Although not all that carbon stays in the atmosphere (accelerated plant growth and all that), I agree. With enough nukes, we'd have power to scrub excess carbon from the atmosphere and pave Nevada with bricks of carbon.

Heh... maybe that's how we solve the nuclear waste problem and carbon sequestration issue at the same time- we'll just surround the waste with billions of tons of carbon.

Seriously, though, if we wanted to get rid of the waste, we could *just* drop it into a deep sea subduction zone and let it get sucked back down into the mantle. If we think it might be useful at some point in the future, we'll want a nice safe spot to keep it.

Yeah- nukes first, then space-based solar if we can figure out a cheap way to orbit.

Wow. A rational discussion on Slashdot. Maybe hell is worried about global freezing right now?

Dude, check the numbers.

Amount of coal the U.S. burned in 2007: 1,145.6 x 10^6 tons

Total mass of Earth's atmosphere: 1.135 x 10^16 tons

Assuming (a) pure carbon, and (b) it all stays in the atmosphere, this represents 0.00002% of atmospheric mass, a trivial amount. (By comparison, China uses 1900 x 10^6 tons of coal each year, much more than the U.S.) Previous numbers are 2006 figures, according to wikipedia. 2008 production amounts are found here, and show China producing twice that of the United States. I didn't bother to check what India is using.

Now, I agree that dumping all this stuff into the atmosphere is a bad idea, a terrible open-ended experiment. But chasing a poor scientific theory (AGW) with worse data ('200 Pyramids of coal') is even worse. Blaming a single country is worse still. Let science do its job- none of the problems are hard- and lets fix the problem instead of running back to the stone age. Energy consumption is not the problem; efficient and clean energy production is.

So, lets get back to the beer and other yummy yeasty foods.