Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tackle climate change | Hacker News Reader

Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tackle climate change

chemistryworld.com

79 pointsblacksqr141 comments

> Using the coast of Peru as a case study, the team calculate that depositing 50,000 tonnes of tephra – a bulk carrier vessel’s worth – offshore could sequester 2750 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Current global CO2 output is 51 gigatons. Their solution is not viable. It won't even put a dent in the current output. [1]

1: https://mobile.twitter.com/BillGates/status/1453367874848837...

Specifically, it would take 927.27 gigatons of tephra.

That said, a quick google suggests tephra is about a ton per m^3; so a 100100100 metre cube of the stuff would be 1 kiloton.

a 111km cube would be a gigaton. So we need less than a thousand of those a year :-)

A 100^3 meter would be one megaton.

Put spaces around your *s or escape them like \*: 100*100*100m is one megaton, and 10*10*10 times that, a 1*1*1km cube, is indeed a gigaton. No one would suggest recapturing all emitted CO2 with this one method though.

sorry, yes, that should be 100*100*100 ...

No one thing will solve this problem by itself.

Just like one workout won't make you fit.

It's not that kind of problem.

If you haven't noticed, most Americans aren't fit...and this is IMO precisely the reason why. The world of instant gratification has ruined our abilities to see and think long term.

Most americans aren't fit because nutritious food is expensive and more time consuming than sugar food.

Time consuming, yes. More expensive, no. People with long term perspective are willing to take the time to provide healthful meals for themselves.

Obesity is strongly correlated with poverty. Don't go mistaking weight as a function of work ethic or long term perspective. Many people both do not have enough to eat and are obese.

It’s one thing to say every little bit helps, but when your talking about something that’s never going to offset even 1% of current CO2 output it’s reasonable to suggest focusing on more effective solutions.

Especially when actually mining transporting and distributing the material is going to release significant CO2.

We have almost 8 billion people on the planet, we absolutely need to "focus" on every possible solution that may work.

There are currently over 100 proposed solutions that do actually add up to more than enough sequestration but the conversation needs to change and the disparaging whataboutism needs to end.

If people get apathetic or nihilism sets in nobody will be able to make the changes required.

What does whataboutism mean here?

Busywork is as useful as doing nothing.

You can’t use every approach as iron seeding and this both do the same thing and the oceans are finite.

So this isn’t a 1% solution, it’s not even a 0.1% soliton it might be a 0.01% solution. “50,000 tonnes of tephra – a bulk carrier vessel’s worth – offshore could sequester 2750 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This, they said, equates to a cost of around £43 per tonne of carbon dioxide sequestered” assuming absolutely zero CO2 was released in the process.

Bulk carriers are quite efficient and could move 50,000 tons ~= 0.4 tons of CO2 per mile in a straight line. Which sounds fine except you can’t simply dump all 50,000 tons 1 mile off shore and expect anything useful to happen. If you can dump on average 50 tons per mile you just released ~400 tons to sequester 2750. And that’s assuming it somehow gets loaded and unloaded without releasing any extra CO2.

You're ignoring that science improves and leads to further discovery.

It's perfectly fine if 0.00000001% of the population spends their lives on something that achieves nothing if a few of these lead to further developments.

0.00000001% of the global population is less than one person.

Which is kind of the issue, we need a significant fraction of the global workforce to solve climate change. Inefficiency is useless because we lack the economic capacity to solve climate change inefficiently.

We need to discuss effective solutions like consuming less (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc).

These "scientisticians are going to fix it (while we gorge)" headlines are bad because they contribute to the public opinion that business-as-usual is ok and will lead to a good outcome. It will not, and we are headed for a dreadful climate so far. This is often called green-washing

Why is 5G bad, I honestly don’t know?

In this context, perhaps higher power consumption (owen side) relative to 4G?

Power consumption of 5G is about 20x lower than 3G and getting lower as we speak (there are many 5G technologies only gradually getting adopted). So probably he meant the planned obsolescence mentioned already above.

Any time we increase efficiency, we also increase consumption. 5G increases efficiency, it's true. Now people consume more. It's enables new usages which people will jump on.

This happens in History every time we improve efficiency. Cars now consume a fraction of what early cars did, yet we use these efficiency gains to stuff them with gadgets, and make them bigger, and overall they still consume more than they used now in absolute terms.

In other words the engine inside your modern car is more fuel efficient than the first Ford, but we now make SUV that consume way more to produce and operate, can't be repaired/services easily, and people own multiple of them per household.

This "rebound effect" can be seen everywhere

Usually requires a new phone, I think the poster meant planned obsolescence.

