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Geo-Engineering to stop Climate Change
MattSparkes writes "Following the latest report of the United Nations climate change panel, there has been a flurry of renewed interest in so-called geo-engineering. This is the theory of using technological schemes to stop climate change. These can range from sun-shades orbiting the Earth, to pumping millions of tonnes of sulfur into the atmosphere to the bizarre idea of painting the ground white to reflect more light. Let's reduce our emissions now, before I have to go and paint my roof bright white." Thanks to jamie for pointing out another potential solution of seeding the southern oceans with iron to spur plankton growth.
anything to stop the people from acting responsibly?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The road to permafrost is paved with good intentions.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Personally I think it'd be kind of nice for a greater portion of the world to be upgraded to tropical and sub-tropical.
Cheaper vacations. And the superhurricanes would take out all of those damn snowbirds in Florida.
...to think we're clever enough to find a technical solution that massive alters the fuctioning of a biosphere we understand to little about and not cause bigger, unanticipated problems.
As an architect, let me say that the moment you try to force me to paint my beautiful roof-top gardens white, I will be forced to get...hostile...
Will enough roofs get painted white to counter the number of solar collectors being installed for hot water, pool heaters, PV and other dark surfaces?
You put up a black solar panel and you just thought you were doing the right thing.
The truth shall set you free!
How many times do we have to screw up an ecosystem before we learn that we don't understand ecosystems well enough to predict what our acts will do.
1st. In Moab, Utah the forest service planted Russian trees to prevent the erosion of the river bed, only to find out that the plants have drained the river and killed many endogenous plants and animals.
2nd. Cane Toads were introduced into Australia to eat the insects that prey on the sugar cane. It turns out that the insects that eat sugar cane in Australia and Hawaii are completely different and there are no predators that can eat the Cane Toads. Now Australia is over populated with a Cane Toads which again are killing the natural plant life and animal life.
3rd. I can't think of another off the top of my head but I am certain there are probably hundreds of examples of this.
We must stop screwing with the ecosystems. When I hear of orbiting solar shields and massive projects to paint the desert, I get really scared because a scientist who really understands the delicate balance of the ecosystem would never dare to suggest such an idea. Only one who doesn't and is looking to make a buck and get on time for "saving the planet from global warming" would do it. These ideas will only result in causing more problems then they solve.
Ok, lets say the world is warming up. Is that bad? Seriously, is that really bad? Who has determined this? Where do they live? What are their motives?
At one time when for natural reasons the earth had lots of CO2 in the atmosphere it warmed up and taller trees grew towards the poles. Great prairie fires dumped millions of tons of CO2 in weeks. Warmer temperatures and more trees resulted. This reduced CO2 and on came a subsequent ice age. It also left behind coal, natural gas and tar sands where today it is too cold for this to happen.
Nature is just fine tuning for the 6.5 new critters crawling on it. It needs to warm up to have more vegetation to scrub out the CO2. Let nature do it's thing.
Man contemplating whole scale planetary changes like this is similar to giving children an atomic bomb kit.
No one disputes Global Warming.
We can see that it has occurred in the past and is occurring now.
What is in dispute is cause and cure, if any.
These cycles have taken place long before we had ANY impact on the planet.
*shudder* I can only imagine the swings once we start "tweaking" the cycles! */shudder*
We are going to make massive changes, spend trillions (US word) of dollars, make some irreversable decisions on ideas based upon an idea whose roots are based more in economic-geopolitical warfare than actual science.
When the hard core scienetists do not agree (and anyone saying there is consensus for man-caused global climate change (warming or cooloing) and there is no need to listen to the other side, are not only wrong, but their motives must be seriously examined), and we are looking at this in a highly emotional state, nearing hysteria, or religios ferver it's time to step back from the jumping off point and realize that we are being led, like lemmings or children by the pipers of anti-capitalism and population control.
Does anyone find it suspicious that the proponents of this man-caused point of view fly around exhaust belching planes and drive in caravans of SUV's, playing the "carbon neutral" carbon-credit shell game (3 card monte, really), to preach this idea when they could just teleconference in, and lead by example? Can't the inventor of the Internet show up to all his conferences by way of video and never travel? Wouldn't that be more beneficial? Wouldn't that show the world it is possible to globally telecommute? Saving the planet starts with you, Al?
