Because it’s a bandaid on an arterial bleed of a problem and has its own host of issues (anoxia once the algae blooms die off being one of the big ones, aside from the cost of actually doing it on a global scale). Lots of discussion around whether it makes sense to do, but really for the effort to do it, and the unintended effects on the environment, it would probably be better and cheaper to just reduce GHG emissions.
Well, why not? Any replacement power generation or transportstion systems will require construction and maintenence, just like any other project.
The actual choice, is
- we either act proactively, or
- our remnant ( if any ) regret, retroactively.
This isn’t consensus for a simulation/model, this is actual historical fact:
- Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19798
They’re ignoring methane, and they’re stating, explicitly, that at our current atmospheric CO2, the planet historically stabilized at between +5C & +6C.
When one factors-in the added methane, 1.3ppm to 1.4ppm, at 82.5x factor, we’re actually between +8C & +9C planet-equilibrium-temperature for our current atmosphere.
-4C put 2 miles thick of ice on North America: planet-degrees are BIG.
Humankind simply is either too devoutly-ignorant or too stupid to live, from the looks of it.
After it has happened, oh, then humanity’ll admit it ought do something…
Utterly retarded, and the obliteration-of-billions-of-lives it is setting-up the enforcing of, is needless.
Any fix on symptoms will only give the worst offenders more excuses to increase emissions. See carbon capture and carbon credits. It’s already being used as an excuse to not do anything real about the problem.
Because band aide solutions are just bullshit distractions. We need less emissions and we need it yesterday.
I think we’re past just lowering emissions. We need to find ways pull some of the co2 out of the atmosphere.
I apologize because I don’t have a source in mind, but my recollection from studying this in grad school (which was admittedly about a decade ago) was that sequestration was one of the hardest parts of this. Creating a bloom of algae was feasible, but even if we ignore a lot of other ecosystem management complications that others have pointed out, there wasn’t a reliable mechanism to convert a bloom of algae into a long-term carbon store.
I could be mistaken here. I’m open-minded towards this kind of geoengineering. But I’m also very skeptical that if this could work, it could do so at a rate that would enable us to continue burning fossil fuels at scale, and there is a strong base of support for this technology among people with that attitude.
Yup, we already know what we should be doing, stop using fossil fuels. The IPCC took into account carbon sequestration in their models, they said we should invest in renewable energies and eco-sufficiency (not sure if it’s the right word, but they chose “sobriété” un french)
Check out GeoGirl on YouTube, she has an excellent video about this. https://youtu.be/IYOTFuklRvI
She also has a lot of other videos where she describes different geological processes and their interconnectedness.
