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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.