It isn't enough. Not on its own.
The big clue though?
It has to remove carbon from the atmosphere and keep it removed. And frankly? We actually know a way to make that happen, we can influence and requires a relatively small investment. What do you think fossil fuel is in the first place?
It's just, we have to structurally remove the net increase in atmospheric carbon, and that's the work of decades no matter what we use. Clear cutting vast swaths of forest to remove already stored carbon and move it to a long term storage facility that is not as vulnerable to a fire and gives room for new, fresh growth to suck down as much CO2 from the atmosphere as possible. After all, young forests have a much greater effect than mature forests, which are effectively negligible at best on the world carbon balance.
Of course, we could also seed the upper layers of the ocean with phosphates and other fertilizers in the hope of creating vast algae blooms that will die off and leave as much detritus raining down to the anoxic ocean floor for burial as possible, but that's even less effective for the amount of effort we'd need to put in.
Of course, elemental carbon (so basically charcoal, remainder is a rounding error) is about 2.2 kg per liter. That's about 2.2 gigatons per cubic kilometer, or billion cubic meters. Historically, there's about 2200 gigatons of CO2 in the planetary atmosphere, and we've added about 1000 (rounding error etc. Source.) which is the amount we need to remove to get to pre industrial era carbondioxide levels. According to the source we can divide this by 3.67 to get the actual amount of carbon we need to store, which is about 272 Gtons. At 2.2 gigatons per cubic kilometer that's approximately 124 cubic kilometers of powdered charcoal we'd need to bury. Or nearly 30 cubic miles for the metrically challenged.
And given that wood is approximately equal to the density of water, that means we need to process nearly 600 gigatons for that. This is actually vaguely plausible; according to wikipedia in 1991 about 3.5 billion cubic meters, equivalent to about 3.5 gigatons, were harvested for various purposes. Of course, total time for this alone to complete sequestering of carbon is some 170 years. And that's not counting the energy cost (and thus CO2 production) of performing this action in the first place.
The big clue though?
It has to remove carbon from the atmosphere and keep it removed. And frankly? We actually know a way to make that happen, we can influence and requires a relatively small investment. What do you think fossil fuel is in the first place?
It's just, we have to structurally remove the net increase in atmospheric carbon, and that's the work of decades no matter what we use. Clear cutting vast swaths of forest to remove already stored carbon and move it to a long term storage facility that is not as vulnerable to a fire and gives room for new, fresh growth to suck down as much CO2 from the atmosphere as possible. After all, young forests have a much greater effect than mature forests, which are effectively negligible at best on the world carbon balance.
Of course, we could also seed the upper layers of the ocean with phosphates and other fertilizers in the hope of creating vast algae blooms that will die off and leave as much detritus raining down to the anoxic ocean floor for burial as possible, but that's even less effective for the amount of effort we'd need to put in.
Of course, elemental carbon (so basically charcoal, remainder is a rounding error) is about 2.2 kg per liter. That's about 2.2 gigatons per cubic kilometer, or billion cubic meters. Historically, there's about 2200 gigatons of CO2 in the planetary atmosphere, and we've added about 1000 (rounding error etc. Source.) which is the amount we need to remove to get to pre industrial era carbondioxide levels. According to the source we can divide this by 3.67 to get the actual amount of carbon we need to store, which is about 272 Gtons. At 2.2 gigatons per cubic kilometer that's approximately 124 cubic kilometers of powdered charcoal we'd need to bury. Or nearly 30 cubic miles for the metrically challenged.
And given that wood is approximately equal to the density of water, that means we need to process nearly 600 gigatons for that. This is actually vaguely plausible; according to wikipedia in 1991 about 3.5 billion cubic meters, equivalent to about 3.5 gigatons, were harvested for various purposes. Of course, total time for this alone to complete sequestering of carbon is some 170 years. And that's not counting the energy cost (and thus CO2 production) of performing this action in the first place.