Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tackle climate change

Re:Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tac... by Retric on Sunday October 31, 2021 @08:33AM (#29056515)

You can’t use every approach as iron seeding and this both do the same thing and the oceans are finite.

So this isn’t a 1% solution, it’s not even a 0.1% soliton it might be a 0.01% solution. “50,000 tonnes of tephra – a bulk carrier vessel’s worth – offshore could sequester 2750 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This, they said, equates to a cost of around £43 per tonne of carbon dioxide sequestered” assuming absolutely zero CO2 was released in the process.

Bulk carriers are quite efficient and could move 50,000 tons ~= 0.4 tons of CO2 per mile in a straight line. Which sounds fine except you can’t simply dump all 50,000 tons 1 mile off shore and expect anything useful to happen. If you can dump on average 50 tons per mile you just released ~400 tons to sequester 2750. And that’s assuming it somehow gets loaded and unloaded without releasing any extra CO2.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tac... by lugged on Sunday October 31, 2021 @10:35PM (#29062516)

You're ignoring that science improves and leads to further discovery.

It's perfectly fine if 0.00000001% of the population spends their lives on something that achieves nothing if a few of these lead to further developments.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tac... by Retric on Monday November 01, 2021 @02:44PM (#29071064)

0.00000001% of the global population is less than one person.

Which is kind of the issue, we need a significant fraction of the global workforce to solve climate change. Inefficiency is useless because we lack the economic capacity to solve climate change inefficiently.

[ Parent | on HN ]