Pumping Down CO2 is like Drinking a Margarita with a Straw

                                     Pumping down CO2 is like drinking a margarita with a Straw


NASA just released an animation of modeled CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the course of year.  The animation lasts about a minute.  You can see it here at the NASA website.  The NASA animation shows how CO2 is released into the atmosphere mainly from the northern hemisphere.  Look more closely and you'll see the biggest producers of CO2 are a few densely populated and industrialized regions in the US, Europe and Asia.

Once the CO2 is released into the atmosphere it mixes with the rest of the atmosphere and eventually distributes new batches of CO2 through the rest of the atmosphere.  Over the course of a year CO2 concentrations grow rapidly in the northern hemisphere during the winter, but then descrease during the summer as new plant growth pumps down CO2 to create new biomass.  Then, each year when winter comes again, the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere rise to new levels.

This animation illustrates an important assumption that lies behind Planetary Geoenginering proposals like Prof. Curry's idea to pump down atmospheric CO2 by freezing air in giant refrigerators, or Prof. Martin's idea to pump down CO2 by fertilizing the ocean, or my idea to scale up industrial chemical process to pump down atmospheric CO2.  Since CO2 becomes rapidly well mixed through the atmosphere over the entire surface of the planet on an annual cycle, it is not necessary to remove CO2 at multiple sites.  If the appropriate geoengineering method can be devised, and if the necessary engineering can be done to put the planetary geoengineering scheme into action, the actual process of pumping down CO2 needs to only be done at one location to have an effect on the CO2 content of the atmosphere everywhere on earth.  

Its like drinking a strawberry margarita from a jar with a straw----you don't have to use multiple straws to get at all parts of the margarita----you can just push your straw down  one spot down at the bottom of the ice cubes and drink---- all the margarita you want can be enjoyed right there in that one spot.