"The discovery of the PyShell could also open promising avenues for biotechnological research aimed at combatting climate change ..." I wonder. Given that the oceans are already full of these diatoms, and the numbers must be gigantic, would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude?
> "...would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude?"
Good question. Answering questions is called 'research'. ;-)
I'm skeptical for the same reasons as you, too. Let's see... the ocean covers 361km^2. If we could engineer a material with "cells" that were 1000x as effective at carbon capture as diatoms, and the manufactured material was 1000x more densely packed together than diatoms are on the ocean surface, then you'd need 361 square kilometers of the magic material. Which is not out of the realm of possibility, though I have no idea what the density of diatoms is and I have a sneaking suspicion that we'd be looking at more of the 3x-4x range of efficiency improvement. And of course, you need to turn the CO2 into something and deposit it somewhere, and maybe move it around lot. Which would use energy that would produce more CO2, offsetting the gains. Oh, and manufacture the stuff.
I'm thinking releasing less of the stuff and stopping forest destruction might be much more effective for a long time here...
Extracting CO2 from the air likely requires some energy, and seafloor organisms are almost certainly energy-constrained. We could beat the seafloor simply by providing more energy, if we get within the ballpark of their efficiency. We have plenty of deserts and solar panels.
Perhaps silicate is already the limiting factor and thus we simply need to add silicate to the sea in ratio with the amount of carbon we want to capture.
Similar has been tested with iron + algae and seems to work well.
You have made a subtle misalignment of figures here. Yes, these existing diatoms fix 20% of the Earth's CO2 and are present throughout the entire ocean. However, we don't need to compete with that volume. We don't have to do the same order of magnitude to meaningfully impact the carbon cycle.
The Earth's carbon cycle manages about 750 gigatons of CO2/year and humans are emitting ~30 excess gigatons a year on top. The diatoms in the ocean are happily out there processing 150 gigatons of CO2/year, but what we need to engineer is only 30 gigatons (to completely eradicate human emissions).
If we engineered diatoms to fix, say, 0.3 gigatons/year, we'd eradicate a whole integer percent of our emissions.
Heck, if we got it in the 0.03 gigatons (30 megatons/year), we've probably built something scalable and created a useful entry in our portfolio to capture carbon, sinking about 0.1% of our carbon/year.
So, don't despair, we don't have to compete with the ocean! We only need to compete with ourselves! Or maybe do despair? Because we have to compete with ourselves... fundamentally, climate change isn't a technology problem, it's a political problem.
When looking into the physics of infrared-absorption of CO2, I found papers about that quite interesting. Maybe climate change is not a political problem and not a technology problem - maybe it's a mental issue.
Around my place people burned witches for 400 years - to fight lightning strikes.
Removing gigatons of CO2 is maybe on the same level - only more stupid - and bad for plants. Arguments against witch burning didn't have much data to process. For CO2 there's quite some number crunching out there available...
Emotions, despair, anger, ... these are a lot of emotional arguments in the media out there. People should be more cool and only care about the physic and mathematics... And actually read some papers - not this emotional science fluff from the media.
No, you're not; however, since there weren't any comments here condemning PyShell's (lack of) speed and stating the absolute need for rewrite in another language[1], it was easy to deduce that Python-the-language really wasn't mentioned in the article.
[1] with the obvious advantage of improving performance by 2 orders of magnitude thus solving Earth's carbon cycle issues
“We have now discovered that diatom pyrenoids are encased in a lattice-like protein shell,” says Dr. Manon Demulder, author on both studies. “The PyShell not only gives the pyrenoid its shape, but it helps create a high CO2 concentration in this compartment. This enables Rubisco to efficiently fix CO2 from the ocean and convert it into nutrients.”
"The discovery of the PyShell could also open promising avenues for biotechnological research aimed at combatting climate change ..." I wonder. Given that the oceans are already full of these diatoms, and the numbers must be gigantic, would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude?
> "...would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude?"
