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Comment by jeejay | Hacker News Reader

I have an impression that in recent years MIT produces much ado about nothing. In that particular case, capture method requires energy input from, let me guess, coal burning? Moreover, you can't trick chemistry: more efficient capture implies higher affinity of CO2 towards this "CO2 battery". Higher affinity means that more energy would be required for regeneration of the "battery".

From chemistry point suggested process is indistinguishable from the following process: pass air over CaO or Ca(OH)2 solution to turn it into CaCO3. Heating of CaCO3 will release CO2 thus regenerating CaO, which could be reused again. This process would require energy input — like MIT tech.

Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing. More CO2 in atmosphere means more carbon will be available for capture by plants, which means more crops and trees.

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It only means more crops and trees if you magically don't get other effects like drought, heat stress, erosion from drought followed by torrential rainfall, loss of icecap melt for irrigation, invasive insects and disease, and forest fires, all of which we're seeing quite a bit.

And of course we have ways to produce energy now without burning fossil fuels.

I should admit that my specialty is chemistry and not environmental science so it is hard to make arguments here. Just a few comments: - it should be proven that these other effects are the causes not correlations. - what invasive diseases you are talking about? smallpox or syphilis? - drought was always a thing, e.g. great famine of 1921 in USSR was caused by it. That was way before modern levels of global warming. - There were at least 5 ice ages. Are the humans responsible for their endings?

I am convinced that climate is changing — just not fully convinced what is the human role in it.

Since you have a science background, I'll strongly recommend the recent short book The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence Krauss, which details how our CO2 emissions change the planet's temperature. It's fairly basic thermodynamics and was predicted with decent accuracy over a century ago.

Also there are several chapters in Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren that go into the geological record, with multiple lines of evidence that all point to a similar sensitivity of the planet's average temperature to CO2 levels.

(Regarding invasive diseases, I meant primarily things affecting forests.)

Citation Needed;

> Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing.

This runs counter to everything we know about climate change.

Check Lehninger "Principles of Biochemistry". RuBisCo (most abundant enzyme in nature) fixates CO2 before they could be turned into sugars but this enzyme operates in suboptimal conditions at current CO2 concentrations. Thus increased CO2 concentration would improve crop yields.

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