Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Geo-engineered first goatse.
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 really like the way the article seems to indicate that geo-engineering is the short term solution and conservation is the long term solution.. I've always seen it as exactly the opposite. If we were to stop all greenhouse gas producing industry *right now* there would still be a global warming problem. If the problem is real then the only solution is global engineering. Hiding in the dark will only buy us time, the world needs a plan to use that time to find a solution.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think we can convince the UN Council
Global warming is a scam.
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
They are geo-engineering the planet already..
Anybody ever look at the sky?
http://tinyurl.com/aerosolcrimes
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
Nice to see they consulted Wyle E. Cyote.
Seriously, how about a chalk farm?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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?
Reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's terraforming conjectures in his trilogy beginning with Red Mars , where an orbital lens first used to provide more sunlight for Mars is ultimately sent to Venus, turned around, and used to shield that hot planet from sunlight.
Just create a really large nuclear drive to push the Earth away from the sun, increasing its orbit. We'll get a few extra days per year as a neat side-effect. Has anyone bothered to calculate the necessary energy for that? Is it theoretically possible with Earth's uranium or hydrogen resources?
Here's how the mirror plan would work. Nuclear fission plants (or solar arrays) would power an array of about 10 billion dollars worth of solid state lasers. (at current prices, available today). The lasers would probably use LEDs to pump doped fiber optics, producing very cheap laser energy.
The capsules containing the mirrors would be kicked into the air using a catapault and then the bottom of the capsule would be vaporized using the lasers to create thrust. The laser array alone would insert the mirror capsules into orbit...tehre would be minimal to no onboard thrusters needed.
That's how you'd launch one every minute (need several arrays) over a 30 year period.
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?
Royal Society Press Release:
http://royalsociety.org/news.asp?id=8734
Which links to a 98-page pdf:
http://royalsociety.org/geoengineeringclimate/
The planet's fine.The people are fucked.
the solution is ... one big tin foil hat for earth?
I mean, so much depends on sunlight that limiting it seems like there's no way it ca possibly end well. This isn't countering global warming, this is throwing another massive climate change into the mix that may on average even out temperature changes. It's like treating an infected wound by setting a person's arm on fire.
I mean climate and plant life depend on sunlight. So how can you not expect to get famines, mass ecological changes, large scale climate changes and so on.
Or we could just do nothing as there doesn't appear to be any evidence that the world is warming anyway.
You caught me on the reference to "terraforming". Looks like we need to start by terraforming our own planet to sustain its suitability for human life. Not so funny.
My suggestion along these lines would be a network of large controllable mirrors in orbit. The individual sections could be aimed, essentially by rotating them with gyroscopes. Some region is too hot? Adjust more mirrors to give it more shade and reduce its temperature. Another area is too cold? Add the appropriate amount of reflected sunlight and warm it right up. Might as well send some extra sunlight to the polar regions and cultivate crops there, too. Surplus light for electricity generation on the side.
Expensive? Yes, but basically within the capabilities of existing technologies. I actually think the largest technical hurdle would be sufficiently accurate weather modeling. We'd essentially need to micromanage the weather all over the world. I don't think the launch capacity would be unsolvable. The early launches would focus on the power generation, and the power would be used to crack sea water for the hydrogen that would be used to boost more mirror satellites into orbit.
Okay, so it would also be potentially dangerous, but I'm hoping that the security problems could be solved, and all technology is morally neutral. Any power to do good is also a power to do harm. (Unfortunately, this is not a balanced relationship. There are some powers that can do nothing but harm... But that's getting off the focus--which can be risky with such large mirrors.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Mirror rain destroying earth. Al Gore should consider reading The Cat In The Hat Comes Back.
Or we could just have a brief and rather blunt conversation with our friends in the coal, oil and beef industries.
Which is what world leaders are tiptoeing around trying to avoid, pretending terrestrial biofuels were an option, pretending carbon sequestration is an option. All of this stuffing around to avoid some uncomfortable conversation about facts that both the politicians, the people and the companies know are true.
