D.I.Y Planet Cooling

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

Fascinating idea.
How would it be done in practice?

It was done in 1993 on a small, experimental scale, by a team lead by Richard Barber and Ken Johnson. They dumped about 500 kg of iron sulfate over a 65 km^2 patch of iron-poor ocean about 400 km southwest of the Galapagos Islands. By their measurements and estimates, this resulted in about 2,500,000 additional kg of carbon being sequestered by the phytoplankton in 2 weeks, the equivalent of about 100 full-grown redwoods.

What about sewerage? Would that be a good, cheap, plentiful solution?

I don’t think sewage contains much iron, so I don’t thinks so.

Fortunately, iron is a cheap, plentiful, easy to find mineral. About 5% of the Earth’s crust is iron.

Some scientists don’t think ocean iron seeding would work. Others worry that it’s viability could be used as an excuse to other greenhouse gas reduction measures. It’s certainly, IMHO, worth serious study.

A few articles on Barber and Johnson experiment: http://www.palomar.edu/oceanography/iron.htm; http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/ecohacking.html; http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...arbonsink.html.

One problem with DDT(and similar) is that it floats on the top micron of the water and interferes with phytoplankton's reproductive capacity.(See DDT sould it be used (sic) Thread). Because of this (floating) you need very little DDT (etc) to do a lot of damage as the chemical is kept 'cheek by jowel' with the phytoplankton (Multiply area of sea surface by one micron then throw in trillions of tons of DDT type compounds==?)
I was amazed to read that phytoplankton are our major source of oxygen so you wonder what contribution DDT has, and is, making to global warming.(?)

I’d never considered this. I hope that this effect is confined to costal waters, and that these DDT films break up, poisoning only a small area of phytoplankton, before reaching the open ocean.

[Michaelangelica]

While we are looking at electrical things ; someone, on hypography, was looking into whether low-energy lamps were net savers of CO2.
Does anyone know if the production of the lamps costs more in CO2 than they save?
My local electricity authority is giving away six for free. (Unfortunately most of my light fittings are recessed and I don't think you can use them in recessed fittings.).

also
How much power do you save by not leaving TVs on stand by mode?

Thanks for the tip re iron and phytoplankton. That is a pretty impressive experiment. Why Iron? What does it do? Half of western Australia is made of iron. We could easily chip a few bits off into the sea. I will go and read the links you gave now.

I don't think DDT ever breaks up into much; DDE perhaps, which is just as bad.
It just spreads out. "Witholding periods" are the time it takes to spread out off your tomatoes so you don't get too letal a dose, not the time it takes to break down. (The half life for most CHs is 18 years -we think.) If it was biodegradable I wouldn't object to it as much.
I have a couple of research papers on this if you are interested although most of my knowledge of this deleterious effect of Chlorinated Hydrocarbons on plankton comes from concerned and informed chemists. You would think that "Round-Up" would be worse than pesticide designed to kill bugs not "Grass -with-Attitude" = Phytoplankton

also
does anyone know how Carbon Credits work?

[Boerseun]

I like the plastic plant bit.

Just as a platform to get your message across, in order to heighten public awareness of the issue:

Walk around with your trusty MacGuyver-style swiss army knife. Whenever you see a plastic plant, look around if anybody sees you and then, if nobody in the store is watching, do some 'pruning', if you catch my drift. And then leave a hand-written note stuck to the plastic stump telling everybody and their dog why you did what you did.

I like!

A few hypographically inspired prunings later, all over the world where our fellow hypographers are, and we'll start a new trend! A plant-friendly meme, so to speak! If you don't do this, you'll never have sex again in your life, and your career and personal life will be ruined by BAD LUCK FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!! Pass it on!!! I do want to have sex again, and I don't want bad luck for the rest of my life. Therefore, I will snip a plastic plant!

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

I like the plastic plant bit.

Just as a platform to get your message across, in order to heighten public awareness of the issue:

Walk around with your trusty MacGuyver-style swiss army knife. Whenever you see a plastic plant, look around if anybody sees you and then, if nobody in the store is watching, do some 'pruning', if you catch my drift. And then leave a hand-written note stuck to the plastic stump telling everybody and their dog why you did what you did.

I like!

A few hypographically inspired prunings later, all over the world where our fellow hypographers are, and we'll start a new trend! A plant-friendly meme, so to speak! If you don't do this, you'll never have sex again in your life, and your career and personal life will be ruined by BAD LUCK FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!! Pass it on!!! I do want to have sex again, and I don't want bad luck for the rest of my life. Therefore, I will snip a plastic plant!