Al doesn't believe it himself. It's not enough of a priority for Arianna. No, it's a means to a socio-political ends, nothing more. And the public is being hoodwinked.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Errrrr.......no.
:-)
Leave the planet alone please.
We know WAY too little about the planet to start screwing around with its Biosphere.
Not only that, but you do not get a second chance if you screw it up.
I say we start someplace else and experiment there, so if we do screw it up, no biggy.
Even the dumbest WINDOZE admin knows you always experiment on a TEST server before doing anything to your production server if you do not want downtime.
"Downtime" in this case would mean the Earths Biosphere.....I hope I do not have to explain what that means.
Besides, if we experiment with a different world, the WORST that can happen is it doesn't work.
Best possible thing that can happen is we get another planet to live on.
Half the people on this planet belong on Mars anyway....IMHO.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I mean look at this, here someone is thinking of mucking around with the ...
planet far worse than people driving in their cars and cows passing gas,
like dumping million of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere
or painting large parts of the planet white or shading the planet from the
sun from orbit
believe me whoever comes up with these halfbaked (http://www.halfbakery.com)
ideas has no clue what could happen.
This article and the one earlier, concerning the causitive nature of cosmic rays on climate should be read together. Many of the readers here are scientists, engineers (applied scientists) or at least capable of a fundemental understanding of science. To those people I say: If you are a proponent of man influenced climate change, you had better be right. This issue has now progressed to the point where the majority of people on the planet believe that there is no scientific doubt whatsoever about human influence and more precisely carbon dioxide. If this is wrong, if humans are not influencing climate or if that influence has nothing to do with carbon dioxide, science will be at fault and science will (rightly) lose credibility.
This means that arguments against intelligient design will now have to show how the "certainty" about evolution is any different from the "certainty" about global warming. Similar issues will come up in arguments for vaccination and other issues where real deaths could follow. Arguments will come up about funding levels at universities and research institutes. Arguments will come up against new initiatives for reducing pollution.
There are a large number of interest groups out there that are waiting with increasing anticipation that this issue will blow up in the face of the global warming proponents. A large number of the rest of us will get hit by the shrapnel of that explosion. As an engineer and consultant who gets a great deal of work and money out of efforts to curb green house gasses, I personally love the hype. As a believer in the importance of science in all of our lives, I am now getting very nervous about the future reputation of science.
Cheers
JE
If you go into the middle of the rain forest, and dig down a couple of feet you hit sand. You would think that if trees were removing all this carbon from the atmosphere the layer would be a 100 feet deep. What happens is the wood rots and releases most of the carbon as CO2 and methane.
I would say that most of the carbon 'sinking' is done by algae that dies and falls to the bottom of the ocean, where it is cold and oxygen is limited. We don't know though if we fertilize the ocean that the algae will end up in the right spot, or just find its way to an area where the carbon would return to the atmosphere.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
The HUGE potential for screwing this up reminds me of something from one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books...
One guy got himself totally plastered, so they went to fetch some super-strong coffee. But they gave him too much, and he went over the edge. So they had to get more alcohol to bring him back to the right level.
The planet is auto-correcting the mistakes we make, at its own pace. We need to make fewer mistakes, rather than try to push the planet to make faster corrections. If you don't screw up, you don't need to fix it.
-M
Yes, I said centuries. Look how quickly we started the whole global warming mess. I think we can reverse it even faster, but I doubt we're good enough to decelerate it and bring things bad to where they belong.
The problem with this and all the other dingbat proposals is that climate is of its essence chaotic; there's no way to predict what any particular action will end up doing. That's why past climate models have been so far off the mark (of course, the next one will be bang-on!). That's how it is with dynamic systems: Even God can't predict climate, and humans certainly can't control it.
When we can control the flow of water down a mountain with a little push here and a nudge there instead of digging a ditch, we might be ready to start thinking about controlling climate.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
1. Pumping sulphur into the atmosphere. Injecting millions of tonnes of sulphur into the upper atmosphere would reflect 1% of sunlight back into space to keep the Earth cool, an idea proposed by Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen. On the downside, it would increase acid rain and might cause respiratory problems, too.
and Earth will smell like egg-farting ass....NEXT!!!
