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."

Comments

Wrong idea

[2names]

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.

Re:Wrong idea

[piripiri]

We need to GET OFF THIS ROCK. Stop wasting money on climate projects and get a plan together to colonize other planets

And repeat the whole damn shit again? No thank you.

Re:Wrong idea

[0123456]

And repeat the whole damn shit again? No thank you.

We're quite happy for you to stay behind while we take over the rest of the universe.

Re:Wrong idea

[2names]

If you send me your address I will send you a keyboard with functional punctuation keys.

Re:Wrong idea

[realcoolguy425]

You first.

This again leads back to my conclusion that people with a liberal mindset believe that resources are running out, and that they need to force change on other people. I'm not saying they're completely wrong, even though I am, but this belief in extreme resource scarcity is at the heart of this sort of logic. Besides, we can do what China is planning, nudge big rocks closer and mine off of them. If you're worried about the climate not staying exactly the same from one year to the next, you have picked the wrong planet to be born on.

The accusation that climate change alarmists are forming a secular religion I believe is not completely unfounded. Anyone who would follow the Goracle on the topic of climate change may not like it when the computer models are finally generated that finally reflect reality. It will be data gathered from satellites that I believe will finally put an end to playing climate games by sampling data in way that produces the desired results. Recent NASA data that shows more heat escapes into space than we previously thought is part of the point I'm trying to make here. I'm not pretending to be an expert on this topic, but I know more than enough to understand that there are people with a vested interest in perpetuating any narrative that casts CO2 as the enemy of man.

Re:Wrong idea

[32771]

How? Is there Oil on Mars?

Re:Wrong idea

[space_hippy]

Funny.

But seriously I wish people would change the word "money" to "resources".

Re:Wrong idea

[0123456]

YThis again leads back to my conclusion that people with a liberal mindset believe that resources are running out, and that they need to force change on other people.

No, you have that backwards. They want to force changes on other people and 'resource scarcity' is just a convenient excuse.

How many times have you seen liberals shouting about some disaster and demanding the adoption of free-market policies to solve it? Creating a problem so you can propose a solution which happens to be what you wanted in the first place has been a standard left-wing tactic since at least the 19th century.

So, for example, first you ban drilling for oil and then you shout about 'peak oil' and how it's going to kill everyone unless we start using public transport. You could just, you know, drill for more oil instead but that wouldn't achieve the real goal of pushing people onto public transport.

Re:Wrong idea

[Rei]

Colonizing other planets is *WAY* more difficult than geoengineering Earth where our entire industrial base is. The atmosphere is a super-thin skin over all of us.

I like to help people picture how easy it is to change CO2 levels this way. Picture you have the Hindenburg full of pre-industrial-revolution air. How much gasoline would you have to burn to bring its CO2 levels up from that to modern CO2 levels?

Pre-industrial CO2 was around 280PPM. Today's are around 100ppm more. The Hindenburg held 200,000 cubic meters of gas. STP air density is about 1.2kg/m^3, so the Hindenburg would hold about 240,000kg of air. 100ppm of CO2 from that is 24kg. The carbon content of CO2 is 30%, so that's 7.2kg of carbon. Gasoline has 2.4kg of carbon per gallon. So three gallons of gasoline.

In short, a single fill of a gas tank on your average car could raise the CO2 content of a volume of air the size of *three* Hindenburgs to modern levels (+36%). When something is as diffuse as air, and when you're talking about gasses that are trace even within that, it becomes very easy to mess with them, even when you're talking about an area the size of the planet.

The downside to most geoengineering projects, however, is that they're merely masking. Most of them -- not all, but most -- simply try to hide the effects of one symptom of CO2 rise or another (usually the heat, ignoring the ocean acidification). Several problems come from this. One, you need ever-greater measures to keep masking the CO2 rise, with ever-greater side effects from whatever side-effects that method has, and ever-greater costs. And two, if you ever stop, or your system ever fails, or you discover that the side effects are too great, or whatnot, there's a sudden surge in temperatures as all of the effects you'd been hiding take full force. Really, you need to address the cause, not the symptom. You don't treat cancer with Tylenol.

There are some geoengineering projects, however, that do work on getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere. At the same time, they shouldn't be rushed without further study, or you risk causing more problems than you're trying to solve. The classic CO2 elimination proposal is of seeding the oceans with iron. Some wishful thinkers like to hope that as CO2 levels rise, plant growth will just correspondingly rise and eat up the additional CO2. But most of the world's surface area is not CO2-limited, but nutrient limited -- in the oceans, usually iron; proposing that CO2 will just increase global plant growth is like proposing that adding more sunlight to a desert will increase its plant growth. For most of the oceans, extra CO2 is simply an acidifier, which reduces maximum biomass. So the concept goes, add iron and you increase photosynthetic activity, and thus sequestration, turning the dead zones into oases of life. It's a neat concept, but a lot of things are still widely open for debate. Do you actually increase the sequestration rate, or does the additional bloom all just rot before it can be deposited? Do you cause hypoxia and severely negative downstream conditions from it? Do you rob the ocean of other minerals and cause severely negative downstream conditions from that? Etc. Basically, ocean seeding is something that bears investigation, but not a rush project. We need to know just what we're getting into before we get into it.

Re:Wrong idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You first.

This again leads back to my conclusion that people with a liberal mindset believe that resources are running out, and that they need to force change on other people. I'm not saying they're completely wrong, even though I am, but this belief in extreme resource scarcity is at the heart of this sort of logic. Besides, we can do what China is planning, nudge big rocks closer and mine off of them. If you're worried about the climate not staying exactly the same from one year to the next, you have picked the wrong planet to be born on.

The accusation that climate change alarmists are forming a secular religion I believe is not completely unfounded. Anyone who would follow the Goracle on the topic of climate change may not like it when the computer models are finally generated that finally reflect reality. It will be data gathered from satellites that I believe will finally put an end to playing climate games by sampling data in way that produces the desired results. Recent NASA data that shows more heat escapes into space than we previously thought is part of the point I'm trying to make here. I'm not pretending to be an expert on this topic, but I know more than enough to understand that there are people with a vested interest in perpetuating any narrative that casts CO2 as the enemy of man.

No there aren't that many people with a vested interest. Our current models show that the earth will warm, and if anything, the models may be underestimating the amount of warming. Before you go blaming people with a liberal mindset, perhaps you should get your facts right. These are scientists who are saying this. Just look at the Arctic right now, its warming. We may get a 10 year stabilization for other reasons, but then things should start warming again.

Re:Wrong idea

[Dunbal]

This again leads back to my conclusion that people with a liberal mindset believe that resources are running out

Resources will never run out, thanks to conservation of matter. What will get tighter all the time, however, is resources per capita. If technology fails to continue its trend of being able to do more with less and if we keep breeding like rabbits then necessarily we will all suffer important changes to our lifestyle as the amount of available resources per individual falls.

Also you have to bear in mind that resources have a cycle - from discovery and mining, drilling, production or whatever - through being manufactured and distributed into usable products, to belonging to someone and being used in the manner they're supposed to be used and finally after succumbing to entropy, being discarded and/or recycled. That means that with many people you have a huge amount of resources "out of the loop" at any given time, meaning that either you have to make goods that last a lifetime, or highly disposable goods that are cycled quickly. Guess which avenue those who make and sell the resources would prefer...

Re:Wrong idea

[jellomizer]

The thing is everyone wasn't to be the guy on record saying I told you so. And they Giggle in Glee if it does happen, even though it may be quite desasterious. (Think Slashdot when there is a severe Microsoft volnerability)

There is a lot of people saying there is a problem. Not not too many coming with valid solutions to it. And like all solutions they come with tradeoffs so this same group of complainers will complain about the solution.

Nuclear is a good solution, but it has good size tradeoffs.

Winds Solar are still not good replacement solutions, but they have less trade offs so they are not complaining as much.

Can we reduce out carbon output, sure, but it will cost in some other area.

Can we reduce our engergy consumption, probably but it will cost us as well.

The problem is sadly is Climate change is an accecptiable tradeoff for the benefits of energy for most people.

Re:Wrong idea

[Lifyre]

No but they have Rainbows and Unicorns and last I checked they were valid power sources for wishes and dreams.

Re:Wrong idea

[firewrought]

I know more than enough to understand that there are people with a vested interest in perpetuating any narrative that casts CO2 as the enemy of man.

Do you know enough to understand that there's an even larger vested interest in preventing that narrative?

I've stayed away from climate change discussions, but it always seems that this argument is always applied one way -- towards the scientist who do the research. In actuality, it seems like ALL stakeholders (scientist, business leaders, investors, politician) have a major economic bias in how they would have others perceive it. Of course, it's the people who come after us who have the largest economic incentive of all, but they haven't been born yet, so... if climate change is real, they're probably doomed.

Re:Wrong idea

[GameboyRMH]

These are scientists who are saying this.

You must be new to this, to the AGW denialist, the word "scientist" lends about as much trust as "crackwhore."

Re:Wrong idea

[blueg3]

This is only true if "resources" is strictly the same as "matter", and note then that it's not really true. Not only do light gases and a small number of space exploration objects leave Earth forever, but radioactive elements are being converted (more or less irreversibly) into different elements.

Only the sum total of energy in the Universe is really conserved by conservation of energy (matter).

However, lots of resources aren't just matter -- from a physics perspective, both harnessable energy and particular chemical configurations are valuable resources.

Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, the total amount of harnessable energy (not just per capita) is always decreasing.

