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Geoengineering To Cool the Earth Becoming Thinkable
johkir writes "As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels might cause 'marked changes in climate' that 'could be deleterious.' Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space — 'a wacky geoengineering solution.' In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe — they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream." We've discussed some
pretty
strange
ideas
in the geoengineering line over the last few years.
It's cool to see some of the speculation about the terraforming of other planets now applied to Earth. I fondly recall how one of the strategies used to warm Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars was spreading black dust to absorb sunlight.
I'm afraid that the researchers haven't considered the possible complications caused by Italians, them and their nefarious ices. Italians might attack, causing dogs to bark and cats meowing, which is freaking annoying when I am trying to read so SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY, TONY!
Here's a crazy idea - let's burn less gasoline! Give me a nobel prize!
>>>As early as 1965, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned CO2 emissions...
In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling. I remember sitting in elementary school while the teacher made us read a scary article about "the darkening of the earth" due to increased clouds.
The scientists later admitting they were wrong.
Don't be surprised if in another twenty years scientists again admit they were wrong about global warming. "It's not humans; it's just a natural process. We will now start cooling again."
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Never a more apt tag in the whole of the internet.
Are we really so arrogant that we'd attempt something on so large a scale with so little hard fact to back up such a plan? This is insanity. The hard core environmentalists will have gone too far if this comes to pass.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
To act like sunglasses... or moving the Earth back from the Sun a little bit.
Who knows what will happen to important sea-life species if we go spreading reflective dust in the oceans?
This is Earth; we have more than Shai-Hulud to preserve.
But what could possibly go wrong?
It seems that a lot of our problems are caused by the introduction of small particulates into the air and water. And once we figure out how to reflect 1% of the sunlight and eventually reduce our own greenhouse emissions I have to wonder one thing.
How do you turn it off when we are 'cooler'?
In actuality, I'm wondering a lot of things, but I'm fairly confident that dumping millions of barrels of reflective particles into the ocean is something that will not be high on a popularity poll.
Of course, I'm one of those evil people who isn't as concerned about global warming. Not because I don't believe it exists, but because a lot of the cure appears to be worse than the symptoms. How much will it cost to relocate costal communities over a 50-100 year timeframe, and how much will it cost so that we won't have to do that. Those are some of the answers I want addressed.
I could spend 3 million dollars to make my home hurricane proof, or I could move to Montana.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
This really is the next logical step in climate science. Instead of being a society that reacts to climate changes, we are able to influence them.
That said, you can keep it. I'm just too worried the one climate we have will get screwed up by people with more ambition that foresight.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
This is a complete myth. Read this and be enlightened - http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
> they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space
Or we could just pollute less? It's less risky than turning the Earth into a big science experiment.
There's another risk: That the same same people promoting "Clean Coal" (a big hello to you Australia) hop on this bandwagon as another reason not to do anything?
The sun is the coolest it has been for a long time...there is no need to even attempt to do this. What such an attempt would illustrate is (1) the outright arrogance of mankind, thinking that we can actually terraform and manage an entire planet when we can't even handle a hurricane in New Orleans or poverty in Africa, and (2) the attempt by a few socialists to use the green movement to control the lives of others.
The green movement has been long ago hijacked by the extreme left. Wake up people!
You first !
It's my opinion, after considerable research, that we don't yet know enough to make long-term climate predictions, MUCH LESS BASE POLICY ON THOSE PREDICTIONS!
It's disheartening that both US Presidential candidates have bought into the CAGW hype for the time being...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
just drag an ice comet in from the kuiper belt
What was the point? To portray him as some kind of visionary instead of a shrewd businessman who ruthlessly promotes his book, movie, and carbon indulgence company? When I see that cocksucker sitting back in coach with the rest of us average folks, then I'll give a shit about what he says.
