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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.
Nice way to conmemorate the 10th year since that movie... scorching the skies as Morpheus said, just that "the machines", this time, are just spambots.
What even makes them think that the U.S. has the right to tinker with the global climate. I'm an american citizen, not a U.S. hater, but we don't have the jurisdiction to make changes that will affect the global climate.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
250,851,833 cars in the US
2,428,202,240 acres in the US(less 6% water)
Your right, theres nowhere near enough space to plant 250 million acres of tree's.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
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.
As we are in 2009, which is less than half way to 2030, let be generous and say there are 900 million cars on the road today.
This means we need to plant trees on 1.8 billion acres.
Considering that the Sahara Desert is over 2 billion acres, I think we have plenty of space. and as the Sahara is not too densely populated, it won't affect too many people, and will actually provide a lot of work for people in Africa, which will go a long way to solving may problems there.
Note: There are other deserts that could be used as well ;)
www.Buy-Proxy.com - A "buyer-driven" global marketplace.
I like that idea. The problem with that is you're more likely to be funding a 30-year corporate investment than genuinely offsetting the pollution. Eg $1000 charged to consumer returns $30,000 when the "crop" is harvested. That's a brilliant scheme if you have a car factory... until the wood market is flooded, I guess.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Preventing a cancer before it starts is far more effective than attempting to treat it after years of abuse. But yeah in these types of topics I generally get modded Troll for telling people they need to give up their cars and ride bicycles if they want to stop (or slow down) climate change. Yes there are certainly a very great deal of reasons why, for example, people can't ride bikes: weather is too hot, weather is too cold, work is too far away, biking causes sweat, etc. Yep, just mark me Troll.
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.
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)
How much additional CO2 will we put into the atmosphere to irrigate the Sahara?
Fool. Just use carbonated water.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Venus's atmosphere has a few magnitudes more CO2 than the earth. So far the most workable modern plan for terraforming Venus would involve creating a sun shield to freeze the planet, then launch a bunch of CO2 blocks into space.
This is my sig.
It rains. That gets the dirt out of the air. So the problem with mitigation will be, what will happen when all of these things we launch into the air come back and hit the ground.
We had a ton of pollution that essentially accomplished this effect and to some degree masked global warming. Once we got smart and lowered the size of and then got rid of particulate emissions of many kinds, that's when temperatures started moving up.
This is my sig.
... build more nuclear power plants.
Yeah, I know, -1 Flamebait.
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.
"No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude."
Perhaps that's because organised astroturfers have conviced many people science doesn't apply to AGW.
The fact that the first hit on a google search for 'icecap "global warming"' is the icecap.us site would indicate your pessimisim is warranted. I actually had someone reply to me the other day who said something like "you don't get to quote Nature and Science as evidence for AGW because they are not statisticians".....sigh.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Some folks spend their entire life walking on paved over ground. I suppose some of them will never ever set foot on ground that's not been bull-dozed flat, planted and manicured. They've only ever seen nature through a car window or a TV screen, and every word the announcer utters is gospel, and the constant message is "Be afraid, be very afraid". By the way send money to our lawyers who will help save the cute-furry critters.
Those are the folks who worry most about the environment.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
A more ambitious solution exists that does not hold such unpredictable consequences. We currently are investing billions in solar cell technology. The next step is to put mass produced panels in space and transmit power to the surface. It would kill three birds with one very large stone. And maybe some more birds would die from the microwave transmissions for power transfer, but I want to emphasize the benefits. It could provide us with a relatively clean energy source that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide a global cooling effect by blocking incident sunlight, and free up land space that is being taken up by solar crop fields. I know I'm not the first to think of this idea. Larry Niven's ringworld had a similar system to simulate day/night. Slashdot had an article earlier about how science fiction influences future technology. This concept is one that is ambitious, but could save the planet. The only thing to figure out is whether or not it's practical.
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 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.
For a while the United States considered many methods for stopping a hurricane including detonating an atomic bomb at the eye of it. Eventually we decided not to even care about lesser methods of stopping a hurricane because if it was successful other nations would see us as a threat. If another nation had a typhoon, hurricane or tsunami, they may blame it on the United States and their weather control voodoo.
If we drastically alter the Earth's climate not in accordance with the international community, we'll be blamed(rightly) for causing longer and harsher winters.
God spoke to me.
Here's a simple solution I haven't heard anyone propose. Extensive renewable thinning of the forests.
Forests only absorb co2 as they grow, once they reach maximum density they become carbon neutral. When a forest reaches maximum density all carbon absorbed by new trees is offset by the trees that died and provided the room. But by continually thinning out our forests and allowing them to regrow we'd gain a infinitely renewable supply of zero net carbon fuel in the form of the harvested wood.
The wood produced could be used to generate electricity, or could be even chemically converted directly to combustible fuel. In addition, the wood could be used for cheap carbon negative building material.
The infrastructure for this would be cheap, the technologies available, and most importantly, it would be immediately profitable. I'm not surprised this hasn't been seriously considered though, both sides in this controversy seam more interested in using it for political leverage than approaching the problem with any sense of logic.
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.
You have have been misinformed.
....[snip]...
