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The CIA Wants To Know How To Control the Climate

Posted by samzenpus on from the fire-the-hurricane-gun dept.

Taco Cowboy writes " The CIA is currently funding, in part, a $630,000 study on geoengineering, the science of using experimental techniques to modify Earth's climate. Scientists will study how humans might influence weather patterns, assess the potential dangers of messing with the climate, and investigate possible national security implications of geoengineering attempts. The study calls for information on two geoengineering techniques in particular, 'solar radiation management (SRM),' which refers to launching material into Earth's atmosphere to try and block the Sun's infrared radiation, limiting global temperature rise; and 'carbon dioxide removal (CDR),' taking carbon dioxide emissions out of the climate, which scientists have proposed doing through a variety of means, from structures that eat air pollution to capturing carbon emissions as they come out of smokestacks."

20 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. The US just has to control everything, eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hmm.

    1. Re:The US just has to control everything, eh? by Electricity+Likes+Me · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most national intelligence agencies care about climate change, because changes in local rainfall, drought and flood patterns is going to lead to unrest and the movement of peoples and what comes with that. Geoengineering falls under this umbrella easily: being able to predict who's going to get screwed by it is a pretty good way to predict who's going to be coming after the US for it, and where the new hotspots/issues will arise.

      A huge part of any intelligence agency's mission is to discern the underlying factors which motivate the behavior of countries: someone beating the drums for war usually has an ulterior motive to the stated one, both locally and abroad.

  2. Obvious by BSAtHome · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.

    1. Re:Obvious by gigaherz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      To expand on it: avoiding pollution can be expensive, and it's not in anyone's immediate interests to spend money just to be greener. People can think long-term, but corporations are usually short-term money-making machines, so green is only ever used as a PR measure to paint themselves more attractive, or avoid taxes.

    2. Re:Obvious by pinkushun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly this. $630,000 that could be used to educate and bring awareness to the people. We are the ones targeted by products, and we have to make an informed choice about what is useful vs what is damaging. Isn't that also known as "geoengineering"? I believe it is, and on a global scale too.

    3. Re:Obvious by DarkOx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not just the corporations. Actually most of the corporations like being in a somewhat affluent society. They are much cleaner than they otherwise would be. Consider here in the US we have more forest than we had 100 years ago, we have about doubled the cars on the road since the 70s and held emmisions mostly constant. Our carbon foot print is big because our living standard is high but if you look at and activity basis rather than a per capita basis we do things with higher carbon efficiencies than most of the world.

      Think about cooking, driving, electrical generation etc. compare the carbon output of the way we usually do those activities to say India, or Chad.

      Running around trying to manage all the greenhouse gas sources only works when you have piles of money to throw at the problem and even then it does not achieve the goal of preserving our comfortable life style and stopping climate change, it demands sacrifice and sacrifice sucks!

      Geoengineering or centralized carbon scrubbing is the future, that or radical population controls. I am more comfortable with the former, I bet most people will be too when they sit down and think on it. What's sad here is its the spooks behind this instead of transparent organization

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    4. Re:Obvious by Poeli · · Score: 4, Informative

      Our carbon foot print is big because our living standard is high but if you look at and activity basis rather than a per capita basis we do things with higher carbon efficiencies than most of the world.

      Most (western) European countries have an equally high living standard but a considerable lower carbon footprint. I doubt that bringing activity into the calculation will change much...

    5. Re:Obvious by trendzetter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Government elected by corporations

    6. Re:Obvious by Seumas · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That seems to completely miss the point. The CIA doesn't give a shit about "climate change" or whatever we're calling it this week. They care about ability to and implications of controlling and weaponizing weather. Some asian country giving the USA shit? Send a hurricane their way. Some south american country not playing along with US policy or making us look bad? Cause an earthquake. Want to bolster US corn syrup? Cause an extensive drought in sugar producing regions of other nations.

    7. Re:Obvious by internerdj · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm definitely in the camp that Americans need to do more but that is a bit disingenuous comparison. It looks like the Western European Country with the lowest population density is three times the population density of the US. That has huge public transportation ramifications.

    8. Re:Obvious by NatasRevol · · Score: 3, Informative

      There are no democracies.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    9. Re:Obvious by buchner.johannes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm definitely in the camp that Americans need to do more but that is a bit disingenuous comparison. It looks like the Western European Country with the lowest population density is three times the population density of the US. That has huge public transportation ramifications.

      Only if you look at the average. The US has large empty areas. If you ignore them -- and you can, for the discussion about public transportation -- the eastern third of the country is densely populated, entirely comparable to Europe.

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
  3. Re:I'm not disputing that this is useful research by FaxeTheCat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Doing something unusual like reading the TFA reveals:
    "It should be noted, and in fact highlighted, that CIA is only funding a portion of this study, with the rest provided by NOAA, NASA, and the National Academy of Sciences itself."
    "one of the objectives of the study is to discuss the possible national security concerns that might arise should geoengineering techniques be deployed (expected or unexpectedly), either by a private entity or another country."

