I have (neigh, had) a client making the same choice right now. All of their infrastructure, under my hand, I could fix as it was fully under my control. We'll see where they are in 5 years.
I'll happily go back to them when they ask me to clean up the shitstorm their current CTO doesn't see coming. As CTO and for double what I was getting as a contractor, of course.
Under my lead, they went from everything running on a single unstable server and going down every other day to everything running on a distributed cluster of servers and not a single outage in sight. This, in the matter of under a year, on a site that is their entire business and sees over 500k uniques and serves over 20 million pages per month.
Their new solution costs them more per month and limits them to 1.5 million pages served per month on the best package they actually list a price for, with no uptime SLA. In short, they'll be paying 15x as much for infrastructure for the capacity the current system has, which more than covers what they're "saving" by not paying me.
It is what it is, but they thought I was only looking out for my own ass when I pointed all of this out. Well, I was looking out for me but, as they were providing me steady full-time work, a huge part of that was looking out for them in-kind.
Animal life produces a shitload of nitrogen as waste, just not in the form of gas.
You mean we produce a shitload (literally, of course) of nitrogen compounds. Of course, you then immediately admit that doesn't do much for our atmosphere. See our other discussion on this for the rest of my thoughts. I think you're on to something, but you're missing a few key pieces; for starters, the difficulty of containing a free gas in such a harsh environment as the poles.
It reduces the overall concentration of the atmosphere
You're conflating volume with concentration.
given that we do not release CO2 at the same rate as we did 100 years ago
We release a lot more methane now, though, and almost no nitrogen. You don't think that shift would have any consequences?
thinning the current atmosphere makes the gas released from that moment forward have a larger impact on the overall concentration
Indeed, which only compounds the above. It also makes many currently-livable higher altitudes uninhabitable, displacing some amount of wildlife. Then, there's the reduction in atmospheric pressure which, <sarc>I'm sure will have no effect on weather patterns.</sarc>
Look. You clearly haven't thought this through very well. That's fine, it's a big and complicated subject and it's really easy to be blinded to the pitfalls of what one believes to be a viable solution to a major problem. The hard part is realizing there are these pitfalls, acknowledging them, and improving your plan until you either find a problem the current plan cannot overcome, or you run out of problems.
Once you've gotten there, you evaluate the plan again and see if it still solves the problem you set out to solve. If it does, you go ahead with it; if it doesn't, you saved yourself a ton of expense, hassle, and potential catastrophe.
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.
Further, the concentration of CO2 relative to other gasses in the atmosphere does not change if you sequester raw atmospheric gasses. Think of it like having a saturated saline solution; if spoon some out of the bowl and sequester it elsewhere, the concentration remains the same, you just end up with less saline.
Yeah, along with O2, N2, and other atmospheric gasses. That doesn't really do much for the overall concentration. If it were that simple, we'd be doing it already.
the freezing point of ice is not nearly as cold as the deep polar ice
Unless it's completely saturated with fucking salt... How do you not get that?
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.
I thought we were discussing solutions for storing the bicarbonate created by the solution in TFA. Given that we're not, what impacts the viability of your solution is the apparent lack of any means of gathering the CO2 you intend to sequester.
Of course we can freeze water faster and better than nature. Hell, my freezer does that.
Not in the volumes we're talking about here, and especially not when it's saturated with salt.
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.
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.
You do know your can put a layer of not water ice under it right?
What not-water ice do you propose we use that won't melt at the high (relatively) temperatures at the poles? Because those temperatures are all high relative to the temperatures of any non-water ice that won't itself dissolve in the water ice.
Saline has a lower freezing point than pure water but it does still freeze
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.
The salt releases water over time and that water WILL freeze and insulate the colder and now drier saline underneath.
Except that the saline will have a higher density and the released water will rise, not fall. If it doesn't evaporate, it will eventually dissolve some of the salt out of the saline it is in contact with. This is called osmosis, my friend, and someone as knowledgeable as you appear to be should be well aware of it. That said, even if what you claim is true...
Ever see the dry salt crystals that remain later?
Indeed, I have. Ever seen the layers build up thick enough that the wind blows them away? Same would happen at the poles if you were in any way correct; and it would ultimately blow right into the ocean.
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
Right, and nobody ever claimed it was. At least not in this thread. Warmth is not the mechanism by which it does that; solution is; the ice dissolves enough of the salt that it cannot remain frozen at its current temperature.
Yes, when the water evaporates, or the saturation becomes low enough by melting other nearby ice (thus increasing the salinity of that ice). It also stops cooling when it does, then begins the melting process all over if there is still ice around with a lower salinity.
