Adding lime to seawater may cut carbon dioxide levels back to pre-industrial levels

what about wood ash? i've always been told its a viable substitute for lime plus it is significantly cheaper not to mention usually very easy to come because it is typically a waste product.

Wood ash, coming from trees, should be returned to the earth or the soil will gradually be depleted. Best to utilize limestone outcrops in desert and other relatively inaccessible margins.

The "lime beds" on Onondaga Lake in Syracuse New York have produced swaths of polluted land that sustain no growth whatsoever. Onondaga Lake is one of the top 10 polluted lakes in the world, and the lime has only added to this fact.

When and if you are in upstate NY, drive along the "coast" of Onondaga Lake and you will see miles and miles of brownfields and wasteland once used to store "lime" from the various industrial plants along it's shoreline.

This is a lie propagated by Shell and it's affiliates.

Damaging.

what will happen to wildlife? people are so concerned about getting rid of CO2 they do even think about what will happen to the thing they are trying to save

Just make sure that the increased alkalinity will not kill off the fish/coral/plants living there. Also, the increased CO2 in the water may have an effect as well. We don't just want to move our pollution from the air to the water!

This is a stupid idea.

What a terrible idea.

Somehow, saving the atmosphere, a small piece of the earth, and potentially killing off 70% of it seems like a bad idea.

I like that there are more and more ideas (old and new) being worked with on how to fight the co2 problem...however, this one just doesnt sound like a good one. Too many unanswered questions about how the marine life would be affected. I was curious about the co2 levels rising in the water as well. To me, it sounds as though this would just cause more problems.

In a perfect world the responsible would ignore the lame brain propositions of those who create the problem in the first place!

Dumping lime into the ocean is about as good as a solution for climate change as oil is for fuel. Actually using lime in such a way is worse then burning oil because lime can/is used for more then just curbing CO2 emissions. Lime for one is used in concrete, so if you use up the world’s supply of lime to balance out CO2 emissions then someone needs to figure out how we are going to manufacture large buildings out of mud.

Even if this climate change was a wholly natural occurrence the idea that we should manufacture the ocean, in such a way as described, is completely ridiculous. We do not need to whip the world into submission we need to ADAPT to our changing environment. That ability made humans top dog in the first place, our ability to adapt, not our ability to fund a ridiculously narrow-minded company that can’t remember a fourth grade history lesson.

How could you look at this idea and not think it’s a bad one? I wouldn’t back this idea even if the scientists of the world agreed on the minimum amount of lime required to deal with climate change. When you think about it nature persists because a delicate balance, even a small amount of influence can have a disastrous affect upon the almost godly proportions that allow for our world to exist.


Lastly lime plus water equals flesh eating liquid.

Aw, I thought it was lemon-lime.

I thought it would make the ocean into a fresh mixed batch of lime-aid, except instead of sugar, salt. Oh well.

So, the natural ability of the ocean to absorb pollution..It'll be changed from absorbing it and diluting it some,to...Absorbing it and NOT releasing it again? What the hell?

while we're at it with all that lime, let's see if we can turn the ocean into a giant alkaline battery.

Lets just kill all the sea critters. We have carbon to get rid of, damnit.

OK!! you know what? I am seriously beginning to have a problem with the people on this site. Don't get me wrong, I'm for most of the things that people here stand for, but everyone of the responses to this article are completely ignorant. I mean, it's one thing to stand for something when you know what you're talking about. At least, the people in the head office of major corporations, that most people here seem to have a vendetta against, know the facts behind what they are doing. They may not care for the repercussions, but at least they know the facts. That's a lot more than I can say about the people on this site. If your going to stand behind something PLEASE, PLEASE!!! know what you're talking about

Let me just say that I am against adding lime to seawater, but for completely different reasons than everyone else here. Adding lime would not damage the sea life. If anything, raising the alkaline levels and the CO2 levels of the water would only help sea life at this point.

However, I am still against adding lime. You may ask why? Let me put it this way. If antelope were going extinct and someone recommended killing off some of the lion population to help them survive we'd have a problem with the lion population once people killed to much. What does my analogy mean?

Adding lime to the seawater would take away CO2 from the air and add it to the water. Yeah, that may seem fine, but what if we added to much lime? To much CO2 in the air is just as dangerous as to little CO2 in the air. For those of you who don't know we do need C02 in our atmosphere. If we as humans continue to raise the amount of CO2 in the air eventually the sun will scorch us to extinction or at the very least we'll enter a new Ice Age, however, as I stated, to little of CO2 is dangerous as well. Adding lime to water in order to lower our CO2 in the air could offset the natural balance to much. CO2 helps plants to produce oxygen as well as many other things. We as people need to figure out a way for humans to progress with nature. We can still advance our technologies and we can still live comfortably. But lets think outside of the box so that our future is not just based upon two choices: Tree houses or more industrialization. Let use our technology so that people can live with nature comfortably. Not everyone wants to live in tents and tree houses. I know some of us here wish they did. But Rome wasn't built in a day and the World can't change with a quick fix. It needs time to change, just like the people. It needs smarter ways to live not a rulebook of how to live differently. New Ideas, Not old ones. Thank You

I don't pretend to know all the science and facts and figures behind this lime "cure all". But it just doesn't seem like a good idea to mess with mother nature on such a large scale. No matter how good the intentions are, I'm sure something will go very wrong.

It does not sound like a good idea. Won't this have bad effects on the fish in the area?

Why the Oil company bothers trying is beyond me. Hated just because they exist. Do whatever you want Oil Company....you will be hated anyway why not make the most money by continuing without caring. I know I would.

Actualy we do not have too much CO2 for healthy breathing. Higher CO2 levels promote plant growth globaly. However, we have enough CO2 to be a greenhouse gas problem.

Another approach that has been around for awhile is spraying reflectent agents into the ionosphere to filter sunlight much like sunscreen film on windows and thus lower temperatures on earth.

Here is a link to a scientific site that discusses various proposals to control global warming. Remember that CO2 is in some ways beneficial for increased food production if we can control the earth's surface emperature.

http://www.chemtrails911.com/intro_to_chem.htm

Edmond Teller, inventor of the H-Bomb talks about global warming in 1972 and about solutions.

http://www.rense.com/general18/scatteringEdTellerwithno...

Why is humanity always trying to correct the damage it has done by trying to compensate that damage with another "inteligent" solution? Why not just solve the problem in the first place?

i'm more interested in what the lime will do to the oceanic ecosystem. what if the lime killed plankton? questions like this keep me intrigued.

Many, many times humans have introduced a foreign substance to the environment to help with one problem but then it causes other problems. Why not come up with a long term solution like cleaning up our oceans rather than dusting our problems under the rug.

I thought you put the lime in the Coke, you nut.

Instead of Lime. How about more of a Lemon-Limey taste? It would be an ocean of Mountain Dew.

Or Sprite.