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Harvard Scientists Say It's Time To Start Thinking About Engineering the Climate
merbs writes: Harvard has long been home to one of the fiercest advocates for climate engineering. This week, Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences published a research announcement headlined "Adjusting Earth's Thermostat, With Caution." That might read as oxymoronic — intentionally altering the planet's climate has rarely been considered a cautious enterprise — but it fairly accurately reflects the thrust of several new studies published by the Royal Society, all focused on exploring the controversial field of geoengineering.
We've been doing unintentional geoengineering for hundreds of years now, why would some intentional geoengineering be so bad?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Their own students have already started trying to manipulate global warming by suing their precious alma mater
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Then if it works we'll have a bonus planet to live it. Win Win :)
- Things are the way they are because they're coded that way -
Sure. Let's engineer it. Just tell me what the optimum global mean temperature is, and I'll get right on it.
(It's no more difficult than any of the other projects that I've been assigned. "Invent a machine that can do X. At a lower cost than a worker in China."
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing for money.
I think it was called Snow Piercer. Do we really want to do this?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I think the idea that we are going to engineer the environment is crazy and dangerous. The fact is we don't HAVE to keep dumping CO2 into the air. We can dramatically shift our priorities and resources to finding alternative energy.
Granted, the economic incentives for clean energy aren't there right now, but is capitalism a suicide pact?
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It seemed remarkably appropriate that this was the cookie at the bottom of the thread:
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell
You are assuming that a warming climate is more helpful, but you could have a warm dry desert which doesn't help any of us. Or it may be that in some areas it will be a desert - in others it might be more like what you describe.
There are no guarantees that the outcome will be one to our liking.
You have only to look at the jungle compared to that arctic to realize that...
Unless you also compare the jungle to, say, the Sahara.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
I am convinced we will eventually build a sunshade, out at the first (inner) Earth-Sun Lagrange point. It won't help with ocean acidification, but it would make a global thermostat possible.
And, it will be good practice on fixing Venus.
We shouldn't be fooling around like this. It's obvious we don't understand, or are too corrupt and greedy to admit, that there's no problem.
Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.
Human emissions of CO2 are what is causing global warming. There is almost no scientific resistance to this idea. There are a bunch of people that own a lot of carbon based energy that have their fingers in their ears and a bunch of people like you that they've convinced of a story alternate to reality but there is no doubt what is causing global warming.
I don't care for online climate change deniers.
You use the word "facts". Let's talk about facts. Suppose I tried to debate this nutjob.
First of all, this person already decided what they "believe," and everything they read will be twisted into evidence supporting their predetermined conclusion. Therefore, right off the bat, actual debate is impossible. They've already decided what they think is true.
So, we'd go back and forth. They would post evidence supporting their perspective, and off to Google I'd go to dig up rebuttals from actual climatologists. That will take time because the climate change denial groups are always generating new bunk data, new misinterpretations of published papers, and new misrepresentations of past quotes. One can't just keep a database of counterevidence because they've always got new bullshit.
After however much time I'd spend researching rebuttals, that person would just keep replying with more bullshit. They either wouldn't read the counterpoints or wouldn't understand them. Then they'd pull out the ever-present Final Tactic by telling me that they know what they're talking about because they're a pilot, physics student, congressional aide, or whatever. They'll try to follow up bunk "science" with anecdote.
By the time the whole thing concluded, I will have failed to convince them because it was never a possibility to begin with. They will have failed to convince me because I actually look at the science and don't delude myself. Then, out there somewhere at their keyboard will sit some layperson who just wants to get along with their church group, some paid anti-climate change shill, or just an everyday idiot repeating what they've been told.
So.
1. They won't convince anybody.
2. Nobody can convince them.
Therefore, their bringing the subject up to start with is masturbatory and annoying. It accomplishes nothing that walking into a movie theater and announcing over a megaphone that the world is flat wouldn't accomplish.
The most constructive response is thus, "God damnit, can you just stop this already?" Optionally, this may be peppered with, "Please just go away."