Rather than putting reflective particles in the Oceans, why not put reflective sheets on land? Giving the world's least hospitable deserts a tin foil hat would do a lot less damage to the ecosystem (since there isn't much of one there), and would be a lot eaiser to reverse if things go wrong.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Here is a geoengineering idea meant to address the concern of ocean levels. In the USA, we have death valley. Death Valley is huge. Check it out on a map sometime. My idea is to dig a trench/pipe from the ocean to death valley (the wacky part of this idea) and beginning filling it up. Eventually, we would have death valley lake and a new rush for lake front property.
It is wacky, it is silly...its mad science!
Bearded Dragon
This is a complete myth.
The target of your own link refers to a NewsWeek article (April 28:th, 1975) which supports the cooling theory.
The article warns that important food producing areas of the world would be negatively affected by the lower temperature (North America and the USSR(!)).
Simpsons did it!
Reading the article, the idea of releasing SO2 into the stratosphere (or any layer of the atmosphere, for that matter) scared me. But if it is true that we are already releasing much more of it into the *lower* atmosphere, then it doesn't seem as bad an idea to have it up there, where at least it is known to cool the Earth's surface temperature.
I think this word means what you think it means.
Unlike unthinkable :)
Accounts for le5s Do, or indeed what
Gaia is ANGRY, and demands sacrifice! If we keep continuing to live our modern lives and just "engineer" the problem away, Gaia will not be mollified! We must decrease the population and go live in caves!
As has been noted, geo-engineering requires massive amounts of hubris and luck.
Geo-engineering is the act of fighting pollution... with yet more pollution!
And when you intentionally try to change a planet-wide system, all manner of unintended consequences will occur.
"a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels might cause 'marked changes in climate' that 'could be deleterious."
40+ years later and this is all they can say today, as well. "might" and "could be" haven't disappeared despite throwing billions and billions at researching something that we are still not sure is even a problem.
According to chemtrails conspiracy theorists, the evil governments have been doing this for a decade or two. It's funny to
Because I am not convinced that limiting of CO2 emissions would bring benefits worth the effort.
Thank you in advance.
Wasn't this the plot of Total Recall,
I just want to know who is supposed to be Arnold in this scene, Al Gore?
How about just laying down huge fields of white stuff... like styrofoam only that doesn't get dirty as fast. There's probably some inert-ish byproduct from things we're making anyway that could be used. Seems like that could reflect a couple % back pretty easy, and if something went wrong we could always fix it.
Want to reflect a lot of light back? Require all new homes to go up with white roof coverings, with exception for shake shingles. All the rest are capable of being white. Likewise, require parking lots (esp. malls and wallmarts) to have loads of trees every couple of rows. These trees would be required to be a canopy type. Or paint the lot with white. In addition, can we make white asphalt? Not just a paint, but a dye? I would guess that it is possible. The simple fact is, that if we start now, then we can easily send back a lot more light.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The company Planktos was showcased on modern marvels that claims they can have a tangible impact on global warming by mixing iron dust into ocean water then spreading it over plankton blooms.
The iron draws plankton to the surface to feed on the iron dust, and the plankton also absorbs the CO2 out of the air. They claimed 1ton of iron could take tens of thousands tons CO2 out of the atmosphere. Not directly related to the article, but its on topic.
You can watch the story on modern marvels
Overclockers
one scientist suggested a cooling and the press (actually, pretty much tabloids like national enquirer) jumped all over. Nothing more. In fact, more of your neo-cons have made a big todo about this, than the press ever did. And we are expected to cool slightly for the next decade. BUT if not for global warming, we would have cooled more.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
real scientists who have been doing the work for 30+ years disagree with you. Imagine that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
to the idiots who tagged this 'sunspots'. I'll be laughing all week.
May the flying spaghetti monster protect you from the axis of evil!
Please do not attempt to cool the Earth.
Global warming means seas slowly rise and cities move inland over the course of a century or more.
But accidently triggering another ice age will kill billions. And if it happens in just a few years, as scientists think ice ages may actually start, most of humanity will die.
