tito

Hey, it's Saturday night and I'm on Hacker News woot woot.

I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?

This is great. I'm typing this message now using Ghost Pepper. What benefits have you seen from the OCR screen sharing step?

Build economies around carbon removal, and investing in climate interventions like sunlight reflection to buy time.

Iceland has the 5th highest GDP per capita in the world. We’re about to witness what rich countries do when confronted by a changing climate.

A tree eats about twenty kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. But burning a tree releases about 100 times that amount of carbon dioxide. So if just 1% of a forest burns for any reason, that reverses the rest. And if it’s more than that, then the forest is emitting more carbon than it absorbs.

I just got back from the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK and was marveling at the size of a small footprint facility that stores samples of more than 10% of all known living plants.

Reading this thread, I was curious about what the size of California's sample collection looks like. I made an estimate using a little 1ul vial and an estimated 40 million people born in California since 1930. 100 samples in each box means 400,000 boxes. It's something like a 60 foot by 60 foot room with shelving.

If you extended it to a bank of 100 billion (about all humans ever born), that gets you to a pretty low tech solution that stores samples in the footprint of five Costcos.

Hey, from the demo video, I thought it was entering the answers to your pre-entered questions based on the transcript, but it looks like you're just typing in the answers. Is that right?

It literally says close the facility in the budget.

It's a little shed on top of the mountain. Here's a picture: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mauna-loa-...

It's an atmospheric monitoring station and a solar telescope. I've been there. it's basically a shipping container full of sensors and computers and two people huddled there keeping it running.

The big telescopes are on Mauna Kea.

Seconded. The facility on Mauna Loa is the Mauna Loa Observatory which is atmospheric sensors and a solar telescope. The famous telescopes are on Mauna Kea (source: I grew up in Hawaii and worked for one of the telescopes, CFHT)

Catching up here. I visited there as part of building The State of Carbon website (https://carbon.datahub.io/). This was much upvoted project on HackerNews back when it was first created: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332595

Totally bogus. First off, it’s a critical dataset for tracking CO2 levels. And second, it’s just like two people huddling in a metal shipping container with a bunch of sensors on top of a mountain in Hawaii, not some kind of crazy budget.

The current best in class methodology for biochar aims for 100+ years. There are some folks saying there are pathways to make biochar last 1000+ years.

Puro methodology: https://biochar.groups.io/g/main/attachment/32853/2/Puro.ear...

The nice thing is biochar is relatively inert. It just sits there in soil, holding onto water, making space for organisms to grow, but isn't "food", so it doesn't get eaten up and turned back into carbon dioxide. So it's a win for farmers and carbon removal.

The potential benefit of this idea is it's very cheap. One penny per ton vs hundreds of dollars of per ton of biochar.

Iron fertilization, shading the sun, and more nukey-stuff, all worth exploring at this point.

Climate science consensus is we need to decarbonize and remove. We've gone too far at this point, decarbonizatin alone is no longer sufficient. So we need all the solar-y wind-y nuclear-y stuff AND all this weird removal stuff. And some other weirder stuff too.

There is no climate model for less than 2 degrees of warming with decarbonization alone. It's unfortunate but that's where we are today. Large scale decarbonization and removal together are both required, and fast.

fascinating. Ignoring the ecological questions, I admire the "outside the box" thinking.

For the sake of the calculation: $10^10 for 10^12 tons is an implied cost of one cent per ton. So three orders of magnitude cheaperish than current approaches around $100 per ton.

The long term value of this paper may twofold - 1. to spark other ideas. This illustrates that carbon removal might be able to be done for orders of magnitude cheaper, even if just on the back of a napkin (most napkins today point to $100/ton). 2. to demonstrate the scale and seriousness of the carbon removal issue. yes, we need to do this, and yes, maybe there are better/safer ways.

For folks pointing out "we need to decarbonize": yes, we do. However, carbon removal is also needed at this point alongside decarbonization. We have to reduce emissions and clean out what's already in the air. Without decarbonization and carbon removal together, there's no pathway to stay below 2˚C of warming. (and given that both decarbonization and removal aren't growing quickly enough, we also need to cool the planet too, which is another whole topic)

also: http://airminers.com/connect - we have a Slack channel of 3,000 people focused about removal solutions. come join!

I looked up my favorite mud awhile back. Just this post of other people looking for it for over 20 years!

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.mud/c/Hn5EOqDfcyg

Agreed, we have to find a way to do both. It's unlikely we will prevail. As is, the path we're on is about 4 million tons per year of removals by 2030. A new model from Rocky Mountain Institute suggests we need to be at more like 285 million tons annually of removals by 2030 to be on track. It's time to invest in scaling carbon removal.

Perhaps in 2010 this would have been sufficient. Unfortunately decarbonization alone is no longer enough to stabilize at 2 degrees of warming. For a stable climate massive decarbonization and removal is needed.

Carbon removal is expensive and sounds like science fiction.

Unfortunately, IPCC reports from 2018 and 2023 confirm that carbon removal is necessary to stabilize temperatures. Decarbonization alone is no longer enough. We need to get better at carbon removal...fast.

thanks for the suggestions everyone. just played the LoTR through MUDlet for a bit.

This just sparked me to look up my old favorite. Just a 20 year old thread with posts over the years: https://alt.mud.narkive.com/No6CZyd7/questwars-quest-for-fae...

What's a good MUD to play now?

cool! i worked on open hardware for PCR (http://openpcr.org). what are you working on now?

i'm working on reversing climate change at http://airminers.com

I hear you, I appreciate the clarification in how you're thinking about this.

Yes there's a potential conflict there. I'm curious to hear from your perspective:

1. Do we need to maintain a stable climate?

2. Do we need to win the decarbonization game to do so? And if not, how else do we maintain a stable climate?

I want this to happen, how can I help?

Stopping doing things we're doing today is one possibility. How are you going to do that?

Oh I get it. You tax emissions with no way to lower the tax besides lowering emissions. That means there's an underlying accounting for carbon, but like you said there's not something like market or exchange. So in this model air travel for example would 2x in price, but 1x of that would go towards the carbon tax which is then redistributed to everyone. Sounds interesting, are there any particular strengths or weaknesses to this model?

Got it, I missed your point and still haven't got it. I appreciate that you took the time to respond.

In line with this, another comment someone said "perhaps they're doing exactly their job but their job is not actually what it purports to be."

It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?