But the analysis rests on 0 ventilation, which doesn’t work at all.
I think the main thing to keep in mind is plants really aren’t industrial carbon sinks. They were never evolved to be. Their biological functions are about growing and thriving, and the soil they grow in are net carbon producers.
In a broad open system, they are net carbon sinks over the long term. But any analysis in a closed system is bound to fail, you don’t even need numbers to know intuitively this won’t work.
Crack open a window. Run a fan. Have plants because they have many benefits. Reducing CO2 around you meaningfully isn’t one of them.
And trees don't exist in isolation as these napkin calculation articles consider them (spherical cows and all that). Every single tree on earth relies on mycorrhizal fungi for the vast majority of its nutrients. Fungi break things down release CO2.
Most of our oxygen comes not from forest but from oceans (specifically from phytoplankton, algae, and photosynthetic bacteria). Between 50-80% of it in fact. Likewise, most of the CO2 that has been captured has been captured by the ocean not by forests. About 25-30% of all human emissions have been captured by the ocean.
Forests (and grasslands) are tremendously important for ecosystems and our health but I think this focus on CO2 and oxygen is simply misleading. If that's your concern you should really be focusing on the ocean. Which IMO is in an even more dire strait than our forests
I don't get why media has been fixating so much on trees and forests (Amazonia!) without even mentioning ocean's role in this.
That fact checks out: about 70% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. It follows that most photosynthesis, thus oxygen comes from oceans.
I think you are probably right, but could you kindly elaborate and provide more details? Very curious to hear your view and learn more.
- ocean acidification and deoxygination (imo the most alarming and underdiscussed doomsday scenarios of climate change): About 0.5 to 3.3% of dissolved oxygen had been lost between 1970 and 2010 which has led to the rapid expansion of Oxygen Minimum Zones ("dead zones"). Acidity has increased by 30 to 40% and at a clearly accelerating rate. That's 10 times faster acidification than at any other point in the last 300 million years
- they estimated oceans had absorbed about 90% of "excess global heat" and their ability to absorb is slowing rapidly
- up to 99% of permafrost could melt by 2100. Permafrost melting was completely unanalyzed in the 1.5C report due to lack of good data
Forests on the other hand have shown surprising resilience. And, if they survive the impending destabilization, they might in the long term (I mean looong term) even benefit from increased CO2 concentrations as they historically have.
PS the IPCC reports are more accessible than people realize. Even the technical reports are often not much more difficult to parse than the policymaker reports meant for the general public. I'd quite recommend giving them a try
And now deep-sea mining.
Has a pretty good overview. But in brief: Changes in biosphere due to heat and decreasing pH balance due to increased CO2 can leave species unable to adapt fast enough causing deaths.
Or, just let the oceans recover, let the mollusks return to the bays and shores, let them do their efficient thing.
I get to spend plenty of time working on climate already, so I was particularly interested in the indoor air pieces. Someone below suggested there’s a ventilation system alternative. I wonder what you could do with a little miniaturized direct air capture machine. Probably crazy energy inefficient and whatnot, but maybe a cool experiment.
A startup has solved this problem the following way (for example): grow microalgae near a very dry desert, and bury it in trenches. It never decays and thus never releases CO2 due to lack of water.
Basically, we'd have to permanently stick it back underground again.
I know that sounds dismissive but I mean it. There's no magic wand.
The proposed carbon storage is permanent in the form of carbonates. This is a variant of the Solvay process used to make washing powder.
Chalk cliffs were once the shells of sea creatures. That's a whole load of sequestered carbon right there.
This kind of battery is useful. All human hearts together produce about the same power in beating as a Falcon 9 in the final stage but you can't use hearts like that.
1. Cognitive decline starts above 600 ppm according to air quality studies.
2. Levels below 200 ppm are actually dangerous.
Close to pre-industrial levels 200 to 280 ppm
I mentioned this elsewhere here, but a friend told me that it’s not only CO2 that leads to that mental fog, but it’s also the VOCs in the air too. All that gets cleared out by having an open window.
In other news, have you considered ditching your car and becoming a vegetarian? Not emitting the carbon in the first place is much easier!
1 kg per day of material adds up fast but that assumes zero ventilation. If I simply wanted a system to keep my office below 500 ppm all day, I wonder how much material that would produce.
Anyone ever build a little carbon dioxide zapping system for indoor air quality? I’ve also heard that indoor CO2 isn’t actually all that bad but it’s VOCs that are what make me feel sluggish.
Even if that is a better solution, I am personally curious about an indoor carbon dioxide zapper, since what I work on is carbon dioxide removal at planetary scale.
(nit) it is more accurate to call this a biological process, or chemical process
Saying "physical process" makes me think of inclined planes, free-body diagrams, and EM fields.
Calling photosynthesis a physical reaction is flatly incorrect no matter how you want to look at it. It is a physics reaction, sure, but "physical reaction" specifically means a Newtonian mechanical, reversible process at the macro scale.
A "chemical reaction" specifically means a (trivially) irreversible quantum/atomic reaction involving chemical bonds at the atomic/molecular scale.
Second of all, what does it matter how much CO2 I produce? What's harmful is the additional CO2 that goes into the atmosphere for burning fossil fuels. All other CO2 is just in the same cycle that's been happening for ever.
EDIT: My child comment is dead and vouching doesn't resurrect it, but now the post makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
Because the author of the piece is worried about the CO2 levels in their home, not about global warming. (well maybe they are worried about global warming too, but that's not what this is about)
realy?
but since I live in a drafty farmhouse up on a windy hill beside the ocean, my room air and the atmosphere as whole have very similar compositions, and I will continue to treat conversations about both, the same as well.
No... How can you be this delusional? This is cult like behavior: something will fix it somehow, eventually, don't ask about details
Feel free to list them, we're basically reverse terra forming ourselves out of existence at that point, I don't think we've done anything even remotely close to that scale in such time frame
That would be the equivalent of $12 trillion per year today, and we would clean up the climate in a jiffy with that. It would be a huge opportunity for job creation, manufacturing, innovation. It’s wild as a society we’ve convinced ourselves that stabilizing the climate is a cost instead of a massive opportunity.