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Can We Really Stop Climate Change By 'Capturing' Carbon? (vox.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The recently-ratified Paris Climate Accord calls on countries to keep the rise in average global temperatures under 2 degrees Celsius (a threshold which would bring extreme weather, water shortages and reduced agricultural production). But a recent article on Vox warns that "the world has to zero out net carbon emissions...for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065. After that, emissions have to go negative... We are betting our species' future on our ability to bury carbon."
That's why everyone's watching the W.A. Parish Generating Station in Texas, which came online this week -- on schedule, and under budget. "The plant will use a newly installed system to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide created during combustion."
Alas, Slashdot reader Dan Drollette brings bad news from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: To fight climate change with carbon capture and storage technology, we'd have to complete one new carbon capture facility every working day for the next 70 years. It's better to switch to a diet of energy conservation, efficiency, and renewables, rather than rely on this technology as a kind of emergency planetary liposuction.
That's why everyone's watching the W.A. Parish Generating Station in Texas, which came online this week -- on schedule, and under budget. "The plant will use a newly installed system to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide created during combustion."
Alas, Slashdot reader Dan Drollette brings bad news from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: To fight climate change with carbon capture and storage technology, we'd have to complete one new carbon capture facility every working day for the next 70 years. It's better to switch to a diet of energy conservation, efficiency, and renewables, rather than rely on this technology as a kind of emergency planetary liposuction.
What if we make private space-based internet of things 3D printers from asteroids to capture the carbon?
I think we can then let the free market sort it out.
I am sick of stupid climate propaganda on my beloved ./
I officially quit this stupid site.
Good-bye.
I just wish there were some way to genetically modify a plant that could suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into oxygen or something else harmless. You think with all our knowledge, someone could figure out how to make something like that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Arctic ice was supposed to be completely gone by 2016 and there's more now that when that prediction was made.
Environmental doomsayers have been making these claims for decades. They have all been proven wrong.
Global temps haven't increased in sixteen plus years.
Manmade global warming is bullshit. At least they are getting smart enough to push the environmental disaster to 50 years away. There's less accountability that way.
Don't get me wrong. Reducing pollution is a good thing. But to constantly declare that it's the end of mankind unless we do something RIGHT NOW is exploitation.
Just exaggerate the effect of carbon capture in the same way the alarmists exaggerate the effect of carbon emissions. Then it will work great
But what is going to change everything is when the rest of the US follows Texas which now gets at least 10% of the power from renewables, mostly wind. This is where the climate change problem will begin to decline.
Which is not to say the carbon capture technology is dead. In other developing countries it may be useful,and the US could be the supplier for those systems.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
. It's better to switch to a diet of energy conservation, efficiency, and renewables, rather than rely on this technology as a kind of emergency planetary liposuction.
Why is everything these days "This and only this is the right path" can we not do both? would that not be even better...
All the prevailing research shows that carbon taxes, not the carbon itself is the solution to Climate Change.
All Climate Change represents a serious threat to humans and we need to stop it, at any price.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
How long before the CO2 captured by this generation plant and injected into oil wells leaks out again?
What was the point again?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Just wait for the CNT industry to go into full swing. Once it's competing with the agricultural sector for atmospheric CO2 - which will eventually be the low-hanging fruit - you'll miss your precious global warming.
The Calpine plant next door to Parrish generates 500 MW of clean energy using natural gas, on a fraction of the land.
$1 billion for carbon capture is pointless.
2nd- and 3rd-world countries say:
But we want to join the 1st-world countries on the world stage! LOL we'll do what we want, and we've got nice cheap coal to burn to slingshot us up with the Big Boys! Saving the planet can wait, LOL, it's not going to really be a problem for a few hundred years, why should we care? We're more interested in next week!
It's hard to get people to care about something that's even decades away when they're more concerned about next week.
so you're either advocating we do nothing to curb our impact on climate change.
OR
you know full well what is actually meant by climate change in this context and you were *TRYING* to be clever.
in either scenario, go fuck yourself.
I am sick of stupid climate propaganda on my beloved ./
I officially quit this stupid site.
