How much lime does it take to treat the whole ocean? Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, dump powdered iron into the ocean. That one didn’t happen yet. Sure, let’s just toss a bunch of lime into the ocean and watch what happens. We’ll just order up a few billion bags of slaked lime and toss ’em into the sea, yeah, that’s the ticket. Note that there is no discussion of what all that lime might do to upset other balances, just so long as we get rid of that nasty CO2. Thank goodness another professor from James Hansen’s Columbia University gives a stamp of approval.
I’d love to see the environmental impact report on this one, especially when they find out that lime does not dissolve immediately or completely in water, but tends to settle.
By the way, slaked lime + water = whitewash. I’ve mixed a few batches myself recently.
From Physorg: A dash of lime — a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels
Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O’Driscoll in SCI’s Chemistry & Industry magazine published today.
Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. ‘We think it’s a promising idea,’ says Shell’s Gilles Bertherin, a coordinator on the project. ‘There are potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change – and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of ocean acidification, so it should have a positive impact on the marine environment.’
Adding lime to seawater increases alkalinity, boosting seawater’s ability to absorb CO2 from air and reducing the tendency to release it back again.
However, the idea, which has been bandied about for years, was thought unworkable because of the expense of obtaining lime from limestone and the amount of CO2 released in the process.
Tim Kruger, a management consultant at London firm Corven is the brains behind the plan to resurrect the lime process. He argues that it could be made workable by locating it in regions that have a combination of low-cost ‘stranded’ energy considered too remote to be economically viable to exploit – like flared natural gas or solar energy in deserts – and that are rich in limestone, making it feasible for calcination to take place on site.
The process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore ‘carbon negative’.
‘This process has the potential to reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would be possible to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels,’ Kruger says.
And Professor Klaus Lackner, a researcher in the field from Columbia University, says: ‘The theoretical CO2 balance is roughly right…it is certainly worth thinking through carefully.’
The oceans are already the world’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 2bn tonnes of carbon every year. Increasing absorption ability by just a few percent could dramatically increase CO2 uptake from the atmosphere.
This project is being developed in an open source manner. To find out more, please go to http://www.cquestrate.com , a new website, launched today.
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Is there no sanity left in this World.
Scotty, “beam me up”
There are soooo many things that can go wrong with all of these goofy plans to save us from that evil gas!
We can’t put thermometers in the right place!
We really have no idea what we are doing!
David
Par’me., but, uh, where does the lime in those bags come from.
Oh, wait, silly me, you wouldn’t put in those bags, would you? You’d put it in ships to get it out past, the….oh, wait, what if somebody doesn’t want it dumped in their … oh, gosh one problem at a time.
Where does that stuff come from? Rocks, doesn’t it?
Can you just throw the rocks in the ocean? How much fuel and all that does it take to get the rock to the ocean?
And don’t you have to bake the rocks or something? what will that cost?
I don’t think I understand.
Yep, another con-artist with a science degree looking to make a million.
Carbon dioxide is now the new DDT and Thalidomide rolled into one. What evils cannot be blamed upon it and what ludicrous schemes hatched to try and reduce it?
Bob Dylan recorded a song called “World Gone Wrong” and I can’t help but feel it is very appropriate in this case.
Neil
I suppose the notion that corals evolved when CO2 levels were about 10 times today’s levels hasn’t occurred to them.
in fact, the sea was literally crawling with shelled animals when levels were even higher than that … closer to 15 times todays levels. These people have no idea what they are talking about. If you want to see what sea life looks like with twice as much CO2 in the atmosphere, simply pull up some core samples from when CO2 was twice today’s levels! That wasn’t all that long ago in geological time.
This is the height of idiocy. You have people that have absolutely no idea what they are talking about suggesting moronic “solutions” to non-problems.
Anthony Extremely important article:
Compo,G.P., and P.D. Sardeshmukh, 2008: Oceanic influences on recent continental warming. Climate Dynamics, in press.
The abstract reads
“Evidence is presented that the recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct response to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) over land. Atmospheric model simulations of the last half-century with prescribed observed ocean temperature changes, but without prescribed GHG changes, account for most of the land warming. The oceanic influence has occurred through hydrodynamic-radiative teleconnections, primarily by moistening and warming the air over land and increasing the downward longwave radiation at the surface. The oceans may themselves have warmed from a combination of natural and anthropogenic influences.”
