Slashdot Mirror
Public Supports Geo-Engineering
Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that there is strong support among the public in the U.S., U.K., and Canada for research into geo-engineering with approximately 72% respondents supporting the research (PDF). The survey was focused on solar radiation management. The article also mentions the U.K. Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project, which would inject water particles into the upper atmosphere as a prelude to spraying cooling sulphate. Researchers for the SPICE project calculate that 10-20 balloons could cool the global climate by 2C. Also mentioned in the article is the voluntary moratorium on the procedure by the international Convention on Biological Diversity."
Welcome our new balloon overlords.
21st Century Renaissance Man
"The survey focused on "solar radiation management", which involves reflecting energy from the Sun away from the Earth's surface, and received support from 72% of respondents." Exactly like a nuclear winter. Except with 72% support. You really can artificially get any result from a survey.
I'm sure the public rted all the changes that came with the Industrial Revolution as well and now look what we have.
We really need to stop masking symptoms it's disgustingly ridiculous.
I support Geo Engineering.
Otherwise thousands of owners of Geo Metros, Prizms and Storms would have no way to fix their cars when they repeatedly break.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
There was strong support for allowing the study of SRM. Support decreased and uncertainty rose as subjects were asked about their support for using SRM immediately, or to stop a climate emergency.
10-20 balloons could cool the global climate by 2C.
If this is true, nobody is going to be able to stop a rogue state (probably located near the equator) from doing this - hell, some of the Pacific Islanders could probably pull it off with the money they make selling stamps to collectors.
What could possibly go wrong?
The acceptance of the research is partly because people don't believe it can have any significant effect. The 2C cooling with 20 balloons is a bold claim.
The problem is that we try to MacGyver a solution without having any real sense of the problem, the million feedback loops that run through it, or the critical impacts our bailing wire and bubblegum solutions will product. Our history is rife with examples of simple solutions that horribly blew up in people's faces. If you're gonna screw with the planet go slow, get clues, make models, test worst case scenarios and for the sake of all that's holy, have a friggin exist strategy. That and the funding to clean up any messes you make (plan big, you're screwing with the entire ecosystem!)
That all depends what the consequences of doing nothing are doesn't it? Lets say we hit an absolute worst case scenario: the oceans are showing every sign of being at or past the tipping point of an anoxic event, a sudden positive feedback induced drop in global ocean oxygen levels. The effects of the CO2 in the air are still going to be building up for years or even decades even if all man made CO2 production stopped immediately. It's possible with immediate, global, brute force intervention such an event could be averted; the risks of knock on effects be damned, millions and possibly billions will die if we do nothing.
So the real question is where is the cutoff point. At what point do the risks of unintended consequences outweigh the risks of doing nothing at all. Flooding of coastal areas? Dust bowl style droughts for years on end? Flooding of formerly desert regions? Ironically, we don't have the technology or will to directly address the threats of global warming. Significantly cutting CO2 emissions just isn't possible today without significant loss of life or at least quality of life. We probably do, however, have the means to address warming in a brute force way. Spreading particulates into the upper atmosphere might not sound great, but if the global temperature is 2C higher than it was during the rest of recent history it may be preferable to the alternative.
Of course some people feel we are in the same predicament as the guy that's been thrown out of an airplane without a parachute. He really wants to try and use his shirt as chute and maybe even flap his arms, and he's getting really sick of the guy putting him in a bear hug and yelling in his ear, "Go slow and think it through, those ideas probably won't work"...
It's not like we have a spare Earth for testing purposes.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And who will make that decision?
The public has made it clear they can't be bothered to do anything.
The politicians are too spineless to mandate real changes.
What options are left? The way I see it this is going to happen so we might as well start experimenting NOW.
Not sure how they're going to pump water 20km up in the air though. It would need a hell of a pump and an even more hellish pipe to hold the pressure. What size balloon could even lift that much? I suspect they haven't thought their cunning plan all the way through...
No sig today...
Who wouldn't support Geo-Engineering?
Geo-Engineering is cool.
It's not like voluntarily limiting CO2 emissions has any chance of success, at least not in a democracy. We will keep burning fossil fuels until the extraction costs become too great. We might as well invest in a plan that is at least plausible.
Except in the situation you describe the consequences of not acting are well understood and imminent. In the climate change realty we face there is NO IMMINENT DANGER, just a longer term view of some potential outcomes; that we have been wrong about before.
The cautionary principle applies here. We don't know the consequences of dumping billions of tonnes of carbon emissions into our atmosphere so we should probably try and cut back on that; but its already happening and things have gone "ok" so far. On the other hand we don't know much about chemically altering our upper atmosphere to reflect energy away. Might not be so wise to fool with that until more modeling has been done.
Also we have an "energy crisis" last time I looked at the news paper. Perhaps reducing our access to the one truly "free" source of power we have is not such a great plan?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
And I drive a soft top...
I like global warming.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Of course people are going to support large-scale 'fixes' rather than having to car pool.
And we are very bad at risk estimation, especially for things we have no experience with. So given vague probability of 'oops we might toast the earth or kick start a new ice age' versus the price of gas doubling, the first choice is going to look pretty attractive.
I don't agree with that, but I think that's what you're dealing with.
Sage advice from the 1940s which fell on deaf ears in the copulate-like-bunnies 1950s. Screwing with the planet dates back to the invention of agriculture. Then came the industrial revolution with soot, SO2, and aerosols. By my count were entering round three, at the very least. Neither of the first two rounds were preceded by any kind of useful model. Another one I should probably include is air transportation as a pathogen vector. Well, we're all still alive. So far, so good.
I guess the exit strategy on copulate-like-bunnies would be to refuse to feed two billion people. But since the consensus seems to be feed all those mouths (present company included), and we can only do so by continuing to burn fossil fuels, and much of the world's population resides near sea level, perhaps we're best served with a thoughtful blend of prudence and haste.
One of the things that could possibly go wrong is that Nero fiddles while Rome burns.
BTW, is it standard costume etiquette for precautionary superheros to enter the conversation swinging their hat like Slim Pickens surfing his big salami?
Not sure how they're going to pump water 20km up in the air though. It would need a hell of a pump and an even more hellish pipe to hold the pressure. What size balloon could even lift that much? I suspect they haven't thought their cunning plan all the way through...
Easy peasy, just run it up the side of the space elevator.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
RESEARCH into geo-engineering is a good idea. What we are doing right now is basicly geo-engineering, but with a blindfold. To think, that we have no clue what we are doing is pretty scary if you think about it. So yes, research it please.
Applying this knowledge to actively geo-engineer is a whole different story though... (as opposed to identify where we are already doing it without knowing and putting a stop to it).
how they're going to pump water 20km up in the air
Simple - just use a space elevator. Now I guess we have some work to do.
Sage advice from the 1940s which fell on deaf ears in the copulate-like-bunnies 1950s. Screwing with the planet dates back to the invention of agriculture. Then came the industrial revolution with soot, SO2, and aerosols. By my count were entering round three, at the very least. Neither of the first two rounds were preceded by any kind of useful model. Another one I should probably include is air transportation as a pathogen vector. Well, we're all still alive. So far, so good.
I guess the exit strategy on copulate-like-bunnies would be to refuse to feed two billion people. But since the consensus seems to be feed all those mouths (present company included), and we can only do so by continuing to burn fossil fuels, and much of the world's population resides near sea level, perhaps we're best served with a thoughtful blend of prudence and haste.
One of the things that could possibly go wrong is that Nero fiddles while Rome burns.
BTW, is it standard costume etiquette for precautionary superheros to enter the conversation swinging their hat like Slim Pickens surfing his big salami?
By copulate like bunnies, I assume you mean that we overpopulated the earth. There is no actual proof of that. In addition in Western countries, obesity has risen to alarming rates while in third world countries people are starving. While I do believe there is a maximum number of people the planet can ultimately support, the food problem seems to be one of distribution, not capacity to produce.
