CLIMATE CHANGE: Sable Systems' solution?
We receive a lot of email here at Sable Systems. Apart from the inevitable spam - which gets quickly deleted by our IT antibodies - and the always welcome requests for quotes, we get occasional letters like this one, received yesterday:
This is an excellent idea. Just one problem: The scale of operations, which exceeds human capability by several orders of magnitude. Also, the scrubber material would have to be mined and treated before it was used, both of which would cause enormous environmental damage, not least by using fossil fuels in staggering amounts. Then would come the problem of the disposal of the sequestered carbon...
But, we can speculate. We are not endorsing the scenario below. Just speculating.
Humanity would be faced with a tremendous surplus of something rather resembling marble, and would have little choice but to compress it and use it for building things. Given the scale of the problem, we would have to build structures on a grand scale not seen since the days of ancient Egypt. Pointless grandeur can't be sustained without a religion, which will evolve for the purpose. Every culture will evolve its own variant, part of its central dogma being the inferior nature of all other variants. The result would be a positive feedback cycle of hostile irrationality similar to the one tearing the Middle East apart now, but on an even grander scale, with the construction of larger and larger, and more and more ostentatious buildings thrown in as the variant religions compete with each other.
Finally the CO2 will be gone, mostly, and the planet's climate will hesitate before crashing and locking the biosphere into a snowball earth scenario.
When the ice clears, only the buildings will remain.
But what buildings!
Do you have a scenario of your own that you'd like to share?
Dear Sable Scientists,
Probably a very silly question, but is it even remotely possible that CO2 scrubbing principles could be applied to the problem of the ever-increasing amounts of CO2 going into the atmosphere and causing global waming? (to hell with the cost!)
Could scrubbers be incorporated, for example, in catalytic converters on cars, or even factory emission outlets? Is there any way we could chemically emulate nature's superb scrubber - the tree?
I look forward to your response.
Dr [xxxx xxxxxxx]
Retired dentist, England
This is an excellent idea. Just one problem: The scale of operations, which exceeds human capability by several orders of magnitude. Also, the scrubber material would have to be mined and treated before it was used, both of which would cause enormous environmental damage, not least by using fossil fuels in staggering amounts. Then would come the problem of the disposal of the sequestered carbon...
But, we can speculate. We are not endorsing the scenario below. Just speculating.
Humanity would be faced with a tremendous surplus of something rather resembling marble, and would have little choice but to compress it and use it for building things. Given the scale of the problem, we would have to build structures on a grand scale not seen since the days of ancient Egypt. Pointless grandeur can't be sustained without a religion, which will evolve for the purpose. Every culture will evolve its own variant, part of its central dogma being the inferior nature of all other variants. The result would be a positive feedback cycle of hostile irrationality similar to the one tearing the Middle East apart now, but on an even grander scale, with the construction of larger and larger, and more and more ostentatious buildings thrown in as the variant religions compete with each other.
Finally the CO2 will be gone, mostly, and the planet's climate will hesitate before crashing and locking the biosphere into a snowball earth scenario.
When the ice clears, only the buildings will remain.
But what buildings!
Do you have a scenario of your own that you'd like to share?
posted by Sable Systems | 10:00
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