"Your cloud provider definitely has more levels of control to deal with outages."
Highly doubtful, your cloud provider has heavy heavy automation which lends itself nicely to cascading automated multi-level failures and an extremely complicated solution built on top of multiple programming languages, dozens of frameworks, etc that were all known by two or three guys... in the world... and those guys left over the last 3 months due to not getting raises, other staff being laid off and their work dumped on them, and cuts to benefits like work from home flexibility and healthcare. That is if those guys really understood all those pieces they were deploying in the first place.
Oh but it is all so automated and dumbed down that it's going to start decaying in small bits and fraying at the edges in ways that your heavily silo'd org isn't going to recognize are a problem until it's too late. Cheers.
Not as expensive as paying someone else to build infrastructure properly. If your cloud solution costs anything less than dramatically more than building your own infrastructure they aren't building it properly.
"One of the strong points of cloud computing is the infrastructure to shift load to accommodate failing hardware. To reproduce that capability with your own hardware & infrastructure requires a tremendous amount of planning and capital investment: in power, servers, and network. It's almost never a simple matter of "fix the server immediately"."
Of course you need to pay for the required infrastructure. That is what "host yourself" means. Either you are paying the higher up front cost of building it out for yourself or you are paying the much higher costs to have google/amazon/digitalocean/etc do it for you. As for shifting load to accomodate failing hardware, it doesn't work as well as pitched (which is why these services go down all the time and have such high latency) but it works better and faster on a private cloud implementation. Which is where you've built a cloud stack on your own gear. Just be sure you actually have redundant controllers across the whole thing and didn't just build redundant controllers on a virtualized layer sitting on top of a not redundant system.
Absolutely agree. The benefits of "the cloud" which is one of a string of terms which initially had zero meaning and people kept trying to figure it out until they'd invented something... can be had in a private cloud infrastructure, anything else is just leveraged hosting which should definitely be a no-no for enterprise.
Yeah but the same thing happens, someone cheaps out. They'll run that redundant infrastructure as active/active but then as people cheap out they start treating that as a pool of resources and get in the situation where service is compromised if one is down.
They certainly can go down but if it is critical infrastructure you've layered redundancy upon redundancy upon redundant datacenters. Cascading failures do still sometimes happen but are rare. Usually if you go down these days on self-hosted model it is because you've switched from avoiding home grown like the plague and using software that has cooked for 5+yrs to home grown apps with continuous integration wherein you are always running on blazing edge alpha code.
The cool thing about automation systems, they give you the power to effect a change across your entire farm with a push of a button, which means they give you the power to break your entire farm with the push of the button.
"Animal life does not produce oxygen in any meaningful concentration; nor nitrogen, not any of the other atmospheric gasses other than methane and CO2. Plant life does produce oxygen, but not at enough of a rate to keep up with animal life because we cut a shit ton of it down."
That is a hypothesis, not a fact. We've cut down a ton of it, that is a fact. Animal life produces a shitload of nitrogen as waste, just not in the form of gas. Plant life does produce oxygen. That plant life can't produce enough oxygen to offset CURRENT animal life is not a known fact and that isn't what current plant life is trying to do, it is trying to utilize all the CO2 in the atmosphere from every source. Also, plant life requires oxygen as well as anyone who has seen root rot can attest.
What is a known fact is that the current atmosphere contains massive amounts of CO2 due to having burned the hydrocarbon elements of millions of years worth of life that is isn't around anymore and doesn't need any of the gases above and that has increased the concentration of CO2 relative to WHATEVER the balance is of plant and animal recycling of atmosphere. Existing atmosphere contains the concentrated result not of what we are burning now but everything we've ever built, Sequestor it and it's overall concentration tomorrow will more closely reflect what we put today rather than yesterday but you will also be sequestoring heavy atmosphere at ground level and replacing it with atmosphere drawn from higher up, which contains a lower concentration of heavy gas elements like CO2.
It reduces the overall concentration of the atmosphere, given that we do not release CO2 at the same rate as we did 100 years ago. Sequestoring the current atmosphere doesn't change the concentration, but thinning the current atmosphere makes the gas released from that moment forward have a larger impact on the overall concentration vs historical atmosphere. CO2 isn't added to the atmosphere in equal proportion to its current atmospheric concentration.
If I pull down a large vacuum bell and blow air into the chamber the concentration of gas with a change in the concentration of a single element relevant to others isn't going to match what I put in, if I vacuum the bell out first the concentration will generally reflect the relative concentration of elements I put in. Sequestering and therefore thinning atmosphere is vacuuming the bell, what is in the air is not what we are putting out today, its dirtied by what we've previously put out. We need to vacuum the bell.
Also, CO2 is heavier than those other atmospheric elements. The air is in motion but it still concentrates naturally to some extent with elevation sequester air at sea level and you'll have a higher concentration than all the atmosphere which isn't at sea level... you know, the thinner, cooler, atmosphere you find higher up.
