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.
We'll be chasing it back and forth like crazy, every time a storm pops up.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
more than climate change ever will.
That's what Global Warming is.
How much effort does that require? Now, do you think some magic sprinkle will reverse it? That's like sitting on a couch for 40 years, then expecting 5-min of effort, one time, and a pill to become a competitive long distance runner.
Global Warming will require a larger effort to reverse than the one that created it.
When these "scientists" "change things" and some climate is altered, I can guarantee more than a billion people are going to complain about the change and the legal charges in the Hague against those that foisted off the plan and carried it out will be a circus.
I'm old enough to remember (and read) the book - Weather War . Forget the lawsuits, look at the next level of targeting for political advantage.
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
Trying to actively control a massive, chaotic system is not going to end well. The only stable configurations that pop out of computer models of the climate are the snowball Earth and the Venus 2.0 scenario. The only right way to play is to stop applying massive perturbations to the system and realize that even then the climate will change.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
It seems a bit frightening to start out on the planet we actually have to live on. This is not good engineering practice. If we make mistakes, it would be nice to do it on a planet where the consequences aren't quite as critical
My proposal is that we should start out by gaining experience by modifying another planet. Let's work on terraforming Venus.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Can we find a way off this rock before we mess it up too badly, please? No throwing the basket around while it holds all the eggs, mkay?
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 mere fact that we seem to be using out ability engineer the earth like a mad scientist intent on doing as much harm as possible does not change the fact that we are already engineering the planet.
Just not in a GOOD way.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Spraying sulphur in the atmosphere in a warmed up Earth? Are they trying to recreate Hell?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
"We are now able to engineer the climate. Weather in Florida will be even nicer year round.....North Dakota...sorry...but you are fucked"
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?
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?
Oh, you mean pictures like these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
So by shunting the extra energy causing global warming into the power grid ...
You should write your congressman and ask him to repeal the 2nd law of thermodynamics. That is one of the worst laws ever, and is the root cause of many of our biggest problems. While you are at it, ask him to repeal the first law too. After that, you should sue your high school science teacher for malpractice, using yourself as prima facie evidence.
This can be easily solved by directing lightning bolts at lawyers. Hell, even if we decide not to engineer the client, we should direct more lightning bolts at lawyers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I guess all that is still cheaper than desalination. Eh, another scam by the people who brought you the bearded lady snake, thing, whatever..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I just modified my local micro-climate.
mmmm, chili for lunch....
also, ib4 "chemtrails!" and "HAARP!"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I am not sure desalinization is not viable due to the cost of the technology, or due to the infrastructure required to get the water from the coast, up over the mountains and into the Central Valley where all of the farmland is.
WRONG - otherwise my heat pump would not work. Take a heat pump and put one end in outer space to radiate heat away from us. The only issue I can see is procurement. Where oh where are we going to get 48,000 miles of copper line, 24,000 miles of electrical cord, and 10 million tanks of Freon? Also have ot look into voiding the warranty for putting the compressor end out in space.
Go test it in the staging environment and get back with us before you plan to put it into production.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Stories like these give people too much hope that our problems can or will be solved by engineering/science breakthroughs and hurt motivation to actually use the tools and knowledge that we have to solve our problems (which generally are sufficient, assuming that there aren't influential groups working to prevent it). Rather than cut carbon emissions and increase sustainable sources, which could be done right away and with the technology we have (even if it wouldn't be simple or cheap), people will hope for breakthroughs because those with the most influence are going to continue to ring the last drops of profit out of the power sources that are dooming the planet in some a game of human extinction chicken.
After describing their solution to global warming, dropping a giant chunk of ice in the water ever few years:
Man: "Thus solving the problem of global warming once and for all!"
Little Girl: "But-"
Man: "I SAID ONCE AND FOR ALL!"
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
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.
The only problem with desalination is the politics and greed that is impeding it. Technology is not an issue. It's about the market. Scarcity is its life blood.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
The main tenet of the anthropogenic climate change is that this climate change was engineered by human activity.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Do you have any data to back up those assertions?
For reference, see Kudzu in the United States and think Law of Unintended Consequences on a global scale.
What, that greed is the biggest impediment to progress? I don't understand the question..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It has to start with discontinuing dumping shit into the atmosphere that's screwing everything up, and we can't get everyone to do it. Then it comes out that a large pecentage of the problem is jet airliners and cattle of all things. No, we're not anywhere close to being able to 'engineer' this, we can't even stop fouling our own nest.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Some data where desalinization projects did not go through due to greed on the part of the incumbent water utility.
I am curious because I used to live in a city that used desalinization. I always wondered why it was not more widely adopted. Everything that I found led me to believe that the root cause was due to the cost of energy required to make the process work.
