Comments on: Ecological Twofer

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By: Engineer-Poet

Engineer-Poet — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:33:20 +0000

There’s no reason for all the material for a space shield to be hoisted up from Earth; there’s plenty floating around in space.

Plankton farming is not going to be able to offset greenhouse warming due to methane emissions from e.g. Siberian permafrost dumping its clathrates. It takes about ten years to decompose to CO2, but there’s not much that could be done in the mean time.

By: Stephen Gordon

Stephen Gordon — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:07:03 +0000

EP:

The technical hurdles of a space shield would be immense. It would be a much bigger project than a space elevator – which you’d almost certainly have to have to make the project even close to feasible.

You get a space elevator (or many elevators) to get the material into orbit, and then have the shield self-assemble – then, maybe.

That’s a bit out of our reach at the moment. Plankton farming seems to be, quite literally, lower hanging fruit.

-Stephen

By: Pat

Pat — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:06:38 +0000

You’re assuming that CO2 has a significant impact on global climate and that global warming is actually occurring beyond the range of fluctuations experienced since, say, the end of the last ice age. Both assumptions are dubious.

Check out this chart of CO2 concentrations and global temperatures over the last 500 million years:

link

Sequestering CO2 in a process that could run out of control might be far worse than the presumed harm of slight increases in CO2 concentrations. CO2 is best viewed as “plant-food in the sky”. No CO2 = no plants = no life.

Burning fossil fuels is really just recycling Carbon back to where it came from hundreds of millions of years ago.

By: Engineer-Poet

Engineer-Poet — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 10:23:45 +0000

I’ll bite: why is the space shield a non-starter? (I need to see if I can turn my plot concept into an SF story about that.)

It occurs to me that the issue of deep-water oxygen depletion is a non-issue if most of the organic matter does not reach the deep ocean. The antarctic has upwelling, but tropical oceans might yield even more if they were fed nutrient-laden water via e.g. OTEC. And if the algae could be captured, or even turned into shrimp or fish protein, the potential productivity looks staggering.

The difficulty seems to be engineering algal growth and capture systems which can tolerate the “high energy” environment (waves and storms) of the open ocean.

By: Stephen Gordon

Stephen Gordon — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 08:00:22 +0000

Heh. "For a small price I can install this little blue button to get you down." Remember that we have to encourage the growth of plankton in the Southern ocean with iron supplementation. Just cut back on the iron and the plankton will die back.

By: Phil Bowermaster

Phil Bowermaster — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 07:33:41 +0000

On the global warming piece, is it a one-way switch? If the planet starts getting too cold can we somehow tell the plankton to knock it off?