LOL
I LOVE IT
You are more evil than I am.
Invoking bad karma, like chain letters, BRILLIANT!
Anyone know a friendly, generous printer?
Now where did I put my secateurs.. . .

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

Basically, my question was because I have a plasma tv. Is it still negatively impacting the environment (per Craigs well articulated post) if I use solar energy to give it the juice it drinks?

Any use of energy is affecting the environment, but it's up to you to tweek the effectiveness of you own use. If you make your own juice, you have the right to use it as you please. Unplug your TV when not in use, and incorporate it into your heating/cooling system when it's on. Plasma rules!!!

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

Does anyone know if the production of the [compact florescent?] lamps costs more in CO2 than they save?

Not even close, I calculate.

The most difficult stuff to melt (and thus form) in a compact florescent is the glass, at about 1000° C. My eyeball guesstimate of the mass of one (I’m looking at a 14 W “ultra mini spiral lamp”, the last in a 6 pack) is about 100 g. The specific heat of typical glass is about 0.67 J/g/K, so an efficient furnace should require about 1000 K * 100 g * .67 J/g/K = 67000 J to make one of these lamps. It draws 14 W, so uses as much energy as it took to manufacture it in 67000 J / 14 W = about 4800 s = about 80 minutes. The bulb has a rated life of 10,000 hrs, so the total energy it will use making light over its lifetime is 10000 hr * 3600 s/hr * 14 W = 500,000,000 J, so it takes about 0.02% the energy to make as it uses over its lifetime making light.

It replaces a 60 W incandescent bulb, which takes about the same energy to make as the florescent. It has a rated life of 1,500 hrs. I’ll need about 6.7 of these to last the 10,000 hrs of the compact florescent. They’ll use 10000 hr *3600 s/hr *60 W = 2,160,000,000 J.

So, with the energy saved by a single compact florescent we could make (2160000000 J – 500000000 J)/67000 J = nearly 25,000 compact florescents over a roughly 7 year period

According to several references I googled, power generation in the US releases between 0.0001 and 0.0002 g/J of generated energy, so powering a compact florescent bulb over its 7 year life releases about 500000000 J * 0.0001 g/J = 5 kg, far more than manufacturing it would release even if it were made of pure carbon and half burned in making each lamp

My local electricity authority is giving away six for free. (Unfortunately most of my light fittings are recessed and I don't think you can use them in recessed fittings.).

I use them in recessed fixtures. The little spiral lights are about 75% as long and 60% wide as the bulb they replace, and produce less heat, so there’s no problem.

After some complaints that the lighting in areas of my basement was too “flat” and white, I added some thin plastic “gells” to give them color. The florescents are so cool, I don’t need to worry about melting the plastic.

I’ve only noted 2 drawbacks with replacing incandescent with compact fluorescents

• In fixtures in which the bulb is visible, they look funny
• They take as long as 10 seconds to produce maximum light, so some places, such as near stair in dark areas that you enter with your eyes adjusted to bright daylight, you may have to pause for them to be bright enough for you to see well

How much power do you save by not leaving TVs on stand by mode?

According to this very nice c/net article, it varies a lot from model to model, from just a few W, to nearly 20.

These questions and articles point out that most people trying to save energy are hampered by the lack of published practical power consumption ratings (the ones usually published are maximums, and of little comparison value), and convenient devices to measure household electric current. A simple gadget you could take to a store and measure the power of consumer electonics before you buy them would be great for the conservation-focused consumer, but I’ve never seen one. Just having a easily viewed power meter for your home, so you could experiment with switching devices on and off and observing your total home power, would be very handy, but I’ve never seen one that wasn’t expensive, hard to install, and intended for commercial use. When I do such measuring, I have to go outside and time the revolutions on my power company electric meter using a stopwatch, an inconvenient, low-tech, but accurate and effective technique.

Thanks for the tip re iron and phytoplankton. That is a pretty impressive experiment. Why Iron? What does it do?

I don’t know the details, only that iron is important to their metabolism, and theories suggest that they rarely get as much as they need for maximum metabolism. It’s a complicated and controversial subject.

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by CraigD

Not even close, I calculate.


