The only carbon sink on earth

This is related to CO2 in the atmosphere and ‘global warming’

In the carbon cycle, IIRC the only way that carbon gets totally removed from the carbon cycle is in the oceans as it is converted into limestone. Other ways seem to have the carbon reemerge at some time, even biomass that is buried will form some sort of fossil fuel and will eventually come back so a soccer mom can drive her little kiddypoo back and forth to school in a SUV even though a bus system is in place.

So is there a way to increase this rate of limestone formation, perhaps having having powerplants exhaust under the oceans through diffusers to carbonate the oceans?

The water would become acidic, and deoxygenated.

Nothing is a permanent carbon sink, and life on earth needs carbon so at what point does a permanent cabon removal system doom us? We just need to keep it out of the atmosphere a bit better, not out of the biocycle. We need carbon to have less time in the air, and more time in others forms that don’t trap heat above what we need in the atmosphere.

I read that Mar’s polar caps are shrinking again. I think watching the polar caps on Mars would give us a good indication when we should expect overall warming or cooling on Earth. When the polar caps on Mars isn’t shrinking and we are getting warmer, it’s all something we’re doing. We still have to worry about warming effects, but it would be a good indicator that the sun is outputing more or less overall heat.

I would choose making diamonds as a long term carbon storage device if we have a fantasy choice.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has been conducting small-scale experiments on deep-sea carbon sequestration. There are thoughts that considerable amounts of carbon could be sequestered in the deep sea for a long enough time period to render its re-emergence moot, but no-one’s exactly sure what the dynamics of large plumes of CO[sub]2[/sub] are yet. Luckily, this time we’re conducting research on what the effects might be before going forward large-scale - something that has been neglected in our current carbon-into-the-atmosphere experiment.

Read more about their progress:

I’m also not sure why people keep thinking Mars is such a treasure trove of information on Earth’s climate when we have vast amounts of information from Earth and so little from Mars. It’s incredibly counter-intuitive. Plus, we’ve had threads discussing the poor climate data we have for Mars: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=415289&highlight=mars+global+warming

It’s the one thing we don’t have on the earth, a control planet - without fossil fuel burning SUV’s (yet). Yes it’s not a perfect earth by a longshot, but it’s the best one we have.

Given the vast differences in the carbon cycles of Mars and Earth, how appropriate a choice of control planet is this?

Given that we have severly limited information on Martian climate, what reliable lessons do we learn from this “control planet?” :dubious:

What’s the quality of our data on sun intensity levels?

There are plenty of carbon sinks on the planet, as far as I know. Methane is sequestered deep in the ocean. Algae absorbs carbon and then is eaten in the ocean food chain and a lot of it sinks into the deep ocean after the animal dies. Oil reserves are carbon sinks. Every time we build a house were’s sequestering carbon, at least for a few decades.

Iron Fertilizaton may be one promising way to sequester carbon in the ocean.

Possibly with the exception of kanicbird - on the evidence of the strange quotes around the words global and warming - even AGW deniers agree that the global climate is heating up. If you wish to be properly contentious, you could put quotes around “anthropogenic”, but not global warming. Unless you’re denying climate change exists.

As for carbon sinking, the deforestation in vast areas of the globe, combined with scads of extra anthropogenic CO[sub]2[/sub] make carbon sinks necessary.

Trees, while not a permanent sink, at least remove carbon from the cycle for several years. And trees make baby trees, which carry on the job. Which is why deforestation exacerbates the problem.

Personally I’ve floated the idea a few times that maybe we should stop being so scared of landfill, since landfills at least encapsulate non-degradable hydrocarbon polymers for decades/centuries.

Ignorant question–would sequestering large amounts of CO2 deep in the ocean lead to the risk of a possible Lake-Nyos type event if there were an underwater earthquake or similar occurence?

The plan was to dissolve the CO2 into the ocean as to increase limestone formation, which would not outgas, but it would seem to carbonate the sea in the process which could cause interesting side effects.