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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."
Cool, it works! :D
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.
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.
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make install -not war
I think you'll find that this topic was covered in an episode of Josie & the Pussycats (In Outer Space) several years before the inception of the Simpsons. The gang travelled to a planet with some aliens that wanted to extinguish the sun because it was hurting their eyes. You see, they had these gigantic eyes. The "bubbly blond" character recommended that they wear sunglasses instead. Everyone lived happily ever after and I'm sure a song was sung at some point.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
And the robots in the matrix thought the blacking out the sun thing was all about them.
Perhaps it is. Perhaps human civilization isn't supposed to continue. Ultimately I for one don't care much about supposed to. There are rather serious consequences for us if the earth does continue its current—and unprecedented in the history of human civilization—rapid and accelerating warming.
I don't mind at all that people are researching potential ways to prevent those disastrous consequences before they materialize. Some of them might have unintended consequences, but that's more, rather than less, reason to investigate them as far in advance of the need to implement as is possible.
Its not about "loving" evolution. People who acknowledge the demonstrated reality of evolution are, however, unsurprisingly also likely to recognize that drastic changes in environment can be very bad for life forms that are very successful in the old environment.
OTOH, people that believe in invisible fairies devoted to protecting them from all material harm as long as they clap hard enough—a kind of immature religious faith that is sadly common in the US—are prone to ignore the facts and just ask everyone else to just clap harder.
I recommend reading the Wikipedia article on Global Warming. Once you do, follow the links to other articles such as Global Cooling and Global Warming Controversy. The last article I mentioned has a section Listing supporters of global warming and also detractors. I recently went through the list of detractors and read what their opinions are (there are articles on some of those people on Wikipedia). As it turns out, the people who don't support global warming still claim that the earth is getting hotter: they only debate the percentage of human influence involved.
There's a good week's worth of reading in there, and I am far from finished. But it is quite informative. Really, the only question is when will this become a problem. Because even if you eliminate mankind, the earth is in a warm cycle, and historically, those cycles tend to wipe out major organisms.
According to the University of California, Santa Barbara: