Fixing Climate With Greenhouse Gas Scrubbers

By the 1970s, Broecker already believed that CO₂ from emissions was causing global warming.

The scientist who coined the term “global warming” in the 1970s has proposed a radical scheme to combat rapid climate change — forests of artificial trees designed to pull carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air.

Wallace Broecker is a professor at Columbia University and a researcher at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observator.

He told those attending a literary festival in Wales last week that some 60 million of the scrubbing devices would be needed to capture all of the CO₂ currently emitted, which would then be compressed and stored underground or turned into a solid.

He details the scheme and other methods to combat global warming in his new book Fixing Climate.

"Each of us in America is responsible for generating about 20 tons of CO₂ a year. So I suppose roughly 17 million scrubbers would take care of the United States," Broecker told Smithsonian.

Broecker’s proposed towers would be about 50 feet (15 metres) high and use a type of plastic that absorbs the greenhouse gas.

“OK, you say that’s enormous, but we make 55 million cars a year, so if we really wanted to, we could. Over 30 or 40 years we could easily make that number,” Broecker said.

He believes the most convenient locations to place the towers would be in remote desert areas.

Photo: Victor Melniciuc - iStockphoto
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