Half the population doesn't believe in global warming, and the other half is subdivided into the following groups: 1) people who don't care enough to do anything about it; 2) environmentalists who will protest outside of nuclear power plants, make the problem worse, and who basically caused this predicament in the first place more than anyone else by aborting the nuclear revolution.
I would say the chances of concerted, rational, worldwide effort to massively reduce carbon emissions are about 0.00001%.
Nonsense! Science will make Mother Nature his bitch.
Aperture Science will fix our problems! Just ask Cave Johnson--he's got the ticket, buddy.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The problem is that it adds permanent consequences (weather impact, long term solar reduction) without actually countering CO2 levels.
It's like a partial band-aid for temperature only. Only this band-aid comes with really nasty side effects.
That way you can kill off the people that are the source of the 'carbon' problem.
Too bad plants breath carbon dioxide. We were also the last hope that plants had to get into space, and find more habitable planets.
The plants are very sad now.
"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun."
For crissakes, half of the public has an IQ at or below 100 (the other half obviously at and above, by definition).
The "public" is dumb. I guess I should count myself among the public too, because I'm sure not qualified to be a climatologist, except from my armchair.
While I posted on here that geoengineering is "a swallowed fly" as the song goes, I can only express my opinion as to the possible effects. It doesn't make my opinion have any weight, though.
What we do to the climate should not be a popularity contest.
--
BMO
"Strong support among the public?" means absolutely nothing when 92% and 55% of the population incorrectly defined the terms geo-engineering and climate engineering respectively. Abstract: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044006/pdf/1748-9326_6_4_044006.pdf
Lying with statistics is always bullshit.
Academic, Political, Religious, Biz-C*O lying for money or privilege is a gross injustice to the public, which very regrettably is not punished by public floggings.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I read an article about this scheme...due to prevailing wind patterns you actually want the balloons in the north and south hemispheres. Interestingly, right about over the Alberta/Saskatchewan tar sands would be pretty much perfect, which is handy because they have *huge* piles of waste sulfur just sitting there ready to be sprayed up into the atmosphere.
Provide thoughts to the semi-literate and below-average IQ people from the cruel thoughtless class of people in politics, business, and religion.
Well, it works at getting reelected, making stealing legal, and public oppression righteous.
Godddd bless them for all their self-helpful lies.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I for one welcome our new dragon overlords, and look forward to their sulfur-enabled atmosphere allowing them to rid the Earth of all humans.
Which is kind of amusing, in that humans will make it possible for dinosaur-like avians to replace them, after we muck up earth by burning fossilized trees and dinosaurs.
Pern, anyone?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
At least /. is not loaded with loathing idiots.
If stupidity or selfishness were made crimes, then the Washington DC mall would be the center of a large penitentiary.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The public also give strong support for "Jersey Shore"
Heck, forget unintended consequences; people have been pointing out for ages the problem with solutions like this one. First, it's only masking. So it must continue to operate and grow ever bigger and bigger of an operation. If it ever fails -- or, if we find some other devastating unintended consequence and have to stop -- all of the "masked" effects suddenly appear in a very short amount of time. Second, we already know that spraying high-altitude sulphate particles is bad for both ozone and acid rain, decreases sunlight available to plants, provides an uneven heat compensation profile, and would likely cause major drought in monsoon areas. Third, this does nothing to address the other (and potentially larger) consequences of ever-rising CO2 levels, such as ocean acidification.
Some geoengineering proposals have promise. This is not one of them.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
We don't know the consequences of dumping billions of tonnes of carbon emissions into our atmosphere
I don't know where you've been hiding for the last 20 years, but yes, we do know. Unfortunately, there's no brick wall that will tell us "stop or die." If we do hit a brick wall, it will just tell us "die."
On the other hand we don't know much about chemically altering our upper atmosphere to reflect energy away.