The other elements are going to replaced at the same rate, the CO2 has accumulated over time. If you thin the atmosphere, life is only going to create new atmosphere at the current rate of release, the industrial revolution is over, our technology is more efficient, we don't output as much CO2 as we did in the past. If you sequester atmospheric gas you DO change the concentration, because what you sequester contains built up concentrations of gases, what replaces it does not.
Overall concentration is currently too high, in atmospheric gas, at the surface. Trap it, and you've trapped it in it's current concentration and thinned the atmosphere, reducing the concentration of all of those gases. It isn't as if there is the same amount of gas that is unchanging, gas is compressable, we are increasing the amount of gas in the atmosphere, we need to thin it. The elements needed to provide life are produced by the existing lifeforms the greenhouse gases less so, we've created this problem by burning the remains of past organic life and releasing them as gas over a long course of time, the life which exists on earth contains enough of the elements we need to sustain and reproduce. It's a self balancing equation, just start sequestering atmosphere until it thins the overall concentration.
You can't remove a bubble of atmosphere without reducing the overall concentration as present in the atmosphere.
As I said, you don't need to seperate it, the CO2 is already in the atmosphere, if sequester atmosphere you sequester the gases it contains. it doesn't hurt anything to trap everything else in the atmosphere alongside it because the elements needed for life contained in atmosphere are so abundant that no life form could remove them. The only problem is having enough space to trap it in, and we have no shortage of that at the poles.
"the apparent lack of any means of gathering the CO2 you intend to sequester."
It is in the air, literally, at surface level. Spray a hose, you've gathered concentrated CO2 and reduced the amount in the rest of the atmosphere. Used compressed air and geling agent to produce foam and captured it as gas, freeze that foam and you've sequestered it. You don't need to trap just greenhouse gas, you just need to trap it at a higher concentration than we want in the atmosphere which the current atmosphere already contains and that will continue to be true as long as this is a problem.
"It did fine until we came along and fucked it up."
No it didn't, it fucked up randomly and constantly and what is left is what it hasn't been able to fuck up yet and anything we fuck up is natures fuck up as well because we are natural and everything we do is natural.
"Go read TFA. Hell, read TFS. We're talking about atmospheric gas converted to bicarbonate and dissolved in water, not atmospheric gas dissolved in water. That basically renders the remainder of your post moot."
It would if the solution I'm proposing and you are arguing against were the one in the TFA or the TFS but since it isn't that isn't really relevant. I'm not talking about their desalination process, I'm talking about sequestering greenhouse gas in a fast and cheap manner. Yes I'm oversimplifying the solution, it needs to be big more elegant in actual implementation but it is being dramatically overcomplicated. The poles have already added enough water to the ocean and you aren't going to hurt anything putting some of it back, the fact is ridiculously cold at the poles means anything you trap gas in physically is going to be more dense and more effective, the more gas you trap in each layer the better it does with insulating the previous layers and keeping them cold, rinse and repeat. It's a compounding process that provides benefit that grows exponentially with each layer making the polar structure more resistant to melting and increasing the heat that escapes from the earth. This is the solution nature produced, it's just a way to compact that solution a little more densely.
"What not-water ice do you propose we use that won't melt at the high (relatively) temperatures at the poles?"
not water-ice. You know, sand, rock, pretty much anything that doesn't oxidize away or dissolve salt. As for the relatively warm temperatures... The highest temperature ever recorded at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was −12.3 °C, and that was the air at the surface, the freezing point of ice is not nearly as cold as the deep polar ice.
"Yes, it does. Consider how much of the world's water would have to be dedicated to this, and our ability to freeze all of that quickly enough to be useful, though. See our other discussion for a breakdown."
What you've said impacts the viability of the solution in the TFA... it really doesn't impact the viability of the solution I've proposed. Hell, you could melt ice at the poles and spray it out a hose and let it refreeze and it will trap more greenhouse gas than the ice you melted contained as long as you are spraying it in the direction of the pole that new ice will also be thicker and making the existing ice beneath it more insulated. As for salinity, you don't need fresh water, the melt water at edges of the poles already has a lower salt content than other sea water. As a bonus the solution doesn't even depend on being right about which greenhouse gas is the worst. It really isn't about how soluble the gas is in water though, at those temperatures the water is going to freeze rapidly and the ice will physically trap gas bubbles without any need for them to actually be dissolved in the fluid.
We can capture heat energy and send it to space as radiant energy if we are trying to reduce heat but we don't really need to use a process that generates no heat, you certainly aren't going to produce enough heat to have any significant impact on the local weather of the poles. We have enough nuclear waste stored up to build radiothermal batteries that can power pumps and robots to automatically build up the ice at the poles virtually indefinitely and since that energy is already there you are globally heat neutral. You won't run out of water, you won't use anyones drinking water, you won't consume any resource anybody wants in their back yard the process better compacts and insulates the resulting ice, and so long as the air contains too high a concentration of harmful gases you'll always be reducing that concentration by trapping it in the ice. That said, I'm sure we could grow algea and produce a frozen foam with an even higher concentration of gas than water alone it would probably insult layer over layer better. We aren't going to run out of three dimensional space.
