Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmuslera | Hacker News Reader

What could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure, and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended consequences.

It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you do something big enough for causing a change it will probably affect a lot of things, most that will be obvious only on hindsight, and by Murphy it will end being something essential. Like what happened with the mandate of reducing the sulphur content in ship's fuel oil.

View on HN

I had the same thought when I read:

> If you want to strip out 1 gigatonne of CO2 from the ocean, you probably have to put the upper few meters of the Atlantic through your machines every year

That sounds…drastic! And this seems quite hand-wavy about the risks:

> a lot of environmental monitoring needs to be done to prove that marine carbon-removal strategies aren’t harming aquatic life

It's also "only" a gigatonne, out of around 40 Gt of emissions per year. It's not nothing, but a mediocre year of global economic growth will outweigh it, and outweigh twice the year after. Unless we get our species' electrical generating shit together on a war footing level of effort, which we won't, global GDP will be a proxy measurement for carbon emissions for a good while.

It’s true that this could lead to unintended consequences as humanity is directly experimenting with a complex balanced natural system. But another perspective is that we have already done/are doing exactly that by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at rates that wouldn’t have happened in nature. I know “two wrongs don’t make a right”, but it’s perhaps worth considering the price of course correcting our already hugely impactful behaviours, as the butterfly had flown years ago.

I've had this idea for a short story for a while, where humans try to do carbon capture and end up going too far, leading to a snow ball.

Haven't seen Snowpiercer yet I take it?

I wrote a short story the other day about making the carbon problem obvious to every human on earth[1]. I’d love to read yours when you finish it. We need more fiction that focuses on this along with the nonfiction imo.

[1] https://jck.earth/2024/12/20/heaven-scent.html

Very nice! mine is not likely to get written unfortunately.

I had the same thought. This idea sounded like the beginning of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie to me. When you start making ocean-sized changes to the earth, you better get it right. My second thought was: where are they going to put all that CO2?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com