Another Ocean Climate Solution Attempted by California Researchers (apnews.com) 84
The Associated Press visited a 100-foot barge moored in Los Angeles where engineers built "a kind of floating laboratory to answer a simple question: Is there a way to cleanse seawater of carbon dioxide and then return it to the ocean so it can suck more of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to slow global warming?"
The technology, dubbed SeaChange, developed by the University of California Los Angeles engineering faculty, is meant to seize on the ocean's natural abilities, said Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA's Institute for Carbon Management. The process sends an electrical charge through seawater flowing through tanks on the barge. That then sets off a series of chemical reactions that trap the greenhouse gas into a solid mineral that includes calcium carbonate — the same thing seashells are made of. The seawater is then returned to the ocean and can pull more carbon dioxide out of the air. The calcium carbonate settles to the sea floor.
Plans are now underway to scale up the idea with another demonstration site starting this month in Singapore. Data collected there and at the Port of Los Angeles will help in the design of larger test plants. Those facilities are expected to be running by 2025 and be able to remove thousands of tons of CO2 per year. If they are successful, the plan is to build commercial facilities to remove millions of tons of carbon annually, Sant said...
Scientists estimate at least 10 billion metric tons of carbon will need to be removed from the air annually beginning in 2050, and the pace will need to continue over the next century... According to the UCLA team, at least 1,800 industrial-scale facilities would be needed to capture 10 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year, but fewer could still make a dent.
The article notes alternate ideas from other researchers — including minerals on beaches that increase the ocean's alkalinity so it can absorb more carbon dioxide.
But this SeaChange process also produces hydrogen. So the director of UCLA's Carbon Management institute also founded a startup that generates revenue from that hydrogen (and from "carbon credits" sold to other companies) — hoping to lower the cost of removing atmospheric carbon to below $100 per metric ton.
Plans are now underway to scale up the idea with another demonstration site starting this month in Singapore. Data collected there and at the Port of Los Angeles will help in the design of larger test plants. Those facilities are expected to be running by 2025 and be able to remove thousands of tons of CO2 per year. If they are successful, the plan is to build commercial facilities to remove millions of tons of carbon annually, Sant said...
Scientists estimate at least 10 billion metric tons of carbon will need to be removed from the air annually beginning in 2050, and the pace will need to continue over the next century... According to the UCLA team, at least 1,800 industrial-scale facilities would be needed to capture 10 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year, but fewer could still make a dent.
The article notes alternate ideas from other researchers — including minerals on beaches that increase the ocean's alkalinity so it can absorb more carbon dioxide.
But this SeaChange process also produces hydrogen. So the director of UCLA's Carbon Management institute also founded a startup that generates revenue from that hydrogen (and from "carbon credits" sold to other companies) — hoping to lower the cost of removing atmospheric carbon to below $100 per metric ton.
Plant More Plants (Score:4, Insightful)
And quit spewing shit into the air in the name of money.
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I was unaware that planting trees and reducing CO2 emissions was the same as "starving your children". Guess I learned something today.
As a side note, if you're that concerned about your children, you might consider that if things continue to get worse in the world of climate change, your children, or their children, very well COULD starve because they won't be able to afford the limited food that still exists. So there's that...
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Planting plants is nice. I have planted many trees and hope to plant more when I have the land to do so.
But "planting trees" is not a solution to global warming. Even if every available space is planted with trees, only a few percent of CO2 emissions will be mitigated.
Here is a list of the solutions to global warming that will actually work:
1. Stop burning fossil fuels
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Ok. That's just silly. I'm highly critical of the costs and unsolved problems, not to mention slowness and lack of flexibility of fission power plants, but it is simply not true that they require more fossil fuel energy than they put out. They don't require zero, since uranium mining is not done with all electric equipment, but they don't use more than the reactors put out. Also, the energy required for the blades for wind towers is not greater than the towers put out and the amount of waste from the used b
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When I was a younger lad, I planted various trees at the family home.
I heard from my ex-neighbour that the new owner of the property razed the entire 1/4 acre block of any vegetation to build his dream McMansion in a million dollar renovation. Some people just like concrete, I guess.
Thus, my personal emissions make absolutely no difference in the overall scheme of things.
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Concrete is double bad here. Cement generates a lot of CO2, but also all of it may block rain water from soaking into the ground to replenish the water table.
