5 ms·

Hmmm. The ocean phytoplankton do it for free. All we need to do is warm the oceans up a couple degrees, dump in a few million tons of old car carcasses for iron

Hmmm. The ocean phytoplankton do it for free. All we need to do is warm the oceans up a couple degrees, dump in a few million tons of old car carcasses for iron, and the resulting algae blooms will suck all the CO2 you want out of the air. As a side effect you get free infinite algae- based oil, plastic, and garden burgers. If you wanted to do this in a slightly more controlled way, you could flood the Sahara about a foot deep and turn it into a giant algal carbon sink and energy (garden burger) generator.

janef0421 4y ago
You are proposing to solve a massive ecological crisis by intentional causing another massive ecological crisis.
tuatoru 4y ago
> a few million tons of old car carcasses for iron * powdered car carcasses, so the iron stays in the photic zone.
- robomartin 4y ago
  …and nobody stops to ask: How much energy is required to collect and deliver a million tons of car iron? How much energy will it take to strip down cars so you don’t dump massive amounts of contaminants into the ocean? Do paint and coatings have to be stripped off? How much energy, chemicals, water will that take? Do we have to build processing, staging and distribution plants? How much energy and resources will that take? Do we have to build specialized ships? Same questions. How much petroleum will all of the above require and burn in the form of derivatives, lubricants, gasoline and diesel for transportation and related construction projects? How many million tons of super-dirty bunker fuel will the thousands of ships used for this have to burn? How much fuel, energy, materials and resources will have to be expended for decades in order to just monitor and manage this? Oh, wait, we want to powder the iron? How much energy and resources are required to powder a few million tons of metal? And then, once that accounting is done: How much CO2 and other pollutants will all of the above produce. This is what I sometimes refer to the self-righteousness of hand-wavy “solutions”. In quotes, because they never are. Yet, they sound great. Politicians and those making money through the insanity climate change has become can use this hand-wavy stuff to great benefit and appear righteous when, in reality, they are in a range between ignorant and scam artists. At the same time, those who dare question the validity of such claims are vilified. “You don’t want to save the planet? You evil bastard!” How about: No! I want you to stop and fully support the nonsense you are trying to float with the aid of a little thing called science. The problem is, you can’t. These do-called solutions are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save it.
  - abrax3141 4y ago
    You’re right and you’re wrong. Not to try to push this, bcs although I started this thread, as I say elsewhere, it is, even to my mind, a last resort, you seem to be having a bit of a failure of creativity. (a) Iron actually comes in powered form to begin with (the cars were literally a joke), and blows off land, or pours out of rivers, in many places already, seeding the southern eddy, for example. (b) More-or-less simple and cheap mining operations to “filter” iron out into, for example, the southern eddy. I’m not making this up. There are academics exploring this and they do actually do the math you’re describing. You’re right that’s it’s more complex than literally dumping powered cars into the sea. But you’re wrong to believe that only stupid people are thinking about OIF.
    - abrax3141 4y ago
      Ps. Now that I think of it, I’ll bet that if you dumped a nuke into the ocean anyplace on the ocean floor in the southern eddy, it would “mine” and bring up (via heat convention) enough iron and micronutrients to create a very significant algal bloom. Not proposing doing it. Just being creative. That’s not much worse than an underwater volcanic eruption. Or maybe just stick a pipe on a black smoker and bring all those micronutrients to the surface in a controlled way.
    - robomartin 4y ago
      > Iron actually comes in powered form to begin with (the cars were literally a joke), and blows off land, or pours out of rivers, in many places already, seeding the southern eddy, for example. It's the same things with all of these arguments, isn't it? Physics never matters. One, six, twelve, one hundred billion tons of powdered iron will magically fly into the oceans and distribute itself --just as magically-- in a uniform patter precisely where it is needed. It will do this without requiring any energy input whatsoever. It will do this without requiring any additional materials at all. It will also do this without having to rip the earth open to mine it. Which is convenient because that would --at that scale-- be incredibly damaging and produce so much CO2 it is hard to begin to calculate it. Of course, the billions of tons of iron powder will have absolutely no effect on anything else on the planet, life, weather, nothing. Sorry my friend. You acuse me of a lack of creativity. I think my