$25M Bounty Offered for Global Warming Fix 766
SaDan writes "Richard Branson is offering $25M as a bounty for a fix to global warming. The person or organization that can devise a method to remove at least a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere will be able to claim the bounty. There are a few catches, of course. There can't be any negative impact on the environment, and the payment will come in chunks. A 5 million dollar payout will be paid when the system is put into place with the remainder of the bounty to be paid after 10 years of continuous use."
Re:Good News, Everyone! (Score:2, Informative)
Grump, Environmental Scientist.
Yes, I really have a real degree in this field.
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:1, Informative)
So, you just need to plan 1.5 million square miles of Pine Trees.
(numbers from http://www.epa.gov/sequestration/faq.html [epa.gov] and google calculator)
That's more than the land mass of India. Good luck!
Re:Get rid of people. (Score:3, Informative)
Remember that the Americans still remain subjected to the same skillfully honed propaganda machinery.
One could argue that in the modern age of the Internet there is no excuse for being so gullible. Especially in the case of the Americans -- they have many of the world's papers and editorials available a mouseclick away in their own language!
Unfortunately, the Americans prefer TV. And seeing through propaganda isn't easy when it surrounds you all the time. So don't despise them.
One difference compared to the Iraq war is that with global warming the catastrophe will be on a far larger scale. This means that the embarrassment will be far, far greater than the embarrassment over Iraq.
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What happened to CO2 percentage vs. year graphs (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/02.htm [grida.no]
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/etc/graphs.html [pbs.org]
Your Google must be broken...
Re:What happened to CO2 percentage vs. year graphs (Score:3, Informative)
Worse if it is English Billions (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Plant a forest(s), among other things... (Score:3, Informative)
Trees will do this, but you'd need a hell of a lot of trees, since you have to compensate for the amount that gets released back when they die, lose leaves, get cut down and burnt, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
"one million of these trees will fix 0.9 teragrams of carbon dioxide" wikipedia claims this figure as over a 40 year lifespan.
Using that as a WAG (and assuming they are accounting for loss).
0.9 teragrams is 900,000 tonnes, so 22,500 tonnes for a million trees.
Your tree solution would require about 50 billion trees to win the prize.
Now, let's see how much space that would take.
Let's assume a tree requires 100 square metres of space - (tree in my front yard measures 10m*10m in google earth)
That's 500 billion square metres of land, or a chunk of land 707 kilometres on a side.
Again fiddling in Google Earth, 707 kilometres square is the entire North-East United States.
I'd say you can't afford to win his prize that way.
And in practical terms that only seems to handle a tiny fraction of mankind's total output.
I don't know if sequestering underground is any cheaper or more scalable, but at least it takes up less space.
Re:Yawn, Eco-Nazi talking about spending money... (Score:3, Informative)
Clinton did not sign the Kyoto agreement because the Senate voted 98-0 to reject it.
Re:Yawn, Eco-Nazi talking about spending money... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_l
Re:I'm sure we could (Score:3, Informative)
It's pronounced 'nucular.' Nu-cu-lar.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Dump iron dust in the ocean to feed the plankton (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/ecohackin
"Ecohacker Michael Markels claims he has a megafix for global warming: Supercharge the growth of ocean plankton with vitamin Fe and let a zillion CO2 scrubbers bloom."
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:3, Informative)
--
Don't burn coal http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Sequestering carbon in grassland soils (Score:2, Informative)
Grasslands can sequester enormous amounts of carbon in the form of soil organic matter, especially humus. Unless disturbed by plowing or poor land management, humus can remain stable for hundreds or thousands of years. Healthy grasslands can sequester considerably more carbon than forests, because grasslands can keep growing soils indefinitely. This is how grassland soils 1-4 meters (3-12 feet) thick -- the agricultural soils of today -- got built over much of the temperate zone.
Advantages of sequestering carbon with grasslands:
Let's do some calculations:
How do grasslands sequester carbon? Here's how it works:
This is how grasslands and grazers evolved to function. This type of "pulsed grazing" can sequester enormous amounts of carbon, and grow 10-30 mm of new soil per year.
Animal behavior is crucial
The trick to making this work is the behavior of the grazing animals. Grazers must behave in the ways grass plants are adapted to. That means moving onto the land in a tightly bunched herd (as wild grazers did because of predation), grazing and trampling intensively, then moving on and giving plants adequate time to recover before they get grazed again.
If grazer behavior is correct, the grasses don't much care whether they are grazed by bison, kangaroos, or cattle. If the behavior is incorrect (too-frequent grazing that weakens plants that are not yet fully recovered, or too-infrequent grazing that we
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm sure we could (Score:5, Informative)
Unless you have some calculations to back that up, I call BS. According to http://rredc.nrel.gov/tidbits.html [nrel.gov], "Every day, more energy falls on the U.S. than we use in an entire year." Since solar panels are more than 3% efficient (quick googling tells us the most advanced ones are over 35%), you fail it. Saying this is not possible is simply foolish, and it undermines your larger argument of whether it is advisable.
Geritol Effect (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yawn, Eco-Nazi talking about spending money... (Score:2, Informative)
-- From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
So, were you ignorant of this fact or just being disingenuous? Neither option lends much credibility to your opinions, I'm afraid.