Of course we can freeze water faster and better than nature. Hell, my freezer does that.
I think you are missing the point. We don't end up with the gas frozen in water, we end up with dry frozen biomass with atmospheric gas trapped in it the water is just a way to facilitate the process. If levels of greenhouse gas are too high because of all the greenhouse gas we are releasing into the atmosphere reducing greenhouse gas from the atmosphere is the simplest thing in the world. I take an empty bottle, I stick a cork in said bottle. I've reduced the global greenhouse gas concentration in the air. It isn't like there is any sort of risk of reducing the overall atmosphere by taking away the gas, we've been putting more and more gas into it. But we can trap gas more effectively in a gel and when we dry it out, the gas is still trapped in it as gas, not solution. If you dry out that gel it becomes more dense, if you get it cold it becomes even more dense.
Gas can be compressed. There is little question about whether we can store it more densely than as it sits in the atmosphere. The only question is the cheapest and easiest method of doing it. Frozen foam provides a renewable, cheap, and easy way to bind it up and put it somewhere we know can preserve that biomass for thousands of years. This isn't something toxic that has to be perfectly leak proof, it just needs to escape more slowly than we put it in.
The south pole is ridiculously cold and thick, is much colder than the freezing point of water and we know how to build ridiculously high. There isn't exactly a shortage of three dimensional space to work with. Salt was a suggestion for something that will naturally dry out the foam and conveniently will allow the water to ultimately escape, it is nothing more or less than a cheap desiccant. Pretending their is no other option but to set salt directly on the ice and that it wouldn't be trivial to put a barrier material is a strawman. For that matter you wouldn't need the salt to be directly in contact with the foam either, you could put an airgap... which also would trap more of the gas you are worried about. Pretending their is some great problem of isolating the gas is another strawman, it is already concentrated in the atmosphere without doing anything you can literally trap air, as is.
Hell, you could pump sea water from further out on the caps to the colder center and it would trap atmospheric gas as it sprays and freeze and you can keep on doing that and build up the ice. Anyone who has lived somewhere it gets cold could tell you that, you can add ice a layer at a time all winter long. Just because the ice at the edges is melting doesn't mean we can't layer on ice to replace it or with a higher concentration of greenhouse gases than the ice that is melted. You seem to have this odd idea that there is some reason we can't use 500 times as much of a free medium to contain the gas if the expensive form would be more efficient. We are never going to use up all the space nobody will ever give a damn about at the south pole. Fresh water isn't a problem, we already have that being melted naturally at the poles. we aren't going to run out of water.
Nature is dumb, it isn't TRYING to contain greenhouse gas or build ice. Whether we can intentionally do better than nature isn't even a question.
The ice at the core of the poles is deeper than we can drill and we can build things extremely high, someone would actually need to run the math but thanks to three dimensional space I'd think we could reach equilibrium at some point and of course we can always use structural laying of rock or other materials. If we get more efficient at producing insulators we could produce "polar ice" that is extremely resistant to imbalances while we need to adjust things. If we reverse the process the ice caps won't just stop melting, they'll grow and we have a cooling solar cycle coming up that will provide a respite and buffer.
We could even reach a point where we want more heat retention and we'd have an easy place to extract greenhouse gases from. Over the long haul (the VERY long haul) that is almost certainly something we would need eventually because while our planet is getting warmer right now our universe is getting colder.
Someone else argued the salt would simply dissolve since you are building on ice but even saline freezes and anything it melts will cool it. Yes the salt melts the ice on the road but that salt dries back out. Also, there is no reason you can't put a layer of some barrier material at the bottom of the pit. If human activity can increase the greenhouse levels at a rate that can warm the entire planet then human activity can engineer a procedure to regulate and control the level of greenhouse gases on the planet. We find out about historic greenhouse gas levels by looking at deep layers of polar ice and we find ancient biomass and creatures buried in it that are tens of thousands of years old... seems like a pretty well established place to store biomass and greenhouse gas to me.
At some point this is a global effort and the entire world needs to pay for it. Those who agree to build and work this effort could be recognized as anarctic nation with their own national bank and currency backed by the global climate regulation effort which indisputably has value and that bank can value its currency vs other currencies based on their emissions. The operation could be powered with the heat output from nuclear waste instead of burying it in a mountain somewhere.
It also dries out again. That saline you use to make your ice cream can actually be frozen as well. But yes, your ice cream example touches on the point. we can make the dry cold foam bricks of biomass and atmosphere extremely cold, the same way we can the ice cream which by the way, also has atmospheric gas trapped in it.
