Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The world has a CO2 problem – there is not enough free CO2 in the atmosphere, to maximise food production, alleviate world hunger, green deserts, and to attempt to hold off the next ice age. But if my calculation is correct, raising CO2 to a safer level would be surprisingly affordable.
Although a lot of nonsense has been written about CO2 harming plant growth, the reality is commercial greenhouse growers maintain elevated CO2 levels of around 1000ppm, because one of the most effective means of promoting plant growth is to make sure plants get enough CO2 – enough being defined as a significantly higher concentration than is currently available in the atmosphere.
The world is also almost certainly teetering on the brink of the next glaciation. I’m not suggesting it will start tomorrow, but interglacials, of the kind we are currently experiencing, typically only last 10-15,000 years. We are well past the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the peak of our current interglacial. Without serious anthropogenic intervention, it is all downhill from here. There is no guarantee raising CO2 will prevent or mitigate the slide into the next glaciation period, but given the catastrophic consequences the coming ice age will have on human civilisation, it has to be worth a try.
How much energy would be required to raise atmospheric CO2 to 1000ppm?
According to Wikipedia, cooking a kilogram of Limestone in a regenerative kiln takes around 3.6MJ / Kg.
Calcium has an atomic weight of 40, Carbon has an atomic weight of 12, Oxygen has a molecular weight of 16. Burning Limestone produces Calcium Oxide (Quicklime) and Carbon Dioxide.
CaCO3 + heat => CaO + CO2.
So burning 1Kg of Limestone releases:
(12 + 16 + 16) / (40 + 12 + 16 + 16 + 16) * 1Kg = 0.44Kg of CO2.
The atmosphere, at 400ppm of CO2, contains 400ppm x 2.3Gt / ppm = 920Gt of CO2.
To raise CO2 to 1000ppm, we need another 600ppm * 2.3Gt / ppm = 1380Gt of CO2.
This will require burning 1380Gt / 0.44Kg CO2 per Kg Limestone = 3136Gt of limestone.
This would require the expenditure of 3.6MJ / Kg * 3136Gt or limestone = 1.1289 x 10^19 joules of energy.
The total global energy budget is 3.89 x 10^20 joules per annum, so if the energy expenditure was spread out across say a decade, we’re talking about 1.1289 x 10^19 / 3.89 x 10^20 = 0.3% of global energy expenditure.
At around $30 / MWh (source Wikipedia), or $30 per 1,000,000 x 3600 joules = 3.6×10^9 joules, the total cost would be:
1.1289 x 10^19 / 3.6 x 10^9 * $30 = around $100 billion dollars.
Obviously there are additional costs for building the kilns and mining the limestone, but even if these additional costs drive the price up to $300 billion, the return on investment would be tremendous – slightly milder winters and substantially improved farm productivity on a global scale. Spread over 10 years, a cost of $300 billion is $30 billion per year – a lot of money, but in the context of previous vast expenditures such as President Obama’s Trillion dollar Stimulus Package, $300 billion would be affordable, for all the good it would deliver.
In addition, I haven’t considered that a lot of the heat for cooking limestone would likely be delivered using fossil fuel – so the amount of limestone which would have to be cooked to achieve this goal would likely be less than the amount indicated by the calculation.
One final issue would be what to do with the approx. 1500Gt of Quicklime which would be produced by burning the limestone. The obvious solution would be to dump it into the ocean, where as Calcium Hydroxide it could counter any ocean acidification caused by the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, and would hopefully not promote rapid re-absorption of the released CO2.
Update (EW) – h/t daveburton, Leonard Weinstein – unfortunately my calculation was way off, so this scheme is currently impractical. However in a hundred years, let alone a millennium, mankind’s engineering capability will be far greater than we currently enjoy (think Wright Brothers to Apollo Moon Landing). Engineering projects such as this one should become feasible well before our civilisation is endangered by the coming glaciation.
Update 2 (EW) – higley7 and Miso Alkalaj pointed out that rapid ocean absorption of the released CO2 would make it difficult to maintain the desired atmospheric concentration.
Now that would take a u-turn in govt policy.
Not really…just more of the same old…same old
Funnel more of our money to China…through Wall Street….China will build even more….and use even more cement
…they are a “developing” country so it’s ok
problem solved
Poor Alarmists, this will make them wet their pants.
Right after their heads explode.
Maybe it would be more economical to use acids, like HCl. Since Chlorine is an inevitable side product of NaOH manufacture, you could transfer it into HCl and together with CaCO3 that would produce CO2 and CaCl2. The latter could also be dumped in the oceans or partly used as frost protection for streets.
What about solar furnaces? Could they get hot enough?
I like that better than using fossil fuels that we will want in the future.
Solar furnaces have already been invented to cook limestone. Our future is secure.
Hard on passing birds, but not hard technologically.
Cooking CaCO3 would produce CO2 and CaO, which in water is Ca(OH)2, a weak base. Your plan would produce enormous quantities of NaOH, one of the strongest bases, which could NOT be dumped into the oceans. The CaCl2 is fine, just as the Ca(OH)2 would be. What to do with NaOH?
Lutefisk?
Hi Higley7
Thanks for you your comment but you have misunderstood my suggestion:
Our chemical industries need huge amounts of NaOH anyhow for a lot of technical uses. Today we have the problem that the dangerous byproduct Chlorine must be used for something because it is out of the question to release this corrosive gas into the environment. At the moment, Chlorine is used in the production of PVC and HCl, and the latter is also needed in great quantities for the chemical industry. But the use of PVC is waning, so we need new rational uses for the excess Chlorine and I suggest taking just this excess to transfer it into HCl and let it react with CaCO3 for the welcome CO2 liberation. The byproduct CaCl2 would be rather unproblematic in the oceans and one could dump it in down welling sea-water like e.g. the Northern Atlantic gulf stream region where it could enhance the salinity of the arctic melt water, which would be a nice side effect BTW.
PS: Ca(OH)2 is not really a weak base, because its base is actually the Hydroxide ion which is the same as in NaOH. Ca(OH)2 is merely not so well soluable than NaOH but this difference means nothing because of the great dilution in the oceans…
Typo correction in PS: “soluble” …
We could dump the NAOH into the mid ocean where nothing lives.
It would disassociate into NA+ and OH- and the change in the NA+ content of the ocean would be insignificant.
Plus it would help stop ocean acidification. The real solution to ocean acidification is to dump strong bases in the mid-ocean until the warmunists quit complaining about ocean acidification.
Castile soap
Hi PA
NaOH is a very useful substance for many industrial and technical applications. So there is no need to dump it into the oceans…
Anyway, we have not to expect an ocean “acidification” by a higher CO2 content in the atmosphere that would be really dangerous for most sorts of aquatic life. Marine life did quite well with much higher CO2 concentrations than today e.g. in the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods.
BTW: The symbol for Sodium is Na and not NA. This correction could be judged as hair-splitting, but writing the second letter in element symbols large is a widespread mistake, which can produce a totally wrong meaning. (Not in the example of Na but CO and Co or SN and Sn are quite different things.)
OOPS!
Messed up the blockquote. This is what should have been in it instead of my comment.
You’re off a decimal point. It’s 3% of global energy budget over 10 years.
not really, he just forgot to include ‘divide by 10’ to account for spreading it out over a decade
Surely not a good idea? The extra CO2 in the atmosphere will cause the earth’s orbit to wobble out of control and crash into the sun! We might even brush past Venus on the way and get an extra dose of deadly CO2 making it even worse. I read this in the Guardian and it has shaken me up quite a bit.
All the material involved is coming from the Earth so the Earth’s mass does not change.
sar·casm
/ˈsärˌkazəm/
noun, the use of irony to mock or convey contempt.
Jimmy Edwards – always one of my favourite comedians.
SteveT
CO2 doesn’t produce any heat nor does it prevent heat escaping the atmosphere.
Yes, based on what we’ve seen so far, raising CO2 to 1000ppm will give us bupkus degrees F! Or 0C.
But that wasn’t the point!
Exactly, the point was to produce more CO2 so plants can grow more and faster.
..but without undue side effects, such as raising the earth’s temperature.
For quite some time I’ve suggested that in the future nations will realize we need fossil fuel production to keep atmospheric CO2 levels high to support global foodstuff production, which is just the opposite of their current inane policy.
I had to look at a calendar to make sure this was not April 1st (all fools day) but no – it is not.
1
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v510/n7503/full/nature13179.html
Dietary deficiencies of zinc and iron are a substantial global public health problem. An estimated two billion people suffer these deficiencies1, causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually2, 3. Most of these people depend on C3 grains and legumes as their primary dietary source of zinc and iron. Here we report that C3 grains and legumes have lower concentrations of zinc and iron when grown under field conditions at the elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration predicted for the middle of this century. C3 crops other than legumes also have lower concentrations of protein, whereas C4 crops seem to be less affected. Differences between cultivars of a single crop suggest that breeding for decreased sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 concentration could partly address these new challenges to global health.
So you have to eat 10% more to get the same nutriton. How is that bad. You are talking about a tablespoon of beans more per serving. Since there will be so much extra food I don’t see the downside.
Most likely our poop will become a little less “rich”. Most people already eat more than they need.
Went to your link. Something is not right. The claim is that they are growing these crops under “field conditions” yet somehow raising the amount of CO2 they receive. To my knowledge “field conditions” would be open fields. Somehow they are controlling the amount of CO2 in open fields?
Something is definitely wrong with their experiment as presented — and undoubtedly also with their conclusions.
Eugene WR Gallun
And as another thought. Since it seems improbable that these crops were grown under REAL “field conditions” but were instead in some type of enclosure — the question has to be asked — under the exact same conditions except with lower CO2 did they grow a crop for comparison with their higher CO2 crop. Or did they just take figures from crops that were actually grown in open fields? If not then how can ignore that it might be the experimental conditions and not the CO2 that is causing lower levels of zinc and iron. They can’t. Therefore their experiment is worthless.
Eugene WR Gallun
As I recall seeing a FACE (Free Atmosphere CO2 Experiments) a section of an open field was surrounded by CO2 emitters coming from pipes so that the crops within the circle could be subject to the desired level of CO2. I thought at the time that as winds shift from different design the circular CO2 source was a good idea. Please see this page and the list of publications and pictures.
http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/~sleavitt/MaricopaFACE.htm
we include 1 beetle with every bag of flour.. fixed 🙂
Leonard Lane
Pst!!! Pzat!!! Sputter!!!! O! Noes! It’s BETTER than I thought!!!
