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UK Royal Society Claims Geo-Engineering Feasible
krou writes "The BBC is reporting that a UK Royal Society report claims that geo-engineering proposals to combat the effects of climate change are 'technically possible.' Three of the plans considered showed the most promise: 'CO2 capture from ambient air'; enhancing 'natural reactions of CO2 from the air with rocks and minerals'; and 'Land use and afforestation'. They also noted that solar radiation management, while some climate models showed them to be ineffective, should not be ignored. Possible suggestions included: 'a giant mirror on the Moon; a space parasol made of superfine aluminum mesh; and a swarm of 10 trillion small mirrors launched into space one million at a time every minute for the next 30 years.'"
I still claim that it's stupid to fuck around with the planet without having some other place to move to, just in case we fuck up our fucking around with things that we think we do understand but actually we don't.
I make that 10,000 launches which over 30 years is nearly a launch a day. I was under the impression that rocket launches have a negative environmental impact not including the impact of actually building so many.
I would prefer a method that we can reverse if it turns out that we misunderstood a bit of the carboncycle.. so please not the millions of tiny mirrors?
The most simple geoengineering technique would be the most effective one: JUST PLANT TREES INSTEAD OF BURNING THEM
The belief, that we humans can 'engineer' the earth and bend it to our expectations is exactly, what got us into this mess in the first place. How about re-engineering ourselves instead for the better?
The planet's fine.The people are fucked.
You're really not listening.. to me or to the article.. geo-engineering is not a short term solution, nor a quick fix.. it's a required on-going effort that will last forever. Imagine you're in a spaceship, what do you need to maintain life? You need active management of your environmental systems or, in the long term, they will fail and you'll die. Well guess what, we are on a spaceship, and it's called Earth.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The point in my previous post is that there are already machines available which are capable of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere using nothing else than solar power, these machines are also auto-replicating and their fabrication process doesn't produce additional CO2 emissions. Furthermore some of their subproducts can be used to feed animals or build... buildings (excuse my poor english pleas). We have these machines already. We know them as PLANTS. I'd rather not get into the real motivations of the current push in favour of geoengineering, but I'm sure it comes from the same people always trying to make money from human disgrace.
You don't need to be a scientist to realize which side is correct.
And you don't need to be a scientist to recognise that the biggest support for the GWisascam doctrine comes from the industries responsible for the heaviest CO2 emissions and buildup: the petroleum and coal industries, in combination with the forestry industry. You can hardly say they're impartial, and that they have no vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are.
If you insist on sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la-la-la-la" as you appear to, then sure you can be selective about your "experts", but you cannot possibly deny that the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is in agreement that climate change is the result of mankind's activities.
I suppose stopping deforestation and planting more trees is beyond the top 1 issue.
From the point of view of Australia having water locked into glacier instead of raining down on our farmland is a crisis.
So if we all start geo-engineering rainfall on a global level what happens when one country wants water that other countries also want? What stops us geo-engineering our deserts to steal your rain? Who sets a quota describing how much rain we're allowed to have, and how will that be enforced?
There are some big technical problems with this plan, but there are also massive social and political problems to be overcome also.
This whole discussion has got to be the most arrogant thing I've read in a while. Last time I checked the earth got along just fine without major modifications. It's a self-adjusting system. How bad can it be that we humans can't overcome these climatic changes that seem inevitable and completely within the cyclical norms? This is just sheer insanity.
now that is interesting. James Lovelock states in one of his book that this is exactly the real risk in geoengineering. namely if we take the responsibility to maintain the very complex balance what is living earth (see James Lovelock's Gaia theory for details) from the earth (gaia) itself (eg your point of view: earth as spaceship) we end up with a very complex task which we never be able to stop doing. doing some clever hack with earth to win some time to reduce co2 and *methane* emissions, that sounds definitely interesting btw.
Aure entuluva!
1. Swindle?/Scam?/Fraud? Perpetrated by who? For what purpose? Who (which golem "them") gains exactly what from preventing this "global warming/climate change" that "they" say is happening and you insist is not? What is their payoff? And why are you so dead-set against it?
2. Are you seriously denying that humanity has, since the start of the Industrial Age, pumped trillions of tons of carbon (we'll ignore the sulfides, the chlorine, etc.) back into the atmosphere that have been locked away as coal and oil for hundreds of millions of years? Really? That just didn't happen? Really? It couldn't possibly have an effect? Really? And you're certain of this, how?
3. What's it to you? Why does it bother you so that people are worried about this and want to do something about it? Why are you so determined to stop them doing so?
Facepalm.
Increased ocean temperatures == releases of methane hydrate == more atmospheric methane == increased ocean temperatures.
Have you heard of the notion of "tipping points"? Runaway positive feedback?
Can you name THREE? Reputable environmental scientists, climatologists, even (real) meteorologists? You know, scientists with expertise in the field we're talking about? Do they have any, what's that word, evidence? Because the glaciologists and geologists and oceanologists are pretty convinced that something pretty wildly out-of-scale for the time frames involved, (in the absence of any other environmental factors: supervolcanos, large meteor strikes) is going on. Do these reputable environmental scientists really think that climate change isn't a real and worrisome threat, that mankind's stewardship of the planet hasn't been incredibly shocking irresponsible?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
We could do with a "Global Warming Hero" like Saddam Hussain. He cut oil production, run his countries industry into the ground and drained marshlands creating deserts - which prevented methane emission. If all governments followed this model we could cut emissions drastically.
