From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sun Dec 01 2002 - 15:28:09 MST
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> Spike,
>
> You may want to take a look at:
>
> http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Papers/GWiaRH.html
>
> I don't think your numbers come out close to mine.
> I'm not sure where the problem is though in my brief examination.
>
> Robert
Robert I looked over your paper and it goes
into a lot more detail than my back of the envelope
one significant digit calcs. There seems to be a curious
non-sequitur in there about the total mass of all the
products of the planet being lower than the mass of
the carbon removal needed to return the atmospheric
CO2 to prehistoric levels.
First of all, we neednt use an industrial process of
any kind, and secondly, that number is annual product
mass. I figure we took a few centuries to send that
carbon up there, we neednt be in any desperate rush
to get it back down.
You bring up a very good problem with my notion of
growing a forest where currently there is a desert
to soak up CO2. Wood contains more than carbon, hydrogen,
nitrogen and oxygen. It also has phosphorus. So we
need to mine a whole bunch of that stuff, perhaps from
the bottom of the sea. Seems to me that the sea bottom
must be under a constant shower of dead animal stuff,
every cell of which contains phosphorus that is locked
up in a form that does not quickly decay, such as bones.
The sea bottom must be rich in phosphorus, which we will
need to fertilize our new forest. Perhaps we could get
tricky and learn how to recover phosphorus from wood
and make something useful in the process.
We both got the same answer with regard to the mass of
carbon to be scrubbed, you said 5E13 kg, I said 1E14 kg,
within a factor of 2 is close enough. Also my conservative
swag takes into account the other mass in wood besides
carbon, so lets just say 1E14 kg of wood, thats 1E10
big trees, and yes I do think we could put something
like that into place with nothing technologically more
tricky than pipes and canals. We just hafta stop wasting
fresh water into the damn sea.
But Robert (J not N), you have flown over this country
and looked down, you know how much empty wasted space
there is. We *can grow* ten billion new trees, honest
we can.
The tree-huggers should love that solution too. If they
hug one tree per second, they would be at it for over
300 years, plus there would be lots of new habitat
for the endangered double breasted fleep bleater. For
that matter we could transplant every endangered species
into that area, and let them cheerfully (if illegally)
devour each other.
Lets grow a biiiig new forest.
spike
ps I did a googlefight and found that the Kyoto agreement
was less popular than sexually transmitted disease.
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