Good question. Answering questions is called 'research'. ;-)
I'm skeptical for the same reasons as you, too. Let's see... the ocean covers 361km^2. If we could engineer a material with "cells" that were 1000x as effective at carbon capture as diatoms, and the manufactured material was 1000x more densely packed together than diatoms are on the ocean surface, then you'd need 361 square kilometers of the magic material. Which is not out of the realm of possibility, though I have no idea what the density of diatoms is and I have a sneaking suspicion that we'd be looking at more of the 3x-4x range of efficiency improvement. And of course, you need to turn the CO2 into something and deposit it somewhere, and maybe move it around lot. Which would use energy that would produce more CO2, offsetting the gains. Oh, and manufacture the stuff.
I'm thinking releasing less of the stuff and stopping forest destruction might be much more effective for a long time here...
> the ocean covers 361km^2
That should of course be 361 million km^2.
Extracting CO2 from the air likely requires some energy, and seafloor organisms are almost certainly energy-constrained. We could beat the seafloor simply by providing more energy, if we get within the ballpark of their efficiency. We have plenty of deserts and solar panels.
Engineer a more efficient diatom. Release it into the wild. What could go wrong.
I guess there would be a silicate famine in the seas, that seems to be the limiting factor for diatom presence overall among plankton
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom#/media/File:Diatoms_Egg...
Perhaps silicate is already the limiting factor and thus we simply need to add silicate to the sea in ratio with the amount of carbon we want to capture.
Similar has been tested with iron + algae and seems to work well.
Sahara is full of silicate. Just make it green.
You have made a subtle misalignment of figures here. Yes, these existing diatoms fix 20% of the Earth's CO2 and are present throughout the entire ocean. However, we don't need to compete with that volume. We don't have to do the same order of magnitude to meaningfully impact the carbon cycle.
The Earth's carbon cycle manages about 750 gigatons of CO2/year and humans are emitting ~30 excess gigatons a year on top. The diatoms in the ocean are happily out there processing 150 gigatons of CO2/year, but what we need to engineer is only 30 gigatons (to completely eradicate human emissions).
If we engineered diatoms to fix, say, 0.3 gigatons/year, we'd eradicate a whole integer percent of our emissions.
Heck, if we got it in the 0.03 gigatons (30 megatons/year), we've probably built something scalable and created a useful entry in our portfolio to capture carbon, sinking about 0.1% of our carbon/year.
So, don't despair, we don't have to compete with the ocean! We only need to compete with ourselves! Or maybe do despair? Because we have to compete with ourselves... fundamentally, climate change isn't a technology problem, it's a political problem.
When looking into the physics of infrared-absorption of CO2, I found papers about that quite interesting. Maybe climate change is not a political problem and not a technology problem - maybe it's a mental issue.
Around my place people burned witches for 400 years - to fight lightning strikes.
Removing gigatons of CO2 is maybe on the same level - only more stupid - and bad for plants. Arguments against witch burning didn't have much data to process. For CO2 there's quite some number crunching out there available...
Emotions, despair, anger, ... these are a lot of emotional arguments in the media out there. People should be more cool and only care about the physic and mathematics... And actually read some papers - not this emotional science fluff from the media.
I was looking into the numbers and what I could find was that is more like 350 than 750. Source: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does.... Still interesting fact not often cited.
Am I the only one that saw this and thought, "What's a python shell got to do with it?"
https://github.com/JoelGMSec/PyShell
No, you're not; however, since there weren't any comments here condemning PyShell's (lack of) speed and stating the absolute need for rewrite in another language[1], it was easy to deduce that Python-the-language really wasn't mentioned in the article.
[1] with the obvious advantage of improving performance by 2 orders of magnitude thus solving Earth's carbon cycle issues
Python seems to be embedded everywhere nowadays :D
Think about how much plastic we produced ? When we want to do something at scale we can.
When individuals want products we're capable of incredible things
“We have now discovered that diatom pyrenoids are encased in a lattice-like protein shell,” says Dr. Manon Demulder, author on both studies. “The PyShell not only gives the pyrenoid its shape, but it helps create a high CO2 concentration in this compartment. This enables Rubisco to efficiently fix CO2 from the ocean and convert it into nutrients.”