Are you at all familiar with osmosis? Or how much bicarbonate water can dissolve at sub-zero temperatures? Or how many tons of bicarbonate would be created to capture 1 trillion tons of CO2? (hint: 1.386 trillion)
At 0C, you can dissolve 69 grams of bicarbonate into a single liter of water. Of course, that water won't freeze at that temperature with all of that bicarbonate in it; it won't freeze at that concentration at any temperature found outside a lab. But let's ignore that fact for a moment and determine how many liters of clean fresh water would be needed to hold all of that carbonate in ice (again, ignoring that it won't freeze at that concentration), because this is the best case scenario for your plan. 1.368 trillion tons of carbonate is 1,241,028,724,320,000,000 grams. Divided by 69 grams per liter is 17,985,923,540,000,000 liters of water. That's pure, fresh water, with nothing else dissolved in it; seawater will hold much less, as it already has a bunch of shit dissolved in it.
While 17,985,923,540,000,000 liters is only 0.0014% of all the water on earth, less than 3% of it is fresh water and less than 1% of it is in not frozen in ice caps. That means we would have to use 0.14% of our fresh water supply (e.g. drain a lot of lakes and destroy a lot of ecosystems) to sequester that carbon in water. Ideally.
We could always use seawater, but we'd need about 100x as much of it, or the same overall percentage of the planet's water supply, all the while pushing up both the salinity and alkalinity of the ocean. Oh, and it still won't freeze at that concentration.
We might be able to get it to freeze at 1/10 that concentration... maybe. Of course, then, we need to freeze 1.4% of the world's water. We, not nature. Nature can't freeze water quickly enough at that saturation level to keep up with the rate at which we're producing CO2, let alone quickly enough to net remove CO2 from the atmosphere; and we can't freeze it any better or faster than nature.
Simple: the ice it is sitting on top of. Salt (all kinds of it) melts ice. Why? Because dissolved salt lowers the freezing point of ice and it will dissolve in frozen ice it cones in contact with.
Ever seen cities salt roads in the winter? This is why they do it and that is why it works.
You can try it yourself, even! Pour salt on the ice tray in your freezer, leave it in the freezer, and check on it in an hour or two.
when it does it actually cools the salt
And, yet, the shit still melts. It is useful for making ice colder while making ice cream, though.
Also, storing atmospheric carbon in polar ice is a tried and true method...
Yes, nature does this for us. I repeat, though: those ice caps are melting.
perhaps binding it up into a foam gel matrix
Those are, quite typically, porous. Even the ones which are not to have a tendency to leak, especially as the temperature deviates (in either direction) from the temperature at which the foam formed. AFAIK there isn't such a foam, currently, which can form at, or even near, sub-zero temperatures; certainly, there won't be one that can be produced by algae which can't survive at those temperatures in the first place.
All that would do, in reality, is take up more space. At freezing temperatures, the only materials that will do a better job of this than water all release more CO2 during their production than they would be able to sequester.
If you take into account the effect massive-scale desalinization would have on the ocean as a whole and the local environments around the desalinization plants, you quickly begin to understand why it quite likely cannot scale. When you factor in the bicarbonate increasing the alkalinity of the ocean and killing off oceanic life (alkalinity is just as bad as acidity, it's pretty basic -- no pun intended), it becomes obvious.
We're talking about electrical energy, heat energy, and chemical energy so, yes, all thermodynamics.
I thought the point of sequestering CO2 was to allow this planet to sustain life for longer. I'm pretty sure killing off most of what lives in the ocean is counter to that point.
Right, because freezing water doesn't use energy or give off heat. Oh, and that ice will certainly never melt. Also, the conductivity of near-freezing water found at the poles is lower than at, say, the California coastline, which means it requires more energy to electrolyze; by a substantial amount.
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I have (neigh, had) a client making the same choice right now. All of their infrastructure, under my hand, I could fix as it was fully under my control. We'll see where they are in 5 years.
I'll happily go back to them when they ask me to clean up the shitstorm their current CTO doesn't see coming. As CTO and for double what I was getting as a contractor, of course.
Under my lead, they went from everything running on a single unstable server and going down every other day to everything running on a distributed cluster of servers and not a single outage in sight. This, in the matter of under a year, on a site that is their entire business and sees over 500k uniques and serves over 20 million pages per month.
Their new solution costs them more per month and limits them to 1.5 million pages served per month on the best package they actually list a price for, with no uptime SLA. In short, they'll be paying 15x as much for infrastructure for the capacity the current system has, which more than covers what they're "saving" by not paying me.
