How much lime does it take to treat the whole ocean? Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, dump powdered iron into the ocean. That one didn’t happen yet. Sure, let’s just toss a bunch of lime into the ocean and watch what happens. We’ll just order up a few billion bags of slaked lime and toss ’em into the sea, yeah, that’s the ticket. Note that there is no discussion of what all that lime might do to upset other balances, just so long as we get rid of that nasty CO2. Thank goodness another professor from James Hansen’s Columbia University gives a stamp of approval.
I’d love to see the environmental impact report on this one, especially when they find out that lime does not dissolve immediately or completely in water, but tends to settle.
By the way, slaked lime + water = whitewash. I’ve mixed a few batches myself recently.
From Physorg: A dash of lime — a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels
Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O’Driscoll in SCI’s Chemistry & Industry magazine published today.
Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. ‘We think it’s a promising idea,’ says Shell’s Gilles Bertherin, a coordinator on the project. ‘There are potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change – and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of ocean acidification, so it should have a positive impact on the marine environment.’
Adding lime to seawater increases alkalinity, boosting seawater’s ability to absorb CO2 from air and reducing the tendency to release it back again.
However, the idea, which has been bandied about for years, was thought unworkable because of the expense of obtaining lime from limestone and the amount of CO2 released in the process.
Tim Kruger, a management consultant at London firm Corven is the brains behind the plan to resurrect the lime process. He argues that it could be made workable by locating it in regions that have a combination of low-cost ‘stranded’ energy considered too remote to be economically viable to exploit – like flared natural gas or solar energy in deserts – and that are rich in limestone, making it feasible for calcination to take place on site.
The process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore ‘carbon negative’.
‘This process has the potential to reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would be possible to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels,’ Kruger says.
And Professor Klaus Lackner, a researcher in the field from Columbia University, says: ‘The theoretical CO2 balance is roughly right…it is certainly worth thinking through carefully.’
The oceans are already the world’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 2bn tonnes of carbon every year. Increasing absorption ability by just a few percent could dramatically increase CO2 uptake from the atmosphere.
This project is being developed in an open source manner. To find out more, please go to http://www.cquestrate.com , a new website, launched today.
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“Why not paint Al Gore white to increase his albedo?”
A ‘brilliant’ idea!
Actually, some time ago I was thinking of patenting a personal ‘carbon footprint reducer ‘(TM)
It was to be a white sheet which you draped on your roof, or pegged out in your garden (killing all the plants underneath!). I did some simple maths, and reckoned that 6 of them would completly balance a family car. Much better than a roof windmill! I could have been a millionaire….
With regard to dumping stuff in the ocean to ‘decrease’ atmospheric CO2; I think we may end up with the consequences, as in the law of unintended consequences. As at least one other poster has observed, dumping large quantities of lime in a fishery isn’t much good for the fish.
Evan Jones (00:49:16) Why not paint Al Gore white to increase his albedo?
I want to know in advance, so I can buy stock in paint companies. The resulting shortage should drive the price through the roof.
The only really viable solution is for all true believers to stop breathing. Enough stupid ideas, and an angry (& starving) public may assist them in this endeavour.
What a goofy idea… cement is the world’s most important adhesive. Without it construction will come to a grinding halt. Not to mention diverting hundreds of millions of pounds of lime will drive the price of concrete sky high.
Is this the time to say: ” Goodbye and thanks for the fish”?
“So long and thanks for all the fish.”
“Does anyone have any idea when the general public will revolt against this epic insanity that embarrasses our species?”
Let me check my infinite improbability generator…
Al Gore plans to get his hands deep into all our pocketbooks. I don’t know why you are complaining. The plans have been available to read for 15+ years now!
My experimental analysis shows that pop holds more CO2 at lower temperatures than at higher ones. So if we dump ice cubes in the ocean, that should do the trick. Or maybe we could turn down the thermostat on the sun, for a couple of decades. Let’s paint all asphalt white. We can melt the sand in the desert, and mirror the surface. We can ban all snow shovelling in the winter.
“Saving the world for dummies” is great, and now I feel sooooo good about myself. Where is my government grant?
“The Nutty Professor” is beginning to look quite sane in comparison.
Seriously, it could be that this epidemic of deranged scientists and “intellectuals” is actually a byproduct of our energy-dependent wealth, so that letting them ruin it by returning us to the Bone Age might at least get get rid of them.
