Plants pull 100 gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year and convert it to biomass (essentially, oxy-ammonia-hydrocarbons like sugars, proteins, fats, etc.). Humans pull about 6 gigatons of carbon out of the ground each year and pump it into the atmosphere.
The reason this cycle doesn't exhaust the atmospheric pool, of course, is that animals and fungi (more the latter) break down biomass into CO2 and release it back into the atmosphere.
That's not what I'd call 'very very little carbon'.
Getting anything at that concentration out is… generally not easy.
Doable! But not easy.
That it’s chemically low reactivity makes it even harder.
Plants have spent billions of years evolving to do it, and from an energy perspective aren’t very efficient at it.
Unless we want to burn even more oil trying to power the process or just make a tiny dent in it, we’ll need to not only figure out a somewhat efficient way to do it, but also figure out how to generate a massive amount of power without burning oil to power it.
For even more perspective, human breath can be easily composed of somewhere between 20,000 ppm and 40,000 ppm, and tens of thousands greater than that with enough energy expenditure. (I know this because I've actually measured this myself with research grade NDIR CO2 sensors)
441 ppm can be "a lot" depending on the gas and the expected effect. You don't want to breathe in 441 ppm of chlorine gas. But CO2 being fairly non-reactive makes 441 ppm of it relatively minuscule in contrast to the other predominant atmospheric gases. It's also nowhere near enough to cause outright catastrophe.
That happened before too, and has been (at lower frequency) for all of recorded history, near as we can tell. As noted, not an outright catastrophe right now.
The discussion is about avoiding it becoming one, and relative impacts. Humanity isn’t going to be dead tomorrow because of this, but may be in more pain in a decade or two, and longer term even more so.
Regional collapses have happened. This will be the first global collapse.
If it happens, it will be much earlier than you hope, as millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions force their way across borders, and fascist governments ride that into power and then start a global thermonuclear war. The refugees will only be fleeing crop failure and increasingly murderous kleptocratic government.
It is already starting. Lots of governments are flirting with dictatorship, and many have got there already. US and Brazil have drawn back a hairsbreadth from the brink, but for how long?
It is a fact that almost half the US voting population is ready and willing to vote in somebody who would arrange never to leave office. Numerous billionaires support that outcome.
Multiple Megatonnes of many different materials are mined at much lower concentration, and that requires digging up rocks. CO2 has many properties that make it fairly easy to select for.
We've already figured out that last part, it's called putting a few tens of square km of solar panels and heliostats (don't need it all to be electricity) in egypt or bolivia. A square metre nets you enough energy for a few tonnes per year in realistic current tech. This will never stem the tide if we don't go to net zero first, but reversing the damage in a century is doable by covering one medium sized desert.
Maybe. Just maybe there's a middle ground between something being unfathomably difficult and impossible because big number bad, and being trivial?
There are lots of potential avenues for stuffing the genie back in the bottle with a small fraction of the energy we got out of releasing it. All that's lacking is the political will to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, stop them doing more damage, and confiscate the proceeds of their crimes to start undoing the damage.
This last part isn't helped by reactionaries constantly screaming 'big number mean impossible' and 'der entropy'. Almost as if the goal of such discourse is to prevent solutions.
You were concern trolling to try to shit on the best plan we have for a planet that remains habitable by vaguely gesturing about how hard it is with no context.
Then you sullenly implied I was saying it was trivial when I contextualised the actual scale involved.
This is part of the standard reactionary fud playbook.
Now you're playing the victim and trying to imply that's never what you meant.
You might want to re-read the thread and actually follow the site rules this time?
Feel free to read my prior comments if you want to see how completely false your perception seems to be of my motivations too.
My point is this takes time and treasure, and it isn’t yet solved - and incremental improvement helps, because if we were to try to actually do things at scale with our current level of knowledge, we lack the infrastructure to do so without burning more oil.
Which will slowly change over the next couple decades and centuries, but not without a lot of fallout first due to the speed of change.
I looked at your previous comments and retract my accusation. Apologies.
Most of the time when someone mentions CO2 air concentration it's as a prelude to pushing CCS or some vague idea about producing 100s of kW of energy per person using nuclear abundanceand I pattern matched a little preemptively.
This doesn't excuse your rhetoric about it not being urgent though. The damage may take effect later, but it is being done right now.
You might want to recheck again though on that urgency claim. I never said that either.
To recap some discussions in other threads, what I’m pointing out is due to the sheer size of the problem, this will take decades to centuries to get under control (if the models are right, barring some truly revolutionary technology), no matter what.
Depending on the level of force used, it can and likely will lead to large scale war, which burns even more oil based on the way military operations are run now (and for the foreseeable future).
Even if we did things at the urgency level of the Manhattan project with infinite resources - unless we burned more oil. Even then, probably.
This is a heavily overloaded train that has been building up speed for 150+ years.
As to if any individual should be panicking or calm about this is up to them, but I personally find panic to put someone in a place where they are easily misled and results in bad and poorly thought out decisions which can often make it worse.
Which tends to be why folks go to fascism when they’re overloaded and scared, IMO.
As to if this discussion is useful or not? I don’t know. But I figured I’d throw it out there.
The reason this cycle doesn't exhaust the atmospheric pool, of course, is that animals and fungi (more the latter) break down biomass into CO2 and release it back into the atmosphere.
That's not what I'd call 'very very little carbon'.