Slashdot Mirror
Will Climate Engineering Ever Go Prime Time?
coondoggie writes "You may or may not be old enough to remember the TV commercial for margarine that had the tag line: 'It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.' But that commercial came to mind as I was reading a report out recently that looked at the viability of large climate engineering projects that would basically alter large parts of the atmosphere to reduce greenhouse gases or basically reverse some of the effects of climate change. The congressional watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office took a look at the current state of climate engineering science and technology (PDF), which generally aims at either carbon dioxide removal or solar radiation management."
We need to GET OFF THIS ROCK. Stop wasting money on climate projects and get a plan together to colonize other planets. Wait, if we're going to colonize other planets, we will need to be able to change the climate on those planets to be liveable. Dammit. I hate it when my logic goes all circular.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I really hope I'm a long way from Earth before some idiot decides to try one of these things. Otherwise I'll be getting out the skis because we'll be heading for a new ice age.
Though I did like the proposal in the 60s to use Apollo lunar modules to carry big mirrors into orbit which would reflect sunlight into the Vietnamese jungles at night. Abosolutely insane, but good fun.
Sure, illegal interception of the intergalactic parcel post is a nice entry to the rest of the universe!
Wait till the Zargons come around looking for their bundle of palladium and naquadah, and we've not even made parole since last time (whatever it was we did to the sphinx or something).
blog.sam.liddicott.com
What could possibly go wrong?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Once we start changing the climate in anyway, no matter how slightly, there will be a lawsuit for every snowstorm injury, rainstorm injury, wind storm injury, cold injury, heat injury,...and the suits will be agianst the researchers, the organizations, the universities, and anyone else connected with this Really Bad Idea.
We are already doing several forms of environmental engineering
1) sulpher release - who knew it caused acid rain .....
2) CFC release - Ozone, whats that, and who needs it anyways
3) flooded land for resoivoirs leads to mercury release from rocks that contaminates fish - nah couldn't happen.
4) urban heat islands
5) plane contrails - planes make clouds, again who could make that connection
6) CO2 release from long term geological storage - well it's good for the plants
whats a few more.
The proud mother of god like all ho's
Is jealous of her own shadow
Maybe they should look for a way to diminsh the strength and impact of hurricanes and typhoons.
Invenio via vel creo
We could use the remaining half of Oil reserves to do this for instance.
Je me souviens.
The problem with removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is that those gases (CO2, H2O) are given off as end products in energy production because they are at a low energy potential. To split up or convert CO2 and H2O into other molecules involves putting energy back into them, which defeats the reason why they were created in the first place - to release energy.
In other words, aside from sequestering (burying CO2 deep underground where hopefully it'll never get out again), due to efficiency losses, you are better off coming up with new cleaner methods of energy generation. Any system you develop which can disassociate atmospheric CO2 and H2O will be less effective than simply using that system to generate energy. e.g. Running CO2 scrubbers powered by natural gas would generate more CO2 than it scrubbed. Running a wind/solar-powered CO2 scrubber would remove less CO2 than if you just hooked the wind/solar-powered mechanism up to the grid and used its electricity to offset electrical generation from coal plants. The only technology we have right now which could potentially satisfy both our current energy demands and provide excess power to disassociate greenhouse gases is nuclear.
Because people who bought into the BS about how mankind is somehow responsible for the weather are now realizing that it's nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a handful of scientists shilling for research grants, governments desperate for new ways to tax peopole, and a washed-up politician who refuses to debate the issue with anyone who dares to disagree.
Unscientific hype about the flooding risks from climate change will cost us all dear
The warmists have sound financial grounds for hyping the dangers of flooding posed by climate change, writes Christopher Booker
On Friday came the fullest and most expert dissection of the Nature paper so far, published on the Watts Up With That website by Willis Eschenbach, a very experienced computer modeller. His findings are devastating. After detailed analysis of the study's multiple flaws, he sums up by accusing Nature of "trying to pass off the end-result of a long daisy-chain of specifically selected, untested, unverified, un-investigated computer models as valid, falsifiable, peer-reviewed science".
His conclusion is worth quoting at some length:
"When your results represent the output of four computer models, fed into a fifth computer model, whose output goes to a sixth computer model, which is calibrated against a seventh computer model, and then your results are compared to a series of different results from the fifth computer model, but run with different parameters, in order to show that flood risks have increased from greenhouse gases..." you cannot pretend that this is "a valid representation of reality", let alone "a sufficiently accurate representation of reality to guide our future actions".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8349545/Unscientific-hype-about-the-flooding-risks-from-climate-change-will-cost-us-all-dear.html
it's controlling huge, non-linear systems that we only partially understand.