Well, there we agree. It's stupid to do this unless the consequences of not doing it are horrific (as in several billion dead) and we're reasonably sure it will help. This wouldn't do anything for acidification of the oceans which is the effect of our carbon emissions that could potentially decimate us in the near term.
Support SETI@home
Unfortunately, in every model I've run, temperatures continue to rise well after all the people are dead.
Support SETI@home
Anytime man messes with this stuff you can bet there will un-intended consequences.
You mean messes with climate by doing things like this? Or messing with climate like we do every day?
Support SETI@home
It must keep increasing? What, from 20 balloons to 40? This is an easy, cheap solution, but you people STILL want to starve half the world to death, and impoverish the rest to satisfy the Climate Gods.
I am reminded of a quote by James Lovelock in The Vanishing Face of Gaia - "..before we start geoengineering, we have to ask: Are we sufficiently talented to take on what might become the onerous permanent task of keeping the Earth in homeostasis? Consider what might happen if we start by using a stratospheric aerosol to ameliorate global heating—even if it succeeded it would not be long before we faced the additional problem of ocean acidification. This would need another medicine, and so on. We could find ourselves enslaved in a Kafkaesque world from which there was no escape."
but that is not all, Lovelock continues:
"The alternative is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself."
Two very grim images of the future.
Not sure how they're going to pump water 20km up in the air though. It would need a hell of a pump and an even more hellish pipe to hold the pressure. What size balloon could even lift that much? I suspect they haven't thought their cunning plan all the way through...
You might suspect that if you assumed the Cambridge University scientists that proposed it were idiots.
RTFM.
And "you people" would rather take the sky away from everyone in the vain hope you won't have to pay a few extra cents per kilowatt.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What part of "likely cause major drought in monsoon areas" was hard for you to understand? And, FYI, these aren't just "balloons". Apparently you didn't bother to click the links. For example, "The proposed delivery system is a tethered balloon that would represent the tallest man-made structure in history." -- did you miss that part? With a whole cargo ship as the base station? With the balloon remaining stationary in 55m/s winds, with 125m/s against the pipe? How about the several-dozen-tonne pipe pumping 3kg/s *straight up for 25 kilometers*? At 4,000 to 6,000 atmospheres pressure? In a pipe that needs to be both flexible and ultralight?
To give you an idea, a high pressure oil pipe may handle 2,000 atmospheres, but does so with 1/4 inch thick steel and weigh something like 25lb/foot. This needs to be flexible, withstand 125m/s winds, handle lightning strikes, three times the internal pressure, *and* weigh only about 1 pound per foot.
Pish posh -- "an easy, cheap solution"!
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
I was excited to think they were talking about Geomatics Engineering, which is my major, but apparently we still get no love.
Except the job market. Jobs seem to love Geomatics Engineers, at least from what I've seen.
Unintended Consequences
JoeR
You might suspect that if you assumed the Cambridge University scientists that proposed it were idiots.
The people proposing the space elevator aren't idiots either, but that doesn't mean it's ever going to be practical to build it.
No sig today...
Every time the public hears a story like this they become more apathetic about global warming.
If you can't actually build it, don't write smug little treatises about it.
No sig today...
The people proposing the space elevator aren't idiots either, but that doesn't mean it's ever going to be practical to build it.
The balloons are 20 km up. The space elevator is 30,000 km or so long. The first is feasible, the second requires a breakthrough or two in materials science. In any case I was responding to the wanker who thought that he was the first to consider the weight of the pipe.
Just wait until politicians realize that geo-engineering solutions
1) don't require global coordination (in fact they'd probably be detracted by it)
2) don't cost all that much, negating the need for huge budgets and the power concentration they cause
Politicians won't like this. Forced CO2 reductions, especially in the form of increased taxation, on the other hand, embody all bad things that government is : it's hugely invasive, expensive, requires massive bureaucracies, and requires regulatory bodies with worldwide power. Caesar should have considered "veni, co2'ed, vici" ... much more effective.
