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Climate Engineering As US Policy?
EricTheGreen writes "The Associated Press has an article featuring Obama administration science advisor John Holdren discussing potential climate engineering responses to global warming. Among the possible approaches? His own version of Operation Dark Storm — shooting micro-particulate pollution high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. I'm sure the rest of the world would have no issue with that at all, of course. Yikes ..."
...what the rest of the world says. Bush made it policy that the US acts unilaterally when the administration believes it is in our best interest.
As Obama has made clear with warrantless wiretapping, he intends to hold onto Bush's powers.
This is not a reversal of climate change.
Reflecting more sun from the top of the atmosphere while increasing greenhouse gasses will place us in yet another unknown region of the earths dynamics.
It might work in controlling temperature - for some small part of the earth - if you get it right, but this is a multi variable system, people might not like your attempts to control temperature if rainfall patterns are altered, winds and currents change, and we get less sunlight to run solar and wind power and grow crops.
We already have one uncontrolled multi decade experiment running, lets start another. I'm quite certain there are no precedents that would indicate that rapidly constructed fixes to problems cause any more problems than the original one.
I'll tell you what Nathan Lewis at Caltech says about ideas like this. I'm sure they are included in the talk/seminars he has on his webpage. The climate is a massive machine we don't fully understand that we need to live. Now you want to walk up and turn a fairly random knob really hard?
Why? We've been trying to change the climate on Earth for the past 100 years or so to be more like Venus.
Are you shooting for +5 Funny? We already have been tinkering with the global climate by dumping enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for decades. The question isn't so much whether we have a right to do this, but whether we have a responsibility to do something.
That said, this particular proposal seems like a really bad idea. If we reduce the amount of light reaching the surface, then we will have to keep producing greenhouse gases to avoid global cooling. While it might seem that we would have little difficulty doing so, what happens when we run out of fossil fuels or fossil fuels are rendered uneconomical by, let's say, the invention practical fusion power? It's also worth noting that the greenhouse effect is not the only problem arising from our freewheeling pollution habits.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This is postponing the problem until some future generation has to fix not only the original problem, but also the problem created by this "fix".
I'd hate to be alive for that, and I have a feeling I will be. We're suckers.
Will you guys put away the heavy words? The wonk was talking possibilities. How much does climate change get fixed by hyper-cynicism? Perhaps the effort on real solution consideration is beyond your capabilities.
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
Evidently, the amount of Greenhouse pollution spewed by the average new car these days is the same as the amount of CO2 that a half-acre of trees sucks up into growth.
If every new car sold came with a certificate that an acre of trees was planted and maintained somewhere, cars would be responsible for slowing and then reversing the Greenhouse.
Getting the trees to grow back seems a lot safer and less stupid than continuing to pretend we can mess with the complex and sensitive atmosphere like we know what we're doing, which is what got us into this mess.
And about every 10-20 years we could cut down the trees and build something with them as an added bonus.
And no, I'm not trying to be funny. Young, growing trees "suck up" more CO2 than mature trees. Cutting them down and planting new ones actually makes them more useful as air filters. This is why I think it's so sad when tree hugging protesters protest outfits that plant a new tree for every tree they cut down and only cut the mature trees to thin a forest out (as opposed to clear cutting it).
Now, the only problem I see with your plan is that we make a lot more cars than we have acres. Eventually, all of the US will be covered in trees especially when you consider that trees last much longer than cars. A ten year old car is ready for the heap whereas a ten year old tree is just getting started.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It also happens to be slowly spinning out of control. Do you want to try to understand it and fix it now, or when you're having trouble breathing?
How we know is more important than what we know.
No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude. Disasters will be the call to action. So basically only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action.. and by then there will likely be nothing we can do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
... build more nuclear power plants.
Yeah, I know, -1 Flamebait.
No, we think driving around cars that a more like tanks and eating food that has seen more processing than it's packaging is excessive behaviour
Normal people worry me!
