Carbon Scrubbers
What Happened To Them?
Thor is worried. It seems you have either lost or miscounted some very important nano devices that are meant to be part of your ecosystem. Namely carbon scrubbers. Surely you know about them, they are meant to be all over the place.
To provide some context, last night as has become “tradition” those of us who couldn’t find anything else urgent to do had to sit through an episode of Master Chef followed by the horned one displaying his culinary prowess. This time it was all about Thor’s discovery of chile, probably from reading the recipe on this site if I do say so myself although he would never admit it.
Anyway after a memorable **cough** culinary experiment involving habenoro chillis, Jalapeño chillis, meat, beans and very little else apart from large quantities of beer the conversation turned to methane production – as it does after consuming large quantities of the aforementioned on an empty stomach.
That in turn lead to you humans and your current obsession with global warming and CO2 which got old Thor very worried.
The problem is that there shouldn’t be any problem. The whole planet is meant to be chock full of carbon scrubbers. You have been pumping out their byproduct and using it to power your motor vehicles for a century or so.
To see if you still have any, go find a green house, pump a pile of CO2 into it and stand back. You should find after a while that the CO2 diminishes, the plants get bigger and if you wait long enough will turn into oil that you can dig up, burn off and the whole cycle repeats.
Now most of your carbon scrubbers aren’t in fact on the land. When this was all kicked off there wasn’t much on land apart from rocks. The bulk of them are in the oceans. But you shouldn’t need to worry about them as they operate on a self regulating cycle.
Remember the island ecosystem exam question every biologist and environmental scientist did in first year uni? The predator-prey model based on a wolf and deer population on an island. An increase in deer numbers creates a jump in the number of wolves, which reduces the number of deer, which causes some wolves to starve. Less wolves means the deer population jumps and the whole thing repeats.
Standard first year stuff. You end up with a simple harmonic motion equation none of you would have forgotten. Particularly the guys who chose bio in the first place because they hated maths and the idea of having to solve wave equations during an exam wasn’t high on their list of expectations.
Well your carbon scrubbers – unless you have totally screwed things up – use the same cycle. Just think of the whole planet as an island of sorts. More CO2 causes an increase in carbon scrubber numbers which increase the rate that CO2 is pulled out of the atmosphere. This occurs until such a point that the CO2 level can’t support the whole carbon scrubber population and some die off. That in turn causes an increase in CO2 and the whole cycle repeats. There is a bit of a lag, but not a large one, these things reproduce pretty quickly.
It worked perfectly well back in the carboniferous and Thor can’t figure out why it doesn’t work now. These things are worse than cockroaches. Once they are in place, barring the sun going nova they are impossible to get rid of. Even if you have just a single one of them they should in theory reproduce to fill all available planetary surface area in no time at all. And to top if off they compete with each other to become even more efficient and fill every available gap in an ecosystem as time goes on.
Nasty little gadgets really, you would not believe the mountain of nanoethics paperwork that went with these things. Everything has to be proven on paper first, all work done in a biosafety level 4 or above lab, spot checks from grumpy old swiss gnomes etc etc. A right pain in the arse actually.
So if they have stopped working we really would like to know. Could you go and have a look? Thor is worried.
Anyway got to go – seems my personal methane production is about to overcame my capacity to absorb.
May 05 2009 02:24 pm | Thoughts of Thor