It's not like 4G will shut down any time soon nor that we're at a stage where we have any use case for 5G speeds on a phone.

I don't see how 5G fits into a planned obsolescence argument.

Just wait a few years!

In a few years the majority of us will swap our phones anyway, 5G or no 5G.

Don't get me wrong, if the comment above said planned obsolescence instead of 5G, I'd be fully aboard. But 5G on its own makes no difference on climate change that I'm aware of.

Whatever flaws it has are completely unrelated to climate.

OP might just be venting.

5G is a new park of machines for the network operators. It's also a new park of machines for the consumers.

It's huge because we are so numerous.

Imagine you renew a boat fleet. Imagine the impact on the nearby forest. Going from no boats to having a fleet may be worth the damage. Going from a very good fleet to a slightly more advanced fleet may not be worth it.

Network infra and smartphones are the same. They require us to mine all their components and use energy to transform them.

4G seems to provide enough value to me. I don't like the tradeoff we get of "i can download 4K in the elevator now" (seems unnecessary to me) vs "we unleashed megatones of CO2, mined out large cobalt mines that will never form again in milleniaz to come, etc (seems critical to me)

Consuming less is not a serious solution and never has been.

Not entirely true. Changing consumer habits is possible, but not without it being replaced by something that's more sustainable AND more convenient.

That's the point. It's about consuming different things, not consuming less. And consuming different things that are at least as good, or better than the things we're consuming now. Nobody has ever, or will ever, make any serious progress by shaming people into not doing the things they want to do.

You're correct. Any plan that calls for less consumption is a non-starter. At this point it's incredibly harmful to hold on to an approach that's going nowhere and never will. We no longer have the luxury to indulge fantasies.

Consumption habits will need to change, people will need to start eating less meat. Factory farming of cattle and other animals is a large contributor of global emissions. So less consumption is definitely part of the answer.

exponential growth is a fantasy until fusion power and asteroid mining become real

I never understood this line of thought. Economic growth is not a growth of raw material consumption. There has been some correlation but you could imagine a forever growing GDP with shrinking raw material usage without any major problem as long as there is technological or organisational progress.

You can imagine it, but it doesn't track with reality. Economic growth has been synonymous with fast fashion, planned obsolescence, new cars every few years, a new phone every year, more and more meat in our diets, cheap plastic crap and so on - conspicuous consumption.

On the other hand, any plan that doesn't call for less consumption is simply going to be inadequate.

Societies of the past had to deal with this. We still deal with this in wealthy societies actually. When the US west coast is hot and dry, authorities ration water usage.

I can imagine governements doing a more serious job and limiting more things for the common good (aka we don't kill ourselves by destroying our environment)

I’m not sure why you think this? We have finite resources, a heavily populated planet and a few nations consuming the vast majority of the resources. Do you honestly think that’s maintainable in perpetuity?

I’d suggest your viewpoint is highly likely to be one of privilege, not from one of poverty.

Perhaps a charitable interpretation of the parent post would be "Voluntarily consuming less is not a serious solution and never has been."

A poverty viewpoint is indeed relevant - there are so many objectively poor people who will consume more to fill their currently unmet needs as soon as they can afford to (so the only way to prevent this consumption increase is to ensure that they stay in poverty); and it should be expected that people will reduce consumption en masse only when they can't afford the current consumption (no matter if caused by prices skyrocketing, or an impactful carbon/fuel tax, or simply declining income), and they will be very unhappy about it as they will treat this reduction as a shift from privilege to poverty.

And a realistic threat of being prevented to escape from poverty or being forced to shift from privilege to poverty IMHO would be considered by people as an existential threat comparable to global warming (I mean, for many people the main threat of global warming is the expected decrease in their living standards caused by it) and a much stronger motivation to act because, unlike climate change, that threat would be (a) closer in time, (b) more certain, and (c) with a clear way to fight against it - voting out a politician or rioting in the streets won't fix climate change (you'd need global coordination for that), but it definitely could suffice to kill any local carbon tax or government imposed reduction of consumption.

TL;DR the way humans behave, it should be expected that they will fight against a decrease in consumption much harder than they would fight against climate change.

Demanding a global decrease in consumption is just about the most privileged viewpoint possible.

If they were serious about saving the environment and not just doing whatever weird thing it is to demand that people buy fewer phones, they'd be pushing for more clean energy. As countries become richer they pollute less and have the resources to protect themselves from climate change. What is needed is a wealthier world, not a poorer one.