The article is specifically talking about Solar Radiation Management (SRM). This is adjusting temperature by reflecting more heat back to space, not by reducing CO2 emissions or sequestering CO2. So any other effects of increased CO2, such as ocean acidification, remain in place.
Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.
Probably not. Consider the thoroughly-documented example of the evolutionary process at work in the modern world. This doesn't affect the belief systems of the religious folks, who still insist that evolution is bogus, and has nothing to do with our modern world. One of the major cases is with the over-use of antibiotics, especially in agriculture. This is forcing the evolution of resistance in most of our disease organisms, destroying the value of many of our medicines. The evidence of all this has no effect at all on the religious believers. They also put pressure on the school systems (especially here in the US) to eliminate evolution from the textbooks, so the people responsible for this evolutionary pressure (mostly in agriculture, but also in medicine) don't understand the issues, and continue to make frivolous or incorrect use of the antibiotics.
Historians have documented many such cases in which our ancestors had knowledge that their actions were leading to disasters, but they continued anyway. These are typically cases where short-term actions were profitable to the people doing them, but bad for society in the long run. History says that we humans don't respond logically to such situations. We continue to act for short-term profit, and ignore the long-term results. Our "leaders" also tend to take actions that encourage this, by hiding the information or denying the validity of knowledge that can't be hidden.
There's no reason to expect that we can organize on a global scale to fix such problems. Our political systems tend to be controlled by the wealthier people, who are the ones ultimately profiting from the short-term results of the problems. About all we can do is prepare for the predictable long-term results, when possible.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
What follows assumes that none of the climate change deniers here are shills.
That's not entirely why these people do this. Craziness, I mean. Religion isn't really it either, so much as something usually involved with it. There are three things about human beings that lead to climate change deniers, to include the anthropogenic deniers who don't deny the change itself.
The first influence is that people will usually believe anything repeated to them often enough. Certain pundits have been drilling climate change denial into the heads of viewers for more than a decade.
The second is that people will believe anything tied to their identity. That's why I brought up church. It's not the spiritual beliefs that give rise to this though. It happens that the social groups in churches tend to be deniers, people conform to the ideas of their social groups, and that conformity becomes a part of their identity. It is very difficult for people to accept that any idea supporting their identity is false, no matter how much proof they're shown.
The third is that when the potential solutions to a problem are politically inconvenient, people tend to pretend that there is no problem in the first place. It has only recently been shown that a change to clean energy isn't feasible on the scales necessary to address climate change, and it has been known for years now that the carbon balance approach is too easily rendered ineffectual through politics. Many people still think that recognizing the truth will mean admitting to solutions they consider inconvenient, even though those approaches would not work. So, they push climate change denial.
I bet that the third group finances those who influence the second, and by the time people are part of the first group, they will never, ever be swayed. They'll continue thinking as they do until the day their hearts stop beating, no matter what happens, what evidence they're shown to the contrary, or who shows it to them. But since most of these people have zero impact on policy and big business, that's not what bothers me.
What bothers me is that the more of those three groups somebody fits into, the more they're likely to be hostile to those who disagree with them. They'll call you a troll for daring to suggest that they don't know everything. Off the Internet, I've seen people fly into rages over this kind of thing. I've seen it take people to the brink of trading blows. Once an idea is that deeply rooted, you can't even have a conversation about reality because these people will come around and stink up the place.
Yes, there has been rapid heating over the last 150 years, as the Earth recovered from the effects of The Little Ice Age. Nothing particularly unusual or exiting about it, because the one thing that's known for sure about the Earth's climate is that it's always changing.
The first picture on that page shows an ominous-looking and unprecedented (in the 2000-year period covered by the graph) temperature spike over the last 150 years. This coincides with a rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Even if that is just a coincidence we still have to face the fact that we are probably headed for CO2 concentrations in the 1000+ ppm range, a range where the atmosphere has not been since the Jurassic.
We can hope that the warming will be significantly less severe than the models predict, but it would be good to have a plan B and a plan C when the stakes include all coastal cities around the world.