Is slaked lime that much cheaper than just dumping lye (i.e. NaOH) into the ocean, considering Ca(OH)2’s really low solubility? I was all for the iron fertilization project before I was a skeptic, but that’s because I make my money doing iron-related research. 😉
Of course, if one is thinking, you also need to take into account the carbonate compensation depth. The carbonate compensation depth is the depth in the ocean where temp, pressure, pH, and pCO2 conspire to cause the dissolution of calcium carbonate shells of marine plankton. Side note: The CCD is a huge deal to geologists and paleoclimatologists, since paleoclimate reconstructions deeper in time than ice cores are based off of oxygen isotope ratios in plankton shells.
You’d want to raise the pH and foster the precipitation of CaCO3 where it isn’t going to become a problem for future generations. So you would need to find the subset of places that where the ocean floor is shallower than the carbonate compensation depth so the CO2 isn’t just buried on the ~1500 year time scale, and also give you the biggest bang for your buck.
As much as we know or don’t know about the atmosphere, I imagine we know less about the oceans…
It would take a lot of money to manufacture all that lime (and to construct the energy plants to produce the required energy to manufacture the lime in out-of-the-way places). That means someone would make a lot of money. It also means a lot of people would have to pay a lot of money to do this. Could that be why this idea even sees the light of day?
Here is an article at “New Scientist” that indicates we still don’t know what the natural carbon cycle is doing in areas where the oceans are fed nutrients by large rivers:
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn14375-plankton-turn-tropical-atlantic-into-a-huge-carbon-sink.html
When you solve most imaginary problems, you’ve got a bigger problem than you “thought” you had before. In this case, the planet is likely to need the added C02 in the next half century, at least, to compensate for shorter growing seasons in Canada, Siberia, etc.
C02 is neither toxic nor evil in any way. Do you think that Al Gore would have a carbon footprint 20 times the national average with his home energy use in Tennessee and fly around the globe on jet planes every day or two if he really believed that C02 causes global warming?
Even if CO2 was a problem, and this *was* a feasible idea to remove it, the environmentalists wouldn’t accept it because it doesn’t fit in with the socialist world goverment they are trying to achieve while at the same time trying to move the western world back to an 18th century lifestyle. Any technological fixes suggested by private industry will be shot down before they get out of the box.
This is an excellent solution!! 10,000km3 of lime. there is only a measly 3000km3 of CO2 in the atmosphere. We could remove ALL the CO2 poison from the atmosphere, bad poison, bad posion, bad poison! Then ALL the plants would die, and that would kill ALL the animals, including humans. Then the planet will be steril. No more discussions about AGW then, eh!
… Oh… the ocean contains 150,000km3 of CO2. Hmm, that 10,000km3 doesn’t look like it will have much effect then. Turn the whole ocean into a whitewash. That would be odd. Swimming in milk.
Sorry, I could not resist! My point, the 150,000km3 (got that number from Wiki, sorry could not resist again). A .1% increase in solar radiation, would increase the temperature of the ocean by a tiny amount. that would in turn release a small amount of CO2 from the ocean, .1% would be 150km3 of CO2, perhaps. That would be 20 years of human emmissions right. As I am not even a good engineer perhaps someone could tell me how much CO2 would be release with a .1% solar radiation increase. After all the ocean pretty much absorbs all the sunlight and turn it into heat.
People who talk about “acidifing” of the oceans have no idea what they are talking about. The maximum amount of carbon dioxide taken up by the ocean is controlled by the solubility of carbon dioxide in the ocean, which in turn is the function of the ocean temperature. The lower the ocean temperature the more carbon dioxide it can take up.
If the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is less than the ocean’s solubility then the ocean can respond by taking up more carbon dioxide, but only up to its limit of solubility. Since carbon dioxide in geologic times was orders of magnitude higher than today and possibly took up sufficient amount of carbon dioxide to reach its limit of solubility. It probably is not at the solubility limit today, because it can still take up carbon dioxide. As crosspatch pointed out, higher past concentrations of carbon dioxide in the geologic past did not prevent numerous creatures with calcium carbonate based shells to develop and prosper.
Does anyone have any idea when the general public will revolt against this epic insanity that embarrasses our species? Anyone? Will it take the cold, hard reality of Al Gore socialism?
Is this the time to say: ” Goodbye and thanks for the fish”?
