Not As Crazy As It Sounds?

From the New Yorker's The Climate Fixers, a longish article on various geo-engineering schemes.

... the other [geo-engineering] approach is less risky, and involves removing carbon directly from the atmosphere and burying it in vast ocean storage beds or deep inside the earth. But without a significant technological advance such projects will be expensive and may take many years to have any significant effect.

There are dozens of versions of each scheme, and they range from plausible to absurd. There have been proposals to send mirrors, sunshades, and parasols into space.

Recently, the scientific entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold [above], whose company Intellectual Ventures has invested in several geoengineering ideas, said that we could cool the earth by stirring the seas.

He has proposed deploying a million plastic tubes, each about a hundred metres long, to roil the water, which would help it trap more CO₂.

“The ocean is this giant heat sink,’’ he told me. “But it is very cold. The bottom is nearly freezing. If you just stirred the ocean more, you could absorb the excess CO₂ and keep the planet cold.”

(This is not as crazy as it sounds. In the center of the ocean, wind-driven currents bring fresh water to the surface, so stirring the ocean could transform it into a well-organized storage depot. The new water would absorb more carbon while the old water carried the carbon it has already captured into the deep.)

That's far crazier than it sounds, and it sounds bat-shit crazy to begin with

 

Comments

[Mike Roberts]

Jeez!

Indeed it's bat-shit crazy anyway but what about ocean acidification? Sadly (almost) no-one cares about that, I suppose.