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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.
Large-scale thermal energy generations requires a heat difference to work, and in effect moves heat from one place to another. The only part of the Earth that isn't likely to be directly affected by global warming is the stuff underneath the crust, but that's already warmer than the atmosphere, so global warming reduces the temperature difference and reduces our ability to generate energy from heat.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The panel posted a quick summary of their results and findings.
Isn't global warming [from greenhouse gases] an exponential system? When the planet gets warmer, doesn't that release more greenhouse gases from clathrates under the ocean, causing more warming?
Isn't offsetting an exponential response by using another exponential curve difficult? I thought that was what made nuclear reactor regulation difficult.
Any control theorists in the audience who can shed light on this?
Can you really call any code of ethics that permits this an actual code of ethics. Lets start with Informed Consent. You have to inform the entire world since it would be involving everyone and not just the one country you want to help. For example, just because we want to stop hurricanes from hitting Florida sounds good, up until you find out that it'll negatively affect the rain fall in another country like Mexico. So we have to inform everyone of the risks, and benefits. Then where do we draw the line at consent. Is it half the countries agree, or half the population. Is it at half, or is it at two thirds. I'd give the option for unanimous, but that's never happening. Then what if it will benefit 90% of the world, but really screw over one country?
I've always liked the idea of seeding the ocean to create enormous blooms of plankton (both the animal and plant kind). If we widened the base of that enormous food chain a lot of carbon could be both sequestered in their dead tiny bodies at the bottom of the sea OR in a new wave of fish. Considering how much we fish globally if we artifically increased the supply (instead of wank-ass fish farming) we could be solving a few problems with one concerted effort. Let's start by trying to make the ocean's deadzones...undead.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
How about we spend that time and energy adapting to any changes that do occur and stop worrying so much about it. Humans adapt tremendously well. If you fear extreme weather, design better living spaces, build tunnels, etc. Here in Minnesota, some of our major cities are connected by skyways between buildings throughout the downtown. Why? Because the climate is not so pleasant for half the year. We engineered solutions to our issues without deciding to solve everybody else's perceived issues.
We should take a lesson from Australia. They introduced Cane toads to solve beetle problems. It was not the savior they hoped for and ended up being a bigger problem then they sought to solve. Too many well meaning and intelligent people think that their engineering of a problem will work, so they propose a huge experiment the size of a region or planet. I think one of our greatest weaknesses as humans is that we refuse to say no. It can be a strength in the right context, but it can be a means of unintended destruction as well.
A famous quote of CS Lewis was "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." I tend to agree. If we engineer climate and hurt people in the process, the powers that be are hardly likely to stop because they will think the overall good will even out in the end.
Besides the "do-gooders" who genuinely care, there will be others involved in the process. The people who make these decisions (politicians) want results to show off come election time. The engineers who execute the decisions want to get paid. Nobody will be there to stop a "botched climate experiment" until it is too late. Once that ball is in motion, it is not likely to stop. We cannot assume everything will always be the same. In fact, trying to change the weather for everybody is probably one great way to start a world war. Instead, focus on adapting. Focus on using technology, common sense, and natural abilities to adapt into whatever climate may exist.
You might find this article interesting. No need to but anything in space.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
"Engineers at Stanford University have developed an ultrathin, multilayered, nanophotonic material that not only reflects heat away from buildings but also directs internal heat away using a system called "photonic radiative cooling." The coating is capable of reflecting away 97% of incoming sunlight and when combined with the photonic radiative cooling system it becomes cooler than the surrounding air by around 9F (5C). The material is designed to radiate heat into space at a precise frequency that allows it to pass through the atmosphere without warming it."
Either use the termal difference to power a heat engine (difficult but possible to use such a low temperature difference) or use that tech on the condencer on a heat pumps to send the heat out in space(instead of dumping it in the air). Your AC could radiate all that heat into space instead of dumping it in the air.
Not if you manage to set of a chain reaction. Anyone else remember the '40s? 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 (not just the humans, but even the cockroaches, just off a single bomb. Well, lets test that in Venus. But it doesn't matter what we do to the atmosphere, it will be unstable, so long as the planet doesn't rotate. And that's something we can never fix (with the amount of energy needed, it'd make more sense to push Mars into the Asteroid belt to "absorb" all the asteroids there to become more Earthlike in size, then move Mars to a more friendly (closer to the sun) orbit. As much as that'd take, it's still be less energy than spinning Venus to Earth days.
Venus, not spinning, has no magnetic field. So the lighter parts of the atmosphere float to the top and are stripped by solar wind. This leaves only the heavy atmosphere, and makes any "fix" of the atmosphere unstable. Venus used to be like Earth. but the closeness to the sun caused tidal effects that slowed the rotation (all parts, even the core). Once the rotation was slow enough to "stop" the magnetic field, the solar winds ripped away all the breathable atmosphere. The top parts of the atmosphere are more earth-like, but are being lost to space, pushed up by the heavier air below, and stripped off by the solar winds. So even if we could terraform it in days, it wouldn't last. Not without spin.
Learn to love Alaska
Trying to actively control a massive, chaotic system is not going to end well.
We are told by climate scientists that we have such an outstanding grasp of this "massive, chaotic system" that they can make accurate long term predictions. Seems to me that the veracity of your beliefs is in direct conflict with theirs.
Or perhaps our grasp of this "massive, chaotic system" isnt the belief that actually drives your opinion. But if thats not it.. then what?
"His name was James Damore."
I'm getting kind of concerned. While I agree strenuously that intentionally messing with the climate is likely to end as badly as unintentionally messing with the climate, the scary part is that the cost estimates for doing so aren't really that high.
It is at least plausible that a Buffet, Zuckerberg, Allen, or Musk might just go ahead and start seeding the upper atmosphere with sulphur dioxide. The cost estimates are low enough (and I suspect that you could do it for a lot less) to make it plausible for non-state actors to do exactly that -- without asking anyone's permission. I kind of doubt anyone would be able to stop them, either. And once they had managed to get away with it for a decade or so, my understanding is that we'd almost have to keep seeding the stratosphere or we'd have a very rapid, very scary climate shift in a very few years.
For that matter, I could see the Russians or the Saudis quietly pursuing a geoengineering program just so they can keep selling oil. It isn't that much of a stretch to imagine a consortium of hedge-fund billionaires with large holdings of Florida real estate doing exactly the same thing.
The heck of it is, if someone quietly did a sneaky climate hack, people would forget about the whole global warming thing in a very short time. Politicians, either ones who had pressed for action or who had pushed for doing nothing at all, would not pay very much attention to the issue if it appeared to be going away. And scientists who claim that someone is messing with the climate would be just as easily ignored as they are now.
See: http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
This method is great because ships are already making bubbles in their wake. We just make it whiter with smaller bubbles. Basically raising the ocean albedo.
In the "What can possibly go wrong?" department, this method is far better than any of the other geoengineering proposals. And it's cheap.
Simply retrofitting existing large ships to produce smaller bubbles could reduce global temperature by 0.5C. If we want more cooling, we could float dedicated solar-powered bot ships that do nothing but cruise the equitorial seas making wake.