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If the McMansion is made of wood, it is sequestering a lot of carbon.
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It's interesting and quite sad that your comment was modded flamebait. Clearly we do need to stop burning fossil fuels, there isn't really any serious scientific debate over that.
Some people who object to that seem to have been scared into thinking that it means a worse quality of life, even though less pollution and being able to charge your vehicle at home is clearly better. Same for heating and of course air conditioning - last time I checked electricity is the only way to actively cool your home.
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Planting plants is nice. I have planted many trees and hope to plant more when I have the land to do so.
But "planting trees" is not a solution to global warming.
That is completely correct. Unless the resulting biomass is sequestered, that carbon is returned to the atmosphere when the plant matter rots. Or when insects that eat it emit methane.
I think a lot of people don't think that process out. Yes, rotting wood does not emit CO2 at the rate that burning it does, and some of the release back into the atmosphere goes through different pathways. AKA termite and other insect farts.
But unless sealed up like coal seams, it makes it's way back to the atmosphere.
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Eventually, yes, a planted tree dies and rots and decomposes, but not for a long time. Palm trees live around 50 years, some cedar trees can live up to 3,500 years. While the tree is alive, it's carbon is sequestered and as it grows it sequesters more and more carbon, albeit slowly. Even after it dies, it's carbon can be sequestered in rotting wood for a long time,
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Eventually, yes, a planted tree dies and rots and decomposes, but not for a long time. Palm trees live around 50 years, some cedar trees can live up to 3,500 years. While the tree is alive, it's carbon is sequestered and as it grows it sequesters more and more carbon, albeit slowly. Even after it dies, it's carbon can be sequestered in rotting wood for a long time, and some of it's needles or leaves can wind up as part of the soil. My house, for example, is mostly made up of still-sequestered carbon from dead trees. Trees can also reproduce, helping to sequester more carbon even after they are gone.
Sure. It's carbon cycle. I'm all about planting trees, but not for that reason. But ask the basic schmoo, and they think that the tree takes in the carbon, and problem solved.
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Re: Plant More Plants (Score:2)
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A lot used to be held in old growth forests, rain forests, etc. Clear cutting them has released a significant amount of CO2. Planting a tree in the back yard isn't a big deal. But stopping a forest for being cut down can make a significant difference.
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A lot used to be held in old growth forests, rain forests, etc. Clear cutting them has released a significant amount of CO2. Planting a tree in the back yard isn't a big deal. But stopping a forest for being cut down can make a significant difference.
Let's just note that it all depends on the timeline. As we all should know, fires in forest and plain are a natural and necessary part of nature. Regenerate the soil. I allways wonder what the folks who think that the fix is more trees for the express purpose of Storing carbon think when they find out that their stored carbon has to be burned in preventative fires, or it builds up and eventually destroys the whole forest?
Would they get stressed out about the Yellowstone fires of 1988, which were direct
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But look at things like the Amazon, huge amounts cut down for farms. Most land for timber eventually switched to a model of planting more trees, just to be practical, but for a long time clear cutting was common. I grew up near the Sequoia National Park, and there were so many sequoias cut down that the remaining large ones were few enough to be given individual names. Forest fires did very little damage compared to what people did.
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I wish I could find the article...but the point it made was that in the terms of the carbon cycle, even something as large of the Amazon is still considered an active carbon cycle. It absorbs AND releases carbon, and that's built into current climate. Even burning down a huge chunk of the Amazon is a relatively small amount of carbon when compared to sources of Greenhouse gasses that are not part of the carbon cycle. Fossil fuels, by contrast, are carbon sources that have been removed from the carbon cycle
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If planting plants is hard, at the very least stop cutting them down! Ie, stop clearcutting forests to make room for farms. But, but... won't those farms feed the starving children? No, these farms are cheap land for putting in junk like palm oil, and the land cleared by burning, and sometimes the farms are mines instead.
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Unfortunately, planting trees in the required number is far out of reach and very difficult. Most "plant a tree" project do in fact only produce dead saplings. It is a "feel good" measure that accomplishes basically nothing.
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What an ignorant, defeatist attitude. I see they have already brainwashed you into believing that load of shit.
If someone is getting nothing but dead saplings then they are a fucking idiot that shouldn't be planting trees to begin with.
