[extropy-chat] Global warming news

[Robert Bradbury]

On 3/25/06, Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Do you have an estimate of how much
> iron would be needed to generate enough biomass to store away 10^14 kg
> of carbon?


At any rate the numbers from the paper were:
a) U.S. pig iron production: 5.3 x 10^10 kg
b) Global Fe in biomass: 2.9 x 10^11 kg

Obviously world iron production is larger than the U.S. and oceanic
phytoplankton Fe is some fraction of total global biomass Fe.

The numbers are "fudged" by using human body mass composition in place of
microorganism mass composition though they shouldn't be too different (in
fact human bodies may require more iron because blood cells use it as an
oxygen carrier and microorganisms don't have that requirement).

(aeiveos.com seems down at the moment).


Aeiveos.com is up 90% or more of the time.  The problem is that the $!#$&
ISP (Verizon) filters port 80 accesses (thus vanilla http requests don't get
through).  Try:
    http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/
and tack on whatever path you need. That should give you access. Cow doo-doo
for brains Verizon doesn't realize that one can setup web servers (such as
apache) on any port one wants to.  There are times that Verizon changes the
IP address for aeiveos.com and it takes a while for the name servers to get
updated so that can cause problems as well.  I'll fix this all at some point
but right now it isn't a very high priority.

If anyone finds flaws or errors in my discussions, particularly in numbers I
cite or calculations, please let me know.

As I have explained -- my interest in these areas was motivated by a small
group of scientists actually going to the trouble to do ocean fertilization
(and publish the results in Science in 1998-2000) and so I really kept
wondering *why* is everyone harping about "global warming" when we already
know of one reasonably good solution.

What has *not* been published to my knowledge is a calculation showing how
many (i.e. what mass of) "dry" nanotech molecular gas sorters and what
energy cost would be required to solve the excess atmospheric CO2 problem.
I am reasonably certain that the mass and energy required *would* be
significantly less, probably by 2-5 orders of magnitude, than that which
would be involved in having oceanic phytoplankton deal with the problem.

Unless you are a hard-core nanotechnology (and semi-singularity) pessimist
then any projections of atmospheric warming trends due to excessive CO2
levels past circa 2040 are completely out of touch with *real* technology
trends.  (Remember -- we are at ~16nm lithography by 2015).  One can
envision a nanorobotic army sucking all of the CO2 out the atmosphere and
piling it up in place of the diminishing Greenland glaciers (as piles of
diamond of course...[1]) as a really nice plate of revenge (best served
cold) for all of the Chicken Littles running around screaming "the globe is
warming... the globe is warming...".

Robert

1. Of course, now that I'm thinking about it, all of that ice laid out on
all of that land in Greenland isn't doing very much good.  So I'll claim
Greenland, then remove all of the excess CO2 humanity has put into the
atmosphere and build a bunch of large cooling towers say 50,000 feet high
around the perimeter of Greenland.  These of course will be used to cool my
1000 cubic meter mini-"Jupiter" brain sitting in the center of Greenland
surrounded by my lush forest (enclosed in an inspiring nearly continent
sized diamondoid "green house") with CO2 concentrations kept at just the
right level to enjoy a wonderful tropical climate.  All the while I'll be
collecting exorbitant environmental "taxes" from the rest of humanity to
leave enough CO2 in the rest of the world atmosphere to keep them from
freezing their collective butts off.  [I'm kidding... maybe...]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060325/87d0d6dd/attachment.html>