Technological Cures for Global Warming
By Lenny Everson
rev 1
Copyright Lenny Everson 2011
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Images in this document are not even remotely to scale, for the most part.
Contents
The Cat’s Out of the Bag
Overview of Carbon and Light
Blocking Light in Space: Solar Orbit
Blocking Light in Space: Earth Orbit
Blocking Light High in the Atmosphere
Blocking Light Low in the Atmosphere
Reflecting Light From The Surface
Increasing Land Plants
Increasing Water Plants
Mechanical Carbon Sequestering
Our Best Scenarios
Foreword
These are only words. Don’t get too concerned.
Lenny
The Cat’s Out of the Bag
Okay, folks; the premise behind this little book is that it’s too late to stop Most Unfortunate Changes to our dearly beloved planet simply by reductions in our output of such carbon compounds as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane.
Too late, I say. If you don’t believe that premise, then you need to read a different book. ( There are lots of great, wonderful, and hopeful books that tell people how to use better light bulbs and bike to work. I recommend them. I just think it’s too little, too late. So, this book.)
There are many ecocalypse (I made that word up, like ecotastrophe.) deniers in our way. Certain first-world countries aren’t doing enough. Many third-world countries are more concerned about achieving a reasonable standard of living for their peoples.
Conservation measures now in place can slow the output of carbon and increase the absorption, but not quick enough. If the world puts out less carbon dioxide than plants use, the concentration will go down. That’s good. That takes time. We probably don’t have that much time.
Taking your foot off the gas will slow a car’s forward progress, but sometimes you need to use the brake when coming to a T-intersection. Unfortunately, meddling with the climate is more like tossing an anchor out the car window hoping you'll snag a light post. You'd better be sure that It's not worse than continuing. The fact of the matter is that there are no good options in geoengineering the climate. Remember that: all the options in this book are bad, and we're trying to figure out which ones are less bad.
But there’s all that carbon already in the air and we still need to do something damn soon to remove it or reduce the sunlight on the planet.
Notes:
1. When I say carbon, I mean carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. Methane’s nastier for doing the global greenhouse effect, but it doesn't hang around in the atmosphere very long. There’s a lot more carbon dioxide being produced and I’ll concentrate on that for the most part. So when I talk about carbon dioxide I often mean all three carbon products, and any others that happen along.
2. Generally, this book assumes the situation’s kind of in a hurry, like. I don’t look favorably on two types of solutions. The first type includes solutions that require more than twenty years to implement. A fix using “hundreds of space shuttles” is in this category. NASA can barely keep a couple operating, and the building of hundreds more, with their launch facilities, seems improbable, if only because it would take fifteen years with a baseball bat to beat the NASA bureaucracy into accepting a new idea.
3. I also frown on solutions that require vast amounts of carbon-producing factories to make a solution that reduces carbon. I suspect that producing white plastic sheets that cover the Sahara Desert falls into that category (but I haven’t done the math). Re-roofing all houses in white and redoing all asphalt in white is definitely in that category.
4. The other thing to watch out for is a solution that isn't reversible. It would be a shame to save the world from global warming only to start worrying about another ice age.
5. Some environmental groups oppose any and all technological solutions. They say it just avoids the reality that we’re going to have to reduce greenhouse gases and darn well have to live properly. I agree with them about that! This booklet is just for interim measures until we learn conservation. In the long run, there's no alternative but to reduce the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere. None.
Overview of Carbon and Light
Memorize the following.
- The sun beams onto the Earth.
- Some of this light bounces back into space from clouds, ice, and anything light-colored.
- The rest of that sunlight warms Earth.
- Carbon compounds keep more of that warmth on Earth, so Earth warms up.
- Plants absorb carbon dioxide until they die; then they release it.
- Humans produce lots of carbon dioxide.
Here are some proposed solutions this booklet will cover:
- Reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by putting something between Earth and the sun. This is a form of SRM (Solar Radiation Management)
- Reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ground by increasing cloud cover
- Increase the amount of light reflected back into space
- Increase the amount of plant growth on the land to absorb carbon dioxide.
- Increase the amount of plant growth in the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide.
- Grab carbon dioxide out of the air and stuff it away.
Did you think I forgot about reducing our output of carbon dioxide? Not for a minute; not for a second. Reducing carbon dioxide is the only long-term solution. But the excess amount we've already stuffed into the air would be screwing up this planet for the next thousand years if we just cut our emissions to nothing (inhale, but nobody exhale; that helps a bit).
Blocking Light in Space: Solar Orbit
We could reduce global warming by reducing the amount of sunlight that gets to Earth (the process is also known as Solar Radiation Management).