Went to the link you recommended. Not only did it give a short explanation of how these “open field” experiments were conducted but also said that control areas were also planted and that was how the comparisons was made. The use of isotopes to determine CO2 uptake was interesting.
Everything seems on the up and up. Thankyou for relieving me of a small portion of my ignorance.
Eugene WR Gallun
Irrigate with “trickle” pipes discharging soda water.
LOL This is such a funny and obvious goofy study.
Dietary deficiencies of zinc and iron are a substantial global public health problem. An estimated two billion people suffer these deficiencies1, causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually
Another absurd position.
1. The C3 plants evolved above 1000 PPM. They aren’t supposed to require as many nutrients as they do now and are supposed to grow much faster. At about 750 PPM C3 photosynthesis is more efficient than C4. The CO2 level has to be below 750 PPM for C4 to even evolve.
2. Plants are mostly carbohydrate/starch. A seed, other than the germ and part of the coat is just carbohydrate/starch. Carbohydrates are carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/a-host-of-ills-when-irons-out-of-balance/?_r=0
3. About 13% of the elderly population has iron levels that would be considered heavy metal poisoning. Too much iron causes organ damage among other things.
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/130/2/347S.full
4. Premenopausal women and some kids have iron deficiencies. They should be eating whole grains (to reduce iron inhibition), more iron rich foods such as meat, or take supplements. Protein in meat is more bio-available. “Let them eat meat.”
5. If we adjust nutrient levels to prevent deficiency in women we will start killing some men and old people.
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Zinc-HealthProfessional/
6. As far as zinc, 1 oyster, 6 oz. red meat, 3 cups of fortified cereal, or 1 1/4 pounds of chicken gives 100% of the USRDA.
Basically people need to eat more red meat (and certain seafoods), and the consumption of refined grain products by people under 50 should be illegal.
The zinc and iron concentrations are down in C3’s with higher CO2 because they are growing faster with less nutrient needs. That’s quite obvious. It just means eating a bit more or take supplements, which are cheap and easy. Done.
To increase the nutrient content, according to the hidden reasoning Smueller is using, we should lower CO2 so that the plants grow more slowly, thus concentrating the zinc and iron.
Ridiculous. Cereals are all about sugars and carbs. Nobody eats cereal for the zinc and iron because it only contains a tiny amount of those trace elements. Most people get their iron and zinc from eating meat or fish. Vegans get theirs from green leafy veg or nuts. Not in cereal.
According to NIH (Not Invented Here) 3 oz. of oysters have 493% of the USRDA. Depending on size that is one or two oysters. I used to do oyster shooters down on the Annapolis docks and didn’t realize I was doing it for the zinc. I probably got a weeks worth of zinc.
Earing a portion of red meat, shellfish, pork, or beans at each meal gives you enough zinc. Otherwise deficiency is possible. Bacon is as good as lobster and a lot cheaper.
2
http://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/69726/gleadow-2009-cassava-online.pdf
Global food security in a changing climate depends on both the nutritive
value of staple crops as well as their yields. Here, we examined the direct
effect of atmospheric CO2 on cassava (Manihot esculenta Cranz., manioc), a
staple for 750 million people worldwide. Cassava is poor in nutrients and
contains high levels of cyanogenic glycosides that break down to release
toxic hydrogen cyanide when damaged. We grew cassava at three concentrations
of CO2 (Ca: 360, 550 and 710 ppm) supplied together with nutrient
solution containing either 1 mM or 12 mM nitrogen. We found that total
plant biomass and tuber yield (number and mass) decreased linearly with
increasing Ca. In the worst-case scenario, tuber mass was reduced by an
order of magnitude in plants grown at 710 ppm compared with 360 ppm
CO2. Photosynthetic parameters were consistent with the whole plant biomass
data. It is proposed that since cassava stomata are highly sensitive to
other environmental variables, the decrease in assimilation observed here
might, in part, be a direct effect of CO2 on stomata. Total N (used here as a
proxy for protein content) and cyanogenic glycoside concentrations of the
tubers were not significantly different in the plants grown at elevated CO2.
By contrast, the concentration of cyanogenic glycosides in the edible leaves
nearly doubled in the highest Ca. If leaves continue to be used as a protein
supplement, they will need to be more thoroughly processed in the future.
Obviously the answer is GM cassava. Breed out the toxins or snip them at the DNA level.
Not the answer.
Once cooked, the cyanogenic glycosides are not harmful in any normal case of ingestion. The cyanide (and also benzaldehyde) poisons are only released in the presence of an enzyme called beta-glucosidase and are neutralised by another enzyme (rhodanese). It is interesting to note that cancer cells have more of the former enzyme, and less of the latter enzyme than normal cells, for which the reverse is true. This may account for an increase in destruction of cancer cells. What is not in doubt are the much lower levels of cancer incidence among populations where cassava or similar cyanide bearing compounds are part of the staple diet.
Don’t take my word for it, do your own research if you have an interest. There may be lots of flak, but this usually means you’re near the target.
SteveT
You’re so funny. First this, can I call it a study?, propaganda piece is so obviously created with the goal in mind. Here is the first sentence of their abstract: “Two major problems facing the world are global climate
change and food security.”
As everyone with a brain knows, ‘global climate change’ was the new propaganda phrase when they realized the world would eventually catch on to the fact the models forecasting horrendous global warming were wrong. Plus it is from Australia, need I say more.
Smueller, I think something smells very fishy in your propaganda post. How much are you getting paid to be a shill for the AGW crowd?
We found that total plant biomass and tuber yield (number and mass) decreased linearly with increasing Ca.
http://www.academia.edu/9175136/Cassava_about-FACE_Greater_than_expected_yield_stimulation_of_cassava_Manihot_esculenta_by_future_CO2_levels
89% more tuber for doubled CO2.
Your older Australia study either had some sort of problem, things work upside down on the bottom of the world, or the scientists were simply crappy farmers.
I don’t know why scientists do some of these studies, they should leave plant growing to professional farmers. Any scientist that does plant growth studies should be required to be certified as competent to grow plants.
This is sure to fan some flames ROFL
Atmospheric CO2 content was counting down for millions of years to dangerously low levels, CO2 is naturally inclined to be absorbed, it could be the normal geological process for carbon, so in that context it might be essential for us to produce CO2 to keep agriculture alive. Obviously I am just speculating, but looking at the CO2 levels, they have more or less consistently declined for millions of years.
This would possibly suggest Earth was geologically destined to be mostly rocky and arid, if it were not for man kind, unless there is some drastic geological event that causes CO2 to jump right back up and the long term view we currently have, accuracy up for question, net CO2 appears to go into the ground over thousands of year time periods to millions of year time periods, so with that in mind, we might actually have to keep putting it back into the atmosphere in order to sustain ourselves.
Who knows.. but every time I look at the this I wonder, was CO2 on it’s way out and plants with it until man made a difference to the gas volume?
http://www.paulmacrae.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/co2-levels-over-time1.jpg
Temperature increase of the oceans seems to return some, but even with the large increase 250 million years ago it is still a massively declining trend. As such what Eric suggests might be a necessity.
Note I said “Might” “could” “may” which means what I say is, like many climate papers, meaningless. 😀
Oceans and Plant life regulate CO2 atmospheric over different timescales. Which is why CO2 does not follow temp too well. Plant life has it’s 24hr exchange and also it’s growth and death cycle. This is impossible to model and verify except for extremely rough numbers without a way of validating them because we are not measuring biomass.
Oceans work on several timescales, including ocean currents and oscillations.
But still the net absorption of CO2 trumps both, sinks dominate, it’s clear to see. This sink absorption had it happened a million years earlier, may have means no man kind
As the half-life of CO2 (and methane) in the atmosphere is about 5 years, human activities have little effect on CO2. We are certainly not seeing any effect of out ramped up CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2. No linkage there.
This is incorrect. Human activities do have an effect, mostly through sink removal.
If you look at the red spot in Africa (below the lake), Tanzania burned for fuel 27% of its forest during the 1982 to 2010 period of the CSIRO study that produced the above map. The 11% growth that the study announced is actually the growth after deforestation. The real global plant growth increase was more than 20% possibly as high as 30% in the “plants still standing”. If you match deforestation to the above map it is clear the majority of the map should be dark green.
The lost carbon sinks and the emissions from the burned trees and soil may be responsible more of the CO2 rise than fossil emissions.
Balmy as this idea is, it is actually a saner one than the geoengineering schemes of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The Greenies have things bass-ackwards. Instead of demonizing “carbon” we should be celebrating life-giving CO2. Instead of taxing it, and punishing coal and oil especially for emitting it and rewarding costly and unreliable “green” energy, if anything, they should be rewarded.
Don’t you mean “Barmy”?
3
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/08/churchills-inconvenient-truth-regarding-al-gores-claims-on-lake-chad/#comment-2232952
Re: “400ppm of CO2, contains 400ppm x 2.3Gt / ppm = 920Gt of CO2.”
That should be 8 Gt / ppmv CO2, not 2.3.
(Note: “400 ppm” customarily refers to ppmv, or, more precisely, dry molar fraction.)
The Earth’s atmosphere has a mass of about 5.3 Gt (some sources say 5.1 or 5.2).
However, atmospheric gas concentrations are customarily expressed in ppmv (parts-per-million by volume), so to calculate the mass of one ppmv requires scaling according to the molecular weight of the gas in question. The average molecular weight of the Earth’s atmosphere is 28.966 g/mole (~29). So, for carbon dioxide, 1 ppmv CO2 (molecular wt 44.01) has mass ~(44/29) × 5.3 Gt = 8.053 Gt.
Thus 400 ppmv CO2 has mass 400 × 8.053 Gt/ppmv = 3221 Gt.
Unfortunately, getting CO2 to stay so high would require a large, expensive, continuing effort. Already, over half of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are removed from the atmosphere every year, by “greening” on land, plus various ocean processes, including dissolving of CO2 in the oceans, and coccolithophore growth. The IPCC estimates that our current, slightly elevated CO2 levels are enabling natural terrestrial ecosystems to absorb an estimated 13%-44% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions (2.5 ± 1.3 PgC/yr), every year, according to AR5, p. 6-3.