We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities." /end_quote
/fixed
The NW passage was not suitable for cruise ships in 1906. Besides none of the crossings via a temporary route say anything much about climate.
"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."
First of all it's Mann et al's hockey stick not Al Gore's, second there is no such "surface data.org" web site, third the source of your half truth is the national academies testimony to the senate which states...
"The basic conclusion of the 1999 paper by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years
"Remember all the data pointed to a new ice age in 1970, now the same data points to warming..."
No, but I am old enough to remember reading a whole lot of newspaper articles based on one national geographic article that by chance I also read when in HS. I do remember when the negative forcing of soot was offsetting the positive forcing of CO2 more than in is now. Again looking at the national academies, they first warned of global warming in the 50's, nothing has changed in those warnings except the credibility and urgency have increased by orders of magnitute.
"Turns out that just about all dust in antarctic PENINSULA ice record comes from Patagonia."
Not sure what your point is here because more dust/soot sitting on the ice speeds up the rate of melting, your link correctly states that the dust levels are low right now because the glaciers are MELTING in patagonia?
I'm not sure where you get your information but if I were you I would start to question them since the sources you do give, are now publishing papers that make Al Gore's movie look optimistic.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The hockey stick has been updated with better data, finding that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years.
No. Ordinary people don't even know what "chaotic systems" are. Ordinary people have no idea what the ice caps melting will eventually imply.
But we have a bunch of very smart people who do complicated experiments in controlled environments, who then take the results of those experiments and do their best to extrapolate them to a global scale over a span of decades or centuries. Some of them will be wrong, but some will most likely be right. It only takes one or two "right" scenarios to change our planet beyond the ability to support "life as we know it" (which doesn't imply supporting no life at all, though it could.)
And we have a bunch of people telling us that there's nothing to see here please move along, or promoting cheap quick-fix solutions that could potentially make things worse in the long run. (Often and I'm sure entirely coincidentally, these are the same people who would have to put up the biggest stake in order for a cleanup to really work on a large scale.)
The only things we really know for sure is that we have exactly one example of a planet that supports life as we know it, that its changing faster than current research suggests it should, and that our own actions have a high probability of being a major cause of the fast-tracked change.
So the question is: do YOU want to risk your only planet (or your grandchildren's only planet if it takes that long) on the slim chance that the scientists are the ones who are wrong? Unfortunately there's currently an overwhelming "yes" from the people in charge. I'm sure its another coincidence that they're frequently the same people (or have ties to the same people) who tell us that science is wrong.
Ordinary people believe what they're told. If they're told two contradictory things, they'll take a brief glance at the available information and choose whichever side seems the most obvious to them regardless of the basis of that particular side.
Many, if not most, ordinary people these days will tend to fall on the side of the scientists if you ask them what they believe (its a lot easier to believe that making things hot melts ice than it is to believe a politician is telling the truth!) Then they'll get in their non-carpooled SUV, drive 20 miles to get to their suburban home and turn the AC to full because they don't understand the basis.
I freely admit to falling into the category of "ordinary people" when it comes to climate change. I listen to what I'm told, then pick my side based on what makes the most sense to me (I'd bet the tone of my comment suggests which side that is). Maybe its just the programmer in me, but I like to look at it in terms of worst case scenarios:
- O(science is wrong): Nothing changes and life goes on. A few large corporations have to spend 0.1% of their budget for 5 years implementing cleanup plans that turn out to be useless. Theres a bit less smog in LA.
- O(stakeholders are wrong): All life on earth is wiped out within the next century or two. No one is alive to care about the smog in LA.
Now of course worst case isn't necessarily the most likely case, but I'd still rather not take the chance. I hope to have grandkids someday and I'd prefer if they have a planet to live on. Its a good thing that I'm not really fond of SUVs.
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.
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?
Because the content of your link is a crock of shit? (As is the rest of the site: "If Barack Obama Becomes the President Prepare for Marxism", "Bristol Palin Pregnant, but Makes Brave Choice", "Sarah Palin: A Conservatives Dream Come True"!)
Your link quotes TV weathermen, people who claim the sea levels are falling, that the global climate is *cooling* (despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
Classic myths (teh Sun is causing the warming!) sit side by side with quotes that claim the planet is cooling.
Why don't you link to the debunking of your... erm... bunk?
Who said the climate is a chaotic system on centennial time scales? It's mostly a boundary value problem, not an initial value problem. That's why we can predict that summer is hotter than winter even though we can't predict the weather in 6 months: you increase the net radiation flux, it will get hotter on average. You can't predict the microstate of the system (which city has what temperature on what day), but you can predict the average macrostate (the system absorbs more heat). Similarly, there is molecular chaos in a pot of water, but that doesn't mean you can't predict the water gets hotter when you turn the stove on.
Now, if the climate system happens to be balanced near a bistable threshold, then you can get chaotic effects, where internal variability can unpredictably flip the system to one state or the other. It's possible that we could cross some threshold with help from anthropogenic climate change, but it's unlikely to happen by itself soon, considering the relative stability of the Holocene climate.
"Chaos" is right up there with "entropy" and "quantum mechanics" with most misused scientific concepts.
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.