Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

There is no climate model for less than 2 degrees of warming with decarbonization alone. It's unfortunate but that's where we are today. Large scale decarbonization and removal together are both required, and fast.

cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.

You do realize the effects of climate change will not be something for which you can just isolate your bedroom for, then move on.

Everyone needs water. Directly, and for food production. The most populous regions in the world run on meltwater. The Indus Valley. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Indonesia. California. Central China. There are thousands such locations as well, by the way, just smaller. Meltwater that only comes if not only the planet is hot, but is hotter this year than last. If not, ZERO meltwater comes. Not a little bit. Zero. If you stop global warming 2 billion people need to be relocated.

To make matters worse, one of the "points of no return" which is coming global warming will switch from pumping water INTO the atmosphere to pumping water OUT of the atmosphere. This will turn the "inside" (any location sufficiently far from a coast) of countries like India, Africa and China back into the deserts they were 500 years ago. Except, it will do so rapidly. We don't know, of course, but certainly less than 100 years. Potentially much less.

If you calculate energy required, you will conclude that lifting water is a nonstarter. With current energy generation we cannot bring water to these locations. Never mind that most don't even have railway connections, never mind electrical power to the trains. We cannot realistically use desalinated water at elevations above maybe 300 meters. It's just not happening.

To make matters worse, both things are tipping-points. There is very, very little change while you get closer to the tipping point, then all the builtup change happens VERY suddenly. And this will happen twice, a two-punch situation, maybe a decade or two apart. First meltwater will stop, entirely, in one or two years, and it will not come back for tens of thousands of years and then a decade or so later rains will stop.

Walkable cities and isolated buildings do exactly nothing to stop any of this.

A 30yr break on an exponential process with dangerous tipping points seems like an awesome deal

Of course it doesn't work as the only fix, and there is the danger that it could be used as an excuse to slow down necessary changes. But the situation we currently find ourselves in is one that moves in the right direction (per-capita CO2 emissions peaked in the late 80s in the EU-27 and the 00s in the US, and many lower-emission solutions now have better economics than their established counterparts) but inertia an an ill-timed increase in the standard of living of China and India mean we are not moving nearly fast enough. More time is one of the most valuable things we can get in this situation

There's no fix other than a technological one. Modifying the collective behavior of 8 billion people is just not going to happen.

Maybe because "We propose burying this device beneath the Kerguelen Plateau in the Southern Ocean, 3-5 km into the basalt-rich seafloor and 6-8 km below the water’s surface." would be prohibitively expensive for hundreds of nukes.

Isn't that much more expensive and therefore less likely to be approved?

Very much this! This is about removing (if it at wall will do that) without fixing the root cause. How deep can you put your head in the ground? It reminds of the Matrix where they scorched the skies to remove solar power capabilities as a way to block the enemy.

Good article!