Slashdot Mirror
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 ..."
Jeesh, Obama doesn't work here anymore, you know that was years ago.
What do you mean the entire northern European Continent's former residents now want reparations now that their countries are under an ice sheet?
After all it was just a little dust, not even what a volcano produces.
It must have been the fault of the relative lack of Solar sun spots.
Oh, what? 100 million people are now claiming they "own" the U.S.? Ice reparations?
You'll destroy us just like, well, the Treaty of Versailles did to Germany a century ago...
The real problem with any such approach, they argue, is
This religiosity in climate-change politics fascinates me - it's why I like the Michael Crichton essays/speeches on the topic even though he says "climate change is fake!" and it's pretty much Not Fake. More recently, I've seen stuff in that same Libertarian magazine comparing the current climate-change political scene to "denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. [It] is every bit as callous and irresponsible."
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Most of these Dire Global Warming predictions are based on computer models which are known to be flawed.
Any measure taken to counteract perceived Global Warming must be reversible if found ineffective (or worse, a hindrance). Injecting more particulate pollution into the atmosphere to counteract Global Warming doesn't sound to me like an easily reversible thing. Far safer and easier to do, me thinks, to park a large asteroid in synchronous orbit between the Earth and Sun to occlude solar radiation. If it's "too effective" then it can be (comparatively) easily moved or removed, if it's "not enough" then more can be gathered.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
But either way, this is kind of stuff is confusing. 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?
I guess it's the same as fixing the the huge credit problem in the U.S. by telling banks to issue more credit to more at risk lenders?
Or by cutting the country's deficit by increasing spending?
Or by decreasing unemployment by giving illegal immigrants legal status so they can compete for the already limited number of available jobs?
Or by fixing solving the global nuclear threat by reducing our nuclear arsenal while Iran and North Korea continue to push theirs.
Is his Administration pulling these ideas out of their asses or what?
(I know I'll be rated a troll by all the kool-aid drinkers, that's okay)
I would advise you to read Fallen Angels as you seem to have described the premise quite well. Of course, you did forget the ending.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
I tend to be a skeptic as a rule but the more I've read on this the more I see of the opposite: that is, the scientists generally agree, but the few that don't get played up in the media because the politicians love to give them undue credit. And of course there are a whole raft full of people (usually House reps) who have opinions on these matters but aren't actually scientists or citing scientific journals.
Even on this board I see that: the couple of actual climate scientists that frequent slashdot are damn sure of AGW, while people afraid of the political implications trot out already-debunked links to Watts' blog or what have you. I don't know if it's the underdog effect or a general dislike of Al Gore and his ilk, but somewhere in all this people seem to be ignoring the science and just assuming it's a liberal vs. conservative thing.
Most of the arguments I see and hear, and CNN is no exception, include things like "it's a cycle", "it's the sun", "it's water vapor", "it's orbits", "it's volcanos"...these have all been accounted for. Then you get your "the models are flawed" (how?), "there's no consensus", and so on. Again, the sort of thing a quick googling will fix. But much like with evolution vs. creationism, the anti-science crowd gets the benefit of using these quick arguments that take a long time to properly debunk, and they circle around like memes forever as new groups of people say "guess what I heard on CNN! I knew all those scientists were full of it!"
I'm not saying that you're wrong for questioning anybody, since that's always the right approach. But I have to point out that what I have seen in terms of money and politics with this issue has been the opposite. There is big, big money in showing that global warming science is flawed. Probably a Nobel prize too. No one has stepped up to the plate.
And you're right...I'm sure there are a number of politicians who'd love to use climate change as a vehicle for pushing one policy or another through, just as every single company this year miraculously "went green". But who said we had to listen to the politicians in the first place? This research has been out there, in some cases for decades, and all I say definitively is I'm doing my best to catch up on it now and IMO there is a massively solid case for AGW. Which is unsettling.
Contrary to all the 'sky-is-falling' BS that people who produce bad computer models to scare the public enough to make government give them more money to find scarier and scarier models, the global average temperature is in a pretty good place.
Too bad the folks who are so quick to listen to iffy computer models about the weather are not so quick to listen to what computer models (and common sense) say about the consequences of burdening this country with imponderable debt (the number doesn't even fit on my calculator anymore!). That is sure going to impact my children and grandchildren a LOT more than whether the sea levels rise 3 inches in the next 50 years.
We are not going to be able to fix climate change. It is a natural phenomena beyond our control, and inevitable.
What we need to fix is peoples attitude towards it. It is going to happen, and some coastal areas are going to be flooded. On the bright side, the warming will create new green areas on the planet. (Some deserts will turn green again) All in all, the earth will be much more of a tolerable place to live in a warmer climate.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.