co2 emmission anhiliation !!!

hey guys wondering whats up with all your thoughts on the planets output of c02 emmisions? with newer technologies and some improvments in refined industiral produciton there will be lots of c02 emissions that will be curbed. also alternate methods to oil usage will be put into effect soon. however there is still a great amount of c02 still in the atmosphere and we are still emitting it on large scales. as far as my knowlegde goes there is tons of free carbon dioxide devouring material that are in plants known as photosythesis! well i pose the question would it be possible to harvest c02 in giant farms such as kelp or other plant life to take away from the emmisions??? here i drew a picture that should explain my idea.

with some netting to shield the kelp from fish you could grow GIAGANTIC farms to absorb tons of c02!!!!!



[edit on 8-9-2005 by John bull 1]

One flaw; it'll only remove CO2 from the area around it - the carbon dioxide that affects the atmosphere will still be there.

its still part of the atmosphere

earth atmosphere includes the entire earth

the ocean already obsorbs a great amount of c02 im just thinking of upping the anty

[edit on 6-9-2005 by sturod84]

But it will still only remove the carbon dioxide from the area around it at sea level. Any carbon dioxide from inland wouldn't be affected. If it's high up in the atmosphere, it can't be coaxed in coming down.

yes but the space will still be filled in with the remaining c02 in the atmosphere!

Nano technology could fix that prob, Nano will cause a technological revolution without precedent.

The water alone could solve most of our problems if it was put in the right places.
Like re-flooding all the peat swamps in Indonesian, and particularily the Central Kalimantan. These were drained so that they could grow rice, but now it turns out that the soil is too acidic or something and rice just can't grow under those conditions, Oooops....
Now these dry beds of peat burn and release long sequested carbon back into the atmosphere. Here's a good quote from Buzzle.com that shows just how much damage Borneo did over the last decade.

Fires in the region in 1997 released up to 2.7bn tons of carbon dioxide, the largest single release since records began in 1957, and equivalent of up to 40% of annual global emissions from burning fossil fuels, Dr Page told the Royal Geographical Society's meeting in London.

She said: "Tropical peatlands are vast stores of carbon that have accumulated over thousands of years. In a matter of months, peatland fires can liberate 1,000-2,000 years' worth of carbon.

The full article is worth a read,
www.buzzle.com...

Any time you destroy a rain forest and start working the land, right from when the first tree is slashed and burnt, the carbon is pouring into the atmosphere. This continues as the organic material below the forest, that is thousands of years old, is dried and burnt either on it's own or used as fuel. And I'm pretty sure that a hectare of cotton isn't absorbing and sequestering .00001% of the carbon that a healthy tropical jungle can. Not to mention the ecological diversity that that hectare of jungle would have in comparison to that field of monocultured, geneticaly altered cotton, soy beans, corn etc...........

Saddly this is not a problem that is isolated to Indonesia.


Another big contributer to global warming that could be solved with some drills and pumps, and a whole lot of water: Underground Coal Fires

China alone has a tremendous amount of coal fires that have been burning for many years, and very little is being done.

Coalmines all over the world are on fire! Often started by lightning or spontaneous combustion, some underground fires have been smouldering for thousands of years. But over the last few decades there has been a huge rise in the number of uncontrolled fires burning in the world's coal seams and waste dumps - because of humans. And the total carbon dioxide released by these fires is thought to be equivalent to all the car exhaust gases in North America in one year!

That's also a short article that is well worth reading, so here's a link to that:
www2.rnw.nl...

I can go on with this one, like in Pennsylvania:

The ruins of Centralia Pennsylvania no longer exists on some maps. The story began sometime in 1962 along the outskirts of town when trash was burned in the pit of an abandoned strip mine, which connected to a coal vein running near the surface. The burning trash caught the exposed vein of coal on fire. The fire was reported and thought to be extinguished but it apparently wasn't. The coal then began to burn underground. That was in 1962. For the next two decades, workers battled the fire, flushing the mines with water, excavating the burning material, backfilling, drilling again and again in an attempt to put the fire out or at least contain it. All efforts failed to do either. By the early 1980s the fire had affected about nearly 200 acres. An engineering study concluded in 1983 that the fire could burn for another century or even more and "could conceivably spread over an area of approximately 3,700 acres."

www.offroaders.com...

