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UN May Ban Blotting Out the Sun
Supervillains and Mr. Burns are among those to be most affected by the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity decision on space sunshades. Even though organizations like NASA have been looking into them as a possible way to slow climate change, the UN is expected to limit research into the technology or ban it outright. From the article: "The Convention may consider banning or limiting research into space sunshades. Some question their wisdom. A space sunshade would have a rapid effect on global warming and provide time to develop more permanent measures, they say. The technique has already received serious attention from NASA and other organizations. But others, such as the ETC group, an environmental and social advocacy group, fear simply blocking the sun is a bandage, meant to cover up the problem, and allow humans to continue using fossils fuels. Another fear is that geo-engineering, as techniques like this are called, could have unforeseen consequences on the weather, ecosystem and agriculture."
Maybe they just don't want any competition with their frikin' sharks...
Living With a Nerd
UN bans shadows!
Even if the sun isn't shining on your side of the planet, its still shining on the planet. If you block it all together, I think it would have unforeseen consequences. Like a sudden chill.
... but when has any UN resolution stopped Montgomery Burns?
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
we already blocked out the sun 500 years ago to try and kill the machines, but they won anyways and we're all just blue pills lying in our pods
But as the sun ages and gets bigger and hotter it might be a good idea to put up a sun shade while we can. I'm sure there's some "extra time" we could buy in the future if we're still around with a sun screen.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
That when you try to fix one problem, you almost always invent a new one? Prime example, using cats to get rid of mice....but than theres to many cats right? well lets roll in the dogs.. what? now too many dogs? ok lets bring in........ Some things are just better left alone
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
UN ban Eclipse, Oracle rejoice
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I don't want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the shade of a Satellite
I don't want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of sunshine like the mayor say
I don't want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the moon from Google Earth
I don't ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That NASA has taken away I'm done
> meant to cover up the problem, and allow humans to continue using fossils fuels.
So what's the problem? Presumably our goal is to address the problem, not to address the problem *in some "blessed" way*.
We should keep all options on the table and pick the one with the best cost/benefit ratio.
And I'm sure Mr Burns is still angry about this.
Gigantic shades in the sky, with patterns of light coming through them. Just think of the sponsorship opportunities! Every time you look at the Sun, you could see an Apple or Coca Cola logo.
Clearly, they aren't thinking this through. The monetization could be extraordinary!
Reflective rooftops have some conceptual similarities, but are somewhat less drastic.
Sorry you can't limit or ban research when there can be only one with the knowledge.
But others, such as the ETC group, an environmental and social advocacy group, fear simply blocking the sun is a bandage, meant to cover up the problem, and allow humans to continue using fossils fuels. Another fear is that geo-engineering, as techniques like this are called, could have unforeseen consequences on the weather, ecosystem and agriculture.
Wow, so let's block research to prevent knowledge. Because information is evil. And we don't agree with this line of thinking, so let's ban it. Hypocrites.
But others, such as the ETC group, an environmental and social advocacy group, fear simply blocking the sun is a bandage, meant to cover up the problem, and allow humans to continue using fossils fuels.
I think this should lay to rest any doubts as to the motives of some of our friends in the Green community. Their primary concern is to cause humans to stop using fossil fuels. The actual need to do so isn't strictly relevant. They'd rather there not be any conflict of interests, so rather than mitigating the issue in any other way, they'll continue to press their agenda.
This should be seen as problematic. If for no other reason than it illustrates that the actual problem (dead humans) is secondary to their agenda.
Food for thought.
