100,000 Synthetic Trees Could Help Combat Climate Change | Hacker News Reader

100,000 Synthetic Trees Could Help Combat Climate Change

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I'm for planting 100,000 'real' trees. All kinds. Everywhere. 100 times that in fact.

But when it comes to CO2 processing I'm with algae. Not ponds, but highly engineered, sustainable facilities that create jobs requiring solid educations.

I look at the picture and think that's where 100,000 cameras are going to go.

highly engineered, sustainable facilities that create jobs requiring solid educations

You're suggesting building in unnecessary complexity?

No.

Solid biological and chemical backgrounds for research, analysis and quality control. Engineering backgrounds to design, build and maintain facilities and infrastructure including IT and automation. Business backgrounds to develop new markets, manage finances, employees, operations, etc.

Creating jobs is never a goal in anyone's best interest when trying to propose a solution to a problem.

Agreed. I believe, however, that processing CO2 using algae would probably produce better paying, higher quality (including entrepreneurial) opportunities in the long run.

Unless this whole CO2 problem is incorrect, it seems to me it's going to take a lot of human ingenuity and effort to solve it.

In that regard, if it creates jobs and careers in the process -- good.

I'm sorry, but these "Synthetic Trees" seem to be incredibly stupid. Trees (real ones) serve several funtions, the ones most important to this being: They remove CO2, and the turn it into oxygen. All that these Synthetic trees do is take CO2 out of the air, and shove it underground to store. This may just be me, but this sounds like the kind of thing that will have massive ramifications a century or so down the line.

Maybe. But according to a number of climate scientists, we've screwed the earth by then if we keep pumping it into the air.

It's not the perfect solution, but it's nominally a better scenario. Who know what we might do with a huge load of CO2 in 100 years? We might have industrialized photosynthesis, so we can convert it all back to oxygen and coal.

The thing about CO2 and O2 is that its a loop. We breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. Plants "Breathe" in CO2 and "Breathe" out O2. It just seems very dangerous to me to sequester a lot of that underground, more so than climate change.

The deal with the climate change CO2 is that we've pumped out an enormous surplus of CO2 beyond what is tied up in that loop. Note, that all that CO2 came from oxygen that was once in the atmosphere, and we're still breathing fine.

If the CO2 that would be caught by these trees would otherwise be "breathed" by plants, there wouldn't be a problem. CO2 doesn't bother the climate as long as it's down here, it's in the stratosphere (I think. One of the -pheres) it becomes a greenhouse gas.

Right, so trying to balance this cycle by pumping it back underground doesn't seem to be the right solution (unless these synthetic trees can operate without being powered). Otherwise all we're doing is creating a second, closed loop of: Pull Carbon out of the ground (in the form of fossil fuels) -> burn, turn into CO2 -> capture out of atmosphere, put back in ground. Unless we the trees do it without using up more fossil fuels to do so, it doesn't seem entirely effective.

It just seems to me to be a bad idea to create a second CO2 loop rather than just strengthening the one that already exists. Yes, the synthetic trees may be more effective, but you get more than just CO2->O2 out of a tree.

We don't don't need to balance the cycle, it's perfectly balanced on it's own, we want to avoid generating large amounts of CO2 that won't go into that cycle, because it will make a greenhouse effect -- either by not emitting, by scrubbing and storing (this solution) or by enlarging the cycle (plating actual tree, algae etc.).

I'd think that if we can convert the CO2 back to coal, we'd want to dump it in a hole somewhere, not burn it. The point was to get it out of the way until then.

The same thing happens with real trees, though. They capture the carbon in themselves. Then when they die and decay, they release the carbon again, as methane (when they rot) and CO2 (when they burn).

I would be curious as to the energy + carbon emissions required to manufacture one of the artificial trees.

"You know? They're growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down. Sharkey says: All of life comes from some strange lagoon. It rises up, it bucks up to it's full height from a boggy swamp on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It's life! It's life!"

Laurie Anderson - Sharkey`s Day

Serious question: how do trees, which exchange CO2 for O2, help climate change? More specifically, isn't the problem that too much CO2 is way up there? How do trees down here help that?

It's down here before it's up there. The idea is to stop it before it goes up (by "cathing it" quickly, or by not emitting it at all), because once it's there, there's not much to do about it.

That's the only thing I could think of too, but then thought... if smokestacks (et. al.) are dumping it up there quite above tree heights, that's just gone, right? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I really don't know how this stuff works.

I imagine the CO2 way up there diffuses down here.

Are these more efficient than real trees? I read before that our solar panels are more efficient than photosynthesis at generating energy from sunlight.

The object, as I understand it, is scrubbing CO2 from the air, not generating energy.

Amazing to read all these comments. One would have thought that whoever is part of the HN scene is highly educated and reasonably knowledgeable. Obviously not so. Research is only just beginning to copy the way real tree leaves operate:

http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/klug/Research/Artificial%20Photosynth...

In the meantime it is probably even better to just reduce CO2 out put rather than try and store it. But as people seem to be unable to kick a habit easily - even if it may kill them longer term see smoking - why not store it.

Climate change is a normal earth cycle of warming and cooling trends. So don't believe the hype. However I would never say no to more trees.

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