  4. relax! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since the use of "ad trap" tactics (CIA... Geoengineering... success!) are usual nowdays in Slashdot:
    The study is commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/projectview.aspx?key=49540) and their spokesperson states that the study is not designed to test any geoengineering methods or experiment with any findings whatsoever, but rather "assess the current state of knowledge about several geoengineering techniques," and use the findings to inform "future discussions" about their use, and the CIA's involvement "begins and ends with its financial contributions.", CIA is only funding a portion of this study, with the rest provided by NOAA, NASA, and the National Academy of Sciences itself.", the study sponsors, including the CIA, only address the committee in charge of the study once, at the beginning, and "do not correspond with the committee or provide any further input into the study. They receive a final, independently peer-reviewed report with the study's findings at the end of the project", "one of the objectives of the study is to discuss the possible national security concerns that might arise should geoengineering techniques be deployed (expected or unexpectedly), either by a private entity or another country.".

  5. They're called trees you idiots. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If only we had a solar powered carbon sink, that you could put somewhere and leave for 20 years, then come harvest it for a resource to build buildings and create heat? If only they also made oxygen helped nature and looked good on the horizon.

    1. Re:They're called trees you idiots. by abies · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Because they are terribly inefficient? According to http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm, 1 tree process around 24kg of CO2 per year. Refrigerator (which I'm not giving away to be 'green'), according to http://www.botany.org/planttalkingpoints/co2andtrees.php, produce almost 900kg of CO2 because of energy used per year. This means, I need almost 40 full-grown trees just to cover my refrigerator. If you add some other things, like PC I'm writing it on, water heating, house warming, washing machine, etc etc, we are probably talking about acre of forest just to cover my family needs. Don't know about you, but I live in area where space is a bit of premium and people are sometimes failing to secure 50m^2 apartment in multi-store building (which translates to probably like 20m^2 of real ground space, even with pavements etc) - they can hardly affort paying for extra 5000m^2 of ground to plant forest there.

      Generally, plants are very bad at anything they do, if you look from pure efficiency point of view. Same way as solar panels are order (or even few) of magnitude better at converting solar to energy than plants, there might be a non-plant solution for getting rid of CO2 in hundred times more efficient manner than trees are doing that now.

      I'm a lot more worried about all these ideas with 'lets change the albedo', 'lets spray air with nanoparticles of HaArP molecules' etc. We don't know a lot about our planet and I'm afraid that any manual steering of single variables will cause catastrophic results.

  6. A giant PRISM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    To divert the sun's rays

  7. Expensive = Less Green by Overzeetop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Consider this: since our economy is based on carbon fuels (renewable sources are very small), every dollar (or euro or yuan) goes into creating carbon emissions.

      0. If you buy stuff or services, where does the money go?
      1. To the seller (20%) - who pays for stuff (goto 0), services (goto 0), and fuel (heat, electricity, personal transportation - carbon emissions)
      2. To the distributer (20%) - who pays for stuff (goto 0), services (goto 0), and fuel (heat, electricity, transportation - carbon emissions)
      3. To the shipper (5%) - of which most goes to fuel (carbon emissions), and the rest goes for stuff (goto 0), and services (goto 0)
      4. To the producer (55%)
      5. And the producer pays for wages for people [to buy stuff (goto 0), services (goto 0), fuel (heat, electricity, manufacturing - carbon emissions)] and raw materials [which used carbon-based fuels for extraction/mining/refinement/etc. and results in carbon emissions]

    With the industrial revolution switch from human power to machine power, the entire economy is based on us paying for energy. The root of all transactions are to pay for fuel. Nobody "pays" for crop growth or minerals - dollars don't flow to mother nature or the ruler of the earth as a dead-end, just to the people who use energy to promote growth or extract minerals. If the economy were based entirely on real/near-time solar sources (sun, wind, hydro) and nuclear, that would be a different equation as all roads wouldn't lead to carbon emissions. But even buying a solar panel or windmill is non-green, as current technology spends as much in fossil fuel to mine, refine, produce, distribute, install, and maintain the equipment as you get back in power.

    Now, that kind of sucks, but it does offer insight into how to *truly* reduce carbon emissions, and that is to minimize your lifecycle costs for everything. Being efficient *is* being green if you're at the end-user point where you cannot control the mix of energy production sources. If you are at the energy producer level (which is almost none of us), you can control carbon emissions through the selection of source - coal, oil, nat gas. (I leave out nuclear and solar, as they are simply purchasers of carbon-based materials like the rest of us, and I leave out fiber incineration/contemporary organics as that's primarily an oil-based source as oil is used for promotion, harvest, and transportation).

    --
    Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
  8. Fusion by Thanshin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.

    - Develop cold fusion.
    - Replace polluting energy sources by unlimited fusion energy.
    - Use unlimited energy to reverse the polluting mechanisms (carbon scrubbing).

    Some times I wonder how bad is the player that's managing Humans in the intergalactic strategy game. Somewhere there's a civilization that made a fusion rush and are now conquering their galaxy.

    Maybe we're the AI set to Dumb.

  9. That's like, one cup of government coffee by argStyopa · · Score: 4, Funny

    $630k is like pop-machine change in government terms.

    $80,000 writing the proposal for funding
    $170,000 for 17 interns to edit it
    $60,000 for 3 admins to bang the interns during "late night editing sessions"
    $3000 for abortions
    $200,000 the inevitable hush-money to the interns
    $310,000 for the multimedia presentation of the project to admins.

    No, it doesn't add up to $630k. This is GOVERNMENT. Having the numbers match up costs extra.

    --
    -Styopa