David, back in my heyday, in the mid 1980s, I came up with the idea of compressing the CO2 to a liquid, and piping it 400 metres under the ocean [at which pressure it remains a liquid] and being heavier than water [with a specific gravity of 1.2] it would sink and dissolve while sinking.
Any undissolved would form a puddle on the bottom of the ocean. Any dissolved would be plant food. Oceans can dissolve a LOT of carbon dioxide.
At power stations, that would take about 20% extra energy, which is not a lot. So power stations on beachfronts could produce huge amounts of electricity, with lots of cooling [which manatees love as do other ocean animals - there could be tropical microclimates around power stations which would be very attractive] and the carbon dioxide could feed ocean plant life or just sink to the bottom.
A few years later, Mitsubishi patented my idea! I think it was Mitsubishi [it was about a decade ago]. I'm surprised that's a patentable idea as it seems so obvious to me.
Plants do use ultraviolet light, as well as visible light below the green [leaves being green because green is reflected unabsorbed]. Of course too much would fry the leaves, but mostly, plants struggle to get MORE light, not hide away and they do battle with each other to get that light.
Sure, if the tide rises, everything will have to move uphill some distance, but that's been the nature of oceans forever = they rise and fall. Now worries there. Expansion due to heating is very slow and nearly all species would just breed their way upstream. The wetness we really need to worry about is from incoming comet splashdowns or just atmospheric explosions of enormous power, which will create huge ocean waves.
It's easy to avoid global warming if we want to, but if you check the weather map over New Zealand right now, you will see that I would like to have about 20 degrees of warming.
Another idea I had was to freeze the CO2 and store it on land. If we need it to prevent an incipient ice age, we could just take the insulation off and release it into the atmosphere to keep us warm. It would make very large heaps! I can't remember the energy required to freeze it, but it was more hard work than just compressing it to a liquid and sinking it into the ocean.
There sure is a lot of limestone too. Since there aren't enough blackboards to use all the limestone and there is a limit to how much cement we can use or lime, I don't know that it's worth trying to release all that CO2 as well as the oil, gas and coal. We might as well bring the easy carbon back to life first.
If coastal cities were inundated, the marine life would love it. Fish just love little nooks and crannies; imagine the squabbling over the penthouse caves when flooded.
Mqurice |
