275 ppm (Target PPM, based on pre-industrial levels)
3210 gigatonnes - ((3210 gigatonnes / 410) * 275) = 1057 gigatonnes to remove.
Advertised scale: 4000 tons per year
(1057 gigatonnes / 4000 tons per year) = 264250000 years
reasonable timeline: 30 years
30 years / 264250000 years = 8808333x increase needed. Call it roughly 10^7 times faster.
So, a lot.
33,000,000,000 / 4408 = ~7486388 years to remove.
All the vegetation, land, and ocean can absorb about 17 Gt CO2 per year (Currently. Of course massively burning forests or increasingly carbon saturated oceans are going to significantly impact this equation as things get worse.)
So this technology would need to get at least 16,000,000,000 / 4408 = 3629764 times more effective just to keep things from getting any worse. And even so, this still seems like one of the more hopeful options because artificial capture could potentially be scaled much higher using less space than vegetation, given enough renewable energy. But even more efficient is simply emitting less carbon.
Who says this is the ideal level to be at?
If you have other opinions, by all means, do your own math :)
There are dozens, hundreds more studies, graphs, and other data to answer that question. At this point, due to the overwhelming amount of research data available, this kind of question should be considered as made in bad faith.
Al Gore made ridiculous claims back in 2008 about how bad it would get in just 10 years (making it seem that the trend was linear, which it isn't) and he was completely wrong on most of them - so the question I raise is very much valid.
The last time CO2 levels were at levels we see today humans had not evolved yet. The last time 1000ppm CO2 was in the atmosphere the apex predators were giant carnivorous birds.
We are looking at billions of deaths from climate change if we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow and tens of thousands of years until the climate returns to pre-industrial levels.
This seems to me to be the more absurd position. The challenge of “returning the climate to pre-industrial levels” is easily solvable without any magical technology with merely tens of trillions of dollars. Given a few decades additional progress in rocketry, perhaps only a low single digit trillion dollars per decade (indexed to current real value).
Assuming a materials science advancement which permits a functional space-elevator, or the ability to do some manufacturing on the moon, it gets significantly cheaper even than that.
The problem is per-capita consumption. The "westernization" of India and China is 2.5-3 billion people that want western consumption patterns.
Of course it is. Populations always eventually demand development, aka "westernization". So as the world population grows, so does the consumption.
This includes dairy + meat consumption, where about 70 billion animals are farmed for food each year right now. When someone brings up that humans are overpopulating the planet, I've never heard someone mention that overpopulating the planet with livestock is also an issue.
Someone always brings up agricultural emissions.
The Australian government talks about it directly here:
https://www.agriculture.gov.au/ag-farm-food/climatechange/au...