We could put up large panels of white or silver material in space to shade Earth. Something that hangs nicely between Earth and the sun.
(It was when I read about someone asking if that would work that I started this book. It was for my own knowledge, but I figured other people might have some of the same questions, so here it is.)
The problem with this plan is that a single panel won’t just stay nicely between us and the sun. Anything up there orbits Earth or the sun, and that means constant movement. You’ll notice, for example, that the moon keeps going around and refuses to stay between Earth and the hot sun. Things that go around the sun at the same speed as Earth are in Earth’s orbit. Which means they’re to one side of Earth, not between Earth and the sun.
Anything between Earth and the sun (which is where you want a shade) moves faster than Earth. That’s necessary for it to stay in orbit around the sun. But that means it won’t stay between Earth and the sun.
Except for one “Lagrange point!”
1.5 million kilometers out from Earth towards the sun there’s one point where Earth’s gravity just cancels the need to travel faster and holds things back.
If we put a large sunscreen there, it would stay in one place, its shadow falling on part of Earth. If it were big enough to shade 2% of Earth, then there’d be a 2% reduction in sunlight reaching the earth and we'd have a cooling of the planet.
The shadow would stay in one place, but Earth would continue its daily rotation under the shadow, so any one place would see the sun darkened for only a few minutes each day.
On the Other Hand…
The Lagrange point is not a big place and it’s quite unstable; things there tend to wander out of the area. There are a couple of solar-observatory satellites there, and they have to correct their orbits regularly. Part of the problem is that the moon gets between Earth and that point once a month, and another part is that Earth’s orbit isn’t a perfect circle, so you get varying pulls and pushes.
You’d need little rockets on the edge of the screen, pulling it back into place.
Then there’s the question of size.
The point in question is about four times the distance of the moon from the earth. Let’s consider that. It’s about 1/100 of the distance from Earth to the sun.
If our standards were so low as to want a sunshield that would provide as much shade as the moon does when it goes in front of the sun, then the shade would have to be larger than the diameter of the moon.
Since it would be about 4 times the distance to the Moon, we could make a large circular sunshield 4 times the diameter of the moon and we’d get as much shade as we get from the moon during an eclipse, only on a constant basis.
Well, the diameter of the Moon is 3,474 kilometers. If we made a sunshield about the diameter of Earth (12,756 km) and put it in place we’d get as much shade as we get from the moon.
And that’s not much, even during a total eclipse. We would probably want to make it even bigger, and use lots of little solar-powered ion rockets to keep it in place.
And we have to keep it in place, since gravitational variations, as I mentioned, would move it away from its assigned location.
Why do I suspect that making a single panel big enough for shade would take the entire resources of Earth and millions of rockets? All of which would produce carbon dioxide….
And right now NASA’s happy to get its set of old-age shuttles into low-Earth orbit, and these machines are good for only a couple of tons of stuff each shot. Try to imagine the manufacturing plants needed for a huge fleet of spacecraft. The launch facilities that would have to be built. And the NASA bureaucrats who would fight it, holding on to their own turfs, as well as the politicians fighting to get a share of the building programs in their own states.
And that’s not the end of the problems. To make a giant sunshade panel, you’d have to make it thin: this sucker would have to be only a molecule or two thick. Then you have the problem of “solar wind” – particles from the sun – which push flimsy things around up there.
The solar wind – particles from the sun – travel at a couple of million miles an hour, but they’re not very strong. But if you add a coronal mass ejection, a large blob of the sun’s atmosphere that leaves the sun every now and then, you can get a shock wave traveling at five million miles an hour. It’s still pretty low-energy (the energy equivalent of 10,000 hurricanes, but there’s a lot of space out there), but some people plan to use thin panels as “sails” to get spacecraft (slowly) to Mars using solar wind, so there’s obviously a “push” to this light.
And our panel would be very much like a sail.
Then, of course, there’s the usual time constraint: by the time we’ve got a new space program for panels, and delivered them, the crisis will likely be past. We’ll have solved the problem by conservation or some other measure. Or we’ll be back in a Mel Gibson Mad Max post-apocalypse movie, living on the remnants of our civilization.
On the other hand, some estimates are trying to say that if we introduce radical conservation measures to cut our greenhouse gases, it’ll still take 300 to 1000 years to get back to where we should be. I hope they’re wrong.
A Scenario
For the Popular Science types who like such things, I've drawn up a little scenario.