Oh - just to be clear - I'm absolutely not of that viewpoint at all.

For one its not just about stopping the unfavorable trend, but also reversing it, not to mention remediation all the pollution in the environment.

All this is going to be insane energy and also resource intensive and totally impossible just by saving some resource here and there. A massive expansion of clean energy sources is whats needed, anything else just wont work.

I have to agree. It's more about changing habits, efficiency savings, and replacements.

Let's take a simple examples: meat. There's quite a saving to be had by everyone eating less meat, but that doesn't mean we eat less food in general... It's just replaced with something else less harmful to the environment.

Another example would be plastic, I've starting seeing more use of those bamboo trays for food containers. Plastic knives and forks are being replaced with wooden ones. Etc

You're looking at bacterias on a petri dish. They are exponentially taking over the dish and soon will collapse under their own activity.

That's us. An advantage we have over the bacterias is that we can discuss together how we will face the limits of our box.

Saying "not slowing down and consuming everything in the dish is not serious" confuses me. It's the only serious thing here. Everything else is noise before we collapse.

Exponential scale is scary. Bacterias doubling every cycle means 1 cycle before the bottle is full, it's half full. You're looking around and there is still plenty of room. Next cycle it's 100% and you're gasping for air.

Humans don't double every cycle but you only need 7% growth to double in 10 years.

So when you hear that we use X% more steel or coal every year, keep in mind it's a doubling cycle every few years.

Reducing consumption (per capita and/or population size) is the only serious discussion to not hit the walls and gasp for air

I agree that we need to use effective solutions, but the first and foremost of those solutions is a much more simpler one than reducing consumption. Every nation (with rare exceptions) is currently burning fossil fuel for the single purpose of reducing costs. Fossil fuels are a cost saving tactic, saving money while producing pollution.

An expensive fossil free energy grid would cause disruptions to consumption but at the same time it would also allow things to mostly be business-as-usual. It just shifts the priority to care about the energy efficiency when cheap fossil fuels aren't there to be burned.

In contrast, trying to reduce consumption while keeping fossil fuels in the energy grid is unlikely to work. Consumers who care might reduce their own consumption a bit, but industries and every else will continue to draw more and more power from fossil fuel power plants and pollution will continue to rise. Public opinion will just grow more divided between those that self-sacrifice and those that don't.

> We need to discuss effective solutions like consuming less (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc).

Yes, let's ban various forms of advertising, for starters. It's the main driver of our over-consumption.

Economic growth is possible without higher emissions. https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1430509654698831878

Because wealth inequality. Rich people getting richer, putting their money in the bank. GDP grows, but median citizen is losing wealth.

Do you know that banks, by and large, don't just stuff your money in a piggy bank?

(Interest on excess reserves is making the discussion a bit more complicated, alas.)

You are effectively saying we should get over capitalism.

I agree, but I gotta ask why are you sugar coating it?

Sounds like your perspective is that human consumption is fundamentally the problem. Doesn’t this perspective lead to a pretty bleak future?

whether or not it's consumption in particular it's undeniably human activity that's the problem

business as usual leads to a pretty bleak future and if we refuse to confront this how will we even begin to adapt to a planet rapidly growing more difficult to inhabit

By his logic the simpler option is just to make living more difficult and to ultimately find ways to kill dumb consumers faster? We could just start heavily incentivizing vaping, smoking and alcohol consumption? Pushing contraceptives is also a big one, you might even start chipping at the goals of the elites if you slowed population growth AND reduced consumerism...

My proposition is that we have to deal with our scale if we don't want to be the bacterias that took over the petri dish and died because they made their environment toxic for themselves.

We have never had to care so far because we were not numerous. Now human activity is similar to geological forces like rain/volcanoes/etc and i think we should plan how we can exist on a stable cycle.

Mindless growth leads to us breaking our environment through our scale. Scale is exponential so after thousands of years we have a small window of 100 years where we grew so high in impact that we may break it all. It's a first for us, and i hope we can see further than the mold in the petri dish and make a concerted plan on how to live in a stable cycle without growing.

I'm advocating for planning a sustainable future. It's the first time in History we have to deal with this. People assume the future is like the past, and other incorrect things. They also live in cities, removed from physical realities. They only understand the collapse of species through some stats in a newspaper they forget the next day, and the energy/resources supply chains are unknown to them until there is a blackout and they lose internet for a few hours.

The future seems bleak in many ways for physical reasons. I don't think pretending we are not reaching planetary limits will help. I think it will make the fall harder. I would rather we concert and plan together what level of quality of life we want, and how we can stabilize our population, so we can cycle generations of human in a sustainable way.

