Long post....
I came up with the idea of compressing the CO2 to a liquid, and piping it 400 metres under the ocean
I'm familiar with that concept.
I actually applied recently for a research fellowship at Princeton on economic analysis of carbon sequestration - haven't heard anything from them yet - another idea is pumping it into oil and gas reservoirs for enhanced recovery.
A few years later, Mitsubishi patented my idea! I think it was Mitsubishi
That doesn't sound fair. Did you publish your idea somewhere?
Plants do use ultraviolet light, as well as visible light below the green
I did say both sides of green. They may use some near UV but what I have read is that a lot of the UV coming through from the sun would be very damaging to them. Big range of wavelengths.
you will see that I would like to have about 20 degrees of warming.
Sometimes I tell people that Canberra is 2 degrees Celsius warmer than London and they are very surprised. They thought it must be more. Daily range is bigger here though. 2 degrees warming would be nice and manageable. A FAST increase above that is bound to be problematic.
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.
Well, I don't think we need to worry about that. If we don't pump the carbon out of that fossil fuel very fast into the atmosphere most will end up in new limestone anyway I think.
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. and nearly all species would just breed their way upstream.
Sure, I'm not worried about things like coral reefs much. They are evry adaptable and respond fast. Other life forms are however much more constrained in moving now due to all the human development and fragmentation of the environment. And a big problem is places like Bangladesh...
Expansion due to heating is very slow
That is true, glacial melt is more significant in the short run, but so far it is mainly mountain glaciers which are very small in the total picture. Snow fall will liekly increase in the short-run over the two biggest ice caps and of course reduced ice shelves don't add to see level.
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.
Deflecting incoming comets will prove easier than stopping global warming IMO.
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.
Yeah well :) I think large cities will make neccessary adaptations fairly easily for any sea level rise in this century.
So in conclusion, I agree a little warming is manageable and may even be good. I think the talking around Kyoto and whatever Bush's proposal will be is good in order to develop responses and institutional frameworks so that we can keep this within bounds though drastic action right away is unlikely to be neccesary.
David |