In addition to that there's of course the huge legal question. Right now climate change is the result of natural processes. Suppose the US starts changing climate, obviously against the wishes of at least a few parties.
Suppose the US were to fix global warming by actively regulating climate. Obviously this is equivalent to "stealing" all agricultural production from Greenland, parts of Canada, Siberia, even Tasmania will sufffer on the other end of the globe. Less obivous, but much more massive losses will occur in Africa. Furthermore, there will be massive increases in required heating in large parts of the world, basically returning to the situation of the 1970s.
Since the US directly and deliberately caused these damages, is it now not responsible for paying damages for the losses suffered ?
To illustrate : in 1940s it was perfectly normal for a winter to kill > 1000 people a year in Moskou. Today, the only dead are from alcohol poisoning and traffic accidents. Whoever fixes global warming through geoengineering is obviously directly responsible for their deaths. What with the half trillions dollars of additional heating required for people to survive ?
Anyone with a plane and basic chemical knowledge who feels particulary "green" at some point in time.
Or a foreign power, or even terrorists that feel like causing a cooling disaster would benefit them, or alternatively would benefit <insert imaginary child-raping friend/prophet/mass_of_earth_with_a_name/... of choice here>
Undoing geo-engineering is basically impossible, so as soon as someone makes the decision for you, you're pretty much fucked. We're hanging by a rope from a cliff face and geo-engineering is researching scissors. I'm not saying it is necessarily going to blow up, just that it's pretty fucking likely.
Just shoot up a lot of water 1km into the air. The amount of water that has to make it to 20km is not that great. Some of the drops will get lucky and get to 20km.
done/done
So which is it :
1) we know all the little feedback mechanisms in our athmosphere (and yes - there are millions, if not billions of those) and so we can predict the consequences of geoengineering and we have reasonable evidence for global warming
2) we do not know all the little feedback mechanisms, meaning that we cannot predict the consequences of geoengineering AND we do not know anything about global warming, not even if it happens at all
If you "believe" in global warming, you're pretty much forced to accept geoengineering will work. And of course, it won't.
experiment with totally unproven technology.
This time it's an experiment with the whole planet - good luck!
Besides that, it's one argument to sullen people to avoid significant steps to reduce emissions to tolerable levels.
The numbers and measures to get there are known. They are inconvenient and current systems political/economic are unable to react adequately.
Future generations of humans will have to deal with it - shuff it to them!
Great, so rather than studying whether its feasible, they are asking joe bloggs if he is in favour of it. Great. Well studies show that a large percentage of the public support everyone being filthy rich and not having to work anymore, and also never being sick anymore. So while we are engineering away our environmental problems I propose we also cure all known diseases and print out a huge bundle of cash for every man woman and child.
Godddd bless them for all their self-helpful lies.
'Surveys' can get pretty much any result you want just by wording the questions appropriately.
No sig today...
The balloons are 20 km up. The space elevator is 30,000 km or so long. The first is feasible, the second requires a breakthrough or two in materials science. In any case I was responding to the wanker who thought that he was the first to consider the weight of the pipe.
Don't forget the weight of the water inside it, did I mention that...?
No sig today...
FTA: "6.8% of the participants were excluded from the study because they appeared to have used external Internet-based sources, such as Wikipedia, to inform themselves about the survey topic."
So....only the ignorant people were counted?
QED.
No sig today...
n/t
We don't know the consequences of dumping billions of tonnes of carbon emissions into our atmosphere so we should probably try and cut back on that; but its already happening and things have gone "ok" so far.
Things have gone OK so far in the sense that we haven't yet destroyed all life on the planet by meddling with the very forces of nature and trying to play God, or anything really serious, I suppose.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
have a friggin exist strategy
Ha ha Freudian slip!
Ha ha you said nipple! Oh, wait...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The public has heard oft geo engineering.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I disagree with this point.
