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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 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 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
Global warming is a scam.
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
That site is loaded with pseudo-scientific data & outright lies. A few examples:
There is a difference between the FACTS of GW, and the solutions proposed. The only thing that I agree with that site you mentioned, is that some of the policies & the utilization for political ends of GW are questionable.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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 believe what you want.
No, I believe the facts. My personal desires are irrelevant.
You don't need to be a scientist to realize which side is correct.
Yes, you do. AFAIK, climatology is a science.
The nasa article in the link speaks for itself.
Which essentially means you didn't even bother to verify it by going to the NASA site I mentioned. Looks like it is YOU who believe what YOU want.
I don't care who John Coleman is what he says makes sense.
He doesn't make sense. Weather is distinct from climate. He is not qualified .
The court case involving the gw swindle ended in a decision that the content was essentially true.
Ofcom, the UK media regulator has ruled that The Great Global Warming Swindle was unfair to the IPCC, David King, and Carl Wunsch and breached a requirement of impartiality about global warming policy.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/ofcom_rules_that_the_great_glo.php
Excess CO2 has nothing to do with global warming in fact rising CO2 is an effect of increased global temps not a cause. The US senate means nothing. The hundreds of scientists that disagree with the climate change fraud do. Think for yourself for a minute. CO2 is what we exhale and what plants inhale. A good case can be made for the good caused by a warming planet. The facts indicate that there has not been any warming. Studies have shown that incorrect measurements taken in hot heat island city environments can account for the change.
You're repeating the same old already disproved fallacies over. Go to the NASA site I mentioned earlier & try your best at looking at the facts.
Natural variation makes a lot more sense than the idiocy of the global warming "proof".
Natural variation has been disproved by NASA.
Go on and believe the few "experts" ignore the others and follow what Al Gore says.
I believe the facts, and that independently of what Al Gore might think. BTW, the "few experts " are the majority. That includes NASA who has the largest concentration of climate scientists, the academies of sciences of 27 countries, and all the major scientific institutions like National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, National Center for Atmospheric Research, American Meteorological Society, US Geological Survey etc...
Increased ocean temperatures == releases of methane hydrate == more atmospheric methane == increased ocean temperatures.
Who knows, maybe this is the reason for the Fermi paradox. Civilized race starts burning sequestered hydrocarbons and ends up broiling themselves when they accidentally turn their planet into something like Venus.
Look, I don't want to get into an argument about whether anthropogenic global warming is 'really happening' or not, but your comments show little understanding of... maths.
CO2 does not, and never has, been a significant greenhouse gas. but suddenly it's responsible for our planets temp???!
It's not 'responsible for our planets temp???!'(sic). It's a contributing factor. Unless you thing CO2 isn't in any way a greenhouse gas you must admit that the increase from ~315 to ~385 ppm since 1960 will result in some increased heat retention which will be compounded every year until a new, higher, equilibrium is reached. CO2 concentration is only one factor in a complex equation which, yes, features insolation and water vapour prominently. Claiming that changing the CO2 concentration should have no effect on the climate only shows that you don't understand the mathematics of a basic climate model.
</rant>
.evom ton seod gis eht
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.
News bulletin: We've already fucked with it. (Without understanding).
...'.
Yes, just another instance of the onion-type repair model. Once a problem has become obvious, create another layer to fix the problem. Reminds me of a code-comment like 'hack to circumvent the bug created by the fix
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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...