Wouldn't it make sense to prove that global warming caused by humans, is actually occurring first? BTW carbon sequestration is already occurring - see e.g. diatoms and other ocean organisms.
You can't "prove" global warming in the sense that you prove other scientific theories, because you can't set up a controlled experiment in which you have one planet just like the Earth be subjected to massive carbon emissions and leave another exactly identical planet alone.
So unless you deny that there exists the possibility of major climate problems that could seriously damage humanity's well being, what standard of proof would you have climate scientists meet before agreeing that there is a problem serious enough to address?
We can have a whole big endless debate about the various studies and climate models that point to one scenario or another, but we won't get anywhere unless we agree on these ground rules to start off...so what standard of proof would you propose?
The science is pretty clear at this point: global warming is caused by human activities. What we should have done is "proven" that human activities such as overreliance on carbon fuels wouldn't be a problem, before we caused this kind of havoc.
And dumping lime in the oceans? An ounce of prevention will be worth a ton of lime cure.
Academia has come up with several scenarios like this. A friend of mine at MIT told me about a similar idea in which they considered using iron filings to promote plankton growth. The problem with solutions like these is that they are likely to introduce their own problems. Case in point: I'm no chemist, but wouldn't adding a large enough amount of lime to do this have a pretty major effect on the pH?
Yes. A few degrees of temperature fluctuation are already having a significant impact on marine ecosystems (coral reefs). Making all of the world's ocean water more alkaline is pure insanity. It is extremely likely to cause mass extinctions of organisms which evolved to live at a specific water pH level. These extinctions will reverberate through the entire food chain, all the way up through commercial fisheries.
Ecosystems are complicated, and no one fully grasps all the variables. Climate change needs to be addressed, of course, but drastic interventions are likely to have drastic and unforeseen consequences.
That's fucked. How was the earth surviving before we got here and realized it needed lime. Maybe we can all just stop being energy consuming pigs and global warming could be stopped.
