I'm guessing that you didn't take physics and chemistry in high school. If you could do as you suggest, why wouldn't you just burn that carbon again and create more heat / electricity? Why wouldn't your electric utility be doing that, rather than buying all the fuel they burn?
The process you're thinking of would make a perpetual motion machine possible, and it's not.
EDIT: You might check out the conversation in Pegminer's comments.
Just so you know, there are several around here who say global warming isn't a problem.
Eg, James, Kano, Raisin Caine, JimZ, Sagebrush, and now Mickey Finn.
Their arguments range from, "It's been cooling since 1998",
"What about global cooling in the 1970s",
"It was much warmer in earth's history",
"There have been times when there's much more CO2 in the atmosphere",
"Warmer is better, more CO2 is better",
and "I don't see any change where I live".
http://science.kqed.org/quest/video/heat...
I tend to give these folks more credibility than some of what I see here.
1. You could look up what universities say. They have a reputation to uphold.
2. You could look up what various scientific organizations say. They also have a reputation to uphold.
Then look at which posters around here seem to agree with the reputable organizations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm...
"The finding that the climate has warmed in recent decades and that human activities are already contributing adversely to global climate change has been endorsed by every national science academy that has issued a statement on climate change, including the science academies of all of the major industrialized countries."
https://www.google.com/#q=scientific+org...
https://www.google.com/#q=universities+g...
Actually the oceans have been doing a great job of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. Limestone is an example of CO2 being taken from the atmosphere. During the jurassic period, there was FAR more CO2 in the atmosphere. I would think that any solid attempt at pulling CO2 would either be from burying plants or creating calcium carbonate, or other methods. It might be worth researching how to get CO2 out of the oceans and let the oceans work on the atmosphere.
Then again, I am not entirely convinced that CO2 is in any way bad. I tend to think that our plant life is limited by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is why the jurassic period and many other periods in Earth's history so much more lush plant life. I would suggest that if we do find a way of taking large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere, we be sure we can place it back in, if necesary.
Pegminer,
LOL, I write something neutral and you jump. There are people developing ways to pull CO2 from the oceans, because they understad the carbon cycle.
But if my neutral answers are going to earn your ire, then I shall go the other way.
The jurassic period saw much more lush plant life and far more abundant CO2.
Your whole AGW crap is nothing but nonsense, as anyone who understands the history of the earth should be easily able to tell, the plants are the basis for the food chain and plants thrive with more CO2 and a warmer climate. Only people too slow to move away from the 3mm/year rise in the sea are stupid enough to have anything to worry about.
Too massive of a scale mate. Pretty sure that would take a long time before we do that and what you are forgetting is when a chemical reaction happens it tends to put out a mass amount of heat depending on the reaction. Ie fires turning wood into ash. Small quantities we can deal with it, but imagine a mass chemical reaction over the whole earth like you are proposing
Why is it that some people want to pretend that they are God and control and sequester something that is absolutely essential for nearly every form of life on earth? We need to forget about screwing with CO2 and the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface of the earth because plants which form the very base of the world's food chain require it.
Nature deals with CO2 and sunlight in a way far better than humanity could ever do because nature has had billions and billions of years doing so. The vanity of AGW cultists who think they know better than nature.
Hmmm. Catalysis of CO2 into some form that sequesters it away from the atmosphere. Rings a bell. Somehow. Lemme think, where have I heard of something like that before. Damn. On the tip of my tongue.
"Birds do it, bees do it." No that's not it.
Crap. I dunno. That is a poser.
Ha ha ha. Yep, this is hilarious. Photosynthesis has been around for millions of years...and is a pretty efficient process. On the other hand, the evidence that CO2 is responsible for AGW is pretty scanty.
In my opinion our world is starved of CO2 and we need more, about 800ppm would be good.
Great idea. You just invented the tree.
Combining carbon with oxygen releases energy; to separate carbon dioxide back into carbon and oxygen requires energy. This doesn't change with the addition of a catalyst. Typically in a chemical reaction, there is an energy barrier than needs to be overcome for a reaction to proceed. A catalyst lowers that barrier, allowing the same reaction to proceed at a higher rate. However, energy would still need to be supplied to carbon dioxide to break it apart. gcnp58 rather subtly points out that such a process already takes place in nature--photosynthesis.
Unfortunately at the rate that humans are putting CO2 into the atmosphere, photosynthesis is losing the battle and CO2 keeps increasing.
It also goes into the oceans, but when Raisin Caine states "...the oceans have been doing a great job of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere" that might be true over geologic time scales, it is certainly not true over human time scales. If it were true, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere would not be increasing, and the RATE of increase would not be increasing, but it is.
Raisin is right. It never ceases to irritate me that alarmists deny how the carbon cycle works. They don't really understand it and have convinced themselves that all the CO2 we are emitting is staying in the atmosphere or ocean. In fact, the ocean has been ridding the atmosphere of excess carbon for billions of years and the limestone cliffs are just the edges of exposed portions of limestone and other carbonate formations that are miles thick and across most of the continents.
Is there a possible reaction to release into the atmosphere to bind with the carbon/oxygen molecules in carbon dioxide to seperate them? Then the global warming can be partly solved(although there will be a lot of random carbon molecules around)
CO2 is at the bottom of the energy well. It will require energy to change it into any other molecule. And where do we get that energy from?
I have seen a few papers on changing CO2 to methane or ethane using a catalyst and solar energy. These are interesting ideas, but solar is best converted directly into electricity (or heat).