You do know your can put a layer of not water ice under it right? Also, if you drop a cube of ice at the poles I guarantee you that you will not watch a hole form all the way to the ocean underneath. Saline has a lower freezing point than pure water but it does still freeze and the ice you are melting is stealing your heat and lowering the temperature of the saline. The salt releases water over time and that water WILL freeze and insulate the colder and now drier saline underneath.
"Ever seen cities salt roads in the winter? This is why they do it and that is why it works."
Yes, I'm well aware of it, I lived it. Ever see the dry salt crystals that remain later? If you follow the process through to completion the salt is ultimately acting as a catalyst to facilitate the transfer of water back into the atmosphere being salted doesn't make the roads warm.
"Yes, nature does this for us. I repeat, though: those ice caps are melting."
At the edges and the process is reversible. Which is the entire point. I don't think anyone is suggesting we have much chance of warming up the core of polar ice anytime in the next few thousand years. All cold things on the Earth aren't getting warmer all at once all the time. They aren't melted yet, and they won't ever be if we can attain equilibrium in the amount of heat retained by the atmosphere. Actually, if anything we are headed into a solar cycle that will dramatically reduce the amount of heat energy from the sun for quite some time and in the much bigger picture everything is not getting warmer all the time, it is getting colder, it is only a localized effect on our planet which is causing it to get warmer... a reversible effect.
"Except that the ice at the poles is melting, or so we keep being told."
Yes, at the edges not the core. If you go deep in the anarctic and urinate I promise you, it WILL freeze. Of course so you will you. Warm ocean currents are melting the ice at the edges of the poles because the atmosphere is warming. If we cool the atmosphere the ice caps would actually grow. By sequestering carbon deep in the heart of the polar ice you cool the atmosphere, meaning those ocean currents will actually start getting cooler and you'd eventually stabilize the process. All you have to do is lock it away in a manner that ensures it stays frozen long enough for that to happen, deep ice in the heart of the poles isn't at risk of thawing anytime in the next several thousand years unless we thaw some.
"The salt would dissolve. In what? Salt would dissolve as it becomes saturated and dry out air passes over it and guess what, when it does it actually cools the salt and your now dry frozen matrix of biomass and dry ice. if you have a thick wall of salt there will likely be dissolved salt on the inner wall and solid salt on the outer layer until the whole thing is so dry and cold that nothing is dissolving. And you will certainly reach that point because it going to be buried under another layer of dry ice, possibly with an airgap for good measure. At some point you'll stop and it's likely at that upper layer you'll end up with a layer of mostly water ice.
Also your nuclear plant is going to produce waste which outputs heat, which conveniently enough can actually be used to make things cold not just hot. It's actually possible you could just build the entire operation using nuclear waste to provide the energy rather than trying to build and operate a nuclear plant at the pole in the first place.
"You don't seem to comprehend the difference between building infrastructure from scratch versus upgrading already existing infrastructure."
That is what I do for a living so i absolutely understand the difference. Upgrading existing infrastructure is almost never done correctly, rarely gives the same result, and is usually a lot harder than a clean fresh implementation.
You are correct about hydrogen storage, but picking a standard is no more difficult than picking a standard for anything else and once one is selected that is also just a question of upgrading existing fueling infrastructure.
"The wires coming into my house are already robust enough to handle powering an electric vehicle. So are the ones going to your house most likely. So is most of the electrical backbone."
That isn't accurate. Most owners of EV's upgrade their home infrastructure to support an EV, most owners have to upgrade their home infrastructure to run a welder in the garage let alone an EV. An EV battery capacity is likely to be about 5 times the consumption of your air conditioner in an hour and when those batteries are replaced by supercaps in the near future that entire consumption will need to happen in seconds not hours. As for the electrical backbone, the backbone currently can't handle everyone running their air conditioner at once and it you aren't talking about charging AN ev, we are talking EVERYONE charging an EV for their daily driving. I've lived on the east cost, I've lived out west, i've lived in florida, i currently live in Texas, I've yet to live anywhere where the grid didn't have occasional brownouts and energy saver programs to give you savings if they could remote disable appliances (mostly AC) because the grid could not handle that heavy demand. If a handful of people in your 10 block radius charged a supercap ev at the same time I guarantee everyone in that neighborhood would see the lights dim.
Also, storing atmospheric carbon in polar ice is a tried and true method... if it weren't we wouldn't be able to measure historic levels of atmospheric carbon from deep core ice samples. I'd be willing to venture we could improve on the natural process a bit, perhaps binding it up into a foam gel matrix. Growing algae to produce the base for a gel will just help the process along and as the ice man and mammoths we've recovered from polar ice indicates, that frozen biomass will not decay for a VERY long time.
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"Your cloud provider definitely has more levels of control to deal with outages."