Typo correction: “The Earth’s atmosphere has a mass of about 5.3 Gt”
should be: “The Earth’s atmosphere has a mass of about 5.3 million Gt”
Oops!
Ref: http://www.sealevel.info/conversion_factors.html
Thx V M for the link, dave!
We could switch all existing all existing power stations back to coal, mandate that all
wind and solar be replaced with coal, and that all future power generation be coal.
The savings in energy cost would make the additional cost of burning limestone to
add the additional CO2 to the atmosphere minor
I started reading about climate in the 70’s when my children were coming home from
school, saying that we were going into the next ice age if we didn’t stop emitting CO2.
I bought several books and became convinced that, based on simple cycles, we were
headed for the next ice age.
I am much more concerned about the coming cold than the possibility of a little extra
heat.
/not sarc!
Technically, the 1970s ice age scare wasn’t worry about CO2 emissions, it was particulate emissions. But yeah.
Per GH theory, more CO2 combats oncoming ice ages!
The article has several major flaws. The first comes from:
“This would require the expenditure of 3.6MJ / Kg * 3136Gt or limestone = 1.1289 x 10^19 joules of energy.”
He forgot to convert MJ/Kg to GJ/ton, so the result is 1000 times too low.
A second major error is that as you add CO2 to the atmosphere, it also is increasingly taken out of the atmosphere (dissolved in seawater, taken up in plants, etc.) so CO2 addition is not a one time event, but a continuous process. I am afraid the approach is not practical.
……make more cement
win…win
But we don’t have enough sand to make that much concrete! See Sand Wars, as referenced in a recent post.
Clarify: Do you mean cement or concrete? One is a chemical binder and the other is a building material.
All we need to do to get more sand is to require the China Govt to stop making sand islands in the S. China Sea. Simple!
But will the forests echo with laughter?
LOL
If no one is there?
Only the lady we all know
Tom
got my flower, got my power :-}
I am astounded and shocked to hear whispered discussions among my fellow esteemed Vatican astronomers, even within the sacred confines of the Gregorian Tower itself…! that serve to lay in and fester this idea of heliocentrism promulgated by the heretic Galileo Galilei.
Stay this madness! Let not the truth arise beyond 400 parts per million!
To be serious for a moment, NO don’t do anything to accelerate CO2 rise beyond what is strictly necessary to preserve modern life. Which shouldn’t be much if we get off our stupid and go nuclear.
Because, specifically, increased algae blooms, which would be globally devastating and directly threatening to life in every ecosystem. And would result in the hunting of those who engaged in raw deliberate CO2 release and placing their heads upon pikes. To achieve this they’d have to start manufacturing pikes again, which would further boost CO2.
Oh, don’t be silly. Algae is the bottom of the aquatic food chain, and necessary for everything which eats it. Pikes are made of wood, which is sequestered carbon. More pikes = carbon sequestration. So there’s nothing to worry about.
Eric must be a fan of “A Modest Proposal” by Swift.
Nature produces much more CO2 emissions than all anthropogenic emissions. It absorbs at least 95% of all emissions (including anthropogenics which includes lime kilns) each year. Even if five percent of anthropogenics were left to accumulate, it would not hardly make a blip in global atmospheric concentrations. Lower atmospheric temperatures in the tropics are controlling the natural emission rates of CO2.
Yes, common global biogeochemical carbon cycle amounts are:
Atmosphere CO2 at 3100 gigatonnes
Annual exchange rate of 20 percent equals at least 600 gigatonnes per year, about equally divided between biology and abiotic cycles.
Human addition of around 30 gigatonnes per year, or about 5 percent of the total exchange.
Note that the amount of CO2 lost to very long term processes, ie permanent removal, is about 5 percent of the atmosphere total or .05×3100 equals 155 gigatonnes per year. This permanent removal has two parts. One part is biotic, the biological pump, and abiotic, ocean exchange into deep storage, at least 1000 year cycle times. This is replaced by deep sources, that mirror the deep sinks.
Also yes to the tropical sources of CO2, confirmed by direct observation by the OCO2 satellite.
The bottom line is that CO2 never “accumulates” in the atmosphere, from any source.
China is doing their part. They have produced more cement the last three years than U.S in the last hundred. It takes a lot of cement to build ghost cities and artificial islands, all according to plan.
Maybe that is why Christina Figueres likes China so much.
Thank you for solving the mystery of why lively plants purchased at the plant store wither after a couple of weeks at home.
1000 ppm CO2 in a house is rather normal, we are breathing 40.000 ppm. Didn’t you forget to water your plants?
Wim, most people overwater a recently bought plant. Usually it was over watered when purchased.
OK, going off on a tangent here to respond more fully to the question of why many people do poorly when tasked with caring for a potted plant:
The average person has little clue of the specific requirements of plants, potted houseplants included.
And most people have zero clue how much less light there is inside even a well lit seeming room that outside in even a shady location.
Outside full sun is around 10,000-15,000 foot-candles or so, depending on latitude and time of year.
Outside on a cloudy day, or under a dense shade tree on a sunny day, 3,000 to 3,500 foot-candles are typical numbers.
In a very brightly lit office or store, or room in a home, 100-200 foot-candles is a typical reading, while 75 fc is sufficient light for easy reading.
Many rooms that may be thought of as “well lit” may have a light level of 30 fc or so.
I have personally investigated the death of very many plants when, after making a sale, unhappy people brought them back saying they did everything I told them to do.
Told to put the plant or tree in a sunny room, I have found that the plant was placed in the farthest and darkest corner of said room.
Light levels in such a spot may be 1/20 of what is available next to a window, which may in turn be less than 1% of what the plant has been used to in the nursery or garden center.
Told to give plenty of water, I have found that people gave large tropical plants in 15 gallon pots a tall glass of water once or twice a week.
And the low humidity common in indoor settings is very hard on plants, especially if placed in the direct path of vents or registers. Most indoor houseplants are tropical plants, and prefer somewhat humid conditions.
Just as a person running a marathon or working outside in the Summer will need far more water to survive than a person sitting in a air conditioned office, the amount of water a plant will transpire can easily vary by a factor of 20-50 depending on humidity levels, temperature and levels of light/sun.
There is no way to give anyone a one sentence explanation of how to properly and best care for a potted plant or tree, and yet that is all many people want, or are capable of remembering.
The reason why some people are considered to have a “green thumb” is because some people either intuitively or by experience understand many things that less aware or observant people simply never think about.
Few commercially grown and sold plants are grown under full sun conditions, and those that are typically acclimated to lower light levels before being shipped for sale. Plants are grown either in shade houses, under 30-90% shade clothe, or in greenhouses which have the roof painted or whitewashed to diffuse the light and lower light levels.
Most people do plenty wrong with their plants.
But depending on the plant, and the type of potting medium and the conditions, it may not be possible to overwater a well grown plant…the potting mix will not hold an excess of water.
Not enough light, letting dry out between waterings, not adding enough water to saturate the root zone, applying fertilizer to a plant which is not thriving…all are at least as common a mistake as water too often.
In my years of growing and selling plants, most people neglected them, and most gave insufficient light.
Also, many people considered a plant to be dying or dead if it was simply adapting itself to it’s new conditions by shedding some leaves or stretching internodally.
Eric
I suspect there was a good deal of tongue in your cheeks when you wrote this article. But, for now, I will assume that you were actually serious. It seems that, although you are acknowledging that CO2 is good for plant life (and hence for animal life too), you have bought into the “CO2-causes-warming” concept.
After following posts and discussions at WUWT for a few years now, I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer to the question – how much warming does CO2 cause? is somewhere between “none at all” and “not enough to worry about”, which is basically the spectrum of healthy sceptical opinions. As opposed to “a hell of a lot and we’re all going to die” which is the warmist answer.
Before embarking on a scheme like the one you’re suggesting, perhaps it would be a good idea to actually measure the greenhouse effect of CO2. I refuse to believe that it’s impossible to do laboratory experiments to accurately simulate how the atmosphere responds to incoming and outgoing IR in actual, real-world P-T-X atmospheric conditions. If experimental petrology labs can reproduce temperature-pressure conditions in the Earth’s mantle, if people can build equipment to measure the neutrino flux, if people can make a differential GPS system that can measure locations with milliimetre accuracy, surely an atmospheric lab is not beyond human capabilities.
The fact that nobody seems to have done those experiments despite the torrent of taxpayer money flowing into the Climate Industry suggests that either (a) they don’t want to do the experiment in case the results will not be to their liking, or (b) even worse – they’ve been done and the results were not to their liking. There is a third possibility, that those experiments would be hard work – you’d need a team of chemists and physicists, and engineers to design equipment and technicians to build it and run it, space to put it in – gosh it’s getting to look like real science!! – it’s SO much easier to play with computer simulations (“models”) where you control the process by specifying the greenhouse effects of CO2 that you want, so the “model” will generate the output you need to sustain the concept that “CO2 is bad and we’re all going to die”.
The other experiments that desperately need to get done are simply to precisely quantify the partition of CO2 between atmosphere and sea water, and how it varies with temperature, salinity, seawater composition etc. It’s not enough to quote Henry’s Law and make a guess at the constant. CO2 in sea water is not just a gas dissolved in a liquid, it’s present mostly as the bicarbonate ion as part of a complex, buffered ionic solution. These experiments should be dead easy and cheap to do – it’s almost incomprehensible that they’ve not been done. Never mind that the air-water system (probably) never reaches equilibrium – if we knew what the equilibrium conditions are, it should be possible to determine the direction in which the system will respond to changing conditions.
Without experimentally-derived parameters to guide you, your proposal is really arm-waving that’s more appropriate to Climate Science than science. That said, here’s a potential objection: if you add all that lime to the ocean, aren’t you feeding carbonate-shelled organisms and building future limestone? Whereas calcium is the dominant cation in most river waters, it’s a relatively minor component of seawater because it is constantly being removed in seafloor sediments, and of course it takes carbonate with it..
Here’s another objection, a practical one from one who actually works in the mining sector: you need some pretty big mines (even if you call them quarries) to get all that limestone. Have you tried to get a permit to put a mine into production lately? Good luck.