Underground coal fires are relentlessly incinerating millions of tons of coal around the world.

The blazes spew out huge amounts of air pollutants, force residents to flee their homes, send toxic runoff flowing into waterways, and leave the land above as scarred as a battlefield.

"A global environmental catastrophe" is how geologist Glenn B. Stracher described the situation.

www.post-gazette.com...


What really gets me is these are factors that we have some control over, and just by attacking these issues with all we've got, we could go a long way in giving our plant a much needed chance to slow global warming. Notice I said "slow global warming", we are beyond the point of stopping it.

One thing we can't control that will have a big impact will be the carbon release from the arctic regions as the melting continues. Already in Northern Canada the permafrost is melting away and changing the landscape. Lakes are seeping away at an alarming rate as the soil softens and alows the water to absorb into the surounding land. Underneath all this are billions of tons of carbon just waiting to be released. If I'm not mistaken, a fair amount of methane will go along with this release.

The original thread started about a kelp farm and I seem to have wandered away from the original idea, but I just wanted everyone to realize that the problem is much bigger than we think.

No offence to sturod84, but I can't see kelp farms being a viable way to extract the amount neccesary to make a difference.


Sorry about the spelling, I hammered this out in a hurry...........

You know, the critters in the ocean contribute so overwhelmingly much to the conversion of CO2 that one could burn down every plant in the world and not much would really change as far as the atmosphere would be concerned. Of course, you would have just rendered every living creature homeless and sent evolution back 2 billion years.

The inherent problem with trying to control the atmosphere is that... you can't really. In fact, all living creatures used to breath methane gas. These were just single-celled little buggers. As time progressed, the earth's atmosphere naturally shifted in its composition to a more nitrogen/oxygen rich environment, and only the critters that were able to adapt to using O2 for aerobics were able to keep living.

I am sure that the atmosphere is destined to change again and that we are just too dang complex to really change with it. So let's just ride it out until we choke.

no worries just an idea! now if there were a plant that would that would extract more then average amounts that might work, something like cyanobacteria that a scientist just invented to farm c02 out of factory emmisions, that might be able to be farmed on a massive scale as well. just thought that the kelp would be sufficient seeing as how our earth is made of 75% water with plenty of room for tons and tons of farms, granted the whole idea was laid out in a practical matter.

Originally posted by motionknight

Nano technology could fix that prob, Nano will cause a technological revolution without precedent.

what is with the latest facination with nano to solve all our current problems. The endemic reminds me of the frenzy that say 'it doesn't matter, god will make it all better in the end'. yeah ok. Nano is decades away. I want something that will be feasible in my lifetime.

There are already gigantic heaps of kelp in the ocean, no? What would be economical about this? How is a large corporation or individual going to profit or at least earn back in revenue the equivelant of the cost of operations from eliminating co2?

Besides, this takes care of the co2 near ocean level. There doesn't appear to be any chemical process in a kelp farm which will attract co2 from higher up in the atmosphere.

it would save a delay the need for huge procurments of other c02 emmision inititives! its a cumulative effort just like the technology being decided for the lessening that will bring huge differentials in our power generation.

Every once in a while I get one of these in a u2u:

A member of the forum staff, dbates, has applauded your activity on this thread titled, co2 emmission anhiliation !!!. Thank you for contributing to the quality of our forums. You received a 250 point bonus, keep up the good work. Do not reply to this U2U.

The last line always says "Do not reply to this u2u" so I never know how to give an appropriate "Thank-you" to the sender.

So now I'll do it in the thread that it originated from.

Thank-you dbates, I appreciate the recognition.