[/sarcasm]
If ever somewhere in the world someone died because climate related issues after doing things, fingers will point to whoever "knowing" did some change. At least now you can say that you weren't aware of the consequences. But once you say that know the consequences, and did it with the intention of changing climate conditions, you will be seen as responsible.
Frank Herbert has thought the idea in Dune, with satellite controlling the climate. Geoengineering and terraforming is maybe science fiction for now, but I'd love to see Mars and Venus altered to support life. Agreed with today's technologies it would take a millennium, but once we get started, development would accelerate and we'd get better and better at it.
Works the following way:
First, cut down all those huge areas of forests all over the earth, in order to decrease vegetative respiration and general evaporation of water. This gets you a double benefit. It means that you decrease the formation of those pesky clouds with their high albedo, which should increase surface temperature through additional sunshine.
But actually, the temperature increases because less water is evaporated through sunlight, which takes up a lot of energy and severely decreases surface temperatures. (That's why rain forests are cooler than the deserts despite more receiving more sunlight.)
Unfortunately, there are not many forests left to do that - it seems like the next ice age will be unavoidable.
I saw a feature on Discovery Channel a while back about solar-powered CO2 extractors. It makes me wonder if you could spin that into carbon fibers directly and produce vacuum formed or injection molded composites for a wide variety of applications.
Carbon is such a versatile element that it would be fantastic to mine it from the air and bend it to whatever use you have while lowering atmospheric CO2 levels; kills two birds with one stone.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I am going to change the climate unlesss the nations of world give me.... one million dollars!
1) Stop deforestation, try to re-forest lands previously cleared. This will help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
2) Try to determine and limit the damage we are/may be doing to the ocean, to help preserve and maybe increase the ocean's natural ability to sequester CO2.
3) Voluntarily control our own birthrates, so that population gradually declines, so that less land is required to be used by mankind, and can thus be returned to natural growth patterns.
4) Exploit carbon-neutral or low-carbon energy generation technologies - you know the list. . . biofuels, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydro, nuclear fission and/or fusion.
5) Continue the trend which has been ongoing since the 1970's to increase energy efficiency, so that we consume less energy to achieve the same levels of benefit (if we can successfully decarbonize our energy supply, this may not be too critical, but may still have an effect on how much land needs to be dedicated to use for growing biofuel precursor plants, wind turbines, solar collectors, etc; and thus unavailable for use by natural forest growth).
Can someone please make sure we get an earth.bak before anyone starts editing earth. If we lose the original it will be hard to recreate
Everyone talks about the weather. But no one does anything about it
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
it would take incredible amounts of funding to engineer climate, and so naturally one would assume corporations to take the role
this wont work, because the majority of the worst offenders in terms of climate simply dont care about the problem and are only working to
marginalize scientific dissent.
government would have to do something like this, but in america it would never work due to our various legislative and regulatory branches being
comprised largely of corporate kingpins and mouthpieces.
TL;DR: we couldnt even adopt Kyoto, what the hell makes you think climate engineering is a possibility.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Resources will never run out, thanks to conservation of matter.
As long as you're content with the elements arranged (or dispersed) however they end up, that works pretty well.
On the other hand, if you're looking for phosphorus in quantities sufficient for agricultural use, refining it out of the oceans is not going to be profitable. Likewise with helium from atmospheric extraction compared to tapping into geological gas pockets.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Perhaps we should just stop now. Seriously. Almost everything we've done has fucked some part of the planet up, and there are ALWAYS unintended consequences. Maybe we should try to minimise our effects on the Earth as much as possible and hope that nature will fix itself over time.
Good IT professionals don't roll out a change into the live environment without trying it out in a test environment first. Unfortunately, we don't have another planet. Nature has done a lot better than us so far, so I think we should just be careful and leave the environment to itself.
When our weather models stop being accurate after a few days, I don't think tampering with climate on that scale is a good idea.
As for the whole climate change debate, I don't know enough about it to speak to it, but I bet the conclusions are probably a little more subjective than objective. I think the math behind all of this is rather chaotic. At least thats what I've observed...
If we are worried that activity X is causing climate change, we need to stop/minimize activity X instead of trying to apply solution Y without knowing exactly how the whole system works.
One guy was afraid of global cooling and he got onto the cover of Time. It was about as scientific as the Time Cube guy getting mainstream media coverage.
Unlike damn near everyone else, I actually looked up that article and read it. The science is not nearly what it's played up to be.