position is precisely opposite that idea. I have decades of experience actually making things, designing, sourcing, manufacturing, building things destined for earth and space. When you do this for as long as I have creativity and imagination increase, rather than the opposite. The other thing you gain is an intense sense of proportion about what is and is not possible, or reasonable. The common fallacy of all of these proposals is that they sound great until one considers actually making it happen at a PLANETARY scale, not at the academic level. One of my favorite things to point out about academic, vs. real-world, science is that in academics a cow is a uniform sphere of milk, one meter in diameter. The issue goes far deeper than this conversation. If you actually honestly look at the issue of global warming, the only conclusion one can honestly reach is that there isn't a thing we can do about it. We are too small. You need Thor to descend on this planet to fix it. This is NOT about denying climate change at all. It's real. No doubt about it. This is to say: We need to wake up, stop listening to those using this for personal profit (financial or political) and start talking about how we are going to manage living with a changing planet. We are wasting valuable time and resources chasing nonsense and following those who promote it. I is particularly egregious when the scam artists among us start talking about fixing it in thirty years, or a few decades. They should be laughed out of the public square, and yet, we don't. You can't fix a problem of this magnitude, of a planetary scale, in a few decades. If you try, you are far more likely to kill all living things on earth rather than save one darn thing. A semi truck travelling at 60 mph stops in about 300 feet. If I were to propose we stop it in 1 inch without destroying the thing and shredding everything in it and the driver everyone would think I was crazy as can be. The mildest comment would be: You can't do that because of physics. And they would be right. The planet takes about 100K years to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration by 100 ppm. That's if we all left earth tomorrow. We actually have people claiming we can do the same in 30 years. That is a ratio equivalent to stopping a semi truck travelling at 60 miles per hour in 1 inch rather than 300 feet. Why aren't we calling these people crazy? This issue will take THOUSANDS of years, and likely tens of thousands, to revert. In other words, it is measured in hundreds of human generations, not three decades and four election cycles. We need to stop with the nonsense and start talking about reality.
robomartin 4y ago
This fails the most basic physics analysis so badly, it isn’t even worth the cost of the electricity used to transmit the message. Step one: Calculate what it would take to warm up the oceans a couple of degrees. Step two: Calculate how close that would get to killing half of all living things on earth, if not 90%.
- laurencerowe 4y ago
  I think the implication is that global warming would heat up the oceans so you don’t need to put more energy in. However I don’t think warming the ocean is necessary for iron fertilisation to promote plankton growth and thereby remove CO2 from the atmosphere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
- donkarma 4y ago
  this is a joke
  - abrax3141 4y ago
    Which is the joke? I assure you that OIF carbon capture is no joke. Nor is utilizing alga as a source for fuel oil, food, and plastics. (I’m a marine molecular biologist, as well as a computer scientist.) I was joking about warming up the oceans, but it would make the process more efficient, and it’s happening anyway. But as pointed out by others, it’s not strictly necessary. Granted, screwing about with the ocean ecosystem is a terrible idea, and shoukd be considered as a last resort, but it’s not a joke. Quite the opposite.
gumby 4y ago
I'm a big fan of what is called Ocean Iron Fertilization, and, though the devil is in the details, I think it's the only way forward (as the article says, sipping the atmosphere through a straw is a nonstarter). Basically all the GHG-removal techniques I have any faith in (including my own work, not on OIF) are essentially all uv powered. Unfortunately, at the moment OIF is banned by the London Protocol to the Law of the Sea. Small research projects are OK, but any deployment is not. As it happens there is still a lot of work to be done on deployment (e.g. the upper parts of the pelagic ocean are pretty much dead as we seem to have ruined an important ecosystem by killing too many whales). You probably want to stay away from coastal waters. Also to really do the job properly, the amount of vegetation growth you need to stimulate is far more than we could use as feedstock (which merely defers the problem anyway): we need to make a lot of it and have it die and sink to the ocean floor, and those vertical currents are not well enough understood. And we need to extract the CO2 that the oceans have been aggressively dissolving for us, acidifying themselves in the process. In any case, you're bringing up the right path.

