Lets Cook Limestone to Raise Atmospheric CO2 to 1000ppm

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.

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.