Good-bye.
Go ahead and quit ./ then, "Mr." Trump. We at /. don't care for your bullshit either.
Reflective stuff in the atmosphere, something like that.
So what is it going to be: mess up the entire planet, or build the safest nuclear plants we can and perhaps mess up one tiny spot every few centuries? Keep burning coal in endless quantities, or choose a completely emission-free technology?
And no, pointing to decades old plants that were in at least one case made by people with zero safety standards does not count as evidence of danger. The true danger is destroying our world; we will certainly do better if we limit that danger to the best nucleair plants we can build.
We can, but it involves using iron seeding of the oceans to turn large swaths of the ocean into a colossal solar panel, using the energy to photosynthesize. This is orders of magnitude cheaper and safer than capturing it and burying it at the source.
But it's still worth a shot, particularly if we can capture carbon emissions from volcanic eruptions.
I find the deliberate altering of the atmosphere with aluminium and barium much more egregious than the normal output of carbon. http://www.geoengineeringwatch... The elites that want to set up the carbon exchanges will certainly exempt themselves from a carbon taxing scheme. It is an agenda to track all human behaviours by pricing all activities in carbon credits which will be tracked by some super-governmental agency that will not be affected by democratic edict. A taxing scheme that makes you pay an indulgence just for breathing to an entity that is immune from democratic input from your elected government is not something I can get behind. You are implicitly bad because you are a carbon based life form so pay them an indulgence and you will be forgiven. Sounds like they learned a thing or two from the holy roman empire. This site http://scienceandpublicpolicy.... discusses many of the other aspects of the AGW issue. Being conservative with energy consumption is a good practice. Using more than you need just because is not and should not be criminal. It is just common decency not to be wasteful.
'Radical'?
"We are betting our species' future on our ability to bury carbon."
Seriously? What do 97% of climate scientists agree on? I'll tell you, it's not that.
This kind of hyperbole is what turns people into climate change deniers. Very few scientists think AGW will cause the destruction of the human race.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There are techniques such as ocean fertilization, but they're controversial and pit paleo environmentalists (pre AGW, concered with a host of environmental issues) against neo environmentalists/greens (it's all about the carbon).
Treating all the environmental issues, or "hitting that one number we all care about". Take your pick.
BTW, if the neo greens push too hard, it's war. Do you know what the CO2 release is on a typical war? I'll give you a hint. It's not neutral.
Nope.
All conjecture and some models point to catastrophic collapse of our climate in trying to reverse it and we still get hit by an ice age regardless.
In fact, letting the planet warm overall is objectively the better route since it would give us longer to secure and save our ecosystem as much ss possible.
Geo-engineering is about as helpful as gene therapy is now.
We've only been doing minor, insignificant tests here and there, but we still basically have zero clue.
Climate change would have happened without us.
Funny thing is the rapid heating actually shoved the chance of another ice age way out there.
There is a very high chance we just did a Venus in slow-motion.
First, we have to phase out CO2 by 2050 or 2040 (1.5 deg C). Second, we do not need fancy carbon capture tech. We can rely on plant growth and reforestation programs which actually work. We had a few of those. Also we have to help countries to protect their forests. Also helpful would be to reduce meat production.
While it's extremly costly and even stupid right now, if we just throw enough money at it I expect it to become a good bussines over time, the same way windpower, solar energy and battery has become the past decade.
I expect the process of capture the carbondioxide from the air will just be the first step, the step afterwards would be to use surplus energy from renewables (for instance during summer) to make something from it. Graphite rope seem to be a obvius option. We need it for the space elevator anyway.
So we're talking about 250 new installations per year. I'm assuming that's for the whole industrial world. That's something like 2 new plants per year per industrialised country. That is not a lot if you compare it with what the industrial world built built back in the 1950's and 1960's after WW2. Sounds reasonable in terms of volume of work.
I mean it sounds reasonable when you first think about it. But I don't know...
I mean it would take work. It would take actual investment in actual projects, and actual political decisions about actual things. You know, those old-fashioned secondary sector of the economy things that we're not suppose to have to bother with in the modern world. We'd even have to hire actual workers to do actual work. Like, physically do work. Like, non-office work.