Re:Wrong idea

[GameboyRMH]

Resources will never run out, thanks to conservation of matter.

Even that is a bit misleading in most cases. For example, even if you assume that the energy to do so is readily available, turning the exhaust from a car's tailpipe, the heat from it's radiator, the sound waves from it's stereo, the cold air from it's AC system, and the vehicle's forward momentum back into gasoline is most impractical.

Re:Wrong idea

[WolfgangPG]

Or this crazy idea liberals have that humans are more powerful than the Sun and seem to forget the climate of the earth has changed many times before man even arrived.

Also: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html
Snip: NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing.

The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

Re:Wrong idea

[Rei]

That right there is just one of the many reasons why the concept of settling other planets is so *#$#@$* difficult.

To live on another planet -- to merely stay alive -- requires a whole raft of modern technology. And each modern technological component has a whole chain of component inputs for parts and manufacturing consumables, and each of those has a whole chain, and each of those, and so on down the line. And as much as we might like to pretend that we can just narrow things down to just a few parts or materials, you really can't. Try substituting nylon for teflon in a container that holds hydrofluoric acid or teflon for nylon in a high-abrasion part and see how well things go for you, for example.

Plastics are a key critical part of modern technology, and there's thousands of them. Perhaps you could do with a couple dozen -- *maybe*, if you engineered each and every component carefully (a massive undertaking when you're saying, basically, "reinvent our modern industrial base"). So we need to have whole oil refineries and chemical plants operating on... wait, what? Oil, Mars?

Right. So before you can even get to those oil refineries and chemical plants -- launched at absurdly expensive prices -- you have to have a way to make oil in the first place, on a planet that has none. This means some combination of the Fischer-Tropsch/Sabatier processes. Which means taking in and compressing the trace atmosphere, isolating the CO2 from the other gasses, reacting it with a steady stream of hydrogen from a water electrolyzer (fed by an ice mine) over a catalyst bed at high temperatures, and then fed into the refinery. And of course, every part will steadily corrode, moving parts will break, etc, and you need supply chains to produce *each and every part*. Every seal, every coil, every valve, every surface coating, every lubricant, every hydraulic fluid, every sensor, everything. In your whole refinery and chemical plant. And everything that goes into making those parts/materials -- not just their raw materials, but their production-process consumables? You have to be able to make them, too. And so on down the line.

It's really a horribly daunting challenge, a colony that can completely support itself. Mostly support itself, with freighters of parts and replacement equipment /low level consumables showing up every few months? That's not that bad. *Completely* independent? That's centuries in the future at best.

A while back I did a whole series going into this sort of stuff in more detail over here:

Beyond The Space Elevator: A Glimpse Of Alternative Methods For Space Launch
The Colonization Of Other Worlds: Where Will We Begin?
The Colonization Of Other Worlds: Who Will Bring It About And Why?
The Colonization Of Other Worlds: The Industry Dilemma

Re:Wrong idea

[Tsingi]

Snip: NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing.

The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

The alarmists being virtually all scientists who know anything about global warming. It's a good thing we have oil companies who pay those few scientists who have the integrity to produce studies like this, and the media to spin it properly, or we would have to pay more for energy.

But none of it matters, as soon as Washington gets it's act together and starts spending less on social programs, God will provide.

Re:Wrong idea

[eedwardsjr]

He used the right form of its/it's though. weird.

Re:Wrong idea

[cobrausn]

Colonizing other planets is *WAY* more difficult than geoengineering Earth where our entire industrial base is. The atmosphere is a super-thin skin over all of us.

Yeah, but if we fuck it up on this planet, we risk destroying the entire species. If we try it out on another planet, well, there's always more of those.

"I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," he said. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next 100 years, let alone next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load." --Stephen Hawking

Re:Wrong idea

[mcmonkey]

I like to help people picture how easy it is to change CO2 levels this way. Picture you have the Hindenburg full of pre-industrial-revolution air. How much gasoline would you have to burn to bring its CO2 levels up from that to modern CO2 levels?

Interesting. But how many Hindenburgs is the entire atmosphere?

Put another way, it took us about 300 years to get atmospheric CO2 from the pre-industrial levels to current.

Re:Wrong idea

[gordona]

I had a '56 chevy that I put on a bunch of devices that were supposed to save gas. Every few miles I had to stop and siphon the tank to keep it from overflowing!!!

Re:Wrong idea

[mrzaph0d]

The Colonization Of Other Worlds: Who Will Bring It About And Why?

i'm willing to sign up to bring potato salad. but you're going to have to tell me how many people are coming.

Re:Wrong idea

[AngryDeuce]

Or this crazy idea liberals have that humans are more powerful than the Sun and seem to forget the climate of the earth has changed many times before man even arrived.

Wow, that's just like the crazy idea a lot of conservatives have that the earth will somehow be able to cope with the copious amounts of, not only the completely toxic chemicals we pour into the environment that it's literally never had to deal with since they're not even naturally occurring at all (like plastics), but substances it can process in quantities far exceeding anything it's able to keep up with...and do all this on a time frame that is in any way conducive to human survival.

But, you know, God will fix everything when he Raptures all the believers up to heaven. These earthly concerns don't matter, back to church. Our kids can always deal with it later. Besides, why inconvenience ourselves to help those not even yet born? Do they pay taxes? I don't think so!

Re:Wrong idea

[dpilot]

One thing to keep in mind...

"If climate change is real" doesn't care whether the climate change is anthropogenic or natural. When the fan starts getting brown, it doesn't matter how it happened - people get hurt.

Re:Wrong idea

[Vintermann]

We would have to mess up this planet amazingly bad before Mars starts looking like a good option. I hope it won't come to that.

Re:Wrong idea

[SirGarlon]

If technology fails to continue its trend of being able to do more with less and if we keep breeding like rabbits

Actually, it is quite possible that we will stop breeding like rabbits. There is a strong inverse correlation between income and birth rate. As the "developing" world slowly but surely rises out of poverty, global population levels will eventually stabilize. They might even go down. I am not an expert on this but one interesting source of data is www.gapminder.org. Their basic thesis is that the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is actually narrowing.

Re:Wrong idea

[32771]

You might want to figure out what mineralogical barrier means and why because of that we don't have centuries left for a space program with our current energy sources.

So it is either fusion and total environmental destruction or stone age in a few centuries.

Read Georgescu-Roegen's works and a paper called something like "Elements of hope" by A. Diederen.

Good night and good luck.

Re:Wrong idea

[MobyDisk]

Thanks for correcting someone without telling us what the right numbers are. So I have to Google it myself. Let's see...

Current levels:
Google search for co2 ppm: 380ppm, 390ppm, 350ppm, 380ppm, 385ppm. Fairly consistent.

Pre-industrial:
Google search for pre-industrial co2 levels: 280ppm, 280ppm, 275ppm - 284ppm, 280ppm. Looks good.

Would you care to tell us what was wrong with the original numbers? I'm assuming you're not simply arrogant and you just misread the first post because the rest of your post was... oh, nevermind.

Re:Wrong idea

[operagost]

How many Volkswagen Beetle Units in a Hindenburg? And if our CO2 levels have gone up 37% in just 200 years, why aren't we all dead yet?

Re:Wrong idea

[operagost]

It's funny how the leftists jump on the fundamentalist Christian straw man, when there are plenty of others who question the AGW theory.

Re:Wrong idea

[amRadioHed]

Assuming you're not a moron, could you explain what's wrong with his numbers? Pre-industrial CO2 levels ~280PPM, current CO2 levels ~380PPM. Seems ok to me.

Re:Wrong idea

[interkin3tic]

We need to GET OFF THIS ROCK

Yes, but not because of climate change. That's like saying "I've really ruined the carpet in this apartment. Better move to a new apartment in a new town."

Re:Wrong idea

[crunchygranola]

How many times have you seen liberals shouting about some disaster and demanding the adoption of free-market policies to solve it?

The successful use of cap and trade for eliminating acid rain (allowing the free market to decide how to allocate resources) comes to mind.

This is also the preferred approach being advocated for dealing with CO2 emissions.

Are conservatives showing their faith in markets by jumping on board?

Re:Wrong idea

[interkin3tic]

How would we "forget" something that happened before humans were around? Oh, using science to figure out that the climate has changed in the past? So science is good only when it backs up your political agenda? How convenient for you.

Anyway, something happening naturally in the past does not mean it MUST happen naturally always. You know, murder is a thing despite people dying naturally too.

Re:Wrong idea

[ravenshrike]

Scientists say a lot of things. If and when their computer models can properly predict what the climate change of the 20th century actually was with the data we've collected, or even the last 50 years, I might start to believe them. Until that point however, the models, and the alarmism is worthless. Of course, even if their alarmist nonsense is correct, as the guy who wrote the article snippet gets to, the only way to actually do a damned thing about it is to engineer the atmosphere to have less CO2. This luddite shit, unless we want to write off, at a minimum, 3/4 of the human race, is for the birds.

Re:Wrong idea

[ravenshrike]

I have had wayyy too little sleep over the past couple of days. Rereading my post the plethora of commas hurts my eyes

Re:Wrong idea

[Chemisor]

Correlation does not imply causation. Just because people with higher incomes have fewer children doesn't mean raising incomes will lower birthrates. If you think about it for a second, it becomes obvious that causation here goes the other way. Incomes will not rise until birth rates go down and families can start accumulating capital in form of houses, personal possessions, and money to spend on increasing income through education, entrepreneural financing, and just plain survival until the next paycheck without going into debt. A family with two children can do all these things easily. A family with six can not do them at all, since capital needs triple with each generation, and the existing capital dwindles at the same rate.

