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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.
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.
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.
... 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.