Slashdot Mirror
How Close Are We To Engineering the Climate?
merbs writes The scientists had whipped themselves into a frenzy. Gathered in a stuffy conference room in the bowels of a hotel in Berlin, scores of respected climate researchers were arguing about a one-page document that had tentatively been christened the "Berlin Declaration." It proposed ground rules for conducting experiments to explore how we might artificially cool the Earth—planet hacking, basically. This is the story of scientists' first major international meeting to tackle geoengineering. It’s most commonly called geoengineering. Think Bond-villain-caliber schemes but with better intentions. It’s a highly controversial field that studies ideas like launching high-flying jets to dust the skies with sulfur in order to block out a small fraction of the solar rays entering the atmosphere, or sending a fleet of drones across the ocean to spray seawater into clouds to make them brighter and thus reflect more sunlight. Those are two of the most discussed proposals for using technology to chill the planet and combat climate change, and each would ostensibly cost a few billion dollars a year—peanuts in the scheme of the global economy. We’re about to see the dawn of the first real-world experiments designed to test ideas like these, but first, the scientists wanted to agree on a code of ethics—how to move forward without alarming the public or breaking any laws.
Oh, you mean pictures like these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
I wasn't around then, but one of the complaints about the atom bomb was that it could "set the atmoshpere on fire" causing a chain reaction that consumed all the oxygen and killed the entire planet's biosphere
Yes, and you'll note from the fact that we still have oxygen to breathe that this did not happen. Similarly the LHC did not create a Black Hole that set off a chain reaction to swallow the Earth. Planets are bombarded by lots of high energy radiation all the time and have been for billions of years. Setting off a chain reaction is going to be incredibly hard because any reaction we can produce will already have happened many, many times over in nature. Indeed after all the CO2 we have pumped into our atmosphere over the past century or more we have only managed to create a tiny deviation in the temperature so far.
Name the study that convinced you beyond any doubt that AGW is "true". It will be based on least squares curve fitting and computer modeling, neither of which every proved anything.
Svante Arrhenius who is 1896 stated:
if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
Or F = ln (C/C sub 0). That formula still hold true today.
Gilbert Plass who in 1958 published a paper called "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change".
Everything today is refinements of that (and some others) work.