We’ve decided to put hundreds of millions, maybe billions of little mirrors in space. Easier to deliver than a single big sail, and if they hang close enough to each other, they'll provide shade. The mirrors are planned to be thin, so that we can stack them together for launch and distribute them later. Even then, it will take thousands or tens of thousands of launches to get all that up there.
Let's get past the fact that we don’t yet have enough rockets, and the development of enough rockets would generate enormous amounts of carbon dioxide (rocket-assembly plants, administrations plants, parts plants, workers driving to the plants, concrete and steel needed to build the rocket-assembly plants….) as well as screwing up the test of the economy, and have us turn to another technology; electric rail launch. They use magnets to launch small packets along a rail and into space.
This is of course Undeveloped Technology and even Untried Technology, which is a no-no to me, but we’ll continue anyway. Thousands of rails, pointing into the east, launch packets of the little mirrors, one packet every five minutes, someone has calculated.
Now, any single rail can’t launch the little mirrors towards the Lagrange point continuously – the launch rail is pointing the wrong direction for all but a few seconds a day. So we launch the packets into earth orbit. When the packet’s at the right place in orbit, a small rocket kicks it out towards the Lagrange point. Since the packet's circling the earth every hour or so, we can nudge a quite a few of the packets every day towards the Lagrange point every day. And any single rail launcher can launch as fast as it can be loaded.
Note that: we’re no longer launching packets of the little mirrors; we’re launching them with rockets attached, to boost them towards the sun. That’s both heavier and more dangerous (for the percentage of launches that fail).
Each packet of the little mirrors drifts towards the Lagrange point. If done perfectly, it comes to rest between the gravities of Earth and the sun. But now you’ve got to spread out the many little mirrors in the packet. I can think of a few politicians I’d like to assign to the task, but it’s a one-way trip and we can expect few volunteers.
So, as soon as the packet is popped open by a small charge, we have to get the little mirrors spread out, sideways to the sunlight. We’ll need little adjusting rockets attached to each mirror to get it to the right place, then to keep it turned to the sun. Things in space tend to rotate, and a mirror’s no good if it’s edge-on to the sun or behind one of its sisters.
So each mirror has a tiny (but tough - there's a lot of radiation out there) computer and little adjusting rockets. This, of course, makes the little mirrors a lot thicker, so we can’t launch nearly as many with each launch, and the whole process takes longer.
Okay, we manage it. We’ve got a billion little mirrors, adjusting themselves to face the sun, and to keep from getting behind each other. Let’s put them a few inches apart; our computers can manage that, can’t they?
The little mirrors have to adjust their orbits a lot. The Earth’s in an elliptical orbit around the sun, so its distance from the sun changes over the year. Which means the Lagrange point changes, too, so the little mirrors have to migrate forward or back during the year. The rotation of the moon around Earth may even affect the exact location of the Lagrange point. Remember, the Lagrange point is the only place where an object can stay in line between the Earth and the sun.
Then comes a solar flare and the mirrors go bouncing away. Just how much fuel are these things carrying?
I could be wrong, but I really don't think politics or technology will be ready to put a big enough shield in place in time.
Blocking Light in Space: Earth Orbit
A more sensible plan is to have a continuous stream of panels or silvery particles in Earth orbits. These could be closer to the heights the shuttle normally reaches.
Above the equator is the logical place for these and probably easiest to set up. Not only would the shade have the most effect there, but it’s where mostly poor people live (so we could ignore their complaints).
Panels
A panel 2% the size of Earth in diameter, in low-Earth orbit at the equator, would reduce sunlight by 2%. But then, of course, it’s in orbit and only between Earth and the sun for part of the time. Nothing’s going to stay in place if it’s not circling the earth once an hour or so.
So we’d need a whole bunch of these panels. Better not ask for 50, each at 2% of Earth’s surface area, because that would total once again a surface area the diameter of Earth and that seems a bit large to get into space, let alone find enough sewing machines to make them. You can think of all that people have produced, and get impressed, but astronauts tell us that from space, in daytime, there’s no sign of human works. We haven’t produced all that much.
And we want to produce how big a set of panels?
Even if we could do it (and for sheets we’re talking things the size of Texas), it involves a lot of carbon-producing manufacturing. And we’d have to run factories night and day to produce the rockets to get them up. Rockets that produce a lot of greenhouse gases. We'll look for volunteers to go into space and sew things together.
On the other hand we could make them relatively thin and they would still be relatively unaffected by the solar wind. Many years ago NASA launched a balloon called ECHO. It eventually deflated, but there was no sign that the solar wind affected it much. Then again, there are limits to how thin and large you can make the panels, so we might have to produce lots of them.
