eli5: what would happen if we cleaned up all the carbon on earth would it become global cooling?
In: Planetary Science
If we could just take a magic eraser and delete all the carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases that do the same thing) from the atmosphere that *we put there*, then yeah. The globe would probably cool back down to where it “should” be, pre-industrial era. Doing this is called “carbon capture”, and while it’s a thing that you *can* do in the real world, it’s probably our [least viable option right now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dRgCsZ1q7g) for counteracting our current trajectory of climate change.
If you removed *all carbon dioxide* from the atmosphere, *period*, all plants would die immediately. They need a nonzero amount of it to breathe. And since plants are the foundation of most of the global food chain, that would lead to a collapse of basically every ecosystem on the planet, including us. Oh, and it would also cool the Earth a fair bit, I guess.
If you removed all *carbon* from Earth (not just carbon *dioxide*), *period*, well, essentially every single living thing would cease to exist instantly. Carbon is *the* building block that allows for every form of life we currently know of. It’s so integral to life that the term “organic” in the context of chemicals is essentially shorthand for “has carbon in it”. As for what would happen to Earth, I guess I don’t really know. Carbon is only about 0.02% of Earth by elemental quantity. Not a huge amount on the grand scale of things, but it would still probably still cause untold amounts of ruin to Earth’s surface.
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