[whaaaaat]

You have made a subtle misalignment of figures here. Yes, these existing diatoms fix 20% of the Earth's CO2 and are present throughout the entire ocean. However, we don't need to compete with that volume. We don't have to do the same order of magnitude to meaningfully impact the carbon cycle.

The Earth's carbon cycle manages about 750 gigatons of CO2/year and humans are emitting ~30 excess gigatons a year on top. The diatoms in the ocean are happily out there processing 150 gigatons of CO2/year, but what we need to engineer is only 30 gigatons (to completely eradicate human emissions).

If we engineered diatoms to fix, say, 0.3 gigatons/year, we'd eradicate a whole integer percent of our emissions.

Heck, if we got it in the 0.03 gigatons (30 megatons/year), we've probably built something scalable and created a useful entry in our portfolio to capture carbon, sinking about 0.1% of our carbon/year.

So, don't despair, we don't have to compete with the ocean! We only need to compete with ourselves! Or maybe do despair? Because we have to compete with ourselves... fundamentally, climate change isn't a technology problem, it's a political problem.

[arj]

I was looking into the numbers and what I could find was that is more like 350 than 750. Source: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does.... Still interesting fact not often cited.

[vlovich123]

Here are a few reality checks that might unfortunately put a damper on your enthusiasm.

Our yearly emissions are 36GT and ever growing modulo a reprieve in COVID. It was only about 20 just 17 years ago. That means you need to sequester more and more every year just to keep a constant percentage of sequestration. If you include deforestation and wildfires, this number goes up to 41GT which means there’s a compound effect since current models suggest that’s part of a negative feedback loop (ie worse due to our actions and global warming).

Perhaps more importantly, the 750GT number you cited (whatever the real number happens to be) is 1.5x larger than before we started burning fossil fuels at scale. So to get the world back to where it was, not only do we need to overcome our yearly expenditure, we’d have to pay back a lot of CO2 emissions debt we’ve spent building our economy and even 10 GT/year won’t pay back nearly three centuries worth of exponentially increasing emissions on any meaningful time frame once the world is at net 0.

All of this is ignoring the practical realities of scaling carbon sequestration up in a way that’s net positive and even mildly profitable or at least not expensive enough that it doesn’t become a collective action problem.

I’d be the first to celebrate if this were an actual solution, but unfortunately I think carbon sequestration won’t be a meaningful effort to even think about in practical terms until we’re meaningfully on our way to net 0 and we’re well off from that with politicians thinking about maybe banning fossil fuel car sales in 2035 which means it’ll take until 2050 or so for a meaningful percentage of fossil fuel cars to start leaving the road. And ignoring the manufacturing challenges about producing so many batteries (which I think we will probably solve), we’re nowhere close to solving decarbonization of shipping and aviation and don’t have line of sight on the big whale of the energy grid which is responsible for >70% of all emissions (yes yes solar - but worldwide emissions from the energy grid keep going up and we haven’t even made a dent in the second order derivative and maybe just in the third order if you’re optimistic with every indication that we’d actually need nuclear to change the calculus in the short term).

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152519/emissions-fr...

[fluoridation]

Is it possible even in theory to make carbon sequestration profitable? You're going to use a ton of energy to make something that's readily available and for which there isn't much use other than burning (which obviously can't be a use for this).

[whaaaaat]

Maybe we can do things that aren't profitable because we believe they are the right thing to do?

But carbon can produce biochar and and just be pumped directly back into the ground. Getting it out of the atmosphere is the use.

[adornKey]

When looking into the physics of infrared-absorption of CO2, I found papers about that quite interesting. Maybe climate change is not a political problem and not a technology problem - maybe it's a mental issue.

Around my place people burned witches for 400 years - to fight lightning strikes.

Removing gigatons of CO2 is maybe on the same level - only more stupid - and bad for plants. Arguments against witch burning didn't have much data to process. For CO2 there's quite some number crunching out there available...

Emotions, despair, anger, ... these are a lot of emotional arguments in the media out there. People should be more cool and only care about the physic and mathematics... And actually read some papers - not this emotional science fluff from the media.

[Bjartr]

> When looking into the physics of infrared-absorption of CO2, I found papers about that quite interesting.

>Maybe climate change is not a political problem and not a technology problem - maybe it's a mental issue.

Care to connect these two thoughts for us?

[noworriesnate]

> Emotions, despair, anger, ... these are a lot of emotional arguments in the media out there. People should be more cool and only care about the physic and mathematics... And actually read some papers - not this emotional science fluff from the media.

[Bjartr]

No need to be flippant. I can read your comment. That's in fact why I asked a question, it wasn't clear how "the physics of infrared-absorption of CO2" being interesting to you led to the idea that "Maybe climate change is not a political problem".

Repeating that you believe it's valuable to focus on data over emotion doesn't answer the question.