It's like I'm an adult in a room filled with kindergarteners. "Hey, let's build a big stack of chairs to reach the cookies!" "Yeah! Good idea!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
make sure global warming exists first, before we go messing with our planet. The consequences could be fatal. http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Widescale+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm
The earth has warmed and cooled many times in its geologic history. What are the mechanisms that cause it to cool after a warming period, and why won't that mechanism work now?
Am I the only one to whom this smells like the setup for some sort of Aesop about human arrogance? "We were so prideful in these days .. we even believed we could change the very atmosphere of this planet. And we paid for our folly. "
If this leads us directly to a post-apocalyptic future where most of the Earth is frozen, allow me to say "told ya".
Retrofitting the space shuttles with giant ice drill, fly to Haileys comet and dump the ice it in the oceans.
:)
How hard can it be? Even Fry manages it..
Would rule if they got someone with a Nixon voice to announce the plan
40% Funny, 40% Insightful, 40% Informative, 40% Dolomite
Sunlight powers photosynthesis, and cutting down on sunlight reaching the surface will reduce the rate at which plants are pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Some portion of the carbon that plants remove from the atmosphere is replaced when the plants die and rot, but not a hundred percent-- some ends up sequestered.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...Reconvert the CO2 into a stable form using energy from a clean power source. This of course would only be ideal once CO2 production was less than the reconversion capacity, thereby being able to actually rewind the CO2 level as opposed to just slowing it.
The best power source for the task would be fission and ultimately fusion IMO.
Honestly I believe that it will come down to this approach whether we like it or not once global warming starts ratcheting up. Only then will governments and individuals care about there failure to pay respect to how something as intangible as climate could possibly cause future pain and suffering. That will be the sobering realisation that induces the investment into a massive rollout of nuclear power that will be imperative just to return the benefits of having global temperature lowered by one degree.
Sunspots are actually DECREASING, so that doesn't explain the warming. Nice try though.
Burning all this coal and oil creates CO2, plus creates a lot of soot in the air which is blocking the sun. Otherwise we would have cooked a long time ago?
...this is much ado about nothing, and can be attributed simply to natural cycles in the weather system. We've had ice ages, etc in the past. People are so damn self-centered they think anything that happens is a direct result of something they did. I'm not saying there's no merit to the idea at all, but seeing how I'm experiencing almost record cold temperatures now for this time of year in my area, and none of the cited rises in temperature are exactly record-breaking, sweltering changes, I just don't see what imminent disasters are looming. And yes, I've done my research.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
...and I'll buy into all this "Global Warming" pseudo-science...
What happens to the Earth between Ice Ages? (the last mini Ice Age one ending right around the founding of the USA?)
As a follow up, don't the Oceans lose their ability to retain CO2 gas as they warm up? Wouldn't that be a better explanation of the higher CO2 levels since mankind is only responsible for 3% of the total output?
(patiently awaiting the *flamebait/troll* moderation for being a "denier" and asking a serious question)
When I was born, the estimated human population of this planet was 2.5 billion, give or take a hundred million. Today, the estimated human population of this planet is 6.7 billion, give or take a hundred million.
Yes, the number of humans on this planet has more than doubled in my lifetime! And we wonder why we are affecting the global climate??
The solutions are obvious. Up to now no one, including me, has had the balls to seriously consider implementing them. Eventually somebody is going to seriously consider implementing them and probably sooner than we expect. Interesting times, indeed.
Didn't anyone tell them that the earth is already entering a cooling stage without any help?
One very simple negative feedback system for CO2 is the biomass of plants and photosysnthesis. CO2 + sunlight dramatically increases the biomass of plants. Plants LOVE it. If you maintain a planted aquarium and want to achieve explosive plant growth, the decades old, proven approach is to inject CO2 and provide high wattage lighting. Left to it's won devices, the increase in CO2 in the earth's atmosphere will result in similar increases in the vegitative biomass. This will, in turn, CONSUME more CO2. One unintended consequence of a sunshade is to REDUCE the efficiency of phototsynthesis and thereby increase the residual CO2 in the atmosphere. I'm sure there are others that people will think of. Nobody can convince me that global warming is anthropomorphic and that computer models are remotely close to accurate. We can model weather a few days in advance. We can't model systems that are orders of magnitude simpler than the earth's climate (like a man-made, mortgaged-back security market!). Plus, my tan will suffer.
Just cover the Sahara with solar panels already ! Route water to each one of them and let them desalinate and split it, and use it to irrigate the ground underneath. The Sahara is so big, it should cover a good percentage of the sun's warmth if you could just funnel it away like that, and solve problems of infertile grounds, clean water and energy at the same time.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Regardless of the position one takes on the question of to what degree warming and cooling trends are influenced by humans, climate is naturally variable and so the question persits: Should humankind artificially manipulate climate to impose an artificial stasis on naturally variable climate trends?
Significant natural warming or cooling of the earth is bound to cause extinctions and human suffering. I think most people would regard those outcomes as "bad". So why not change the natural environment to suite our own desires? Natural is not necessarily better.
A catastrophic impact event would be natural. Saying that we should leave the climate alone because ice ages are natural is like saying that we should leave bolides alone because human extinction would be natural.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
if Al Gore had been working on ways to reverse global warming instead of inventing the internet.
If you do the math, assuming you want to reflect an extra 1%, you have to cover about 3% of ground with 10 mil aluminum foil, you get that you'll need about 10 billion tons of aluminum.
That's about 35 years of world production.
And that foil is unlikely to last 35 years, so you can never get it done.
Come on, we're in 2008 and we still have weather?
How about something relatively simple like everybody changing the color of the roof of their house from brown, grey, black, to a more reflective color like white? That seems pretty simple and might reflect rather than absorb light and heat.
You do realize, don't you, that there is absolutely zero evidence to support this "trend" you refer to? That it is an entirely hypothetical construct, based on little more than numerology? Yes, there was a sunspot minimum during the European little ice age, but there is ample reason to believe that there was no cause and effect relationship: cooling was regional, not global, it was strongly correlated with a period of increased volcanic activity (which, unlike the sunspot theory, has a clear, well demonstrated causative correlation), and the solar constant (the amount of energy we receive from the sun) did not change significantly.
Ah, the irony. "We" don't know enough to make long term predictions after "considerable research" but somehow you can tell us that a 20-30 year cooling trend is coming based on...what?
--MarkusQ
Lemme guess...we get to buy some sort of "credit" from Al Gore to get this thing started, right?
For millenia biological organisms have been absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and incorporating it in their bodies. In the normal course of things, they die and release it. However, a small, potentially lethal, breakaway sect have been dieing and deliberately covering themselves rapidly in a variety of muds, clays and rocks, thereby preventing their component parts dispersal.
Finally after at least 4000 years, Mankind - the saviour of the planet - has come along. We are now locked in a deadly struggle with these creatures, spending billions of our hard earned currency units on extracting and incinerating these carcasses to free the C02 that they have sucked out of the ecosystem.
Free the C0 two. Join the movement, I know its a sacrifice - but please, please drive as far and as fast as you can afford. Run with flat tyres, windows open and air con on full. We need to put right the damage that has been done for billenia, (or 4000 years) by these evil creatures. Put right their selfish act.
the island is almost entirely comprises human-made trash. It currently weighs approximately 3.5 million tons with a concentration of 3.34 million pieces of garbage per square kilometer, 80 per cent of which is plastic.
Due to the Patch's location in the North Pacific Gyre, its growth is guaranteed to continue as this Africa-sized section of ocean spins in a vortex that effectively traps flotsam.
you had me at #!
I've always just thought, why don't "they" make it a law that any new roofs being installed (homes, buildings, barns - anything with a roof) be done with white reflective shingles... you'd think the amount of surface real estate we have in homes and buildings would make up a good percentage of the reflective white mass we're losing with the polar ice melting.
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
I've lived long enough to have heard both sides, and though I'm more inclined to go with the 'global warming' scenario, the main thing I got from both debates is what people now call "climate change"*. Either things will get hotter, or they'll get cooler, but I've seen very few claims that things will stay exactly the same.
