[sfink]

> "...would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude?"

Good question. Answering questions is called 'research'. ;-)

I'm skeptical for the same reasons as you, too. Let's see... the ocean covers 361km^2. If we could engineer a material with "cells" that were 1000x as effective at carbon capture as diatoms, and the manufactured material was 1000x more densely packed together than diatoms are on the ocean surface, then you'd need 361 square kilometers of the magic material. Which is not out of the realm of possibility, though I have no idea what the density of diatoms is and I have a sneaking suspicion that we'd be looking at more of the 3x-4x range of efficiency improvement. And of course, you need to turn the CO2 into something and deposit it somewhere, and maybe move it around lot. Which would use energy that would produce more CO2, offsetting the gains. Oh, and manufacture the stuff.

I'm thinking releasing less of the stuff and stopping forest destruction might be much more effective for a long time here...

[magicalhippo]

> the ocean covers 361km^2

That should of course be 361 million km^2.

[innagadadavida]

I’m skeptical that the entities that created this problem - first world countries, industries, politicians all supported by scientific advances can/will solve the problem they created.

The industry will look for a profit motive to solve this. The scientists will look for a publication and fame motive. The politicians will try to grab more power. The poor animals and other third world country people who had nothing to do with this will bear the brunt. Only time will tell.

[ordu]

Hmm... If we are removing CO2 at that rate from some place, then the concentration of CO2 in local atmosphere will drop. It will create a gradient so CO2 will start moving toward us, but what the maximum rate of CO2 diffusion? Wouldn't it impair our ability to miniaturize the ocean filled with diatoms as a CO2 absorber?

Though probably one can try to create an artificial wind, blowing CO2-free air away so CO2 could move quickly into the freed space.

[delecti]

There are a lot of prevailing winds around the world. You'd have to go out of your way to find somewhere still enough that local concentration could drop, rather than just creating a very slight CO2 "shadow" downwind.