Re:Wrong idea

[interkin3tic]

a liberal mindset believe that resources are running out, and that they need to force change on other people

As opposed to assuming they'll never run out despite every indication they will, and letting other people selfishly use them up? Gee, we're such assholes.

If you're worried about the climate not staying exactly the same from one year to the next, you have picked the wrong planet to be born on.

When climate change is avoidable by a little self-restraint, we should take steps to avoid that climate change. In life, pain is inevitable, but that's a pretty piss-poor justification for saying "It's okay for me to hurt you, because if you worry about pain you picked the wrong planet to be born on."

The accusation that climate change alarmists are forming a secular religion I believe is not completely unfounded. Anyone who would follow the Goracle on the topic of climate change may not like it when the computer models are finally generated that finally reflect reality.

Some people on this side of the debate are stupid yes, but that doesn't make all of us wrong.

It will be data gathered from satellites that I believe will finally put an end to playing climate games by sampling data in way that produces the desired results.

Your accusations that people are skewing the data have not been backed up. Most recently the whole climategate thing showed the skeptics were trying to make something out of nothing.

If the data is being skewed, where's the smoking gun? If you don't have it, then stop throwing those lies around.

Re:Wrong idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably getting about 103 to 105% improvement in fuel economy, aren't you? Well that's what I was getting. Unfortunately, my car accidentally caught fire one day when I was trying to tune a new device I'd just installed, and with all those gas saving gagets running it didn't stop burning for two days. The only thing that didn't melt down was the left rear taillight dome, I don't know why. Even the engine block had sagged in on itself from the heat.

And the worst thing about it was that two days later the state sent gas tax revenue agents - even though I was giving away the excess gas for free. So I lost the car and had to pay a big fine for not paying the gas tax. Don't let it happen to you, pay your taxes.

Re:Wrong idea

[Dunbal]

Er you're backwards. People have fewer kids out of the fear of not being able to afford them or maintain their previous lifestyle. Understanding that this fear is real and not imagined is a function of education, not income. There's nothing magical about being poor that forces you to have more kids. Condoms and other forms of birth control are not that expensive. Here in the third world, where I live, there are government programs that give them away free. I've had many women from poor families save money to come to me as the village doctor for a shot of medroxyprogesterone which will keep her period free for up to 6 months - it costs about $8. I usually don't charge for this.

However the poor are usually also poorly educated, so they fall prey to religion (the Pope says condoms are evil), superstition, or other factors that lead them to avoid birth control. Or the men simply don't give a shit about the women getting pregnant and the woman thinks she can "trap" a man with a baby - none of which lead to healthy functional relationships. This dysfunction tends to perpetuate poverty vertically.

Re:Wrong idea

[pubwvj]

"We need to get off this rock"

Exactly. And to do that we need to have lots of babies, educate them, teach them to love learning and doing so that we have enough minds and bodies to solve the big problems. So get out there and have sex.

I'm serious.

As to climate control, really scary. If they goof we get another ice age. I much prefer global warming. Global warming opens up a lot of new territory that is currently too cold. People just like it the way it is because that is what they're used to. The fact is the biosphere has thrived better during warmer times. Colder times are death and extinction.

Re:Wrong idea

[Gripp]

you realize that, whether by our own fault or not, there will come a day (maybe sooner than later) that will *need* to be able to establish ourselves on another planet in order for the species to continue, right? and further, by trying to control the environment we may just make things worse if it turns out that these fluctuations that have always occurred regardless of our presence are required to keep things in check. ... aka damned if we, damned if we don't. so our ONLY option of survival in the long run is that "large enough space craft" ...

Re:Wrong idea

[AstrumPreliator]

Right, because settlers on another planet, moon or exoplanet wouldn't have to worry about conserving every little thing they possibly could to survive. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere would be colossally stupid since they'd most likely have a closed system where the plants can use this CO2 to provide oxygen and food in return. Plus it's not like we'll be using oil as an energy source since not only would it probably be nonexistent on another world, but it would also require oxygen to combust, something which is better saved for the people. Perhaps one day after a few hundred years of terraforming to reach an atmosphere near Earth normal and a steady supply of oil from Earth (which hasn't run out in that time frame) will lead to everyone getting all nostalgic and buying SUVs and causing global climate change, but I'm not seeing it.

Most worlds out there have no ecosystem to destroy, they have almost no atmosphere to pollute, and they are inhospitable to all but the most resilient forms of microbial life. So how exactly are we going to repeat "the whole damn shit again"? Hell, colonization would probably help out here since colonies would need to recycle everything they possibly can at the highest efficiency possibly. They'd also need the cheapest, easiest, and most efficient energy sources to power their colony.

Re:Wrong idea

[ColdWetDog]

If you send me your address I will a send you a three months supply of Prozac.

Re:Wrong idea

[canadian_right]

Can't we do both? Fix this rock and find another nice rock?

Re:Wrong idea

[canadian_right]

There are actually more than two types of people in the world. You can't neatly divide everyone into "liberal" and "conservative". Also note that the meaning of these words can change drastically depending on where you live.

We ARE going to run out of oil, just not any time soon. Cheap oil will run out in the near future, but tar sands and oil shale will become economically viable as the price of oil rises. Environmentalists are already protesting Canadian tar sand oil production. Environmental regulations don't stop production, it just makes it more expensive or shifts it to places without such regulations. It is only rational to plan ahead for a big change you know is coming. Oil is going to get a lot more expensive, then become too expensive to burn as fuel.

Public transit is seen as a good idea in most of the world as it moves people a LOT cheaper than cars using a lot LESS energy. Public transit is not a liberal plot. Properly implemented public transit works great for moving large numbers of people in fairly densely populated areas.

Re:Wrong idea

[canadian_right]

We also jump on the big oil paid mouthpiece.

Out of thousands of climate scientists world wide only a handful question global climate change exists, and human produced CO2 is a big part of it.

Re:Wrong idea

[rastoboy29]

What...exactly...is the "vested interest" some people have in perpetuating a myth of climate change?

Re:Wrong idea

[unencode200x]

I'm no atmospheric scientist (although I did take several atmospheric science classes in college, including the 4-credit labs...), but here's what I see:

There is a group of people that claim that the majority of PhD's on this topic are wrong. They have various claims and cling to a couple of "studies" with little evidence. For some reason, some of them see this as a political issue; probably because of Al Gore's movie (idk?). When I read these comments, they do not sound like scientists, they sound like politicians attacking the messengers. Obviously not always, but I see numerous examples of this all over the place.

The other side tends to use math, science, and logic to build what sounds like a coherent case.

I imagine that this was what it was like when people were arguing about whether the earth was flat or the center of the Universe.

Re:Wrong idea

[lennier]

We need to GET OFF THIS ROCK.

Everyone thinks "Mars", but I vote for airship cities on Venus. Once we solve the little breathing-sulphuric-acid-rain and falling-to-a-screaming-burning-implosion-death problems (gas masks and handrails might be one solution, as long as they can be tastefully designed), we'll be able to set up profitable carbon dioxide refineries!

We do have a solar system wide market for carbon dioxide, right?

Re:Wrong idea

[LordLucless]

The alarmists being virtually all scientists who know anything about global warming.

And "scientists who know anything about global warming" being defined as "those who agree with me". Any time anyone trots out a scientist with a dissenting opinion, the rebuttal that comes back is "well, they're not a real scientist, or obviously they'd agree with me.

It's a good thing we have oil companies who pay those few scientists who have the integrity to produce studies like this

And this is why people like me and the OP find the whole debate tiresome. Everyone has a vested interest in the perspective they're pushing.

Re:Wrong idea

[LordLucless]

if we keep breeding like rabbits

What, like the 1.8 fertility rate (below replacement) of the US? Or the 1.5 fertility rate of Europe?

Re:Wrong idea

[lennier]

How many times have you seen liberals shouting about some disaster and demanding the adoption of free-market policies to solve it?

None, because liberals believe free-market policies cause problems not solutions - they redistribute weath upwards to the already rich and powerful, for instance. The right wing thinks that that is a feature, not a bug.

But I was born in New Zealand and lived through both the Roger Douglas "sell off everything" privatisation panic of the 1980s, and the current John Key reprise of the same under "Canterbury Earthquake" urgency. The right wing in NZ has done exactly what you claim the left does: shouting about impending disaster and then railroading through "free-market" policies in great haste. Which usually involved selling off assets owned by the people to foreign private corporations in dodgy under-the-counter deals. A few years later, shock horror! We discover that our now private owner in Qatar really doesn't care about our New Zealand railroad or power line and has just been charging extortionate rates and failing to invest in infrastructure. But hey, they've been making exquisite profits for some investment fund on Wall Street so hoo-ah for capitalism!

So don't try to pretend that this is a "liberal" thing. It's not. It's a political thing, every group with an agenda for restructuring society believes that they should be the ones to restructure society because their beliefs are right.

  I mean, that's only common sense, right? And if you disagree with me, you're just wrong.

Re:Wrong idea

[BlackSnake112]

I am not so sure I would call methane oil. We could possibly use it, but it is not oil.

Re:Wrong idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate models do a reasonable job of hindcasting already. Here's a page on the accuracy of climate models with graphs.

Re:Wrong idea

[LordLucless]

Obviously, you could only read half the post before your blinkers of rage came down.

