Climate change mitigation: Turning carbon dioxide into rock

An international team of scientists have found a potentially viable way to remove anthropogenic (caused or influenced by humans) carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere -- turn it into rock.

The study, published in Science, has shown for the first time that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) can be permanently and rapidly locked away from the atmosphere, by injecting it into volcanic bedrock. The CO2 reacts with the surrounding rock, forming environmentally benign minerals.

Measures to tackle the problem of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and resultant climate change are numerous. One approach is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), where CO2 is physically removed from the atmosphere and trapped underground. Geoengineers have long explored the possibility of sealing CO2 gas in voids underground, such as in abandoned oil and gas reservoirs, but these are susceptible to leakage. So attention has now turned to the mineralisation of carbon to permanently dispose of CO2.

Until now it was thought that this process would take several hundreds to thousands of years and is therefore not a practical option. But the current study -- led by Columbia University, University of Iceland, University of Toulouse and Reykjavik Energy -- has demonstrated that it can take as little as two years.

This is a BAD idea. Very, very bad.

The problem is that plants need a certain concentration of CO2 in the air to survive. Above that concentration, plants pull that CO2 from the air and convert it to larger carbon molecules that are necessary for all life to survive. Below that concentration, plants cannot pull the CO2 from the air, and they do not survive. Without plants, nothing else survives, either.

These schemes to pull CO2 from the air and convert it into forms that are unusable by biological life, unfortunately, will not cause visible damage immediately. If such a scheme should go forward before clearer heads (and people who understand the carbon cycle and the fundamental necessity of CO2) put a stop to it, then here is what will happen. As the concentration of CO2 is decreased, the plants that need the highest concentration of CO2 in the air will die off. As they die, their bodies decompose, releasing more CO2 into the air. So far, the actual measured concentration of CO2 won’t change much even as tons of CO2 are destroyed—at the point where the most sensitive plants die off, the concentration will remain somewhat constant. So the clueless zealots work to remove even more CO2 from the air, causing more species of plants to start dying off. And as they die and their bodies decompose, CO2 is released back into the air.

And so on and so on. After many iterations of this process, after several years of converting CO2 to unusable form, some “geniuses” might notice a decrease in plant biomass and extinction of species—without much effect on the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Another effect might be to increase the temperature of the earth; without plants to soak up the solar energy to convert CO2 into more biologically useful molecules (like sugars, fats, and proteins), that energy will soak right into the ground, where it is converted directly into heat.

In any case, as monumentally bad as this idea is, by the time the true believing warmists figure it out, the environmental damage will be extreme.

I think in my profile, I have links to a study that estimated the remaining time left for life on earth, somewhere between 100 million to a billion years left. That is because natural processes sequester CO2 constantly, so that the level of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere is a fraction of what it was when, for example, dinosaurs roamed the earth. And, without humans doing anything at all, that is the time range within which the concentration of CO2 will fall so low that life is no longer possible, based on the current rate of natural carbon sequestration.

These warmist kooks, in their zeal to impose totalitarianism by scaring everyone about CO2, would gladly accelerate the extinction of life on earth in order to impose a primitive life style on people and stop all progress.

Yes but it is a “following” indicator of temperature change. There is a lot more involved. We are at the relatively cold point that we have because of a combination of the Indian Ocean currents that bring the Monsoon rains over India and South Asia and the massive CO2 sink that the Himalayam are after the plate collision that formed them exposed sedimentary and volcanic rock.

However only a political solution will keep us from destroying our economy and ourselves as we think that without immediate action the earth will be turned into an unlivable desert of near boiling temperatures. This article seemed to point a way to clean up after ourselves (always a good idea) without such drastic extremes that are likely with the greens ruling.

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