These questions and articles point out that most people trying to save energy are hampered by the lack of published practical power consumption ratings (the ones usually published are maximums, and of little comparison value), and convenient devices to measure household electric current. A simple gadget you could take to a store and measure the power of consumer electonics before you buy them would be great for the conservation-focused consumer, but I’ve never seen one.

I love it when you calculate Craig!

Knock, and I'll open the door. (did you know your doorbell system is constantly on regardless of whether someone rings it or not? The transformer that supplies the low voltage AC is usually hardwired into the house wiring>! )
Whatever the matter, here is your meter:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/measure.html

[Michaelangelica]

Re terra preta thread.
This was part of the the last post.
An especially interesting article in nature on carbon sequestration.

Originally Posted by erich

HOT DAMN!!!!!........We made it into Nature!!

If this doesn't get Terra Preta some real traction , I don't know what will.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...l/442624a.html

Good article.
This was especially interesting re global warming

According to Glaser's research, a hectare of metre-deep terra preta can contain 250 tonnes of carbon, as opposed to 100 tonnes in unimproved soils from similar parent material.
The extra carbon is not just in the char — it's also in the organic carbon and enhanced bacterial biomass that the char sustains.

That difference of 150 tonnes is greater than the amount of carbon in a hectare's worth of plants. That means turning unimproved soil into terra preta can store away more carbon than growing a tropical forest from scratch on the same piece of land, before you even start to make use of its enhanced fertility.

and
further on

The remarkable thing about this process is that, even after the fuel has been burned, more carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere than is put back. Traditional biofuels claim to be 'carbon neutral', because the carbon dioxide assimilated by the growing biomass makes up for the carbon dioxide given off by the burning of the fuel. But as Lehmann points out, systems such as Day's go one step further: "They are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative".
. . .
Then he discovered that his employees were reaping the culinary benefits of the enormous turnips that had sprung up on the piles of char lying around at the plant. Combining this char with ammonium bicarbonate, made using steam-recovered hydrogen, creates a soil additive that is now one of his process's selling points; the ammonium bicarbonate is a nitrogen-based fertilizer.
. . .
Brown thinks a 250-hectare farm on a char-and-ammonium-nitrate system can sequester 1,900 tonnes of carbon a year.

[Little Bang]

Yeah, reduce the population on this planet by 99.9 percent and 99.9 percent of all our problems will disappear.

[Michaelangelica]

a lot of talk
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/sc...rssnyt&emc=rss
but not a lot of practical ideas that could empower us all
So lets have some vision and far-out ideas (apart from genocide)

Some scientists noted that the earth reflected about 30 percent of incoming sunlight back into space and absorbed the rest. Slight increases of reflectivity, they reasoned, could easily counteract heat-trapping gases, thereby cooling the planet.

Dr. Broecker of Columbia proposed doing so by lacing the stratosphere with tons of sulfur dioxide, as erupting volcanoes occasionally do. The injections, he calculated in the 80's, would require a fleet of hundreds of jumbo jets and, as a byproduct, would increase acid rain.

By 1997, such futuristic visions found a prominent advocate in Edward Teller, a main inventor of the hydrogen bomb. "Injecting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach," Dr. Teller wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "Why not do that?"

But government agencies usually balked at paying researchers to study such far-out ideas, and even ones that were more down to earth.

Another idea was to fertilize the sea with iron, creating vast blooms of plants that would gulp down tons of carbon dioxide and, as the plants died, drag the carbon into the abyss.

The general reaction to such ideas, said Alvia Gaskill, president of Environmental Reference Materials Inc., a consulting firm in North Carolina that advocates geoengineering, "has been dismissive and sometimes frightened — afraid that we don't know what the consequences will be of making large-scale changes to the environment."

Dr. Gaskill said small experiments would let researchers quickly pull the plug if such tinkering started to go awry.

Scientists estimate that the earth's surface temperature this century may rise as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

"This could engage a whole generation," he said in an interview. "All I'm saying is, let's start thinking about these kinds of things in case we need them one day." Such visionary plans are still far from winning universal acclaim. James E. Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who attended the talk and strongly advocates curbing emissions, belittled the orbital sunshade as "incredibly difficult and impractical."

Dr. Crutzen, the Nobel laureate from the Max Planck Institute, has also drawn fire for his paper about injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. "There was a passionate outcry by several prominent scientists claiming that it is irresponsible," recalled Mark G. Lawrence, an American scientist who is also at the institute.