Scientists Blocking out the Sun

Ashtangiman writes to tell us The New York Times is running an article about geoengineering in which many solutions to global warming include decreasing the amount of sunlight that the planet sees. The ideas are not new, many have been around for quite some time, however they have been relegated to the fringes of science and many have never been published because of this. From the article: "Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding."

Comments

Flawed assumptions...

[__aaclcg7560]

Seems like a lot of people want to avoid the one fact that sticks out like a sore thumb. Just as nature adapts to the environmental effects of humans, humans need to adapt to the environmental effects of nature. Instead of trying to stop the ice caps from melting, maybe it's time to move the houses on the shorelines back a mile or two and put in better flood control.

Trees Hug Back

[Doc Ruby]

What's wrong with spending that money on engineering to reforest the huge deforested areas of every continent? Just replanting the native vegetation sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere, increases energy absorption by the greener surface, and produces material to consume. And lets the plants do all the hard work. Without another risky meddling in the poorly-understood, vastly complex feedback system we all depend on.

Instead we should blot out the Sun? That's insane, and therefore even more likely to burn us harder and faster.

Re:Trees Hug Back

[Doc Ruby]

Currently participating in the carbon cycle is not the problem. Carbon clogging the atmosphere is the problem. Reforestation is an extremely effective way to sequester the carbon out of the atmosphere, where it's safe. Without expending much energy to clean up the pollution. In fact, absorbing lots of warming energy in the sequestration process instead.

It's nontrivial, but less nontrivial than leaving the CO2 in the air, leaving the deforested areas bare, or messing with the basic source of practically all energy used by Earth's life, including us.

Re:So did Highlander 2 (was Re:One comment.)

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find there never was a Highlander 2.

It was just a collective hallucination. We're better now. We just have to keep telling ourselves that, OK?

And the level of ignorance is also astounding

[TheAxeMaster]

To think that dumping billions of tons of CO2 (and slightly less H20) into the atmosphere over the last 30 years alone (rough calculations indicate around 130 billion tons from early 70s to early 00s), while simultaneously deforesting much of the world's forests as fast as they can be cut, has little to no effect on the environment is the height of ignorance. CO2, the #2 greenhouse gas out there, right with H20 (which also comes from that gas combustion). And lets not forget that even modern gas engines aren't 100% efficient, so there's all that waste heat and energy dumped into the atmosphere that was previously buried underground. And this is only considering gasoline produced in the past 30 years. Figure the long-term gas use/production, not to mention coal and natural gas, and it is enough to make you sick (if you care, that is).
 
What we need are real solutions to undo what we've done and at least bring the global temperature down a bit. Remember that article about how the temp is as high as it has ever been for as long as we have accurate records? Yeah, what we're doing is real, you can feel it when you walk outside. Blocking the sun just gives us an excuse to keep doing as we've been doing, not to mention F'ing up the ecosystem in the process.