The researcher was actually working with a real climatological problem: from around WWII to the 70s, there was a distinct cooling in global temperatures. If you look closely you can see it in the GISS data. The question isn't "was the Earth cooling" but "what is causing the Earth to cool?"
Well, we later figured it out. It was air pollution. In particular, the huge upturn in worldwide burning of high-sulphur fuels starting in the 30s and accelerating from then through the 70s put a lot of sulphur oxides in the upper atmosphere, and they're pretty good at blocking incoming solar energy (similar to the Mount Pinatubo cooling in the early 90s).
However, atmospheric sulphur has other problems. Like acid rain, ozone depletion, asthma, things like that. So we cut back on it, and the temperatures returned to trend.
At the time, the Earth was cooling -- but the lesson isn't what you'll hear from the people pushing that as a reply to real climate science.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
My favorite part about comments like this is that there's no way anybody could reasonably look at the body available evidence on the subject and come to this extreme of a position.
It therefore follows that that "body of evidence" is fabricated to hide the truth. Which proves that there's a conspiracy of all of the scientists in several different fields from around the world!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
We've already had a long term experience with introduced species. So far all but a few cases have been devastating. Most people think of accidental introductions but there have been lots of intentional ones. I lived in New Zealand for a while and they had an Australian species of Opossum that was brought in to create a fur trade. The population have exploded and now they are literally eating the forests from the top down. The point is it's impossible to know the affect you are having on a complex system. It's trial and error and unfortunately with climate an error can result in devastation. A clue can be taken from the few successes in introduced species. Where they tend to work is if recently a species was driven to extinction leaving an ecological nitch available. I've even read proposals to introduce elephants to North American since it was only 10,000 years ago that Mammoths died out. The proposal might have been interesting if we hadn't wiped out the Great Plains and most of the forests. Wolves were recently reintroduced in the US and it's been very successful. The point is any wolf species would have filled the gap. Why it applies is say something like CO2 levels being inflated. This isn't natural, we're pumping billions of tons of CO2 a year into the atmosphere so deal with it. The point is since nature didn't put it there it's okay to remove it without adversely affecting climate. The ideas though for increasing cloud cover to reduce temperatures is insane. Plants need sunlight and it could lead to crop failures. Check out "The Dimming Sun" documentary to see it's already happening so we don't need to make it worse.
We aren't smart enough to engineer climate and yes it's been tried unsuccessfully in the past. We are smart enough to see what doesn't belong and remove it. Getting rid of CFCs shows we can have an affect. It's the political will that is lacking.
It took us 250 years to ramp up a (profitable) industry that ultimately boils down to turn turning craploads of alkane chains into water and craploads of carbon dioxide. Unless we find a process that does the opposite orders of magnitudes faster and at near zero cost, it'll take thousand of years to reverse the effects.
And I haven't begun yet on how we could possibly control such a system with 1) no measurable effect before decades 2) no idea if we fuck up something else with the side effects before centuries.
Frankly, we'd be better off learning to live with the effects.
*snip the rest of the song*
There was an old woman who swallowed a cow,
I don't know how she swallowed a cow!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old woman who swallowed a horse,
She's deadâ"of course!
--
BMO
or, How I learned to stop worrying and love climatic disaster.
The only reason why to think about climate engineering is to fix the problem caused by current "unintended climate engineering", i.e. the global warming due to accumulation of CO2. And unfortunately, climate engineering, as any large scale project, needs a lot of energy.
Where are we going to take the energy? We have basically 2 options:
- Use a carbon-based source. Then this doesn't make sense, because if you actually calculate it, you will find out that to fix the amount of CO2 released by geoengineering you need to release more CO2 than you will fix. Even if you wouldn't, you still need to release CO2 from the energy source somewhere, at some point, so this is in fact always less efficient than not using that energy at all.
- Use a renewable source. Then this doesn't make sense either, because we can do that now and forget about the problem.
So simply, either way you look at it, it's better to stop releasing the CO2 in the first place rather than trying to finance (energetically) an adhoc solution for unintended CO2 released.
It always amuses me to hear all these ravings about "getting off this rock", as if doing so would somehow be of a direct benefit to you. Colonization of other planets may indeed eventually happen, in order to make our species less vulnerable to extinction due to damage or even destruction of the Earth. Likewise, we may want to send colonies to other stars to avoid going extinct if something were to happen to ours. What is definitely not going to happen is outward population migration to those other planets to alleviate population pressure, to breach new frontiers, or to find trade opportunities.