There are exceptions. While Earth’s magnetic fields protect its orbiting craft from normal solar winds, every now and again there’s a burst from the sun that overwhelms the magnetosphere. A burst in 1989 dropped one satellite three miles from its normal orbit. Lightweight panels would fold like bedsheets in such conditions.
We wouldn’t have to put the panels in orbit around the equator. We could angle them so that no single place got too much shade. And any single site on earth would get alternating light and shade as the panels orbited past.
A Ring of Particles
An alternate plan is to give Earth a ring of particles. We’d make Earth look a bit like Saturn. Powdered aluminum, pieces of white foam – it would all work as long as it produced shade.
To stay in orbit you need a Saturn-like ring: a wide band like a wedding ring wouldn’t work.
If we put such a ring of tiny silver particles out from the equator (just like Saturn has) then we’d get shade, except when it’s tilted right at the sun (during the two equinoxes). Since the particles aren’t solid, it would be a diffuse shade, which is good; since the shadow would be more constant, the farmers below it could grow something shade-tolerant during the season it’s overhead. And we could tell them to stop complaining.
It wouldn’t be necessary to have the ring stick straight out from the equator; you can tilt it at a sharper angle and spread the shade out more. I don’t know whether that would be better or worse. Anyone who can do a computer simulation should let me know.
On the Other Hand…
But then you have the problem of what to do with the particles when you’ve cooled the planet by conservation. (At that time we shouldn’t need the shade – unless we’ve adapted to a world where it’s then necessary for cooling.)
How the heck do you collect a gazillion gazillion particles before you’ve put the world into a new ice age? A vacuum cleaner? (Joke.)
We’re actually in an interglacial period, a few thousand years of warmth between ice ages. We don’t’ know how much it would take to start the glaciers rolling in again.
Blocking Light High in the Atmosphere
We could add to the cloud cover.
Ours is a rather cloudy planet, as you can see from those photos they take from way out in space. This is good, because those clouds are white, and white reflects light back towards the sun, cooling Earth. In fact some people argue that when Earth warms up even more water will evaporate, producing more clouds, and cooling the planet again.
Generally, scientists don’t think this will be enough. They point out that Earth has had some really hot ages and obviously the clouds didn’t do enough. And that Venus is completely cloud-covered and hotter’n Hell.
Anyway, we could add to the cloud cover, if we knew how. A large number of jets would do it, zipping back and forth, leaving contrails. A study comparing cloud cover right after 9/11, when planes were grounded, and the rest of the time, when they weren't, showed that planes create a lot of clouds. Unfortunately, another study showed that the planes leave contrails at high altitudes, which actually increases global warming by keeping heat in at night, like a blanket. The same clouds, at lower altitudes, would shade the earth more, helping it cool. We gotta talk to the airlines.
Or nuclear power plants boiling off steam. Or maybe enough leftover nuclear bombs, exploded at the surface of some ocean we weren’t using much.
Or we could just drop a big nuclear bomb down the throats of a couple of mostly-steam-producing volcanoes.
On the Other Hand…
All those jets, and the manufacturing plants that would make them would produce more of that carbon dioxide we’re trying to get rid of. It’s possible we’d come out ahead, but I don’t’ think anybody’s done the math. It’s said that a typical transatlantic flight dumps the equivalent of three tonnes of carbon dioxide into the upper atmosphere. That’s a lot if you need thousands of planes to create clouds.
Nuclear power plants don’t produce much carbon dioxide, but they produce heat (that’s how you turn water into steam). And heat’s the problem in the first place!
Activating a volcano’s like kicking a grizzly bear because you need practice running. It can be overkill. There’s very good evidence that some of the mass extinctions (when most life on Earth disappeared) were caused by volcanoes rather than by comets hitting the planet. The stuff they throw up is just too hard to regulate. Actually, we can’t regulate it at all.
And finally, more clouds do block sunlight, but they also keep heat in at night, so you’re not as far ahead as you think you are. The Amazon rainforest is a pretty cloudy place much of the time, and it doesn’t cool as much at night as a desert does.
On the Third Hand
Sometimes you need a third hand. Every lawyer needs that.
There’s tentative evidence that our atmosphere contains a lot more floating matter than it used to. Much of this is in the form of pollutants, but the surprising thought is that these pollutants are acting as a screen for the sunlight.
Perhaps we should encourage air pollution?
Perhaps we should fire off a few nukes in really dusty areas of the planet (some deserts have few people) with strong prevailing winds?