Highly doubtful, your cloud provider has heavy heavy automation which lends itself nicely to cascading automated multi-level failures and an extremely complicated solution built on top of multiple programming languages, dozens of frameworks, etc that were all known by two or three guys... in the world... and those guys left over the last 3 months due to not getting raises, other staff being laid off and their work dumped on them, and cuts to benefits like work from home flexibility and healthcare. That is if those guys really understood all those pieces they were deploying in the first place.
Oh but it is all so automated and dumbed down that it's going to start decaying in small bits and fraying at the edges in ways that your heavily silo'd org isn't going to recognize are a problem until it's too late. Cheers.
Not as expensive as paying someone else to build infrastructure properly. If your cloud solution costs anything less than dramatically more than building your own infrastructure they aren't building it properly.
"One of the strong points of cloud computing is the infrastructure to shift load to accommodate failing hardware. To reproduce that capability with your own hardware & infrastructure requires a tremendous amount of planning and capital investment: in power, servers, and network. It's almost never a simple matter of "fix the server immediately"."
Of course you need to pay for the required infrastructure. That is what "host yourself" means. Either you are paying the higher up front cost of building it out for yourself or you are paying the much higher costs to have google/amazon/digitalocean/etc do it for you. As for shifting load to accomodate failing hardware, it doesn't work as well as pitched (which is why these services go down all the time and have such high latency) but it works better and faster on a private cloud implementation. Which is where you've built a cloud stack on your own gear. Just be sure you actually have redundant controllers across the whole thing and didn't just build redundant controllers on a virtualized layer sitting on top of a not redundant system.
Actually you pay more and get much less.
Absolutely agree. The benefits of "the cloud" which is one of a string of terms which initially had zero meaning and people kept trying to figure it out until they'd invented something... can be had in a private cloud infrastructure, anything else is just leveraged hosting which should definitely be a no-no for enterprise.
Yeah but the same thing happens, someone cheaps out. They'll run that redundant infrastructure as active/active but then as people cheap out they start treating that as a pool of resources and get in the situation where service is compromised if one is down.
You mean the people who ignored their "overpaid" in-house engineering staff so they could chase the latest buzzwords? Sorry, no, it is on them.
They certainly can go down but if it is critical infrastructure you've layered redundancy upon redundancy upon redundant datacenters. Cascading failures do still sometimes happen but are rare. Usually if you go down these days on self-hosted model it is because you've switched from avoiding home grown like the plague and using software that has cooked for 5+yrs to home grown apps with continuous integration wherein you are always running on blazing edge alpha code.
The cool thing about automation systems, they give you the power to effect a change across your entire farm with a push of a button, which means they give you the power to break your entire farm with the push of the button.
"Animal life does not produce oxygen in any meaningful concentration; nor nitrogen, not any of the other atmospheric gasses other than methane and CO2. Plant life does produce oxygen, but not at enough of a rate to keep up with animal life because we cut a shit ton of it down."
That is a hypothesis, not a fact. We've cut down a ton of it, that is a fact. Animal life produces a shitload of nitrogen as waste, just not in the form of gas. Plant life does produce oxygen. That plant life can't produce enough oxygen to offset CURRENT animal life is not a known fact and that isn't what current plant life is trying to do, it is trying to utilize all the CO2 in the atmosphere from every source. Also, plant life requires oxygen as well as anyone who has seen root rot can attest.
What is a known fact is that the current atmosphere contains massive amounts of CO2 due to having burned the hydrocarbon elements of millions of years worth of life that is isn't around anymore and doesn't need any of the gases above and that has increased the concentration of CO2 relative to WHATEVER the balance is of plant and animal recycling of atmosphere. Existing atmosphere contains the concentrated result not of what we are burning now but everything we've ever built, Sequestor it and it's overall concentration tomorrow will more closely reflect what we put today rather than yesterday but you will also be sequestoring heavy atmosphere at ground level and replacing it with atmosphere drawn from higher up, which contains a lower concentration of heavy gas elements like CO2.
It reduces the overall concentration of the atmosphere, given that we do not release CO2 at the same rate as we did 100 years ago. Sequestoring the current atmosphere doesn't change the concentration, but thinning the current atmosphere makes the gas released from that moment forward have a larger impact on the overall concentration vs historical atmosphere. CO2 isn't added to the atmosphere in equal proportion to its current atmospheric concentration.
If I pull down a large vacuum bell and blow air into the chamber the concentration of gas with a change in the concentration of a single element relevant to others isn't going to match what I put in, if I vacuum the bell out first the concentration will generally reflect the relative concentration of elements I put in. Sequestering and therefore thinning atmosphere is vacuuming the bell, what is in the air is not what we are putting out today, its dirtied by what we've previously put out. We need to vacuum the bell.
Also, CO2 is heavier than those other atmospheric elements. The air is in motion but it still concentrates naturally to some extent with elevation sequester air at sea level and you'll have a higher concentration than all the atmosphere which isn't at sea level... you know, the thinner, cooler, atmosphere you find higher up.
