Do you know what is the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere humanity needs to sequester to avoid global climate change catastrophes and possible extinction?

Scientists have warned on many occasion that reaching 450 ppmv (part per million of volume) would mean a 50% chance of heating planet 2 degrees Celsius - many call it the ‘point of no return’.
In May 2020 Earth’s CO2 levels may reach 417.33 ppmv. Combining that information with the factual harmful effects of wildfires, storms, floods, hurricanes, droughts and especially thawing permafrost in Siberia - we can calculate that we approximately have less than 12 years to put our best effort to prevent worst-case scenarios.

As the generally accepted maximum level of CO2 is 350 ppmv, we can calculate that we need to remove 67.33 ppmv CO2 to get to the safe level. Considering that every 1 ppmv of CO2 in the atmosphere weighs approximately 2.1297 Gigatons of Carbon, to get to the safe point, we need to sequester 143.39 Gigatons of Carbon from the atmosphere.

The world population as of April 2019 stands at 7.7 billion people. Giving everyone equal Carbon burden - each person would need to sequester around 18622kg of Carbon!
For comparison, each human would need to sequester 10450 graphite (pure Carbon) bricks. Having we could fit 1271 bricks within one cubic meter, each human would need to sequester 8.2 cubic meters.

If we would use different material to store the sequestered Carbon, for instance, blocks of Pinewood - we could fill 103.5 cubic meters, or 2.6 standard rooms (4m long x 4m wide x 2.5m high) tightly packed from floor to the ceiling with pinewood per each human on the planet.

To add to this picture, the Great Wall of China extends about 21,196 km with the wall around 7.8m high and 5m wide - if we would sequester all 143.39 GtC using graphite bricks - we could build a wall 76.6 time longer than Great China Wall, or we could build a wall 10 meters high and 5 meters wide encircling the Earth around Equator 32 times.

Lastly, the question is how to do such a massive endeavour?
Yes, there is a way, by simply helping it to build itself, our next articles will provide more details on how to do it.

If you want to find more how we came up with those numbers, you can explore our Jupyter Notebook file: CarbonInAtmosphere.ipynb