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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.
Never a more apt tag in the whole of the internet.
To act like sunglasses... or moving the Earth back from the Sun a little bit.
This is a complete myth. Read this and be enlightened - http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I dunno why she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly -
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a bird;
How absurd, to swallow a 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.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly -
Perhaps she'll die
There was an old lady who swallowed a cat. ...
Imagine that, she swallowed a 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.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she'll die
There was an old lady who swallowed a dog. ...
What a hog! To swallow a 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.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a goat. ... ...
Just opened her throat and swallowed a 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.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a cow. ...
I don't know how she swallowed a cow!
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.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a horse -
She's dead, of course.
To be fair, we will have to address a myriad of issues before we are able to effect any real change in the US.
One of my biggest gripes is the lack of community planning since the 1950s. Everyone wanted to live in the suburbs, and now, thanks to the housing construction boom, local governments drunk on property tax revenue, and a complete lack of traffic planning we have broken the back of many of our communities.
I've seen so much of the countryside consumed in this glut of home building it sickens me. I'm not even 30 and I have seen some historical areas and homes purchased by development companies and turned into sales offices. 5000 sq ft homes on 1 acre plots are built while nothing is added to the existing communities. Watching people reward this blight by purchasing or renting these homes and commuting 30-50 miles boggles the mind.
It is a culture of the car. Shops are spaced out almost as much as the homes. The expectation is that you will drive to one business, get back in your car and drive to the next.
The design of our communities is so freaking wasteful it really marks the 'green' movement as a cute fad for people that really don't understand the problems that exist. 'greening' your less than 10 year old subdivision or condo is spending more money for less solution. Save the money and work to bring your community back to one where you don't have to get into your car to perform any sort of activity and you will see a much greater return.
(Now where's my coffee, thats too much of a rant for this early in the morning)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
That's nice in a science fiction story but in the real world hurricane modification research was curtailed because of the fear that unsuspected interactions would result in more damage not less.
It seems to me that we shouldn't tinker with the entire atmosphere if we don't have a good deal of confidence we can control one of the constituent phenomena.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The real problem is the business of the process.
There is too great an incentive for companies to dream up potentially damaging and idiotic ideas in order to secure lucrative government contracts to carry them out. The company then makes a large profit from screwing with the environment in a big way.
It's the same mechanism that results in companies having an incentive to push the country into war; massive mega-contracts that result in huge gains to that company at the severe detriment of everyone else.
Huge dollars going into mega projects like carbon sequestering attract morally bankrupt companies like Bechtel, companies who would strip mine the entire Amazon if they could make it profitable. They put together a reasonable sounding proposal, submit it to the bumbling idiots who call themselves our leaders along with a fat bribe and then go about reaping enormous profit using our tax dollars to fuck up the planet.
There are few things that anger me more than the privatization of social responsibility.
I hate printers.
We don't know for sure the effects of anything we do to try and combat climate change. Even just reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses to what they were at some arbitrary time in the past does not guarantee that the climate will just go directly back to how it was, it's a lot more complicated than that.
Taking the attitude you express would therefore lead to simply doing nothing, which seems to be a pretty close-minded view. You do what you can via modelling etc to try and predict the effects of any potential intervention. Then you try it on a limited scale, and try to confirm your models. If it seems good, you scale it up. Sure you can't 100% guarantee that you won't cause a disaster, but doing nothing is even more likely to cause a disaster, so the "do nothing" approach is pretty obviously silly.
Oh no... it's the future.
Don't listen to that guy. What he really meant is there is no try. Only do or do not.
All points of time and space are connected.
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.
Stuff like sprinkling the ocean with reflective material doesn't have a very well known effect because we haven't tinkered with the planet in that way. I'm just a lowly ex-Biologist, but immediately after reading the description, alarm bells are going off like wild.
These particles will be exposed to one of the world's largest food chains, possibly poisoning one of the greatest stores of bio-mass in existence. Life will probably manage to struggle on, but even a reduction in bio-mass in the ocean has a very profound impact on the land dwelling population of the world.
We already have significant problems with mercury content of many types of edible marine life. They don't eat a lethal dose at any given time, but their bodies accumulate the poison until it presents problems for their predators. Such systems of poison storage causes collapses of the predators first, which then cause blooms of the prey, which then cause mass extinctions of the prey due to starvation. In this respect, animals are like humans, willing to watch the whole species go to hell in a hand bucket as long as they can exploit the environment for everything its got.
Even if they're plastic particles, plastics leech phenols which seem to cause some health problems. Even if they're 100% inert (perhaps ceramic?) small particles are deadly in their own right. Particular atmospheric pollution does it's damage whether you get it from living in a city or other means, some people can't get enough of particular pollution so they take up smoking ;)
I wonder if the researchers have considered how easy it would be to live, work, sleep, and eat in a house where every interior surface was covered with a fine layer of glitter.