>If good/cheap/big/fast carbon sinks are up for discussion i would recommend 
>phytoplankton... Salmon are tasty too, but that is a side dish.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/24/18273198/climate-change-russ-george-unilateral-geoengineering

~greg
http://krsnadas.org

--

from: Ian Clark <[email protected]>
reply-to: [email protected]
to: [email protected]
date: Jun 7, 2019, 11:15 AM
subject: Re: [Jchat] TABULA announcement and request

>> I'm going to put myself in the "not enough interest to try to figure this 
>> out" category, for now.

>Whoa, folks. It's only an example! Let's not carried away by the magnitude of 
>the problem domain to refuse to focus on the two limited questions I've asked.

>Let me repeat them, hopefully clarifying them…

>++ are the input figures reliable, i.e. has the data been corrupted when 
>moving it from web to SAMPLE9?
++ is TABULA calculating it right?

>These are purely questions of data integrity and code reliability. I thought 
>everyone on this list was keenly interested in such issues.

>The first question arises from the deceptively simple task of looking up a 
>quantity on the web and transferring it into a calculating engine. Simple, but 
>errors can arise. Issues arise about where such-and-such a physical constant 
>or observation comes from. How the end-user can verify its source. Would it 
>have helped if I'd phrased it in terms of looking up the current $/£ exchange 
>rate?

>TABULA is distributed with tables of physical and chemical constants. Are they 
>up-to-date? Have they been copied across correctly? Built-in tables are an 
>inherently unsatisfactory solution. I'm now considering an interactive 
>specialised browser, with which the user can locate any of these quantities on 
>a given webpage, draw a box round them, and leave TABULA to fetch the numbers 
>and units at the point of use. Hey presto: keying errors eliminated, 
>up-to-date figures, near-perfect assurance of the integrity of the data being 
>fetched. Warning if the webpage has been corrupted or pulled.

>These, and only these, are the questions I'm interested in here. I just fail 
>to see how I could possibly have made it clearer.

--

from: Raul Miller <[email protected]>
to: Chat forum <[email protected]>
date: Jun 7, 2019, 10:43 AM
subject: Re: [Jchat] TABULA announcement and request

On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 12:18 PM Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Would anyone fancy checking my calculations?

>I don't, but if I did, I'd try to find an alternate way of getting the same 
>information and see if the numbers land in the same order of magnitude.

>(For example, when talking about global temperature change over the last 
>century, I like double checking those kinds of numbers with rise in sea level. 
>Weather stations tend to be near airports, which tend to have lots of asphalt, 
>but sea level doesn't have that issue and the thermal expansion coefficient of 
>water is something I can easily find, as are NOAA numbers on sea level...)

>So, if I were be double checking numbers related to CO2, I'd try to find some 
>similar thing. For actual levels, I don't have any good ideas - maybe 
>something optical?

>For cost of pulling it back out? The big mechanism there has always been trees 
>and similar vegetation. So maybe I'd check forestry service records, or lumber 
>statistics. I'd probably have to put some thought into it though - maybe a few 
>weeks before I had any really good ideas on what to look for. Hopefully 
>someone else has been doing this thinking, but most people aren't really 
>interested in doing that kind of thinking.

>(Related: It takes about 60 years to grow a typical crop of trees for lumber 
>-- maybe 10 times that for something like Sitka Spruce -- and during that time 
>they relatively large amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere. So if enough land 
>is earmarked for vegetation, we should be seeing a lot of CO2 being pulled out 
>of the atmosphere. Well, that and don't let them burn up in forest fires, for 
>example.)

>Anyways, good luck, but I'm going to put myself in the "not enough interest to 
>try to figure this out" category, for now. Maybe if I think up a good approach 
>I'll change my mind.

Thanks,
Raul
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