The other elements are going to replaced at the same rate, the CO2 has accumulated over time. If you thin the atmosphere, life is only going to create new atmosphere at the current rate of release, the industrial revolution is over, our technology is more efficient, we don't output as much CO2 as we did in the past. If you sequester atmospheric gas you DO change the concentration, because what you sequester contains built up concentrations of gases, what replaces it does not.
Overall concentration is currently too high, in atmospheric gas, at the surface. Trap it, and you've trapped it in it's current concentration and thinned the atmosphere, reducing the concentration of all of those gases. It isn't as if there is the same amount of gas that is unchanging, gas is compressable, we are increasing the amount of gas in the atmosphere, we need to thin it. The elements needed to provide life are produced by the existing lifeforms the greenhouse gases less so, we've created this problem by burning the remains of past organic life and releasing them as gas over a long course of time, the life which exists on earth contains enough of the elements we need to sustain and reproduce. It's a self balancing equation, just start sequestering atmosphere until it thins the overall concentration.
You can't remove a bubble of atmosphere without reducing the overall concentration as present in the atmosphere.
As I said, you don't need to seperate it, the CO2 is already in the atmosphere, if sequester atmosphere you sequester the gases it contains. it doesn't hurt anything to trap everything else in the atmosphere alongside it because the elements needed for life contained in atmosphere are so abundant that no life form could remove them. The only problem is having enough space to trap it in, and we have no shortage of that at the poles.
"the apparent lack of any means of gathering the CO2 you intend to sequester."
It is in the air, literally, at surface level. Spray a hose, you've gathered concentrated CO2 and reduced the amount in the rest of the atmosphere. Used compressed air and geling agent to produce foam and captured it as gas, freeze that foam and you've sequestered it. You don't need to trap just greenhouse gas, you just need to trap it at a higher concentration than we want in the atmosphere which the current atmosphere already contains and that will continue to be true as long as this is a problem.
"It did fine until we came along and fucked it up."
No it didn't, it fucked up randomly and constantly and what is left is what it hasn't been able to fuck up yet and anything we fuck up is natures fuck up as well because we are natural and everything we do is natural.
"Go read TFA. Hell, read TFS. We're talking about atmospheric gas converted to bicarbonate and dissolved in water, not atmospheric gas dissolved in water. That basically renders the remainder of your post moot."
It would if the solution I'm proposing and you are arguing against were the one in the TFA or the TFS but since it isn't that isn't really relevant. I'm not talking about their desalination process, I'm talking about sequestering greenhouse gas in a fast and cheap manner. Yes I'm oversimplifying the solution, it needs to be big more elegant in actual implementation but it is being dramatically overcomplicated. The poles have already added enough water to the ocean and you aren't going to hurt anything putting some of it back, the fact is ridiculously cold at the poles means anything you trap gas in physically is going to be more dense and more effective, the more gas you trap in each layer the better it does with insulating the previous layers and keeping them cold, rinse and repeat. It's a compounding process that provides benefit that grows exponentially with each layer making the polar structure more resistant to melting and increasing the heat that escapes from the earth. This is the solution nature produced, it's just a way to compact that solution a little more densely.
"What not-water ice do you propose we use that won't melt at the high (relatively) temperatures at the poles?"
not water-ice. You know, sand, rock, pretty much anything that doesn't oxidize away or dissolve salt. As for the relatively warm temperatures... The highest temperature ever recorded at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was −12.3 °C, and that was the air at the surface, the freezing point of ice is not nearly as cold as the deep polar ice.
"Yes, it does. Consider how much of the world's water would have to be dedicated to this, and our ability to freeze all of that quickly enough to be useful, though. See our other discussion for a breakdown."
What you've said impacts the viability of the solution in the TFA... it really doesn't impact the viability of the solution I've proposed. Hell, you could melt ice at the poles and spray it out a hose and let it refreeze and it will trap more greenhouse gas than the ice you melted contained as long as you are spraying it in the direction of the pole that new ice will also be thicker and making the existing ice beneath it more insulated. As for salinity, you don't need fresh water, the melt water at edges of the poles already has a lower salt content than other sea water. As a bonus the solution doesn't even depend on being right about which greenhouse gas is the worst. It really isn't about how soluble the gas is in water though, at those temperatures the water is going to freeze rapidly and the ice will physically trap gas bubbles without any need for them to actually be dissolved in the fluid.