* Although they tend to mean that, for example, global warming means the earth will warm up - but that we'll also get more extreme weather; so just because the earth is warming up, doesn't mean you can't have an unusually strong winter some year.
Spraying this stuff into the atmosphere won't do anything to fix the growing acidity of the oceans due to CO2 uptake, and might allow us to continue that kind of pollution longer. That's bad news for corals and shellfish.
There's always building more Greenhouse farms to cool the lower atmosphere. Or we could research this further to come up with alternative way of cooling locally.
My brother-in-law does numerical modeling of the oceans, He tells me that the oceans are already absorbing CO2, in massive amounts. The ocean-atmosphere CO2 balance uses the oceans like a CO2 sink, pump CO2 into the air and the ocean tries to balance the system by absorbing it some of it, takes decades to do it. Here is the flip side to the system, say we stop all CO2 releases into the atmosphere and even find a way to rapidly remove the excess to bring it down to some 'golden' level. Now the ocean-atmosphere CO2 balance is out again, now the oceans release CO2 back into the atmosphere. At a natural rate, with us not releasing any more CO2, and the rest of the earth's biomass removing the CO2 from the air at a natural rate, CO2 levels in the air would still climb, then peak over several decades and then start to decrease back to this 'golden' level the last stage in this may take 200-600 years.
"All those, moments will be lost, in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die." Roy Batty
I respectfully suggest everyone read "The King, the Mice and the Cheese" by Nancy Gurney and Eric Gurney. Then think carefully about any large scale geoengineering experiments. Then remember that we have only one laboratory for these experiments. Also remember that it is already engaged in a poorly designed and mostly out of control experiment.
were we become a huge snowball? I can grow and eat things if it's a few degrees warmer and don't own any waterfront property but last time I tried to plant anything in the dead of wither my shovel broke.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Playing with the environment on such a massive scale has a very high probability of unknown sideffects. Like introducing introducing the cane toad in Australia or Kudzu in North America.
most of humanity will die.
And that is a problem why exactly? If (Mother Nature/God/the universe) intends to kill us off because we are too many there is nothing we can do about it. Watch "The Happening" to see what I mean.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It seems like a paradox to me that we have heard endlessly from the so-called climate sceptics that we don't know enough about the climate, the atmosphere or anything else to say anything about global warming; but on the other hand, we are all too willing to throw ourselves, arms and legs flailing, into trying to modify the global environment to cool the planet down. After all we know even less about what will happen if we try to do any of that, than we do about modeling the planet's climate as it is now.
No matter what effect modifications of this sort might have on our climate, the very first thing we must do is to stop burning fossil fuels. Otherwise we are just going to paint ourselves into a corner, where we start cooling the planet down, but never get around to stopping the CO2 emissions. CO2 doesn't just warm the planet up, it has a large number of other harmful effects, acidification of the oceans just being one example. If we live in a filthy house, we can cover the bad smell with perfume for a while - but if we don't clean up and stop throwing waste on the floor, the house will end up being unihabitable, even if it doesn't smell too bad.
I think it's Manbearpig. Case closed.
The Discovery channel will broadcast an entire series in 2009 on geoengineering concepts and tests in the wild to see if they work. As in microparticles spread on glaciers. This tells me money-making TV tycoons see profits in global warming education.
I've watched healthy and hale people in my family drive to places that would only be an easy and pleasant five or ten minute walk away.
There's a grocery store eight minutes from my home by bicycle. But how do I rig my bike to carry a week's worth of groceries for a family of four?
And most people don't NEED to drive to work. They choose to live and work in places that aren't convenient for transportation. You could restructure your life such that you didn't have to drive to work.
Sure, one could move closer to work where the property values are higher, and then he might have to pay so much in rent or mortgage that they'd have to cut back on food or heat or light. Or the new place would be farther from where the spouse works. Or the new place would be farther from where the kids go to school. Not everybody can find a home, two employers, and a school, all of which are within reasonable cycling distance of one another. What exactly did you mean by "restructure your life" that doesn't unduly interfere with the lives of other members of a household?
