the temperature of the planet.
RealClimate.org has a good discussion on CO2 lag for anyone interested.
They want to do all this using stranded energy-- wind or solar which no one uses because it is located in the middle of nowhere.
Their analysis makes no mention of the energy cost of transporting zillions of tons of limestones from the middle of nowhere to the ocean. Or, rather, to all the world's oceans (since we don't want to cause one region to spike in alkylynity.)
And if it doesn't cost that much money/energy to transport those zillions of tons of rock, then it presumably costs even less to transport the electricity (Electrons don't weigh that much). In which case, the resource wouldn't be stranded.
But, it is good to see people thinking about this sort of thing, however incompletely.
I've dealt with plenty of GW deniers and creationists before, those equations are very good at identifying them.
I see that you're practicing package-dealing, too. Frankly, you've got rather more in common with creationists than you would care to admit.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
While I'm not 100% on board with this, on the first reading, it's the first relatively "sane" thing that someone's suggested so far about the "global warming problem"- which is not to say I think we need to do it right away or that this is the sole answer.
What about massive reforestation projects? There's a lot of people starving and doing nothing all over the world. Let's feed them and put them to work planting trees (and other related and necessary elements of a sustainable ecology.)
We could be growing bamboo, or hemp, or kenaf, or I don't care what on every piece of ground that will sustain it. We could be shifting our oil consumption over to biofuels made from algae grown on seawater, which is available in roughly unlimited quantity (and soon to become even more copious!) There's a ton of great ideas. None of them are sufficient in and of themselves; good thing we can work on some or even all of them in parallel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You give away your bias too easily...
If you really think global warming will kill you all, then any side effects are of secondary concern - go nuclear, kill all the dolphins be damned.
Not necessarily. Imagine you had a black-widow spider crawling on your forehead, and your friend sees it, pulls out his gun, and prepares to shoot the spider. Would you say that, if you really believed the spider was going to kill you, you'd let him shoot, because side effects are a secondary concern? Or would you encourage your friend to consider the consequences before he pulled the trigger?
There are times when the cure is worse than the disease, and lots of problems were begun with good intentions. Even the current ecological problems were caused by someone trying to fix an economic problem without considering (or else ignoring) the ramifications. If you're setting out to change the chemistry of our oceans, I'd say it's worth looking at all the angles.
We're going to fix a weather problem, which may be cyclical, that we don't understand that may not be a problem because there may be solar interactions we don't fully understand as well as Earth core changes we don't fully understand by dumping lime into the ocean?
Camping on quad since 1996.
my arguments are based on science
Really? So, tossing off terms like "deniers" when someone doesn't agree with you is a scientific argument?
Look, let's suppose for a second that global warming is a problem, that people are causing it, and so forth. Do you think that you can possibly be part of the solution by getting nasty with anyone who isn't yet convinced?
Bottom line, I could attack the arguments without prejudice but my experience has taught me not to waste the time.
What you're doing is a waste of time. I'm sure you enjoy your holier-than-thou posturing, but it doesn't help.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
True, but of the gases released by human activity CO2 is the main culprit, and the main one that needs to be "managed." To deny its role in global warming is just wrong.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Old growth is "sacred" because healthy forests are composed of more than trees, and old growth supports a much broader range of species than just itself, which new growth alone cannot do for a long time. But you're right. Growing and cutting new growth is not the solution to that. Stopping logging is the solution to that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Look deeply into the arguments for and against anthropogenic warming. The most interesting thing isn't global warming, but the sociological issues surrounding the head-in-sand propaganda campaign. Truly an eye-opener into how far we can trust corporate america, and mainstream media - which is to say not at all.
Take everything you read with a grain of salt. When you read a website - look at the references. Read the references. Examine the arguments for yourself, instead of trusting someone else's analysis.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,"
This has always been as mystery to me, cows are herbivores, and don't chase anything.
it is good to try to treat everything with a modicum of respect. The dividing line you draw in the sand between what you will show respect for, and what you won't, is subjective, and specific to only you. Someone else may come along and think that what you have decided not to show respect for, deserves respect. Who is right? While applying respect unilaterally gives you closer to a true moral high ground to work from.
I respect those of a religious persuasion enough to actually take a look at their Big Book of Holiness, to attempt to point out to them where they are making their mistakes (if we are to disregard the old testament for the new testament, why follow the ten commandments.. and if we are to follow the ten commandments, why ignore the rest of the rules laid out in the old testament?)
There is science to back up the probability that we are adding to global warming, but there is also science that shows that the Earth goes through normal periods of heating up and cooling down. I mean... who caused the global warming that brought us back from the last Ice Age?
Understanding an issue is leading someone from ignorance to knowledge. One cannot condemn another for their ignorance. One can only condemn another for their lack of desire to leave their ignorance behind. All you can hope to do is educate and allow people to see the reason and logic behind the presented evidence. You cannot say that you are sick of dealing with thick-headed people and therefore you see no point in explaining yourself. If you can't be bothered to make an honest attempt at improving the situation, you are only making it worse.
Personally, I think playing with our Ocean's chemistry is playing with fire... so to speak. I'd rather see a manmade increase in Plankton and Forests, and gain the benefit of the additional oxygen.