We can capture heat energy and send it to space as radiant energy if we are trying to reduce heat but we don't really need to use a process that generates no heat, you certainly aren't going to produce enough heat to have any significant impact on the local weather of the poles. We have enough nuclear waste stored up to build radiothermal batteries that can power pumps and robots to automatically build up the ice at the poles virtually indefinitely and since that energy is already there you are globally heat neutral. You won't run out of water, you won't use anyones drinking water, you won't consume any resource anybody wants in their back yard the process better compacts and insulates the resulting ice, and so long as the air contains too high a concentration of harmful gases you'll always be reducing that concentration by trapping it in the ice. That said, I'm sure we could grow algea and produce a frozen foam with an even higher concentration of gas than water alone it would probably insult layer over layer better. We aren't going to run out of three dimensional space.
Of course we can freeze water faster and better than nature. Hell, my freezer does that.
I think you are missing the point. We don't end up with the gas frozen in water, we end up with dry frozen biomass with atmospheric gas trapped in it the water is just a way to facilitate the process. If levels of greenhouse gas are too high because of all the greenhouse gas we are releasing into the atmosphere reducing greenhouse gas from the atmosphere is the simplest thing in the world. I take an empty bottle, I stick a cork in said bottle. I've reduced the global greenhouse gas concentration in the air. It isn't like there is any sort of risk of reducing the overall atmosphere by taking away the gas, we've been putting more and more gas into it. But we can trap gas more effectively in a gel and when we dry it out, the gas is still trapped in it as gas, not solution. If you dry out that gel it becomes more dense, if you get it cold it becomes even more dense.
Gas can be compressed. There is little question about whether we can store it more densely than as it sits in the atmosphere. The only question is the cheapest and easiest method of doing it. Frozen foam provides a renewable, cheap, and easy way to bind it up and put it somewhere we know can preserve that biomass for thousands of years. This isn't something toxic that has to be perfectly leak proof, it just needs to escape more slowly than we put it in.
The south pole is ridiculously cold and thick, is much colder than the freezing point of water and we know how to build ridiculously high. There isn't exactly a shortage of three dimensional space to work with. Salt was a suggestion for something that will naturally dry out the foam and conveniently will allow the water to ultimately escape, it is nothing more or less than a cheap desiccant. Pretending their is no other option but to set salt directly on the ice and that it wouldn't be trivial to put a barrier material is a strawman. For that matter you wouldn't need the salt to be directly in contact with the foam either, you could put an airgap... which also would trap more of the gas you are worried about. Pretending their is some great problem of isolating the gas is another strawman, it is already concentrated in the atmosphere without doing anything you can literally trap air, as is.
Hell, you could pump sea water from further out on the caps to the colder center and it would trap atmospheric gas as it sprays and freeze and you can keep on doing that and build up the ice. Anyone who has lived somewhere it gets cold could tell you that, you can add ice a layer at a time all winter long. Just because the ice at the edges is melting doesn't mean we can't layer on ice to replace it or with a higher concentration of greenhouse gases than the ice that is melted. You seem to have this odd idea that there is some reason we can't use 500 times as much of a free medium to contain the gas if the expensive form would be more efficient. We are never going to use up all the space nobody will ever give a damn about at the south pole. Fresh water isn't a problem, we already have that being melted naturally at the poles. we aren't going to run out of water.
Nature is dumb, it isn't TRYING to contain greenhouse gas or build ice. Whether we can intentionally do better than nature isn't even a question.
The ice at the core of the poles is deeper than we can drill and we can build things extremely high, someone would actually need to run the math but thanks to three dimensional space I'd think we could reach equilibrium at some point and of course we can always use structural laying of rock or other materials. If we get more efficient at producing insulators we could produce "polar ice" that is extremely resistant to imbalances while we need to adjust things. If we reverse the process the ice caps won't just stop melting, they'll grow and we have a cooling solar cycle coming up that will provide a respite and buffer.
We could even reach a point where we want more heat retention and we'd have an easy place to extract greenhouse gases from. Over the long haul (the VERY long haul) that is almost certainly something we would need eventually because while our planet is getting warmer right now our universe is getting colder.
Someone else argued the salt would simply dissolve since you are building on ice but even saline freezes and anything it melts will cool it. Yes the salt melts the ice on the road but that salt dries back out. Also, there is no reason you can't put a layer of some barrier material at the bottom of the pit. If human activity can increase the greenhouse levels at a rate that can warm the entire planet then human activity can engineer a procedure to regulate and control the level of greenhouse gases on the planet. We find out about historic greenhouse gas levels by looking at deep layers of polar ice and we find ancient biomass and creatures buried in it that are tens of thousands of years old... seems like a pretty well established place to store biomass and greenhouse gas to me.
At some point this is a global effort and the entire world needs to pay for it. Those who agree to build and work this effort could be recognized as anarctic nation with their own national bank and currency backed by the global climate regulation effort which indisputably has value and that bank can value its currency vs other currencies based on their emissions. The operation could be powered with the heat output from nuclear waste instead of burying it in a mountain somewhere.
It also dries out again. That saline you use to make your ice cream can actually be frozen as well. But yes, your ice cream example touches on the point. we can make the dry cold foam bricks of biomass and atmosphere extremely cold, the same way we can the ice cream which by the way, also has atmospheric gas trapped in it.
