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Solving global warming with giant vacuums (& other technological devices)

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 29, 2008 at 6:20 am

From the LA Times:

Here’s a simple solution to global warming: vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air.

Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world’s atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine. After a decade of work, his shower-sized prototype whirs away inside a Tucson warehouse, each day capturing about 10 pounds of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas as air wafts through it.

Only a few billion tons to go.

In the battle against global warming, technology has long been seen as the ultimate savior, but Lackner’s machine is a clunky reminder of how distant that dream is.

He estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of trillions of dollars a year. The orchards of filters would have to be powered by complexes of new nuclear plants, dams, solar farms or other clean-energy sources to avoid adding more pollution to the atmosphere.

Despite the scope of the proposal, the allure of high technology is irresistible for modern humans. Salvation has arrived again and again over the last century: the automobile, the jet, the Internet, the iPod. That dream has pushed scattered groups of scientists to work on massive schemes to reengineer the planet.

Artificial volcanoes? Tiny satellites that arrange themselves in formation to reflect sunlight back out into space? Click here to read the full text of this article from the LA Times and find out what other schemes scientists have been working on to try and combat climate change from a technological perspective.

April 29, 2008 · Filed Under Climate change & water supply

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