And you'd have to train people to do it too! I you think about it, you'd have to train unemployed people so that they could take these construction and planning jobs.
Seriously? There ought to be a way to solve global climate change in some reasonable way. Like by inventing a new financial scheme, or by making a new smartphone app. Or at least by having drones or self-driving cars do all the work. I'm sure someone will think of something.
Try algae instead. There's far more ocean than land surface, and we're not using any of it.
There's still the problem of how to permanently fix the captured carbon though, ideally without turning it into more carbonic acid.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
It takes effort to limit your energy consumption. Especially when it comes to vehicles. Get off your asses and stand at a bus stop instead, bike to work, carpool if you have to.
Lead by example and lay down the groundwork for others to follow in your footsteps.
Fight to the bitter end with your dollar. Don't be complacent.
Seriously. The only reason this shit is perpetuating is because of the choices that you're making right now.
The only reason the temperature of the planet increases is that energy input to the planet exceeds the energy dissipation of the planet. Since neither energy nor matter can be created or destroyed or transformed from one to the other (for all reasonable intents and purposes), all the hooey about climate change being linked to carbon is absolute unadulterated hooey spewed by a bunch of shitheads that failed primary school.
The only way humans know to "use energy" is to dissipate it as heat. Therefore, all energy use will increase the temperature of the planet. The only way to "stop" it is to figure out how to use energy without creating heat.
So even if all "carbon emissions" were reduced to zero and all energy requirements were met by conversion of solar energy, the net outcome would be unchanged.
Of course, "climate change" and "carbon emission reductions" have nothing whatsoever to do with each other -- they are simply a scam being used to direct "money" (another thing that does not exist) from the hands of the many to the hands of the few for their own purposes (usually institution of totalitarian governments and slavery of the proletariat).
Maybe some scientist may have predicted ice free by 2016, but most predicted the date as much later.
"Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". They have noted that climate model predictions have tended to be overly conservative regarding sea ice decline.[2][13] A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot.[14] A 2006 paper predicted "near ice-free September conditions by 2040".[15] Overland & Wang (2009) predicted that there would be an ice-free Arctic in the summer by 2037.[16] The same year Boé et al. found that the Arctic will probably be ice-free in September before the end of the 21st century.[17] A follow-up study concluded with the possibility of major sea ice loss within a decade or two.[18] The IPCC AR5 (for at least one scenario) estimates an ice-free summer might occur around 2050.[3] The Third U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), released May 6, 2014, reports that the Arctic Ocean is expected to be ice free in summer before mid-century. Models that best match historical trends project a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer by the 2030s.[19] However, these models do tend to underestimate the rate of sea ice loss since 2007. A 2010 study suggested that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free sooner than global climate models predict. They chart the summer of 2016 as ice-free, but show a possible date range out to 2020.[20] This assessment was reported in the press as "US Navy predicts summer ice free Arctic by 2016" [21] In a study from 2016, the prediction uncertainty of an ice-free Arctic was quantified to be at around two decades, based on model simulations [22]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So let's get this straight:
Conserving living species biodiversity and habitat,
Preventing a wholesale shift of climate into a new regime 10 degrees F warmer
Slowing down the massive rates of fresh-water pollution and over-use
Preventing the oceans from acidifying due to warming and killing off all shellfish and many other ocean lifeforms
All of these things would be radical?
As opposed to continuing on our present accelerating course to a profoundly messed up life-support system on this planet and the attendant mass-scale misery and resource wars. Which would be, what, conservative?
Do you see quite how f**ked up your perspective is yet?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Volcanos:
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/...
180-440 Million Tons of CO2 a year.
Capturing carbon will protect us from anthropogenic climate change as well as garlic will protect us from vampires, and for the same reason.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It was a poor article. Yes CCS can grab the Carbon coming out of the exhaust stacks but what is missed is the fact that the process requires a lot of energy. The article doesn't mention anything about it but other plants have systems that require 30% to 40% of the electricity generated by the plant. So the plant has to produce a lot more electricity just to get production back to what it was. And then there are the emissions and waste generated from the additional mining and transportation of the extra coal. Of course that isn't mentioned.