"Simple: the ice it is sitting on top of."
You do know your can put a layer of not water ice under it right? Also, if you drop a cube of ice at the poles I guarantee you that you will not watch a hole form all the way to the ocean underneath. Saline has a lower freezing point than pure water but it does still freeze and the ice you are melting is stealing your heat and lowering the temperature of the saline. The salt releases water over time and that water WILL freeze and insulate the colder and now drier saline underneath.
"Ever seen cities salt roads in the winter? This is why they do it and that is why it works."
Yes, I'm well aware of it, I lived it. Ever see the dry salt crystals that remain later? If you follow the process through to completion the salt is ultimately acting as a catalyst to facilitate the transfer of water back into the atmosphere being salted doesn't make the roads warm.
"Yes, nature does this for us. I repeat, though: those ice caps are melting."
At the edges and the process is reversible. Which is the entire point. I don't think anyone is suggesting we have much chance of warming up the core of polar ice anytime in the next few thousand years. All cold things on the Earth aren't getting warmer all at once all the time. They aren't melted yet, and they won't ever be if we can attain equilibrium in the amount of heat retained by the atmosphere. Actually, if anything we are headed into a solar cycle that will dramatically reduce the amount of heat energy from the sun for quite some time and in the much bigger picture everything is not getting warmer all the time, it is getting colder, it is only a localized effect on our planet which is causing it to get warmer... a reversible effect.
"Except that the ice at the poles is melting, or so we keep being told."
Yes, at the edges not the core. If you go deep in the anarctic and urinate I promise you, it WILL freeze. Of course so you will you. Warm ocean currents are melting the ice at the edges of the poles because the atmosphere is warming. If we cool the atmosphere the ice caps would actually grow. By sequestering carbon deep in the heart of the polar ice you cool the atmosphere, meaning those ocean currents will actually start getting cooler and you'd eventually stabilize the process. All you have to do is lock it away in a manner that ensures it stays frozen long enough for that to happen, deep ice in the heart of the poles isn't at risk of thawing anytime in the next several thousand years unless we thaw some.
"The salt would dissolve. In what? Salt would dissolve as it becomes saturated and dry out air passes over it and guess what, when it does it actually cools the salt and your now dry frozen matrix of biomass and dry ice. if you have a thick wall of salt there will likely be dissolved salt on the inner wall and solid salt on the outer layer until the whole thing is so dry and cold that nothing is dissolving. And you will certainly reach that point because it going to be buried under another layer of dry ice, possibly with an airgap for good measure. At some point you'll stop and it's likely at that upper layer you'll end up with a layer of mostly water ice.
Also your nuclear plant is going to produce waste which outputs heat, which conveniently enough can actually be used to make things cold not just hot. It's actually possible you could just build the entire operation using nuclear waste to provide the energy rather than trying to build and operate a nuclear plant at the pole in the first place.
"You don't seem to comprehend the difference between building infrastructure from scratch versus upgrading already existing infrastructure."
That is what I do for a living so i absolutely understand the difference. Upgrading existing infrastructure is almost never done correctly, rarely gives the same result, and is usually a lot harder than a clean fresh implementation.
You are correct about hydrogen storage, but picking a standard is no more difficult than picking a standard for anything else and once one is selected that is also just a question of upgrading existing fueling infrastructure.
"The wires coming into my house are already robust enough to handle powering an electric vehicle. So are the ones going to your house most likely. So is most of the electrical backbone."
That isn't accurate. Most owners of EV's upgrade their home infrastructure to support an EV, most owners have to upgrade their home infrastructure to run a welder in the garage let alone an EV. An EV battery capacity is likely to be about 5 times the consumption of your air conditioner in an hour and when those batteries are replaced by supercaps in the near future that entire consumption will need to happen in seconds not hours. As for the electrical backbone, the backbone currently can't handle everyone running their air conditioner at once and it you aren't talking about charging AN ev, we are talking EVERYONE charging an EV for their daily driving. I've lived on the east cost, I've lived out west, i've lived in florida, i currently live in Texas, I've yet to live anywhere where the grid didn't have occasional brownouts and energy saver programs to give you savings if they could remote disable appliances (mostly AC) because the grid could not handle that heavy demand. If a handful of people in your 10 block radius charged a supercap ev at the same time I guarantee everyone in that neighborhood would see the lights dim.
Also, storing atmospheric carbon in polar ice is a tried and true method... if it weren't we wouldn't be able to measure historic levels of atmospheric carbon from deep core ice samples. I'd be willing to venture we could improve on the natural process a bit, perhaps binding it up into a foam gel matrix. Growing algae to produce the base for a gel will just help the process along and as the ice man and mammoths we've recovered from polar ice indicates, that frozen biomass will not decay for a VERY long time.