Re:Wrong idea

[NeoTron]

It's extremely funny to me when the watermelons play the christian fundy card, because I'm an atheist and I also do not get taken in by that other religion called Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Re:Wrong idea

[NeoTron]

I see your weasel words "global climate change" - do not try to obfuscate that with "human caused global warming" - it doesn't work and we can see right through your tactic.

Does the global climate change? Sure it does - it's been doing it for millions if not billions of years - it did it before you and I were born and it'll still be doing it when you and I no longer exist.

is it the human race who are largely responsible for the current climate changing? Perhaps at the micro-scale or local level, where we build big concrete jungles which absorb heat from the sun and stall wind movement within the cities, and air conditioners extract more heat from inside buildings and blow it outside the already warmer city streets.

But on a global scale? There are far vaster forces at work than mere humans can have influence on.

Lastly, here's a nice headline for you "Scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming" , http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2053842/Scientists-sign-petition-denying-man-made-global-warming.html

Are all those scientists shills paid for by big oil?

Waiting for the "But they not CLIMATE SCIENTISTS" strawman.

Re:Wrong idea

[Muros]

We need to GET OFF THIS ROCK. Stop wasting money on climate projects and get a plan together to colonize other planets.

I agree with that sentiment. However, there is one little detail in that that everyone overlooks. Getting off this rock takes a HUGE amount of energy. We're near the bottom of a gravity well. The only way to get out is a shitload of propulsion.

The idea of getting off this rock matches up exactly with the idea of developing renewable energy. And I don't mean the usual politicians bullshit dream of "80% of our energy needs from renewable sources by 2050". I mean 5000% of our energy NEEDS. We need energy to play with. Enough to get by on is nowhere near enough. We need energy to lift matter off the planet and send it into space, energy to toy with desert ecosystems to see what we can make of them. We need to see what we are able to do. And we need an infrastructure in place that will pay for it.

Re:Wrong idea

[mattack2]

I'm not even sure if your starting theory that we need plastics is even correct, but there are other types of plastic than fossil fuel derived plastic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic

In other words, since we're going to be growing food, we also have the stepping stone for these types of plastic (assuming we really even need them).

Re:Wrong idea

[Curunir_wolf]

How? Is there Oil on Mars?

No, but Titan is loaded with hydrocarbons...

Re:Wrong idea

[mattack2]

The "climate change" euphemism was popularized by Republicans. (Just like other charged terms like "death taxes".) I say that as a registered Republican, btw.

Re:Wrong idea

[Lifyre]

Actually in this case I am a moron. Complete and total reading fail.

Re:Wrong idea

[Lifyre]

Not a damn thing >. I read it as today's are around 100ppm and some how repeatedly ignored the "more" after it... even when copying...

Re:Wrong idea

[rtb61]

The biggest thing about that whole raft of technologies to leave one rock in space only to colonise another, why leave the raft.

Once you have a large realistic coloniser style space craft, why would you leave. No storms, earthquakes, meteors and comets etc. you can't avoid and basically a whole galaxy to explore. As your population grows stop by a Nebula and use readily accessible raw resource to build another ship, a whole fleet on an intergalactic tour, with regular stop overs at interesting worlds, to explore and interact with.

Re:Wrong idea

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Chuck Bukowski so rightly observed: A man is an asshole on earth, he'll be an asshole on the moon.

You want to change something in your own power? Change yourself.

Re:Wrong idea

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Hell. Last night I was loaded on hydrocarbons!

Re:Wrong idea

[ravenshrike]

K, now for the million dollar question, were those models made without looking at the temperature data in question. Cause if the people had access to the temperature data while programming the models you're decidedly going to be looking at a computerized version of the BMI. An utterly useless metric that was originally based upon late 19th century Belgian middle and upperclassmen. The modern equations for which were backfit to the data.

If they have access to the temperature data from the sensors than the model is by definition suspect. For one, their models assume much more heat is trapped by the earth than is the case.

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html

If the models were correct and not backfit to the data, there would be a lot more warming shown since as their models assume that the earth traps more heat than it demonstrably does. Since this is not the case, the only way that their models show a close hindcast is if the algorithms used in the models were through adjustment backfit to the data.

Re:Wrong idea

[NeoTron]

The origins of the term doesn't matter, and my post above still stands regardless. :)

Re:Wrong idea

[mattack2]

The origins of the term *do* matter, since you were clearly posting from a "right wing" perspective, bashing someone for using the euphemism.

Re:Wrong idea

[ShooterNeo]

Problem : to manufacture everything we use right now requires a vast and complex infrastructure. To produce any high tech good requires a complex process with thousands of steps with many steps unique to that particular good.

Solution : molecular manufacturing. Living creatures are far more complex internally than the most complicated machine humans have built to date. Yet, it is possible for living creatures to produce every single component they use, atom by atom, when supplied with nothing more than energy and the raw elements they need in a suitable feedstock. (the fact that larger creatures such as mammals lose the ability to be self sufficient like that is a limitation of evolution as a design algorithm and not a technical limit)

Molecular manufacturing is a technology that, through some technical means (there are hundreds of possible solutions) allows us to produce products with control over the bonding of all individual atoms in the product. By definition, since the machinery that performs molecular manufacturing is made of individual atoms bonded a particular way, said machinery will be able to manufacture a new copy of itself, leading to exponential growth.

The most common concept for this technology would be a 3d printer that is extremely small and can place individual atoms. It is accepted by all credible scientists that biochemistry already does this, so said printers are at least theoretically possible. (some have argued that we can't make a printer like this work without a suitable solvent)

Anyways, once we have this technology, space colonization would become quite simple. We would not even attempt to terraform planets - doing so would deprive us of the valuable elements located inside the celestial bodies. We would instead land a few probes equipped with high speed molecular manufacturing equipment, some ore gathering robots, and a power source. Those probes would produce more copies of the robots, the power plants, and the molecular printers which would in turn...

Once you have an entire surface covered with machinery, you order it to produce something to put cargo into orbit (a linear electromagnetic accelerator, or a laser launch array, or a few million space elevator tethers, or whatever is appropriate) and you throw your waste and your finished products into space. In space, you use the same technology to produce space habitats for humans.

Assuming you still have human beings, that is. This same technology would make many other things possible.

Re:Wrong idea

[toddestan]

I calculate about 21 trillion Hindenburgs worth of air. Sounds like a lot, but as someone else posted it's about 3,000 Hindenburgs per person with a global population in the billions. Given 3 gallons of gasoline per Hindenburg you can drive about 200-250k miles with a typical car before you've "used up" your allotment of air, so to speak.

I guess the other question is, how many Hindenburgs worth of other various carbon sinks (such as the oceans) do we have?

Re:Wrong idea

[Bing Tsher E]

People have been making money, or getting a reputation, or getting laid, with apocalyptic tomes for as long as we've had writing.

Your reading assignment is: Chicken Little.

Re:Wrong idea

[Rei]

As mentioned, and discussed in more detail in the series, bioplastics are not a universal substitute for petroleum plastics, and (as mentioned right hear), not all plastics can be used for all jobs. Different plastics have significantly different material different properties. Show me a single bioplastic, for example, that's suitable for containing strong oxidizers. And even producing bioplastics is anything but an easy, consumable-free process. It's not like you go and pick a piece of PVC off the plant.

Re:Wrong idea

[Rei]

The problem with what you propose (as discussed in the last diary of the series) is the throughput problem. The throughput on such a system would be abysmally low, and for some things, throughput is life-or-death for a colony. The reality is that a colony will need a combination of bulk industry and mass manufacturing along with rapid prototyping (whether involving nanomanufacturing or not) for the numerous, but only occasionally replaced, parts.

Re:Wrong idea

[Rei]

Nor was it supposed to. It's simply a thought experiment to make clear how little of a carbon-bearing material you have to burn to make a huge difference in CO2 levels, because many people have difficulty comprehending how human activity can influence something as "big" as our atmosphere.

Re:Wrong idea

[Wandering Idiot]

You're assuming FLT travel (which there's no way to achieve within the currently understood laws of physics, and Star Trek is not a textbook), I take it? Because "exploring the galaxy" isn't remotely doable on human timescales otherwise.

Re:Wrong idea

[werewolf1031]

That makes two of us. A very small sample size, granted, but odds are we're not the only ones.

Re:Wrong idea

[ShooterNeo]

I don't think you understand the power of exponential growth.

Bacteria already do exactly what I am describing. The simplest bacteria use about 2,800 mechanical parts, some of which are fiendishly complex. Those bacteriums can self replicate in about 40 minutes if supplied with ONLY : 1. Sugar. (energy source and feedstock) 2. Water and C02 and oxygen (feedstocks and solvent) and 3. trace amounts of other elements they need (iron, magnesium, etc)

In a week, given unlimited resources, the bacteria would out-mass the planet.

For various technical reasons, the machinery of life are not as fast nor as efficient as they theoretically could be. If we build machinery with internal parts made of graphene or diamond, each part rationally optimized for maximal performance, we could in theory make bacteria seem slow.

So yes, the first molecular printer would be pathetically slow. But if it could print itself in even a week we'd have enough of them to cover entire planets in a year.

I'm not really interested in reading your diaries given your obvious ignorance.

Re:Wrong idea

[ShooterNeo]

Despite what I said, I skimmed your article. I do agree that bulk processing is more efficient than atom-by-atom processing. And a plasma centrifuge or something similar would make for a good universal separation step to prepare the feedstocks for the molecular printer arrays. (the concept I have in mind...and remember this is a specific implementation of molecular manufacturing that may or may not be practical is flat, extremely thin plates that are arrays of trillions of individual 'print head' subunits, with rotary mechanisms for positioning groups of a few hundred heads and internal pathways for transporting feedstocks to the needed locations)

Each plate would of course be able to print a clone of itself. Eventually, low probability events (damage from radiation, random chance, etc) would jam pieces of the machinery and a plate would wear out to the point that it would need replacement.