2. Trillions of little sunshades in space (pictured). More like lenses than shades, these would bend sunlight away from Earth, reducing the light hitting the planet by about 2%. Although the shades would be simple and lightweight, it would still cost trillions of dollars to build and launch so many of them, according to astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona, who is championing the idea.
and, if we put enough small objects in orbit, we won't be able to orbit anything else for fear of impact....NEXT!!!
3. A giant orbiting dust cloud. Vast quantities of dust obtained by vaporising a comet - or collecting lunar dust - could be injected into an orbit similar to the Moon's. The dust cloud would eclipse the Sun for several hours each month, cutting the total amount of sunlight reaching Earth per month by more than 1%, according to a proposal by astronomer Curtis Struck of Iowa State University. On the downside, the particles making up the cloud would eventually spiral towards Earth in huge numbers, hitting and possibly destroying satellites.
Wasn't this one of the plot elements in the MATRIX? and hey, why stop at tweaking our own planet's eco-system when we can tweak the entire solar system....NEXT!!!
4. Painting the ground white. We could cover roads, oceans, deserts or other surfaces with reflective material, thereby increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back into space. On the downside, changing the amount of solar energy absorbed by the ground or oceans could have unanticipated effects on the weather.
Reminds me of THX1138. Oh and, I did an experiment in elementary school where we had shoe-boxes that were painted different colors on the inside with glass tops and thermometers inside. We left them out in the sun and, guess what? THEY ALL REACHED ABOUT THE SAME TEMPERATURE!!!...yes, the dark ones may have heated up faster, but they all peaked about the same....NEXT!!!
I sure hope this is just a science-fluff piece....like Omni Magazine.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
One of the great insanities of the modern age is the fact that environmental problems get treated like sins, for which humanity (Western civilization in particular) is expected to pay penance and sacrifice exactly the essense of the civilization that we worked so hard to built in the first place. What is sorely needed - and what I push in my class - is a rational look at things that would treat environmental issues as engineering problems: what (if anything) can be done at the cost the clients are willing to pay? And,no, "humanity" is not the client here; those who push for action on climate change, whatever their reasons might be, are.
On the last subject here, I would take climate change alarmists a whole lot more serious if they, expecting the rest of the world to make sacrifices, were willing to make some sacrifices themselves. No, giving up cars on their part wouldn't cut it, as they already regard cars as evil - it has to be something of a value. Let's see... I value personal transportation, they value... let's say, old-growth forests. As old-growth forests are essentially carbon-neutral, and tree farms remove carbon from the atmosphere, are climate change action proponents willing to sacrifice some of those to mitigate global warming? Until I hear an honest "yes" from the "global change is bad" camp, I'll remain unconvinced as to the severety of the problem and opposed to any action that diminished my quality of life.
Repeat after me: no no no NO
It's precisely this sort of dominion-over-nature mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. The (annoyingly American) idea that we can solve any problem by simply throwing enough money and ingenuity at it needs to be extinguished, and fast. If we can't even figure out the precise extent of the damage we've already done to our ailingplanet, I shudder to think what nth-order unseen repercussions would result from reducing the level of solar radiation reaching the atmosphere by any meaningful amount. This "fix" is a complete nonstarter and every moment we waste discussing it as if it were a serious option just digs us further into the already deep hole we're in.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
--"This issue has now progressed to the point where the majority of people on the planet believe that there is no scientific doubt whatsoever about human influence and more precisely carbon dioxide."
Not to mention the rapidly growing number of people who question the carbon theories.
--"As a believer in the importance of science in all of our lives, I am now getting very nervous about the future reputation of science."
Organized science is about to slam rock hard into religion: it's taking the same fall. People are
indeed getting wise to the politics in and around science. Those of us limited to black and white
are in serious trouble though, because they're running out of colors fast. Up to maybe 250 years
ago you could fool people by wearing a black priest robe. Then came the Age of Enlightenment. After
that you had to put on the white lab coat to fool people.
The question that you neglect is what happens to the plankton that dies and falls to the ocean floor? Does it rot quietly or does it deplete the oxygen from the sea water? A solution to global warming that results in massive die-off of ocean life from lack of oxygen does not quite meet the need.