this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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The downside of that kind of stuff is that you need a balance. Scrub too much CO2 and it's trouble again.
If we can get atmospheric CO2 back down to where it was 100 years ago that would be an amazing problem to have.
Look up the Oxygen Catastropy, also called Oxygen Holocaust.
That's what happens if too much carbon is removed from the atmosphere and thus there's too much oxygen in it.
It sounds like you have no idea the magnitudes involved, or the timelines. You're talking about something that took place over a period of 400 million years and whose effects (the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere and our oceans) remain. There's no chance that geoengineering would change the oxygen levels to anything we can't handle, and if it starts to head down that direction we can easily handle it (just stop the processes that would sequester carbon).
It's like being worried that your air conditioning is going to freeze your pipes in the house, in the middle of summer.
Great, in 50 years we'll be desperately switching back to fossil fuels to prevent an ice age.