I see the geo-engineering deniers are out in force today with their mod points.
Go ahead and ignore what is hanging above your heads. I have made my peace with it already.
I am not sure why people get so defensive whens someone points out that they are trying to make it rain over California, a state that is experiencing its worst drought in decades.
One would think that I was touting conspiracy theories about the Illuminati trying to poison the masses with aerial bombardments of bacteriological agents.
So we're already engineering the climate, and doing it without a clue as to what the changes we've been making (and are still making) will ultimately end in. Do we really know enough to try adding yet more crap to the original pile of crap in order to cancel out the whole pile?
Yikes.
Step out from behind your fear, AC. It is easy to sling mud when nobody knows who you are.
We are already 'engineering the climate' - we're just doing it randomly and without plan.
If the price of oil goes down and everybody starts burning more of it, we're engineering the climate with more CO2.
If we chop down hundreds of square miles of amazon rain forest and replace it with cattle ranches we're engineering the climate with more methane.
If we want to start engineering the climate in a more directed manner, we MUST control these activities as well. Trying to control some of the strings while others are being yanked in a haphazard manner is not a practical approach.
The Kyoto Protocol has many critics - and with reason. It is clumsy, largely ineffectual and tainted by accusations of corruption. But real practical climate engineering will only be achieved by some sort international cooperation along these lines.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Yes, because bean counters make policy. Energy is just another commodity under very tight controls by government protected industries. At the foundation is plain old greed of very class conscious people.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
How much effort does that require?
Well technically none at all - absolutely no effort was put into changing the climate whatsoever it was just a byproduct of doing something else. While I would tend to agree that I think that the environment is particularly stable and will be very hard to affect I would expect that if we deliberately set out to change it we will probably find it an order of magnitude or two easier to do than changing it inadvertently.
Cloud Seeding Hurricanes
Scientists that had their lives dedicated to the study of climate and consequences still getting surprised by some of the newly discovered consequences of global warming. Tinkering with a very complex system that you don't understand could have even worse or more urgent consequences than the original problem you were trying to solve. And if you make big mistakes there you not only lose the future of mankind, but also all the past.
Whats wrong with solving it in the plain, simple, ordered and pretty studied solution of diminishing our influence in the change?
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.
You have no idea what you're talking about. You can prove AGW in your basement — that is, depending on what parts of empirical reality you take issue with. Proving that CO2 absorbs IR is trivial. Proving that CO2 levels are rising is less trivial, but possible, and hopefully not in dispute. Proving that Earth is surrounded by vacuum is would be difficult but again hopefully not in dispute. Determining the variation (negligible) of solar irradiance is best done from space, but you might be able to get a good enough measurement from Earth.
The above would be sufficient to prove the fundamentals of global warming. There's only one major heat input, and only one way for heat to escape Earth. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere must correspond to a rise in temperature; it's very simple physics. Attributing the rise in CO2 to humans is pretty simple and two-pronged: one, we know pretty much how much fossil fuels are being consumed, and two, there's a huge difference in oxygen isotope ratios.
That's not all though. Unless everything that is known about radiation is wrong, as previously mentioned, a rise in CO2 means a rise in temperature. This can actually be calculated fairly exactly: 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling, corresponding to about 1 degree C change in global temperature. No one cares about this. However, we have lots of this "water" stuff lying around, and it's a way better greenhouse gas than CO2, and the amount of water that can be in the air increases exponentially with temperature. At first glance, this leads to a runaway positive feedback cycle. At second glance, there are reasons why it does not do that, but despite years of research, there does not seem to be any factors that can lead to a negative feedback cycle. The exact degree of forcing is a matter of research.
Realize that science started investigating this problem at least a hundred years before computer modeling existed. If computers were the only evidence people would be more skeptical. In point of fact, they were more skeptical; it has taken more than a century to muster convincing evidence that humans could affect the climate at all. At this point arguing against AGW is equivalent to arguing against evolution or heliocentrism; literally everything we know about atmospheric and radiative physics would have to be wrong in order for it to be untrue. It's actually a lot easier to prove the fundamentals of the theory than it would be to try to prove evolution.
Talking about computer modeling in the context of proving AGW is like talking about epidemiological models in the context of proving the germ theory of disease. You have the relationship backwards, and you're missing the actual evidence entirely.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
Carbon has been proven not to be a significant contributor to warming, otherwise instead of global temperatures holding pretty much flat for ever a decade the temperature would have gone up a lot in response to continued large increases in atmospheric CO2.