I think we need to decrease our footprints radically, but I think the "consume less" framing scares people (though honestly, we should be scared ...)

But in the cases you name, and in many others, the messed up part is that we're creating so much stuff/waste that _isn't_ consumable, and so we needlessly use new resources.

Fast fashion is destructive because both the retailers and the end consumers end up throwing out so much stuff that piles up in landfills and isn't recyclable. If yesterday's garment was cheap (in a resource sense) to recycle into fiber to make a new garment, it would be a lot less harmful.

The cars-becoming-bigger pattern, in part an arms race between car manufacturers to improve safety ratings (in a collision, passengers in the heavier car experience smaller forces; who cares about pedestrians), with the net effect that after several years everyone has more massive cars but their safety edge has been totally eroded away. We no longer get a benefit, but we're all stuck pushing around extra metal for every mile driven.

The move to 5G didn't _have_ to be harmful, but we produce waste streams in all the devices that are now discarded which are _not_ consumed. Most of the components in the phones we toss every 2 years are still fine, but we make it so hard to put them all to good use.

The _unconsumed_ garments that go to a landfill, the _unconsumed_ discarded phones, touch screens, batteries, the ... non-benefit of moving around excess car (including those 4 empty seats when a person drives alone) are just as much the problem.

> (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc).

Do you have any idea how much of a problem so called fast fashion habits actually are? Same for the others?

Scale matters.

We moved from having a few new clothes a year to having new clothes as often as we want. We have also exponentially grown our population.

An Earth with let's say 2 billion people at 2 set of clothes a year has considerably less environment impact that an Earth with 8 billion people averaging let's say 10 set of clothes a year.

The scale of deforestation to produce coton, and the boom of the plastic fiber industry are sizable phenomenons with huge visible consequences. Whole industries exist now in Bangladesh and Vietnam for instance that didn't exist 20 years ago. Factories, supply chains, large yearly resources consumption, etc.

These changes are visible anywhere from the shops of wealthy nation cities, to Google Earth timeline where you see entire forests disappear every year now (rate is exponentially accelerating)

You use a lot of adjectives, but not a lot of numbers.

How much of a problem is this actually? Eg what proportion of our overall emissions (or environment impact etc) are from the manufacture and supply of clothing? And how much extra is from 'fast fashion' vs a return to old fashioned clothing habits?

I just did a very quick search, and found eg https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector Their numbers suggest that cotton and clothing barely show up.

A comprehensive carbon tax that's more expensive than CO2 sequestration will solve the problem by itself (or rather by market forces, everyone will either optimize away emissions or offset them with sequestration rather than pay the tax). For that we need a sequestration method that's cheap enough that a comprehensive CO2 tax at that price point is viable and won't be riddled with loopholes. $50/ton is still a bit high for that, but it's a lot closer than other methods we have so far.

This will be as much reduction as retrofitting about 200 homes, without any of the social benefit. Not to dismiss their work, but puts things in perspective.

What social benefit?

Perhaps reduced cost to the homeowners for heating and cooling their homes with a reduction in pollution due to lower energy production.

Hmm, perhaps. Though the first part are just private benefits to the homeowners (which of course, should go into the cost-benefit analysis), and the latter is basically the same kind of benefit that the proposed ocean seeding has.

I have no data on which method is best here, I was just confused by 'social benefit'.

They claim a price of less than £50 per ton. So 51Gt would about to £250 billion. If that method would indeed work it would be -by far- the cheapest I ever heard of.

50x50B=2,500B.

Still in the order of magnitude of military spending.

About 1.3 times the world's annual military budget, or 3.2 times that of the USA. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

Honestly, still... if that was what it cost globally? Sounds cheap to me, the next closest I've read about is in the $100-$120/ton range.

Better to just not emit it, but nice to have numbers for how big a carbon tax needs to be to encourage reduction over capture.

At a mere $15/tonne, coal becomes 100% more expensive (ie. dead):

https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-vario...

The low-hanging fruit is to just stop burning coal for electricity, and to enact that restriction globally.

We can deal with gas, metallurgical coal, oil later. Just get rid of coal now.

I agree, phases make sense.

I myself like to think of the situation you're describing as the coal costing the utility $15/ton or whatever while the rest of us pay that $100-120/ton to repair the commons.

But certainly different sources will become less viable at different extra costs, and perhaps for coal $15/ton might as well be $100-120/ton.

How embarrassing...

Yes this kind of reporting is the established industry exploiting "whataboutism" / newspaper scoring when absolute numbers are absolutely necessary.

