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Space Ring Could Combat Global Warming
telstar writes "Though the debate continues around global warming, a new proposal suggests building an artificial space ring around the Earth to block the light of the sun and bring a balance to solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The ring could be comprised of particles which would scatter the sunlight, or be built by an interconnected ring of spaceships aligned to block the light. The former proposal is estimated to cost anywhere from $6 trillion to $200 trillion dollars, while the spaceship solution would run approximately $500 billion. Halo fans rejoice."
In this world of fantasy (which we do not live in) it would be nice...however I'd much rather my tax dollars going towards more enviromental regulations and research than some high tech sci-fi wonder.
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Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to, I don't know, build energy systems that don't release carbon? Just a thought.
What kind of a hair brained scheme is this??? What happens when global warming ends because we haven't any more money for cars having spent it all on this ring?
Of the 6 trillion, why not spend the$ 3 trillion on environmentally safe energy (fusion plants, geothermal, solar panels in the deserts) and spend $3 trillion to buy off all the oil megacorporations.
Besides, moving the earth further away from the Sun is a much more hair brained idea, so why not do that?
You can buy a lot of solar cells for $6 trillion dollars.
then we change the economy.
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For decades we've been told by the environmentalists, "if there's even the tiniest chance that global warming is real and man made, then it would be foolish to do nothing about it." This is Pascal's Wager, but applied to a different religion. But two can play at this game!
"If there's even the tiniest chance that global warming is NOT happening, then this would be an extremely foolish thing to implement, as it could trigger the next ice age..."
c.f. Niven's "Fallen Angels"
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I think you meant to write "finding a way to eliminate dependence on foreign oil."
In other words, let's start using the energy we get from the sun to meet our current needs.
It's unbelievable that someone would suggest that we should restrict future energy delivery from the sun just so that we can keep on consuming energy stores from the past (oil) and pollute our sky with the smoke. Pure laziness. It's like a teenager cleaning his room by hauling his dirty laundry out of the house and burying it, wasting all the effort he ought to be using to just clean the clothes. Not that I've ever done this.
And we will get the raw materials for these ventures...how exactly?
Then we'd still be getting the heat. The whole point is to reduce the flux absorbed and trapped by the earth.
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Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to let you build another nuclear power plant.
Have any of you geeks, freaks and whoever else stopped to think for a moment that such a device puts an enormous amount of power into the hand of a few individuals? And what if this device was hacked, or was physically appropriated by others with sinister intentions? The answer is more simple - stop burning so much coal and oil! How?? Make its price reflect its true value, not the price at which presidents get rich! Sheesh!
If you're willing to blow 6 trillion on this, you should certainly be willing to blow 10% of that on reducing greenhouse emissions, weaning the world off of oil onto "greener" energy sources, etc, etc.. What the hell ever happened to practicality?
So, does anyone even bother to think about where those 'fossil fuels' originally came from? Oh, oh, I know! It's the remains of vast swamp lands! So the fossil fuels are old concentrations of plant matter that's been fossilized & turned into hydrocarbons of various lengths and types. So all that stuff we mine up was once on the surface as living plants that took water and CO2 and sunlight to make the sugars that were the basis of our hydrocarbon fuels. So when we burn it, we are releasing matter that was already on the surface and in the environment. Thus, as long as we have some sort of reserves of fossile fuels left, there will be fewer greenhouse gasses (CO2, CO) in the atmosphere than before all those durn swamps photosythecised it into solid material. I make no argument against global warming per se, just against the assumption that "we caused it" and that we "we need to stop or the world will end." FUD, FUD, FUD. Life existed very well before the concentrations of materials lead to the fossile fuel deposits, and it will continue just damn fine even if we end up buring it all back out into the atmosphere that it came from anyway. Take a moment to step back a few levels from the general aruments of human-caused global warming and give it some real critical thinking of what is going on. Climates cycle, and that's a fact. Live with it, deal with it. You're going to have to 'cause we aren't going to do anything to stop it, nor should we. JDP
Or we could, ya know, spend 1% of that and colonize Mars, fund pollution free energy sources, control human over population, and, ya know.. STOP SCREWING UP THE EARTH. Yeah, let's build impossibly-large space structures with money that *could* go to solving the root causes (our bad ecological practices) instead of just behaving ourselves and taking care of the Earth, that's MUCH easier. What utter stupidity.
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Yeah. Great idea. Treat the symptom, ignore the cause.