Just joking. Crap in the air at lower levels - this includes stuff from millions of tiny cookstoves in Asia - tends to heat up as it absorbs light. At least one study says the effect of carbon soot falling on the Earth (especially the ice caps) generates more global warming than carbon dioxide does. That's not what you want, but providing poor people with more efficient cookstoves sounds like a win-win situation.
But, high in the atmosphere, crap can help bounce light back into space.
It wasn't too hard to figure; every time a volcano blows a lot of sulfur dioxide high into the atmosphere, the temperature of the planet drops. The "year without a summer" of 1816 (there was ice on lakes in Pennsylvania in August) was mostly due to a bunch of volcanoes on the other side of the planet. Within a couple of years, most of the sulfur dioxide had fallen out of the air, and the planet warmed again.
So some people came up with the idea of putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Pumping it our of airplanes was the obvious method, but others, including cannons, have been considered.
There are problems, of course. The sulfur dioxide, as it comes down, creates acid rain, and that's not good. And there are indications that it might reduce the ozone layer that protects us from harmful ultraviolet light. So it's far from perfect.
There might be other chemicals that do the same, or better, with less harm, but we really don't know. There's been little experimentation on this. Sulfur dioxide is the front runner right now, if only because we know pretty well what it does.
Sulfur dioxide into the high atmosphere; keep it in mind; I'll come back to it. Sorry, I don't have a little picture of an airplane spewing sulfur dioxide; next edition, maybe.
Blocking Light Low in the Atmosphere
Somebody figured out, thirty years ago, that low-level clouds bounce light back into space.
So, produce more low-level clouds. How hard can it be?
The leading contender is a ship that sucks up sea water, pulverizes it into water vapor that's full of ocean salt, and spews it up into the sky to make clouds. The salt in the water is essential in the formation of the clouds.
It gets better. Engineers designed automated ships that would sail the oceans, using wind power to run the both the ships and the pumps. A few hundred of these ships, computerized to make clouds (mostly off the west coasts of North America, South America, and Africa), could go a long way to helping us cool the planet.
In early 2011, computer simulations showed that the original plans would have put particles that were too small into the air. These would have actually reduced the formation of normal, natural clouds, and the end result would have been less cloud formation, not more.
The proponents are sure they can adjust the size of the water particles they spew upwards. We'll see. It sure would be nice to see a single trial effort.
Reflecting Light From The Surface
A lot of sunlight reaching Earth doesn’t stay there. It’s reflected from the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, and from the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean.
Unfortunately for us, most of the existing ice patches are going to melt when the planet warms up. That leaves vast stretches of light-absorbing rock and water instead of light-reflecting ice. Which makes the problem worse.
Can't we add reflecting surfaces to bounce light back into space?
One wonders just how much white paint or aluminum foil you’d have to put on Greenland to get back what ice used to give. Can you imagine the teams of workers painting Greenland white? Or trying to tack down foil in the wind?
There’s a place in Switzerland where they’re coating three or four thousand square metres of the Gurschen glacier in foil every summer to try to keep it there for the winter skiing season. That’s a small part of a small glacier, but they’ve got the idea.
Even floating patches of foil (foil bonded to foam?) at the equator might take more time and energy than we have, especially since ocean currents and hurricanes would mean they’d have to be tied in place, with passages for ships and whales. Enough floating panels on the water would reduce rainfall in the rest of the world (the winds would pick up less moisture) and there would be less oxygen in the water itself.
We could spread white sheets on all the open patches of land, but at the equator there aren’t many open patches of land. Just plants, and people who need those fields for food.
Minor solutions such as making everybody paint house and car roofs white, or making people carry white umbrellas when they go outside would probably be more trouble than they’d be worth, especially since most of the world’s surface is water.
Serious people have noted that if all the roofs in the US were white, global warming, at least over the States, would go down a percent or so. More, if the highways and other asphalt were made a more reflective color, too. I look out the window of the car as I drive into the city and it makes me think that the cost, in climate terms, of producing and installing a long-lasting white surface for roofs and asphalt, would be as great as the savings. It would be sensible to give a tax break to reflective surfaces and a tax penalty to dark ones, but this wouldn't make a lot of difference in the time line we've got.
Increasing Land Plants
We could grown more plants on the land.
Land plants, especially rain-forest plants do one thing very nicely: they take in carbon dioxide and use it to build plant tissue. This is good. It gets that damned carbon dioxide out of the air.
(Of course, right now people are cutting rain forests to raise cows for hamburgers. The cows fart methane all day. Banning hamburgers would be such a good first step.)
