A recipe for global cooling: put seafloor on dry land near the equator | Hacker News Reader

A recipe for global cooling: put seafloor on dry land near the equator

arstechnica.com

58 pointsshawndumas16 comments

Open articleView on HN

I've read the article and still have no idea how the title was approved by an editor. It makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense to me. Then again I bake a lot.

Its structered like a recipe.

"Recipe for chocolate coating: Whisk sweetened cream with cocoa paste at low heat."

"Recipe for shortbread: Bake mix of plain flour, caster sugar and unsalted butter until lightly coloured"

"Recipe for runny egg: Add egg to buttered pan near edge"

"Recipe for pointless egg: Add egg to oiled pan near centre"

The first part seems to work. What does the second part mean? Put the sea floor on dry land? What? Is the dry land being lowered to sea level? Is sea floor dirt being moved?

Its using the term "sea floor" as an ingredient, "dry land" as a location. "Put rocks from the sea floor on a plot of dry land". To be fair to the editor, I don't see how "put x on y" could ever lead someone to ask the question "is y being lowered to x?".

It's because people identify "sea floor" as being in a, relatively speaking, fixed position. Moving rocks from the sea floor != move sea floor.

What they mean is: the seafloor is raised up by the process of plate tectonics over millions of years. Sounds less catchy though.

The only feasible technology to remove carbon from our atmosphere is burning biomass with capture and sequestration of the resulting CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BECCS

This article is about the Silicate-Carbonate cycle, a geologic process, not politics.

Why do you need to burn the biomass? Wouldn't simply growing lots of biomass remove the CO2?

You would need to store the biomass somewhere where it doesn't release the captured carbon due to decay. I think the burning is supposed to pay for the process.

The amount of energy and land required for this plan, and keeping in mind that most of that area is in conflict zones or less than stable. Also there's potential impact to deep sea habitats (that are still very mysterious). Good job thinking outside the box, but I don't think this is viable.

The article is about plate tectonics, not geoengineering.

It suggests that replicating the nature process can have the desired effect. Though perhaps that implication is less pronounced without the title (and the author may have had no control over that) so point taken.

There's absolutely nothing about replicating the natural tectonic process in the article.

The combination of the title and phrases like "simulations using a mid-latitude climate couldn’t get the job done because the rocks didn’t weather fast enough" did make me think initially that they were proposing using this as geoengineering to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

(But yes, that's not what they're saying. And my guess is it wouldn't be anywhere near worth it.)

Next in line for clickbait titles: "A Mexican recipe for pest control: hurl a mountain-sized space rock into Yucatan."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com