Though the debate continues around global warming...
What an excellent opening sentence. The problem is, which debate is he referring to? Is he talking some real scientific debate? Or maybe a politically motivated debate based on non-science in which the powers that be try to confuse the public into believing there is no scientific consensus, with the goal being to maintain the status quo and avoid angering the energy lobby.
Because, scientifically, there is no real debate anymore over whether or not man is impacting the climate and causing global warming.
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Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to stop burning gas in their SUVs.
lets spend billions of dollars to put a ring around the earth. tons of fuel would have to be burned to do this. they could just throw some glitter into orbit. heres a better idea. have everyone on the planet plant at least one tree. trees would help cool the earth. because they hold more water. trees also help water evaporate so there will be more rain. more rain = cooler weather.
How the hell do you actually estimate that something will cost 6 trillion dollars? Trying to get an estimate for something that can run upwards of a million dollars would be extremely hard.
I mean, sure, if you're off by a couple million then it's not a big deal in the scheme of things but has there ever been a more "pulled out of our ass" estimate ever?
Sounds like saying "We don't know but it'll be lots!"
Now I know anything to do with space and the words "global warming" tend to induce a frontal lobotomy in many Sladot readers, but there are people actually taking this seriously??? Come on, there's gotta be something left in that cavernous skull to realize this has got to be one massive joke. I mean, somebody seriously misplaced the foot icon here.
Look at it this way... You've got $6 trillion to $500 trillion dollars burning a hole in your "save the earth" pocket. Dontcha think that maybe, just maybe you could put that money to better use by throwing it at something that doesn't require lobbing multiton roman candles into orbit? I mean $500 trillion . You honestly can't think of an industry or two here on the ground you could revolutionize overnight, let alone in the time it'd take to assemble THIS project?
Speaking of that, what sort of time frame are we talking? Any mention of such is amazingly absent. And we haven't EVEN gotten into the fact that the scientific community is still deeply divided on the exact cause of global warrming. Everything from man's impact to the natural warming and cooling cycles of the earth come into play. Hell, there are even published scientifc reports that say the Sun is hotter than previously measured. We still don't have a conclusive clue and these people want to throw a reflective tarp over a portion of the earth. What is the damn environmental impact of THAT? What happens to the plant and animal life UNDER it? Not as much heat or sun, that's for sure. Draw your own conclusions.
I'm sorry, but this is a prime example of what happens when people who think they're smart smoke crack. They find implausible and extrodinairy ways to waste our money.
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Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to stop burning gas in their SUVs.
People like their SUVs. But they don't give a sh*t what fuel the SUVs run on.
Build more nuclear plants, and people won't have to burn gas to operate their SUVs.
If we were to cover 1/2 the land area we've paved in the US with solar panels of standard efficiency, we'd generate as much electricity as we consume in all forms of energy in the US. The rest of the world is quite parsimonious by comparison, though they could so too meet all their needs and live as profligately as we do without environmental impact.
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Biofuels are relatively inefficient compared to solar cells, but fairly simple as well and carbon net-neutral. Biofuels and solar hydrogen could meet our mobile and nightime needs easily.
We can live as we do, with all the juice and cars and whatnot, so long as we do not too grossly expand our population, in a closed loop, steady state system. We could live quite comfortably if we overturned the Ford coup of the 1920s and reversed the graft-based decision to build roads and the 1950's military decision to build suburbs. With a predominantly urban population moving by train (or working close to home/at home) we could buy the solar cells with a few year's oil expenditures.
Unfortunately Solar doesn't have the profit margin of oil, so there's no political/industrial interest. There's $10 trillion worth of oil in Iraq we took ownership of for a mere $1 trillion in military expenditures (at the current burn rate, given the time it will take to pump it out). The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Nobody building solar factories is going to see that kind of profit, and without it they can't compete in the congressional auction. Laws aren't bought flat rate, they're sold to the highest bidder and no industry can outbid the oil industry.
It would be far cheaper to convert the global energy economy to solar (as a combination of solar-thermal, solar-electric, and solar-biofuel with the only other long-term viable power source as a backup--breeder nuclear, which (not ignoring the very real waste problem) is the only other energy source we have that can meaningfully contribute to our long term power needs) than to build a great space ring. The low range costs are small compared to the current value of the known oil reserves (roughly $80 trillion, proven plus mid-range USGS unproven estimates at $40/bbl).