That's actually not a bad idea, considering that Venus is in many ways similar to earth. Venus's average temperature is 461 Celsius, so it would be ideal for testing the injection of micro-particles into the atmosphere.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Spinning out of control? How can we make such a judgement without understanding how it works? Plus, fixing something you don't understand is pretty much guess work and luck.
The ice shelves in that quote are ~10Kyrs old
It's an amazing coincidence that the last ice age peaked about 10k years ago too.
Hmmm maybe we are emerging from an ice age, and glaciers and such mmmm melt after an ice age...
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Just because you personally don't understand it well enough to make sound risk management decisions does not imply others are in the same prediciment.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable. The ice caps are melting does not imply that my house is going to be flooded next week, or next year or next century (and if it does, I probably don't give a shit, it's a century from now, meh), so how am I supposed to react? "Shit keeps changing, I don't like it!"
How we know is more important than what we know.
Woah, woah, "spinning out of control????"
Look heat balance is a tricky thing to calculate for several reasons. One, q=k*A*e*T^4, which means that dT/de goes like 1/T^3: very small temperature changes balance out small emissivity changes, and balance out more quickly at higher temperatures.
The tricky bit is that we live on a thin skin, so there's some "difference of very large numbers" type effects that could have a wide-ranging effect on us
But there's no spinning out of control. It's possibly moving slowly toward a new, very slightly different equilibrium.
Please excuse yourself from the debate* for a while while you stop hyperventilating and do a little research. We'll be glad welcome you back in when you're ready to talk without histrionics.
*the public policy debate. The science, while far from settled, says what it says. We can't change the science by debating it. All we can do is discuss what, if anything we're going to do, and that must take into account more than just "how to keep the environment exactly the same as it is right now."
It's not quite as simple as that. This morning I watched the sun come up in the east. Right now it is more or less overhead, and i'm pretty sure it's going to go down in the west in a few more hours. It looks to me like the sun is revolving around the earth (which appears pretty flat from where i'm standing).
I know that the earth actually revolves around the sun because i've be told it does. From my viewpoint it's a pretty hard thing to observe though. I also know that the earth is pretty much round, because of some pictures i've been shown (which kind of amounts to being told).
Based on my observations, the weather in the last 10 years has been quite a bit hotter than the 10 years before that. People who have taken and recorded measurements over the last 20 years have told me that their numbers confirm my observations.
I've also been told that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which I kind of have to take their word on. But we have different groups of people saying:
. The increased temperature is nothing to do with the CO2 content, it's getting hotter due to natural climatic variations
. The increased temperature is related to the CO2 content in the atmosphere, but the CO2 content is a product of nature and nothing to do with us
. We put the CO2 there after digging it out of the ground, and that CO2 is the biggest contributing factor to global warming, and we need to start doing something about it yesterday
So who do you trust? At the end of the day you have to take all the available inputs (which always come to you from someone with an agenda to push) and figure out which one is most likely to be true. The sort of stuff we are talking about here is not something that is easily to 'observe' in any way that is useful to most people.
"Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable.
Yes but how many "ordinary people" realise that is a red-herring because the statistics of chaotic systems are stable? Examples: Turbulent water flow does not mean you can't measure the rate of flow. The n-body problem of celestial mechanics is chaotic but that does not prevent us from exquisite accuracy in the trajectory of space probes.
Weather is chaotic, climate is the statistics of weather and by comparison is stable over centuries/millenia. To be pedantic climate is in dynamic equilibrum over all but extremely long time periods.
Many "ordinary people" have been duped into beliving science does not apply, ordinary people have kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, ect, who will be affected by much more than wet carpet in much less than a century.
so how am I supposed to react?
Keep defending science and common sense as you have done in the past...and maybe build a well stocked bunker on high ground...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'll assume you're not trolling, and answer your questions as best I can.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
Yes, you can cherry-pick two points on a noisy signal and pretend it's meaningful, but that doesn't make it so. The meaningful indicator is the overall trend, not the year-by-year variations: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-1.htm
Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?
You're assuming that all pollutants have the same effect. Is it so far fetched to think that some materials might have different effects than others?