You are aware that James Lovelock is a fucking kook who has been discredited more times than creationists in Kansas right?
No scientifically educated person thinks the commonly used term "Mother Earth" is anything more than a pleasant analogy. There's nothing written in the stars that says the Earth will be good to us if we're good to it. If we stopped all industry right now the majority of people on Earth would die, and the remaining would be overtaken and killed by "nature".
How we know is more important than what we know.
Warming, schwarming. If we can't head off the next ice age, then we're royally boned. Not completely as a species, but our post-ice-age descendants will have to bootstrap themselves from wood to nuclear, since we've used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. Sucks to be them.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We have been doing that for the last couple hundred years with horrible effect. You know the funny thing about each of these recommendations is that they say these projects are feasible but don't talk about what could go wrong, how to fix them, and the cost of both. Ridiculous. In my mind we should of course reduce production of CO2 but we should also prepare for the inevitable fact that governments will move too slowly and we are going to need to mitigate a lot of the damage. Some of these mitigation strategies are going to take a long time to plan and we should start now.
Here's another good way to use trees to capture and store extra carbon, plus dramatically improve the soil and help with water issues. Biochar
To be fair, there are quite a lot of people who are scientifically minded who think just that. the fact that you don't agree doesn't mean they don't exist and since you are not the center of the universe, it also doesn't mean they're wrong just by virtue of agreeing with you. The earth doesn't need to be "good to us". What it needs to do is exactly what it does. it needs to behave like a giant organism and repair damage done to itself. Which is what the earth does when left to it's own devices. And since we are creatures that evolved to live here on earth when it's in good shape, that will suite us just fine. there doesn't need to be any candy-like feeling attached to it. Just an ounce of thought.
bio-char. As for old growth forests, 30yrs ago I was literally cutting them down for a living, the area is now a national park.
It's much smarter to prune than mow. The pin in the map link is where I worked in the early eighties the policy was to cut individual trees (mountain ash) marked by the parks authority. If you scoll north over the border where the rules were different you will see a giant bald patch created by woodchiping during the 70's. The last time I drove through the bald patch (1990's) it was covered with tree stumps standing a few feet high on a ball of roots because the soil had long since washed away.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If Gaia existed it would be the most capricious and brutal god imaginable. Only the strong survive, unless a rock falls on them, or a supernova goes off too close. Nature isn't the default state, the safe state, that we should try to cower in. Nature is the ravening maw of a stochastic greedy optimization technique with an arbitrary value function, that wants to test each individual of our species every moment of every day until we mess up and get squished. Nature is the enemy and we aren't safe until we subjugate it.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
The problem is he could name three and it wouldn't matter who they were as you would immediately dismiss them as it's become an emotional issue to you, so I hate to say it but your as bad as the parent.
You've invested in the theory emotionally as has he and so you neither of you can be counted on to be rational about it.
Not to mention appealing to consensus is a really shitty way to "win" a debate.
It wasn't long ago that the UK Royal Society were in consensus that tuberculosis outbreaks were caused by dirty air and motivated by egos and politics refused to accept solid evidence to the contrary while offering ridiculous (and expensive) solutions for years while thousands died.
Arguing consensus opens a whole can of worms on many of the "known and widely held consensus ideas" that turned out to be obviously and ridiculously wrong. So best not to do it.
And I'll answer this for him "3. What's it to you? Why does it bother you so that people are worried about this and want to do something about it? Why are you so determined to stop them doing so?"
Powerful people are trying to fundamentally change the way we live. Not to mention suggesting dangerous "solutions" like the one in the article. It's perfectly rational to be concerned and sceptical when a handful of people start telling everyone they have to accept a whole new way of thinking especially when many many of the loudest proponents of the new way of thinking come with quite a bit of political baggage.
And when the supporters of the "new way of thinking" are as emotionally attached to the idea as many tend to be you get a natural negative reaction from many as science is meant to be about facts and hard evidence, not emotion...
Or we could just have a brief and rather blunt conversation with our friends in the coal, oil and beef industries.
And all of their customers. You know there is a reason that the people in these industries have the power that they do. See, if you force the oil industry to take some action that costs them money, the price of fuel goes up. When the price of fuel goes up, the cost of producing things (such as food) goes up. The cost of getting things (such as food) to people goes up. People get upset and yell at the politicians, possibly vote them out of office in democracies, riot in the streets, etc.. Similar things happen in the coal and beef industries.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No we haven't. Changes to the world have been unplanned and unsystematic, which is not engineering.
That's like an overweight person reading an advert for "Body engineering - reduce your weight" and saying "No way, look where body engineering has got me!"
A rich country like the US shouldn't ever have a problem with water. Since there is no shortage of salt water, the only problem is the energy needed to convert it to fresh water. If people in the US didn't have such an irrational fear of anything called nuclear we could have plenty of energy for this and other things. I used "shouldn't" in the first sentence since it's unlikely people will become rational anytime soon.