I thought his comments re-warming were of the, it can’t hurt variety.
That is, the primary purpose of increasing CO2 was to green the planet. If it also raised the temperature a few tenths of a degree, that would be good also.
With CO2 as a “pollutant” think of all the red tape you would have to go through to get permits to build lime kilns plus “not in my backyard”.
Burn the coral reefs? Coral makes good cement. If the coral was farmed at scale the production of CO2 would be sustainable. We don’t want to run out of limestone! We can use solar PV to accelerate the accretion of ocean CO2 and put it back into the atmosphere maintaining it at an artificially high, beneficial level.
The kilns could even be solar, operating only in the daytime. The coral doesn’t care. The Sahara Forest would be a major CO2 loss so the scale might have to be larger than initially expected.
We would want to be insane to start taking CO2 out of the oceans, that’s crazy talk 😀
I have the same suspicions about CO2 in the atmosphere. They continually run models that don’t work but never question the underlying assumption! Ridiculous! Give the lead end of this issue to the physicians.
Bah! Physicists!
I like it. When can we start? 🙂
Sounds like a good job for a solar furnace.
(Oh the irony)
He said that greenhouses keep CO2 levels around 1000ppm. Because that’s what makes the plants happy, not because it keeps them warm.
Eric, lets stay with proven fossil fuels. It will actually make sense (and money)
Just saying…
Um, the resultant cement will just slowly reabsorbe the CO2 and in a couple of decades, you get to start over…
you only see the down side … just define it as a sustainable jobs program … win/win.
Sustainable.
This lava lake has been here in Ethiopia for 110 years. Less than 100 km down the road in Eritrea are large fossilised coral beds which sucked the CO2 out of the atmosphere in the first place.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/07/08/10/3610637D00000578-3680466-image-a-2_1467969101875.jpg
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3680466/Welcome-Gateway-Hell-Daring-photographer-captures-rare-images-lava-lake-flowing-100-YEARS.html
Give back what the coral has taken away. Put the atmosphere back how it was. Now that would be Green.
If it causes any sea level rise there will be ample concrete for coastal defences.
I love it – very “Lord of the Rings” 🙂
Right on! Lads. But wait there’s more. Cook the Limestone in the (all natural sustainable) Ethiopian Lava lake, sell the CaO to Chinese Construction Contractors and dump the surplus into the ocean reversing the “Catastrophic acidification of the Oceans.. (CaO?)”. We’ve got a win-win one here! Make money, save the planet and while we’re at it let’s dig up the limestone from the Afar depression (nearby) and fill it up from the Red sea to stop Sea-level rise. Did we miss anything?
p.s. not sure whether to label this sarc or serious?
Dunno, it depends on elevation. If the limestone is higher than the lava lake we can use gravity, a bit of C4 and a simple rail system to feed it. Some of the Rift Valley is below sea level. Then if we have to get it back up to sea level we could use one of these new Hyperloop things powered by the CO2 to get the concrete back up to the coast before releasing the CO2 to the atmosphere. And the Hyperloop can carry a bit of sea water back again on the return trip. Sorted! A totally cost free way of saving the planet 🙂
I’m in! Now we need a conference, a journal, and, most importantly, Limestoners t-shirts!
And government grants.
Lots and lots of government grants and more ngos.
Eric, your heart and broader goal is great but sadly, you missed a factor of 3,000 or so (3 for ppmv interpreted as ppm-of-mass and 1,000 for mega-giga or kilo-ton confusion – as others have probably pointed out above) and another factor of 3 from the stabilization of the elevated concentration.
Because the project is 10,000 times harder than you announced, see
http://motls.blogspot.com/2016/07/can-we-upgrade-atmosphere-to-1000-ppm.html?m=1
it’s probably not economically feasible. After all, any attempt to geoengineer the composiion of the whole atmosphere is uneconomic. You wanted to push CO2 in the right direction, unlike the IPCC, but at the end, both projects are equally unreasonable in the absolute value. The atmosphere is just too large and it’s not reasonable to try to change the whole atmosphere – much like it’s not reasonable to try to feed the whole Milky Way.
A rather large space based reflector might do some good. Heat small areas of ocean water and cook limestone out in the desert somewhere. Control sea ice with it. Focus on your enemies’ house for a couple minutes.
Underground coal mines only have about 50% yield. A better solution is to seal a large fan at the mouth of the main shaft of abandoned coal mines to provide positive air pressure and light a fire in the mine.
Remind me not to ever live near you or one of your groovy ideas.
Thank you.
I always appreciate hearing from fans.
Enjoying the Satire…
The evidence for CO2 levels vs glacial periods and Ice ages is that CO2 follows temperature, the idea of increasing atmospheric CO2 to increase planetary temperature is flawed from the start, first of all CO2 is already saturated, there will be no rise or fall of global temperatures related to CO2. And “slightly milder winters” which is weather caused by CO2 is just about the dumbest thing I have read on a wuwt post (and there have been some hot-whoppers lol).
Even if we pretend that CO2 could increase planetary temperature by producing more, we would need the rate of CO2 production to be in the ballpark of several massive volcanoes to produce the CO2 to 1000ppm, and when this goal is reached, then we need to gradually increase the production of CO2 as the planet got greener and the oceans absorbed more and try to maintain this rate of CO2 production just to stay ahead of the carbon cycle.
In reality, as soon as the Ice age rolled around, cooler oceans will have huge CO2 absorption rates, CO2 itself will cool and literally fall from the sky and become buried in growing ice sheets miles thick, and at this stage the futile anthropogenic carbon-dioxide production will have to be increased by several more volcanoes with no obvious effect to planetary temperature just to stay in balance with absorption rates of an Ice age.
Defeatist!
tactical nukes on the methane hydrate deposits in the Arctic would be cheap and effective.
Locating unextractable coal seams and burning them in situ with forced ventilation is low cost as well.
We could just ban renewable energy. That would increase CO2 emissions and cut power costs. Cheaper power and good for the environment, a win-win.
As long as the continents have their present configuration, there is little hope that we can change anything to the glaciation cycle. Unless there are astronomical phenomena which could influence the quantity of energy that the earth receives from the sun and that we haven’t taken into account (galactic dust clouds for instance), the conditions of limits are well-known and will lead to a new glaciation.
*wrings hands and gnashes teeth concernedly*
“Eric, your heart and broader goal is great but sadly, you missed a factor of 3,000 or so (3 for ppmv interpreted as ppm-of-mass and 1,000 for mega-giga or kilo-ton confusion – as others have probably pointed out above) and another factor of 3 from the stabilization of the elevated concentration.
Because the project is 10,000 times harder than you announced, see
http://motls.blogspot.com/2016/07/can-we-upgrade-atmosphere-to-1000-ppm.html?m=1
it’s probably not economically feasible. After all, any attempt to geoengineer the composiion of the whole atmosphere is uneconomic. You wanted to push CO2 in the right direction, unlike the IPCC, but at the end, both projects are equally unreasonable in the absolute value. The atmosphere is just too large and it’s not reasonable to try to change the whole atmosphere – much like it’s not reasonable to try to feed the whole Milky Way.”
One wonders if the management will come around to retract the post or force the writer to correct his errors?
Na..
never happen..
Maybe Eric can go post with Goddard
You are the one that keeps bringing him up.
Why do you do that?
If it wasn’t for you….his name would never come up here.
Because the truth hurts los warmistas, so they must falsely put Heller down. Poor souls, not a patch on him, just childish.
Lol, why don’t you ask Anthony why Heller’s stuff doesn’t get posted here anymore?
Eric you will be relieved to learn that eminent climate scientists have pondered the problem of delaying the next glacial inception and concluded that we are safe for at least 50000 years at the current , human enhanced , CO2 levels and that your bold but demanding experiment will not be needed (if their models are correct ):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015RG000482/full
Reviews of Geophysics ” Interglacials of the last 800,000 years”
Excerpt:
-“Based on model experiments, the glaciation threshold depends not only on insolation but also on the atmospheric CO2 content [Archer and Ganopolski, 2005]. Models of different complexity and time series analyses of proxy data have been used to investigate the response to orbital forcing in the future for a range of atmospheric CO2 levels. These results show consistently, that a glacial inception is unlikely to happen within the next approximate 50 ka (when the next strong drop in Northern Hemisphere summer insolation occurs) if either atmospheric CO2 concentration remains above 300 ppm or cumulative carbon emissions exceed 1000 Pg C [Loutre and Berger, 2000; Archer and Ganopolski, 2005; Cochelin et al., 2006]. Only for an atmospheric CO2 content below the preindustrial level may a glaciation occur within the next 10 ka [Loutre and Berger, 2000; Cochelin et al., 2006; Kutzbach et al., 2011; Vettoretti and Peltier, 2011; Tzedakis et al., 2012a]. This can be used to explain why glacial inception occurred during MIS 19c under astronomical configuration rather similar to the present one but at lower CO2 concentration (~240 ppm).”-
How do we feel about climate models around here? I’m starting on my space based reflector. Please send your surplus gold and silver to:
John Harmsworth
Canada
(We all know each other)
We need to have festivals where we burn limestone in the public square — while waving Save The Planet banners. I bet a lot of dumb without a clue greenies would attend and cheer the burning on.
Eugene WR Gallun
My banner will say, ” burn the greens, save the limestone “!
Greenhouse CO2 use as an indicator of ideal plant conditions keeps getting cited as evidence ~1,000 ppm CO2 is “more better” for them. It overlooks the fact that the plants in greenhouses are living in artificially controlled conditions for water, light & available nutrients. The 1st link original post gives describes greenhouse enclosures as otherwise prone to use up natural CO2 soon (by the way also specifies not to add CO2 come night – unless contrary to nature keeping high pressure sodium lights on then), action on mulch (organic litter outdoors) by soil microrgsnisms itself adds CO2 that should be taken into account & the conductivity (electrical conductivity = EC in link) rather than the numerical amount of different nutrients in a fertilization formula has to be modified.
From memory (no time right now to look for free full Brazil text link in English, would later in anyone interested): when water is just enough, ideal or a lot (of water) edible peppers grown at current ambient CO2, ~ 600+ & 1,000 ppm CO2 the crop was not the best at 1,000 ppm CO2. This shows that when 3 water levels & 3 CO2 levels were experimented with the assumption that a linear increase if CO2 to 1,000ppm is not automatically going to be “more better” outdoors.