So we could stop cutting rain forests and stop cutting our northern boreal forests, and start planting trees, trees, everywhere. Plant them in the fields and let the pastures go back to shrubs. Don’t harvest the crops now planted; just let them grow. Stop all burning of wood; just stockpile it for a few decades.
I’ll let someone else handle the politics of this, and how many farmers and forest executives and politicians we have to shoot….
Because we’re already using most of the available land for food for Earth’s still-increasing population.
This is good for the short term. A crop of beans, for instance, takes a lot of carbon dioxide from the air, but as soon as the plant dies and rots, that carbon dioxide starts going back into the atmosphere. We need longer-term plants, like trees.
Trees don’t do much when they’re small, and as soon as they’re harvested they start going back to carbon dioxide, but there’s a period in between when they’re useful.
In general, you can fiddle with the oceans and space and Antarctica before you can get away with fiddling with Earth’s land, every inch of which is measured and owned. And, if the ecologists are right, needed. The days when a country had surplus farmland have probably just run out.
There are a number of cautions in the growing of plants to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Sure, it's the way nature did it for a billion years or so, and the way nature is still doing it. But we're humans, and in a hurry, and we can screw up almost everything, even growing plants.
For example, the easiest and fastest-growing trees in northern climates are evergreens, pines and spruces mostly. But these are dark trees, and darkness not only absorbs sunlight in the winter, but the trees shade the snowy ground. The very white ground that helps bounce sunlight back into space. Ideally, Canadians should be planting trees that lose their leaves (or needles) every fall.
Crop leftovers; people talk about them. Stalks, leaves, and anything we're not going to use. There's a lot of carbon in those things, carbon that we'd like to stay out of the air. Burying it might help the soil, after a bit, but some patience is required.
There are people who talk about bundling up the waste plant material (they mean corn stalks, mostly), floating it down the Mississippi, and sinking it to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. People like that should end up in the same place. For all the scientists alarmed about global warming, there are a bunch absolutely terrified of what creating a dead zone of rotting vegetation in the oceans might do to the planet.
We may have to plant trees on farmland.
Increasing Water Plants
We could increase the quantity of plant life in the oceans.
Three-quarters of this planet is covered with water, mostly ocean, and most of that’s a desert, in terms of plant life. The plants that do grow are found where there’s sunlight (near the surface) and nutrients (near the poles or the coasts of the continents).
Because of the odd nature of the water molecule (it shrinks as it gets cold, but then expands again a few degrees above freezing) there’s an upwelling of waters near the Arctic and Antarctic. This upwelling brings nutrients that otherwise sit around the dark depths doing nothing useful. That’s why there are penguins and polar bears and whales in the cold waters.
There’s not an awful lot of life in the middle of warm-water oceans. More at the edges, where rivers wash nutrients out to sea. Fishermen in Bonne Bay, Newfoundland, like to fish next to the sewage treatment plant; it has a better food chain from the nutrients.
So we can simply dump the needed nutrients into the oceans, right? That’s the question.
The most common ingredient needed is potassium, and Saskatchewan’s sitting on one of the world’s biggest supplies. Another item that's in demand is iron.
The answer’s a little hard to come by, because nobody’s tried it on a large scale.
Here’s the most optimistic scenario:
1. Boats cross the Pacific scattering potassium and other nutrients into the water.
2. The phytoplankton (tiny floating plants) multiply better than rabbits, increasing by gigantic factors. Huge quantities of carbon are used to build the plants.
3. The zooplankton (tiny floating animals) multiply in response to the increased food supply. Huge amounts of carbon are used to build the animals.
4. Fish and whales multiply in response to an increased food supply.
5. The oceans are full of fish, which provides food to humans. Massive amounts of dead pants never get properly used and drift downward to the deeps, carrying carbon to a place it can rest in peace for a few million years. Nice.
Here’s the most pessimistic scenario:
1. Boats cross the Pacific scattering potassium and other nutrients into the water.
2.
The phytoplankton (tiny floating plants) multiply better than
rabbits, increasing by gigantic factors. Huge amounts of carbon are
used to build the plants.
Soon there are France-sized masses of
plants floating in the ocean. Zooplankton are unable to keep up.
3. The masses of plants raise the temperature of the ocean surface because plants warm up in the sunlight better than water does.
4. The plants decay, taking oxygen from the air and the water. Animal life in the water suffers and fish stocks plummet.
5. Decaying plants rot, producing methane and carbon dioxide, which increases the global warming.
To some extent we’ll get “blooms” of phytoplankton anyway as the water warms and plants use more of the nutrients available. Adding nutrients is going to exaggerate any tendencies. This year (2011) there was a bloom of phytoplankton off the coast of Vancouver Island (and running the length of the island), and a decline in upwelling seems to have reduced animal life off California (water must cool to sink and start other water upwelling).
