Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (57471)	12/22/2004 6:05:26 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

Ray, sequestration of CO2 does seem a silly idea to me, since it's plant food and plants are struggling for light and CO2 as it is. Greenhouse farmers dose their glass-houses with CO2 and heat to increase production. Of course they ensure the plants have sufficient nutrients to metabolize the CO2. Those plants which don't have sufficient nutrients will ignore the extra CO2 just as humans at a smorgasbord know when they've had enough and push away from the table. Some don't and prepare for the next famine. But I don't believe that sunk CO2 is a problem other than in the immediate area for bottom-dwelling scavengers such as hagfish. Anyone who falls into the CO2 lakes can turn into radiolarian ooze, ready to be processed through the subduction cooker to be deposited as oil and gas in a million years or so or to be used as volcano fuel. Maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to tip it out by the Great Barrier Reef. Australia would be planted in pine trees and photovoltaics anyway, so they wouldn't need to pour CO2 into the ocean. Japan isn't noted for their reefs, so they could pour CO2 into the ocean. So could NZ. Mqurice

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (57471)	12/22/2004 10:03:43 PM
From: Hugh A	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Ray - You're right, sort of. At first pass it would seem that increasing pCO2 in the atmosphere and thereby increasing CO2 content in the ocean would be devastating on coral reefs due to formation of carbonic acid and dissolution of coraline carbonate minerals. Today the precipitation rate of calcite (calcium carbonate produced by reef building corals etc.) exceeds its dissolution rate in world oceans down to about 3.5-5 km, the so-called "carbonate compensation depth" (CCD). So, unless we get a massive shallowing in the CCD it is unrealistic to believe that rising pCO2 will cause massive reef dissolution, as is implied in the article I posted. On top of this, the greatest epoch of carbonate sedimentation was the Paleozoic when atmospheric CO2 contents were 8-10 times as high as they are now. Some work I did in the '90s and published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta is relevant here. CO2 acts as an acid as long as the system is unbuffered - this is the reason that some have suggested adding pulverized limestone to the CO2 sequestration stream. However, as we showed, more effective pH buffers are clay minerals, which are abundant in the deep ocean. So although in the simple H2O-CO2 system one might expect massive acidification of the oceans, when one looks at all available sources and sinks for CO2 and H+, the clays are more effective pH buffers (they contain H, no?) and counteract the effects of increasing pCO2. It never ceases to amaze me how reasonably intelligent people of a leftward inclination can look at something and see only the negative implications. Us of the silent majority are slower to anger, but when roused can change dynasties - or perpetuate them. Long live King George II. HA