Also I said plants. Trees are just a subset of plants.
Try harder next time.
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Bullshit. Have a look at actual facts before completely disgracing yourself.
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Facts from a bunch of liars? OK. What the fuck ever.
We have so much desert on this planet that could be turned into farmland and forests if we would just irrigate it. Running water through pipes is easy. Getting people off their lazy asses to do it is another matter.
It will make a difference if we can just eliminate the stupid lazy people. When was the last time you grew some plants?
But I guess you get paid to spread bullshit so passionately.
Re: Plant More Plants (Score:2)
Sure, "just irrigate the deserts". With the last drops from our depleted aquifers, or maybe by building a thousand-mile long pipeline and clusters of desalination plants & large solar+wind farms to power them? A few billions later, we now have wet sand.
Plants also need fertile soil to grow in, with microbial populations to fix nitrogen, and an ecosystem of pollinators etc to support them. Greening the desert is a massive task - but attempts are indeed being made, like the Great Green Wall of China [wikipedia.org]. Whic
Re: Plant More Plants (Score:2)
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Why don't you move to Venus then? By your logic, the place should be a veritable veggie smorgasbord.
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There is absolutely no danger of plants running out of CO2. I know that's one of the darling arguments of climate change denialists, that CO2 is good for the earth because plants like it and somehow this will result in healthier forests, but please spare us your feigned interest in plant health. If you're worried about billions of years of evolution, perhaps consider instead having some concern for the steep temperature changes that have occurred over that last 100 years. That's a time frame that evolution
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"Forever" is a really long time, that's not happening. And this would have to happen on a massive scale just to offset what we're currently adding, much less get the atmosphere back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. In 2022, we emitted over 1100 tons of CO2 per second.
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Yeah, looks like we're at a real risk of dipping below that critical percentage. Tell you what, if we figure out a way to have machines pull that CO2 out of the atmosphere and things start dipping dangerously, we'll turn them off...not as if they're going to just keep running on their own.
https://climate.nasa.gov/clima... [nasa.gov]
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It's been lower than that in the last two million years. Or maybe you are just talking nonsense.
Ooooh oooh, pick me, pick me, I'll take a guess. It's "they're making shit up" isn't it?
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Indeed. If we had global warming over 100'000 years, this would be mostly a non-issue. But we have it over 100 years. Most plants will simply die from too fast changes in temperature, irrigation and other factors. What remains will be hardy plants that are already very flexible. No food crop falls in that class.
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Polar bears changing behavior isn't evolution, it's an animal changing behavior. Just like me shopping at Target instead of Fred Meyer or starting to eat chicken instead of fish isn't evolution. They're doing the best with what they have right now, but their biology is essentially unchanged. They can adapt as best they can, because they're still smart and somewhat flexible animals, but those aren't genetic changes.
You may be correct that when looking at a forest and seeing which trees survive a large die of
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That then sets off a series of chemical reactions that trap the greenhouse gas into a solid mineral that includes calcium carbonate
Where does the calcium come from? The sea water? We pull enough out of there and the calcium equilibrium changes. And maybe the coral reefs dissolve.
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Indeed. Pulling calcium out of seawater increases acidity, which in many ways is worse than the dissolved CO2.
The standard way to deal with this is to heat treat the CaCO3 to turn it into lime: CaO, and sequester the CO2 separately. But that is energy intensive.
The money spent on this scheme would do far more good if it were instead spent on wind turbines or solar panels.
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Basically all carbon capture projects are exceptionally experimental at this time. Some may eventually become viable, but most are simply done to keep up the illusion that we still have options that allow us to keep pumping out more CO2 so that some already incredibly rich assholes can get even richer.
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These people are going to keep on messing with things they don't fully understand and eventually there will be unintended consequences. Less CO2 in the air means less plant food to eat. This cycle is billions of years of evolution that they are messing up.
Some times speaking the truth gets you modded as troll, my man! Everything you wrote is precisely correct, yet you offended someone.
I think there should be an "I'm offended!" mod for people.
