Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Direct Air Capture: Climate Savior or Distraction?" video.

  1. Aerospace engineer here - this is one of the most annoying subjects wasting out time these days. There's no real need to go into the technologies. You can kill this entire argument just by asking how they'll process 1 Billion cubic kilometers of air to remove 2.5 Trillion tons of CO2? Here's the explanation. FIRST - the basic task comes from the fact we have (since the start of the Industrial Revolution) put an extra 2.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with 1.5 Trillion Tons of that being just in the last 80 years and at current rates we'll add another 1/2 a Trillion tons by the early 2030s. Way back in 1987 as an undergraduate (in America) we had a NASA Engineer (as a guest lecturer) explain to us why terraforming Mars was utterly impractical. He'd just completed a project for NASA on what it would take. It was simply the amount of stuff needed to do the job. Before you even get to the subject of making things like water, oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles work you need to just get enough air and water. Its a subject I now call Planetary Mechanics which is doing basic calculations on volumes, mass and energy. He showed us just the basics. From that its relatively easy to calculate that to give Mars a layer 1km thick of Earth standard air requires 178 Trillion (with a 'T') tons of air. Plus you need to raise its temperature from -60C to +20C and that's a lot of energy for that much air. And you'd need a lot more than just 1km to make a planet viable. The related subject is Planetary Dynamics which is how you make things like the water and gas and thermodynamic cycles work which is incredibly complex. Planetary Mechanics is reasonably easy for anyone to grasp except for how big the numbers are, because its mostly just being able to calculate volumes and what mass it takes to fill that volume. That's how you get 178 Trillion tons of air. So coming back to Earth. Earths surface is just over 500,000,000 km² so in the first 1km above the Earths surface you have about 1/2 a Billion cubic kilometers of air. Its actually about 2% more than that. But its just easier to use 1/2 a Billion. Because if you want to consider the first 2km above the Earths surface its about 1 Billion cubic KILOMETERS of air and that's where most of the excess CO2 is and there's 2.5 Trillion tons of it we need to remove. So how do any of these clowns with plants that can do 1,000 tons per year plan to remove 2.5 Trillion tons? How much will it COST in BOTH money and materials to build all these plants? How much CO2 will be produced getting all those materials and building all those plants? How much energy with it take to just build those plants and then operate those plants? You don't need to explain the technology, because just the scope of the task rules it out as impractical.
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  2. Aerospace engineer here - this is one of the most annoying subjects wasting out time these days. There's no real need to go into the technologies. You can kill this entire argument just by asking how they'll process 1 Billion cubic kilometers of air to remove 2.5 Trillion tons of CO2? Here's the explanation. FIRST - the basic task comes from the fact we have (since the start of the Industrial Revolution) put an extra 2.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with 1.5 Trillion Tons of that being just in the last 80 years and at current rates we'll add another 1/2 a Trillion tons by the early 2030s. Way back in 1987 as an undergraduate (in America) we had a NASA Engineer (as a guest lecturer) explain to us why terraforming Mars was utterly impractical. He'd just completed a project for NASA on what it would take. It was simply the amount of stuff needed to do the job. Before you even get to the subject of making things like water, oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles work you need to just get enough air and water. Its a subject I now call Planetary Mechanics which is doing basic calculations on volumes, mass and energy. He showed us just the basics. From that its relatively easy to calculate that to give Mars a layer 1km thick of Earth standard air requires 178 Trillion (with a 'T') tons of air. Plus you need to raise its temperature from -60C to +20C and that's a lot of energy for that much air. And you'd need a lot more than just 1km to make a planet viable. The related subject is Planetary Dynamics which is how you make things like the water and gas and thermodynamic cycles work which is incredibly complex. Planetary Mechanics is reasonably easy for anyone to grasp except for how big the numbers are, because its mostly just being able to calculate volumes and what mass it takes to fill that volume. That's how you get 178 Trillion tons of air. So coming back to Earth. Earths surface is just over 500,000,000 km² so in the first 1km above the Earths surface you have about 1/2 a Billion cubic kilometers of air. Its actually about 2% more than that. But its just easier to use 1/2 a Billion. Because if you want to consider the first 2km above the Earths surface its about 1 Billion cubic KILOMETERS of air and that's where most of the excess CO2 is and there's 2.5 Trillion tons of it we need to remove. So how do any of these clowns with plants that can do 1,000 tons per year plan to remove 2.5 Trillion tons? How much will it COST in BOTH money and materials to build all these plants? How much CO2 will be produced getting all those materials and building all those plants? How much energy with it take to just build those plants and then operate those plants? You don't need to explain the technology, because just the scope of the task rules it out as impractical. If you want to know why an aerospace engineer is interested in all this stuff its pretty simple. My goal in life was to build a moon base. You then start with a couple of very simple issues. How do you build a volume of space that you can seal so that you have somewhere to live? How do you fill that volume with air? How do you get enough water to sustain life, because water is life? How do you create just enough of biologic systems that they can become reasonably close to self sustaining so that you have enough air and food to survive? I think creating a 100% self sustaining system is impractical so the actual task is how close can you get for it to be practical in that it doesn't require too much effort to keep functioning. THEN FINALLY - how do you power it all? This is where Kirk Sorenson got to when he was at NASA and re-discovered molten salt reactors. If you want to do a video on this stuff let me know.
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  3. Just a quick addition. I know that since 1940 we have added 1.5 Trillion tons of C02 because I have that data because its well published. And I know that at current rates 1.5 becomes 2.0 Trillion tons in about 2033-34. I am not as sure as the 2.5 to date which you said was 1.7 Trillion tons. I think there is some contention over the pre-1940 data and what the "normal level" is supposed to be. If you look at the historical CO2 graph that NOAA and others publish then it should be below 270ppm for a normal Milankovitch cycle, except there was that event about 200,000 years ago that had one cycle hit 300ppm. Irrespective getting the current 415ppm back down will take a geoengineering effort of staggering scale. The only viable way that I can see it being done is a massive worldwide re-forestation program. We have to see trees as very cheap low maintenance solar powered carbon pumps. The issue is the number we need. In ball park terms we need every person on the planet to physically plant themselves or have others plant for them 1,000 trees. Hoping that we get 1-2 in every 8 survive to adulthood then we'd have 1-2 Trillion trees each pulling 1-2 tons of Carbon from the air. Every other plane like seeding the ocean with iron to promote algae growth or seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 has major issues in that NOBODY KNOWS what the secondary effects would be. The SO2 idea is the most off the deep end thing I have heard yet. What if it doesn't work? What if it works to well? What if they get it wrong and all that SO2 falls out of the sky as sulphuric acid AND its the same sort of questions for iron seeding the ocean. In the end it comes down to doing something we know will work and we know trees work. We just have to do it at the scale that is needed.
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