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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."
Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!
--Matthew
"If the lights of Broadway blind me, I won't mind..."
After all, Launch Solar Shade is one of the techs you pick up along the way.
Cool, it works! :D
Isn't this already happening?
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
Given that the most reasonable "something-other-than-humans-caused" global warming hypothesis I've heard so far is that the sun's energy output is increasing, (incindentally, this would also explain Martian global warming, which by some evidence matches terrestrial warming), this seems like exactly the way to go. A more direct and exact correction could not be found (if this is, in fact, the cause of global warming) without changing the energy output of the sun manually, which is to my knowledge impossible.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
This idea is totally not new.
The only problem is, last time we simulated it, humanity ended up enslaved by robots.
How to Cool a Planet (Maybe)
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said the focus should be on reducing greenhouse gases and preventing global warming in the first place.
But now, in a major reversal, some of the world's most prominent scientists say the proposals deserve a serious look because of growing concerns about global warming.
Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.
"We should treat these ideas like any other research and get into the mind-set of taking them seriously," said Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.
The plans and proposed studies are part of a controversial field known as geoengineering, which means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability. Dr. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist, will detail his arguments in favor of geoengineering studies in the August issue of the journal Climatic Change.
Practicing what he preaches, Dr. Cicerone is also encouraging leading scientists to join the geoengineering fray. In April, at his invitation, Roger P. Angel, a noted astronomer at the University of Arizona, spoke at the academy's annual meeting. Dr. Angel outlined a plan to put into orbit small lenses that would bend sunlight away from earth -- trillions of lenses, he now calculates, each about two feet wide, extraordinarily thin and weighing little more than a butterfly.
In addition, Dr. Cicerone recently joined a bitter dispute over whether a Nobel laureate's geoengineering ideas should be aired, and he helped get them accepted for publication. The laureate, Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, is a star of atmospheric science who won his Nobel in 1995 for showing how industrial gases damage the earth's ozone shield. His paper newly examines the risks and benefits of trying to cool the planet by injecting sulfur into the stratosphere.
The paper "should not be taken as a license to go out and pollute," Dr. Cicerone said in an interview, emphasizing that most scientists thought curbing greenhouse gases should be the top priority. But he added, "In my opinion, he's written a brilliant paper."
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.
"A lot of us have been saying we don't like the idea" of geoengineering, he said. But he added, "We need to think about it" and learn, among other things, how to distinguish sound proposals from ones that are ineffectual or dangerous.
Many scientists still deride geoengineering as an irresponsible dream with more risks and potential bad side effects than benefits; they call its extreme remedies a good reason to redouble efforts at reducing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. And skeptics of human-induced global warming dismiss geoengineering as a costly effort to battle a mirage.
Even so, many analysts say the prominence of its new advocates is giving the field greater visibility and credibility and adding to the likelihood that global leaders may one day consider taking such emergency steps.
"People used to say, 'Shut up, the world isn't read
that plants now receive far less light. Less light, means slower growth, less uptake of CO2, etc.
Off hand, all the solutions (CO2 sequestering,etc) that allow us to keep our oil/coal dependancies will probably come back to bite us. Far better to bite the bullet now, and switch to nukes(fission and fusion) and alternatives.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...then the flamewar from this thread will start it.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
We'll be having rave parties 24x7 then. Cue the Matrix soundrack. Where are the hot chicks in post-apocalyptic skimpy outfits? I see these scientists have started using their recreational drugs even before the raves have started!
Now that we might be able to block out the sun, its ok to burn fossil fuels.[end sarcasm]
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
I am worried more about the vampires, who will reign supreme if there is no more daylight.
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
... a cure against skin-cancer ... and an increased possibility of slashdotters mating.
Everybody will be as pale as we are! Yey!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
They already do; Look at d.c.. Can you not feel your life being sucked out?
Date line Aug. 17th, 2017:
NASA has confirmed that it was an error converting metric to imperial measurments that caused the death of almost seven billion people and the started our current ice age.
In other news; Today's high is expected to reach -65 celcius.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
Some people just don't get it. Perhaps the earth is supposed to get warmer. What happens when they decide block the sun and the earth cools too fast, or photosynthesis doesn't occur like it's supposed to?
The same people who can't get beyond the Rule of Unintended Consequences want to something like this?
Can I take the next ship to another planet now? Either let it evolve or destroy it, but try not to do both.
Why is it the same people who love evolution are the same people who want to keep everything the same?
Please don't forget to make it reversable.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because evolution is such a speedy process.