We have created a mess, and the concept of monkeying with the atmosphere via purposeful sulfur aerosol injection, or Ironing the oceans, or this scheme is just a terrible idea. As well, ima bet that this is going to take a lot more than 1500 of these wunderfacilities to remove 10 billion metric tons of Carbon from t
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Well, yes. A few plants will do pretty well in some places. Unfortunately, typical crops and many naturally growing plants are not compatible with the other changes that more CO2 brings with it and the changes are orders of magnitude too fast for plants to adapt. The "unintended consequences" come from too much CO2. This is an effort (probably doomed to failure) to reduce the unintended consequences.
SnowPiercer ready for departure! (Score:2)
Get your tickets while they are available.
Build more nuclear power plants (Score:1, Troll)
California could easily reduce the level of CO2 in the ocean by building more nuclear power plants to replace the natural gas power plants they are building, or energy produced from fossil fuels that they import. On top of that they could build more water desalination so that the added salt acts as a pH buffer to the added CO2, which keeps the pH more stable. Of course the water desalination means more drinkable water for the citizens of California but that doesn't seem to rank high on their concerns.
Ther
Re:Build more nuclear power plants (Score:5, Informative)
If Californians truly cared about the environment then they'd be demanding more nuclear fission power plants.
We are demanding it. When polled, 58% of Californians [prnewswire.com] want to keep Diablo Canyon running.
The folks pushing back hardest against nuclear power are the companies that are running them, because they're much more regulated and harder to keep running than natural gas peaker plants, and they don't want to have to fool with it. They don't want the ongoing risk or the ongoing regulatory oversight.
Oh, and demanding more water desalination would not hurt.
I've been saying this for about two decades. The problem is largely one of political will.
On the one hand, you have a group of fringe environmentalists who won't settle for anything less than a perfect solution, and who are not-so-secretly hoping that an upcoming water shortage drive people out of California so that there will be fewer people and more pristine land and water. They're willing to destroy California's agriculture and potentially let people die if that's what it takes to make this happen.
Fighting against them are all the people with common sense, who realize that at some point, we're going to have a drought that is so bad that conservation won't get us through it, and in the meantime, we're paying some of the highest water bills in the country.
Caught in the middle are the politicians. They look at the whole situation and think to themselves, "Chances are, the drought will be over before this desalinization plant gets finished, and then I'll look bad for spending money on something that we don't immediately need. And if the drought doesn't end, then someone else will probably be in office by then anyway, and the water shortage will be their problem to solve." And so the easiest choice is to do nothing and claim that you're refusing to build the plant because you care about the environment. Win-win.
And this is why so many critical things never get done in California. You can apply pretty much the same problem description to a wide range of other projects with only minor changes....
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Yes, a big problem is that nuclear power is damned expensive. They take forever to build and maintenance is non-stop. Imagine how a utility who cuts corners daily to increase profits would treat a nuclear plant maintenance. Let's hope the smaller nuclear plants prove viable. Also, renewable energy is catching on fast.
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For example, May I hold up the 'honorable' Kevin De Leon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_de_Leon
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If Californians truly cared about the environment then they'd be demanding more nuclear fission power plants. Oh, and demanding more water desalination would not hurt.
"Californians" is a weird way to spell "politicians"
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building more nuclear power plants
Except that nuclear plants take decades to build and are far more expensive than any other energy source.
After the financial debacles at Hinkley, Vogtle, Summer, and Olkiluoto, nobody will invest in nukes again until there is a reason to believe that "next time will be different."
more water desalination
Oh please. "Desalination" to solve California's water problems is profoundly stupid. It costs $1 per cubic meter to desalinate seawater, while water from the Colorado River is sold to farmers at $0.07 per cubic meter.
The actual sol
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Except that nuclear plants take decades to build and are far more expensive than any other energy source.
In Western countries. Where regulations are made exactly so that the costs are completely disproportionate (due to the pressure of the anti-nuclear lobbies). And when we don't take into account the billions in damage that we lose each year due to climate change and fossil-fuel burning.
In other countries, like China, or even Japan, nuclear plants are less costly and take less time to build (6-7 years for China for instance, which has 150+ plants planned for 2035, and built over 50 in the last 15 years, on to
Re: Build more nuclear power plants (Score:2)
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building more nuclear power plants
Except that nuclear plants take decades to build and are far more expensive than any other energy source.
After the financial debacles at Hinkley, Vogtle, Summer, and Olkiluoto, nobody will invest in nukes again until there is a reason to believe that "next time will be different."
Indeed. There is absolutely no reason to believe next time will be different. In fact, while renewables and storage only get cheaper, nuclear gets more and more expensive.