-Gotta think positively, and all.
Could we grind up coral reefs for the limestone? After all, the living corals are living on the work of their ancestors, so just consider it an estate tax.
This is unbelievable. When will we learn from all our past mistakes at trying to manage a “problem” we don’t yet fully understand. See this excerpt from a speech Michael Crighton gave:
To see what I mean, let’s take a case history of our management of the environment: Yellowstone National Park.
Long recognized as a setting of great natural beauty, in 1872 Ulysses Grant set aside Yellowstone as the first formal nature preserve in the world. More than 2 million acres, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. John Muir was pleased when he visited in 1885, noting that under the care of the Department of the Interior, Yellowstone was protected from “the blind, ruthless destruction that is going on in adjoining regions.”
Theodore Roosevelt was also pleased in 1903 when as President he went to Yellowstone National Park for a dedication ceremony.
It was his third visit. Roosevelt saw a thousand antelope, plentiful cougar, mountain sheep, deer, coyote, and many thousands of elk. He wrote, “Our people should see to it that this rich heritage is preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with its majestic beauty all unmarred.”
But Yellowstone was not preserved. On the contrary, it was altered beyond repair in a matter of years. By 1934, the park service acknowledged that “white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone.”
What they didn’t say was that the park service was solely responsible for the disappearances. Park rangers had been shooting animals for decades, even though that was illegal under the Lacey Act of 1894. But they thought they knew better. They thought their environmental concerns trumped any mere law.
What actually happened at Yellowstone is a cascade of ego and error. But to understand it, we have to go back to the 1890s. Back then it was believed that elk were becoming extinct, and so these animals were fed and encouraged. Over the next few years the numbers of elk in the park exploded. Roosevelt had seen a few thousand animals, and noted they were more numerous than on his last visit.
By 1912, there were 30,000. By 1914, 35,000. Things were going very well. Rainbow trout had also been introduced, and though they crowded out the native cutthroats, nobody really worried. Fishing was great. And bears were increasing in numbers, and moose, and bison.
By 1915, Roosevelt realized the elk had become a problem, and urged “scientific management.” His advice was ignored. Instead, the park service did everything it could to increase their numbers.
The results were predictable.
Antelope and deer began to decline, overgrazing changed the flora, aspen and willows were being eaten heavily and did not regenerate. In an effort to stem the loss of animals, the park rangers began to kill predators, which they did without public knowledge.
They eliminated the wolf and cougar and were well on their way to getting rid of the coyote. Then a national scandal broke out; studies showed that it wasn’t predators that were killing the other animals. It was overgrazing from too many elk. The management policy of killing predators had only made things worse.
Meanwhile the environment continued to change. Aspen trees, once plentiful in the park, where virtually destroyed by the enormous herds of hungry elk.
With the aspen gone, the beaver had no trees to make dams, so they disappeared. Beaver were essential to the water management of the park; without dams, the meadows dried hard in summer, and still more animals vanished. Situation worsened. It became increasingly inconvenient that all the predators had been killed off by 1930. So in the 1960s, there was a sigh of relief when new sightings by rangers suggested that wolves were returning.
There were also persistent rumors that rangers were trucking them in; but in any case, the wolves vanished soon after; they needed a diet of beaver and other small rodents, and the beaver had gone.
Pretty soon the park service initiated a PR campaign to prove that excessive numbers of elk were not responsible for the park’s problems, even though they were. This campaign went on for a decade, during which time the bighorn sheep virtually disappeared.
Now we come to the 1970s, when bears are starting to be recognized as a growing problem. They used to be considered fun-loving creatures, and their close association with human beings was encouraged within the park:
Bear feedings were a spectacle in the 1930s. Postcards treated it humorously:
But now it seemed there were more bears and many more lawyers, and thus more threat of litigation. So the rangers moved the grizzlies away to remote regions of the park. The grizzlies promptly became endangered; their formerly growing numbers shrank. The park service refused to let scientists study them. But once the animals were declared endangered, the scientists could go in.
And by now we are about ready to reap the rewards of our forty-year policy of fire suppression, Smokey the Bear, all that. The Indians used to burn forest regularly, and lightning causes natural fires every summer. But when these fires are suppressed, the branches that drop to cover the ground make conditions for a very hot, low fire that sterilizes the soil. And in 1988, Yellowstone burned. All in all, 1.2 million acres were scorched, and 800,000 acres, one third of the park, burned.