Or by cutting the country's deficit by increasing spending?
Increasing spending can in fact cut the deficit -- if it causes the economy to grow sufficiently that the increased business activity generates more tax revenue than the amount spent took away. (whether or not that will happen is open to speculation, but it has worked in the past)
Or by decreasing unemployment by giving illegal immigrants legal status so they can compete for the already limited number of available jobs?
Oh wait you are trolling, aren't you. You just wanted an excuse to post the standard list of Republican talking points to another forum. Well done.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Why would you link the IPCC report when it's common knowledge that 650 of the scientists whose work was used for the report have come out publicly and said that the entire report is pretty much a fabrication and false in nearly every aspect?
The North west passage was first crossed in 1906 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/420084/Northwest-Passage
Al's famous hockey stick is dirty data taken from weather stations that have experienced heat islands being installed in the form of pavement. Go check out surface data.org. Sometimes one needs to "scrub" the data, and throw out obviously tainted data from a compromised station.
Remember all the data pointed to a new ice age in 1970, now the same data points to warming...
Go see Geology.com for the latest in antarctic dust... Turns out that just about all dust in antarctic ice record comes from Patagonia. Previous thought was that dust in the antarctic ice record indicated global warm dry years. Current thought is dust in the antarctic ice record is heaviest in cold dry years when Patagonian glaciers were advancing, released little water, and dust from dry terminal moraine coated antarctic ice. Warm years in Patagonia the glaciers retreat flooding the terminal moraine, and trapping the dust.
http://www.geology.com/news/2009/antarctic-dust-and-climate-record.shtml
The real source is Nature.com, but I don't have an active account.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
I believe they are talking about putting the pollution very high up in the atmosphere where rain doesn't wash it out in a few days / weeks. Particulate matter high enough up in the atmosphere stays there for many many years.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Link?
If you actually mean "discredited" and not "refuted", I think that you're the one guilty of politisizing this issue.
I find it completely outrageous that one side's profits are so suspicious, but the other side's (the oil industry's) is beyond doubt, even though they realistically must have much more money riding on the outcome of the AGW debate.
It's also worth noting that the greenhouse effect is not the only problem arising from our freewheeling pollution habits.
Like the rising acidity of our oceans, which threaten to kill off many species and knock out the based of the food chain? Yes, you are correct, pollution would do this.
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I was wasted last night and too lazy to look up a more legit link, but the quotes are all legitimate, as well as fact that well over 650 of the scientists have spoken out against the IPCC report. Global warming is a political thing, if scientists were to speak out en masse against it they would lose their funding for whatever research they do etc
This is what happens when science is politicized, either you toe the line or you get fucked for actually interpreting the facts for what they really mean.
Much of what we consider "waste" could be reprocessed into perfectly good nuclear fuel. We don't do it because... Well, I don't know why, but other countries like Japan and France do.
Think it through. First, reprocessing reduces the amount of actual "waste" to a fraction of the original. Second, the most radioactive elements have the shortest half-lives. So that the high-level radioactive "waste" is going to be virtually gone after 500 to 600 years, not 10,000 years. A significant amount of time but nowhere near 10,000 years.
Yeah, the low-level stuff is going to take longer, but after 500 to 600 years the "waste" is going to be about as radioactive as the ore it was mined from. Do you compulsively worry about Uranium mines in the US and Canada?
Heck, if you really want to get rid of it, just glassify it and dump it in a subduction zone and return it to the earth's core.
Reprocess the "waste", which significantly reduces the amount of actual "waste", and sell the fuel back to the utilities.
Three Mile Island was the worst disaster in a commercial nuclear power plant in US history, where almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and the release of radioactive material into the environment was virtually negligible. And we have safer designs now.
First, we can extend our nuclear fuel supply by reprocessing our nuclear "waste". Second, Thorium is about 4 times as abundent as Uranium and can be used with Uranium as fuel. Third, there are breeder reactors that produce more fuel than they consume so we never have to run out.
One thing that always struck me about nuclear power opponents is that they don't want to find solutions to larger issues.