What you fail to understand is the magnitude of the warming signal compared to the magnitude of natural variations. Natural variations are considerably larger than the warming signal but the natural variations mostly just cycle up and down netting to zero in the long run while the warming signal just continuously rises. Even a decade or two of "no warming" is not long enough to make the statement you made.
Why the hell are we waiting? We have like a dozen volcanic eruptions worth of climate change data just from the last 200 years or so to prove it works. If a mountain and arbitrarily launch dust into the atmosphere and we record worldwide temperature drops, that's all the experimenting I need. The miscalculation risk repercussions of any method would be what, wild climate changes? Oh no! That's almost like the exact same thing that will happen if we do nothing.
I think these scientists should stop watching Snowpiercer, which wouldn't happen in reality unless we launched the entire Hawaiian island into the atmosphere, and start spraying something up there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Come back to us after you look up what percentage of the earths atmosphere is CO2, and look at the increase over the last decade where warming has flatlined while CO2 substantially increased.
The fact that CO2 absorbs IR under controlled conditions in your basement means essentially nothing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
:-) I would never mod you down for anything, but maybe you should check out that sloppy post before you complain about other peoples' editing.
(yeah, I know I will hear more whining about no unicode and how it's everybody else's fault, but hey, that's why I'm posting this. The reaction reveals a person's true character)
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
On this occasion, I did do a poor job of checking my typing before hitting submit, there are some typos in that message that are definitely my fault. However, in what way is it my fault that text rendered by this site does not get accepted properly back in to the text input boxes on this site?
More to the point, "overrated" is a cowardly mod. The person who used it on my comment almost certainly disagreed with what I was saying, rather than how it was entered and was too much of a coward to actually talk about it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I sincerely hope that they wait to do this until after I am dead. Honestly, I believe that they want to tinker with things that they barely understand.
Coming up with a code of ethics first means you've hamstrung yourself before you've started. If you don't DO before you handwring, you'll never get past the handwringing.
The trouble is that nautical engineering attempts to minimize these bubbles. They literally eat away at the propellers. more smaller bubbles, turns into less efficient boats, and higher costs in keeping them afloat. And those props are expensive. At least with other approaches, the investment can be calculated, and made by a single agency. This one, if you mandate that, you externalize the costs to hundreds of shipping lines, millions of consumers (on tickets, shipping costs, and on personal watercraft, if we take it that far), and unless an exception is made for navies, we then further balloon defense spending, and put servicemen at risk. Especially submariners, who already have hellish jobs, and we then have more ships, laid up more of the time, getting propellers replaced. No thanks.
Netting zero takes a lot longer than you might think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
...unless the taste of human flesh and cockroaches appeals to you, that is.
The fact that CO2 absorbs IR under controlled conditions in your basement means essentially nothing.
Why? Propose a mechanism. If what you're saying is true, there has to be an effect to counter the CO2+H2O forcing. It has to be a large effect since the positive feedback is strong. That should make it easy to find. Go ahead, find the evidence, show us what we're missing.
... look at the increase over the last decade where warming has flatlined while CO2 substantially increased.
I am not aware that the warming has done any such thing, and most of the warmest years on record fall in the last decade. The multi-decadal trend is upwards, in close agreement with theoretical predictions.
Come back to us after you look up what percentage of the earths atmosphere is CO2...
Now here's a fact in search of an argument. Either you're disputing easily-observed facts about CO2, solar irradiance, and radiative physics, or you have to admit that CO2 causes warming. Specifically, all other things being equal, a doubling of CO2 results in about 4 W/m^2 of warming. Since I know you're not going to dispute basic laws of physics, we're back to the top of this post, where you find the term that makes a bunch of positive feedbacks go negative, but only on this planet, and only when it's convenient, and contrary to observations.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Isn't global warming [from greenhouse gases] an exponential system?
The opposite, it's a logarithmic system. Every ounce of CO2 released produces less warming than the previous ounce. This is why climate scientists talk about warming in terms of "a doubling of CO2", because if it causes 1 degree of warming with one doubling, the next doubling will also cause a degree of warming.
Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you!
Great response!
yeah, I know I will hear more whining about no unicode and how it's everybody else's fault
in what way is it my fault that text rendered by this site does not get accepted properly back in to the text input boxes on this site?
Thank yooouuu... gonna call you damn_reliable
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
....in this where something goes horribly wrong and we crash the planet into a new Ice Age......
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
I believe that they are doing everything that they can to keep the state's agricultural economy from cratering. Too much of the Western United States is dependent on California's agriculture.
If that were true, they would have already built salt-water purifiers so they could reroute the water to agriculture. If they were really worried, they would not dump as much water for the delta smelt. If either of those things happened, there would be plenty of water for agriculture.
