113 points by lux 2 days ago | 32 comments
incompatible 1 day ago
sfink 1 day ago
Good question. Answering questions is called 'research'. ;-)
I'm skeptical for the same reasons as you, too. Let's see... the ocean covers 361km^2. If we could engineer a material with "cells" that were 1000x as effective at carbon capture as diatoms, and the manufactured material was 1000x more densely packed together than diatoms are on the ocean surface, then you'd need 361 square kilometers of the magic material. Which is not out of the realm of possibility, though I have no idea what the density of diatoms is and I have a sneaking suspicion that we'd be looking at more of the 3x-4x range of efficiency improvement. And of course, you need to turn the CO2 into something and deposit it somewhere, and maybe move it around lot. Which would use energy that would produce more CO2, offsetting the gains. Oh, and manufacture the stuff.
I'm thinking releasing less of the stuff and stopping forest destruction might be much more effective for a long time here...
magicalhippo 1 day ago
That should of course be 361 million km^2.
ordu 20 hours ago
Though probably one can try to create an artificial wind, blowing CO2-free air away so CO2 could move quickly into the freed space.
delecti 17 hours ago
innagadadavida 18 hours ago
The industry will look for a profit motive to solve this. The scientists will look for a publication and fame motive. The politicians will try to grab more power. The poor animals and other third world country people who had nothing to do with this will bear the brunt. Only time will tell.
Qwertious 1 day ago
marcosdumay 17 hours ago
In all likelihood, we can get ~10x better efficiency without trying very hard.
Living beings don't focus much on growing. They are usually less than 1% efficient on that, with more complex life being on the order of 0.1% efficient.
tantalor 1 day ago
lainga 1 day ago
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom#/media/File:Diatoms_Egg...
aeternum 1 day ago
Similar has been tested with iron + algae and seems to work well.
ThrowAaaaway 1 day ago
Reason077 22 hours ago
euroderf 21 hours ago
pbmonster 19 hours ago
This would end pretty much all higher life on land.
There are theories that earth was slowly moving towards this point naturally, as across the last 2 million years, CO2 concentration successively decreased with each passing glacial period. Maybe humans inventing fire saved everything!
wongarsu 21 hours ago
whaaaaat 1 day ago
The Earth's carbon cycle manages about 750 gigatons of CO2/year and humans are emitting ~30 excess gigatons a year on top. The diatoms in the ocean are happily out there processing 150 gigatons of CO2/year, but what we need to engineer is only 30 gigatons (to completely eradicate human emissions).
If we engineered diatoms to fix, say, 0.3 gigatons/year, we'd eradicate a whole integer percent of our emissions.
Heck, if we got it in the 0.03 gigatons (30 megatons/year), we've probably built something scalable and created a useful entry in our portfolio to capture carbon, sinking about 0.1% of our carbon/year.
So, don't despair, we don't have to compete with the ocean! We only need to compete with ourselves! Or maybe do despair? Because we have to compete with ourselves... fundamentally, climate change isn't a technology problem, it's a political problem.
arj 1 day ago
vlovich123 18 hours ago
Our yearly emissions are 36GT and ever growing modulo a reprieve in COVID. It was only about 20 just 17 years ago. That means you need to sequester more and more every year just to keep a constant percentage of sequestration. If you include deforestation and wildfires, this number goes up to 41GT which means there’s a compound effect since current models suggest that’s part of a negative feedback loop (ie worse due to our actions and global warming).
Perhaps more importantly, the 750GT number you cited (whatever the real number happens to be) is 1.5x larger than before we started burning fossil fuels at scale. So to get the world back to where it was, not only do we need to overcome our yearly expenditure, we’d have to pay back a lot of CO2 emissions debt we’ve spent building our economy and even 10 GT/year won’t pay back nearly three centuries worth of exponentially increasing emissions on any meaningful time frame once the world is at net 0.
All of this is ignoring the practical realities of scaling carbon sequestration up in a way that’s net positive and even mildly profitable or at least not expensive enough that it doesn’t become a collective action problem.
I’d be the first to celebrate if this were an actual solution, but unfortunately I think carbon sequestration won’t be a meaningful effort to even think about in practical terms until we’re meaningfully on our way to net 0 and we’re well off from that with politicians thinking about maybe banning fossil fuel car sales in 2035 which means it’ll take until 2050 or so for a meaningful percentage of fossil fuel cars to start leaving the road. And ignoring the manufacturing challenges about producing so many batteries (which I think we will probably solve), we’re nowhere close to solving decarbonization of shipping and aviation and don’t have line of sight on the big whale of the energy grid which is responsible for >70% of all emissions (yes yes solar - but worldwide emissions from the energy grid keep going up and we haven’t even made a dent in the second order derivative and maybe just in the third order if you’re optimistic with every indication that we’d actually need nuclear to change the calculus in the short term).
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152519/emissions-fr...
fluoridation 16 hours ago
adornKey 1 day ago
Around my place people burned witches for 400 years - to fight lightning strikes.
Removing gigatons of CO2 is maybe on the same level - only more stupid - and bad for plants. Arguments against witch burning didn't have much data to process. For CO2 there's quite some number crunching out there available...
Emotions, despair, anger, ... these are a lot of emotional arguments in the media out there. People should be more cool and only care about the physic and mathematics... And actually read some papers - not this emotional science fluff from the media.
Bjartr 21 hours ago
>Maybe climate change is not a political problem and not a technology problem - maybe it's a mental issue.
Care to connect these two thoughts for us?
noworriesnate 17 hours ago
debacle 1 day ago