I haven’t written a technical post here on RJsCorner for some time now. It seems my recent thoughts tend to be more emotional and personal. But, I am still an IT (Information Technology) guy who loved mechanical stuff. As I have mentioned several times before, I got great joy in spending eight years in my barn filling my micro-RV with among other things, technical stuff. Plain speaking, I am a techie.

So, it’s about time for the techie post. I found the topic for this post at one of my favorite information sources called Inkl. But before I get into that, let my give you something I learned 60 years ago.

The basic way life exists on this earth is that people, and other living creatures breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. The second part of our existence is that trees and such taken in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. That circle is called a symbiotic relationship. One cannot exist without the other. The earth, at least that part that is not covered with water was once covered with trees. Moving forward to the 21st century, there are many fewer trees than there were even a couple of centuries ago. It just seems logical that to keep that symbiotic relationship going we either need less people or more trees. But that is far too simplistic an answer.

Finally, fast-forward to the techie part of this post before I use up my 500 words.

---

Two centuries of burning fossil fuels have put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than nature can remove. As CO2 builds up it traps excess heat in the atmosphere causing global warming.

One possible solution for that is to create mechanical trees that capture CO2 and by a chemical reaction removes it from the atmosphere. Why do we need to do this? Let’s look at the data:

• People and breathing animals product about 3 billion tons of CO2/year
• Fossil fuel burning produces about 36 billion tons of CO2/year

In case you were wandering, there is no need to fear us running out of oxygen as the ocean produces much more than we need through photosynthesis alone, but that process is incapable of absorbing all the CO2 we now produce. So, it ends up accumulating in our atmosphere.

Just to give you an idea of how much fossil fuel has contributed to global warming here is a graph.

The math just doesn’t add up to anything but trouble. How many more years can this go on? We have to figure a way to bend this curve before it is too late, if it isn’t already. Mechanical trees are one possible stop-gap solution, but it won’t begin to solve the long-term problem.

All you have to do is to look at a satellite view of the earth to see just how thin our atmosphere is. That should scare you enough to want to do something about this problem.