It doesn't matter that smart people immediately do the actual gigatons accounting within seconds of reading the article. The headline is in the public, ready to populate some neuron in their brain that represents false equivalence "Well we polluted the atmosphere with gigatons for 150 years, well that's offset by the gee-whiz volcanic ash headline".

What I mean by newspaper scoring is the surfacing of that simplistic offsetting neuron encoding in lazy people: Simply have three points on one side, three points on the other, regardless of veracity or actual scientific/environmental/economic scales and accounting, they offset in the minds of both the vapid news parroters and those that watch them. Worst of all, the newsmen get to pretend like they are objective because they "represented a balanced perspective".

"Two issues remain: the concern that tephra could harm marine ecosystems – an area which Longman concedes needs investigation – and the fact that marine dumping in general is banned under the 1972 London Convention on marine pollution."

What about "how do we haul all that tephra out into the ocean without producing a bunch of pollution in the process"? Are there solar-powered bulk carriers that we can load up with solar trucks, diggers and forklifts? I assume you could at least get to break-even with that process if you optimized everything enough, but then you start wondering about the materials costs and environmental impact of all the special-case equipment...

Maybe the reverse is more efficient? I. e. landscaping the sea into the volcanic ash?

Is it "An" idea? Yes. Does it scale or work at the scale of humanity or has any potential to do so? No.

There is a climate summit presently underway and the topic of nuclear energy has been completely banned from it. That should tell you enough about the political forces manipulating genuine climate concerns to further their own ends.[1]

[1]https://theferret.scot/were-barred-from-cop26-nuclear-indust...

China is also not participating, so that should tell you how serious this is.

China isn't explicitly not participating though. The president hasn't traveled to any foreign country for 2 years now due to COVID.

Biden will not be attending either. But you can send delegates. China isn't sending any delegates (neither is Russia).

> China isn't sending any delegates

China's @COP26 delegation will be headed by Climate Envoy Xie Zhenhua & Vice Minister Zhao Yingmin. The delegation, smaller than previous yrs due to COVID, will bring China's NDC and arrive in London on 26th. While there, they will conduct pre-sessional talks with key countries.

https://twitter.com/LiShuo_GP/status/1451801646749519876

I stand corrected. Thank you -- unfortunately I can't edit my comment.

Someone's already debunked this for China in another comment, but it's also a false claim with regards to Russia. Putin himself pulled out (perhaps because he had a COVID near-miss last month, who knows?), but they're still sending a delegation.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/10/22/russia-to-lobby-fo...

It has been established that political forces will do whatever thats needed to maximize their profit margin, that's not news.

In order for them to align with climate protection, I think the only reasonable solution would be to make the "climate friendly" solution to be also the most profitable one.

This could come from new technological innovations, government regulations, or raise education and awareness for their stakeholders.

This sort of thing might actually work according to George Church. However, it would require one more very important step.

Most blue green algae do not live long. They are swiftly killed by a virus that has evolved to kill that particular algae.

cyanobacteria (BG algae) are hyper prevalent. However, so are cyanophages. Once killed the cyanobacteria re-release the carbon they sequestered back into the environment.

The idea is to genetically modify cyanobacteria to be unaffected by its cyanophage.

These organisms would then flourish, sucking insane amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere and then eventually sinking to the bottom, where apparently it is harder for them to be re-consumed and their carbon to be re-introduced to the atmosphere.

Interesting idea...

But could enter easily in trophic chains of mollusc filterers, that make durable shells lasting for many years.

I would think that it's effectively impossible to modify cyanobacteria to be unaffected by "its cyanophage" (it would be many different cyanophages, wouldn't it?) in the long run - you can create a strain that's immune to the currently popular cyanophages, but viruses and phages do mutate quickly and given a cyanobacteria bloom I'd expect another functioning phage to emerge soon.

Also, it seems to me that a major cyanobacteria explosion would be sufficiently fundamental to screw up the whole ecosystem around them; it might help carbon capture but at a cost/risk to other green values such as biodiversity and security of the ocean-based food chain for humans.

Crustaceans would put a dent into it. It's why carbon levels fell from 4000ppm to where they are today.

All those shells absorb a lot of carbon over millions of years.

Is there any research on harnessing the same process as crustaceans? Sounds absurd to write, but genuinely curious.

Conversion of carbon dioxide to calcium carbonate (one of the materials found in shells) has been researched:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2017.0001...

