Will stashing more CO2 in the ocean help slow climate change?

‘CDR can be thought of like “a time machine,” David Ho, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wrote last year in Nature. Stripping some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere would be like returning to an earlier time with lower concentrations.

For example, the world’s largest direct air capture plant, Climeworks’ Iceland-based Orca plant, can remove up to 4,000 tons of CO2 each year. That might set the clock back by perhaps three seconds annually, Ho estimated…

The ocean’s carbon storage capacity is vast. For example, from 10,000 years ago until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 280 parts per million. But at the height of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, that concentration was just 180 ppm. The “missing” 100 ppm of CO2 during the ice age was all stored in the ocean, in part due to decreased ocean circulation at this time.’

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