Five Ideas to Avert Global Warming

National Geographic has a short article on crazy-sounding ideas that could avert global warming. Read all five ideas here.

Digging for a Solution

Dissolving mountains of rock might sound like a mad scientist’s dream. But it’s one of the proposals for speeding up the natural process of rock weathering, as a way of absorbing CO2.

Normal rainfall is slightly acidic, and over hundreds of thousands of years, it dissolves away mountains and other rocks.

The process pulls CO2 out of the air, locking it away in the form of minerals such as limestone.

A big operation for artificial rock weathering would need big mines, and a lot of electricity to chemically split seawater to make an acid that would be sprayed over the rocks.

The approach is “basically feasible,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California and a co-author of the Royal Society report.

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