It's much better to put the money towards conservation and methods of electrical generation that doesn't create CO2.
Yet the Leo decaprios and al gore of the world are not living a conservative enviromentally friendly life style . They live in houses 10 times bigger than need , fly private jets when commercial flights are available etc . Technology will bring us to carbon negative in 30 years but rushing efforts and putting people into poverty while the liberal 1% goes on with their wasteful lifestyles . No way
AGW (aka Chicken Little) activist cause. You guys play that card too often. When somebody reminds folks that the predictions for warming have been amazingly WRONG over an amazing number of predictions, for decades, your response cannot POSSIBLY be to pretend to honestly claim ignorance of all those predictions - not when they are the very predictions you people used in those previous years!
For those who are actually curious and lack the skills to Google for yourself, try starting here
every day for the next 70 years that is encumbered by all sorts of exotic and expensive carbon capture hardware TO SAVE THE PLANET, but China and India and most other countries are perfectly free to keep burning coal with no emissions limits.... and all those people in Africa who cannot afford modern power plants are free to keep cooking food (and heating, generally) by open flames produce by burning things like dung and the trees they chop down which is double-damage (liberating the carbon from the "murdered" tree AND removing the tree as a carbon absorber).
None of this makes any sense until you pay attention to what a bunch of the warmists say to each other when they think the general public is not listening...
"If this [global distribution of emissions rights] happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. " and "Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. " and "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole." - Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group III
How is your cherry-picked example of a few individuals' behavior in any way relevant to the essential problems at hand and substantial solutions needed?
To me how you responded sounds like an ad hominem attack with an agenda of stopping the changes needed. You must be out of valid logical arguments.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If we really want to stop warming we should invest in geoengineering our climate, and taking control of it. It could work, but people hate to admit it because they are afraid it might take away the need for their chosen totalitarian policies. Makes you wonder what the real motive is.
But more importantly, climate change is the wrong problem to worry about. We should be putting those resources into figuring out how to mitigate or limit the impact/force of the super volcano under Yellowstone, instead.
"The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me."
That doesn't mean it doesn't have boundaries, and that we can't be changing those boundaries, and that those new boundaries might be bad for us.
There, I even rendered it in your bizarre overuse of italics. Did you like it?
Those people are automatically against any solution. They oppose even trying out solutions, out of fear that one will work. Search on 'Haida experiment' for an example.
Humans: 35,900 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2014 from fossil fuel burning.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Dedicate 1% of the budget to this global warming bullshit, and make it illegal to ever increase it beyond there. That will give all the idiots something to do, and will finally let the rest of us get back to the real world. I don't really care how the money is spent, put the most rabid greenpeace lunatic in charge for all it will matter.
Because "climate change" is too broad and nebulous a term.
And the people looking for grant money LIKE it that way. You can basically wrangle ANY sort of phenomenon in Earth's atmosphere into some definition of "climate change". Basically there is no bottom to this well.
Also, climate change is a NATURAL process. Earth's climate has been changing since basically FOREVER.
Now, can we stop "man made climate change/global warming"?
Maybe. If we sequester enough carbon out of the atmosphere. It may make a difference.
Can we stop "man made climate change" PERIOD? No. Because anything we do is going to cause the climate to "change" in some way.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yes, radical. These guys want to harm the human race with extreme measures that still won't make a bit of difference, but they don't care, they have "the environment" to worship.
The thing to stop is the diminishment of the prosperity we actually need to have in order to research the solutions to the problem. Research costs money, and if the country is pauperized by ill-conceieved and ineffective half-measures to attack the problem that don't actually have a hope of making a significant difference, the real solution will be delayed instead of hastened.
What we need first and foremost is a much improved battery. I call it the "magic battery" which needs to be cheap and small and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap and durable enough to not be wearing out and further increase cost and cheap and easily manufactured in quantity and cheap. Oh, and it has to be cheap so customers can buy a $12,000 electric car that will do everything that a $12,000 gasoline-powered car will do.