Aerosol geoengineering has a fast response time. We already have a pretty good idea of how strong the cooling effect is, because volcanoes do it all the time. We can gradually dial it up or down, because the climate responds quickly to changes in aerosol optical depth. If the effect is too large, we can dial it down within a few years before anything lasting happens. Accidentally plunging ourselves into an ice age is not a serious risk.
That being said, it's still a bad idea for reasons discussed in TFA, most notably the scenario where we counterbalance the warming for some time and then fail to do it, leading to a large abrupt warming once the cancellation stops.
YA lets polute the water with millions of sparklies from confetie. I'm sure all the fish would never eat those.
Ok, so say we go ahead and deploy this idea. The suns rays enter our atmosphere, hit these reflective objects, bounce off and begin heading back out into space... but instead bounce back down to earth because we didn't remove the greenhouse gasses that got us into this situation in the first place.
So how, exactly, is this supposed to help? Am I missing something here?
Solution: move the Earth further from the Sun. We're going to have to do it eventually, to deal with solar expansion as the Sun ages. Might as well lay the ground work now... Also need to prepare the backup plan: Begin exploration and colonization of the Mars and the moons of the Jupiter and Saturn.
Umm i propose a new tag for these kinds of experiments, that we should try it and see what happens because 'itscoolregardless' of what may come. (And if it works it going to be literally cool)
Anyone has a better tag idea?
But... the future refused to change.
The Happening was a stupid movie. The universe is not a haunted house. Even if there were supernatural beings that gave a shit about the course of events on a random backwater hunk of mass and its arrogant multicellular meatbags, they wouldn't off humanity in any kind of dramatic show. When a higher organism kills a lower one, it just does. Sharks don't put on a show for fish, lions don't turn eating gazelles into some elaborate stage play, every animal has more important shit to do than make some kind of statement to whatever happens to be up for killin'. If "god" or anything with godlike powers wanted humanity gone, more likely than not it would just happen. All the mythology about apocalypses has the underlying importance of humanity assumed because they were all designed by humans to have emotional effects on other humans.
If I had mod points at the moment I'd mod the grandparent up. In any case, his point is well made. This planet has had more ice ages than most environmentalists have brain cells, and each one results in mass extinctions. The funny thing is, for all the lip service ignorant people pay to 'endangered species' and what not, they don't have the background to understand that a) ice ages kill more species than warm, interglacial periods b) there have been so many mass extinctions punctuating gradual extinctions throughout geologic time that 98% of species that have existed on Earth are dead, and no, most of those died before anything remotely analogous to man ever existed.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Asphalt just needs to be white, not black. You can undo it a lot easier if you have to, and it doesn't harm life, such as algae and plankton, that hasn't already been harmed by the asphalt.
All we should do is limit our impact on the environment as much as possible. Any talk of actively modifying the climate is insane and retarded. Everytime humans try to play god very bad things happen. Don't believe any person that says they know how to fix a problem and there will be no unforeseen problems and everything will go exactly as planned. The designers of the Titantic thought they had it all figured out. Unsinkable my ass.
Rising temps could possibly trigger another ice age. Counterintuitive, but if you look at how complex the environment and Earth's geothermic processes are you would know there is no simple cause and effect. How could anyone possibly know the outcome of initiating a cooling of our planet. Would you like to be responsible for the idea that led to a global climate catastrophe that killed the entire planet.
Planet Earth had much, much, much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then it currently does. The carbon dioxide in the air was processed by plants and stored in vegetation. The vegetation collected on the surface and eventually was pushed under ground. After millions of years the vegetation transformed into oil, coal, and natural gas. Human activity is not creating carbon dioxide that didn't already exist in the atmosphere. We are simply releasing it back into the atmosphere, where it came from in the first place. Artifically cooling the planet is adding to the equation something that never existed, ever. That seems more dangerous to me than redistributing carbon dioxide from a solid or liquid form into a gas.
