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> Bear in mind that the atmosphere retains carbon dioxide for ~50 years

It's 300-1000 years [1].

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...



Good thing plants eat carbon dioxide then, so we don't need to wait for it to break down by itself. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more plants grow and convert it to oxygen.


Plants only store the CO2 until they decompose a relatively short time later. The only way to end up with a net decrease in CO2 this way is to bury the plants deep. Of course that is the process that initially created coal.


We could also start treating timber so that it would last and then build houses out of it. Too bad we're not doing it enough.


You can see the earth "breathing" CO2 in this data.

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

The amplitude of the world's natural CO2 cycle is on par with about 1.5 years of anthropogenic emission. Which is certainly impressive, but it's cylic and fairly steady. Plants are not growing fast enough to support the fantasy you describe.


The carbon cycle is an interesting and complicated subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle

TLDR is that a large part of the carbon we dump into the atmosphere is only removed by geological processes that take hundreds or thousands of years.




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