Must we be stupider as a species than our individual parts ?
"First, we kill all the lawyers" to
"First we kill all the engineers/scientists"
I suppose stopping deforestation and planting more trees is beyond the top 1 issue.
"In the short term, the BFG hopes to offer an on-demand (i.e. dedicated launch) suborbital service..."
They couldn't have named their company better ! :p
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.
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.
How about taking a SMALL NEO asteroid, carefully put it into L1 (earth-sun) and then slowly grind it into dust (spraying the dust to form a slowly dispersing cloud). If the particles are small enough, an asteroid perhaps 100m cubed could block out perhaps 1% of the sun for a few decades. Not only would it lessen our global warming predicament (temporarily until the cloud disperses through radiation pressure completely, but that's a good thing we don't want a permanent fix!) but it would teach us very valuable lessons on how to move celestial objects around; first for our protection and later for resources.
Needed: a (probably nuclear powered) mass mover/ion drive (a gravity tractor is probably too slow for anything but gentle nudges). Then some sort of grinding machine (celestial snow blower?) which will be powered by said nuclear reactor (the dust cloud will make solar panels ineffectual).
* I really liked the idea of iron fertilization of the ocean "deserts" but I guess it was not proven effective and the possibility of creating huge amounts of jellyfish rather than tuna was not a good thing.
The thing that strikes me as funny is that we are still not mending our ways. Well, just as any bacterial colony, the human race fills the available space and then dies from its own trash. Fitting.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I thought albedo modification was the way forward? It doesn't have to be expensive either:
1. Make sure new/repaired roads get a more reflective/whiter surface.
2. Make sure all new buildings get a reflective/whiter roofing.
3. Retrofit roofs with either paint or new roofing.
That would transform urban areas from heat-traps to energy-bouncers. And cut airconditioning usage too!
Stop the brainwash
I also love the variation of headlines for this story. Slashdot and the BBC report it as "UK Royal Society Claims Geo-engineering Feasible," while the Financial Times reports it as "Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions". The Nature blog has an interesting entry about the variation in headlines.
Deconstruct the State
I think this was one of the options that were rejected because it had too much effect on the environment. It is known that the rate of carbon fixing by small critters like this is usually throttled by a lack of iron. If you dumped iron salts into the open ocean in quite low concentrations, then they bloomed. However, all sorts of other things bloomed too. I seem to remember in a recent small-scale experiment, krill moved in in large numbers, and spoiled things.
Making the oceans bloom is not necessarily a bad thing. We were worried that there were too few krill a year or so ago. However, as the RS correctly notes, this is the sort of uncontrolled side-effect that can easily lead somewhere nasty. Once you have put the iron salts into the oceans, there is no quick way of turning the process off. Compare this with the cloud-seeing experiment where you could have ships pumping fine sprays of sea-water into the skies to increase cloud cover: That should make white clouds which reflect sunlight back into space, and perhaps increase rain levels. If there turns out to be a side-effect, then you turn the jets off, and in a day or so things should be back to normal.
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.
Afforestation? That'd be making new forests then. How about repackage that as "reforestation" -- putting back some of the sh*tload of trees we cut down worldwide for shipbuilding in the Imperial Era and for early industrial firewood?
I.E. Why don't we think in terms of "righting our wrongs" rather than trying to battle against an invisible (and uncertain) enemy?
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Any geoengineering solution that doesn't actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere is a waste of money because it fails to confront the totality of the problem. Though it garners the majority of the media attention, the biggest problem with increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere is not climate change, rather that it leads directly to an increase in the acidity of the worlds oceans.
because as soon we started restrictions on importation of certain types of wood the places where they grow chopped them down to never replant and instead turned the forested areas into farms.
Recently a large tract in my area was clear cut but is already being prepped for its next batch of trees. I fully agree that planting more trees is helpful but don't forget that they are a renewable resource and when managed properly and encouragement is given for their use we actually end up with more trees.