The part you're missing is just how outrageously expensive it is to move anything in space. That is always going to be true not because "I say so", but because of the basic laws of physics that dictate that any movement of matter through our solar system or between stars is going to cost a lot of energy. Energy is a limited resource and always will be. Even if we manage to discover fusion (which has been "20 years in the future" for as long as I've been alive), fuel will still cost money to mine and purify. The fixed energy cost of transport between large energy wells such as Mars and Earth will always greatly exceed the cost of just making whatever it is at the destination.
Earth has all the elements you can find on Mars or other planets, or the asteroids. They are all present here in greater or equal abundance and purity than you will find out there. Even if you had to sieve the ocean for them, it would still be cheaper than getting it off Mars and all the way over here. Physics and economics pretty much ensure that there will be no trade between planets. As for trading or recreational travel between stars, that is absolutely not going to happen. The amount of energy involved there is truly astronomical, and after we send the initial colony there will be no justification whatsoever to send anything else. Even the initial colony will almost certainly not carry people. It is much more cost effective to send a robotic ship with frozen embryos.
Once the colonies exist on other planets or other stars, they will have no tangible effect on Earth. You will never move to Mars, because it costs so much to travel, and because it is so much easier to breed people who are already there. Sure, there might be a brief initial surge of colonists, but very soon after that, in a few generations at most, immigration will be restricted by the Martians who'll want to keep Mars to themselves and their descendants. Breeding there will always be more cost effective than importing Earth overflows, and before too long they'll have their own population pressures without importing them.
So no trade, no immigration, and very expensive travel that only the very rich can afford. That's all the colonies will mean to regular people like us. We'll still have the very same problems on Earth that will in no way be solved or even alleviated by those colonies. The colonies' benefit is to the species, not to individuals.
We as a society would be absolutely insane to ever attempt to alter the climate on a large scale. We barely have a grasp on the affects of Carbon Dioxide on the environment and if we start willy-nilly playing with the environment whatever we do could actually have worse consequences than what we have done so far. For example if we start removing Carbon Dioxide on a large scale (or other climate changing initiative) we may actually be screwing ourselves in the next 15/20 years. Just recently there were reports that the sun may have very minimal amounts of sunspots for the next 70 years, which would possibly cause a mini-ice age. If we start any climate changing initiative we could actually be intensifying the affects of the mini-ice age.
We should learn from our mistakes in the past that originally caused the climate issues we are seeing today, "Do not mess with the environment". We should just let our mistake be, reduce our carbon emissions, and let the environment balance itself out as it has always done in the past. There may possibly be some species that we lose in the process because we did not take an initiative to balance out the environment ourselves, but guess what the species that go extinct were weak. It is a game of survival of the fittest and a part of that is surviving the unexpected.
I guess that must be the reason.
I find it difficult to fathom why people think geoengineering is feasible.
In terms of cost, effort, technical know-how and potential risk, there seems to be a clear hierarchy of options:
1. Conservation/efficiency - do more with less
2. Alternative sources - biofuels, algae, solar, thermal storage etc
3. Geo-engineering - deal with the consequences of failing on 1 and 2
4. Colonize another planet - !!!
If people can't be convinced to make even the smallest dent in their lifestyle to support the costs of doing 1 and 2, what on earth makes anyone think taxpayers will be willing to fund the true cost of 3 (or 4)?
Talk about jumping the shark.
All hail the Second Law of Thermodynamics ... and please forget that the Rock whe presently inhabit is not a closed system.
Gases go out, Meteorites & Very fast and oddly-shaped weather balloons (according to the DoD, at least) come in.
Also, if you look up with some very powerful binoculars, you may distinguish a yellowish orb, who seem bent on spreading bits of heat on us, also known to some ancient cultures as the Sun. According to some fringe scientists, the Rock is periodically circling around that one (or at least Fringe for XIVth century Christians).
I wonder where the 'thermo' part of t-d stems from ? Ancien greek for Heat, maybe ?
Please go back and live in your flat refrigerated world to read about Science while I & Seven Billion humans enjoy Helios.
Short answer to story title: No, geoengineering will not go prime time.
Longer answer: Geoengineering schemes to counteract climate change would all be large scale efforts and enormously costly... even if they worked as hoped the first time. There is an excellent chance they wouldn't work as well as hoped or even anywhere near as intended, and so additional funds would likely be required. Sort of like a war: you don't really know what it's going to cost until you stop fighting it.