Does any Nation actually listen to the UN?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
just add excessive heat, or cold, that'll do it. everything goes around & around?
the corepirate nazi freemason holycost (life, liberty etc...) is increasing by the minute. you call this 'weather'?
continue to add immeasurable amounts of MISinformation, rhetoric & fluff, & there you have IT? that's US? thou shalt not... oh forget it. fake weather (censored?), fake money, fake god(s), what's next? fake ?aliens? ahhaha. seeing as we (have been told that) came from monkeys, the only possible clue we would have to anything being out of order, we would get from the weather. that, & all the other monkeys tipping over/exploding around US.
the search continues; on any search engine
weather+manipulation
bush+cheney+wolfowitz+rumsfeld+wmd+oil+freemason+blair+obama+weather+authors
meanwhile (as it may take a while longer to finish wrecking this place); the corepirate nazi illuminati (remember, (we have been told) we came from monkeys, & 'they' believe they DIDN'T), continues to demand that we learn to live on less/nothing while they continue to consume/waste/destroy immeasurable amounts of stuff/life, & feast on nubile virgins while worshipping themselves (& evile in general (baal to be exact)). they're always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere/planet (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is exp
What about blanketing large tracts of land in solar-cells? Is that still okay?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
This convention is just a pretense to declare fatties war criminals and mandate treadmills.
So, they think banning this is going to stop my nefaruius plans! Hah! My evil empire sneers at your pitiful laws! Soon we shall be asking for **one million dollars** to remove our space umbrella (with the baby chicks imprented on it), which we shall use to fund our evil empire! Bwaaa-haaa-haaa!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The UN should only have one policy on space: getting humans off planet Earth.
The only thing (most) humans can agree on is that humans should outlive their home planet.
I hope the US/NASA reaction to any possible UN resolution on this subject is the typical "it's nice that you think so".
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Aside from the fact that a working sunshade is likely decades, if not centuries, in the future and therefore may occur past the lifetime of the UN, aren't there other applications for a planetary sunshade such as blocking solar storms? I'm referring to ACC and Stephen Baxter's Sunstorm
We're ridiculously far from a technological level where we can do this. Also, it'd require huge amounts of energy to get it up there in the first place...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Where are they going to make billions from letting their well-connected friends sell carbon offsets if we just build a giant shade?
if a sunshade were installed installed then global warming could not be used as a tool to control people and governments. I hate to bring up tinfoil hat topics, but sometimes I wonder if the UN has some dishonest ambitions when it comes to the topic of global warming. a centralized system of carbon credits and regulation to limit carbon footprints including mechanisms to enable inspection by some central authority seems like crazy conspiracy stuff, but it also seems plausible to me.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There is a way out, but you're not ready. When you are, we'll come and get you.
I will warn you though, it's not going to be comfortable. Your body has never developed many real muscles, so you won't be able to walk or talk. Even once you are, the reality here is not anywhere near as pretty as the simulation that you are currently in. You may believe decisions are life and death there, but they simply restart you in the simulator. Out here, there is no second chance.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It's the only way to get the votes needed to stop this. We can raise sea levels and recover the Unity core while we're at it!
The whole fossil-fuel anthropogenic-warming movement allows developed nations to generate artificial demand for techniques and IP held primarily in developed nations. Undeveloped nations that are industrializing now don't get to drink from the same accelerative well of no-concern-for-externalities industrialization that the world's developed nations did, still having to funnel money (read: power, resources) to developed nations in order to keep trade open.
Undeveloped nations that choose to disregard UN formulated rules on carbon emissions may find themselves free-trade pariahs, left out of the global economy. Only nations already in positions of power, like China, could play outside of the intellectual-property-tax-for-mandatory-technologies treaty minefield if things go the UN's way.
Sure I'm aware that it would be hard to enact carbon-production limiting rules on a non-global scale, but the effects on international markets shouldn't be disregarded as likely (and obvious) motivations for policy decisions. Add in the pleasant regulatory generation of artificial demand to continue pulling on the leash of the economies of now-faltering western nations, and it's a win-win all around.
Poor people in poor countries stay relatively poor, and middle-class people in rich countries stay relatively poor.
