Hmm, we need more swamps. That\’s it.
You see, those coal beds that we\’re digging up and burning. They were created by trees falling over into swampy ground. Rather than their rotting completely and returning their contained carbon to the atmosphere (or the biosphere in general) they sequestered ther carbon into rock.
So, all we do is spray the forests with water, creating such swamps, and we\’ll sequester all that carbon again.
No?
ah, I used to wonder if the solution was to grow lots of trees and veg and bury it all in big pits. Sadly, I learnt that all that coal and oil was laid down in the carboniferous era before the evolution of bacteria that decompose dead veg and release the carbon.
Timk adds: I thought that was probably the flaw….
So we pour in a few hundred gallons of amoxicillin?
“I used to wonder if the solution was to grow lots of trees and veg and bury it all in big pits”
That’s how the dinosaurs did it. Sadly they spent all their time digging holes they didn’t see the asteroid coming.
Might be more humankind’s style to manage forests as we currently do and store the wood deep enough underwater to stop it rotting. Then bring it back up as and when the materials are needed.
It might be easier simply to encourage building stuff out of wood like we used to. You could lock up a lot of carbon in houses and furniture.
Er,
Why don’t we just chop the trees down, burn the wood, and plant some new trees?
Now of course the theory that CO2 causes anything is nonsense, but let me assume the false premise that it hots the place up.
Hurrah, hurrah. I live in Western Canada near the US border. We get under 200 growing days per year and right now its -27 degrees C at 6:30 PM and going down to maybe -30. Some few years ago in global time we used to be subtropical with ferns and dinosaurs and such.
So I’m burning every damn bit of locked in carbon I can. No downside for me. Seaside dwellers can bloody look after themselves in 5 or 6 hundred years when the sea rises.
Didn’t you Brits used to be able to grow grapes for wine? I mean back in the day when you had some common sense. How could you possibly oppose global warming in that cold no-central-heating place you call home?
Oh well, as we say in in the colonies, after you hear him speak, you can always tell an Englishman. But you can’t tell him much.
I tried to work out once if we could transition to a wood burning society. Looking at the total forest cover for the entire planet, logging it and then reducing it to charcoal. The economics of it are not my strong suit, in fact I didn’t bother with it, but a sustainable harvest of wood might be able to replace coal. We wouldn’t even have to change that much – you can partially burn charcoal in the absence of air and add water to produce hydrogen and CO which will work in a diesel engine. Not good for the engine though.