Lake Erie got a lot of nutrients in the last century, mostly phosphates from agricultural runoff and from cleansers. Was there a boom in fish? No – the lake was for a while approaching death, as the decaying masses of plants used up the oxygen. The animal life never caught up to the increases in plant life.
Check out the Black Sea to see what too many nutrients can do to an ecosystem.
Someone estimated that adding nutrients to the waters around Antarctica could get rid of eight billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. There’s even a theory that whether the phytoplankton around Antarctica get iron or not controlled the ice ages (iron drifting in from dust or from meteorites). Lots of phytoplankton absorbed carbon dioxide and cooled the planet.
So some scientists from the University of California decided to try. They put powdered iron sulfate in a couple of patches 15 km square. This resulted in massive blooms of phytoplankton that covered thousands of square kilometers and consumed 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Their computers show that the results will taper off in a few hundred years.
Last heard, they’re waiting to see if the plants would just die and create more carbon dioxide, or would sink to the bottom as they died, or would promote the growth of animals to eat them. Only the last two options would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
They’re also trying to figure out if all this new plant life absorbed more sunlight and warmed the water.
Another group plans to try fertilizing an area (the size of Nevada) out in the warmer waters of the Pacific Ocean. Since this is a pretty barren area, the scientists expect the phytoplankton to absorb as much carbon dioxide as the US produces in a year, and to get fish increases of 400 times the current levels. We’ll see.
No we won't. Various international laws are being brought out to stop this testing.
I'm in favor of small-scale testing. If the time comes when we get desperate, I think the knowledge as to what works and what doesn't is going to be critical. My own guestimate is that there are three ways to make the ocean work with us and twenty ways to really screw it up.
The oceans are big, but they're important. One of the most interesting things happens when the deep oceans die. There's a pond down the road from me. In winter it freezes, and rotting vegetation at the bottom uses up oxygen. The fish move to the surface, where there's still a bit of air.
One day in spring, the ice breaks up. Now there's a chance for air to dissolve slowly into the water, bringing air to all levels of the pond. But suppose it's a really windy day when the ice breaks up. The wind drives the ice to the far shore and starts the water in the entire pond circulating. In a couple of hours, the dead water at the bottom mixes with the oxygenated water at the top, and the average can drop to a level below that which can support life. That afternoon, for a hour or two, the waters of the pond don't have enough oxygen, and fish die in large numbers. By evening, the winds have brought the oxygen levels back to normal, but it's too late for the fish.
Some scientists believe this has happened with the oceans from time to time in the past. The deep waters stopped circulating for a while and became dead. Most of the oceans died, and this killed off an entire planet's ecosystem. I don't know if they're right, but I'm hesitant about mucking around with the oceans before we know a lot more about them. And we can't simply cool the world without lowering the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; increased carbon dioxide dissolves into the oceans, making them acidic, killing plants and animals, and possibly leading to the dead ocean scenario.
Mechanical Carbon Sequestering
In this wonderful development, people take carbon dioxide and stuff it underground.
“Sequestering” means getting it out of the way, like sequestering your Uncle Bob in a locked room in the basement. In this case it means getting it out of the atmosphere. Trees do this, while they’re living and growing. Ocean creatures with shells do it better: the shells (which contain carbon) often sink to the bottom of the ocean where they’re sequestered for millions of years.
There are a number of companies around the world who claim to be able to take carbon dioxide and stuff it way underground. Some have experience in this; it’s common to take gases such as carbon dioxide and stuff them down oil wells. That creates a pressure down there which forces more oil into the next oil shaft.
If you force carbon dioxide down into a crack deep enough underground (more than 800 meters below Earth’s surface), it becomes a supercritical fluid, in which it is neither liquid nor gas. It takes up less room than a gas does, and dissolves into some rocks and liquids down there.
There are a lot of disused holes under the ground from abandoned drilling. Some are under the earth; some are under the ocean. We could put a lot of carbon dioxide down there. The British Environment Minister is pushing this plan – just as an “interim” one, until humanity learns to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The British figure there are enough old oil and gas fields under the North Sea to store all of Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions for the next hundred years.
Once we run out of old wells, there are still enough cracks in the earth for lots of storage.
One study shows that carbon dioxide could be stuffed into low-grade coal seams more than five hundred feet under the surface. One coal seam in Wyoming and Montana could (theoretically) hold over six times the annual production of carbon dioxide from the U.S.
