It's probably too late to stop catastrophic warming simply by cutting emissions. We still need to do so, because it can always get worse, but it's time to look seriously at terraforming as well.
As for your suggestion, I doubt this is even possible; we released millions of year worth of concentrated solar energy in the span of a century (edit: slightly misleading statement, see below). Scrubbing so much carbon from the atmosphere would take huge amounts of energy, and that energy needs to be clean or you're just adding to the issue. And all this needs to be done in a capitalistic system without any direct profit motive - good luck with that.
The most "realistic" examples of geoengineering I have read about usually have downsides that end up killing most of us as well (such as a solar shield at L1 to decrease warming - the impact on plant life and as a result, food, would be pretty bad). Meanwhile we're still pretending less than 2C is possible, and even pretending that 2C is survivable as-is without profound changes to our way of lives.
That being said, they mention that human CO2 emission have plateau-ed; I'm far from sure that this the case as a lot of it comes from self reporting and those numbers are likely heavily under reported (especially - but not only - from China). It should also be mentioned a lot of this could come from El Nino; but then again climate change is expected to impact that cycle and we may get stronger and/or longer El Nino periods - it may be partly consequence as well.
This seems like an overestimate of how much energy it would take to do capture and sequestration. The energy density of fossil fuels is nowhere near that high. A gallon of gasoline is ~33kwh of energy, which is about the same amount of energy that falls on a square meter of Earth's surface in about 22 hours.
In terms of barrels of oil, with global consumption at 96 million barrels per day, assuming 12hrs of sunlight a day, I calculated 8600km^2 of Earth's surface, or a square about 93km on a side.
It collects light across a circle with same radius as the planet. A = (pi)r^2. The surface of a sphere is A = 4(pi)r^2. Net result on average you get 6 hours of full sunlight equivalent averaged cross a planet.
In northern latitudes panels tilt to collect more sunlight, but that means you can't completely cover an area with panels without some of them being in the shadow of another panel.
TLDR; you need 2 squares that are each 93km on a side, or one ~131 km on a side assuming 100% efficient panels and energy conversion. At say 20% net efficiency which would be very high that's a square ~300km on a side.
Consider, in theory we could use solar power to break the earth into little pieces and move it to a younger star. But, in practice that's simply not going to happen.
So, yes with years to possibly centuries of effort we could trap similar amounts of carbon. But, it currently seems unlikely for that to happen on any reasonable timescale without few economic reasons to do so.
All the gold ever mined fits in an olympic pool, but it's also not saying anything about how achievable that picture is. Ignoring the order of magnitude is even more misleading.
How much of energy is actually produced at the moment in solar plants? How much area do they need? How much is achievable? That's why I'm comparing your (wrong) estimate with the attitude like "I see the golden ring on my finger, I can get it easy, just go in the shop and buy it, now it's 'just' an Olympic pool of gold with which I can 'solve' the problem, see, it's easy." No.
I think you completely misinterpreted my statement and now you're just being needless angry. Read it again. The original poster seemed to imply that it would take millions of years worth of solar energy to "put back" all the CO2 into hydrocarbons. That's not even close, which is why I pointed out in my latest comment that there is at least 8 orders of magnitude difference there.
> It really took 13.8 billion years for the Earth to come to the point we're now. 3 billion years life on Earth uses the energy of Sun, only a small part remained stored in the Earth's crust. Two billion years of cyanobacteria work (using the energy of the Sun!) was needed only to produce enough oxygen in the atmosphere to enable more complex life. The next billion of years the complex life bound the carbon from the CO2 (chemically not small achievement at all) and the complex environment interaction stored it in the earth crust.
Wow, you got a very long, complicated chain of reasoning, but just let me stop you right there.
You've got a totally wrong model. Nature didn't "store up enough energy" gradually in some grand plan. Nature recycles everything; coal deposits are actually from plants and are total accidents.
Evidence: according to https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/2503/how-mu...
A large amount of the fossil deposits were due to a couple of relatively short periods of geologic history, the most important one that was the carboniferous period where so many plants grew they actually depleted the CO2 from the atmosphere (and as a side effect produced nearly 40% atmospheric oxygen concentration). That wasn't the outcome of a long, slow, one-directional process that kept adding oil and coal to the crust. It happened because there was a gap in the biosphere; nothing in that period existed that could digest plant cellulose. When microbes did eventually evolve to do so, then they were able to recycle the dead plant material on the surface (not buried under hundreds of meters of sedimentation) and lead to a homeostasis closer to what we see today.
