The ocean breathes in and out too. Very little carbon sinks down to the sea floor. The ocean does happen to absorb a lot of CO2, but that's from acidification rather than photosynthesis.

Forests do net sequester carbon. But if you want to really sock away the carbon you harvest the trees and pyrolize it. It will give you energy (heat) you can use and elemental carbon (biochar). You could bury that a few feet under or innoculate it with microorganisms and work it into fields. Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it.

Forests and grasslands are critical for the climate because of the carbon they lock away. So long as the plants stay alive, they store carbon in the cellulose structures of roots and stems.

Conserving these ecosystems is less about their daily respiration and more about keeping existing carbon out of the atmosphere. It's a defensive strategy. Not "carbon capture" per se but more "avoid loosing the carbon we've already captured". We're interested in the sink, not the flow.

Of course when the plant dies and decomposes or burns up, it all goes back. Long term, it's almost exactly net zero. The ONLY way to use plants for long term carbon sequestration is to make sure that plant matter gets treated or literally buried so that aerobic microbes and fungi can't break it down.

> Most of our oxygen comes not from forest but from oceans (specifically from phytoplankton, algae, and photosynthetic bacteria). Between 50-80% of it in fact.

That fact checks out: about 70% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. It follows that most photosynthesis, thus oxygen comes from oceans.

it looks like i'm guilty of having never really thought and done some research about this and i'm a bit ashamed to admit i fell in this trap and used to think forests and trees are the most important pieces in the system.

I don't get why media has been fixating so much on trees and forests (Amazonia!) without even mentioning ocean's role in this.

> Which IMO is in an even more dire strait than our forests

I think you are probably right, but could you kindly elaborate and provide more details? Very curious to hear your view and learn more.

If the ocean is the main hero there, why is the forest still important to our health?

“I couldn’t live with so many trees. They suck up all the oxygen.”

As somebody who works on carbon dioxide removal at planetary scale, I was excited about your article about indoor air… but nearly every comment here seems to want to talk about the changing climate!

Challenging in an apartment setting, but the state of the art here is an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) installed in your home to continuously refresh the air.

"Residential CO2 scrubber" seems like the sort of gadget eccentric rich people would buy, sort of a distributed DAC system.

If it wasn't an apartment and you could cut holes in the wall, I would say a ductless HRV.

NASA is working on it: https://www.nasa.gov/spacecraft-oxygen-recovery-scor/

You don't necessarily have to bury the plants to sequester the carbon. A lot of oceanic carbon just sinks to the bottom and is eventually covered over, especially near estuaries that spew silt.

To me, this is great that demonstrates how ridiculous carbon capture and storage is. I just can't imagine us paying to do something like this at scale, when we have a much more straightforward alternative: Stop burning fossil fuels, and use clean energy instead. Right? Like why even both going through the effort of carbon capture, when we're still going to have to stop burning fossil fuels anyways, in order to fix the climate?

I find it especially a problem at night. Started out leaving the window open in the bedroom, but that lets in noise and wind. Current solution is leave the bedroom door open and have a window cracked open in another room. It seems to work out really well as measured by my CO2 monitor.

I mentioned this elsewhere here, but a friend told me that it’s not only CO2 that leads to that mental fog, but it’s also the VOCs in the air too. All that gets cleared out by having an open window.

Outside it's not much better it's 430 ppm. Supposedly that's not enough to impact cognition.

Here's a real world* example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAbyUaLN2QA

*youtuber

I did some of the napkin math on algae a couple years ago... The fun realization is that the physical carbon has to go somewhere. So if we're trying to sequester the average american's 14 tons a year of carbon or whatever it is these days, that means you're going to have at least 14 tons of dead algae to deal with. (And a lot more weight if the algae isn't dehydrated.). That's a lot of dead algae, which demonstrates the difficulty of the problem...

In other news, have you considered ditching your car and becoming a vegetarian? Not emitting the carbon in the first place is much easier!

> Cognitive decline starts above 600 ppm according to air quality studies.

According to an older, small study of short duration (Mendell and Fisk at LBNL), the results of which are heavily disputed. Since 600 ppm isn't too much higher than the current level of 400+ ppm, this study is the one most commonly cherry-picked in order to instill fear in people that climate change is getting ready to damage our brains.

Just for comparison, the CO2 composition of exhaled breath is around 40,000 ppm (~4%), which is the reason that it's totally normal for CO2 concentrations in enclosed spaces like bedrooms and classrooms to reach several thousand ppm. CO2 levels in submarines average well over ten times atmospheric, and routinely reach well over 10,000 ppm.

In none of these situations have researchers found a clear and convincing long-term impact on cognitive performance. Short term yes, but our bodies and brains adapt. Some compensations appear incomplete, but others are possibly sufficient to incur health benefits from high CO2 concentrations. Notably, high CO2 levels cause blood vessels to dilate, increasing the flow of oxygen to tissues including the brain. There is in fact ongoing research into medical therapies using concentrated CO2.

I think what you really want is an Energy Recovery Ventilator. It cycles in fresh air and uses an intercooler to limit the heat and humidity loss.

It's all physics at the bottom. Nature doesn't have APIs.

It might not be clearly worded, but 132.5 watts is the power used by 2 incandescent light bulbs, whereas 918 watts is the power present in the light produced by 765 light bulbs. The factor of 50 comes from the fact that incandescent lightbulbs are only ~2% efficient at turning power into light.

> what does it matter how much CO2 I produce

Because the author of the piece is worried about the CO2 levels in their home, not about global warming. (well maybe they are worried about global warming too, but that's not what this is about)

Article is not about global atmospheric or climate phenomena, nor civilization scale industrial processes. It's about the CO^2 levels in your room due to your breathing.

Getting CO2 back to preindustrial levels by natural processes may take 100,000 years, IIRC. There will be some drawdown, but the ocean surface waters will become more saturated with carbon and that will stall. Over a longer time scale, CO2 will be pumped down into the deeper ocean. The true drawdown will require mineralization and precipitation as calcium carbonate, a slow process. The fossil fuel CO2 emitted each year corresponds to the calcium added to the ocean by erosion over about 100 years.

> plants, rocks, and many other natural processes will return CO² levels to a more moderate level.

No... How can you be this delusional? This is cult like behavior: something will fix it somehow, eventually, don't ask about details

This article isn't about climate change. It's about using houseplants to absorb the CO2 you exhale in your house.

Hi! I work a lot with carbon dioxide removal systems. If every person on Earth dropped everything and started making biochar, it would definitely make a huge difference. Yes, we add a lot of carbon dioxide to the air of a year, but it’s doable to remove it. Humanity has taken on much bigger challenges before and succeeded. Now that’s not to say that it’s likely. I think it’s entirely unlikely that we avert the worst impacts of climate change unless something big changes. Thankfully, we get to choose what to work on every day, and I get to choose to work on that alongside inspiring people. (and yes, this isn’t what the article is about, but it seems like it’s what everyone is responding to)

It's going to be ok.