Using the exact technique that crustaceans use during biomineralisation will be very, very expensive at scale due to the enzymes needed. Current techniques involve using high-pH hydroxide solutions to perform the reactions. Carbon sequestration by pumping concentrated carbon dioxide gas underground would naturally use the high-pH geological environment to run this reaction over time.

There are still unanswered questions about pumping CO2 gas underground with regards to leakage - nevermind the fact that when it's pumped into old oil wells, it has the side effect of forcing out more oil which is recovered, sold and burned.

Converting CO2 to a solid, stable form like CaCO3 then storing the solids is a nice sequestration option, but like a lot of things in this space, the economics are holding it back more than the technology is.

> the economics are holding it back more than the technology is.

Is it not more the missing political will? (and yes, they are related as politics always seeks/ caters to big corps to get their buy-in)

In 2008 when the financial system felt some distress, the German finance minister provided 400bn euros over a weekend to Deutsche bank and others. It took politics 2 fregging days to unlock that amount of resources. And it was like no questions asked.

And we kept pumping that amount in there on a quarterly basis ever since.

I do not need to go into military spending.

So for me the earth ecosystem which needs to sustain is as a species is in as much of distress as the financial system was back then. It warrants the same sense of urgency and resource allocation.

The most promising geoengineering proposal I've seen is spreading "green sand" on beaches which is being researched by project vesta[1]. One of the outputs is calcium carbonate which also has the added benefit acting as a pH buffer.

1. https://www.projectvesta.org/

I wonder if you could make building bricks out of this. Cinder blocks, basically. That would be a way to have profitable sequestration.

I would be very surprised if this actually works. Ocean fertilization has been tried before and busted.

Fundamentally, you are supplying the nutrients that are limiting growth. You get a bunch of growth because of that. Most of what grows is eaten by other things up the food chain--atmospheric carbon dioxide becomes bound up in algae, fish and the like. When things die they mostly are eaten by something else. However, not every scrap is eaten--what isn't eaten falls into the ocean depths were bacteria get to it and produce methane.

The end result is more fish to eat but basically no change to the greenhouse effect as methane is far more potent than carbon dioxide.

Also, ocean fertilization only works to the extent that you can supply the missing nutrients. Dump too much fertilizer into the ocean and you get algal blooms that are bad for everything else in the ocean.

All this presupposes the global system is a 1 variable tweak away from being “fixed”:

if CO2 lowered then Earth saved, else death for all species.

Never mind that the plants consume CO2. Or that we are wise enough to know what is the correct cooling/heating rate for the planet. Or that CO2, is even the right metric at all. Last but not least, that it if humans had stayed pre-industrial, at what temperature would the planet be at and is that good or bad?

You're just throwing up arguments to see what sticks here. Almost everything you're saying is wrong or misdirected.

> Never mind that the plants consume CO2.

The linked technique is literally about getting more plants to grow to consume CO2.

> Or that we are wise enough to know what is the correct cooling/heating rate for the planet.

Strawman. You don't have to have a perfect master plan to know that "wildly distorted CO2 levels from the geological baseline of the last epoch" is almost certainly the WRONG level from the perspective of existing ecosystems. You don't need to be able to engineer a perfect wheelbarrow to fix a broken handle with duct tape.

> Or that CO2, is even the right metric at all.

Same deal. It's pretty clearly a metric, and something we're messing up. You're right that there are other greenhouse forcing mechanisms (methane being the big one). That doesn't constitute an argument for "don't fix CO2". You don't skip an alignment appointment on your car because it also has a rattle under the hood.

if the house is on fire, putting out the fire good, regardless of what other deficiencies the house might have.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Look at the graph and share your inferences on those questions?

It would be interesting to see this picture (its very bottom) updated now that five years have passed, as both the current state and the projections are meaningfully different than it was in 2016.

Careful. You’re getting a bit off narrative there.

What happened to olivine?

https://www.projectvesta.org/

How available is volcanic ash as a product? Some kinds are known to make good concrete? It's $2/pound on Amazon, but presumably cheaper in bulk.

Effectively free if you happen to live in Kagoshima City:

http://www.city.kagoshima.lg.jp/soumu/shichoshitu/kokusai/en...

Just go to the closest ash collection spot and pickup as much as you need. ;-)

I thought iron and possibly phosphorus were already known to be very promising for this idea?

I can't tell you whether the below is accurate, but this was why they said it is novel.

‘Tephra is cheap, not limiting, and all the required tech already exists. Bentonites – altered tephra – are already regularly mined, so we don’t need to develop new approaches,’ Longman says, adding that tephra would only require sieving in preparation for use. This, he added, ‘is unlike other ocean fertilisation approaches, which use processed iron oxide liquids.’

