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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."
a preemptive strike against the machines!
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
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.
There was an episode of Futurama where they combatted global warming by putting a giant ice cube in the ocean. As global warming became worse, they would use a bigger ice cube each year.
This plan seems to have the same sort of thinking behind it.
This concept is also known as Global dimming, and has already been occurring for a while now. In fact, it's one of the reasons we haven't noticed global warming as much. A very unsurprising downside to global dimming is that it totally mucks with rain fall, casting some areas into complete drought.
I recommend anyone that's interested in this concept check out the NOVA on this issue.
I can keep driving my Hummer!
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Sulfur dioxide is hardly a solution -- it just trades one problem for another.
Didn't Venus try this?
Way back when, one of the suggested "fixes" for nuclear weapons was to loft a few tons of gravel into LEO. ICBM's would be destroyed upon hitting the gravel lair, and the threat of nuclear annihilation would be gone forever. Except:
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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
This sounds similar to the idea floated a few years back about fertilizing the antarctic and other polar oceans with iron compounds to induce a plankton bloom. The plankton would then suck up the CO2, and either use it personally or turn it into calcium carbonate, die, and fall to the bottom of the ocean.
Unfortunately, these are the same phytoplankton which produce volatile haloorganics, on roughly the same scale as anthropogenic sources. End result; we stop global warming and blow away the ozone layer. A sub-optimal trade, to say the least.
Personally, I say it's time we start to cut back on the warming gases, and get ready to live with a warmer world with higher sea levels. Unless, of course, shutting down the Gulf Stream cools western Europe off enough that it starts snowing, reflecting heat back into space, and induces a new ice-age. The joys of climatology; we won't know until we finish the experiment.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Anyone remember the TV show Dinosaurs, and what they did to combat global warming caused by deforestation? Yeah, they blew up a bunch of volcanoes, thus causing the end of the show... and mass extinction of the title characters.
Burning sulfur is not such a good idea.
" She swallowed the cow to catch the goat. She swallowed the goat to catch the dog. She swallowed the dog to catch the cat. She swallowed the cat to catch the bird. She swallowed the bird to catch the spider. That wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly..."
"Each and every problem we face today is the direct and inevitable result of yesterday's brilliant solutions."
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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...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
These guys are almost as bad as "area man". They lurk around trying to foist the most asinine ideas on the rest of us. The only thing they're doing is combatting the general betterment of the human intellect.
I heard "some scientists" suggested we should build a giant space elevator (w/ a kick-ass carbon nanotube teather) and then send up a few guys to ask the sun to cool it for a little while.
Jack asses.
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Sulfur dioxide is hardly a solution
Of course not, it's a compound!
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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The key idea here would be to start gradually. One good thing about sulphur dioxide is that it is cleared from the atmosphere quickly, so if something bad starts happening you can reverse what you are doing and things will clear up.
I saw a proposal from Greg Benford that the arctic would be a good test bed. Concentrate the SO2 emissions over the arctic during the summer and see if we can reduce the rate of shrinkage of the northern ice cap. It's much less expensive than trying to do the whole earth and should provide immediate benefit. Plus you only have to do it during the summer since the arctic gets little sunlight in winter. So each season you can adjust the amount and see what effects it has on temperatures, precipitation, etc. It's a good natural laboratory to start getting experience with the technology.
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.
In 1815, Mt. Tambora http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora/ erupted, launching millions of tons of sulfuric dioxide into the stratosphere (sound familiar). 1816 was known as "The Year Without A Summer" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
What a GREAT idea!
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