Those materials do not reflect evert frequency.

Just to put it into numbers, wikipedia has the total amount of CO2 on the global warming page, if we assume it's in a 2 kg/l substance it totals to around 180 km^3.

1). Wikipedia does have a citation [1] saying 2,450 gigatonnes of CO2 have been emitted by human activity, of which 42% stayed in the atmosphere and 34% dissolved in the oceans, with the rest already sequestered by plant growth and land use. As we start to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, it will begin to be emitted from the oceans as well; therefore, let's assume we have to recapture all excess atmospheric and oceanic CO2:

:: 2450x10^9 tonnes CO2 x .66 fraction to sequester ~= 1.6x10^12 tonnes CO2.

2) Let's convert the CO2 to something more stable for long-term storage: HDPE.

- Convert mass of CO2 to mass of carbon:

:: 1.6x10^12 tonnes CO2 x 12/44 mass fraction of C in CO2 ~= 4.4x10^11 tonnes C

- Convert mass C to mass HDPE; assume HDPE is effectively (CH2)n. Then:

:: 4.4x10^11 tonnes C x 14/12 mass fraction CH2 to C ~= 5.2x10^11 tonnes HDPE

3) That's a lot of plastic! How much volume? Wikipedia says HDPE is ~930-970 kg/m3; let's be conservative again and take the low figure:

:: 5.2x10^11 tonnes HDPE x 1.0/0.930 m3 per tonne HDPE ~= 5.5x10^11 m3 HDPE

4) Those are cubic meters; how about cubic kilometers?

:: 5.5x10^11 m3 x 1.0/1.0x10^9 km3 per m3 ~= 5.5x10^2 km3

In other words, if you turned all the [excess potentially climate-change impacting] CO2 that humanity has emitted since 1850 into plastic (a process that would certainly emit a large additional CO2 fraction given the industrial buildout required) then we'd end up with about 550 cubic kilometers of the stuff. Coincidentally, that's about the volume of Mount Everest according to an intermediate calculation in [2].

So, a mountain of carbon: more than a pile but less than a mountain range.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphe...

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-would-the-estimated-weight-of-Mou...

It's a literal mountain chain of plastic. We do have uses for it, but it's a lot.

Extending the current exponential for 20 years, we get into the 500ppm region.

I don't think that's enough to need scrubbers.

If your room has 2 times the open air concentration, and you are concerned if it's 2.0 times or 2.2 times, you should already be dealing with the problem.

So at 500 external you'd pretty much need continuous ERV but not necessarily scrubbers just yet.

I have no idea why the journalist that wrote this article choose to highlight the carbon density of the sub-header. It's almost completely irrelevant for carbon capture plants.

Another clear benefit is that it's a liquid.

Today people mostly use the substances that you called non-reversible in research plants (AFAIK, all plants are research right now). They are perfectly reversible, but that uses a lot of energy.

Looks like a perfect match to a solar plant, which provides basically free energy periodically. All you need is a large enough cistern to hold the liquid during night time.

But you don't need to store the capture medium. You use a bit more energy to make they work faster while the Sun is shining, and stop everything when it's gone.

The largest bottleneck is what you do to get rid of the CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania

Those popped all over Europe during the entire century, with the last one popping at the 1890s. For some reason, people focus only on this large one on the UK.

Sources for how 19th Century imperialism had a lot of support from extend-and-pretend infrastructure bubbles are harder to search.

Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.

Yes it does. In fact, unless you want to get nit-picky about intra-gene, inter-allele selection, that is _exactly_ what it does.

I think I understand the GP pretty well. Cheating, or defection in the language of evolutionary theory, is subject to frequency based selection, meaning it is strongly selected against if its frequency is too high in the population. It's not a stable strategy.

It can be a winning strategy for a few individuals in a cooperative environment, yes, but it breaks down at a point because the system collapses if too many do it.

And yet, cooperative systems are common and stable, which is my point.

Chance to pass genes forward. This is only equivalent to individual fitness for very solitary species and humans aren't.

As an extreme example, take soldier termites - their chance to pass their genes is zero, but the chance for the colony to survive grows. Also gay people exist (they also - usually - don't reproduce, but help others instead).

Humans naturally care about their family and tribe because this increases the chance of their bloodline to survive.

In evolutionary theory this is made clear by using the term "inclusive fitness" - worker ants actually pass their genes on to future generations more effectively by taking the detour, if you will, through the queen.

If you want to be nitpicky and argue we should consider the individual gene the unit of selection, as Dawkins famously argued, I'm not going to disagree, you can see it that way too.

That specific distinction very rarely leads to different predictions though.

But not all bad tests come from a goal of 100% coverage.

The yearly salary of knowledge workers in the US are about 10 times the public OpenAI investment to date, and in the entire world about 70 times...