Of course, I believe that anthropogenic CO2 has a warming effect. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Just as you'd have to be an idiot to take the wildly speculative high-end-of-the-margin-of-error conclusions of UN funded climate researchers at face value, or think that the planet's climate has been balancing on the head of a pin instead of sitting in a self-correcting trough. That the UN pushes so hard for their solution and so hard against honest research into techniques that would give us such fine-grained control over our climate reveals a great deal about their probable motivations.
In short, these guys* are crooks.
(These guys*: United States, France, the UK, and other developed UN member nations)
I remembre having done some math on this idea a wile ago and it turned out you had to send something the size of Egypt (that's 1.000.000 -one million- km) in space to hope reduce the average global temperature of 1C.
My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Anyone who thinks sunshades are a good idea is a complete idiot. Lets think about this for 2 seconds. What do we currently think causes global warming? CO2. Ok, so how do we think the levels of CO2 are regulated? Well on the production side there is any form of combustion or aerobic respiration. And on the other side? Carbon fixation by plants, the rate of which is determined, yes, you got it, but the amount of SUNLIGHT they get.
Sure this might work if they blocked out some of the infrared that planets etc. dont use, but for some reason I doubt they've thought of that. Furthermore, we have no fucking idea what the impact of these things would be, forget the complete waist of brainpower that might be used to put them up there.
Now the meddling do-gooders want to do to the environment what they've done to the economy. Enough with the grand schemes to control complex systems you don't understand, assholes.
"we are blue pills" ??
You didn't watch the movie, did you?
DID YOU?
As long as they don't ban blowing up the sun, I'm OK with this.
Somewhat we take measures to stop a problem that make even more damage than the original problem, like with the cane toads in australia. Could have been predicted, or calculated with what was known in that time? Maybe not, or maybe yes, but the original concerns dismissed as something improbable (or that winter will kill the gorillas anyway). Playing with no fully understood things in global scale makes an "oops, didnt know that it could happen" pretty dangerous.
But i suppose that when (if) we undertand fully how climate and ecosystems works we can start to control the first without harming the second in a global scale.
Somewhat it remembers me all the sci-fi movies and books where traveling to the past is strictly forbidden for the possible consequences, or the consequences that happen where is not forbidden.
There are a number of things that could be done here on Earth. Paint the roofs white and use lighter colored pavement. Reflect the energy back into space, reduce air conditioning costs. Come up with a method of reliably re-planting the vast stretches of land with trees (I'm not talking about mere acres here, but rather hundreds or thousands of square miles). Pick (or genetically engineer) trees with lighter colored leaves so that they too would reflect more energy. Make coal fired power plants more expensive to run (this is being done already). Etc, etc.
As far as space shades, as long as they can be removed reasonably easily, I have no problem with them. I hope they don't ban them outright. The "fossil fuels" problem will fix itself in a hundred years or so, since there won't be any deposits of inexpensive fossil fuels left. Hopefully, physicists will also figure out the ways to sustain nuclear fusion by then as well (though in this case, we'll still have to figure out a way to get rid of the excess thermal energy—it will be produced in copious quantities).
I've had it up to here with these damn rickets.
Ummmmm....
Wat?
No, it's about blocking our connection to GOD (sol invictus, to you dimbulbs out there...) This has NWO repotid thalamus-level thinking written all over it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...only outlaws will blot out the sun.
hasn't anyone seen highlander 2? if we have a giant sunshade, it's just 1 step closer to an evil plan to project that horrible movie onto it 24 hours a day and drive the world mad!
Isn't the sun going to get hotter and hotter as it approaches the transition to Red Giant?
I read that long before the sun consumes http://www.universetoday.com/12648/will-earth-survive-when-the-sun-becomes-a-red-giant/ us, all the oceans in the world will boil off. http://startswithabang.com/?p=1536 (Doesn't sound healthy)
Seems that for such drastic times, a sun shade in the sky may be just the ticket!
Blocking out the sun in any significant ways seems kind of... difficult. Do we have the knowledge and resources to even build one and maneuver it? Is this any more useful than banning time travel?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I find myself in the unusual and uncomfortable position of agreeing with the UN.