And the Down Side…
There’s probably no down side, as long as we don’t stuff carbon dioxide into fault zones and create earthquakes. Of course the carbon dioxide will leak out, but that could take centuries and we only need to keep it there a few decades till we come up with something better (like conservation). And what if it leaks out - we won't have lost anything but a bit of time an energy. We'll find another place to stuff it.
But there are problems.
The biggest one at the moment is that the only carbon they can sequester is the carbon dioxide coming out of the smokestacks of large industries. It’s concentrated, you see, and usually right on the end of a smokestack. Convenient.
The idea that anyone could sequester all the carbon dioxide emissions of a nation is obvious nonsense. You can collect the emissions from the larger factories, but what about the emissions from Tom’s Burger Place? Sally Muggins gas heater in her flat in Manchester? Al Daigen's Honda or the Queen’s Rolls?
Not to mention the cost. It currently costs about a hundred American dollars to bury a ton of carbon dioxide. A medium-sized electricity-generating station would have to budget a few hundred thousand dollars a day just to get rid of the carbon dioxide it produces.
Cheaper technology is coming, but not for a decade or two.
And even if you had a special carbon sequestering device clamped on to the tailpipe of Queen’s car, and a footservant deliver a giant bag of carbon dioxide to a special gas warehouse each week, you haven’t done anything to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide still in the atmosphere. The best we might attain is to get most of the carbon dioxide out of the emissions of the largest producers (such as coal-burning electrical generation facilities).
Of which, as we said, there’s too much now and there’ll be more before we get these solutions working.
Some people are complaining that the big electricity-generating plants tend to be near the big cities, while the best places to store carbon dioxide underground tend to be somewhere else, usually a long way away. Well, whoop-de-doo. The cities pipe in gas and water from long distances; they can darn well pipe the carbon dioxide long distances. No sympathy here.
Taking Carbon Dioxide Right From The Air
There are no reports yet of anyone being able to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it on anything more than a laboratory scale. Carbon dioxide makes up just one third of one percent of the atmosphere. And it’s a big, big atmosphere.
One can imagine huge howling facilities sucking in air at one end and spitting it out at the other end, minus the carbon dioxide. Or giant tree-like towers getting the carbon dioxide as the wind blows by. There's a prize for anybody who can figure a way to do that at a reasonable cost.
It’s just hard to imagine enough of them, and to figure a way to provide the chemical and physical operations without using so much energy that you’re adding more carbon dioxide than you’re taking away. Sodium hydroxide (a rather caustic substance) will grab carbon dioxide, but then you end up with a lot of rather sodium hydroxide with carbon dioxide chemically attached. Either you find a way to dispose of the sodium hydroxide, and make more, or you chemically remove the carbon dioxide, store it, and re-use the sodium hydroxide. Sounds to me like it would take a lot of carbon-dioxide-producing energy either way, possibly as much as you'd take from the air, so you'd gain nothing. I'd like to see the figures on that.
Our Best Scenarios
My daughter asked me if there were any hope, since I'd listed problems with many (well, most) of the options described.
Here's a couple of scenarios that are most likely to work if the time ever comes that we actually consider geoengineering the climate:
Scenario 1
1. Teams of jumbo jets dump sulfur dioxide into the air around the north pole. This cools the arctic and the Arctic Ocean freezes over. The Greenland Ice Cap stops melting and the planet cools a bit. Methane stops bubbling out of the permafrost.
2. Ships spray salt water to make cloud cover over the oceans.
3. Carbon laws begin to dramatically reduce human emissions of carbon dioxide. Millions of trees and fast-growing weeds are planted.
3. Mechanical devices are developed at a (more or less) reasonable cost to get the carbon dioxide out of the air.
Scenario 2
1. Economical fusion power is developed, producing cheap and abundant electricity. Everything is converted to run on electricity or hydrogen (generated from electrical energy). Humankind stops producing so much carbon dioxide.
2. Teams of jumbo jets dump sulfur dioxide into the air around the north pole. This cools the arctic and the Arctic Ocean freezes over. The Greenland Ice Cap stops melting and the planet cools a bit. Methane stops bubbling out of the permafrost.
3. Mechanical devices are developed at a (more or less) reasonable cost to get the carbon dioxide out of the air.
Fusion power used to scare the crap out of me, because I had my doubts that humans could use cheap and abundant power responsibly. But it's starting to sound better than not having it.
If you have thoughts and ideas, forward them to me. If I use them in future editions, I’ll try to give you credit (which is more than I’ve done for the many sources used in this book to this point).
Lenny
lennypoet@hotmail.ca