Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
The amount we would have to extract to get there is staggering.
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Agreed, it's a laughable concept. The original poster was adamant that 'they' wouldn't know when to stop extracting, so we're all doomed.
Having said that, the amount we would need to extract to make a meaningful difference is also staggering. Current estimate of CO2 mass in the atmosphere is about 3.29 x 10^12 tonnes:
Quote:
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The molecular weight of CO2 is 44 g mol−1. The current (April 2023) CO2 con- tent of the atmosphere is about 410 ppmv, or 420 x 10−6 moles per mole. The atmo- sphere contains about 7.48 x 1016 moles of CO2. The number of moles of CO2 is thus about 1/9 the number of moles of of water vapor. The total mass of CO2 is about 3.29 x 10^18 g.
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Supposing we want to reduce this by 10% at an optimistic cost of $100/tonne. We're looking at $32,900,000,000,000, and that's assuming no new contributions.
I'm all for it - every bit helps - but this is far from a panacea.