I say megatons per year. See how quickly limits to knowledge are reached = you imagine more is dissolved back into the water column than is buried in sediment. But thinking can give us the answer near enough for government work.
The CO2 that goes in the surface plus seagull poop, feathers, river runoff all ends up on the bottom and is finally buried no matter how much is cycled around at the surface, in the water column and at the bottom by hagfish and whatnot.
So while there is some up and down, in the end it's a trip to subduction.
We are obviously producing so much CO2 that the clearance rate is much less than that. But the clearance rate has accelerated as per the leaky bucket process. In biological rather than leaky bucket terms, when grass grows prolifically the rabbits breed like bunnies. The wolves and foxes produce big well-fed litters. More grass means faster grass eating and more rabbit eating.
Either we run out of carbon to burn, or burning carbon is made obsolete by fusion, photovoltaics, plant harvesting, geothermal, lifestyle changes, or the number of people declines, or the rate of CO2 removal is increased such as by my patented CO2 liquefaction and ocean injection system, ocean iron enrichment, or desert agriculture, etc.
The way things are going it looks like a combination will be the outcome. Fewer people, swishy technology such as Cyberspace replacing physical stuff and transport such as my photovoltaic powered 1000 km per hour vacuum tunnels that Elon must have read about in SI a couple of decades ago that he called Hyperloop. He has it wrong in that he envisaged little holes like on a hockey puck table game whereas I say just fly through the tunnel. No need for holes and drag.
Mqurice |