One key limitation is this technology would be extremely good for making huge amounts of very thin objects with molecular precision but the 'print times' for a thick object would become extremely long. Eric Drexler estimates that it would take a year in the best case to produce a meter - thick object.

So you'd have to build smaller, very thin, subunits in mass and assemble big things out of little pieces - or be prepared to wait a long time.

Re:Wrong idea

[Wandering Idiot]

Or this crazy idea liberals have that humans are more powerful than the Sun and seem to forget the climate of the earth has changed many times before man even arrived.

That's an utter nonsense statement, which you yourself already know if you would think about it for more than 2 seconds. Saying "they think humans are more powerful than the Sun" is meaningless in this context, as it's not about the energy release of humans vs. Sun, it's about relatively minor changes in how energy is contained in the atmosphere that could have a major impact from a human perspective. There are nearly 7 billion humans on the planet, along with all their attendant industries, cultivated fauna, and machines, so it's hardly unthinkable that they might have some cumulative impact on the atmosphere. If the Sun's output were to vary by say 10% in either direction, that would obviously overshadow any change humans could make at present, but even taking sunspots, solar flares etc, into account, average Solar output just doesn't change that much. The Earth's climate has indeed changed plenty of times in the past (including times influenced by the atmosphere, which was created in its current form by *gasp* the biological life you seem to dismiss), the changes the scientists are currently worried about seem to be shorter-term and not part of a larger natural cycle.

I don't actually have any definitive opinion on anthropogenic climate change/warming, as I haven't looked into it particularly deeply and mostly just know it from general media stories, which are notoriously poor at science reporting (I do get the impression it's all fairly speculative- even if most relevant scientists agree on the likely outcomes, that doesn't speak to their degree of certainty). I just think your comments are remarkably stupid, to anyone with a working brain and the wherewithal to look up basic facts.

(Also, the article you linked is an opinion piece by a shill for a conservative think tank, making it even less reliable than the media's usual well-intentioned, if inept and sensationalized science reporting, although the study referenced is interesting, and possibly good news if it means the worst of the projected outcomes will be avoided.)

Re:Wrong idea

[spauldo]

More like how current estimates place world population over nine billion by 2050.

The population is still rising globally. The highest rates are in Africa and the Middle East.

Re:Wrong idea

[TheTurtlesMoves]

It is quite doable on human timescales. On the order of 1 million years. What we call human has been around for 3-4 Million years roughly IIRC. Or did you mean a generations time scale?

Personally I am in this for the long haul (aka the species). There is no reason to think that their won't be humans (or trans/post humans) still around in a few Million years.

Re:Wrong idea

[TheTurtlesMoves]

It is not really trace amounts of other things. DNA needs phosphorus and quite a bit of nitrogen. In fact you need quite a bit of nitrogen and other elements. Carbon based life forms really under emphasizes just how many critical elements are needed and their proportions. Quite a few of them are needed in the percentile range rather than trace levels (ppt or ppm).

Re:Wrong idea

[tinkerton]

Could you give an estimate of the resources needed to get a few billion people to another planet? Then compare with fixing up this planet. It just doesn't make any sense. You can start small colonies and let them grow, but the people who are here, are here to stay.

Re:Wrong idea

[dbIII]

accusation that climate change alarmists are forming a secular religion I believe is not completely unfounded.

It's the Plimer method because he found it so effective when arguing against creationists.
1/ Ignore what the person you are arguing against says and attack them instead accusing them of being in a cult.
2/ Roll out extreme examples of behaviour by various weird religious cults completely unrelated to the opponent.

No need to customise the technique, it works for any subject. It's merely playing a parody of the man instead of the ball and does not need to be dignified with a Latin term.

Today I heard another variation which said climate science was all about politics and control (communist and fascist world government run by a Jewish conspiracy optional) - which was from someone (a newspaper editor) obsessed by politics and control. If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. To some in the business (instead of the charity) of religion they see EVERYTHING that does not include them as a rival religion.

Also nice to hear that after all that doom and gloom in climate science since the 1950s (later brought to the attention of President Johnson) that finally something has been published that is optimistic and you can look at it and ignore all that scary stuff.

Re:Wrong idea

[dbIII]

Resources will never run out, thanks to conservation of matter

We need better science education in schools so the kids can find out about entropy before they are let loose in the world. It's a very big deal when energy is being considered.

Re:Wrong idea

[Nox3173]

If there is oil on Mars, don't tell anybody. Leave it to humans to fuck up a perfectly good wasteland.

Re:Wrong idea

[fiddley]

Unless I've misunderstood you, I think your timescales are out. 'Modern Humans' (as in Homo Sapiens) have probably been about for around 200,000 years - even if it's 400,000 it's still the blink of an eye. Behaviourally modern humans (i.e. ones you could tell apart from apes with pointy sticks) are about 50,000 years old. The entire genus Homo has only been around 2.5 million years, and austrailopithocene (the ancestors of the ancestors of humans) are about 4 million years old. If we did have a raft we could survive on for a million years, it'd be interesting to see what would happen given the starting point of such a relatively shallow gene pool. I suspect we'd still end up with different species landing the craft, than the one's who launched it..?

Re:Wrong idea

[Eunuchswear]

Chuck Bukowski so rightly observed: A man is an asshole on earth, he'll be an asshole on the moon.

Much more fun. On the moon he'll be an asshole in charge of your oxygen supply.

Re:Wrong idea

[Agripa]

The downside to most geoengineering projects, however, is that they're merely masking. Most of them -- not all, but most -- simply try to hide the effects of one symptom of CO2 rise or another (usually the heat, ignoring the ocean acidification).

If we bought one of those Outsider drives we could just move the Earth further from the Sun. I know they are expensive but maybe we could arrange a payment schedule or something.

Re:Wrong idea

[MobyDisk]

fair enough. :-)

Re:Wrong idea

[radtea]

You nailed it, sort of, the scientists who agree with me, being 99% of them actually go towards forming my opinion. I tend to trust them.

How many have you actually sat down to talk with over a beer?

I'm a computational physicist, and every computational physicist I've talked to has fairly serious concerns about the quality of climate models. They are good science, no doubt, but people who actually do this stuff professionally, for a living, know how misleading even a good model can be.

Every climate model I've looked at in any detail is significantly unphysical. They do things like conserve energy by hand (by redistributing temperatures at the end of each time step) rather than ensuring it is natively conserved down to the ground. Anyone who has ever done serious modelling of any simple physical system will tell you that the results from such a model are not to be trusted: the errors from apparently benign adjustments can and do result in outputs that look sensible, but which are nonsense.

Re:Wrong idea

[trickyD1ck]

Are you sure that destroying the western civilization the most efficient way to cope with this change?

Re:Wrong idea

[Yamioni]

Wow. Don't feel too bad, I did the exact same thing. I didn't realize why you two were 'arguing' until I read your comment. Yikes, needy more sleepy.

Re:Wrong idea

[RockDoctor]

The process of GETTING OFF THIS ROCK will, with very high likelihood, require an intermediate stage of keeping some people in closed environments for multiple years (e.g. at a minimum, going mining asteroids for materials for large spacecraft). By the time that we do properly understand how to do that, we'll probably have a much better handle on how environments work. (Incidentally, to move populations onto another planet, one of the significant problems is dumping the gravitational energy that people and material acquire falling into the holes (gravity wells). But you can get people OFF THIS ROCK in adequate numbers into the asteroids without having to deal with that problem.)

Re:Wrong idea

[operagost]

Are you claiming that all dissenting scientists are in the pocket of Big Oil?

Re:Wrong idea

[rtb61]

Just consider what has been achieved in the last paltry thousands years. Now take into account the end of the last ice age kicking the crap out of more advanced societies.

So dependent upon how we handle future crisis, just a thousand year could see us off this rock, as long as we do it peacefully.

Horse drawn carriages to part time space stations, abacus to the internet and we are still the same short haired crested rock throwing monies we were one hundred thousand years ago, just the statistical bell curve on IQ rating shifted over a few points.

Re:Wrong idea

[blueg3]

It can increase locally, temporarily, but a decrease in entropy here requires a larger entropy increase elsewhere in the universe. As we are part of the universe, if the universe's entropy is always-increasing, so must we eventually be stuck with a commensurate entropy increase.

Yes, it will take a ridiculously long time. Still, it's technically true that even pedantic definitions of "resources" are finite.

Re:Wrong idea

[rgviza]

yea but murder requires a human. Glaciers which used to cover as far south as new york and paris 5km thick started melting before gasoline. Read about the "last glacial maximum".

Global warming is a huge factor responsible for humans being smart enough to debate the cause of it. As far as humans _being_ the cause of it? It would certainly be a paradox. If humans didn't cause it there must be natural factors that are mostly responsible.

Re:Wrong idea

[dpilot]

Gee, that sounds rather alarmist too - from the other direction.

I rather think that adapting to climate change creates opportunities along with causing problems. I see most of the objections as coming from people who want to continue the same easy, profitable business models that their pappy and grandpappy used.

I agree that the subject of green high-energy technology is difficult, and am ambivalent toward nuclear power. If we weren't generating domestic electricity with designs dictated by naval constraints and weapons technology I'd feel a lot better about it. There are better, safer, and cleaner ways to generate electricity with nuclear power - but none of them are getting serious consideration.

