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A Modest Proposal For Sequestration of CO2 In the Antarctic
First time accepted submitter Alienwise writes "Judith Curry reports a scientific concept of an atmospheric CO2 sequestration plant. It would be based in the Antartic to profit from the cold weather, which would facilitate the creation of CO2 snow — which would then be buried. The plant could be powered by windmills." The lead author has agreed to let Curry link to a copy of the final manuscript, if you'd like to read more.
Your reading ability will one day be the stuff of legends.
This doesn't involve eating babies, does it?
#DeleteChrome
This actually seems like a feasible plan.
It plans not just for the extraction of atmospheric CO2, but the long-term storage of it. The power source is wind, so it doesn't fall into the trap of generating more CO2 than it generates.The choice of location makes sense for both the temperature and for the political neutrality. They don't list an actual cost, but it would likely be only in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions in the worst case. Which is a lot of money, yes, but not the trillions or quadrillions some plans have required. And it calls for a demonstration plant first, which would be just a few dozen million.
The only thing I see stopping it is politics. In particular, America and China. Europe seems to at least recognize the need for action, and they're willing to work together to try things. China is generally too selfish and shortsighted to worry about the environment, but you could probably convince them if you could make it somewhat-profitable for them (just have the wind turbines and such made in China, that should satisfy them).
But then it falls on to America. And you're going to need America at least not fighting this plan, because if the US decides to actively fight it, it's not happening. Period. You'd also need them to at least chip in a good chunk of the funding if you're going to do the full plan, make a serious dent in CO2. Problem is, denying the very existence global warming is a political *requirement* for half the country. They'll fight it just on principle, and I can't see the rest of the country fighting back for a project that doesn't have any immediate gains for the US specifically. While some sort of "compromise" could probably pull it off, or with luck it could be swept under the rug and never become a political issue, that's not guaranteed.
Still, it's the best plan I've seen so far.
The amount of heat produced directly by all human activity combined is tiny compared to the heat applied by the sunlight the earth receives. The contribution of all human direct heat production is so small that no large-scale analysis of global heat retention even bothers to include it. Global warming is effectively entirely the result of increasing CO2, which increases the amount of incoming solar heat the Earth retains. Removing significant amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere would relieve global warming regardless of how much direct heat the process generated.
Not only that, but this guy says if we don't have more CO2 we're not going to be able to grow enough food for the planet.
http://www.liebertpub.com/MContent/Files/Kleinman_ch19_p379-398.pdf
I hate to state the obvious but do you suppose there's a chance that the balance of trees to CO2 got a bit messed up when we cut them all down?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2BAdNIG5Q2FJlEdac1l-KXiTSCA?docId=CNG.dfe97e07f144a2d29eb615412e0c12be.a81
Maybe... put the trees back? If everybody on the planet planted 10 fast growing and 10 slow growing trees... well, do the math.
Or maybe a lot of C4 plants, the ones that use crazy amounts of CO2 and do really well when CO2 is high (the historical maximum is 7000ppm, we're at about 400ppm now).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation
"Today, C4 plants represent about 5% of Earth's plant biomass and 3% of its known plant species.[13][9] Despite this scarcity, they account for about 30% of terrestrial carbon fixation.[10] Increasing the proportion of C4 plants on earth could assist biosequestration of CO2 and represent an important climate change avoidance strategy. Present-day C4 plants are concentrated in the tropics and subtropics (below latitudes of 45) where the high air temperature contributes to higher possible levels of oxygenase activity by RuBisCO, which increases rates of photorespiration in C3 plants."
And no excess heat. The plan in TFA sounds to me like introducing cane toads to Australia.
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