Its the restrictive trade in certain types of wood that have doomed more acres of forest land than anything.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
A target for the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere that makes sense is 350 ppm: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf
This target is getting broader support: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hacayDuUcngLmhNkplHB5VtG5GNw
This is a target which may require effort beyond just eliminating emissions. Building up carbon in soil either through modified methods of agriculture or the use of biochar may be the most cost effective way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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
There is always a rise on CO2 before every Ice Age. Ice cores have proven that. This rise of CO2 is a natural phenomenon and I wonder what the consequences would be if man tried to circumvent that.
But for the love of mankind, let this beast never out of close academic circles, near funding or any political power. ;->
The Venusians surely found out the hard way
If you wanna play with mirrors on a global scale, rather look here:http://www.desertec.org/en/
From the same idiots who legitimized the madness called evolution.
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.
we're dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and NO (recently found to depelete the ozone layer) and SO2 (acid rain), etc.
the question is not whether we should geoengineer, but what we want our geoengineering to consist of
this is in remarked contrast to certain dunderheads who believe the solution is for mankind to have less of an impact... as if over 6 billion technologically advancing humans can have less impact on the planet
we are going to have to proactively manage and counteract the effects we have on the planet, its a nobrainer. our effects will eventually affect weather and climate in such a way that the cost of NOT geoengineering will be higher than the cost of geoengineering
and please: there's no such thing as minimizing our impact. the problem is not the usa or japan or europe. the problem is advancing nations will see it as advanced nations keeping them down
go ahead and live in denial, but geoengineering is inevitable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hey, I have a better argument. How about this?
1. We're fucked and only MAGIC will save us.
2. The problem is being vastly overblown and mere conservation will suffice.
For some reason everyone is saying that it is the first, ergo... we should conjure up MAGIC! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for SOME reason, some guys have so little trust in science that they ignore the overwhelming majority of climate scientists saying we need to cut down on CO2 emissions NOW, yet they have so much trust in science that they think applying unproven technologies in a global scale (with serious chance of fXXXing up the earth irreversibly if anything goes wrong) will save the world's largest problem.
My mind boggles.
I live in New England and as I get older I really don't care if the winters warm a bit. I'm tired of snow. Along those lines do you really think Canada and Russia are going to go along with geo-engineering to make winters longer and colder. I don't think so. I think our best use of resources would be to figure out how to adapt - not wasted on a futile effort to keep things the same. Good advice would be to rent that beach house instead of buying it....
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tax their consumption, and use the $ to geoengineer effective countermeasures?
why do you think some weird individual level guilt trip will be more effective than that?
you don't have much of an understanding of humanity: the kind of extreme sense of social responsibility and conscience you are depending on is actually quite rare, and will always be rare, and is usually quirky and individually-driven, meaning everyone is not practicing the most effective methods, and is doing half-assed methods
"if we can get them that lifestyle using 5 units of consumption, instead of the 10 that we are using, it will have a tremendous impact"
there's a lot of "if" statements like that that depend upon fundamentally altering human nature that has not changed in thousands of years across all human cultures. in other words, what you are asking for humankind to do will never ever get done
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So have Volcanoes on terra firma and under sea and for billions of years at that, so listen up dickwads, you fuck with earth and were gonna have a problem, big problem and you can bet it will lead to war as one a-holes geo engineering project with its unexpected consequences results in disaster for another country etc.
Global Warming is a fucking Hoax, get it through your fucking dickless brains and get back to fucking work!!!!!!!!!!
He kicked the Mega sharks ass so I'm sure a little CO2 will be easy for him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LpjxWF7C6E
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
I don't believe in or disbelieve in this argument. Personally there is way too much FUD on both sides of the issue to make heads or tails of it.
That said, I read this recently http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/74019.html
which suggests that many of the proposed solutions may just be a fad.
"Official government measurements show that the world's temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998."