I'll make a bit of a generalization here... Suggestions of conservation come up now and thing, things like insulation, tire inflation, mileage, etc, generally to a hue and cry of outrage. Somehow we have this warped perception in the US that energy consumption is a right, almost a duty. Completely ignoring any climate issues for the moment, IMHO energy consumption should be viewed as a COST, and therefore a thing to be minimized. Heck, I'd far rather see energy costs minimized than employee costs. It might even help this economy if we put more money into people and less into fuel.

So no, I don't think that climate adaptation, properly done, would destroy western civilization. A few business models certainly, perhaps gleefully, since those are some of the same people telling me I have no right to my job, but apparently they have a right to their business model?!?

Oh dear

[0123456]

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.

Re:Oh dear

[TheSeventh]

Right, don't try and remove carbon dioxide from the air, in fact, don't even look at the viability of it. There's absolutely no reason anybody would ever need to know how to do that.

Re:Oh dear

[ThatsMyNick]

Its already being done in most parts of the world. Lookup Cloud Seeding

Re:Oh dear

[nido]

Its already being done in most parts of the world. Lookup Cloud Seeding

Or just look up in the sky. Some days you might see odd "contrails" from jets that don't disperse properly, and after a time there's a funny grid pattern up there, before strange "hazy clouds" form (in what was a perfectly blue sky). The "crazies's" websites say that there are patents for dispersing aluminum and other atomized elements through a jet engine... Or maybe "they" have a fleet of drones with spray nozzles on the wings.

I've seen them in Arizona, and also in southern Oregon. Pictures here, so you know what to look for: ArizonaSkywatch.com

Re:Oh dear

[SydShamino]

Climate engineering is already being done in most of the developed and developing world. Lookup Global Warming.

Re:Oh dear

[Vintermann]

srsly? Chemtrail conspiracy theories on slashdot?

Contrails can become clouds in a clear sky, if the atmospheric conditions are right. I suppose you could see this as a kind of accidental geoengineering, since there's some evidence the increased cloud cover reduces surface temperatures.

Re:Oh dear

[interkin3tic]

I find it odd that you are sure releasing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere can't possibly be having negative effects, but attempting to regulate the Earth's temperature is sure to cause nothing but doom and ice. Reminds me of those people who won't take drugs they're prescribed because those doctors are out to get them with their "chemicals" but will inhale thousands of chemicals if they're sold by Philip Morris.

Re:Oh dear

[Deliveranc3]

The Russians did it and it worked.

Remember in space there's no atmosphere so you can have a mirror microns thick with no problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(space_mirror)

Illegal interception

[samjam]

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).

Re:Illegal interception

[samjam]

how did I post to THIS story? I meant to post to the chinese stealing international asteroids story

Re:Illegal interception

[ArhcAngel]

Given the tone of most of the comments yours is still more relevant.

Re:Illegal interception

[Lifyre]

And yet when taken with the rest of the comments here it didn't seem that out of place, and honestly made more sense than many.

Law of unintended consequences

[goldspider]

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[blueZ3]

Exactly.

Someone expects the government to diagnose and correctly prescribe treatment for AGW? Where have these people been the last 40 years? Unless you're a basement dweller who has cut off all communication with the outside world, you have to know that "unintended consequences" is the touchstone of modern government action of any kind. We're talking about the same group of brilliant idiots who can't agree on which direction the sun rises and who believe that the solution to the debt crisis is more spending. Hello McFly!

It practically writes itself as a disaster movie script: In a world where the greenhouse gas problem has become too bad to ignore...

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[kylemonger]

Yes, there will be unintended consequences but if they aren't worse than the situation you're trying to prevent, you win. Tackle the next set of problems. That's what humanity has been doing since the start of civilization.

The tricky bit isn't coming up with a plan or even implementing it. Rather it's getting everyone with a stake to agree on it. Climate change might be a boon instead of disaster where you live. In that case, you might consider attempts to slow global warming an act of war.

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[dkleinsc]

If a government policy promises consequence A, and gets 95% of A and 5% of unintended consequences, is it something that should just be thrown away?

I'm all in favor of judging a government policy based on the usefulness of its goals and its effectiveness in achieving its goals. I'm not in favor of rejecting all government actions of any kind because it's not going to be 100% of what was planned on.

To make this a bit more concrete: Assume 5% of recipients of unemployment are rejecting job offers because they can live off a government check. Assume the remaining 95% would be homeless and quite possibly forced into a life of crime if they didn't have unemployment checks coming in. Since there are a few people that are taking advantage of unemployment who don't really need it, should we scrap the whole thing? (Note that this is an separate argument from whether government should be in the business of supporting the unemployed at all, since you're argument is based on ineffectiveness of a policy rather than whether the goal is a desired one.)

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[brainzach]

Some technologies are obviously risky but how is removing CO2 from the atmosphere going to create major unintended consequences? We know how the effects of less CO2 because we experienced in the recent past.

Compare this to our current geoengineering project of raising the CO2 levels in the atmosphere where we have no idea what the consequences are.

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[amRadioHed]

The unintended consequences aren't from the lower CO2 levels, but from the method we use to lower the levels. For example, seeding the ocean with nutrients to stimulate growth of algae to take CO2 from the air. The consequences we have to consider for that are what happens to existing ocean life? Would they be unable to compete with the new algae thus causing a die off of oceanic fish and mammals?

Certainly the current state of affairs with rising temperatures isn't ideal, but it would be a mistake to assume we couldn't put ourselves in an even worse position with a poorly thought out fix.

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[Shatrat]

The other problem is that the 95% which comprise intended consequences consist entirely of making the correct people filthy fucking rich, see cap and trade.

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[Deliveranc3]

Keynsian economics works. It's meant to restore an economy to a functional state, not reduce the deficit (obviously).

What you're looking at in the U.S. is an unsustainable deficit AND a recession intersecting.

Trying to reduce the deficit will kill the economy dead. Trying to fix the economy will increase the deficit.

Personally I believe the problem the U.S. and Britain are facing is the same. Rich people hire smart people who make their money grow faster than that of poor people. Very quickly you end up with a situation where the very rich have almost all the wealth, resource rights (including frequency rights, media rights etc.) and the poor are forced to work for them because they can't go into manufacturing on their own.

The poor feel disenfranchised and if you're lucky you get Che Guevera or the French Revolution. If you're unlucky you get tyranny.

As far as the environment goes we need to get a lot better at recycling, one way to do this seems to be to move to 3D printers with reusable plastics for almost everything. We also need to reduce and re-use, which means government intervention in situations of planned obsolescence.

In terms of mitigating our effect on the environment we need to switch to environmentally friendly energy sources and reduce incoming solar radiation. Improving cloud cover seems like the best method at present but localized blocking of solar radiation using near Sun orbital mirrors is much more precise (think reducing solar radiation in deserts, over the icecaps, etc.).

We need to embrace the fact that we have robotic manufacturing, which reduces the need for workers. That means that we can urbanize heavily (which makes a small effect already and more in the future). It also means that wealth will be more concentrated than ever before and we need to alter taxation to take it into account.

If one man invented a machine that made autonomous Coke factories for example, he could literally make all the coke in the world. The government helped him by providing land to produce ingredients, infrastructure for his factories and consumers for his product. Don't think that those things, in particular the last one, aren't important. Laissez-faire capitalism makes less sense every day. By protracting it you simply make the eventual revolution more horrific.

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[dkleinsc]

It's quite possible to have both the experiences you describe, and unemployment having a 95% effectiveness rate. Imagine, if you will, an area with 10000 unemployed people. 5% of those 10000, or 500, are the kinds of cheats you describe, and 50 of those people are ones you actually want to hire if you can.

You will see the 500 cheats, because they are going to go around to every single potential employer and never getting hired. You might, if you're lucky, see some of the 50 people you want to hire (they might get hired by your competitors). You will never see the remaining 9450, because they're legitimately looking for work and realize that they aren't a good match for your firm.

Or another way of putting it, as Joel Spolsky points out in his advice on finding good employees, the people you really want are almost never on the market (because they're either happily employed or snatched up really quickly), while the people you don't want are always on the market and applying for everything under the sun.

Re:Law of unintended consequences

[radtea]

you have to know that "unintended consequences" is the touchstone of modern government action of any kind

Right, because nature KNOWS when its a group of humans calling themselves a "government" as opposed to exactly the same humans calling themselves a "corporation"!

The Left and Right are defined by what they discount, not by what they advocate: the Left discounts failures by humans calling themselves governments, the Right discounts failures by humans calling themselves corporations. Sane people recognize that it's humans all the way down.

A dream come true for the Ambulance Chasers

[Squidlips]

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.

Re:A dream come true for the Ambulance Chasers

[GameboyRMH]

True, this is why we have never tried to change the course of storms, even though we certainly have the technology to do it. For example hurricane Irene could have been redirected a bit towards the middle of the Atlantic, surely for less money than the damage it caused.

Probably doesn't help that there's zero political will to spend money on avoiding/preventing problems before they hit us in the face.

Re:A dream come true for the Ambulance Chasers

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Not necessarily.

First, just because there might be a lawsuit doesn't mean you don't behave in a profitable activity, it just increases the amount of profit required to justify the risk.

Second, if Congress decides to address the problem, it can specifically prevent related lawsuits, making such defendants judgment-proof for those purposes--or at least can set a very high standard of liability. (e.g. wanton negligence, and perhaps the plaintiff has to show that inaction would not have resulted in more harm to others than you suffered).