janef0421 4y ago

You are proposing to solve a massive ecological crisis by intentional causing another massive ecological crisis.

tuatoru 4y ago

> a few million tons of old car carcasses for iron * powdered car carcasses, so the iron stays in the photic zone.

robomartin 4y ago
…and nobody stops to ask: How much energy is required to collect and deliver a million tons of car iron? How much energy will it take to strip down cars so you don’t dump massive amounts of contaminants into the ocean? Do paint and coatings have to be stripped off? How much energy, chemicals, water will that take? Do we have to build processing, staging and distribution plants? How much energy and resources will that take? Do we have to build specialized ships? Same questions. How much petroleum will all of the above require and burn in the form of derivatives, lubricants, gasoline and diesel for transportation and related construction projects? How many million tons of super-dirty bunker fuel will the thousands of ships used for this have to burn? How much fuel, energy, materials and resources will have to be expended for decades in order to just monitor and manage this? Oh, wait, we want to powder the iron? How much energy and resources are required to powder a few million tons of metal? And then, once that accounting is done: How much CO2 and other pollutants will all of the above produce. This is what I sometimes refer to the self-righteousness of hand-wavy “solutions”. In quotes, because they never are. Yet, they sound great. Politicians and those making money through the insanity climate change has become can use this hand-wavy stuff to great benefit and appear righteous when, in reality, they are in a range between ignorant and scam artists. At the same time, those who dare question the validity of such claims are vilified. “You don’t want to save the planet? You evil bastard!” How about: No! I want you to stop and fully support the nonsense you are trying to float with the aid of a little thing called science. The problem is, you can’t. These do-called solutions are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save it.
- abrax3141 4y ago
  You’re right and you’re wrong. Not to try to push this, bcs although I started this thread, as I say elsewhere, it is, even to my mind, a last resort, you seem to be having a bit of a failure of creativity. (a) Iron actually comes in powered form to begin with (the cars were literally a joke), and blows off land, or pours out of rivers, in many places already, seeding the southern eddy, for example. (b) More-or-less simple and cheap mining operations to “filter” iron out into, for example, the southern eddy. I’m not making this up. There are academics exploring this and they do actually do the math you’re describing. You’re right that’s it’s more complex than literally dumping powered cars into the sea. But you’re wrong to believe that only stupid people are thinking about OIF.
  - abrax3141 4y ago
    Ps. Now that I think of it, I’ll bet that if you dumped a nuke into the ocean anyplace on the ocean floor in the southern eddy, it would “mine” and bring up (via heat convention) enough iron and micronutrients to create a very significant algal bloom. Not proposing doing it. Just being creative. That’s not much worse than an underwater volcanic eruption. Or maybe just stick a pipe on a black smoker and bring all those micronutrients to the surface in a controlled way.
  - robomartin 4y ago
    > Iron actually comes in powered form to begin with (the cars were literally a joke), and blows off land, or pours out of rivers, in many places already, seeding the southern eddy, for example. It's the same things with all of these arguments, isn't it? Physics never matters. One, six, twelve, one hundred billion tons of powdered iron will magically fly into the oceans and distribute itself --just as magically-- in a uniform patter precisely where it is needed. It will do this without requiring any energy input whatsoever. It will do this without requiring any additional materials at all. It will also do this without having to rip the earth open to mine it. Which is convenient because that would --at that scale-- be incredibly damaging and produce so much CO2 it is hard to begin to calculate it. Of course, the billions of tons of iron powder will have absolutely no effect on anything else on the planet, life, weather, nothing. Sorry my friend. You acuse me of a lack of creativity. I think my position is precisely opposite that idea. I have decades of experience actually making things, designing, sourcing, manufacturing, building things destined for earth and space. When you do this for as long as I have creativity and imagination increase, rather than the opposite. The other thing you gain is an intense sense of proportion about what is and is not possible, or reasonable. The common fallacy of all of these proposals is that they sound great until one considers actually making it happen at a PLANETARY scale, not at the academic level. One of my favorite things to point out about academic, vs. real-world, science is that in academics a cow is a uniform sphere of milk, one meter in diameter. The issue goes far deeper than this conversation. If you actually honestly look at the issue of global warming, the only conclusion one can honestly reach is that there isn't a thing we can do about it. We are too small. You need Thor to descend on this planet to fix it. This is NOT about denying climate change at all. It's real. No doubt about it. This is to say: We need to wake up, stop listening to those using this for personal profit (financial or political) and start talking about how we are going to manage living with a changing planet. We are wasting valuable time and resources chasing nonsense and following those who promote it. I is particularly egregious when the scam artists among us start talking about fixing it in thirty years, or a few decades. They should be laughed out of the public square, and yet, we don't. You can't fix a problem of this magnitude, of a planetary scale, in a few decades. If you try, you are far more likely to kill all living things on earth rather than save one darn thing. A semi truck travelling at 60 mph stops in about 300 feet. If I were to propose we stop it in 1 inch without destroying the thing and shredding everything in it and the driver everyone would think I was crazy as can be. The mildest comment would be: You can't do that because of physics. And they would be right. The planet takes about 100K years to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration by 100 ppm. That's if we all left earth tomorrow. We actually have people claiming we can do the same in 30 years. That is a ratio equivalent to stopping a semi truck travelling at 60 miles per hour in 1 inch rather than 300 feet. Why aren't we calling these people crazy? This issue will take THOUSANDS of years, and likely tens of thousands, to revert. In other words, it is measured in hundreds of human generations, not three decades and four election cycles. We need to stop with the nonsense and start talking about reality.