The article goes on to say that opponents feel that the solutions are crazy and will cause hardships on people - Is this not true?
Maybe we should just continue on with space exploration. I'm sure the colony will be nice this time of year.
and i apologize for reading your words wrong and assuming you were the usual guilt-trip driven environut
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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!"
I suppose stopping deforestation and planting more trees is beyond the top 1 issue.
Remember the three wise monkeys? Well that's the way we are approaching the solution. Most people are so enthralled in advancing blindly into the future and an eye on profit margins, that the future generations be damned. Then there are questionable solutions, which avoid the real issue and in fact worsen the problems, such a biofuels. Turns out road building are also doing more damage than expected:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327236.700-roads-are-ruining-the-rainforests.html
Yes, planting more trees and deforestation are amongst the real solutions, but how do we convince the various governments to act when they are being offered dollar signs to act as monkeys.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I didn't see any mention here of the hilarious acronym that they are using for this technology.
I seem to remember another large projectile-firing device being called a BFG....
I have heard of research that claims the only the first 50ppm of CO2 has any effect on temperature. If CO2 is such a GW culprit, the quantity of CO2 has increased over the last 10 years, HOWEVER, the average temperature of the earth has FALLEN by 0.75 degrees Fahrenheit. More CO2, cooler temperature? For information re climate and its constant changes, look into sunspot activity, cosmic rays, the tilt of the earths axis, the gravitational effects of other planets such as Jupiter and the changes in the earths orbit. THe earth was warmer during the medieval warming and it was cooler during the mini ice age. These and other climate patterns correspond with the sun's activity. THe IPCC is a political organisation therefore full of bullsh*t. Blaming CO2 is just a reason to tax the air we breathe. Regards, Royce R. Vines "You can generate a lot of courage if you don't know the endeavor you are entering." - R. Pfeiffer
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) H.L. Menc
No we haven't. Changes to the world have been unplanned and unsystematic, which is not engineering.
False. We have been "geoengineering" the earth for thousands of years. We have clear cut forests, changed the path of waterways, terraced the sides mountains, etc. Sure, the scale is different given that the climate affects everyone, but given that we have screwed up the environment doing these things through unintended consequences what makes you think we ought to be messing with the climate?
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!"
Uh, no. Not even close. It's like taking a knife away from a child before he moves on to hurting himself or other people after he has destroyed the kitchen table.
A while ago I worked out how much energy it would take to remove 100 ppm of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The area of the earth is ~5.1 x 1014 square meters; air pressure is ~100,000 N/m2. The force would be ~5.1 x 1019 and the mass (force/acceleration of 9.8 m/sec2) is ~5.2 x 1018kg or 5.2 x 1015 t. One ppm would be 5.2 x 109 t and 100 ppm would be ~520 billion tonnes. It takes ~100kWh to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/uoc-cd092908.php Removing 100 ppm of CO2 from the air would take 52000 billion kWh or 52,000 TWh, or since a year is about 8700 hours, about six TW years. A TW is about twice the installed power in the US. It would take a 1000 1GW nuclear reactors 6 years to bring the CO2 level back to the level of 1960 if no new CO2 was being added. The problem is what to do with the CO2? Liquid CO2 has a density of 1.1. As liquid, this much CO2 would occupy ~470 cubic km. It would cause a real problem downwind if it blew out of storage. We know that oil stayed in the ground for millions of years. It takes ~50 times as much energy to convert CO2 to synthetic oil as it does to capture it. So to convert 100 ppm of CO2 to synthetic oil would take ~300 TW-years. If we are already feeding 15 TW into making synthetic oil, we could dedicate another 15 TW into making more and pumping it back into empty oil fields. It would take two decades at this rate to bring the current CO2 level back to that of 1960. We might be able to take the CO2 level down far enough to get the earth to go into an ice age (for those who like to ski). For the details on the energy cost of making synthetic oil see www.htyp.org/dtc
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain