Global Warming and CO2

well, the biggest CO2 sink we now have is the oceans and they operate absorption over their entire surface and various sea animals eat this CO2 and make shells and they sink into the abyss, so in time a babalce will ensue. As to man made methods

when you consider the huge volumes of CO2 made and the way it is dissipated the energy cost of extraction that CO2 from the air and dealing with it may well exceed the cost of the energy we got from the combustion process.

So only a few concentrated sources of CO2 will be amenable to this method.

About the only methods left to man are to stop burning it, however, we have the tragedy of the commons in operation here and no man will reduce his use for the common good because he benefits from the use and others benefit from the cuts.

Once the oil/coal is gone, a new balance will be struck. It will be warmer and hotter and we are stuck with it as we cannot and will not stop burning fuels

Any absorption scheme requires energy, either to sequester the gas,
or to produce the chemical to retain it, (NaOH -> NaCO3 eg.).
This energy must not be permitted to produce CO2 or the scheme fails.
Use of "CO2 free" energy that could otherwise be used elsewhere is
not productive.

About the only thing I've heard that sounds at all practical from an
"over-all effect" point of view is the encouragement of shell forming,
sinking or bottom dwelling, marine organisms.

One big problem we are now facing is the acidification of the oceans to the point where these small organisms can no longer make shells, and perish, leaving us with various gradual transport mechanisms(downwards diffusion, and surface layer descent due to colling, being about it). That will mean we will not have the large amount of shell building we have now, which is a lot larger that the gradual transport mechanisms.

More CO2 = more algae = more krill etc., so the base of the food chain will grow a lot larger, at least until some limiting nutrient is encountered, like iron.

Quite a complex situation. and now we have the loss of arctic ice even in winter, a very serious situation as it means accelerated warming.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10072-winter-arctic-sea-ice-in-drastic-decline.html

While his work is not well-publicized, Dr. Reed Jensen, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory Physicist, is presently developing and testing a working model of a solar-powered device to create hydrogen from CO2. His invention is exciting and you can get more details at his SOLAREC website, http://www.lare.us/.

Thank you for all comments.

Another question is "why dont we use more trees to absorb CO2?"

Why dont we get the third world to plant them and we pay them for it through taxes?

Its better then getting the third world to grow food which we then have to transport!!

Trees only lock up CO2 for the life of the tree, which then decays and is eaten by various things and metabolized into, of all things, CO2 with the animate and fungal mass being a steady state.

Best lockup that is natural is ocean fertilization, into those shells whcih sink, with the critical nutrients, one of which is iron. This would require one of the waste products of steel pickling, iron chloride, to be dumped at sea. The accompanying chloride and hydrogen ions being trivial, there is zero harm from this fresh water toxic waste(it cannot be dumped in FW lakes). The iron would catalyze an enormous bloom of biomass, on the order of 10,000 times the iron dumped. This biomass would be algae and them what eats them, these shelled critters. On top of this would be the krill and the rest of the food chain.

Most of the ocean exists in what is called an 'ocean desert' state. Almost nothing grows, nothing lives there = a type of desert. Areas where ocean current bring nutrients from the depths in the form of these trace minerals, like iron, is why the polar regions are so fertile. Temperate tropical and temperate fertile zones exits where seamounts etc lift abyssal currents to the surface with their nutrients.

Obviously you look for places where iron is the only missing item. You can also use iron rich earth, but unless finely powdered most of it falls to the bottom quickly.

This needs to be done ASAP.