Given the costs and risks, it would be a difficult sale to those who'd have to pay for it. Those at the top of the business model that causes climate change aren't going to, since it's their desire to hang onto an existing income stream that makes geoengineering even a topic of discussion. The mass of taxpayers aren't going to buy in, especially when they see that their individual out of pocket cost is vastly greater than what it'd take to just reduce the emissions that caused the problem.
But, this is all specious. Geoengineering is PR, is a distraction intended to comfort voters who are a bit undecided about climate change that everything will be OK, and if Al Gore turns out to be right, we'll get a crew out there to fix the problem, pronto.
Luke, help me take this mask off
People are so short sighted.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Building Better Worlds
Atmosphere processors. Remarkable piece of machinery. Completely automated.
Cue the pinhead-dancing angels.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Because it has worked so well for our economy?</snark>
Given basic human nature, I can predict with a fair degree of confidence that the denialists will be able to avert serious efforts to reduce CO2 levels until people start dying from the effects of AGW in significant numbers, in the developed nations (they are already dying in places like Africa, but we can ignore that).
Unfortunately, by that point it will be far too late to remedy the situation.
Of course this won't be the "end of the world." The planet will still be here. It may not even be the end of Mankind, although it will be a major extinction event. It *will* be the end of technological civilization, and overpopulation. If humans survive, they will number in the thousands, not billions.
> Climate Engineering
It's actually Climate Warfare. You engineer so that drought or floods hit other countries or continents, not yours. You try to shade away the sun from other countries using space shields, etc so they freeze to death. This will lead to thermonuclear war.
In fact there was an 1979 UN treaty on the comprehensive ban on geo-physical warfare, which elapsed in 2005 and the USA is refusing to re-install it, which makes the rest of the world totally worried.
There are persistent rumors the US Pacific Coast is not hit by long overdue earthquakes, because USA has a series of faux oil wells, that pump DOWN a teflon-like slimy subtance, so the lubricated ridges glide slowly under their terriroty and the tectonic plate stress gets built up and released elsewhere, like hitting Japan, Oceania, etc. with big earthquakes.
The HAARP is also an aspect of US geophysical warfare: with remote plasma generation they can modify the density of the athmosphere anywhere on the globe, so that it coincides with a forecast very high or low tide event, and the upset weight balance of air+water mass, versus the stress of the litosphere results in a huge, devastating earthquake elsehere, like Japan, thus alleviating the US pacific coast from danger. This is the modern equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The relation of sudden bad weather, extreme tidal situations and large earthquake events have been well understood ever since the 1923 large Tokyo earthquake and the USA uses that method to protect her citizens and lands, by devastating lands in other countries and killing people like the Japanese.
Geo-engineering is already mainstream.
Technologies used:
- spraying barium and aluminium in the skies by means of chemtrails. Increases the albedo effect by causing artificial milky skies and acting as sunscreen, but these neurotoxins end-up in our food chain.
Video's: What in the world are they spraying
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0khstYDLA
- HAARP = radiating the ionosphere with microwave to manipulate weather, hurricanes, Irene, cause earthquakes and tsunamis as seen in Fukushima and Niigata ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InV0cVH6KZc
Don't panic, just take a look on that article today about cloud seeding to get an idea of how far off "geoengineering" is.
The climate of part of the dustbowl was changed by planting trees to control wind and creating many new lakes which changed the local water cycle enough to change the types of plants that now grow in the area. Changing the local water cycle was known even before the mis-guided concept that "rain follows the plow" which was based on the incorrect assumption that as you managed land by farming, it would increase the local rain. They missed out on the bit where they need local sources of water like man made lakes.
I expect some of the inland salt lakes in Australia will end up flooded as a way to get more rain into the south eastern part of the country. Some of the lakes are below sea level were they could be easily flooded.
they are already dying in places like Africa, but we can ignore that
Really? So you think climate models--which show very low impact in tropical zones--are all false?
There is plausible evidence of climate change (anthropogenic or otherwise) at high latitudes. In the tropics, the picture is much muddier, but that's ok because the models don't predict big changes there this century.
Your comments are precisely what is wrong with your side of the climate change debate: you're claiming on the one hand that climate models are true, and on the other that they're false. Make up your mind and argue consistently.
I'm a skeptic about climate models (I'm a computational physicist, and so professionally qualified to judge them) but aware that ocean heat content does suggest that the Earth is warming.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Guess I was unclear there. I am *not* attributing the Somalian man-made disaster to AGW. But Africa is a pretty big continent, and by no means is all of it tropical.
I was thinking more of situations like water shortages and related crop failures resulting from the shrinking of the Kilimanjaro and Rwenzori glaciers, the drying up of Lake Chad and similar phenomena.