A fair number of recent studies have noted the greening of the planet thanks to enhanced CO2.
Other studies using real world plants have found the enhanced CO2 causes increased growth in plants.
Enhanced CO2 also helps plants use water more efficiently which permits crops and other plants to grow in areas that used to be to dry for them.
Since see commentators enthused by greenhouse CO2 let’s look at O.P. 1st link’s very last sentence how elevated CO2 sometimes requires increasing boron (B). By the way, using reverse osmosis to get the water used for mixing fertilzer nutrients formulation (so can control electrical conductivity, EC) be aware boron is not removed by reverse osmosis (greenhouse operators test the water they are going to use including boron level).
Seedlings require low boron at first & plant root cells use transporters (influx & efflux) to shunt it. Low boron does not lead to less nitrogen, phosphorus or potassiun uptake or these themselves being low in leaves. Raising boron however does increase uptake of potassium, calcium & nitrogen; this affect on nitrogen applies only to field plants & not in hydroponics.
Low boron leads to reduced growth in root apices; stem (meri-stem) cells defects stop tip growth (possibly related to worse cassava root yields reported in earlier commentator’s link).
There is also reduced meri-stem cell division in primary & lateral root meri-stems which plays out as less root elongation. The reduced cross linking (of rhamno-galact-uron pectin poly-saccharides) in cell walls (from low boron) creates thinner & shorter root nodes.
Low boron sustains the natural level of auxin hormone, but it (auxin) just stays where made & this by altering the auxin ratio to cytokinin hormone leads to less root development; &, for that matter, less absorption of phosphorus (H2PO4-). The downstream reduction of cytokinin ratio means + low boron induced reduction of root cytokinin output leads to less cell division/mitosis/nuclear RNA & less root elongation. The result is a bushy plant (lots of lateral buds) but this is a consequence of reduced auxin transport (low boron stalls auxin movement & limits apical dominance auxin movement normally exhibits).
Vegetative (leafy crops) growth under low boron can not be extrapolated to flowering conditions (since leaves are not trying to undergo morpho-genesis & ~67% of boron in leaves is just stabilizing calcium in pectin of cell walls) the aberrant stem (meri-stem) cells at axis of floral transition site lose their cell wall integrity. The phase in of cell vacuolation off the stem is reduced, defects in inflorescence occur (young inflorescence are normall ~65-87% cross linked pectin with increased dividing cells), pectin wall defects increase, cell integrity is less & barren inflorescence patches occur.
Elevated boron produces firmer fruit; it helps more potassium get pulled into the sector (the reduction of leaf potassium gets leaves to do less physiological processes. This boron let’s 20-40% of potassium move over at fruiting with leaf levels of potassium only going down to ~3% potassium (from usual 4.5% potassium in leaves); whereas low boron draws leaf potassium down to ~2%.
Earlier (above) I mentioned how 1,000ppm CO2 was not optimal for edible peppers & one of the criteria was that (at 1,000ppm CO2) it resulted in a lot of aberrant shaped peppers (not very saleable). The more commercially appropriate level was 600+ ppm CO2 & this was better than current ambient level CO2 for pepper production.
Dog needed taking out for walk; shall resume. Unlike greenhouse growers field levels of boron can vary at start of season & with different soils be lower.
~70% of leaf cell division happens after the lamina open & ~ 4% of leaf expansion has happened (bonzais leaves have less numbers of cells & normal sized leaf cells). As leaf gets 12-50% expanded (hormone gibberellin synthesized in young leaf boosts expansion) it won’t draw on root carbohydrates; best CO2 derived carbon (water & minerals) assimilation in leaf in many plants’ leaves occurs when leaf is 3 weeks along (peak days approximately 22-24 day old).
Once the leaves start making sugar (sucrose) the hormone auxin can synergistically use that for forming “tracheids” phloem/xylem; the ratio of xylem to sieve cells depends in turn on the % of sucrose in use. Higher CO2 leaf made carbo-hydrates results in a dynamic with auxin that creates more lignin & as the % sugar goes up this auxin hormone interaction creates both longer growing parts above ground + more dry weight.
Some variation of plant responses to elevated CO2 is related to the way carbo-hydrate levels interact with cytokinin hormone; cytokinin up-regulates the enzymes that increase starch metabolism, which leads to less oxygen O2 uptake into cells. Different plants regulate their cytokinin hormone balance by the same enzyme (cytokinin oxidase) in opposite directions (thus natural cytokinin hormone might be increased or decreased).
Cytokinin hormone level is important to get the plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) tied up for lowering the ABA level; otherwise the NO3- nitrogen processing enzyme (nitrate reductase, whose messenger RNA transcription gets increased by cytokinin) level is held down. Young leaves have higher natural ABA levels (than older leaves) & ABA has a temperature response (in addition to soil moisture response); this is part of why some temperate crops introduced into tropical fields do poorly despite abundant nitrogen fertilization (I have elsewhere detailed how elevated CO2 causes poor NO3- nitrogen assimilation).
Greenhouses control temperature & this affects cytokinin levels; as temperature goes up in the field
more cytokinin is needed to get the same cytokinin related effects downstream in the plant. Commentators repeatedly point out that high CO2 close leaf stomata (pores) & less water moves out of the leaf; actually it is this water coming out of the stomata that cools (evapo-transpiration) the immediate air at leaf surfaces out in the field.
A differdnt geno-type of the same plant can make a difference in it’s cytokinin hormone response to temperature; the same kind of plant’s growth rate can go down when exposed to cooler &/or higher than it’s optimal temperature range. Balancing the level of cytokinin is via an enzyme (cytokinin oxidase) & different kinds of plants respond differently (feedback loops vary); when cytokinin levels go up some make more of that enzyme (cytokinin decreases) & other making more of that enzyme increase their natural cytokinin. By referencing CO2 levels from millions of years ago as proof plants thrive on1,000 ppm CO2 seems (to me) overlooking adaptations plants have made; & seem to have made under human agricultural selection of plant landraces.
WOW.
Now I know why we added boron to our citrus nutritional sprays.
As others have pointed out, the calculations are badly in error. Yet another error is the statement “The obvious solution would be to dump it into the ocean, where as Calcium Hydroxide it could counter any ocean acidification caused by the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, and would hopefully not promote rapid re-absorption of the released CO2.”
The chemical reaction that counters acidification is the same as the reaction that promotes rapid adsorption of the CO2. So you can not have one without the other.
We are engaged in rather modest, unintended geoengineering.
Just because the panic over that is overblown does not mean that much more massive, intentional geoengineering is a good idea.
We are returning the earth to a state closer to what was natural for 100’s of millions of years.
How is that an experiment?
“How is that an experiment?”
Unprecedented rate of change.
Eric Worrall
I have a possible way to test your theory outside of a “green house”
Pick a busy street with plenty of car, truck and bus traffic. Plant trees, ferns and such along its side walks.
Pick an out of the way place with no traffic. plant the same. Other then one being on a busy street all other factors should be as close to the same as possible.
monitor growth, and CO2 levels in each location.
Oh and get a gov grant, must not forget the grant.
Anyone from New England has seen the effects of sweet little trees planted alongside side walks after twenty to thirty years.
michael
been done.. http://sealevel.info/ScientificAmerican_1920-11-27_CO2_fertilization.html
oops. this study was done in 1920.. some young folk may feel this is ‘obsolete’ (based on feedback I’ve had elsewhere;)
Scientific American sure has gone downhill in the last 100 years.
Karl,
Thanks.
seems we are always reinventing the wheel.
1920 ………………..
michael
Very funny article, Eric. Thanks. Let’s hope it causes a few alarmists to spill their coffee. 🙂
Of course it’s not necessary to treat the entire atmosphere with CO2 to improve agricultural productivity, at least for some high-value plants. As vertical farming increases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
food plants can be exposed to optimal levels of CO2 (and light, nutrients, etc.) with far lower production of the gas.
The sun is evaporating water just as fast as it can. The resulting water vapour drifts up, up and away until it condenses high in the atmosphere and releases heat, much of which escapes to space. H2O as a “greenhouse gas” has a built in governor.
Quite visible in the equatorial daily weather patterns.
The calculations above are way off, as they ignore the partitioning of CO2 into the oceans at a rate of 50 to 1. You would have to burn 50 times the amount calculated as the oceans would fight increased atmospheric CO2. The cost would be in excess of $5 trillion, particularly as plants in and out of the water would be gladly feeding on the higher CO2.
And, by the way, ocean acidification is not happening because carbonic acid is a weak acid and, as it is part of unexpended equilibrium from CO2 to calcium carbonate, any protons (H+) released by carbonic acid are meaningless as an equilibrium cannot affect itself.
Photosynthesis is an alkalizing process, such that in bays and estuaries the pH can rise from around 8 to above 10 on a sunny day. Clearly, this does not harm these organisms.
Furthermore, metabolic processes in living corals produce acidic waste products such that waters passing through coral reefs come out the other side acidified. However, this dilutes out quickly and the complex buffer system we call seawater, resists great changes in pH.
As the oceans’ pH has been within normal ranges of variation for the last 50 years while atmospheric CO2 has risen, it is clear that ocean acidification is not a problem. Even if it was happening, it is clear that all of the marine species we have today survived during times of much higher and much healthier atmospheric CO2. They have what is called physiology that can control their internal pH. Human blood pH must stay within 0.1 pH unit of 7.4 or we go into a coma and die. However, we can literally drink vinegar with a pH of 3 and are fine.
In addition, referring back to the extended equilibrium from CO2 to carbonic acid to bicarbonate to carbonate to calcium carbonate, when you add more CO2 you get more calcium carbonate deposition. The warm oceans (calcium carbonate is less soluble in warm water than cold, an exception to the normal rule for salts) are also effectively saturated solutions of calcium carbonate, with lots of extra calcium as well, so, when CO2 rises, calcium carbonate precipitates, which is exactly why coral reefs tends to concrete shells together over time, building up the base.
A nice summary about [no] acidification. Thanks!
Limestone is currently (previously?) added to coal-fired power boiler furnaces. Just build, or reopen, coal-fired power plants!