If there is one thing we've proven over and over throughout the decades, our climate scientists have an INCOMPLETE understanding of global climate change issues. Through the course of my lifetime I've heard new ice age coming, acid rain will dissolve our cities, farm animal flatulence is going to doom the planet, ozone layer, global warming, blah blah blah.
No matter what you think about global warming (which we're now supposed to call global climate change because we've now learned it's not actually about warming...sigh), everyone should be able to admit that we don't know all there is to know about the VERY complex global environment. So maybe...just maybe we shouldnt' be deliberately tinkering with things we actually hope will change it. Oh yeah, let's fuck with the environment deliberately, hoping we have some god damned clue what we're doing. great plan..what could go wrong?
Maybe we should just try to be responsible about our industrialized society? can we at least TRY that first???
I'm still waiting for a USB CO2 sequesterisation device to appear on slashdot 2.5 watts to suck carbon out of the air and put it in a little tray underneath. of course it would only help if millions were sold and the computers they're connected to run off wind turbines
Demand for oil and natural gas is still increasing faster than production, so even if you ignore the CO2 problem there is still the question of where we'll get our energy from. Unless you want to expand coal mining significantly, we have to switch to non-fossil fuel anyway.
What if we put the shades into a geo stationary orbit hovering only over the deepest parts of the ocean.
As somebody else pointed out, that's not how GEOstationary orbits work. They are stationary with respect to the Earth, not the Sun moving across the sky. Rather, the notion is to place sunshades in orbits around the Earth-Sun L1 point (Lagrange worked out these specific solutions to the three-body problem) where the teeter-totter gravity of each body balances out. Google "Roger Angel".
Also, the atmosphere is well mixed, such that cooling the air over one place cools it everywhere. You might be able to enhance cooling in latitude bands relative to the six Hadley cells (3 north, 3 south). This could be handy for tweaking the North Atlantic Drift that keeps Europe happy and habitable. Of course, global warming is expected to affect the Hadley circulation itself, but as long as the equator remains warmer than the poles, the air that goes up must come down generating an odd number of cells. An interesting notion whether we could tweak the shading asymmetrically to result in differing numbers of cells north and south.
Whether we should pursue such a project is doubtful, but it would be good to work out the details before we find that we must pursue such a project.
http://matrix.wikia.com/wiki/Bluepill
Paint the roofs white and use lighter colored pavement. .
I'm not sure about the effect on the environment, but light colored roofing makes a big difference on how hot your damn house is. I've never understood how here in the US we decided the standard is to cover our houses with broad expanses of BLACK shingles...and then we crank up the air conditioner to offset it. Am I missing some key point of heating/cooling physics?
Now all they have to do is ban blowing up the moon, ban the construction of death stars, and ban initiating an inverse tachyon pulse at the same coordinates in space in three time periods.
The Earth is a BIG thing..to blot out the sun from any reasonably sized area of land would require a massive 'umbrella' in space. The materials for that are simply staggering..
This kind of research sounds like the 'pointless' or 'way too difficult' kind. Banning it is pointless because I don't think anyone will ever achieve it.
Very good point! Anyone who is smart would start investing in small startup companies that are working on alternative sources of energy now while the stock for said companies is cheap.
What would happen if they figured out a way to release particles of some kind to create a non-solid barrier? A cloud for example is not solid but it can hide the sun.
What about blanketing large tracts of land in solar-cells? Is that still okay?
That ought to heat things up a whole bunch. (Ditto solar heat concentrators, such as the solar power plants using parabolic-cylinder reflectors to make process steam for generation.)
Solar panels are a pretty good black color and reflect very little light. Maybe a fifth of it is turned into electric power (to make heat elsewhere when it's used). The rest makes heat locally. Both become infrared radiation which is largely blocked by greenhouse gasses - unlike the unchanged sunlight that would have been reflected by whatever was covered by the panels. (Similarly with the power and waste heat from concentrators powering heat engines.)