An old survival skill I learnt is to chuck a load of lime into a river and then wait for all the suffocating fish to float to surface and skim them off. I wander what chucking tonnes of the stuff into the sea will do?
“Does anyone have any idea when the general public will revolt against this epic insanity that embarrasses our species?”
They haven’t revolted against epic insanities before; why should this be any different? eg. carbs are good, fats are bad; carbs are evil, fats are good, eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good (again). Look at religeous wars: one person’s god is another person’s myth and we’ll go to war over it.
The current epic insanity is Zimbabwe. Where are the protests in the streets over that? Why are embassies not being demonstrated against every day? Where are the boycotts, the demonstrations?
[…] Watts Up With That? adds a little pespective: Nutty Story of the Day #2: whitewashing the […]
Why not paint Al Gore white to increase his albedo?
The last technical fix I recall being advertised was some months ago when a proposal to build a fleet of ships which would do oceanic cloud seeding was made. The costs were quite low compared to the assumed AGW impact cost, and the environmental advantage was that this simply exaggerated a natural process, so could easily be scaled back if any problems arose.
The AGW crowd went banannas! This was a TECHNOLOGICAL fix – didn’t we realise it was technology which got us into this in the first place? All technology is therefore bad, and we must address this problem only by behavioural change.
I have rarely seen so strong an indication that AGW is a religion, not a science….
With regard to the current ‘debate’ in the APS forum, I note that much of the argument considers theoretical proposals for what MAY be happening in atmospheric physics. There is little application to real life. Science, however, proceeds by making testable hypotheses, and then testing them. I would be much more inclined to believe either side if an experiment could be proposed, agreed by the main protagonists as being capable of providing a conclusive result, and then undertaken.
Where is the Pascal barometer or the Young’s double slit of global warming?
Dodgy Geezer,
Do you think you’ll actually get some scientists to agree on an experiment and stick to the pre agreed position after it has been run?
Look what happened to the Viking Mars landers. 4 life detection experiments. Presumably these were agreed upon as being definitive. When a couple actually appeared to detect life(one was shown to be too insensitive) a new hypothesis (peroxides and superoxides in martian soil) was invented to explain the apparent detection. A billion dollars or so blown away.
Seen any talk of peroxides or superoxides with the current rovers? Didn’t think so.
And notice the tone in the final paragraph of This little gem from Science Daily. There’s a lot less certainty about clouds……..and their place in the climate models.
I believe that ABC’s own John Stossel says it best, “Give me a break!”
All these looney tunes hustlers come crawling out of the woodwork with schemes in response to looney tunes science. Thirty+ years ago, in response to a different flavor of looney tunes science, the looney tunes solution was to place soot on Arctic ice to stop the new Ice Age. Just recently, another looney tunes scheme was to fire rockets or whatever to inject sulphur in the stratosphere, to cool the climate. And all this in response to a looney tunes hypothesis buttressed by computer models that are more likely wrong than right.
The public needs to wake up and smell what’s cooking and it ain’t fish!
Give me a break!
Dodgy Geezer,
I think Nature is about to provide us with the grand experiment you were wishing for. All indications are that the Sun is about to enter a period of low magnetic activity. This has been well correlated with increased Galactic Cosmic Ray flux hitting the Earth’s surface. According to Henrik Svensmark such an increased Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) flux creates an increased low level cloud cover, which reduces the Earth’s temperature. This was theory he put forward to explain the cold climate during the Maunder and Dalton minima of sunspot activity, which was the most visible evidence of reduced solar magnetic activity. The length of the current solar cycle 23, already well over 12 years compared to the average of 11 years is indicating a lower solar magnetic activity. Since this is taking while atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is marching inexorably higher, a continued low solar activity will provide us with a unique opportunity to find out whether carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or solar activity is the main driver of our climate. A significant cooling in the next several years
while atmospheric CO2 continuing to increase will be very hard for the AGW crowd to explain away. On the other hand, continued warming in an environment of reduced solar activity would strengthen their case immeasurably.
Jennifer Marohasy had an interesting short piece on C02 concentrations and coral reefs (July 2nd 2008 – look in the July archives on her blog). The two photos in the article show coral and seagrass flourishing in an environment quite literally “bubbling” with C02.
I guess the ocean acidity/toxicity crowd haven’t told the coral here that it can’t possibly exist according to their models.