Re:A dream come true for the Ambulance Chasers

[vbraga]

this is why we have never tried to change the course of storms, even though we certainly have the technology to do it.

Really? Maybe my Google-fu isn't sharp today but I couldn't find any links. Could you share more about the subject?

Re:A dream come true for the Ambulance Chasers

[GameboyRMH]

Whoa you're right, it is hard to find this stuff online. Here's one article:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-tropical-cyclones-be-stopped

I've seen a few documentaries on the technologies involved. Off the top of my head, one of the ideas was to drop a cooling chemical onto the ocean ahead of one side of the hurricane. It would be sort of like "applying the brakes" to that side. There was some similar idea involving the use of algae.

Re:A dream come true for the Ambulance Chasers

[brainzach]

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.

IANAL but I am pretty sure weather events are considered acts of God so there are no grounds to sue. Maybe if you can prove that the geoengineering directly caused the weather event you could, but that would be nearly impossible to do. It is like linking a butterfly to causing a hurricane.

Re:A dream come true for the Ambulance Chasers

[Squidlips]

It would be even worse. Every time there is a crop failure there would be a law suit. Or lower crop yield. Or heavy surf. Or strong winds. How about when your wedding gets washed out by a thunder shower? Time to sue, right? Total nightmare.

Unintentional experimentation

[RichMan]

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.

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[GameboyRMH]

True, this is the best argument I've seen for geo-engineering. We're already fucking with the environment drastically with no plan or real intent (but with known negative effects), why not fuck with it in a planned way towards a positive goal?

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[Uhhhh oh ya!]

Seriously I can put up with this global warming hype as long as the scientists just use it to get free grants, but they better not start getting carried away and actually screwing stuff up.

I can totally see it in 100 years when we have caused an ice age after releasing something in to the atmosphere in an attempt to stop global warming.

Lets just sit back and see what happens, I remember not to long ago when people were afraid of global cooling.

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[GameboyRMH]

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.

If you did any research into the issue you'd know that. You're another "informed skeptic," no doubt.

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[Palpatine_li]

How about sulphide release countering global warming? Where are the studies when we need them?

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[mapkinase]

I am already modifying my bike:

1) bumped into a street sign pole yesterday - who knew my front wheel will turn into 8?

etc.

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[Vintermann]

I remember not to long ago when people were afraid of global cooling.

Most likely you "remembered" it after reading it on Watts or something.

I suggest you read up on skepticalscience.com, which is to global warming denialists what the talk.origins FAQ is to creationists. "Scientists predicted an ice age in the 70s" is number 11 of 169 on their list.

There's really no excuse for an educated person to deny climate science any longer.

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[radtea]

We are already doing several forms of environmental engineering

It isn't engineering until you can weaponize it.

Although digging through memory and a quick search on "cloud seeding warfare" reveals has actually been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[Uhhhh oh ya!]

I may have not expressed my stance correctly. I do not deny climate science but we are constantly learning more. To state that everyone who believes in "Global Warming" is in agreement on what it actually implies would be very ignorant. I have heard so many (sometimes contradicting) views on what causes global warming and what it will lead to, that I have a hard time developing a stationary stance against them.

What I should have stated more clearly is that I am thankful to climate science. Smog in LA had reached unacceptable conditions and were only getting worse. Desiring to lessen the damage we are doing to our world is very admirable. That is, in moderation. We are still learning how everything that influences our climate work together, only in recent years have we noticed that things such as sun spots may have a profound influence.

I simply do not want a scientist to get carried away and do some permanent damage. If we start to see dramatic changes in climate then I will argue that we need to look in to a solution. However, recently the weather has been fairly nice where I live and I don't think we need to jump the gun to "fix" it.

Re:Unintentional experimentation

[Vintermann]

However, recently the weather has been fairly nice where I live and I don't think we need to jump the gun to "fix" it.

Is this a parody? So hard to tell...

Katrina, Irene

[FurtiveGlancer]

Maybe they should look for a way to diminsh the strength and impact of hurricanes and typhoons.

Re:Katrina, Irene

[whiteboy86]

Once fusion or other excess power is viable, the abundance of energy combined with advanced automation and robotic technologies could easily enable even enormously large scale environmental projects that are out of reach today. For example large artificial ocean floating islands producing heat/cold/vapor could easily be manipulating atmospheric condition to prevent hurricanes... There is no doubt that there will be technology in the future that is capable to affect weather this way.

Re:Katrina, Irene

[tp1024]

Hurricanes have been known to occur in the Caribbean Sea by Europeans since the year 1500 - and paleotempestology has shown those to have been hitting on ocean shores of the USA basically for ever. That includes both of the spots where New Orleans and New York have been founded. If you don't prepare for things that have been happening for centuries, it's your own damn fault.

Don't blame climate change for things that never needed any change at all to occur in the past.

Re:Katrina, Irene

[dbIII]

Easy, move a looong way back from the coast into tornado country.

Idea

[32771]

We could use the remaining half of Oil reserves to do this for instance.

Circular problem

[Solandri]

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 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.

Re:Circular problem

[cforciea]

Hmm, I'd mod interesting if I could. Using our atmospheric makeup as an energy storage medium is a very interesting concept.

Re:Circular problem

[Comboman]

There are ways to sequester CO2 that don't require much energy input, like planting trees or spreading iron in the ocean to encourage algae growth. Other climate engineering ideas don't involve sequestering CO2 at all but rather reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed on earth and increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back into space. These can vary from orbiting mirrors, to really high smoke stacks on existing coal-fired plants, to painting your roof white. Many are local and scalable so that the effects/unintended consequences can be measured on a small scale before deploying widely.

Re:Circular problem

[yacwroy]

You don't have to remake coal or oil. You can use lower-energy storage forms, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage

Re:Circular problem

[dbIII]

Scrubbing is typically done with vast amounts of water, but if that water is pumped in the energy has to come from somewhere. Scrubbing CO2 and CO would be a lot harder than scrubbing for NOx, SOx and solids.
It's easy to bind CO2 with lime, which of course is made by a process that releases more CO2 than it can bind. Everything that looks obvious is unfortunately like trying to cool a room down by opening up a fridge and only making it hotter over time.
You also need to learn a bit more about nuclear - nothing about nuclear is "right now" and we still haven't finished building a single 1980s designed AP1000 reactor.

No, it won't.

[scottbomb]

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.

Re:No, it won't.

[GameboyRMH]

Hey dude you typed in the URL for Freerepublic wrong.

Re:No, it won't.

[brit74]

I'd bet a billion dollars that, if you told the companies responsible for global warming that the government was going to pay them to correct global warming, they'd flip 180 degrees and admit that the science for global warming is solid. Afterall, it was only the lust for money that they denied it in the first place. (The oil companies stand to reap a hundreds trillion of dollars* worth of money in oil revenue -- which is far larger than any money earned by climate scientists. So, if you're going to being up the "shilling for money" argument against global warming, you've got far, far, far larger problems if you're supporting the oil-companies talking points.)

* There's an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels of oil still in the ground. At $90 / barrel (roughly the average over the last year), that works out to over $100 trillion in revenue. Depending on the source, a large percentage of that can be profit (it costs a few dollars / barrel to pull the oil out of Saudi Arabia).

Re:No, it won't.

[Mashiki]

Yeah I guess that inconvenient fact about research admins leaning hard on controversial and counter data is just bunk too. Right? I guess once a troll, always a troll.

Re:No, it won't.

[GameboyRMH]

We'll see how it turns out. What's funny is that these tree ring and ice core sources are "controversial" yet they both match up pretty well. What an odd coincidence.

Re:No, it won't.

[Paul1969]

I'd point out all the things that are nonsense in your statement, but the massively brain-dead substitution of "weather" for "climate" really says it all.
I bet you sleep with a plush Rush Limbaugh doll.

Re:No, it won't.

[mvdwege]

[citation needed]

Because if there's ONE thing we're good at

[Anonymous Coward]

it's controlling huge, non-linear systems that we only partially understand.

[/sarcasm]

Won't work

[gmuslera]

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.

Already thought about

[werfu]

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.

Re:Already thought about

[Eunuchswear]

Frank Herbert has thought the idea in Dune, with satellite controlling the climate

Huh? In Dune the climate was controlled by the sandworms sequestering the water.

Re:Already thought about

[werfu]

Arrakis climate isn't regulated. But others, like Caladan, are.

I've got an idea how to increase temperatures

[tp1024]

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.

Carbon Harvesting

[Phoenix666]

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.

Re:Carbon Harvesting

[Tickety-boo]

I've seen these Terrestrial Reclamation Energy Exfoliates too! I hear that when they are fully charged, you can make all sorts of neat stuff out of them chairs, tables, houses...

I know what you are getting at, I just couldn't resist....

fair warning

[belloc1]

I am going to change the climate unlesss the nations of world give me.... one million dollars!

I've got a great C-E plan:

[JSBiff]

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).

Re:I've got a great C-E plan:

[metrometro]

Yes. Just because it's likely to work doesn't make it less exciting.

Re:I've got a great C-E plan:

[tp1024]

Actually, reforestation has a much more direct impact on temperatures than sequestering CO2 could ever have. It also prevents water from directly running off in rivers - with helps with mitigating all the floods that are occurring these days after people have sealed too many surfaces that would usually have held back the rain. (Which people ignore and instead blame all floods on climate change.)

