Global warming - an urgent problem requiring radical solution (no politics or religion)

For anyone who thinks that a bit of warming will be beneficial or will have only small consequences-

I suggest you read this article ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/02/trump-administration-planet-boil-refugee-camps

This would partly be carbon sequestration, which usually means the storing of waste CO2 somewhere other than the atmosphere.  On individual vehicles it is virtually impossible. For one thing the mass of CO2 from burning fuels is much larger than the mass of the fuel, but a bigger problem is the volume: this is of the order of 1000 times bigger than the fuel. The equipment to convert it to a non-gaseous form is bulky and expensive. The only practical way to do it is on a large scale at a power station and use the electricity for vehicles etc, but even that is expensive (especially compared to renewable energy).

One thing that is worth trying to do is to capture the nastier pollutants that kill people, especially in cities, but this too is challenging and expensive. Electricity has no such problems if it is generated in a clean way.

Sustainable plastics are surely a necessity for the future, given the enormous utility of this class of materials. It's worth noting though that making plastics from oil contributes little to global warming until the plastic is burnt.

Growing palm oil has been very bad for the environment.

True. I understand it is one of the most environmentally damaging crops.

I'm in favour of co-use of land - wind turbines and crops - and harnessing solar power where there is little conflict with agriculture. A big advantage is that you need at least 20 times less land for that than for growing fuel crops, even with a calculation that is biased towards fuels. This leaves the rest for more harmonious use.

Where is your energy source? Hurricanes are created by powerful solar energy over water, with Coriolis' force playing a crucial role. The amount of energy involved is stupendous even by human standards. It doesn't work on a small scale, because of the physics.

More realistically, solar energy can be harnessed in an analogous way using a solar updraft tower. These are very inefficient on a small scale, and only really work on a massive scale, in combination with a greenhouse to improve the economics. Make one really big - like the one planned in Namibia, 1.5 kilometres tall, 280 metres in diameter, and with a 37 square kilometres greenhouse at its base - and you have a good power source (but no hurricane, just a powerful updraft driving massive turbines).

Here is perhaps the largest solar updraft tower in existence, in Spain (note the huge greenhouse at the bottom).

To identify the shape, I would need to see it. Post a photo.

It's essentially a geodesic dome.

I have no clue as to what you are talking about s23 - but if it keeps you busy its probably doing us all a favour  

Before you worry about reentry you might want to think about escape velocity...

It occurs to me that you are sort a cross between Elon Musk and Derek 'Del boy' Trotter. That last person you probably haven't heard of but he was a sort of (fictional) entrepreneur.

[EDIT: this post was in error. The effect is tiny at the poles, but smaller elsewhere]

No, it is where it is least. At the pole, it is like you are on a roundabout that rotates only once every 24 hours, so the effect on dynamics is tiny.

You are indeed correct about Coriolis force being stronger in Northern latitudes. In fact is it proportional to the sine of the latitude. What fooled me is that the force is very small at the North pole, but it gets even smaller as you go South. This is why it only alters the direction of winds a lot on scales of hundreds of miles. The rotation at the centre of a cyclone or anticyclone is not a local effect: rather it is a feature of the Coriolis force acting on the motion over a diameter of hundreds of miles. It is insignificant on a small scale.

The formula for the Coriolis acceleration (a_C) is:

The first two terms in the column vector are the East and North components, v_u , v_n, and v_e are the upward, north and east components of velocity, so you can drop the v_u term if velocities are horizontal, but the main thing is that little omega is the angular frequency. This is very small - 1/86400 Hz - which is why the Coriolis acceleration is very small compared to gravity unless speeds are stupendous.

For example, say v is very large, say 1 kilometer per second,  and you are at the North pole. Then the Coriolis acceleration is 1000/86400 = 0.01 m/s^2, which is 1/10000 as big as the acceleration due to gravity. You won't notice this on a small scale!

Because it acts on air currents that move over hundreds of miles. The average anticyclone is about 2000 miles across.

Nobel prize for economics awarded for the economic modelling of climate change

Rising temps will worsen the current 6th mass extinction.

FYI --  Neither recipient is favorably inclined to the UN Climate Negotiations, unfortunately.

Romer (recently) only lasted 15 months as the World Bank's Chief Economist, before he "pulled the plug," or the World Bank pulled his.  

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/01/25/paul-romer-quits-after-an-embarrassing-row

I don't even know in detail what their contributions are, but I believe in the idea of costing climate change and making sure that these costs are reflected in the economy. This is one of a small number of ways to prevent "the tragedy of the commons", a problem of which economists have been aware for 185 years and which is still not understood by right wing politicians (or Austrian economists probably).

Virtually the only objection rational people have to UN agreements relating to climate change is that they don't do enough to shift to a low carbon economy.

[The reason Romer left the World Bank seems to be all about their unwillingness to improve the quality of communication as he suggested. He is not the only one to have noticed they are at fault in this respect: 'A 2015 study by Stanford University’s Literary Lab found World Bank publications seemed almost to be “another language”. The study coined the term “Bankspeak” to describe report styles becoming “more codified, self-referential, and detached from everyday language.'].

You need energy to make C and O from CO. The same for CO2 (which is more relevant). Plants don't do this, but they do something similar by using solar energy (the total efficiency is less than 1%).

 There is nothing to retain if the engine does not produce pollution in the first place. Hydrogen fuel cells, for example. 

As someone who advocates the replacement of fossil fuel powered transport by electric vehicles (which is going to happen in the next 20 years), that claim does not make sense.

The problem with your ideas is not their revolutionary nature: it is that they don't work. The energy available is minuscule.