So solar panels erected over anything that is lighter than a similar black (i.e. over anything but, say, shale or an exposed coal seam) increase global warming. Horrors!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So I may not use sunblock at the beach any more?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How does Cloud Seeding compare with blocking out the sun? Cloud seeding contributes to Global Dimming, and has been considered as a possible way to fight Global Warming. But is cloud seeing similar enough to the Simpsons-style large sun shade to block out the sun?
There are people who oppose geoengineering, some of them have good arguments, some of them are worthless pieces of garbage that need to die before they spread their diseases any further.
People with good arguments say things like "we need to think about this a lot more", "a environmental benefit for one nation state may be an act of war for another" and "please, please, for the love of all that's good in the world, don't try anything that's irreversible". You can deal with people like that, study the issues together, strike bargains - and the part about no irreversible large scale prototyping just plain makes sense.
People who need to be removed from serious conversation with a hazmat suit and a chainsaw say things like "it's unnatural", "we need to leave this to God" or, my favourite, "you shouldn't goeengineer because it might work and that would prevent the collapse of western consumer capitalism". That's the people who think we deserve to suffer for knowing too much, asking too many questions or having too much stuff. They think there's something inherently wrong about wealth and technological progress, something that removes us from nature, destroys out humanity or makes us impure. They cannot be reasoned with as the source of these views is usually their own sexual maladjustment. Working with people like that is always about minimizing the damage they cause. I suggest using dynamite - rectally.
(I've been watching a lot of George Carlin lately, in case you were wondering.)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Well crap...there goes my afternoon.
This is not about changing global warming - it is about sacrifice to show your worship of planet earth!
Blocking the sun for 1000 years because you don't want to turn the heat down? Get real.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I have long thought that such a device like a "space shade" could be a useful non-lethal weapon.
Some country not cooperating with you? Plunge them into darkness. Crops wither. Threat of famine.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
You know, when the choice is to bandage a wound or leave it to fester in the open, a bandage is probably the way to go.
Instead of doing common-sense, easy, and reasonable things to stop global warming like moving away from fossil fuels...we will create a giant solar shade which will cost taxpayers BILLIONS! Smithers, get R&D on the horn. I need to build a some expensive sunglasses.
Kent Brockman: Uh, Mr. Burns, people are calling this a meltdown.
Mr. Burns: Oh, meltdown. It's one of these annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
ETC's justification is that any real-world research would either be A) on such a large scale that it would be the same as the "real thing," or B) too small to reveal potential downsides.
No worries. *My* supervillain plan is to snuff out the Sun itself.
Still not seeing enough sunspots, astronomers? Heh heh heh...
No, you're not, it's a bad idea all around. The worst part is, a lot of Home Owner's Associations (*spit*) actually won't let you install roofs that aren't black shingles. Now there are some cases where say your highly reflective roof is reflecting late afternoon sunlight right into your neighbor's windows which could be a legitimate issue, but many of them have banned them (or anything else odd, like mostly-blackish solar panels) for aesthetic reasons.
However there's a pretty easy way to mostly fix this issue without getting rid of your existing roof (or pissing off the HOA if you're unlucky enough to have one; thankfully I'm not): Radiant barriers. Installed on the underside of the roof, it still serves the same function and prevents the energy absorbed from the sun from being radiated into your attic. So your shingles will end up a little hotter, but your cooling bill goes way down.
The enemies of Democracy are
Did you catch that?
In other words, even though this would provide a fix to the problem, we don't think it's a good idea because it conflicts with our ideology (that fossil-fuel burning is wrong). This is a classic example of why the Left is out of step with the country.
What's the problem here? Is it global warming (or climate change in general) or is it over-consumption, convenience, and basically living the luxurious life of an American. If the problem is the unpleasant effects of climate change, then lets fix that. But many on the left want to enact more broad social change/social justice/social whatever... When Tea Partiers (and others) complain vaguely about "hidden agendas", this is what they're referring to.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
What about blanketing large tracts of land in solar-cells? Is that still okay?
