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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Law of unintended consequences

[goldspider]

What could possibly go wrong?

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: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.

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).

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