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Scientists Find Way To Make Mineral Which Can Remove CO2 From Atmosphere (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston. Now, for the first time, researchers have explained how magnesite forms at low temperature, and offered a route to dramatically accelerating its crystallization. A tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite can remove around half a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the rate of formation is very slow. The researchers were able to show that by using polystyrene microspheres as a catalyst, magnesite would form within 72 days. The microspheres themselves are unchanged by the production process, so they can ideally be reused. Project leader, Professor Ian Power from Trent University in Ontario added: "Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude. This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient. For now, we recognize that this is an experimental process, and will need to be scaled up before we can be sure that magnesite can be used in carbon sequestration (taking CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently storing it as magnesite). This depends on several variables, including the price of carbon and the refinement of the sequestration technology, but we now know that the science makes it do-able."
So one tonne of this mineral will remove 5 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 per year. One article I found based on a quick Google search gives an estimate of about 1,100 tonnes of CO2 emitted every second. Perhaps some of this could be captured more easily where it's being generated, but we'd need to manufacture a lot of this stuff if we wanted to be carbon neutral with just this technology alone.
The annual yield of magnesite is more or less 30000000t per year. The amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere is 1090t per second. If we used all the annual yield to bind CO2 we could stop the increase of CO2 for whole 7 hours.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
This obviously is not APK. Some imitator has gone full retard again.
OK, if we're going to talk about "continue functioning the way it has for thousands of years" then we should look at the record over thousands of years. And from that, there's really zero indication that things are different now than in the past 10, 20, or 500 thousand years.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You linked to a chart that shows an x-axis with a thousand-year increment, and zoomed in "recent proxies" inset shows a 0.5 degree C anomaly as of 2004. This is entirely consistent with models. I'm not sure what you are getting at, but your conclusion that "there's really zero indication that things are different now than in the past 10, 20, or 500 thousand years" is completely unsupported by the linked chart.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You're confusing a few things.
Oil was formed many hundreds of millions of years ago, mostly from dead animal and plant life in shallow seas. Trees did not exist yet.
Around 300 millions years ago, some plants evolved the ability to produce a protein called lignin. Lignin is the primary structural component of wood. That allowed those plants to get taller than their neighbors and eventually evolve into trees.
At the time, there was nothing on the planet that could digest lignin. So, tree dies and falls over and it just sits there. It can't rot because nothing can eat it. And it did not help that the first trees had very shallow root systems, so a lot of them fell over. Eventually the dead trunks get buried by sediment and other tree trunks, get compressed into peat, which then got further buried and heated and compressed into coal.
It took about 60 million years for bacteria and fungi to appear that could eat lignin. So a whole lot of trees got piled up before any could rot.
Btw, there are still no animals that can digest lignin. Termites and carpenter ants have a species of fungi in their gut that digests lignin for them.
Planting trees is a no brainier tho. Option 1) let sun's heat be absorbed by ground warm things up. Option 2) let it be converted by solar panels, natural (leaves) or man-made, to drive other processes than heating things up. It's not all about carbon
It's all about carbon.
The sunlight hitting a leaf is still an energy input. The sugars made by the tree will be consumed and result in heat. It's similar with the solar panels - the electricity will be used to do something, and that process will release heat.
The released heat is not 100% of the energy input from sunlight, but 100% of the energy input from sunlight on dirt isn't released as heat either.
You mean scientific solutions like nuclear power? The complaints against nuclear power boil down to it being unsafe. Okay, which is the greater risk to our safety, nuclear power or global warming? If someone wishes to make a case that nuclear power is in fact a greater threat then my response is, "Problem solved!" If nuclear power is a greater threat to humanity than global warming then we have solved all our energy problems. Move along, nothing to see here.
If nuclear power is less of a threat to humanity than global warming then we need to build nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow, because if the fear mongers on global warming are to be believed then there may not be a tomorrow.
So, you "scientifically minded" global warming fear mongers, which is it? Have we solved the problem or not?
The science tells us that nuclear power is as safe and "green" as wind, water, and sun for power. Science tells us we can build nuclear power plants that are "walk away safe", and will shut themselves down if there is a problem and no one is there to activate the safety mechanisms. All the safety systems would be driven by natural processes like gravity to dump in neutron absorbing solutions and convection of air to cool everything. The production of CO2 in building and operating a nuclear power plant is as low as any "carbon free" energy source like wind and solar. The problems of waste products from nuclear fission are solvable with proper processing to extract the valuable isotopes that are produced (and direct them for use in medicine or industry, if not for making new fuel), and the rest can be vitrified and buried underground where it can hurt no one. Any problems with nuclear power is either a myth or solvable with application of science.
Here's what really boggles me, with all the scientific advancement we've had in reducing humanities impact on the environment there are very few people that will recognize how far we have come. We are doing an excellent job in protecting the environment. This isn't just in relation to the shit job of environmental protection in the past but in absolute terms in getting more food from less land, using fewer resources (in money, manpower, etc.), and creating more open land for wildlife than would have happened naturally. It would be nice if once in a while I was able to see some recognition of how well things are going. Things can certainly improve but we are already doing very well right now.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.