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
nothing. Try driving a european car, especially the smart car. The amount of effort people in the US are prepared to go to so they can keep driving hummers and suvs is amazing. Sometimes you will even prefer to fight bloody wars in the middle east, although I'm guessing the families of the 1500 dead marines so far probably wish Bush had just put a few cents on gas prices instead.
I guess thats what happens when you let oil companies fund election campaigns.
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Around the year 1000 for example, it was much warmer than today. There's a reason why "Greenland" is called that: it had thawed and the Vikings could colonize and farm it.
Then it cooled off some time later, and the colony was all but abandoned.
The fun part is, the humans didn't go extinct, the gulf stream didn't reverse, ocean fauna didn't all float belly-up because of melting glaciers being sweet water, etc.
Basically that's what gets me pissed off about this _political_ "waah, we're all DOOMED if you don't follow ME" hype about global warming. It's mis-representation and scare tactics.
As was said, it's only the bullshit media and political speeches where global warming is a certainty, and certain doom is just around the corner. The media loves a good scare story. That's what sells. Actual scientific facts don't.
The science part is a lot more ambiguous and not fully understood yet. It's not just that the earth has cooled off just fine before. It's also that:
- The "Global Warming" measured, that started the whole hype, was actually based on limited data from only a tiny portion of the world. And it was only a 1 degree Celsius over a _century_ increase.
- The Earth has periodic warming and cooling cycles, ranging roughly between 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today in the last glaciations, and some 6 degrees warmer in the times of the dinosaurs. Think roughly a sine wave spanning whole ages. With a lot of noise superimposed.
And we're roughly in the middle. It's _normal_ to rise slowly on the average. Not this fast, but basically a century of it might well be measuring just the noise in the real signal. Especially given that:
- Actual satellite data that covers a helluva lot more of the whole globe (you know, the "global" part of "global warming") actually shows a global _cooling_ for the last 20 years straight. There is actually a theory that we might be heading into a "mini ice age". (Not that it will stop journalists and politicians from presenting a _cooling_ as an effect of global _warming_.)
- Also for this last interval, there is data indicating that the average temperature on Earth just faithfully follows fluctuations in the Sun's energy output. Think, for example, how we got a very warm winter between 2003 and 2004, because of solar flares. We can actually observe and measure those things nowadays, and blimey, temperature on Earth seems to just follow them.
Is it that unbelievable, since Sun is where that heat comes from in the first place? We're talking some 0.3% temperature difference in this "global warming." It only takes _minor_ fluctuations in the energy input to produce that.
- Humans never accounted for more than 2% of greenhouse gasses. If not only we stopped driving cars, but if humanity as a whole even stopped breathing, it still just wouldn't make that much of a difference.
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You have on the one hand a peer reviewed, falsifiable, reproducible study that says one thing by a bunch of folks (perhaps in lab coats) who studied and workd 8-10 years of their lives to get to the point where they could be 'peer' reviewed.
On the other hand you have something called a study with none of the above features (except the authors often have a TLA in something, though maybe not anything to do with atmospherics or even physics).
But the press thrives on conflict, so it reports both studies as being by 'noted scientists' or maybe one was a fictional tale by some guy who wrote alot of SCIENCE (fiction).
Most folks have no idea what 'falsifiable', 'peer review', or 'reproducible' have to do with anything important like the price of gas, so they believe the press when it tells them that the different 'studies' represent two sides of the issue (fair and balanced).
And with enough money on both sides to support new 'studies' the debate could well go on until every last icecube in Greenland turns into liquid oxygen dihydride.
Then the big controversy will be whether to build giant seawalls around the coastal cities or to run screaming for higher ground.
And you can bet the press will present that story with two nicely balanced sides, as well.
In 1988, the Dr. James E. Hansen mentioned global warming was here and predicted that by 1998, temperatures would have increased .35 degrees Celsius, whereas the actual increase was .11 degrees. By the time that the decade had elapsed (and by the time he made the comment that long term climate forecast is impossible- even TV meteorologists don't try to predict the weather ten days from now), the increase had only been .11 degrees. He was wrong by more than three hundred percent.
NASA launched the Mars Rover claiming that it would land on Mars in 253 days at 8:11 PM, Pacific time. The margin of error was a few thousandths of a percent: it landed at 8:35. An estimate has to be an "educated guess". When a leading scientist in a field is off by three hundred percent, that casts doubt onto the whole field.