Then, having killed the wolves, and having tried to sneak them back in, the park service officially brought the wolves back, and the local ranchers screamed. And on, and on.
As the story unfolds, it becomes impossible to overlook the cold truth that when it comes to managing 2.2 million acres of wilderness, nobody since the Indians has had the faintest idea how to do it. And nobody asked the Indians, because the Indians managed the land very intrusively. The Indians started fires, burned trees and grasses, hunted the large animals, elk and moose, to the edge of extinction. White men refused to follow that practice, and made things worse.
To solve that embarrassment, everybody pretended that the Indians had never altered the landscape. These “pioneer ecologists,” as Steward Udall called them, did not do anything to manipulate the land. But now academic opinion is shifting again, and the wisdom of the Indian land management practices is being discovered anew. Whether we will follow their practices remains to be seen.
See his full speech here:
http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-complexity.html
Sorry about the long post.
Is this really such a nutty idea? I don’t see it as any more ridiculous than the promise of using terra prete (agrichar/biochar) to fixate CO2 & improve croplands. There are other, more troublesome IMO, acid sources falling into the seas, pollutant aerosols of sulfates and nitrates which are far more acidic than carbonic acid and deplete calcium carbonate as well.
The question to me is which of these three acids have been – or will be – the most responsible for ocean acidification and how much ongoing coral bleaching events may reflect acid precipitation of sulfates and nitrates, not CO2.
When Newsweek in 1975 ran the infamous article, “The Cooling World”, they mentioned how some scientists wanted to melt the Arctic ice cap by covering it with soot. I think too many people actually believe Star Trek was reality, not fiction. The idea that we can reengineer the planet is stunningly arrogant, in terms of both understanding and ability.
“It was to be a white sheet which you draped on your roof,”
I’ve always wondered how much UHI could be countered by having all cars painted white, and have all roofs covered in that aluminum paint.
First there would be the direct affect of all that sunlight beeing bounced back to space, then a secondary affect as all those air conditioners have to work less hard.
I am an economic geologist working for a private consulting company. Does anyone else wonder why the guys who concoct these totally wierd ideas continue to get paid ?
“Why not paint Al Gore white to increase his albedo?
Considering Gore’s massive surface area that might work. 😉
I am truly stunned….. Lime the oceans!….. These people are beyond belief.
I have no doubt now in my mind, that they are completely mad.
….. The only Lime I have in a belief in, belongs in a margarita…. And that’s th’ green sort off a tree!
ah come on, the libido post was funny.
REPLY: Decorum has been lax lately, I deleted several other posts also that were just OT or ad homs, so don’t feel singled out.
My first thought was “Great, now the oceans won’t get scurvy!” but then realized it’s the wrong kind of lime!!!
There are on topic posts in this thread?
Greenpeace will be all over this. Sometimes, I agree with them, such as would be the case here. In fact, in this case, maybe they need deck guns?
“Is this the time to say: ” Goodbye and thanks for the fish”?”
ITYM “…all the fish.”
But I’m guessing there won’t be any edible fish left after this experiment.
leebert:
1. Every cubic meter of seawater naturally contains about 6 pounds of sulphate ions. Nothing we can do is likely to change that significantly.
2. Nitrates stimulates growth of the symbiotic algae in corals, i e the opposite of bleaching.
3. Seawater is alkaline, not acid.
Why stop at painting Al Gore white? You can further increase your personal albedo by by wearing reflective headgear. A tinfoil hat will help cool the planet AND stop aliens messing with your brain.
I see a business opportunity here.
P. T. Barnum would have loved this.
I happen to think it’s brilliant:
Crush limerock
Heat in gas-fired kiln (making CO2)
Drive off CO2 from limerock
Add to ocean to absorb some of the CO2 released in production.
Charge the rubes an arm and a leg for doing it.
Repeat.
It’s an economic perpetual motion machine.
Brilliant.
i only wish I’d thought of it.
This is right up there with simulating a huge volcanic blast………
What? Star Trek isn’t real? You risk being phasered into oblivion. A couple of good lime-photon torpedoes would take care of this ocean acidification problem. If the fish die, well, we’ll just send the Enterprise back into time to retrieve them. I think somebody has been slipping lime into my drinks.