> The atmosphere, at 400ppm of CO2, contains 400ppm x 2.3Gt / ppm = 920Gt of CO2.
> To raise CO2 to 1000ppm, we need another 600ppm * 2.3Gt / ppm = 1380Gt of CO2.
You forgot absorption into the oceans.
But you didn’t take into account that there have been a slew of submarine volcanoes discovered recently and large amounts of volcanic gasses, a significant portion of those is CO2.
giant biodomes! I know greenies like giant biodomes.. Have them fund a few, don’t tell them they’ll be coal powered (don’t worry, they won’t ask.. they never ask for details) we make them big enough then we can move in and farm our Frankenplants in peace – they may remain out in the natural world with Gaia looking after them and helpfully vaccinating them the natural way. With crystals.. we’ll need to give them crystals.. and maybe hummus
This is a very entertaining speculation, but the last thing we need is another vast technocratic Plan. Besides, CO2 is increasing quite nicely already and, without the greens suppressing it, and China chugging along, would arrive at 1000ppm in due course.
Yeah, but this is a DIFFERENT vast technocratic plan!
Regarding idea of 1000 ppm of CO2 as a natural background, please take into account:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-comfort-level-d_1024.html
http://www.e-inst.com/carbon-dioxide/legislation
The effects of CO2 on adults at good health can be summarized to:
normal outdoor level: 350 – 450 ppm
acceptable levels: < 600 ppm
complaints of stiffness and odors: 600 – 1000 ppm
ASHRAE and OSHA standards: 1000 ppm
general drowsiness: 1000 – 2500 ppm
adverse health effects may be expected: 2500 – 5000 ppm
maximum allowed concentration within a 8 hour working period: 5000 – 10000 ppm
maximum allowed concentration within a 15 minute working period: 30000 ppm
The levels above are quite normal and maximum levels may occasionally happen from time to time. In general – ventilation rates should keep carbon dioxide concentrations below 1000 ppm to create indoor air quality conditions acceptable to most individuals.
I suspect some of those numbers are too low. For starters submariners, people trusted to have their finger on then nuclear button, live for months at a time, with substantially elevated CO2 levels, well above 1000ppm.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/17/claim-co2-makes-you-stupid-as-a-submariner-that-question/
In addition, people in respiratory arrest can be revived with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, breathing air into their lungs at around 50,000ppm CO2. I’m not suggesting a sustained 50,000ppm would be a good thing, but it seems difficult to reconcile harmful effects from levels as low as 1000ppm, with the ability to revive people whose respiratory system is compromised with air which contains 50,000ppm CO2.
that’s a little different to any numbers I’ve seen in Australia too – http://hsis.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/HazardousSubstance/Details?hazardousSubstanceID=4370 suggests 5000ppm (0.5%) is acceptable indefinitely – with a short term exposure limit set at 30,000 ppm (3%)
It’s disgraceful that so many would mock the very serious problem of CO2 emissions like this.
And to do so with such a cavalier disrespect for the many thoughtful people who have committed so much of their human existence to facing the challenge of climate change is just plain mean.
The laughing ridicule aimed at the caring and concerned side of the climate debate feeds the justified demand that government intervention establish harsh consequences for the horrible people who impede the necessary steps to address climate change.
You’re all in very big trouble.
In this troubled era those responsible for the fate of the planet and it’s people will need to become supreme judges to deal with the ringleaders in this treason, and to cauterise down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our human survival. Let the world know that its existence—which depends on its order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the necessary world governance, then discipline is his lot.
That is all.
Tee time.
Good day 🙂
You may want to consider notifying the OSU Bias Response Team. Note that the Bias Response Protocol (although not formally completed) states that the Protocal may be initiated for even for off campus incidents that adversely impact the OSU community.
But be careful and don’t mention the golfing. Letting people know that you have the surplus time and financial resources (that they don’t have) for such a grand en devour is more than just being plain old rude, it is a great big fat elitist micro aggression.
[No offense intended by “plain old”, or “great big fat”]
[No offense intended by suggesting that “you may want to consider”, when you are obviously intelligent enough to have considered it already, all by yourself]
WOW!
Nice rant.
I copied it to a word file, printed, posted in my office and now I will try to memorize it.
You don’t mind do you.
[snip -off topic -policy .mod]
Steve Oregon, I sure hope you forgot the “/sarc” tag.
What you said is funny if you did forget. Sad if you didn’t.
The obvious solution would be to dump it into the ocean, where as Calcium Hydroxide it could counter any ocean acidification caused by the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels….
===
uh no
It will locally supersaturate…..taking the calcium carbonate (buffer) with it…result, less buffer
It is unlikely that we are teetering on the brink of a new ice age.
Because orbital eccentricity is low at present, there will not be a strong precessional (Milankovitch) Great Winter to force ice sheet growth, for some considerable time.
The insolation forcing at 65oN that forced the last ice age was 441 wm2, 116 ky ago.
This is quite low.
The Holocene maximum was 529 wm2, 11 ky ago
Our present insolation has gone down to 480 wm2, which is why it is cooler now than at the Holocene maximum. However, NH insolation will be going up from now on, not down. So we are at the start of a very weak Great Summer warming period, and will not experience an ice age now.
The next possibilities for an ice age are:
53 ky hence, with 470 wm2
96 ky hence, with 474 wm2
170 ky hence, with 455 wm2
(Data Laskar 2004.)
But if the albedo theory for the modulation of ice ages is correct, then we can just spray the growing ice sheets with soot and avert the next ice age. It will be cheaper than producing Co2, and more effective if Co2 is actually a very weak warming agent.
Ralph
Ecovangilists pick the wrong thing to demonize . CO2 plant food could double and be well within Happy Planet range . The massive con-game is so obvious yet most media keeps pumping it just like they pumped the 1970’s global cooling scare . Politicians ever so keen to jump on a new tax fall all over themselves to
sell the goofy con while serial corporate welfare industries ( “renewables”) have to keep tax payer grants flowing till the owners fleece the companies enough before going bankrupt .
When the next ice age starts we won’t be able to stop it by adding human generated CO2 like it was part of a recipe , All we will need is NOAA to BS the numbers …at least for a few elections .
Smueller:
No need to worry about cassava, it seems yields are affected more by what kind of container they are grown in than CO2.
http://www.academia.edu/2300650/Cassava_about-FACE_Greater_than_expected_yield_stimulation_of_cassava_Manihot_esculenta_by_future_CO2_levels
Excellent GP, – only wish to point out that experiment was not 1,000ppm as original post seems to favor, but rather a little under 600ppm CO2.
As stated in other comments, atmosphere CO2 is about 3100 gigatonnes, or 8ppmv per gigatonne.
You will need at least 10000 gigatonnes of limestone. 10000 gigatonnes is 10E15 kilograms. 10E15 times 3.6MJ per kg is 36E21 Joules. Also, 3.6MJ is one kilowatthour, or about 0.1 us dollars.
So, the cost of the energy needed is 1E15 dollars. 1 million gigadollars, or 1000 trillion dollars.
We better start saving our nickles.
OBTW, limestone has the typical density of rock, 2.5 tonnes per cubic meter. That means you will need 10000 gigatonnes divided by 2.5 equals 4E12 cubic meters. At 1E9 cubic meters per cubic kilometer, thats 4000 cubic kilometers of limestone. Or, for a 100 meter by 100 meter strip mine, that would be 1E5 meters long, or 100 kilometers. That would take a good chunk of the cliffs of Dover.
Addendum, a first guess on the economics is that it might be possible to construct the infrastructure to cook the limestone needed if the entire resources of human-kind were diverted into the project for the next 20 years.
With the advent of molecular nanotechnology, atmospheric carbon dioxide is going to become default raw material for almost anything. Under those circumstances it may indeed be necessary to replenish it using limestone, otherwise technology gets into direct competition with plant life for an indispensable resource. And, of course, as soon as plants loose the battle, we all gonna die.
It may even be wise to prepare for a coming shortage by loading as much of it into the atmosphere as possible well before draining is expected to start. This way we can buy some time to avert catastrophic collapse of the biosphere.
Therefore postponing switch from coal to fourth generation nuclear may be advisable, although the latter process can generate as much energy from a ton of granite, the stuff continents are made of, as burning fifty tons of coal.
Eric, you have a basic number wrong.
At 400 ppm there is about 3,130 Gt of CO2 in the atmosphere.
That is 855 Gt carbon.
This is a pretty simple calculation.
The equilibrium temperature for a ball with any particular spectrum as seen from its radiant source(s) can be straightforwardly calculated .
It does not explain why the bottoms of atmospheres are hotter than their tops . That gradient is the scare GHG story foisted by Hansen & Gore , et al . It is false at an undergraduate physics level which is why neither quantitative equation nor experimental demonstration has ever been presented .
To me the significant fact to consider is that all that CO2 plus all the CO2 “sequestered” as carbon and hydrocarbon deposits by organic processes was in the pre-photosynthesis atmosphere . CO2 and Methane together formed perhaps 30% of the original atmosphere and even with an early weak sun , should by GHG theory burned up the planet before life could start sucking it down to barely survivable levels .
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. The removal of CO2 from our atmosphere by the formation of carbonate rocks has been going on for ages. Putting some of the CO2 back in the atmosphere will not hurt anything.
Something you might want to consider if it were feasible to actually increase carbon dioxide to 1000ppm. According to the folks that say the Earth is being heated by carbon dioxide, the effect of the addition of carbon dioxide is logarithmic and it appears that we are high on the curve. I have heard that line spreading will allow the effect to continue as larger amounts are placed in the atmosphere; but I know of no process that would cause this in the Earth’s atmosphere, unlike the Sun and stars which have extreme conditions. So if your greening of the Earth is successful, at some point you could change and start cooling the Earth.
I can’t make any sense of your comment. A logarithmic curve keeps on increasing, just slower and slower.
A log curve keeps on increasing, slower and slower and effectively reaches a limit. The carbon dioxide curve is fast approaching that limit and with the greening of the Earth being more linear the heating effect will be less than the cooling and the Earth will cool.
Great suggestion Eric. Pay good money to heat limestone, when CO2 is already being raised for free willing to pay good money to burn fossil fuels. Central planning at its best.
