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Climate Scientist Pioneer Talks About the Furture of Geoengineering
First time accepted submitter merbs writes At the first major climate engineering conference, Stanford climatologist Ken Caldeira explains how and why we might come to live on a geoengineered planet, how the field is rapidly growing (and why that's dangerous), and what the odds are that humans will try to hijack the Earth's thermostat. From the article: "For years, Dr. Ken Caldeira's interest in planet hacking made him a curious outlier in his field. A highly respected atmospheric scientist, he also describes himself as a 'reluctant advocate' of researching solar geoengineering—that is, large-scale efforts to artificially manage the amount of sunlight entering the atmosphere, in order to cool off the globe."
So long as they don't accidentally break some important system that they forgot to account for, I'm all for it.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
We know there is an ice age tipping point just a few degrees colder then present. Geo-engineering could fuck us all if they trust a climate model that overestimates.
Alternatively we could all be driving 10 liter W-16s, just to save the planet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Furture? Really there's furture?
Yeah, that was my first thought. Before you go fucking with something as important as the climate, you had better be DAMN SURE you know EXACTLY what you're doing. Some systems are just not to be fucked with lightly.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Humans must control the environment, it's just what we do. To quote the late, great Jacob Bronowski, man is, “...not a figure in a landscape, but the shaper of the landscape.” We've already affected the planet - just look at the deforestation in the Amazon (the jungle) from satellite images - it's impossible to ignore, even from space. If your face looked like the Amazon looks right now you would go see a doctor. How could this not be inevitable? First we sow the fields, next we sow the planets.
If people thought conflicts over rivers, lakes, land were bad wait until one country is setting the thermostat.
Did he talk about it furtively because he knew he didn't spellcheck first?
And they already do this stuff at varying scales. Want to increase/decrease rainfall? Been doing it since the 60's and probably earlier.
I say climate scientists are a pretentious lot. And while I hate to be considered an unreasonable person with regard to respecting scientific opinion, climate science is a major source of ridiculously dangerous and harmful ways to do the wrong thing and throw a complex poorly understood system awry. Thanks for the Ice Age/Marsification/Greenhouse World you self-righteous boffins! ;) but complex organic systems are probably pretty resilient, so perhaps it'll just be a temporary roaring correction til Mama decides to purge the fleas on her back who pretended at trying to fix a system that is self-regulating by doing grossly ridiculous things in the interests of saving us from the over-hyped threat of the generation. ..!..
It does nothing to address global warming's ugly twin brother, ocean acidification. And by presenting the world's public with an apparent techno-fix, it could deflate the movement to reduce carbon emissions.
"For me, my main concern is that we would start doing solar geoengineering while we're still building things with smokestacks and tailpipes," he tells me. "And in that framing, I think the solar geoengineering is just facilitating continued greenhouse gas emissions."
Very well, as long as you know. No point having a nicer climate for a little while as we set the stage for an oceanic mass extinction.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
What we have to do is fairly simple.
1. Stop using fossil fuel. Fairly easy to do this, just end all tax exemptions and artificial subsidies for coal oil and gas. All of them. Then start phasing in retrofits of existing coal plants to use cogeneration (waste heat) and cut coal use in half. Use oil for lubricants. Cut jet fuel use in half using 787s (half fuel use) and turboprops (even less fuel use). Use high speed trains and then battery EV trucks fed by local wind/solar storage for short runs. We know we can do this, we just subsidize the old 18th century methods.
2. Cut energy use in heating/cooling buildings. Efficiency. There's most of your energy use. Passive solar design, put solar cells on roofs, use shades and ceiling fans. We know how to do this and have for half a century. Just expire tax subsidies and exemptions for buildings that don't do this, phasing them out 10 percent a year.
3. There is no 3. It's that fracking simple.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Warmer nations, particularly smaller island nations furiously trying to create global cooling, while an alliance of Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and the newly created United Federation of Antarctica desperately trying to keep it nice and toasty.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Geo-engineering to counter the effects of CO2 is like someone taking sleeping pills to counter the effects of habitually doing amphetamines at an alarmingly increasing rate. If that doesn't convince you, how about listening to a well-informed 3rd party who isn't chasing research funding for their pet geo-engineering project: Can Geo-Engineering Save the Planet? - Christopher Williams on Reality Asserts Itself http://therealnews.com/t2/comp...
All they need to do is follow the example set forth in those tomes of knowledge. First you start by putting larger and larger ice cubes into the world's oceans.
When that no longer works (or you run out of ice), you construct a very large mirror in orbit about the Earth which will reflect large amounts of sunlight. Just make sure a piece of space debris doesn't run into it and point it down towards the planet. Ants under a magnifying glass anyone?
Finally, if all else fails, have every robot on the planet point their exhaust vents skyward and at a predetermined signal, furiously vent their gasses to move the planet slightly further away from the Sun.
Simple really.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Practice makes perfect, so try it out on Venus first.
At the same time, try out warming techniques on mars, so that when inevitably used on and screws up earth, you can attempt to reverse and make it even worse.
Since China has already agreed to GATT, invoking Article XX carbon tariffs on their imports ought to be a solution that avoids more costly and risky approaches.
Already done : we have around 43% of earth's land surface covered by humans .
I call for all bad spellers in the wolrd to untie together.
We're already engaged in geo-engineering so I'm having trouble seeing how doing it in a smarter more rigorous way is a bad thing.
...let's do Mars first, and *then* take those lessons back to earth.
The law of unintended consequences for well intentioned human interventions into natural systems is legend. Diurnal mongoose introduced to Hawaii to eat nocturnal rats, ended up attacking the same endangered bird species as rats.
Planet hacking is a very, very, very, very, very, very bad idea. Might I emphasize that a bit more? People don't understand things well enough, are too incompetent, too driven by greed and the risks are enormous.
LEAVE - IT - ALONE.
The problem with injecting SO2 into the stratosphere is that you can never stop doing it as it has a limited lifetime in the atmosphere and as more and more CO2 is in the atmosphere you would have to increase it. Who's going to pay for that indefinitely into the future? On top of that the SO2 reduces the sunlight hitting the Earth which will reduce photosynthesis and thus agricultural productivity. TANSTAAFL.
I don't see any problems with carbon dioxide removal, aside from potential local environmental problems. The methods include reforestation, adding iron to the ocean and grinding up serpentine.
Solar radiation management, like adding sulfates to the air, has lots of global environmental effects, and it doesn't do anything about acidification of the oceans.
It's best to consider these separately.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)