We've already done geo-engineering by putting the greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in the first place. It requires less creative engineering to stop putting them up there, and we know that greenhouse gasses from (whatever) source raise ambient temperature. Therefore, not putting greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is a generally plausible solution, even if it means we have to change our lifestyle.
Greenhouse gases? But it is already getting colder, despite the fact that there is more CO2 than ever in our atmosphere:
Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof.
I love how some Slashdotters are libertarian until it's time to tell me how to live my life in accord with the Global Warming Spaghetti Monster.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Move, if you have to
I thought I covered that in my last post: "Sure, one could move closer to work where the property values are higher, and then he might have to pay so much in rent or mortgage that they'd have to cut back on food or heat or light." I've read posts by other Slashdot users complaining that the only parts of town close to employment are parts of town where even a two-bedroom apartment costs more than half of what they make.
find another job, learn to use public transportation.
I've tried public transportation. Sometimes, it works. But other times, I have to wait literally 60 hours for a bus: buses stop running early on Saturday, don't run at all on Sunday, and don't run at all on Memorial Day or Labor Day. What kind of job should I look for that pays enough for me to afford taxi fare if the boss insists on assigning me hours on a shift or day when buses don't run? Besides, how would a business that performs on-site sales or service, such as the Geek Squad, continue to operate if all its employees switched to public transportation?
And so what if your spouse also has to find another job
It took me five years after I graduated to find the job I have. What should be the backup plan for people who fail to find new jobs within a couple months?
So on a day of the week or holiday when the buses do not run, how do I haul children who are too big for a baby trailer but not yet old enough to ride a bike on a public road?
We simply need to drill Haley's comet.
1.) Fly to comet.
2.) Drill for ice.
3.) Drop giant ice cube in ocean.
4.) Profit $$$ (survive?)
(no need to worry about raising sea levels or anything of course.)
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
Forests absorb C02 and absorb sunlight in order to do so.
No sig today...
Back in the '70s they didn't have hundreds of weather satellites accurately monitoring average temperatures at a global level. Mostly all they had were mercury thermometers in built-up areas (because they had to be read daily by real people).
They also didn't have the ability to analyze any great quantity of data, as all data had to be entered by hand into the computers of that era.
Without good data, and the ability to visualize it, it's not surprising their predictions weren't very accurate.
Let me ask you this: When you grew up the weather forecasts were the butt of many a joke, right? I've got TV programs from the '70s where they joke about it and my parents tell me that they were mostly wrong.
Well, guess what? These days they're a lot more accurate...
No sig today...
IANA oceanographer, but I don't think most of the problems you list apply, because the idea is to do this in relatively barren areas of the ocean far from shore: few fish and no coral beds. And the idea has been tested in a way: the iron-rich runoff of rivers and seashore areas are the areas that have the most fish and other desirable ocean life. Doing the same thing in the middle of nowhere, in a controlled way without the pollutants etc. in regular runoff, seems like a pretty safe bet.
On the whole it's a far more sensible idea than the glitter, and far cheaper than launching anything into orbit. Relatively inexpensive small-scale tests are also easy. And the argument that it would take decades to take effect, well, global warming takes effect over decades as well.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
If you believe that temperature varies spontaneously, maybe you also believe that the atmosphere also cycles naturally between Oxygen/Nitrogen and Ammonia/Methane, that meteor impacts are as frequent now as they were a billion years ago, etc., etc.
Nope, warming/cooling cycles don't happen spontaneously, they have causes behind them. Mostly it's things which change the chemistry of the atmosphere.
In the past it may have been a new species of plant which grew on a massive scale and sucked all the CO2 out of the air, stuff like that.
"...look at 100 or 200 years of monitored weather"
Thing is ... we're not looking at "200 years".
We can look at the exact composition of the atmosphere over millions of years by sampling antarctic ice.
We can very accurately calculate average temperatures going back tens of thousands of years by looking at tree rings.
We can make pretty good guesses at average temperatures going back much further by looking at pretty much anything which deposits layers of organic material.