Nature recycles everything.
(and yes, in an ironic way, we are finally recyling all those dead plants)
Really? Not the way I read his message. I don't know what you've read (and why it is "seemed to imply" and not some quote that would support your claim), I know only this part of his message: "we released millions of year worth of concentrated solar energy in the span of a century." And if you analyze what actually happened on Earth, it is really billions of years of photosynthesis that were needed for this to happen (to produce the conditions that the concentrated carbon remained in the crust).
You write that you've discovered that only for a geologically "short" time the carbon was stored. Yes, indeed. But that geologically short time is compared to the billions of years where the conditions weren't right, both before and after.
And you still ignore what I wrote: without the pure oxygen, which was produced by the cyanobacteria using photosynthesis(!), there would be no geologically short period of the more active storage.
So yes, the fossil fuels are the still result of the almost 3 billion years of photosynthesis. And yes, it is an "accident" in a sense that everything needed to happen exactly as it happened, it wasn't in any way inevitable.
Which should actually make us appreciate even more that we probably used half of all the easily obtainable oil from the crust in just a 100 years.
And yes, we are burning the hydrocarbons from the crust and releasing the CO2 back to the atmosphere, 300 millions of years after the Carboniferous, and it won't be good for us.
Together with the Holocene extinction, humans already immensely changed the nature.
I still think my point stands - scrubbing it from the atmosphere would involve an amount of energy that is unrealistic without deep, deep changes in our society.
There's no scenario in which Mars is a viable alternative for the human race this century.
I suppose the best option would be carbon capture, if it isn't too expensive, but I rather suspect it would be.
Combined with solar and wind for peak of course because why not.
There are currently no other options. Renewables alone are not enough to even power civilization at current level. (They get somewhere shy of 60% in an impossible best case.)
no big deal!
Source for that claim? The number of studies I’ve read (as well as conversations I’ve had with astronauts) about the health impact on astronauts who’ve been on the ISS for extended periods seems to disagree.
https://www.space.com/23017-weightlessness.html
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/a...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/20/health/your-body-in-space/inde...
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_h...
tl;dr version:
> In space, without gravity, bones lose more than 1% of minerals and density per month.
> Astronauts also experience blood volume loss, weakened immune systems and cardiovascular deconditioning since floating takes little effort and the heart doesn't have to work as hard to pump blood through your body
> "It changes their visual acuity," Charles said. "They're not able to see things up close. It's like advanced aging. That sort of thing happens at a sort of an accelerated rate."
https://www.space.com/5245-long-space-missions-risk-cancer-p...
https://srag.jsc.nasa.gov/SpaceRadiation/Why/Why.cfm
All of those links are on radiation in space. The first two are as it relates to accelerated aging. These were not difficult to find.
maybe we need to sacrifice our own moon.
Is this what you meant by terraforming, or something else entirely?
It's a natural process and we just have to mine as many rocks as we dig up oil. We just need to catch up for the last few hundred years where we only dug up oil and no rocks. It still seems like the least expensive option.
The other problem is transporting them rt places where they would be most effective - near cities and factories.
This is most easily done in forest, but note that you need regular forest fires, otherwise the fire is hot enough to run all the carbon into CO2 and we didn't gain anything. Thus most of the forest fires you read about are bad - but if we change our policy after the fire and burn those forests often we can make them a net negative CO2.
Carbon emitted from the decay is not net positive into the air. It would still be net negative so long as you didn’t expend fossil fuels to bury it. In fact, I could burn some of the harvest to fuel burying the rest :)
Plus burning it would release the carbon faster than decay, and decay of CO2 into roots is generally just fixes by growing plants again. So the rate of carbon release would be dramatically faster to but versus decay. And what we want is net sequestering so slow release is good.
It’s literally the process that generated a low CO2 high O2 atmosphere in the first place, I’m just proposing we cultivate it and not harvest.
But I suspect we'll need a lot of forests to compensate for the current rate of fossil-fuel use.
Secondary problem would be handling all of that junk. You cannot burn it, have to bury it instead.
What do you mean by "you can't burn it"? It would release some amount of CO2, but as another commenter points out, there would still be a non-zero amount of left over carbon, no?
If you want to go full genetic engineered plants, there are better options out there.
There are so many orders of magnitude differences between the two problems (budget, timescales and difficulty) that I'm not sure if this is sarcasm.