Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

TL;DR: To stop climate change, just do this - raise crops for biomass (sequestering CO2) and freeze them in huge aboveground piles during winter by running pipes through the middle. With a little insulation, they won’t ever thaw out during the summer. Since thermal exchange is \(\propto r^2\) and total heat capacity \(\propto r^3\), a big pile can be kept frozen indefinitely with a few tricks.

This is text from a research proposal I never finished. I keep thinking that I should do something with it. To keep from going crazy, I’m putting it here.

The removal large quantities of carbon from Earth’s atmosphere is one of the most promising pathways to avoiding or mitigating the worst effects of global warming or climate change. Proposed methods for doing so include direct air capture (DAC) 1.

An advantage of direct air capture is that the relevant infrastructure does not depend strongly on climate or soil type, and is limited primarily by manufacturing capacity and available energy. An alternative to using engineered systems for direct air capture is to instead allow plants to capture carbon via photosynthesis and store the vegetative biomass in a manner that prevents reentry of captured carbon back into circulation. Examples of biomass-centric carbon sequestration approaches include burial in deep, anoxic water 2, compression into polymer-lined bricks3, carbon mineralization 4, and storing salted biomass in a moisture-controlled environment 5. Unfortunately, storing carbon in deep water makes it challenging to reliably sense and monitor carbon emission rates. Carbon casting requires wrapping in polymer sheeting as well as storage in a controlled environment, thereby incurring substantial added costs while carbon mineralization requires extraction of substantial mineral resources.

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