Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "A Crazy Solution To Global Warming" video.

  1. 14:00 Creating carbon nanotubes to create CO2 capture devices using CO2 previously captured from the atmosphere would be awesome. Of course, you would need to dump the oxygen as a side-product but I guess most humans would accept leaking that into the atmosphere.
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  2. 19:10 Did I get this right? If we were to spend equal amount of money to CO2 capture as we are using to maintain military, we could get from 420 ppm to 300 ppm in around 50 years? Using only already existing technology? What are we waiting for? PS. Also note that we would only need to get from 420 ppm to 420 ppm in around 50 years to not make things worse. That would be much cheaper, but we're not doing that either!
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  3. The problem with CO2 capture directly from air is that we "only" have 420 ppm right now. As a result, if you want to extract 1 kg of CO2 from the air, you have to pump 1000000/420 = 2380 kg of air through your filters, assuming 100% efficiency. Of course, real world efficiency will be much less so you're going to need to pump more air. The mass of one cubic meter of air is about 1.275 kg so at minimum you would have to pump 1867 m^3 of air for 1 kg of extracted CO2. Year 2021 total CO2 emissions were 37.12 billion tons or 37120000000000 kg. To avoid making things worse, we would have to pump all of that away from the air. To do that, we would need to pump minimum of 37120000000000 * 1867 = 69303040000000000 m^3 of air yearly (again, assuming 100% efficiency for the capture). To put that into perspective, that would require million capture locations, each pumping about 2 million litres of air per second. It would be doable with about million large wind turbine sized capture systems worldwide. Of course, you would then need to run those "capture wind turbines" with electricity to force the air through the capture filters. In the end, it seems possible to do but very expensive. It's still much much much much easier than terraforming Mars so we should do it anyway.
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