The chief problem with iron seeding is that it is one of many nutrients required. It may be the one most needed, but stimulating growth by supplying just iron depletes the ocean of the other needed nutrients, so you stimulate growth in the seeded area and depress it elsewhere.

Seeding with volcanic ash provides a fuller range of required nutrients.

The world has always been in a state of change. It seems to be a widely believed falsity that there is a magic ideal environment for all of its species. The world changes, species die, other species take their place.

> It seems to be a widely believed falsity that there is a magic ideal environment for all of its species

The thing everyone is talking about and thing we need to address is called anthropogenic climate change, which specifically refers to the damage we humans do to the environment, the long term changes, uncertainty and instability we risk with that damage, and the damage already done.

> The world changes, species die, other species take their place.

Nobody argues against that, because that's simply not where the conversation is at. Anthropogenic climate is caused by humans, it comes to the detriment of humans, and it is in the interest of humans to prevent as much of it as we can. As it stands, we are polluting and destroying our home, and the home of future generations.

It's in our interest for species not to go extinct and to preserve as much biological diversity as possible, it's in our interest for the oceans not to be polluted, it's in our interest for the weather to stay somewhat stable and predictable. It is in our best interest for our pollution not to compound for another 100 years.

If the externalized, emotional appeal doesn't work for you, that's fine and I am very much in that camp with you. But for entirely rational and selfish reasons, human-caused climate change is something that we desperately need to address, hoping to avoid the worst of what could be ahead of us.

Sure, there are individuals and interest groups who are trying to appeal to emotions via the damage and suffering we're causing, talking about the poor animals and the forests burning down and the coral reefs disappearing, but in the end, you're right:

Earth doesn't care.

Humans on the other hand have every reason to care about sustainability.

Any thoughts on species Homo sapiens surviving?

Yeah, have you seen TikTok?

Or maybe, we could not do that.

I like solutions that are simple... Sprinkling dust is in that category.

Can’t we just institute population controls? I feel like that’s a higher confidence path to curb emissions while not requiring a change in quality of life.

No, that’ll neither work to solve the problem, nor would it work as a matter of practicality.

We either need to get to 0 net emissions pretty much now, or negative emissions in the not too distant future. Even if we cut the world’s population by half through very unethical means, and did nothing else, we’d still be in trouble. We’re going to have to push forward and innovate our way out, most likely.

dumping ashes in the ocean will work much better....

Do you really think the the large part of human population around the world living in extreme poverty (multiple billion people) are the problem? As one poster said, if they do transition to "middle class" (whatever that means to them) then they will become part of the climate problem. But right now, the problem lies with us, our hyper-capitalist and super corrupt western societies. Don't distract from that with whataboutism to Africa. Currently, we (meaning western countries, not just geographically, I would count China for example as a western country as well, since to me "western" is a financial/economic definition, not a geographical one) are the problem, not the people living in mud huts, drinking water that Nestlé seized and now sells to them.

Is this sarcasm? Population controls are a massive change to quality of life for most people.

It depends what sort of population control is being suggested. Already, most people live in countries with less than replacement fertility (i.e. with a total fertility rate (TFR) below 2.1 births per woman).[0]

That means if someone wants developed countries to reduce their population, they are really arguing for stricter limits on immigration, and possibly for those developed countries to use economic pressure to make people in poorer countries have fewer children.

Even if the people advocating for that aren't motivated by racism, colonialism, or eugenicism, it might be difficult to convince people of their good intentions.

[0] https://ifstudies.org/blog/half-the-worlds-population-is-rea...

> Even if the people advocating for that aren't motivated by racism, colonialism, or eugenicism, it might be difficult to convince people of their good intentions.

It's enough to let them starve.

I am thinking out loud here but I am imagining a simple tax. If someone wants to have a child they pay a massive offset fee. Put another way people have to give up spending on other things or create more value for society (earn more income) to have that right. Perhaps this cutoff can be decided on a per country basis to get every country on board. It’s either that or we rely on a very complex series of technological and policy changes that are potentially not going to work out and will cause everyone to live more limited lives of restraint rather than live freely.

It is already expensive to raise a child, which puts off many of the people[0] who would otherwise make great parents, so I think you need to consider whether your simple tax would in practice mean that only the rich could have children (and whether those people would be too busy "creating more value for society" to focus much on their children's upbringing).

[0] https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2021/10/10709356/women-fert...