But forests also increase evaporation, because water running off in rivers has a much lower surface area and doesn't evaporate for the most part - quite unlike water clinging to needles and leaves or being temporarily stored in the plants themselves. Increased evaporation also cools down the lower atmosphere, because it sequesters latent heat in vaporized water which will go on to form clouds higher up in the atmosphere - which increases temperatures there, by releasing its latent heat through condensation. But this is ok, because we are complaining about higher temperatures lower down in the atmosphere (that is, on the ground) and not higher up. More clouds also increase albedo, thereby reducing solar forcing.

Air is heated up by the ground surface. Light falls on the ground, heats the ground up, the ground emits far-IR radiation which gets absorbed by the air - which is otherwise mostly transparent to the light of the sun - and heats the air up. If you ignore the properties of the surface, you are ignoring a key part of the system. And we did change the properties of the surface a lot in the last 100-150 years by deforestation and expanding agriculture in large areas of the earths landmass. That is, turning areas that were forests throughout the year into savannas for one half of the year, and deserts for the other half of the year.

Re:I've got a great C-E plan:

[JSBiff]

The problem with your question is that to answer it, one must assume a particular technology to analyze. You could look at our current wind turbines, and say that, well we use C amount of concrete and S amount of steel, X amount of some other substance, and the production of C concrete produces C_c carbon, while the production of S amount of steel produces S_c carbon, and so forth.

But, the possibility exists that someone in the future will come up with a different approach to converting wind power into a more useful form, which may require much less carbon.

It's also possible that using the same technology, we can engineer different manufacturing/refining processes for making the various raw materials, which use wind power as the source of energy, to produce low-carbon materials, which might significantly reduce the carbon footprint of making wind turbines.

As for natural gas backing, that's the current approach. It needn't be the only approach. There's a lot of very smart people working on trying to create practical "utility scale" energy storage systems (some of the ideas include flywheel-based systems, compressed gas systems, and other approaches). In the relatively near future, we might have much better storage options, which might obviate the need for 'backing' for wind and solar.

However, I will admit that for that reason (that is, the current need for gas backing for wind/solar), as well as a number of other pragmatic issues, I currently favor nuclear power (especially Gen IV systems which would 'recycle' our current nuclear waste - like the Integral Fast Reactor and Molten Salt Fast Reactor).

Re:I've got a great C-E plan:

[lennier]

Actually, reforestation has a much more direct impact on temperatures than sequestering CO2 could ever have.

+this.

I'm rather annoyed by the whole CO2 issue as I think it's a red herring compared to deforestation. The big problem is that we're cutting down too many trees, fishing the oceans dry, and letting too many species go extinct; if we just stop doing that, CO2 will fix itself. No need for fancy industrial band-aid solutions; even if we have those, they won't solve the bigger problem of lack of biodiversity.

It's really not that difficult. We've been watching a slow-motion environmental disaster unfold since the 1950s. But this very recent myopic focus on CO2 and global warming to the exclusion of the real, living, parts of the biosphere is disappointing and seems to miss the entire point of the environmental movement: it's the life forms, stupid.

Re:I've got a great C-E plan:

[Eunuchswear]

1) Stop deforestation, try to re-forest lands previously cleared. This will help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Only if you then turn those trees back into coal and oil.

Re:I've got a great C-E plan:

[Eunuchswear]

+this.

I'm rather annoyed by the whole CO2 issue as I think it's a red herring compared to deforestation.

I'm mostly annoyed by people who decide they know what is going on with no references to any actual, you know, research.

Got some papers to back that up or did you just pull it out of your arse?

Re:I've got a great C-E plan:

[radtea]

Everything you are suggesting is already underway, although we could be more aggressive about understanding and protecting the ocean. Deforestation stopped in North America a long time ago, and as farmland goes fallow the number of woodland acres is increasing. Birthrates are dropping due to world-wide urbanization and empowerment of women, although religiously dominated states like the US and the Islamic world are behind the curve on that. Alternative energy is now an industry, and I'm seeing new solar installations all over the place, including a couple in my neighbourhood. A decade of that and I think people will be astonished at how much solar capacity we have. Energy efficiency will continue to improve, particularly as we embed intelligence into more and more machines.

So we're actually doing not too badly, if we can keep the wheels turning for another couple of decades and convince the religious nuts to leave off their insanity.

Everyone talks about the weather

[goombah99]

Everyone talks about the weather. But no one does anything about it

in a word, no.

[nimbius]

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.

Re:in a word, no.

[brainzach]

Corporations can profit off geoengineering.

The problem with the Kyoto Protocol was that it required nations to use less energy which would hurt energy companies profits. It will also put one country at a disadvantage because other nations will ignore the Kyoto Proctocol and have the advantage higher energy usage. There is no economic incentive for an individual nation to follow the Kyoto Protocol.

With geoengineering, we can theoretically burn all the cheap fossil fuels we want and not have to worry about the effects of global warming. Everyone wins.

Conservation of matter

[overshoot]

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.

Not quite that bad

[overshoot]

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.

Re:Not quite that bad

[SleazyRidr]

Also, not emitting sulphur only required a few modifications to the existing process people were using, so there wasn't as much political opposition to it. If we want to stop emitting carbon that'll take a lot more effort, so people are putting the effort in to opposing it rather than just going along with it.

Proof beyond all doubt

[overshoot]

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!

we're fsckd

[justleavealonemmmkay]

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.

Geoengineering is a swallowed fly.

[bmo]

*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

Will never happen, dream on

[azgard]

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.

YOU will never get off this rock

[Chemisor]

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.

Re:YOU will never get off this rock

[spauldo]

The bulk of the energy required to move in space isn't as much as you seem to think it is, unless you're trying for a significant percentage of lightspeed. The problem we have is that our most developed technology for getting to space is horribly inefficient.

Solve the problem of leaving the gravity well cheaply, and space manufacturing, recreation, and colonies become possible, at least in the local neighborhood (Earth orbit). Yeah, we'll never see martian wine at the local liquor store, but we might use medicines and electronics assembled in microgravity, and the middle class could probably afford a three day vacation in a space hotel.

Mining may be profitable, at least as a long-term operation, even with the high cost of chemical rockets - not today, sure, but as robotics technology advances and the rare elements (platinum group, etc.) become rarer, it might work. There's all sorts of good stuff in the mantle, but it's easier and more economical to get it from space. There's one major advantage to space mining - you don't have to lift ore out of the gravity well if you're going to use it in space. Need iron to build an orbital factory? Lift a smelter into space, and process the iron there. This will have to happen if we want habitats, because mass is the only reliable way to shield people from radiation.

That's all engineering and economics. Eventually, some group will think it's worth it economically to build a space elevator or launch loop or whatever, just like we thought it was worth it to go to the moon. Once you can get to orbit cheaply, space becomes accessible to all kinds of things.

Physics gets you in the end, but not with energy. It's the scale of space, and the limitations on speed, that kill any idea of some kind of "Star Trek" future. Economics is (currently) keeping us from leaving the Earth, but physics will keep us from leaving the solar system. Fortunately, there's plenty here for us to work with.

As an aside, I completely agree with you that there will be no mass population relocations to space, but not because of energy cost. The logistics simply won't support it. Even if you built five space elevators and kept them running 24/7 bringing people to space, you'd have a hard time keeping up with the birth rate. The CIA factbook estimates in 2009 there was a population increase (not just births, but births - deaths) of around 211,000 people every day. Even if you could get them all into space, you'd have to build habitats for them.

We will not see this in our lifetime, but that doesn't mean we can't be a part of the development.

That's the alphabetical order

[tp1024]

I guess that must be the reason.

Sure we will...

[BlackSabbath]

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.

No: Geoengineering Is Just A Diversion

[cmholm]

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.

Re:No: Geoengineering Is Just A Diversion

[cmholm]

Sure, of course, which is why you didn't bother to bullet point them... least they get shot full of holes, ar, ar.

MOD PARENT UP

[citylivin]

People are so short sighted.

Re:What could possibly go wrong!?

[NeutronCowboy]

Yes, and QED is just a computer model. Unless I see specific comments on what is wrong with the individual models, this makes as much sense as "automobile expert says that feeding one gear into another gear that feeds into another gear that drives a shaft that drives more gears is not a valid way to move an object."

Re:earth.bak

[geminidomino]

Ever since Slartibartfast tore down his git server like a little bitch when some joker complained about the gratuitous comments in fjord.h

Brought to you by Weyland-Yutani Corp

[Slutticus]

Building Better Worlds

You know, we manufacture those by the way....

[Slutticus]

Atmosphere processors. Remarkable piece of machinery. Completely automated.

Reverse Effects of Climate Change

[ChrisMaple]

Cue the pinhead-dancing angels.

Environmental keynesianism...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it has worked so well for our economy?</snark>

Yet another reason I am SOOO glad to be childless

[Paul1969]

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.

Don't Panic!

[dbIII]

Don't panic, just take a look on that article today about cloud seeding to get an idea of how far off "geoengineering" is.

It has already been done

[thogard]

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.

Re:Yet another reason I am SOOO glad to be childle

[radtea]

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.

Re:earth.bak

[BranMan]

And you want to test the recovery process... how?

Re:Yet another reason I am SOOO glad to be childle

[Paul1969]

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.

Re:Thermodynamics ?

[blueg3]

The universe as a whole is a single isolated system.

Alternately, the second law still applies if you consider the universe to consist of two interacting systems: your non-isolated system (e.g., Earth) and the rest of the Universe. Your system (Earth) can lose entropy as long as the rest of the Universe gains at least as much entropy.

Second law still applies -- it's just that you can probably manage for longer by harvesting free energy outside of Earth.