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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 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?
News bulletin: We've already fucked with it. (Without understanding).
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
I assume this would be managed by a rail gun setup. While we can't fire anythign as big as a spaceship into space shooting a shiny ball into space is no problem at all.
However this does show just how desperate we are getting. Shooting 10,000 metal balls into space pretty much guarantees we wont be leaving this planet... Unless they are all going for lagrange points I suppose but then I question the value or our ability to aim so accurately.
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.
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.
The obvious solution here is to build an orbital cannon. The biggest built and successfully used was in the 60s by the U.S. Navy to launch atmospheric probes up to 100 miles into the atmosphere. Building a 50-100m long gun up the side of a mountain(or even underground in a mine shaft or silo) isn't that technically hard. Estimates for the gun itself run about 200 million to build. The idea is to have each payload have its own small positioning rocket and external case. Drop the mirrors in the case and lob into space - the small engine moves it out to the proper position. Since we're talking just scattering the mirrors, there's nothing else required here - just position and open it up. Once a day is trivial. 10,000 launches would cost a mere 1-2 billion dollars. Even if it required 10x that many launches, with it firing off every couple of hours, it would be simple enough to accomplish. With ten of them, this could be done in just 3-5 years.
2-3 billion for an array of ten of these. Problem solved in a new years.
http://www.tbfg.org/
This is the latest company that is working on this. They will have a test-launch next year.
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.
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
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.
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.
Not to mention that *most* of the CO2 hype is largely based on computer models... Models are useful tools, but while most scientists apparently agree that we have global warming, even more agree that you cannot accurately model climate yet. And some even suggest that it will likely never be possible.
Models are especially cool since climate is a 10-15 year deal, by the time you can measure the accuracy of your model, it's long forgotten and you already got your money and 15 minutes of media fame for saying the collective farting power of krill will cause the next ice age.
There is a lot of good climate science being done, don't get me wrong. But given how political the issue has become, there is also a giganormous load of bullshit being peddled as science too. And apparently, all you need is pictures of polar bears to disable most bullshit radars.
Mind the frickin' laser...
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