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Combatting Global Warming With Artificial Volcanos?
An anonymous reader writes, "Some scientists are suggesting that a short-term solution to global warming could be to inject sulfate-based aerosols into the stratosphere as a 'sunlight-reflecting, cooling foil.' Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says that adding just 5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide annually to the stratosphere 'would have a significant influence.'" From the article: "Constant aerosol production also could mean we wouldn't have blue skies anymore, and it could reduce incoming solar radiation enough to hobble such imperatives as replacing fossil fuel with solar energy technologies."
Anyone who needs evidence science is an inexact science need only remember Carl Sagan and his wrong prediction on the Kuwait oil fires (emphasis mine):
And that prediction explicitly about the effects of something on our atmosphere, ostensibly by one of our most noted intellects. The notion that we have any notion of what the effects of this effort would ulitmately be is indeterminant, and could introduce far more disastrous and devastating unforeseen results.
The primary means of fixating atmospheric CO2...
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Fact of the matter is we still don't know a whole lot about the planet's temperature cycles. If we do this, and then run into a "random" cooling period, the effects could swing back around and be catastrophic.
Burning sulfur is not such a good idea.
Not that this idea isn't totally half-baked but they are talking about "injecting" it into the stratosphere, which is above the level where rain is formed.
1) Wouldn't do anything for bombers or other delivery methods.
2) Would forever close off space exploration, thereby stranding us here and cutting us off from sending out probes, etc.
The worst thing is, some considered the second a small price to pay to guarantee their safety.
To me the worst thing is that they'd make the decision to sacrifice access to space for safety... but then completely ignore point #1, meaning they aren't sacrificing access to space for safety, but for an illusion of safety.
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Hence, we should instead build a giant mirror to redirect some of the Sun's rays, thus cooling the Earth.
Your first sentence and the ones following it don't seem to follow each other. At first you imply that global warming doesn't really exist -- I disagree, but I understand how this could be a concern. Certainly, we wouldn't want to take any sort of drastic action before we knew what we were getting into.
But it's your second sentence that really bothers me: "We'll probably end up detonating some sort of nuclear bomb to try to counter-act the forces of nature." This sounds a lot like a sort of pastorialist, head-in-sand point of view; in fact if you replace "nature" with "God," it starts to sound downright medeival.
If we knew that some sort of disastrous climate change was imminent, and if we had the means to prevent it, don't you think we should? To hell with "nature" or 'God' or anybody else's 'plan;' if it's going to be bad for us, then surely we ought to do something to prevent it, if it be in our power to do so. In the face of an existential threat to our species, certainly any action ought to be justified if it stands a chance of preventing our demise.
I'm not saying that we should start throwing nukes down volcanos tomorrow, but I'm just saying that it seems like a refusal to "counteract nature" could easily turn us into nothing but a bunch of fossils. It's a rejection not only of technology (since what have we been doing as a species since we first discovered fire, but counteracting nature?), but of humanity in general, since what distinguishes us from animals is in large part our ability to not be ruled by nature, by our ability to choose to shape our own environment to suit ourselves.
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Can't we have some other type of section, maybe for dumb pseudo-scientific ideas? Like a 'creationism' section or something...
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This solution sounds good, am I understanding it right? They'll burn more fires, then there'll be more rain, and the earth's temperature will be a nice constant (energy from sun - standard dissapation)? Then again, that could be what's causing the global warming, since the heat input from the sun > dissapation. Or equal to. But it's probably not less than.
Sigh*. Once again, I'm struck by how people who frequent a nerd site can be so ignorant of what the science community says. Look, the climate science community has spoken on this subject in about as much unison as a bunch of cranky scientists ever get to: a substantial component of warming is due to anthropogenic carbon inputs (read any statements or reports from climate science organizations and this will be evident). If you've got substantial evidence to the contrary, please do publish it in a peer-reviewed journal immediately, as it is doubtless an important part of the scientific discussion. Otherwise please do us the favor of noting that your statements are discordant with 30+ years of scientific research.
I happen to think your UNIX analogy is a rather good one, but its present version relies on a critical faulty assumption, and that is that continue the current trajectory is "doing nothing". We are quite clearly not doing nothing, we are pushing a major lever of climate with increasing strength. The right way to analogize what we're doing is changing and deleting files from
You point out that Earth has done a good job moderating climate for millions of years. That's true, and it's due to a robust biosphere. As humans have grown to be the most populous macrofauna, we have dramatically changed a lot of those balances. In particular, since the industrial revolution our capacity to change those balances has grown dramatically, but our understanding and willingness to preserve them has moved much more slowly. Earth has never naturally produced hypoxic zones hundreds of kilometers across, nor has it dried out an ocean and filled it with chemical residues. These are unbalancing events due to changes to the environment not well integrated with the biosphere's functioning. That's not to say that sort of thing should never be done or can't be remediated, it's just to say that our ability to cause change in the environment around is now so great that we need to integrate better with the "legacy" functioning of the biosphere in our designs, or we're wreck the whole infrastructure. Throwing a nuke down a volcano is not a good example of this. Improving the natural capacity of algae to fix CO2 into cellulose and oils is a good example. Genetic modification of food is probably more in the middle - it's sometimes an effective enhancement to natural systems, and other times radically damaging. That's why I tend to be very skeptical of these geo-engineering projects that have very little component of restoring or enhancing biosphere functioning.