But then, people would have to give up on living on their 4 acres of grass.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Powerfull stuff sir,
Somehow you manage to draw you enemies all together under the banner of tree hugging geniuses. Then, you ingeniously lump disparate environmental issues together. Next you demonstrate profound insight into the mind of nature. You follow all this up by advocating what, to the untrained eye, would seem like some random course of action unfettered with the burden of proof. But you're not done! Somehow you still manage to finish this sweeping literary tour de force by utterly decapitating that nebulous group of government worshiping tree-huggers doubtlessly responsible for countless environmental and economical catastrophes going back untold millennia!
Rest easy tonight sir, secure in the knowledge that the world is better place you in it.
Actually, there were a few scientists predicting cooling, mostly due to increasing sulfides in the upper atmosphere. Happily, Nixon started the EPA and ended that trend.
I saw a survey of climatology papers published during the imagined "global cooling scare", and papers predicting warming outnumbered papers predicting cooling by about 6 to 1.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
a science-denying wackjob argument
Seems to me that one well conceived and executed Controlled experiment would be all it takes; otherwise you will have a difficult time convincing rational people Global Warming is proven to be caused by human activity rather than a coincidence. A population of one make the statistic unconvincing, I've done enough computer programing to be unimpressed by computer models.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"Only 150 years of research shows that science has been in dilemma about where the temperatue has been going for the last 150 years."
4 times scientists have pivoted their position on global warming and global cooling. 4 times in the last 100 years. 50 years of research before that did not address "Global" climate whatsoever, but sure, lets listen to your history as you call it.
I am just waiting until we hear that the sky is falling because of an impending ice age, because lets face it, if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that it just repeats itself over and over again.
Then again, maybe it appears we are warming since 1820 because that was the end of the little ice age.... If you start your data points where you want to, the results the computer produces will always be favorable. GIGO.....and if you don't understand that, then you really don't need to be looking at computer models to begin with, much less posting about your opinions.
It's nonsense, as anyone with sophomore chemistry and the ability to google up the quantities of CO2 we're talking about could tell you.
That's why we ask people with more than a sophomore chemistry level.
You are kidding... right? But look at that moderation! WOW! What really blows my mind is that all the climate change cultists that read here haven't even bothered to give the article a critical look and instead are content to make jokes about fruit flavoring. The article claims:
Gee, do tell guys. How does reversing CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2 magically use up twice as much CO2 as it releases? No chemical formula, no citation. Nothing. Jack squat. Hmmm, a little digging produces this.
So... CaO + H2O + 2CO2 -> Ca + 2HCO3...
Wait a second!? Doesn't 2H2O + 2CO2 -> 2H + 2HCO3...
So they're really just substituting Ca(2+) for 2H(+) and this is just more cultist sleight of hand. "We can drop CaO in the water and be SAVED! It'll absorb twice as much CO2 as it releases! HEAL mother Earth and REJOICE!! Send your support for our computer modeling efforts in the form of a check to..."
Besides, making lime takes LOTS of energy. Where is this pile of miracle lime going to come from??
Great, the cultists are going to stripmine the F'in desert and haul it all the way to the oceans. I'm sure that process will be "carbon neutral." I'll bet it's really inexpensive and gentle on the desert ecosystem at the same time. <sarcasm />
I am not a biologist. I am a graphic designer and a programmer and a dad. So I have NO credentials in this field. However, based on owning a couple of fishtanks and terrariums and so on, I would humbly make the following observations ...
Amid this and all the other jokes (which are mostly pretty funny), I must say that we keep trying to go down the wrong road. If we think we're causing an increase in global warming, we need to TAKE AWAY what we're doing instead of ADD MORE stuff. Things worked before, more or less, and it seems to that adding new crap to the equation just adds random results.
I don't know what I believe about it -- I find the argument that this is all part of a natural cycle completely plausible, but (living in a huge metropolitan area) I can clearly see that we're having some kind of effect on our environment. Whatever turns out to be the case (and I have my doubts that we'll ever know), I think it's statistically probable that adding more crap to the environment will, at best, do nothing. And more likely will slingshot certain measurements toward the extreme ends.
In other words, I think the problem is that we try to fuck with something bigger than us and, in doing so, delay the natural adjustment that will occur if we let it. Which is not to say that we can just roll on as the smog-barfing bastards we've been, but that continuing to barf smog while trying to offset it with silliness like dumping lime into the oceans seems counterproductive to me. And will most certainly produce other shit that we'll need to adjust later. Which will produce more unwanted crap. And it told two friends, and they told two friends ...
When all else fails, I think we should back off of the aggressive treatment of our environment and see what happens. I'm not an environmentalist, per se, but it just seems to me that if we're all worried about our environment we should remove as many outside influences and see if things level off.
Just my $.02, of course.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Yeah.. okay. Propose a controlled experiment that we could perform. God knows hundreds, probably THOUSANDS of said experiments have already been done, but obviously since we can't build a viable climate model in the laboratory, we've turned to very, very complex computer models which do the same thing.
You think it's rational to disregard hundreds of thousands of man-hours of research by climate scientists because "you've done computer programming?" What makes you an expert in this field? have you even read the research you're disputing? (hint: you couldn't read it all in a single human lifetime, so no you haven't).
I understand why the OP is so frusterated... if you aren't an expert in the field, freaking defer to those who are! Quantum mechanics sounds pretty wacky too, but I don't question it because I defer to the experts. Anyone who doesn't in this day and age has a serious god complex.
Jeremy