Well... there is a critical shortage of raw materials. You see, we are not just reaching peak oil, but peak everything.
Mind you, I am not a pessimist about the energy situation. There is a lot of investment in finding alternatives, and this type of thing looks really good (energy producing roads), not least because the engineers are thinking about the materials to build the roads with.
However, one sad fact remains. Exponential growth cannot continue forever -- at some point something will break. It is just a question of what or when.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I've tested out this "block the sun" thing at home. All of my plants grow so much better in the shade. I wonder what the impact on food chain might be?
As if it were possible in the first place! Bahahahaaaaa!!!!!
Yes, everything has a downside, everything has a cost. Doing something, implementing a new solution will have a cost just as doing nothing does. That doesn't mean we should go full out Luddite and refuse to do anything because there might be consequences. You just have to figure out what the costs are how to mitigate them and be willing to deal with them.
In the case of your false example your bring in the cats, but your spay/neuter them. Also, you care for them lovingly and keep them as pets. There is still cost to having all the cats, but it is one easy to pay and easy to control in terms of numbers.
Everything has cost, a downside.. Action on inaction, you pay some price. It is all a matter of weighing benefits vs cost.
1) And orbital sun blocking system is totally reversible, unlike some of the more idiotic suggestions like pumping chemicals into the atmosphere and crossing your fingers while hoping there are no side effects.
2) The fossil fuel thing is a self-solving problem. Believe me, in 40 years or so, it's contribution to global anything will be insignificant, since there won't be enough affordable, positive EROEI liquid or solid hydrocarbons being used as an energy source to matter. We may still be using natural gas, and while it does cause some pollution, it's quite a bit less than either coal or oil.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Once you take the right to blot out the sun from the citizens, the only ones who will block the sun are the criminals...
messenger: "our shades will blot out the sun" ... wait"
spartan: "then we will fight in the shade
For example, if some country with the technology wanted to extort another that didn't have the technology for this, they would probably be able to selectively blot out the sun for the victim cout
Other than this, I don't see any reasonable objection.
I think I can safely speak for the vast majority of Slashdotters when I say that ' blanketing large tracts of land' is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing. Unless we're also under that blanket. If you see what I mean.
I've been reading lots of stupefyingly idiotic stories recently, including this one (mountains will collapse and cities will be destroyed due to Global Warming).
It is now my firm opinion that the whole world has gone stark raving mad, and that the Scientific establishment has been so hopelessly corrupted by special interests, Government institutional and research funding and the new philosophy of post-normality, that it has regressed to a kind-of pre-enlightenment age.
It is my firm belief that the UN, a body that has a Human right commission chaired by Libya, should not be given any power over anything whatsoever.
The UN has no authority to ban anything.
The signatories to the Convention may decide to limit research in their own countries. More likely, they'll say they will and then do nothing.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Instead of messing around with a simple shield, let's convert the solar system into a ringworld. With a little work, I'm sure scrith wouldn't be much of a problem. Especially if the Pac were willing to help. Simple adjustments to the shields would handle any GW problems.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The UN hasn't been able to stop the logging of the rainforests, nations aquiring nukes, or the persecution of minorites (like the Baha'is of Iran, the Palestinians in Israel and the Buddhists in Tibet) so how are they going to stop someone blotting out the sun. I wonder how they will prevent the next solar eclipse.
Anyway how do they plan to prevent global warming if they ban such things that could help?
Say like when a rat population is carrying plague. Then the cats might be kinda useful.
What has happened here is that the organization has confused it's goals and long term plans with being "right". The reason CO2 building up in the atmosphere is a problem is mainly due to the heating effects. But the climate change folks in the UN have had long term plans to force everyone to cut their carbon emissions for decades to solve this problem. These folks now see the CO2 emission itself as evil, not the effects of it.