> in practice mean that only the rich could have children

Yes that is what it might mean, but that also seems like the right incentive to me. I would argue the rich are more deserving of having children in a world with constraints. Wealth is money accumulated by getting others to voluntarily give it to you in return for valuable goods or services. Therefore it is very literally a measure of value to society. It seems morally justified to let those who produce more value to have the privilege of raising children if we have to limit it. Also, I don’t think those parents would necessarily be too busy - most probably work 9-5 like anyone else.

I don't even know where to begin, so instead I am going to pose a question that will hopefully lead to you re-evaluating your views:

How do you reconcile the concept of land ownership, inheritance, and rent-seeking with your world view?

Can you be more direct about your point instead of posing this question? I’m not sure what you’re getting at. If your point is that some people inherit wealth, then I see no problem with that both because the vast majority of the rich are self made and because it is completely valid for someone to work hard to leave their descendants with a better situation.

You literally said "Wealth is money accumulated by getting others to voluntarily give it to you in return for valuable goods or services.", so are you saying that being the child of a billionaire means you are providing them the valuable service of being an heir? It seems like the barrier to entry to providing that "service" is pretty high, and society might want to regulate that market to make it more efficient.

It's true that the majority of the rich are considered self-made[0] (although one in three are not) but it's also true that children of rich parents are at an advantage compared to children of poor parents, meaning people don't get an equal start in life. One study estimates that "adult children tend to earn another $0.33 for every dollar their parents earn".[1]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...

expensive real estate is already working as a child tax. you want to raise kids - you need a bigger house, and with prices skyrocketing fewer and fewer parents are able to afford a child

Niger has the highest fertility rate in the world[1]. As far as I know, they don't live in palatial affordable mansions there. How are they managing to afford all those children?

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer...

not all those children survive, thats the reason

> Already, most people live in countries with less than replacement fertility (i.e. with a total fertility rate (TFR) below 2.1 births per woman).

This is a textbook example of what unsustainable means. In the long run most people will live in the countries with the highest fertility rates.

I’m suggesting that instead of creating a web of complex restrictions and bans, why not just create a simple system that replaces all that complexity by altering a single input into the pollution equation? Fewer humans means less consumption and emission. The humans that do exist will live in relative freedom instead of being subject to authoritarian restrictions on their every action.

Most developed nations are not growing anymore in terms of population so this is essentially already happening without any government intervention.

The vast majority of net-new carbon emissions over the next 30 years are going to be the 4 billion people in the developing world who are transitioning into the middle class.

Population controls (especially in the developed world) would be 100% pointless. Unless you're talking about invading and sterilizing people in developing countries... and I really hope you're not.

No, just countries building stronger borders to prevent ecological and economic migrants from escaping the countries that don't have enormous wealth as a buffer against change.

Population controls won't fix our emissions problems. A bunch of our emissions are from things that won't suddenly stop even if we drop population growth to 0, like manufacturing and power generation.

Wouldn’t a smaller population consume less goods and power?

In the long run yes, however, (a) realistic population controls would likely mean a stable population, not a much smaller one, so that doesn't help much for deceasing consumption; and (b) even with totally unrealistic population controls (e.g. zero births worldwide) the population decrease would be slower than the time scale in which we need to reduce emissions - zero births would mean a population decrease of less than 1%/year (currently 60m deaths/year over 7.8 billion, the world skews young-ish so the death rates don't match what you'd expect from life expenctancy) but we need an emissions decrease of 1.5%-2%/year to keep the global warming in reasonable limits.

A smaller population would consume less goods and power, but since we need much less carbon emissions, achieving that through a population decrease alone would require a much smaller population i.e. so much extra death that IMHO that would be more horrible than the consequences of any climate change.

The population of China is expected to halve in 45 years. Japan down to 1/3rd of its currently level by century’s end. We are doing it already, no need to impose a heartless bureaucracy over it.

The climate has always changed and will always change, that's never been the real problem.

The real problem is raping the planet for profit.

These so called solutions are little more than excuses to keep on doing it.

Not so. We’re not getting to 0 pollutants any time soon, so to reach a net 0 (or negative) amount of carbon we’re going to need to remove what’s already there.

We don't need to get to 0, we need to start giving a shit about anything but profit and stop making excuses.

This is exactly it. The wealthy and powerful of our world want to continue their reckless and rampant exploitation of the planet for profit; bullshit solutions like these are what they come up with because they want to keep doing what they're doing, earth be damned.

That's why the solution isn't these absolutely absurd "solutions", but rather in destroying the power of the profit motive, reorganizing our economic model based on rational resource allocation rather than chasing infinite growths and profits for the 1%.

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