We can judge average sea temperatures by looking at calcium deposits, etc., etc.
IOW, the real scientists are doing real science. That guy with the website? He isn't.
No sig today...
did anyone consider that the oceans may need sunlight, and to make it "reflective" would ultimately ruin this planet even faster ?
happy trials
Now that solar energy is soon to intersect with profitability, why not take all the extra greenhouse sunlight and turn it into electricity? Is the problem that all the flight time of greenhouse sunlight turning the photos into heat before they can be captured?
/.is against patents.
This in from the future of an alternate timeline: The standard protocol for terraforming experiments such as these is to always have a backup planet, with complete infrastructure in place, in case something goes wrong.
I don't think we're going to meet that requirement for many decades to come. Experimenting with global systems is ill advised at best until we have somewhere else to go in the event of a failure.
--
Toro
What people are forgetting is that the whole global warming thing itself doesn't have much scientific grounding.
"..they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming"
Immoral?
Can someone enlighten me on how this would be immoral?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
And the requisite glitter (very small reflective particles) will serve to reflect the warming rays. We just have to work on getting the rockers to go out during the daylight hours
The story quotes a climate modeler from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, CA. To anyone who speaks Portuguese, that name is pretty funny in the context of global warming. "Caldeira" means "boiler" in Portuguese.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
If your job insists on handing you shifts that are inconvenient/harder and not compensating you for that (by perhaps, paying taxi fare when you do shift-work) they aren't a good place to work.
Yes, we get the idea that changing your driving might require changing your employer, which might require changing your housing... It is complicated. But your life will be better if you pay attention to it.
Why have you made 3-5 posts in this thread all saying "Sure, but then when a problem (not enough cargo capacity/not enough transit/etc) looms, WHAT DO I DO!?" Isn't it fairly clear? You do something else. If there's no cargo capacity buy a basket/trailer/take the bus, if the bus doesn't run, haul cargo another day, if your work is inaccessible on weekends, refuse weekend shifts. If you can't choose your shifts at all (what are you, an elementary school child? Do you need to ask for potty breaks?) find another job. If you can't, consider moving closer to other jobs.
Maybe we'll do this another way. What parts of what you're doing are so sacred you can't consider changing them. Is that apartment/whatever special, or just the one you got when you needed one? Is the job making some life-saving thing that won't be made if you don't do it, or can you pick up another job elsewhere? Is your kid's school the only one that works with their special needs? Then sure, make that one thing fixed. But if you're like everyone else, 99% of what you do is dictated by chance, not design. So if part of that 99% must change, it should be painless because you didn't specifically pick it.
You'll never hear an Al Gore follower mention it but the Earth has actually been on a cooling cycle for the last two years. Maybe we should be starting to look at schemes to increase planetary warming. This could be especially worrisome if sunspot cycle 24 continues to be unusually weak.
or something close, they are called contrails.
In fact there are places on the planet that get 5% less light then they did 50 years ago.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What would happen if we were to start replacing asphalt-paved roads with more reflective materials? Nothing sufficient to glare-blind drivers of course, but I have to imagine even the cement used for freeway surfaces reflects more light and retains less heat than blacktop.
I'm not saying go rip up roads either -- just use the lighter-colored material whenever replacement is already necessary. The advantages would be many: (1) no additional land footprint, it's just making existing roads have a secondary function, (2) traffic loads are usually highest when the sun is at a steep angle in the morning and afternoon/evening, so much of the road would be left exposed when the sun is at its peak, (3) it would reduce the heat of the road surface, meaning the people who drive on it would stay slightly cooler, which means running the A/C a little bit less, which means a small amount of fuel saved.
For roads that do not need resurfacing any time soon, perhaps they can be painted in a thin layer to do the same job (if less effectively).
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Hey I'm all for ZPG, but this way is much faster, dead people don't breed. Then there is all the growth you would get in the funeral industry!
"All those, moments will be lost, in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die." Roy Batty
Why quote something when your spelling and punctuation is so utterly abysmal that meaning drifts away?
=S