What we need is to be able to leave the oil and gas and coal in the ground, and we can't do that until we can make cars and planes and boats and ships and locomotives run on electricity. For that we need the magic battery. Otherwise, for solar and wind we need a world-wide power grid so that when the wind stops blowing at night, we can get our power from the Sahara or the Ukraine. A world-wide power grid and a magic battery will together solve the problem, but both will be expensive to make happen, and will be delayed by a strategy of "conservation" and maybe even "efficiency" if that is misapplied, such as vacuum cleaners that just make it take twice as long to do the carpets because they're underpowered.
Work the solution, but don't diminish us as a strategy.
To paraphrase Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: "I'll believe that it's an emergency when the people who are TELLING me it's an emergency star ACTING like it's an emergency."
"Climate change" conferences have the unfortunate tenancies to be scheduled in far-flung exotic locations like Bali, rather than on Skype. When 500 environmental activists each charter THEIR OWN private jets to take them to their vacat/////conferences, they dump as much carbon into the air as hundreds of thousands of average citizens like me.
The fact is that there has been NO warming in the last 15 years, and the Earth is colder now than it was in 900, when Eric the Red named the place "Greenland" because it was green. The climate is always changing, in cycles that are a thousand years long. Al Gore (the failed preacher who has invented his own "religion" of Gaia worship) is like the mayfly trying to pass a law to ban summer.
I read an interesting article about the possibility of just burying trees in huge amounts to capture carbon. https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... Might that not be more easily scaleable than carbon capture systems near powerplants?
Why not genetically modify the plants to combine the C02 with some H20 and produce hydro-carbon fuel, why we are at it.
LE SCAN SPORT - Lors de la douzième étape nike tn 2016 Montpellier-Mont Ventoux, Christopher Froome a continué la course à pieds après une chute, avant de récupérer un vélo à environ 1,5km de la ligne d'arrivée.Le Maillot jaune du Tour de France a chuté à 1.5 kilomètre de la fin de l'étape. Sa voiture de dépannage bloquée par la foule massive et compacte, le Britannique a jeté son vélo et a terminé la course à pied. A l'origine, une chute impliquant Richie Porte, Bauke Mollema, et le Britannique. L'Australien Porte, en tête du trio, a percuté la moto les précédant,qui avait dû s'arrêter brutalement à cause de spectateurs qui bloquaient le chemin.Et il faut reconnaître que, ces deux dernières années, la demoiselle s’est forgé une certaine culture de mode. Proche d’Olivier Rousteing, designer de Balmain, qui l’a carrément embauchée pour sa campagne printemps-été, Riri a écumé les derniers défilés parisiens. Entre buzz et rédemption, la rétrospective mode.
Video conferencing it still a bit hit-and-miss, unfortunately, otherwise I would suggest that a lot of meetings could be handled that way. The largest meeting I've been in was around eight locations and forty people and it was mostly ok after thirty minutes apart from one location dipping in and out. However, with video conferencing there are a lot of non-verbal cues that are missing and scheduling speakers in large meetings to avoid people talking over one another takes practice and experience, and seems to work best among groups that already know each other. We still have a way to go to make more natural for large meetings, and experience of one-to-one Skype isn't really a preparation for the experience
There has been warming in the last fifteen years. You can look up the figures.
It is not clear, linguistically, if the original name for Greenland in Icelandic has anything to do with colour. Certainly the world was not globally warmer in 900.
The problems with geoengineering is that our ability to model all impacts and assure that noone will be adversely impact anyone is not there yet. This means any geoengineering needs to be easily reversible yet available at huge scale which is likely to make it very expensive. It also requires agreement worldwide to attempt, which is hard to agree.
Examples of potential short scale schemes are use of aerosols, cloud formation, or algae stimulation. The first requires that the aerosols don't do things like cause cause rain, which rules out the cheap options. The first pair might change rainfall patterns which might open up questions of compensation. The last might have as yet unknown effects on fisheries and so on, and again open up issues on compensation.
