[Terrapreta] Scrub CO2 from the atmosphere!

[Sean K. Barry]

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Hi Duane, Peter, et al.,

But some scientists say that the potential of such ideas cannot be ignored given the world's political paralysis on controlling emissions and its myopic addiction to cheap and dirty coal.

...

The attraction of a technological silver bullet lies in the failure of the world to solve global warming through the obvious solution: reducing emissions.


These are quotes from the article you cited, Duane.  I've seen more of this on the TED Talks site (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tags/id/59<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tags/id/59>). David Keith, Jim Hansen, Wallace Broeker, the IPCC, shows on National Geographic channel, the Discovery Channel, Frontline, and the History Channel are all beating this drum.  We must address the problem.  ANy mechanisms that work should be allowed to be tried.  Certianly some will be inefficient and not cost effective.  Hopefully the free market can crush this bullshit out of existence.

The world's people and particularly the world's politicians are addicted to FOSSIL CARBON and the cheap abundant energy, the wealth, and prosperity that it now provides.  The coal and oil interests and most politicians would have you called UN-AMERICAN and against the "American Way of Life" if you stand out and say it IS WRONG for us to continue to pump billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year!

But then what should we do?  These technologies that can "suck up" carbon, the ones that are not the obvious living ones that God designed and put on the Earth, plants, remind me of stupid things like ... driving down the highway in the middle of a hot summer day with all of the car windows wide open (because it is so hot) and the air conditioner blasting (because its so hot).  They will fall down as stupid and useless, eventually, even if tried.

We do need to see and do the obvious.  We MUST reduce and STOP (if we can) all emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere, pronto.  Then we have to grip the obvious again and make use of nature's plants, which have the most prevalent function to take up CO2 from the atmosphere.  Nature removes CO2 and "fixes" (temporarily albeit) some Carbon every year.

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This is an important and famous graph above.  The blue line is average annual atmospheric CO2 concentration.  The saw tooth red line shows the cycling of atmospheric CO2 concentration up and down through the calendar year.  It cycles down because as noted in the "Annual Cycle" graph below, Spring comes in April (to the northern hemisphere, where most of the land and terrestrial plants are) and a burst of plant growth takes up the CO2, reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  Then, in the Fall in about October, when the leaves begin to drop and the harvests are over, biomass left on the ground and in fields begins to decompose and release CO2 back into the atmosphere.
The constant upward pace of this natural saw tooth is the evidence of HUMAN CONTRIBUTION to CO2.  So, nature does remove CO2 from the atmosphere and puts it into GREEN PLANTS.

Now think like a Day Trader for a moment, while looking at this graph.  We want to make progress (make money) to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations in an environment where CO2 ZIG-ZAGs up continuously.  A Day Trader would see this and would "buy short" annually in April or May, then sell out in October, if they could make money when CO2 concentrations fell.  They would make progress against rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations by eating up all the small reductions, along the rising path.

I think this is an apt analogy for the what the formation of Terra Preta soils can do.  What we can do with making biochar from annual growth biomass that would decay anyway would effect this graph in our future.  If we took the dying biomass in October and made charcoal out of it and then took that biochar and invested it into the soil, we would "fix" that CO2 reduction.  There would still be a ZIG (the down stroke as the plants took up the CO2), but no ZAG.

Regards,

SKB




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