If you were injecting something which had a short half-life in the upper atmosphere, then why would it blow up? The process would essentially be active - it would need power to continue - and thus could be halted reasonably rapidly. Climate change's issues come from rapid alteration of the Earth's climate, but we're still talking timespans of 100's of years. If you have a process which can be varied over a much shorter timespan, then it would be much safer.
Between CO2 emissions reduction and geo-engineering, I'd pick geo-engineering just because it's more likely to get done. Of course the real problem is, as always, that it's not *just* CO2 in the atmosphere that's a problem (hi there ocean acidification).
What's so implausible about it? You wouldn't need a giant structure, you could use an active structure. A system of hydrogen balloons (since helium shouldn't really be used this way, and it's not full of people anyway) could actively cycle up to 20km, release their water (or burn off their hydrogen) and then having lost their lifting gas cycle back down to the base.
Energy intensive to produce all the hydrogen maybe, but nuclear/solar/wind/whatever would let you work around that.
Where do you get the idea that modern agriculture is implicitely dependent on the explicit combustion of fossil fuels?
Every combustion process in farming could be replaced with an electrically driven one (or biodiesal for things like tractors). Same for the heat and pressure requirements of the production of ammonium nitrate fertilizers, their feedstock requirements. Hell, we don't even need to stop drilling for oil (cheap plastics hoy) we just need to stop burning them.
Once anyone starts monkeying around with the climate, they can expect a blizzard of lawsuits for any weather events that plantifs can dream up. Car accidents, crop failures, floods, lightening strikes, storm damage, too much rain, too little rain, too hot, too cold, fog, ice, etc. But not just the major stuff but any old fakakta excuse to sue; expect to hear this: "My daughter's pool party was rained out; I want damages" This a really bad idea...
Relative to shutting down worldwide production, yes, quite easy, and quite cheap.
Engineering challenges are more easily overcome than the laws of economics.
Yes, it could. Feel free to get to work on that. You will make a fortune when a: these nutjobs get their way, or b: oil gets scarce and expensive.
The blowing up part was figuratively. For using water you'd need continued power, but if you used reflective aerosols you wouldn't need power. And you'd only need the capacity to deliver a few hundred kilograms in the upper athmosphere of relatively trivial chemical compounds. Trivial, because they have to be as light as possible.
So by "blowing up" I mean "drop the temperature by 20 degrees", which would basically start a new ice age. If done with aerosols, once this starts, it's unstoppable.
I have it on good authority that you can't take the sky from me.
1) we know all the little feedback mechanisms in our athmosphere (and yes - there are millions, if not billions of those) and so we can predict the consequences of geoengineering and we have reasonable evidence for global warming
We don't need to know what all the little feedback mechanisms are if 1) we can determine their combined effect or 2) we can determine what the large ones are. Your argument (again) amounts to "we don't know what all the mechanisms by which cells maintain homeostasis, therefore eating lots of salt can't raise your blood pressure. Similarly drinking gallons of water couldn't possibly kill you." But, of course, we do know that salt will raise your blood pressure and drinking too much water will kill you, because we know the dominant mechanisms involved.
So, no, bringing up feedback mechanisms didn't make you look smart. It made you look under-educated.
Support SETI@home
Two corrections: you forgot to write "probably impossible" in reference to the balloons, and instead of "shutting down worldwide production", you meant to write, "costs less than the amount saved in terms of health costs just from reducing coal power plant emissions" (in the US, that's 2.5 to 12 cents per kWh, depending on the plant; the cost difference between coal and wind in the US averages about 2 cents per kWh).
Oh, and "carbon" is not a law of economics, no more than chalk is a law of classrooms or caramel color is a law of food.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
1) we can determine their combined effect
Let me ask you a question. Have you given 5 seconds of thought to the kind of mathematical demands this would place upon those feedback mechanisms ? We do not, of course, need to 'determine their combined' effect in an instant, but we must actually find a formula that is not just true today, but that remains true. So these functions must be statistically significantly different. Needless to say, even the functions used in the models are not statistically different (meaning it is not possible to calculate the model used for a certain prediction given that prediction).