The drought has the powers that be more worried than they are letting on to.
Conspiracy theories become mundane when you stop using vague words like "powers that be" and do the actual work of figuring out who those powers are. It's not the illuminati.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, everyone knows that condensed water vapor in the atmosphere always fades in a few minutes. That's why clouds aren't real!
What makes anyone so sure that we need cooling? What if they go over the edge and trigger irreversible Ice Age conditions? I should think we'd find that a more difficult problem to rectify! I don't think Earth can warm faster than our technology to stop it, at current rates.
We could stand a warmer climate -- dare I say it, a much warmer climate if you ask North Dakotans -- so long as we address the issue of desertification.
I promise it's much more complicated, but it should be sufficient to say that more ground cover planetwide will bring more atmospheric moisture, which leads to more ground cover, which, yadda yadda, prevents things from getting too warm. I'm told there is a period of history in which the global climate was much warmer -- and more importantly, wetter -- than it is now, and remained stably so for several hundred million years. I don't think the matter of stability is being addressed by these folks.
It's not really warming that we should be going all Chicken Little for; it's desertification. Overall stability of the climate should be the priority over desperately trying to stabilize the current conditions, which may or may not be optimum for human use.
It is my country bumpkin opinion that we should be concerning ourselves with how to make our climate wetter, not colder. I think city folks who live in more tropical locales lose sight of that fact, but those of us who live in the deserts are keenly aware of it.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Of course there are long term variations like Milankovitch Cycles that operate on scales of thousands of years and drive the cycle of ice ages but they have so small an effect on a scale of a few centuries that you can ignore them. I was talking about variations that work on multi-year and decadal scales like ENSO, the AMO and PDO, solar cycles, etc.
Firstly, this is exactly the kind of solution the climate change and energy crisis deniers have in mind when they say that science will one day solve their problems. that way we will continue to burn fossil fuels until earth is a smoldering smoke stack. and for our energy needs, while the last drops of oil is pumpwed up, the densiers will say cold fusion is going to happen any day now.
energy conservation, renewable energy, reuse and recycling, population control, sustainable food production etc. etc. are by far the cheapest ways to solve all these problems.
climate engineering will be too little too late, akin to peeeing your pants to stay warm. an net longterm side effects likely to be much worse than any short term gains.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Yeah good idea. Let's start messing with this incredibly complex system on which all our lives depend and for which we have no validated model to predict what will be the outcome because we are seeing some measurements results lately that surprise us a bit because we don't have a clue of how it all works in the first place! Grand idea!
If you are truly to experiment, what is the control group? Without a control is this really Science?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This upcoming failure of science will lead to a religious backlash that will put all further scientific progress on hold for centuries.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Nuke the middle-east and the global cooling will stabalise the climate
... Right up until someone invents fembots in an effort to steal the weather control devices.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
No, it won't. LHC at its highest energy doesn't even get near the energies that happen in the higher atmosphere when solar wind particles hit it.
Like any such large-scale effort, climate engineering will produce both winners and losers (including, of course, many non-human species). How will we decide which people and other creatures will enjoy the benefits, and which will bear the costs?
if we start tinkering with the climate
We've been tinkering with the climate for a hundred years, that's why we're even talking about this.
I might believe it if they had any real Engineers in the group.
Scientists make theories, Engineers do engineering. The tasks are -very- different.
Scientists doing small experiments is good. Scientists trying to do large Engineering is very dangerous. What they are talking about, is like doing flammability testing on your house while you are sleeping in it...
You're a jerk in addition to a complete psycho for posting the same damn thing so many times. If you can refrain from spamming and trolling my every post, I might think about replying. You have a long history of harassing people who disagree with you; it's a bad habit that will get you in trouble some day.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
See reply here — Slashdot doesn't like that "DNS" is repeated so many times.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
2) What makes you think we are stumbling around blindly? Interesting proposition. Can I see some evidence. Because honestly, we appear to have our eyes wide open and know full well what the effects of our actions will result in. If we know what will happen but refuse to change our behavior, that is not stumbling around blindly. That is full speed charging at the wall, with our eyes wide open, clearly seeing what we are doing.
We plan, execute, analyze and revise the plan, while reacting into changes and unforeseen obstacles. Some of those obstacles include people pretesting against those environmental actions. All the things we are doing have method, rationale and logic. It's just not good logic
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
An Ad Hominem is when you attack someone's character because you can't think of a way to attack their actions. Yet your cyber-stalking is quite disturbing even to those of us with no skin in the game. It's pretty damned spammy, and I get annoyed every time there's a serious discussion going on that you have to pollute with your endless attempts at getting back at anyone who might have questioned your character.