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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."

8 of 238 comments (clear)

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

    Hmm.

  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 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
    3. 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.

  3. 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.

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

    To divert the sun's rays