That was revisionist history. The robots knew tnat sunlight could have given them the energy they needed, and they knew that humans blotted it out. They put two and two together and came to the conclusion that the humans blotted it out to spite them.
> are we contributing to climate change? its just too uncertain to say... possibly. But concidering how much the atmosphere changes its chemical composition from volcaic activity alone, i think its a bit presumptuous to think that our tiny contribution (in comparison to volcanic activity) means jack shit.
Amazingly, thousands of climatologists have the brass to disagree with you.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Given that we don't conclusively understand the way the earth works, it strikes me as insanely arrogant to think we can CONTROL the biosphere. We should work on controlling our own (that is, INDIVIDUAL) actions before we try to tell "mother nature" what to do ..
So, I gather that you don't go for the idea of importing weasels to destroy the snakes that you imported to destroy the frogs that you imported to destroy the flies that you imported to destroy the...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It was also in Highlander 2
A few years later: Tokyo is 'lost' after the giant sunscreen is blown to earth by solar winds, covering up all of Honshu island... The giant reflective shield blocks out all heat, light, radio signals, air, but conducts elictricity so many are electrocuted. All of the worlds scientists whom built the block would figure out a way to help the dying/freezing/suffocating Japanese but the world is too busy laughing.... Imagine it, most of Japan destroyed by a giant sheet of mylar. Is known to future generations as the Great Tokyo Jiffy-Pop Disaster.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
I seem to recall that the Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End had this ability. I, for one, welcome our new Overlord overlords.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Rather than making the sunshade orbit earth, wouldn't it be easier to put the shade at some point between the sun and the Earth? Say at one of the Lagrange points?
It wouldn't have to be a solid shade, either -- just truck a lot of water out there and spray it out through a nozzle, and create a cloud of ice crystals. They'd diffuse the incoming light rather than blocking it completely, and as a "fail safe," perhaps you could put them in a slightly unstable orbit, so that over time they'd stop shadowing the planet. If the system wasn't refreshed every few years, it would stop working. (Or maybe the solar wind would push it out of the Lagrange point and cause it to fail eventually...?)
I'm sure there's probably some better fluid to use than water (maybe something lighter?), I was just using it as an example. Maybe even we could use a material that absorbs at particular wavelengths -- diffusing infrared while letting visible light through?
We're only trying to block light here, it seems like a solid shade would be overkill. Why not make a cloud? They do a good job at blocking light inside the atmosphere.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
damn it...u had to ruin it for me!
I was trying to get Keanu's butt out of my mind....thx man...thx.
You can see that in all facets of life, and thus in weather as well. However the weather used to be that's "normal" in the minds of most people so when it changes in any way that's "abnormal" and thus a problem. Even if they intellectually understand it most people don't really grasp that the only constant on the world is change.
I will say that such a plan, as a last resort isn't a bad idea because regardless of what the Earth would naturally do we want to keep it habitable for humans. The Earth may go through a natural cycle that would kill us off and we want to stop that, if we can.
However in general we shouldn't screw with things like this because it's clear we have a very poor graps of how climate actually works.
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.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Do you also advocate moving away from places like Canada and Norway rather than building heated homes?
In the context of humans adapting to nature vs. adapting nature to humans, there is no fundamental difference between preventing the icecaps from melting and putting in better flood control. We are still adapting nature to our needs (i.e. controlling nature), not the other way around. In fact, preventing the ice caps from melting is an example of better flood control.
Yeah those plants and their damn migratory routes.
No existe.
According to the University of California, Santa Barbara:
Larry Niven did this in his novel "A World Out of Time" published in 1976. Damned internet generation.
Photons are enegy packets. If an object absorbs it, it heats up. If that object were a baseball bat, I'd pummel you with it. Then I'd find any moderator who marked this 'Interesting' and percussively sterilize him with it.
It's one thing to say something ignorant; it's another to raise that stupidity above my reading threshold.
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
I play Nerd-Folk!
We finally start to recognize the negative consequences of some change that's happening in nature. There happens to be a preponderance of evidence that certain actions of human society are responsible for this change. So do we all say "Hey, I guess we need to change our habits" and try to fix the problem at it's most probable source? No. Instead, some of us say "Well, if messing around with part of our ecosystem without having a clue what we were doing got us into this mess, then, by golly, maybe messing around with a different part of our ecosystem without having a clue what we are doing will get us out of it!" This really is a sad indicator of human psychology. Even when we recognize our problem, and even when we recognize that we our the source of that problem, we try to fix things by doing anything other than changing ourselves. Mess with the oceans, mess with the clouds, put sun-shades in space, but certainly don't make humans alter their behavior or make society adapt to a new way of meeting our energy needs!
these guys can get it delivered to custom size in only 3 days
I have to admit that I didn't read the article (yet)... but this begs the question... what about "global dimming". Haven't heard of global dimming? most people haven't. For a good overview, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
Reducing the amount of sunlight that hits the earth is already happening with some negative side effects.