Permanent options have huge upfront cost implications and without modelling consequences, a huge risk.
Nobody?
CO2 at 600 ppm already sedates the brains, decreasing its performance.
Similar effect demonstrated lately in fish.
CO2 at 1000 ppm affects intellectual performance, smilar effect demonstrated lately in fish. One team found an impact on the brain at 600 ppm already.
The geoengineering that needs to be worked is one that extracts the CO2 from the air and turns it into carbon and oxygen. Make it something that runs on solar energy and generates electricity at the same time and it'll be a winner. The STEP process:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
would be something that would fix things forever, but apparently no one has actually gotten this thing to work. Somebody should. We could run it, have more and more pure carbon than you could get out of coal mines, and then recycle the carbon thru power plants to make even more electricity with _just_ CO2 as an emission, rather than CO2 plus SO2 plus mercury plus uranium plus radon plus a thousand other things not good for living things to contact.
Try algae instead. There's far more ocean than land surface, and we're not using any of it.
Algae is a small plant, it's not an animal or a vegetable or a mushroom.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... that we need to build these new Intel chips for 70 years to be able to run Facebook for 1000 users. You have to start somewhere, then it gets exponentially better.
Climate stasis is our goal at the Tyrell Corporation.
Of course environmentalists hate carbon sequestration. They have an agenda that includes telling you how to live and carbon sequestration defeats it. If you can mitigate the damage, real or imagined, without resort to their remedies of deprivation, mandate, and punishment, you slip from their control, and they cannot abide that.
Great, so with the world pumping 35,000 Million tons of CO2 a year in the air, with the US taking about 14% of this, just the US excretes about 10x the amount of volcanos each year. California contains about 10% of the population of the population, but they are actually on a good road to minimize their footprint. So Texas it is. Let's nuke Texas instead of putting a cork in all volcanos. Easier and the world would be a much better place.
Capturing the co2, then using it to extract more fossil fuel from underground, won't get us to a carbon-free economy.
Geezus, climate change policy is not a science. It's a basket of deplorable religions. No amount of "scientific" analysis is going to sway anyone in any of the cults.
God damm your stupid, he named it Greenland to encouraged settlement by his people. Greenland was a vast icy wasteland at the time. Also, how the f**k do 7 billion people all trying to live like people in west NOT have a serious and profoundly negative effect on the earths biosphere. I'm soooo sick of you morons destroying our planet...
No, what needs to happen is that 3rd world countries need to get off their asses and modernize. They are the primary source of CO2 emissions. Not efficient running countries like the US.
You can't stop climate change you arlamist nut jobs...unless you remove the magnetosphere in which case solar winds would strip our atmosphere away thus no more climate.
Yeah these stupid mother fuckers of course mod you down.
Climate Change is real and has always existed and cannot bet stopped and humans have an incredibly small impact on it as more than 78% of climate change is driven by water vapor while a mere 0.7% (if not less) is by man.
Per capita you're way wrong.
Country - - - - - - - CO2 Emission per capita (t) in 2014
United States - - 16.5
China - - - - - - - - 7.6
European Union 6.7
India - - - - - - - - - 1.8
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
We already have these amazing devices! We often refer to them as plants! They go by many different names, but the most iconic is called a tree!
Well, we already have the plants, and they are obviously not getting the job done. We likely don't have enough land that can grow them, and it might even be dangerous to create some kind of super-plant and stick it into the sea without knowing the environmental impact of doing so - what if it overmultiplies and not only clogs the seas to make shipping impossible, but sucks virtually all the CO2 out of the atmosphere and plunges the planet into an ice ball. I once read of an alien attack that was accomplished entirely by tricking our scientists into creating some single-cell critters that they carelessly allowed into the environment, they found their ways to the sea, and commence to sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, suffocating all animal life on the planet. Forget how the planet was saved, but it was probably unworkable and the planet would actually have been destroyed.
Doing our geo-engineering without summoning the fire of using living things to do it might be a safer route. If we make a machine that is detrimental to our survival, we can turn it off. Living things in the biosphere are much harder to control.