Dyson also describes a solution to any warming that is relevant to the article: better land management.
It takes a few years for carbon to cycle - into the air, then plants, then soil, then back.
Capturing carbon at some stage could be as simple as changing the plants that grow in certain areas. This doesn't require crippling an economy.
Surely there is some process by which biomass can be converted to black carbon, and perhaps generate power. Such a technological solution is but one of many, and the real answer to global warming and peak oil:
1. invest in research into alternative energy generation and storage that, at scale and independent of oil prices, are cheaper than coal
2. invest in research into technological solutions that cheaply remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.
Additionally, one of the issues with increased CO2 content in the oceans is acidification. The oceans can't absorb more CO2, even in biomass, without this occurring.
I think it's important to consider the amount of fossil fuels we are using. One example that springs to mind at one of the older coal power plants in WV they decided to change the location where they deposited the coal ash that was left over. It turns out over the last 40 years they had just kept making a larger mount and it was about to become the tallest mountain in the state. Now you might wonder how this ends up but the simple fact is coal is mindbogglingly cheep. There is literally mounds of the stuff which you basically pickup off the ground. (It's slightly worse than that but not by much.)
In Appalachia there are coal fires that have been burning for thirty or forty years, and they are allowed to keep burning because the coal is worth less than what it would cost to pipe in enough water to put out the fires.
It takes a few years for carbon to cycle - into the air, then plants, then soil, then back.
Capturing carbon at some stage could be as simple as changing the plants that grow in certain areas. This doesn't require crippling an economy.
Surely there is some process by which biomass can be converted to black carbon, and perhaps generate power. Such a technological solution is but one of many, and the real answer to global warming and peak oil:
1. invest in research into alternative energy generation and storage that, at scale and independent of oil prices, are cheaper than coal
2. invest in research into technological solutions that cheaply remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.