So the real demand this places upon the weather, is that weather systems must be simpler than the weather simulations we use for prediction.
Do you seriously think that's true ?
2) we can determine what the large ones are
This is just a special case of 1). This only works, obviously, if the large ones are large enough, when combined. In the series sum(1/(2^n)) they are large enough, in the series sum(1/n) they're not. That's just the first of many, many problems that these sorts of series can have. They must be convergent (most climate models are divergent).
On top of that, you're dependent upon our ability to calculate the large ones accurately. That depends on the exact formulas used of course, and obviously the functions used in climate models are computable functions, but they do not match the ones the real world uses. It is perfectly known that the "real" functions that embody the effects are not computable. But that's not the biggest problem by far.
Sadly, climate theory fails on both counts. But there's more. Climate theory, extremely simplified is a formula that allows to calculate w(t+1) = F(w(t)) where w is the function setting earth's athmospheric properties (weather, climate, ...), and F is our knowledge of climate. This is the way climate works in real life as well. The weather at time x is the direct cause of the weather at time x + e (where e is a planck length).
Okay, given that we're trying to calculate w(t + 100year), what we do is we calculate F(F(F(F(F(F(F(F(F.....(w(t))))))))). That is how models work.
Now let's model the error bars. As a general indication F(w(t)) is accurate to within about 2 degrees with delta t being 3 days (mostly because we don't really know all that much about w(t), the current weather. We know cloud cover, measured temperatures at ~ 1000 sites and a few other things. This is obviously much less than the state of the entire weather system). This, of course, makes F(F(w(t)) accurate to within 4 degrees. You see where this is going ? Incidentally, as said above nature works with a delta t of 1 planck lenth. You know what the best model works with ? 1 week. Nature looks at every atom separately. The best climate model only looks at blocks of air 100x100x100 meters. How many atoms is that ? How accurate can such a prediction be ? Google temperature and chaos.
So how did climate science solve this you ask ? Ah simple, it's called "poisson sampling", a technique from computer simulation. You'll soon understand why statisticians rejected this method long ago. You simply pretend that there is no error, and you calculate F(w(t)), F(w(t) + 0.1), F(w(t) - 0.03) and other random variations, and you average out the outcomes. This doesn't actually reduce the error, of course, and if you inspect the actual simulation results you see that different runs have vastly different outcomes. I've seen numbers from -10 to +25 degrees, which may be a bit on the extreme side, but not absurdly so. Of course, poisson sampling has a few downsides. First, it only provides 'realistic' results, not accurate ones (it only gives you one possible outcome, which looks good, but there is no mathematical relation between that outcome and what a perfectly simulated model would predict). Second, you're supposed to run your model hundreds to thousands of times. BUT climate model
It would probably only take in the order of 5 degrees (Kelvin ; you didn't specify). But it would probably take several centuries to develop a full-blown ice age, as opposed to dropping temperatures enough to allow large areas to start accumulating snow from winter to winter (thus triggering positives feedbacks).
That depends on the half-life of your aerosol in the atmosphere. Which varies for the aerosol chosen and the height they're injected into the atmosphere at.
Observation of volcanically-injected sulphate into the middle atmosphere (principally the Pinatubo experiment) suggests that the half-life of that aerosol in that part of the atmosphere is around a year. And for other aerosols, and other parts of the atmosphere?
That question implies experimentation. Which I'd probably support. That is not the same as supporting putting this geoengineering scheme into action.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Which part of the word "experiment" do you not understand? And you a Slashdot reader?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So that leaves concerns about the children. I don't give a shit what you think about my non-existent children, and I sure as hell don't give a shit what is going to happen to your children, let alone grandchildren (if your children are stupid enough to not use contraception). So that's all right then. No problems.
Feel free to fill up your SUV's tank - you're pouring money indirectly into my pocket, and I'm not complaining.
Energy crisis? What energy crisis?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"