I’ve been saying this for quite a while. Whether sooner, or later, if humans are still around rocks will be cooked to put CO2 into the atmosphere. There will be a worldwide “carbon incentive” – a negative carbon tax for you alarmists who need a good scare – because more CO2 is good. Carbon Is Life.
I don’t have the link at hand but the numbers stuck in my head from a US forestry publication that concluded 1 acre of harvestable trees require(d) 20 cubic kilometers of air to give up a sufficient quantity of CO2 to grow those trees. Obviously that’s across the time span it takes to grow those trees not all at once.. ant it’s not hard to determine the accuracy of that – just measure the dry weight and charcoal weight of a lump of wood and extrapolate to the tonnage of cut trees from an acre – point being, plants gobble it as quick as they can. Paulaownia trees will reach harvest size in as little as 5 years – sucking all the CO2 from 4 cubic kilometers of air per year. Clearly to raise the CO2 levels such that greedy little plants don’t gobble it up almost immediately, for this little thought experiment about replenishing the air, we’d need to pump out far, far more CO2 than these calculations suggest. (it’s also worth keeping these figures in mind to toss at the next hyperventilating greenie you meet – it’s fun! (“yes, keep going.. shout louder! the trees need your hot CO2 enriched air – good job, keep going.. good, good – no don’t stop .. ” )
“Let’s cook limestone to raise atmospheric co2”
Another reason why worthless wind turbines are totally unsustainable in the true sense of the word — not only would you be unable to produce the steel with the energy turbines produce, you could not get the high temperatures needed to roast the cement.
ref:
“The most common way to manufacture portland cement is through a dry method. The first step is to quarry the principal raw materials, mainly limestone, clay, and other materials. After quarrying the rock is crushed. This involves several stages. The first crushing reduces the rock to a maximum size of about 6 inches. The rock then goes to secondary crushers or hammer mills for reduction to about 3 inches or smaller.
The crushed rock is combined with other ingredients such as iron ore or fly ash and ground, mixed, and fed to a cement kiln.
The cement kiln heats all the ingredients to about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit in huge cylindrical steel rotary kilns lined with special firebrick. Kilns are frequently as much as 12 feet in diameter—large enough to accommodate an automobile and longer in many instances than the height of a 40-story building. The large kilns are mounted with the axis inclined slightly from the horizontal.
The finely ground raw material or the slurry is fed into the higher end. At the lower end is a roaring blast of flame, produced by precisely controlled burning of powdered coal, oil, alternative fuels, or gas under forced draft.”
Let’s cook limestone.
Ya that is the five year plan.
“One final issue would be what to do with the approx. 1500Gt of Quicklime which would be produced by burning the limestone. The obvious solution would be to dump it into the ocean, where as Calcium Hydroxide it could counter any ocean acidification caused by the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels…”
…Where at least it will not be disturbing the cattle with infrasound, killing birds in midflight, taking up 10,000 acres for a single fleet, nor dominating the lovely country landscape.
http://plymouthvoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Wind-Turbine-Construction-588×407.png
Better at the bottom of the sea, I agree!
Especially good for mangroves apparently.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-10/unprecedented-10000-hectares-of-mangroves-die/7552968
So much blather on this site about science and it’s short-coming and you guys want perform some kind of massive experiment on the whole planet to prove to yourselves CO2 is our friend, just plant food. See how your going in September when the Arctic ice is at another record low and god knows what other climate surprise has bitten some corner of the world on the arse.
Nice trolling Eric.
Don’t panic Tony we’re having a giggle but thanks for raising the issue of the Mangroves. My bet is keep an eye on this and we’ll see Phytophthora cinnamomi is deemed the culprit in the near future. It seems to be a factor being considered by the Qld environment agency as well as Canadian researchers – something that sounds more plausible than climate changification.. I guess they need a botanist/mycologist up there. it’d probably be cheaper too than having a climate scientismist fly over the area.
Have a peek here for more info on C3 photosynthesis which includes links to studies conducted during the devastating dust bowl event, when CO2 was at very low levels. These showed crops had depleted the air of CO2 within hours of sunrise, leading them to starve to death (total crop failure)
Karl, apart from increased food production do you see any other benefits of an uncontrolled experiment with the atmosphere?
lower chance of the planet dying soon. Seriously – plants like all lifeforms gobble resources with gay abandon.. we human are not unique in this.. CO2 is consumed as hastily as possible by plants and any closed system experiments inevitably lead to total system death as plants work as hard as they can to convert all the CO2 to plant mass. Once it’s gone they die, all aerobic organisms die and the system degenerates to sludge.
More CO2 means more plants, more free water (plants use substantially less water when CO2 levels are higher), more animals to feed on the plants, the potential for more biodiversity – it is the basis of all multicellular life on Earth – the carbon cycle. C4 and CAM plants only evolved recently as CO2 levels have dropped and recent experiments to splice C4 photosynthesis into existing crops should be of substantially greater concern as C4 plants can drive CO2 levels all the way down to zero.
In reality it’s just a quirk of life on Earth that CO2 dependence hangs on what the planet does, binding CO2 in the aquatic environment as carbonates and releasing it again when these rocks sublimate at high temperatures below the crust. There’s a great video of liquid CO2 here bubbling from the ocean floor and a good article here from Nat Geo about a lake of the stuff – we don’t know how common or rare these sights are since we don’t really go looking.
Ultimately though all this teaches us is that life is precariously clinging to this rock with zero chance of long terms survival irrespective of what humans, termites or antelopes do or do not do.. if the nuclear reactor beneath our feet slows or shuts down it’ll all be gone pretty quickly. If we really (and I mean really) give a hoot about long term survival we’d recognize this was a great place to evolve, but it won’t last forever.
When I first encountered the warnings about AGW I heard nothing about the role of plants – as I had studied botany I found it extremely odd that CO2’s role in the carbon / life cycle had been left out of the discussion. It’s becoming more of a thing as botanists speak out, though the MSM is less interested in botanists as they are deemed unqualified to talk on matters of climate.
You cite bio-diversity as a benefit, I suppose, indirectly – as a result of there being more food for herbivorous critters. Lots of variables there so certainly no guarantee of that and certainly not in the short to medium term (say up to 10,000 years) – evolution of new species (simple organisms aside) often takes more time than that.
At the moment the biggest threat to biodiversity is habitat loss from human activity and if the only other benefit is potentially more food then considering the risks (perceived or otherwise) wouldn’t lower risk option (especially as far as short to medium term biodiversity is concerned) be for stasis – a continuation of the stable Holocene conditions?
Might not a rise to 1000ppm CO2 risk some pretty rapid climate changes and unpredictable outcomes iif it occurred over human scale time frames (decades) as opposed to the millennia of the past?
Tony Those are entirely reasonable questions.
My primary concern in any tampering would be the same as yours, which is why I looked long and hard at what I was being told about CO2 and found a lot that didn’t add up. I’ll start with it’s properties before I head to the biological side. GSS educational documents state “Molecules of carbon dioxide gas resonate when they encounter photons of infrared energy; while molecules of oxygen and nitrogen do not”
This same school education guide (link above) goes on to describe an experiment to test CO2’s capacity to absorb heat, but at the very end of the piece concludes effect “Unfortunately, all of the efforts by GSS
staff and teacher participants have failed (so far) to develop a procedure, using laboratory equipment that is easily available, that will enable students to measure the differential absorption of heat energy by air and pure samples of greenhouse gases. While the results seemed reasonable in most of the pilot experiments, the class data only turned up random differences in the temperatures of the various samples. This was even the case when we tested the published activity.”
The first statement while technically true is at the same time evasive. Sure O2 and N do not directly absorb IR wavelengths, but they DO absorb other wavelengths just as glass does not absorb visible light while it does absorb UV, and just as absorbing UV radiation will cause glass to heat O2 and N will absorb other wavelengths of radiation and heat up. Tagging infra red (IR) as ‘heat’ and other forms of radiation are not is as silly as suggesting only UV can burn your skin – not only that, but as any gas absorbs energy it’ll transfer some of that energy to the surrounding gas – this is basic physics ..you can’t discriminate and heat only one gas in a mixture. So unsurprisingly everything on our planet absorbs radiations of multiple wavelengths and all cause the molecules to become excited, which we know as ‘heat’.. Water is particularly good at this
Gasses are also misrepresented, starting in the way we’re taught about them in schools – as we know conduction and radiation confer energy to the surroundings, gasses are known to transfer heat by convection, but this understates their true nature quite considerably, as gasses act as refrigerants by absorbing energy and carrying the energy with them as the rise, transferring it to cooler areas. We take full advantage of this every day with refrigerators but rarely do people stop and think just how efficient gasses are at this. Water is even better as a refrigerant because it has an extremely high energy requirement to raise it’s temperature (so it carries more energy) and it exists in 3 phases on the one planet.
back to the biological side – you’re right there’s no guarantee of anything, but there’s a fair number of examples we could look at, and a few premises that are worth examining. Life forms are pretty adept at moving around, crossing distances with sometimes insane proficiency such as the snakehead fish and I should have used the term ‘regional biodiversity’ – My apologies for that, the word ‘regional’ gets dropped so often I did the same thing. just as species can become regionally extinct, they can move into areas that were previously hostile or less than ideal.
Evolution is throwing up some surprises – rapid
evolution: ‘after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake captured marine fish in newly formed ponds which rapidly became freshwater ponds’. The fish are now freshwater fish. Similar geological transformations speculatively, may have led to the landlocked freshwater dolphin and even seahorses in places such as Lake Titicaca. Then there’s the whole epigenetic angle, when plants that had alleles for spines removed regenerated the spines (from ‘junk DNA) when faced with predators. The alleles were gone, but then they came back – epigenetics has thrown the world of geneticists into a tailspin.
Loss of biodiversity is a funny one, we can see evidence of it around us every day in locations from urban to rural areas and it looks true, yet we’re not hearing much about the farmlands lost to regrowth around the world – in fact there’s been a concerted effort to prevent lost farms being viewed as returning to nature, as this article about an internal debate within the Smithsonian suggests discussing that ‘for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of farm are lost to regrowth‘. As anyone knows, keeping plants at bay can prove extremely difficult without constant tending. Every time they fly a LIDAR run over the regions around Angkor Wat they seem to extend the size of this once vast city – and more recently the Amazon Jungle we’re taught is a near pristine wild, untouched by humans could in fact have been one mighty garden, with evidence of diverted rivers, terraced mountainsides, countless roads, villages, town and even cities. Plotting plant species has led others to conclude many trees were cultivated, and population estimates run from 20-90 million people. Not quite the way we imagined, but perfectly reasonable given the rate at which tropical plants grow. Animals rapidly populate abandoned farms when there’s cover and vegetation , and predators soon follow – like the leopards in Indialiving in Mumbai.