robomartin 4y ago

This fails the most basic physics analysis so badly, it isn’t even worth the cost of the electricity used to transmit the message. Step one: Calculate what it would take to warm up the oceans a couple of degrees. Step two: Calculate how close that would get to killing half of all living things on earth, if not 90%.

laurencerowe 4y ago
I think the implication is that global warming would heat up the oceans so you don’t need to put more energy in. However I don’t think warming the ocean is necessary for iron fertilisation to promote plankton growth and thereby remove CO2 from the atmosphere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
donkarma 4y ago
this is a joke
- abrax3141 4y ago
  Which is the joke? I assure you that OIF carbon capture is no joke. Nor is utilizing alga as a source for fuel oil, food, and plastics. (I’m a marine molecular biologist, as well as a computer scientist.) I was joking about warming up the oceans, but it would make the process more efficient, and it’s happening anyway. But as pointed out by others, it’s not strictly necessary. Granted, screwing about with the ocean ecosystem is a terrible idea, and shoukd be considered as a last resort, but it’s not a joke. Quite the opposite.

gumby 4y ago

I'm a big fan of what is called Ocean Iron Fertilization, and, though the devil is in the details, I think it's the only way forward (as the article says, sipping the atmosphere through a straw is a nonstarter). Basically all the GHG-removal techniques I have any faith in (including my own work, not on OIF) are essentially all uv powered. Unfortunately, at the moment OIF is banned by the London Protocol to the Law of the Sea. Small research projects are OK, but any deployment is not. As it happens there is still a lot of work to be done on deployment (e.g. the upper parts of the pelagic ocean are pretty much dead as we seem to have ruined an important ecosystem by killing too many whales). You probably want to stay away from coastal waters. Also to really do the job properly, the amount of vegetation growth you need to stimulate is far more than we could use as feedstock (which merely defers the problem anyway): we need to make a lot of it and have it die and sink to the ocean floor, and those vertical currents are not well enough understood. And we need to extract the CO2 that the oceans have been aggressively dissolving for us, acidifying themselves in the process. In any case, you're bringing up the right path.