Scott Dowdle
www.MontanaLinux.Org
Sorry, I would rather find a way to make chicks more comforatable about giving head than to just go with out. Finding solutions to keep a life style is always more prefered then to change the lifestyle.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The problem is not too much Sun it's too much heat. The reason the heat's there is that we've got greenhouse gasses. Were it not for the greenhouse gasses this planet would be a freezing ball of ice and rock. We have too much greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide is one of, if not the, biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect. Chloroplasts absorb and convert carbon dioxide during the light stage, however, during the dark stage they actually produce carbon dioxide. The overall effect of the two stages is that carbondioxide is reduced. If we reduce the amount of light being recieved by these plants the ratio might be altered and plants won't be able to absorb as much carbon dioxide as they currently do, perhaps even giving off more than they absorb. The plants will also not be able to make as much energy and will die. Decomposing plants give off more greenhouse gasses that'll just cause more of a problem than we currently do.
And don't say that moving the planet further out is going to make a difference, if Mars and Venus were switched they'd pretty much retain their current climates. Venus too hot for most solid metals, and Mars too cold and variable to sustain much gasseous carbon dioxide...
"Sure we do. I definitely would not contradict Steven Hawking in his field of expertise. But global climatology is an area where he's a layman just like the rest of us."
You can say what you want, but a scientist and author as bright as Mr Hawking is not a layman in anything that he talks about as a speaker at a conference.
Do you think that a thorough understanding of math, physics, chemistry, and astronomy, let's say "the universe" has nothing to do with climate? And when a highly intelligent scientist such as Mr Hawking talks about it, he doesn't know what he's talking about?
Wake up and smell the coffee.
A lot of fields of science are quite strongly related. For example, the famous physicist Niels Bohr was definitely not a layman in other fields, say chemistry.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
A: determine honestly to the best of our ability what and when and how ( leaving if on the table ) we humans will be affected. and no dilly dallying or politicing, or hiding heads in sand.
B: once we know that, decide how we semicollectively want to respond. options seem to include getting us off the earth, and letting it go the way it wants to, while we terraform lifeless ( hopefully ) planets elsewhere, space stations, etc, etc. Or deciding to taylor earth better to our liking ( would not be my first choice ). and think of other strategies.
C: Put the plan into action, if one is needed.
D: PROFIT!http://time-proxy.yaga.com/time/archive/printout/0 ,23657,944914,00.html/
Perhaps we should give the scientists a cooling off period before we start messing with climate control?
Trying to engineer our climate doesn't count as adapting, it is as foolhardy as a little kid trying to cool his bedroom in the summer by breaking out his dad's power tools and cutting holes in the walls.
I'm a historian, and I can tell you for a fact that the earth has been much warmer in the past than it is now, and I really do not think that we are responsible for the climate warming that we're observing now. Applying systems theory to the data doesn't work because our instumentation hasn't been good enough for long enough to really tell us much; we could be looking at a perfectly natural rise in temperature that cycles every few thousand years. The astronomers up the hall from me say that the surface of Mars has been increasing in temperature at the same rate as Earth's for as long as we've been able to observe it. They think that our climate is reflecting a cycle going on in the Sun. It could be so. In any case, a warmer climate is nothing new and nothing to worry about as long we can adapt.
Well not exactly the reverse, but how about using a series of lenses to warm up the northern hemisphere during winter? Them equator types probably wouldn't mind missing a bit of heat during December and we Ohioans could use an extra 20 degrees 3-4 months of the year.
A certain amount of the flora and fauna of the north depends on low temperatures, as I've understood it, and there are repercussions in that regards. On the other hand, it's a relatively easy sell environmentally--a 20 degree increase in temperature for the Northern United States (during winter) would reduce the resources used to heat homes and offices significantly--thereby reducing the accompanying pollution.
that the Simpsons is fully 3 /. mod point points funnier than the Angry Beavers.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The gravity of the situation becomes crushing ?-)
Well, what actually happens is that the BH will vaporize into pure energy near-instantly due to Hawking's radiation. This creates an explosion whose size depends on the mass of the hole.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.