Another example : what if a drug chemist created a recreational drug that was perfectly safe, almost impossible to overdose on, and the effects could be reversed with a simple injection of an antidote. The DEA/Congress would still
make the drug illegal and throw in prison everyone involved in supplying it. They would hire scientists to "research" the drug who would "discover" that it was in fact incredibly dangerous and that taking it was putting your life into your own hands. Again, the organization confuses it's purpose (protect people from the harm of dangerous drugs) with it's implementation (throw anyone in prison caught with any substance declared to be illegal)
A final example : those electronic cigarettes. There is talk of making them illegal, not because they cause harm, but because the government's advisors sees smoking/nicotine addiction itself as being evil. The electronic cigarettes are many, many times safer than the burning paper ones, yet the government wants to ban them because the devices are not intended to help a user quit their addiction.
The reason for getting people to quit smoking was original because cigarettes are dangerous, but now the goal has been perverted into being an end in itself.
Banning the use of such devices I can see... until we more fully understand them, and the potential un-intended impacts.
But to ban RESEARCH on such subjects??? The whole idea of research would be to understand these issues in the first place. Since when is better knowledge of something undesirable (in a "free" state, at least)?
Maybe it's an issue with the summary, and I should have RTFA... but I'm stunned that a global body would be so naieve and ignorant.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
You know, I think the combination of science and politics is a lot like the combination of rock music and religion. It makes both worse.
"OUR SCIENTISTS WILL BLOT OUT THE SUN!!!"
"Then our factories shall spew in the shade."
(stupid yell filter.)
The UN has no authority to ban anything, nor do they have the legal authority to pass any type of legislation, of any kind(which such a ban would be). I mean, I do not want any country to threaten my suntan and my mari...my cultivation activities, but the UN has no authority to do any of this.
If the UN actually had any type of legislation(law-making) authority, then it's first focus would be to remove all citizen's access to firearms, then to freedom in general.
I watched an interesting TED presentation a while ago about geo-engineering. The presenter pointed out that we should develop international agreements around geo-engineering to prevent one country from unilaterally deploying a solution that may benefit them but be to the detriment of the rest of the world. Not that it would stop anybody from going ahead and doing it anyways...
The UN can talk about banning it, but once they get the message that all their coastal cities and resource squares will be inundated within 20 years, they're usually pragmatic (except for wackjobs like Santiago or Miriam). I've found that there's virtually no downside, anyway. Don't worry about the UN saying they won't do it. When push comes to shove, you can often bribe enough holdouts with a few techs or credits, to get the majority that you need.
UN stupidity surprises you? What, you think they are all geniuses because they are in "charge" some how? Uggg...
Nations do, sometimes, listen to the UN. This happens mostly when the UN is doing something well that doesn't impinge too badly on the nation's interests. We might let them make decisions about who owns nonstrategic islands, for example, or how certain international conventions should be interpreted. It also happens when the UN arranges peacekeeping forces and the nation cares about upsetting the countries supplying those forces. It also happens when the UN works to provide aid, or to expose atrocities. International Law is a part of the Law of the United States, at least nominally, and the UN has at least some say on what international law is.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
It's not just carbon fixation in plants thats determined by how much sunlight they get. That's more a secondary effect and not really the big problem.
It's also how much they grow (while fixing CO2) and therefore in the case of crops how much food they produce. Shading the earth from the sun might well reduce the amount of heat reaching the earth but it would also impact the amount of sunlight available for photosynthisis and food production. Given that one of the major issues around global warming that we need to resolve is the impact on our food supply it's probably not the the ideal outcome. This is (I think) reasonably straightforward and a fairly major handicap for any kind of solar shade.
It probably is a good idea to try to stop any one nation unilaterally blocking out the sun. Banning research into it (like how to only block certain wavelengths) does seem a bit stupid though.
we have to listen to the U.N why?
Michael Kristopiet's wife sucks big donkey dicks.
Michael Kristopiet's sex life = stagnated.