To top it all, Boston University found last year when they looked (not surprisingly) “scientists found that during the growing season, releases of the greenhouse gas from soil may approach those of (vehicle produced) fossil fuels in dense residential areas
My own limited horticultural experiments agree with this – bottled plants provided with soil containing organic mulch did equally well with comparable growth to plants grown in sterile soil with a pipe connecting them to decomposing (fermenting) organic material in a separate bottle (vastly better than the ‘control’ in sterile soil).It confirmed a theory I had that organic material in soil provides ‘food’ to plants largely from the CO2 released.
I don’t think anyone (here) would reasonably start tampering with the atmosphere, largely because most would see it as futile – though there’s been a few rogue attempts to geoengineer such as Russ George’s illegal dumping 100 tons of iron sulfate into the ocean Interestingly, it may have increased the salmon numbers by providing more algae for the baby salmon to feed on – I don’t think that was his goal though.
Tony Those are entirely reasonable questions.
My primary concern in any tampering would be the same as yours, which is why I looked long and hard at what I was being told about CO2 and found a lot that didn’t add up. I’ll start with it’s properties before I head to the biological side. GSS educational documents state “Molecules of carbon dioxide gas resonate when they encounter photons of infrared energy; while molecules of oxygen and nitrogen do not”
This same school education guide (link above) goes on to describe an experiment to test CO2’s capacity to absorb heat, but at the very end of the piece concludes effect “Unfortunately, all of the efforts by GSS
staff and teacher participants have failed (so far) to develop a procedure, using laboratory equipment that is easily available, that will enable students to measure the differential absorption of heat energy by air and pure samples of greenhouse gases. While the results seemed reasonable in most of the pilot experiments, the class data only turned up random differences in the temperatures of the various samples. This was even the case when we tested the published activity.”
The first statement while technically true is at the same time evasive. Sure O2 and N do not directly absorb IR wavelengths, but they DO absorb other wavelengths just as glass does not absorb visible light while it does absorb UV, and just as absorbing UV radiation will cause glass to heat O2 and N will absorb other wavelengths of radiation and heat up. Tagging infra red (IR) as ‘heat’ and other forms of radiation are not is as silly as suggesting only UV can burn your skin – not only that, but as any gas absorbs energy it’ll transfer some of that energy to the surrounding gas – this is basic physics ..you can’t discriminate and heat only one gas in a mixture. So unsurprisingly everything on our planet absorbs radiations of multiple wavelengths and all cause the molecules to become excited, which we know as ‘heat’.. Water is particularly good at this
Gasses are also misrepresented, starting in the way we’re taught about them in schools – as we know conduction and radiation confer energy to the surroundings, gasses are known to transfer heat by convection, but this understates their true nature quite considerably, as gasses act as refrigerants by absorbing energy and carrying the energy with them as the rise, transferring it to cooler areas. We take full advantage of this every day with refrigerators but rarely do people stop and think just how efficient gasses are at this. Water is even better as a refrigerant because it has an extremely high energy requirement to raise it’s temperature (so it carries more energy) and it exists in 3 phases on the one planet.
back to the biological side – you’re right there’s no guarantee of anything, but there’s a fair number of examples we could look at, and a few premises that are worth examining. Life forms are pretty adept at moving around, crossing distances with sometimes insane proficiency such as the snakehead fish and I should have used the term ‘regional biodiversity’ – My apologies for that, the word ‘regional’ gets dropped so often I did the same thing. just as species can become regionally extinct, they can move into areas that were previously hostile or less than ideal.
seems i’m having difficulty posting this – TBC
Hi t. mcleod,- If interested might want to read how “… temperature warming and the direct effects of increased CO2 have been found to be mostly beneficial to mangroves, increasing mangrove productivity and latitudinal range…” (quote & citation from link below). CO2 dynamic for better productivity is “… subject to limiting factors of salinity, humidity, nutrients … soil elevation increase…” (quote from link below, Tabke 1). Y
Your link aerial photographs include one seeming to locate die offs near named settlements & I wonder if (?) human activity has impacted tidal conditions. I am not ignoring the issue of rainfall, just not competent to evaluate that for the die off locations.
For a parsing of 6 different factors in nature (including CO2), each one’s relevance to mangrove plant processes, each one’s sphere of dynamics + specific multiple citations for each factor see Table 1 (& if inclined read the free full text) of J. Ellison’s report originally published in journal Wetlands Ecology and Management, Vol.23 (2015) “Vulnerability assessment of mangroves to climate change and sea-level rise impact”; springer.com/article/10.1007/s11273-014-9397-8
continuing my reply..
Evolution is throwing up some surprises – rapid evolution: ‘after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake captured marine fish in newly formed ponds which rapidly became freshwater ponds’. The fish are now freshwater fish. Similar geological transformations speculatively, may have led to the landlocked freshwater dolphin and even seahorses in places such as Lake Titicaca. Then there’s the whole epigenetic angle, when plants that had alleles for spines removed regenerated the spines (from ‘junk DNA) when faced with predators. The alleles were gone, but then they came back – epigenetics has thrown the world of geneticists into a tailspin.
Loss of biodiversity is a funny one, we can see evidence of it around us every day in locations from urban to rural areas and it looks true, yet we’re not hearing much about the farmlands lost to regrowth around the world – in fact there’s been a concerted effort to prevent lost farms being viewed as returning to nature, as this article about an internal debate within the Smithsonian suggests discussing that ‘for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of farm are lost to regrowth‘. As anyone knows, keeping plants at bay can prove extremely difficult without constant tending. Every time they fly a LIDAR run over the regions around Angkor Wat they seem to extend the size of this once vast city – and more recently the Amazon Jungle we’re taught is a near pristine wild, untouched by humans could in fact have been one mighty garden, with evidence of diverted rivers, terraced mountainsides, countless roads, villages, town and even cities. Plotting plant species has led others to conclude many trees were cultivated, and population estimates run from 20-90 million people. Not quite the way we imagined, but perfectly reasonable given the rate at which tropical plants grow. Animals rapidly populate abandoned farms when there’s cover and vegetation , and predators soon follow – like the leopards in Indialiving in Mumbai.
To top it all, Boston University found last year when they looked (not surprisingly) “scientists found that during the growing season, releases of the greenhouse gas from soil may approach those of (vehicle produced) fossil fuels in dense residential areas
My own limited horticultural experiments agree with this – bottled plants provided with soil containing organic mulch did equally well with comparable growth to plants grown in sterile soil with a pipe connecting them to decomposing (fermenting) organic material in a separate bottle (vastly better than the ‘control’ in sterile soil).It confirmed a theory I had that organic material in soil provides ‘food’ to plants largely from the CO2 released.
I don’t think anyone (here) would reasonably start tampering with the atmosphere, largely because most would see it as futile – though there’s been a few rogue attempts to geoengineer such as Russ George’s illegal dumping 100 tons of iron sulfate into the ocean Interestingly, it may have increased the salmon numbers by providing more algae for the baby salmon to feed on – I don’t think that was his goal though.
This should have been published on April 1st.
No need to cook limestone. It’s a waste of money and energy. Just burn all the fossil fuel reserves and we’ll get to 1,000 ppm. But it will go down to 650 ppm in 40 years after we stop emission. It will continue decreasing to 300 ppm. Limestone cannot stop the glaciers. Only cow fart can save us. They never stop farting
More CO2 in the atmosphere = more plants taking up more CO2 = less CO2 in the atmosphere. You’re going to have to replenish the CO2 in the atmosphere forever. Why not just use seltzer water to slow irrigate the crops as suggested above? You can carbonate the water as it goes into the irrigation system and drip irrigate to maintain a miasma of CO2 over the crop. An added advantage is you won’t have to mow your lawn as often.
“One final issue would be what to do with the approx. 1500Gt of Quicklime which would be produced by burning the limestone. The obvious solution would be to dump it into the ocean”
if you put this in the ocean it will quickly react with CO2 in thw water and convert to calcium carbonate. In short the quicklime will pull CO2 out of the air just as fast as you produce it. In order for this to work the quicklime needs to be locked away so that it cannot react with air or water.
Increasing atmospheric CO2 is simple. All you have to do is warm the ocean. Henry’s Law takes care of the rest. It’s easy to do in climate models; it’s just utterly impractical with the most futuristic technology imaginable.
And you don’t have to worry about global warming from the added CO2 – or anything else for that matter. As the ocean warms, the Clausius Claperon effect increases cloud cover, albedo increases, and warming from any cause is mitigated.
Henry’s Law regulates atmospheric CO2 content. Dynamic cloud cover regulates surface temperature.
These two simple bits of physics are the most powerful feedbacks in the climate system, but neither is in the Global Climate/Circulation/Catastrophe Models. If they were included, why the GCMs would haven’t the slightest chance of doing what they are designed to do – show that man’s CO2 emissions must be controlled by government.
I agree w/Eric that this might be a good or even necessary idea in the very long-term (lots of limestone available), tho not necessary yet. But try to push this past the current crop of paranoid greenies? We’ll need a major culture-change….
I see an engineered climate in humankind’s future. It will probably be a matter of centuries, but it’s gonna happen when we see the next ice age coming. A killing June frost in a substantial portion of the corn belt will quickly make people see that cold is a more dangerous enemy than warm. June frosts in the northern corn belt are not unknown before the 20th century. June 5, 1859.
The world may be teetering on something worse than the end of the interglacial. At these low triple digit CO2 levels, imagine the impact of one or more of the following:
– Asteroid strike
– Dust or other solar flux blockage is presented between Earth obit and Sol
– Sol’s output suddenly shifts into a lower power output or different frequency spectrum
Many green plants and phytoplankton would die off. The resulting mass of detritus would spawn a mass growth of fungi. The geological record has at least one perhaps two similar past events represented.
Silver lining – the fungi would liberate immense amounts of CO2.
Does the author have scientific credentials?