It is what it is, but they thought I was only looking out for my own ass when I pointed all of this out. Well, I was looking out for me but, as they were providing me steady full-time work, a huge part of that was looking out for them in-kind.
Animal life produces a shitload of nitrogen as waste, just not in the form of gas.
You mean we produce a shitload (literally, of course) of nitrogen compounds. Of course, you then immediately admit that doesn't do much for our atmosphere. See our other discussion on this for the rest of my thoughts. I think you're on to something, but you're missing a few key pieces; for starters, the difficulty of containing a free gas in such a harsh environment as the poles.
It reduces the overall concentration of the atmosphere
You're conflating volume with concentration.
given that we do not release CO2 at the same rate as we did 100 years ago
We release a lot more methane now, though, and almost no nitrogen. You don't think that shift would have any consequences?
thinning the current atmosphere makes the gas released from that moment forward have a larger impact on the overall concentration
Indeed, which only compounds the above. It also makes many currently-livable higher altitudes uninhabitable, displacing some amount of wildlife. Then, there's the reduction in atmospheric pressure which, <sarc>I'm sure will have no effect on weather patterns.</sarc>
Look. You clearly haven't thought this through very well. That's fine, it's a big and complicated subject and it's really easy to be blinded to the pitfalls of what one believes to be a viable solution to a major problem. The hard part is realizing there are these pitfalls, acknowledging them, and improving your plan until you either find a problem the current plan cannot overcome, or you run out of problems.
Once you've gotten there, you evaluate the plan again and see if it still solves the problem you set out to solve. If it does, you go ahead with it; if it doesn't, you saved yourself a ton of expense, hassle, and potential catastrophe.
What's funny about that is that the heat is being trapped by stratospheric carbon...
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.
Further, the concentration of CO2 relative to other gasses in the atmosphere does not change if you sequester raw atmospheric gasses. Think of it like having a saturated saline solution; if spoon some out of the bowl and sequester it elsewhere, the concentration remains the same, you just end up with less saline.
The concentration of CO2 relative to other gasses in the atmosphere does not change if you sequester raw atmospheric gasses.
It actually does matter if you trap the other elements, as it's not the amount of CO2, but the concentration that is the problem.
Yeah, along with O2, N2, and other atmospheric gasses. That doesn't really do much for the overall concentration. If it were that simple, we'd be doing it already.
I'm not talking about their desalination process, I'm talking about sequestering greenhouse gas in a fast and cheap manner.
As I said in our other discussion, you're missing the whole "how to collect the CO2" part, which is what the desalinization discussed in TFA does.
the freezing point of ice is not nearly as cold as the deep polar ice
Unless it's completely saturated with fucking salt... How do you not get that?
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.
I thought we were discussing solutions for storing the bicarbonate created by the solution in TFA. Given that we're not, what impacts the viability of your solution is the apparent lack of any means of gathering the CO2 you intend to sequester.
Of course we can freeze water faster and better than nature. Hell, my freezer does that.
Not in the volumes we're talking about here, and especially not when it's saturated with salt.
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.
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.
Nature is dumb
It did fine until we came along and fucked it up.
You do know your can put a layer of not water ice under it right?
What not-water ice do you propose we use that won't melt at the high (relatively) temperatures at the poles? Because those temperatures are all high relative to the temperatures of any non-water ice that won't itself dissolve in the water ice.
Saline has a lower freezing point than pure water but it does still freeze
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.
The salt releases water over time and that water WILL freeze and insulate the colder and now drier saline underneath.
Except that the saline will have a higher density and the released water will rise, not fall. If it doesn't evaporate, it will eventually dissolve some of the salt out of the saline it is in contact with. This is called osmosis, my friend, and someone as knowledgeable as you appear to be should be well aware of it. That said, even if what you claim is true...
Ever see the dry salt crystals that remain later?
Indeed, I have. Ever seen the layers build up thick enough that the wind blows them away? Same would happen at the poles if you were in any way correct; and it would ultimately blow right into the ocean.
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
Right, and nobody ever claimed it was. At least not in this thread. Warmth is not the mechanism by which it does that; solution is; the ice dissolves enough of the salt that it cannot remain frozen at its current temperature.
It also dries out again.
Yes, when the water evaporates, or the saturation becomes low enough by melting other nearby ice (thus increasing the salinity of that ice). It also stops cooling when it does, then begins the melting process all over if there is still ice around with a lower salinity.
