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.

Comments

These people scare me

[Kernel Kurtz]

more than climate change ever will.

Re:These people scare me

[Hardhead_7]

more than climate change ever will.

As opposed to the people changing the climate now with no code of ethics?

Re:These people scare me

[MightyMartian]

"the climate is always changing."

A statement about as useful to climatology as saying "the patient is going to eventually die" to medical research.

Good Luck

[Irate Engineer]

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.

Start with Venus...

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:Start with Venus...

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Free energy

[ShanghaiBill]

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.