my apologies for the intemperate tone. Please allow me to revise and extend my remarks as follows.
I have no claim to special expertise but living in the US we are regularly treated to pictures of huge Western wildfires that lay waste to wide swathes of land, destroy hundreds of homes, often cause significant casualties, and require days to bring under control (not extinguish) with the efforts of hundreds or thousands of workers and special equipment -- all that without adding the requirement to bring a particular substance to the task. These are just the wildfires that make the news because they impinge on heavily populated areas. Also, I am somewhat familiar with world fires data. If you look at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/view.php?d1=MOD14A1_M_FIRE, and play the Quicktime video there, you will note that there are a whole bunch of fires burning all the time (these are 1 km pixels I believe) and that they tend to be burning in tropical and boreal areas that are relatively far from Fire Departments. Finally, what reason is there to believe that forest ecosystems would still function as we would wish if we make a dramatic intervention in the duration and heat behavior of fires? Given all these practical objections, does it really seem fair to characterize fire fighting with serpentite as a "commercially feasible" method? My objection is more to the title, which seems like overreaching, than to the idea itself. I may perhaps be overly sensitive to the title because there is a lot of controversy about the cost feasibility of emissions control and cost claims have policy implications. Overly optimistic cost claims tend to induce skepticism in otherwise sympathetic listeners. Frankly, I think it would be so difficult to scale serpentite use to truly global levels that there is no great harm in using it to put out human-critical fires, so, I'm not really opposed to the idea (which seems clever, and, if nothing else, a boon for serpentite mine owners), just cautious about marketing it as a big part of the solution. Cordially, Fred ᐧ On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 8:15 AM, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) <[email protected]> wrote: > Mr.Zimmerman, > > You made a rather crunching remark about my proposal to quench forest > fires with serpentinite slurries instead of water. I would appreciate a > more detailed criticism. My paper on it (serpentinite slurries against > forest fires) has just been accepted for publication in Int.J.Forestry, and > the Dutch Fire brigades were very enthusiastic when they witnessed my > quenching test, and I would like to know why the reviewers of the paper and > the Dutch fire brigades were so far off the mark according to you, Olaf > Schuiling > > > > *From:* [email protected] [mailto: > [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Fred Zimmerman > *Sent:* woensdag 1 oktober 2014 18:58 > *To:* Andrew Lockley > *Cc:* geoengineering > *Subject:* Re: [geo] 6 commercially viable ways to remove CO2 - Schuiling > > > > Title vastly oversells commercial feasibility of the blue-sky notions > described below. One need only inspect the item on putting out forest fires > with serpentite--reads as if authors have no appreciation whatsoever of the > scale of forest fires, how difficult they are to put out, and the fact that > they play crucial role in vital ecosystem services. > > [image: Image removed by sender.]ᐧ > > > > On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Andrew Lockley <[email protected]> > wrote: > > attached > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "geoengineering" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "geoengineering" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
