8 ms·
That doesn't change anything. You need a huge amount of energy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere because CO2 is a tiny constituent part of Air (~400ppm) - that
by macspoofing 4y ago
That doesn't change anything. You need a huge amount of energy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere because CO2 is a tiny constituent part of Air (~400ppm) - that means one has to move a million molecules of air across a collector (whatever that is) to remove 400 molecules of CO2. You can't do that without huge amounts of energy and a huge surface area for your collector ... on any human timescale.
- blueflow 4y agoPlants do. And they only need the sunlight they have where they grow.
- tomtomistaken 4y agoI think that’s the “huge surface” op is talking about.
- abyssin 4y agoAnd we’re busy decreasing the surface of woodlands on the planet.
- rowanG077 4y agoHuh I thought the world has more trees now then ever before.
- lazyasciiart 4y agoI don’t know, but they could both be true. How many 5yo pine trees does it take to equal the surface area of one giant redwood?
- googlryas 4y agoIt's really about growth rate rather than size.
- iostream25 4y ago
- Schroedingersat 4y agoThe mass of air that moves past the existing fleet of wind turbines in a year is roughly a fifth of the mass of the atmosphere. It is a civilisation sized project that will take a lifetime, but it is achievable.
- mjhay 4y agoOr we could just stop burning coal.
- googlryas 4y agoThat would be very easy if we didn't benefit greatly from burning coal
- mjhay 4y agoAre you familiar with the term "negative externalities?"
- googlryas 4y agoSure. But the benefit is way bigger than the drawback. At least that is the decision society has made.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNo. People like David Koch benefit. The rest have very little say.
- SimbaOnSteroids 4y agoWhy do we talk about removing CO2 from the atmosphere but not trying to pull it out of the ocean?
- mjhay 4y agoWhat makes you think it would be significantly easier to filter out the carbolic acid from the ocean? The same difficulties apply, and water is much more viscous than air.
- SimbaOnSteroids 4y agoDidn’t carbon we’ve carelessly dumped in the atmosphere start as ocean life that sunk to the bottom, can’t we turbo charge that cycle?
- mjhay 4y agoNot practically. We are talking about huge scales, such that the industrial production, transport, etc., would be as much of an environmental disaster as what it's trying to solve.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoBecause there is an homeostasic relationship between the co2 in the ocean and the air, and it always end up balancing out automatically.
- marcosdumay 4y agoOh man. Somebody always gets a way to make problems out of the entropy of diffusion. It increases with the log of the concentration, so whatever problem you estimate to happen, it can be worked around. On the case of silicates, a trivial work around is to just spread them around and let the same diffusion bring the CO2 into them.
- sslayer 4y agoAnd of course its not like we have giant windmill farms all over the world that we could integrate CO2 collectors into the blades