1 point

Carbon sequestration is not going to solve global warming. CO2 is less than 2% of atmosphere. Even if you pass a shitton of air through the strata the difference will be negligible.

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3 points

Water absorbs a lot of co2 and removing it from the water via weathering is a valid idea.

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20 points

I think y’all are missing the point here.

It’s really to justify the production and testing of an insanely large planet altering weapon that would create a really cool firework.

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11 points

The only way to convince conservatives to fight climate change is if we do it with guns and bombs

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4 points

Actually, one of their feasibility assumptions is that the device is too large to be used militarily.

https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1#%3A~%3Atext=Confronting+the+escalating+threat+of%2CEnhanced+Rock+Weathering+(ERW).

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3 points

Ah. I suppose building an 81 gigaton nuclear weapon wouldn’t be small.

Let’s fire up the antimatter then!

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20 points

I mean… if we’re being honest, the long-term effects of global thermonuclear war would be (very eventual) carbon sequestration in tens to hundreds of millions of years, and then we’ll renew our oil reserves! We of course won’t be around to use them, seeing as we’ll have been sequestered into the oil.

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8 points

Can we get new oil actually? I thought we now have organisms that can break down every organic matter and thus it can not really accumulate anymore?

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2 points

There’s an abiotic pathway that creates new oil geologically. It’s a very small amount.

The theory is popular in Russia, where it’s claimed to be the main way oil is produced. That’s complete bullshit. It turned out there is some, but not enough to matter.

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3 points

If you squeeze a baby hard enough

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9 points

Oil actually comes from aquatic life (mostly plankton) that sinks to the sea floor and gets buried, squeezed and heated. Oil still forms today, but it’s a process of millions of years.

Coal is formed from plants, and that does indeed require something doesn’t eat it first. Swamps, for example, help a lot, letting the fallen trees sink down where most stuff can’t eat it. Peat can also form into coal. Coal forms even slower than oil though, and it’s much rarer, but it also doesn’t require an ocean, so it’s often more accessible for us land-living humans

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5 points

Coal is much rarer than oil? I have to look that up, I always thought there is far more coal.

Nope, there is about 3x more coal than oil.

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5 points

Being sequestered into the oil sounds pretty nice at this point.

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1 point

Another cycle, another life. Same shithole planet.

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11 points

Just spitballing here. These grand ideas good/bad practical/or not are the beginning of mankind learning how to geo engineer planets or moons. I’ll be long dead before I get proven right or wrong so it’s easy to spitball

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44 points
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55 points

wow, and the bomb only needs a yield of 1620 times the largest nuclear bomb ever deployed.

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42 points

“Nuclear explosions are inherently unsafe”

Well, he warns about it.

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2 points

And states the main problem, with a deep ocean detonation, would be fallout.

I’m not sure that’s right. The shockwave of a bomb that insane could easily have seismic and tsunami effects. Probably be the biggest mass of dead fish floating at the surface, too.

Should probably talk to some geologists first.

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20 points

Nuclear explosions are inherently unsafe…

…but fuck them fish!

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1 point

[citation needed]

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5 points

Would 1,620 of those bombs work instead?

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8 points

perhaps, though you’d have to dig a much bigger hole. however, the paper points out that the sheer military uselessness of such an enormous bomb would be crucial to making it legal or politically feasible. the international community would be understandably sus of anyone wanting to make 1620 tsar bombas.

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15 points

Thanks for the link, interesting read! I know that a good paper is succint, but honestly, I thought that making the case for a gigaton-yield nuclear explosion to combat climate change would take more than four pages…

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5 points

It’s quite light on details.

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