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You are speaking sense (so you are getting moderated into oblivion), because desalination is what makes the Middle East habitable, and nuclear is what keeps the lights on in countries that may not have the fossil fuel reserves, and don't want to wind up another nation's bitch, trading sovereignty for cheap fuels.
The problem is that California politicians are focused on taking stuff away from the average person (while the rich always get a pass). They want to take away your car. They want to take away your
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I know you're leaving Fox, Tucker, but I think you can find a more viable venue for your act than Slashdot.
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Bullshit. Stop lying. Nuclear is now about one order of magnitude more expensive than renewable plus storage. Also, renewables and storage are only getting cheaper, while nuclear only gets more expensive, and is also exceptionally slow to build.
Do you _want_ to make climate change worse?
Cost effectiveness? (Score:2)
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is easy.
Doing it cheaply -- and without releasing more CO2 than you collect -- is the difficult part.
This proposed process need electricity production, which immediately makes me wonder whether it would be more efficient to use the same amount of (I assume) solar energy production for something else, like directly replacing a more polluting energy source.
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Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is easy.
Doing it cheaply -- and without releasing more CO2 than you collect -- is the difficult part.
This proposed process need electricity production, which immediately makes me wonder whether it would be more efficient to use the same amount of (I assume) solar energy production for something else, like directly replacing a more polluting energy source.
We see a lot of "new" techniques announced to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. All of them "work" but none of them scale unless we somehow have free electricity or "heat" or some other other form of free energy. If we had free energy, we wouldn't have needed to burn all those fossil fuels and got into this mess!
The only explanation I can come up with is that it's cheaper for the big fossil fuel companies to throw a few bucks at researching carbon sequestration, and making optimistic announcements, than it is
worthless approach to this (Score:2)
At every nuclear power plant that is cooled by sea water, simply capture the CO2 at the point where the water is heated. Cold sea water holds more than 26x CO2 than what the atmosphere does. And yet, at 100C, it holds far less than what the atmosphere does. It is tivial to extract and concentrate the CO2 from the sea water as a side effect of cooling a nuclear power plant. In addition, the water can be desalinated, while some of the b
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Cool plan bro. Only that the existing equipment cannot do it. Like at all. So nothing free here at all, rather exceptionally expensive as you either have to shut down the nuke for a long time or build a second cooling infrastructure.
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Now, these other groups use calcium to absorb the CO2 as a means of concentratting it and then have to heat it up to release it. And humorously, they release it with cement, so that it will absorb it. BUT, I have been wondering if the gas from above was added to the concrete, would it be enough to accomplish the same thing? T
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rather exceptionally expensive as you either have to shut down the nuke for a long time or build a second cooling infrastructure.
You obviously do not know about thermal power plants, let alone nuclear power plants. For those that are cooled by water reservoirs, it is brought up, compressed and ran by the steam pipes to pull heat out and cool the steam back into water, and finally, the coolant is decompressed and then dumped back into the water reservoir.
This means that it is trivial costs to add this part in, and no, they do not even have to shut down the nuke to do so.
Re: worthless approach to this (Score:2)
ofcourse. (Score:2)
So the director of UCLA's Carbon Management institute also founded a startup that generates revenue
Ofcourse he/she does, and I'll bet he/she already has some extra startups. Also I'll bet he/she takes a nice salary from that startup.
It's sucking something out of something, already (Score:1)
CO2/the ocean
Money/Investors
Potato...pohtahtoe
Where's the electricity coming from? (Score:2)
They must have plenty since they plan on selling the hydrogen instead of making MORE electricity with it.
A nuclear barge?
Don't tell me it's all solar.
What could go wrong? (Score:2)
Another tunnel-vision solution that boils down to "Try to fix a fucked up ecosystem by fucking with the ecosystem"
Sure it will work (Score:3)
It will work just as well as cleaning the barnacles off the Titanic worked.
Can you really trust scientists anymore? (Score:1)
Um, I think there's a phrase for that ... (Score:1)
Based on my back-of-the-napkin calculation, there is roughly 200 times more water in the ocean, by weight, than atmosphere.
Wouldn't it make more sense to try and remove the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere before trying to process the entirety of the oceans?
Basically a giant floating industrial coral (Score:1)
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