Are you at all familiar with osmosis? Or how much bicarbonate water can dissolve at sub-zero temperatures? Or how many tons of bicarbonate would be created to capture 1 trillion tons of CO2? (hint: 1.386 trillion)
At 0C, you can dissolve 69 grams of bicarbonate into a single liter of water. Of course, that water won't freeze at that temperature with all of that bicarbonate in it; it won't freeze at that concentration at any temperature found outside a lab. But let's ignore that fact for a moment and determine how many liters of clean fresh water would be needed to hold all of that carbonate in ice (again, ignoring that it won't freeze at that concentration), because this is the best case scenario for your plan. 1.368 trillion tons of carbonate is 1,241,028,724,320,000,000 grams. Divided by 69 grams per liter is 17,985,923,540,000,000 liters of water. That's pure, fresh water, with nothing else dissolved in it; seawater will hold much less, as it already has a bunch of shit dissolved in it.
While 17,985,923,540,000,000 liters is only 0.0014% of all the water on earth, less than 3% of it is fresh water and less than 1% of it is in not frozen in ice caps. That means we would have to use 0.14% of our fresh water supply (e.g. drain a lot of lakes and destroy a lot of ecosystems) to sequester that carbon in water. Ideally.
We could always use seawater, but we'd need about 100x as much of it, or the same overall percentage of the planet's water supply, all the while pushing up both the salinity and alkalinity of the ocean. Oh, and it still won't freeze at that concentration.
We might be able to get it to freeze at 1/10 that concentration... maybe. Of course, then, we need to freeze 1.4% of the world's water. We, not nature. Nature can't freeze water quickly enough at that saturation level to keep up with the rate at which we're producing CO2, let alone quickly enough to net remove CO2 from the atmosphere; and we can't freeze it any better or faster than nature.
Sorry, not going to work.
See our other conversation for why this is all a moot point.
The salt would dissolve. In what?
Simple: the ice it is sitting on top of. Salt (all kinds of it) melts ice. Why? Because dissolved salt lowers the freezing point of ice and it will dissolve in frozen ice it cones in contact with.
Ever seen cities salt roads in the winter? This is why they do it and that is why it works.
You can try it yourself, even! Pour salt on the ice tray in your freezer, leave it in the freezer, and check on it in an hour or two.
when it does it actually cools the salt
And, yet, the shit still melts. It is useful for making ice colder while making ice cream, though.
Also, storing atmospheric carbon in polar ice is a tried and true method...
Yes, nature does this for us. I repeat, though: those ice caps are melting.
perhaps binding it up into a foam gel matrix
Those are, quite typically, porous. Even the ones which are not to have a tendency to leak, especially as the temperature deviates (in either direction) from the temperature at which the foam formed. AFAIK there isn't such a foam, currently, which can form at, or even near, sub-zero temperatures; certainly, there won't be one that can be produced by algae which can't survive at those temperatures in the first place.
All that would do, in reality, is take up more space. At freezing temperatures, the only materials that will do a better job of this than water all release more CO2 during their production than they would be able to sequester.
No, that ice will not melt because it being stored in a giant natural global freezer at the poles.
Except that the ice at the poles is melting, or so we keep being told.
The salt can actually be used to wall the frozen output giving layers of sea salt and dry ice with water slowly migrating to upper layers.
The salt would dissolve. Simple as that.
If you take into account the effect massive-scale desalinization would have on the ocean as a whole and the local environments around the desalinization plants, you quickly begin to understand why it quite likely cannot scale. When you factor in the bicarbonate increasing the alkalinity of the ocean and killing off oceanic life (alkalinity is just as bad as acidity, it's pretty basic -- no pun intended), it becomes obvious.
We're talking about electrical energy, heat energy, and chemical energy so, yes, all thermodynamics.
I thought the point of sequestering CO2 was to allow this planet to sustain life for longer. I'm pretty sure killing off most of what lives in the ocean is counter to that point.
As I said, I was probably wrong, and that's an opporunity to learn, which I've done here. Thanks for the follow-up. ;)
Right, because freezing water doesn't use energy or give off heat. Oh, and that ice will certainly never melt. Also, the conductivity of near-freezing water found at the poles is lower than at, say, the California coastline, which means it requires more energy to electrolyze; by a substantial amount.
Did TFA address that?
well... "about as well as" not very well is still not very well, so... yes, that was what I was getting at
"could be" doesn't indicate something is unlikely...
No. But, in this case, a basic understanding of thermodynamics does.
That, of course, is a maybe (and likely not), and not a yes. If you think I'm wrong, you can loan me a million dollars and I could pay you back.
I see someone has never had a fish tank. While you're technically correct, aquatic life tends to survive alkalinity about as well as acidity.
Where can I get 277.8KWh for $3? Can I see that study? Please?