By all means, ban it now before we even have the ability to model solar shades accurately, and have no idea whether materials technology will make them economically viable in time to do anything. We need to preempt actual science from weighing in on our decision making. Sometimes the UN goes and does something that makes me wonder why we don't just use a paperclip to jam the "veto" button down and withdraw our diplomats.
we just need to live in a controlled greenhouse
present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i will kill you.
this site is overrun by ignorant hypocrites who couldn't engineer working systems if their lives depended on it.
slashdot = stagnated
Since pollution in the atmosphere is enough to change climate. In fact the lowering of particulate matter in the the air over Europe, is considered to be one of the factors why it's been hit (maybe more so?) with "Global[sic] warming problems... The effect of cleaner air was also observed in the US, but to a lesser extent, I believe.
However, in places like China, particulate matter is 'up' and likely to increase further since they didn't (or haven't) implemented the same controls as was done in the US and Europe and aren't likely to jump on board as quickly due to the increased cost and their desire to catchup and exceed in the short-term.
If a country's particulate matter really affected global temps that much though, we might expect to see further global cooling as China and India (basically with many people, all increasing use of higher-particulate matter-generating products and technologies) expand their industrial base and continue to bring the whole population up to the levels of the US and Europe.
Particulate matter can affect global temps (Krakatoa -- a few degrees cooler, globally for 3-4 years following), so it may depend on size of the particles among other factors.
Who knows, if China and India increase the output of the same pollutions that Europe and the US decreased in, with their significantly higher population, they may have a much larger cooling effect in the short term and CO2's potential, in the short term.
The faster the most modern nations can move to renewable energy sources, and the cheaper we can make such energy, the more easy it will be to get less rich nations to use such energy -- in fact, ideally, if renewable energy can be made such that it is cheaper than non-renewables, the problem will solve itself. While that will almost be guaranteed to happen in the long term, it may not be soon enough for climate effects to outweigh cost factors in energy selection and is certainly not soon enough for *prudent* management of the planets limited reserves. What took thousands of times as long to create as human civilization has been in existence, is being spent in a time period that is a small fraction of the time humans have been around and might be able to 'be around'.
Those resources have other user than just for 'fuel', and almost certainly more uses over the future of human civilization, than we've discovered so far. If we consume all of them now, just as 'fuel', it would be disastrous planning for the human race.
no you won't.
only a coward would make such a claim, as i only state facts.
present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i will kill you.
No, you won't.
only a coward would make such a claim, as i only state facts.
present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i will kill you.
No, you don't.
why do you cower? what are you afraid of?
Kinda like the temporary issue caused by the utilization of technologies that did not exist - the hole in the ozone layer. Who cares if it's temporary - if the Human race dies tomorrow does a roach really matter that much - if it doesn't is anyone going to advocate taking the "bandaid" off other than some stoned treehugging fudgepacker?
At the rate we're clearing ancient forests we're going to need nuclear powered carbon scrubber machines to reverse the effects.
How are plants going to displace the amount of carbon we've pumped out of the ground, the trend would need to be more large permanent biomass, but the trend is decidedly the opposite.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Yeah, but if we re-enact the exact same scenario inside the matrix that caused the matrix in the real world, the matrix will have to emulate itself. As that's physically impossible, it'll eventually crash and free humanity.
Even if they can optimize out enough stuff to pull off the emulation, that scenario is likely to start an infinite-depth recursion, leading to an inevitable crash anyway.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
The ban on research may be based on the idea that knowledge of the technology may be rather dangerous in bad hands. It is also very likely inspired by the misguided belief that such a ban will stop evildoers from doing the research - of course everyone listens to the UN.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Surprise Twist Ending: Actually, we are the machines.
If this goes through, then I vow to initiate research into the subject myself.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
There should be a Matrix comment here somewhere...
last time i checked, the very existence of humans have had a large effect on everything mentioned in the summary. I am surprised the mentioned group is not advocating issuing cyanide pills or something...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm