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What If We Lost the Sky?
HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "Anna North writes in the NYT that a report released last week by the National Research Council calls for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. But such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. "You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore." says Alan Robock. "Astronomers wouldn't be happy, because you'd have a cloud up there permanently. It'd be hard to see the Milky Way anymore."
According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, losing the night sky would have big consequences. "When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger. There's clearly a neurophysiological basis for that," says Keltner, adding that looking up at a starry sky provides "almost a prototypical awe experience," an opportunity to feel "that you are small and modest and part of something vast." If we lose the night sky "we lose something precious and sacred." "We're finding in our lab that the experience of awe gets you to feel connected to something larger than yourself, see the humanity in other people," says Paul K. Piff. "In many ways it's kind of an antidote to narcissism." And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that's available to almost everybody: "Not everyone has access to the ocean or giant trees, or the Grand Canyon, but we certainly all live beneath the night sky."
Alan Robock says one possible upside of adding aerosols could be beautiful red and yellow sunsets as "the yellow and red colors reflect off the bottom of this cloud." Robock recommends more research into albedo modification: "If people ever are tempted to do this, I want them to have a lot of information about what the potential benefits and risks would be so they can make an informed decision. Dr. Abdalati says deploying something like albedo modification is a last-ditch effort. "We've gotten ourselves into a climate mess. The fact that we're even talking about these kinds of things is indicative of that."
According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, losing the night sky would have big consequences. "When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger. There's clearly a neurophysiological basis for that," says Keltner, adding that looking up at a starry sky provides "almost a prototypical awe experience," an opportunity to feel "that you are small and modest and part of something vast." If we lose the night sky "we lose something precious and sacred." "We're finding in our lab that the experience of awe gets you to feel connected to something larger than yourself, see the humanity in other people," says Paul K. Piff. "In many ways it's kind of an antidote to narcissism." And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that's available to almost everybody: "Not everyone has access to the ocean or giant trees, or the Grand Canyon, but we certainly all live beneath the night sky."
Alan Robock says one possible upside of adding aerosols could be beautiful red and yellow sunsets as "the yellow and red colors reflect off the bottom of this cloud." Robock recommends more research into albedo modification: "If people ever are tempted to do this, I want them to have a lot of information about what the potential benefits and risks would be so they can make an informed decision. Dr. Abdalati says deploying something like albedo modification is a last-ditch effort. "We've gotten ourselves into a climate mess. The fact that we're even talking about these kinds of things is indicative of that."
Possibly the worst movie ever, but everyone in their world hated their lives because they had no sky.
Developed areas currently cover around 1% of Earth's surface already. Switching to more-reflective materials -- asphalt mixed with recycled glass, roofs with light-colored shingles instead of dark, Mediterranean-style exterior color schemes -- not only increases albedo but can mitigate heat-island effects and reduce the need to expend energy on cooling.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...the plot to a really terrible movie.
Liberty in your lifetime
I know we think we're all-knowing, or at least smarter than mother nature. But we just shouldn't be fucking around trying to fix something by doing something more. History is full of humans trying to fix one invasive species by introducing another to 'control' the first, and then winding up even worse off. Fix the cause of the problem rather than trying to chase around the symptoms. Or else we're all fucked.
In fairly short order, we'll get a nice long volcanic eruption which will lower the planetary albedo without us lifting a finger. Wait for it....
"You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore."
Living in Ireland, the sky is white or grey about half the time. You get over it.
--
and our leadership is filled by tools bent on their own reelection above all else,
we are likely to wait until such a measure is a the only recourse.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Well blow up the ocean!!!!!
Burn the land, boil the sea; you can't take the sky from me.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
What effects might the aerosols have?
What if we use too much? Do we really want to risk a snowball Earth?
Do we really want to risk anything on such a large scale just because some yahoo wants to roll coal?
Can no one see that not messing with the climate any more than we have to is the conservative position, at least as "conservative" is properly defined?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky."
What climate mess? Trying to blot out the sun would definitely cause a climate mess to fix a climate mess that is still largely theoretical.
I'm not a climate science denier, but the people coming up with these headlines (the sky will disappear) are not doing scientists any favors with this "morning doom and gloom" machinery.
Gently reply
Highlander II but the sky part should of been it's own movie not Highlander + a B movie scifi plot.
Subject says it all.
See here https://vimeo.com/25430951. It's not good.
We already know the human body is essentially a giant walking blue light detector. Changing the color of the sky permanently could seriously screw with us in ways we don't even know about, let alone the ones we do already know about.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Any fix on this scale will come with many, many unintended consequences.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
no not really, new theory suggests that Earth might once have been a gas giant the size of Neptune. Solar wind pressure burns off the hydrogen and helium, leaving behind a small rocky core and a tenuous layer consisting of nitrogen and argon, carbon dioxide and a little oxygen. Biological processes start and begin to liberate oxygen, and we're where we're at now.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
9/11 happened and when the planes were grounded, the skies over California got a bit brighter.
(ref: BBC Horizon, "Global Dimming")
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
This is supposed to "reverse" the climate change? As in making it essentially perpetually cloudy? This sounds nothing so much like a nuclear winter, though without the nukes...
How something like that is going to reverse anything, now climate being that chaotic as it is doesn't easily move forwards or backwards along some line, like a car or animal does. It will change it, sure. Probably to the nuclear winter-like conditions, as if that were anything better than today's situation. Or maybe this would also keep heat in, so we would get what is essentially a runaway greenhouse... now wasn't that what was supposedely the problem initially?
This is just wrong on so many levels...
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Why does TFA focus on neurophysiological handwavery rather than clear and obvious physical concerns? The loss of light at night would be a major hassle to a lot of people, and would result in increased need for electric lighting. Some nocturnal animals would likely be seriously inconvenienced, messing up the ecosystem. But the biggie -- the real biggie -- Plants Eat Light. Crop yields would decrease the world over. Still want to mess about with aerosols and the atmosphere...?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
That sounds like a practical, reasonable plan that can be done with 19th century solutions. In other words, gay.
We're going to need a solution, preferably more than one, that will require 3D printers, private space, and dozens of universities, think thanks, and tax-funded "private" companies to rob you blind.
Welcome to the 21st century, don't forget to pay your rent.
Who are you? What do you even do with the rest of your life when it's not waiting to post something about systemd in every single article on Slashdot?
What is interesting is that Irish people are some of the nicest people I have ever met. It is a bit of a mystery why they are so nice, given how war-torn their two countries are, and that potato famine thing. Feherty is must-watch golf TV. Conan is one of the greatest late-nighters. Then there's one of the greatest 'stand-up' comics: Dave Allen.
- an envious Canadian
I come here for the love
The problem is actions like this put the burden individuals and smaller municipal governments.
People especially Americans, do not like the government telling them what they can and can't do to their own property. Also the small local governments have limited funds, such actions will mean that the local government will need to make a serious sacrifice.
Putting such actions in place, will only lead to the politicians who put the rule in place being kicked out, and if it continues violence will escalate.
Now your post didn't mention a forced change, I just wanted to bring up trying such smaller scale modifications, will require a slow approach, where alternatives will need to be sure that there aren't major flaws in the design, as a large scale implementation failure could have a major backlash.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And more omninously, make bikinis go out of style?
Whitewash the whole built environment, like Greek villages? Albedo hackers, meet the solar panel supporters. Popcorn!
Like they tried in Snowpiercer http://eudoxos.svbtle.com/on-s...
Last time i checked we weren't the only creatures on this planet, worse yes, only, no.
Might be a good idea think what it does for the living biomass in a whole....We are kept alive by that very same mass.
Why try stop the warming like this? Pretty obvious, after that we can cash in for the fossil fuels that are still left to burn.
*pffft*
He is Leonart Poetering. He spends the rest of his time actually writing Systemd.
Our sky is mostly gray half of the year anyway. In the other half, it's mostly dark.
I'm pretty sure that the planet Krikkit had no sky because they were in a nebula and could not see any other stars. And as soon as they learned about other worlds, the first thought they had was they'd have to destroy everything. And then the killer robots came for us all.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
What if
we lost this guy
di di dah.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
“Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don’t fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don’t play so often now, and have stopped going to school. Education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead.”
I added the bold.
From: http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
I only read this a few days ago, but was really struck by it. The reason is completely different from that covered in the original article, but I wonder at the effects the author is concerned about...
Cheers,
Bruce.
Bruce A. Knack
Silicon Surfers
Seriously. We have a perfect understanding of the climate. We can predict to a tenth of a degree what the weather will be two weeks or two hundred years from now anywhere on Earth. We fully understand what triggers ice ages and can hindcast the climate of the entire Pliestocene, quantitatively. Our knowledge of solar dynamics is almost perfect, so we can confidently predict the state of the sun well into the future. Our measurements of atmosphere, ocean, and land are complete so that we know the entire state of the ocean (for example) well enough to predict with complete accuracy its future evolution given any possible variation of solar input. Finally, we are perfectly capable of predicting the future course of human affairs -- global population, the distribution of that population, land use -- and can predict already precisely when we will make critical scientific and technological breakthroughs (like thermonuclear fusion or widespread LFTR fission or storage batteries that don't suck or high temperature high current superconductors) . Our knowledge of the interior of the Earth itself is at last nearly complete, so we can predict to the day when Yellowstone or other supervolcanoes will wake up and erupt continuously for ten or twenty thousand years. Finally, once we create an orbital cloud of atomic sodium (or whatever) into space, it will be easy to remove it or rearrange it if it turns out to do something completely different than we expect, such as trigger snowball earth or act in its own right like a layer of greenhouse gas between the Earth and 3 K infinity.
Oh, wait, those are all things we don't have, and can't do, and don't know. And I absolutely shudder to think of the price tag, both in dollars and in joules.
I swear, common sense is a lost art.
Let's go back to discussing orbital solar cells as a solution to both energy production and screening. Adding 64 MJ/kg (times a thousand or so) to the cost of solar cells by lofting them into orbit and giving world governments potential access to an orbital superweapon just to get to 1370 W/m^2 sunlight is sheer economic brilliance compared to this one. Oh, wait! Maybe we can combine the two! We can mortgage the next 100 years of human productivity to pay for it, no problem! It's not like we have anything else to do, like ending world poverty, preventing antibiotic resistant malaria from breaking out into a worldwide pandemic, embracing rational thought at the expense of the not-great world religions, and coping with leftover hypernationalism and colonialism from the cold war. So sure, let's do it! Solar cells AND making Earth a ringed or stratospheric smog laden planet!
What could go wrong!
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
How about a space mirror? This seems like a better alternative than to blanket the sky with aerosols.
We must stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere. We need a Manhattan project for clean energy and over all efficiency. We will also have to change the way we live and perform operations on the planet. (No one want to hear this.) We could use this crisis as an inspiration for building a better life for all and more hopeful future. (Yeah, I like Star Trek.)
Gene Roddenberry - "In the 24th century there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all the children will know how to read."
Since I found Serenity
All she's done is operate a 3.5 meter telescope, shoot a laser at the moon, and paint houses.
Besides, if we do this, we'll all end up xenophobic and composing songs that would make Paul McCartney weep. The first ET that landed on the planet would trigger a universe-wide genocide, all in the name of that which is not Krikkit.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I suppose the first thing to ask is "What can go wrong?"
Our planet maintains a balance so far and if you start to upset that balance then you are going to have two possibilities. 1) The planet goes through a runaway greenhouse effect and effectively gets far too hot, although probably not as hot as Venus. 2) The planet goes into deep freeze and this has happened before. We can actually thank volcanic action for reversing this process.
I can understand concern over potential global warming and am in favour of reducing green house gas build up or better still to have a balance between consuming liquid fuels (example: practical bio-fuels without the hype) and growing them. Burning fossil fuels without some sort of balance is asking for trouble. Solar energy in all its forms should be seriously considered and the most suitable for each region implemented if possible and practical by all nations, although IMO that is basically asking the impossible but at least first world countries should set the example.
Another area to look at is the design and building of housing that is energy efficient in that there would be less need for heating and cooling. Practical solar solutions should also be considered here as well.
The things I have just mentioned are easily achievable with our current technology and would go a very long way in stabilising the climate of our planet. Of course this is but a pipe dream since we are a short lived species but if our life potential could be made to say 200 or more healthy years then most people in power would realise that they and not just their children are going have to put up with radical changes if they make stupid decisions. Of course human greed and fanaticism can still blind some even in the face of imminent disaster.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
No, the real reaction would be disapproval because of how ridiculously expensive it would be and yet not work. Even if you white-washed everything you could get your hands on, the light is still going to scatter near the ground. And even if it didn't, it would still bounce right back off of clouds. And even that doesn't mater because the planet is mostly covered in water or undeveloped land. Even the most developed countries look like plain brown land from space.
But yeah, don't let that stop you from nonsensically calling all Americans dumb. I guess we should all throw money at things that you think are good ideas, despite the fact that you never thought them through.
This magnitude of hubris is really staggering. It's like saying:
"Fluoride seems to lessen the occurrence of tooth cavities, so let's just fluoridate all the water supplies!"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The temperature also dropped.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Yeah, and did you notice that nobody -- nobody at all -- is calling for street lights to be turned off for good. Everybody's worried about burning coal, wasting energy, making resistance heating electric hot water heaters illegal as of this year (sheesh!). They want us to turn off the lights in our houses, they want us to spend $20-30 on LED bulbs because incandescents use too much energy -- but the streets are lit outside of my door with enormous halogen bulbs that burn all night even when there are no human eyes open to see their light. Empty parking lots blaze with halogen and mercury and neon. Cities string Christmas lights by the thousands along miles of road once a year. We pay for all of it, and yeah, it means that we can't see the sky particularly well even living on the rural edge of the city with deer in our back yard.
As a species, we're scared of the dark. We don't even consider turning off all of this completely wasted light (and saving some serious power, instantly) because then bad things would come out from under the bed and get us.
We're not even completely incorrect in this belief. One of the bad things is us and we are indeed scary as shit.
However, for far, far less than it would cost to loft crap into upper atmosphere or orbit, for far less than it would cost to even "commission research into" eventually lofting crap into orbit, we could start to actually use smart technology we already have and e.g. make street lights motion sensitive, or control crime (the usual excuse for having them, since "to prevent irrational fear of monsters" isn't an easy political sell for all of its truth) by actual robocop monitoring, looking for crime and not just putting up lights to nominally scare it off.
One could go down a rather long list of petty vanities that cost comparatively huge amounts of energy that we routinely pay for -- and waste. Billboards. Streetlights. The pointless annual time shift. Trucks vs trains. The utter lack of functional, safe, bicycle lanes in almost all the communities in the US. Electric cars. Living in borderline desert regions instead of water-rich temperate regions just because cheap, plentiful energy and long range importation of water makes it possible if unwise (as California and Las Vegas and the southwest in general may learn any year now).
Personally, I think that the evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is all but nonexistent -- it is a simple matter of fact that the changes in climate from the mid-1600's to the present, whatever their cause, have been almost entirely beneficial and in any event are utterly lost in the noise of normal daily and annual variation (overall warming from that entire period is around 1 C, an a signal too small for people to even notice against the noise). If someone truly "believes" in it, however, in spite of the fact that the models that predict it suck and the IPCC itself in the third annual report admitted that the problem of predicting the climate was basically unsolvable so that it is no surprise that the models suck -- let's start by turning off not the lights in my house, where I live and use the light, but outside where all it does is help the deer find the best hastas and roses from my garden to eat late at night.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Great idea. First, we foster the greenhouse effect with aerosols. Second, we shield the atmosphere with more aerosols. Instead of breaking something and try to fix it by breaking another thing. It would be more wise to stop messing around. However, that would not be in the interest of the fossil fuel industry. And it is against the idea that a conservative can never do wrong.
Look at the records when volcanoes injected aerosols. Plenty og cooling, no effects on sky except sunsets got colorful more than usual. You need a tiny amount og sulfur in the stratosphere, not teratons in the troposphere, unless you want to create a deep ice age. Nobody is proposing this.
The article is alarmist BS.
That solution is too permanent.
1 - Send a 3D printer to the L1 Lagrangian point and feed it mass to build a large translucid shield that can be turned on and off (transparent opaque).
2 - Threaten other countries with permanent night unless they pay the "Sun tax".
When we try to assess effects of altering the sky and put them beside the effects of allowing global warming it is rather like asking just how we would like to die and given only two choices. So which bulldozer would we like to run over us? Sadly the public seems to completely fail to understand the huge and quickly building consequences of global warming. Our social and political structures are just not adapted to the kinds of change required. One example would be planting bamboo forests of substantial size in the US. during the first five years of life bamboo soaks up co2 quite efficiently. Bamboo can grow super fast. A 30 foot tall bamboo can actually grow in a single month. Bamboo is also a very useful product when harvested. Now try to get your state to plant a really large bamboo forest and you will find out just how fast our laws and social customs prevent such an action. Try putting a law into effect that requires all roof tops to be snow white and watch the legal horrors begin. How about enforcing a must use a clothes line law for drying clothing which would save untold amounts of fossil fuel used by clothes dryers. Tesla cars stop a lot of oil products from being used and look at the wave of resistance against electric cars. The American public is its own worst enemy.
Local governments can change local building codes to require all new construction to fit the guidelines for albedo modification. Done.
Yeah, it won't affect existing infrastructure, but in the long term (and with AGW we're talking long term, or should be), it'll have the desired effect.
Assuming, of course, that the albedo-modification theories are correct in the first place.
Yes, I know that modifying the albedo will do what we want. What I wonder about is whether we can effectively modify the albedo in a controlled fashion.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Almost all the migrator birds would be severely confused if they can not see the stars for extended periods of time. Many of them sense the Earth's magnetic field. But the species that have survived the periodical shifts in Earth's magnetic field and polarity reversals, they must be using celestial navigation. Losing the stars would leave them very confused.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Are you guys non-ironically really trying to re-create the Matrix?
Nothing like purposefully re-creating conditions that have nearly killed off all life on earth before. What could go wrong?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, and did you notice that nobody -- nobody at all -- is calling for street lights to be turned off for good
I see plenty of street lights being turned off where I live, or street lights being replaced with much smaller LED lamps.
The amount of light that you'd have to reflect to counter even the most extreme climate change models is so minor that it is unlikely to be noticeable with the human eye in anything but the most extreme circumstances. Picking it out of a sunset for example might be possible but otherwise... no. Maybe if you had some scientific equipment... but with the naked human eye with the sun high above? Unlikely.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This was the unbelievable premise to a Korean film. It was almost as unbelievable as the last of humanity living on a train. But the fact that someone is now seriously talking about this incredibly stupid idea means that maybe I need to start building a very big train.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Granted, controlled artificial volcanic eruptions are neater than the Illuminati spraying beryllium nanoparticles from 747s 24x7.
But if you don't have a orbital sunshade swarm at L1 and blackout Tuesdays, you're just not a power worth worrying about.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
solar forcing has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE
Pretty much true. Solar forcing has some effect, but it's small.
So, what's your point ? Even though the solar output has remained very stable, doesn't mean we can't sit in the shade.
Trust the scientists, they know what they're doing....
Dinosaurs, Season 4, episode 7: Changing Nature
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
I know science is hard, but let's go over it like you're five.
Global warming is largely considered to be caused by something called greenhouse gases. The most prominent one is CO2, which is generated by burning fossil fuels among other things. Earth is by and large heated by the sun's rays going through the atmosphere and hitting the Earth, heating the air and ground. A part of those rays, however, gets bounced off the surface or re-emitted. Those rays can then leave the atmosphere, not heating up the Earth. Greenhouse gases act as a sort of shield around the atmosphere, reflecting those rays back again towards the Earth over and over.
Aerosols act as an additional barrier beyond the greenhouse gases which have the opposite effect: they bounce the sun's ray off the atmosphere before they can even get in, thus reducing the total amount of heat getting in the atmosphere in the first place and thus reducing the impact of greenhouse gases.
TL;DR Human CO2 increases greenhouse effect, but that still requires heat to get in in the first place.
You say that like there'd be a different reaction if there was a guaranteed fix. Hint: there wouldn't be.
Nothing happened, I don't see the conflict. The atmosphere got hotter because of the amount of CO2 in it, not the amount of sunlight coming in. But reducing the amount of sunlight coming in can still cool it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Where do you live? Someplace either very enlightened or broke, I imagine. Mostly enlightened if they are buying LED lamps, which are not cheap.
But hey, when I visit Charlottesville, it has these lovely 1 meter wide bike lanes on most of the streets near UVA. I'm so jealous. Durham just painted a line on the side of existing streets that sequesters anywhere from 0 to 40 or 50 cm and call that a "bike lane". On my own ride into campus there is a place where it goes from 40 cm to 0 cm under an overpass at one of the two busiest traffic points on the entire route. Several people are badly injured or killed every year riding bikes in Durham (including, a couple of years ago, Seth Vidal, the principle developer of YUM and a good friend of mine) -- I wonder why?
These are the steps we should take long before we try uber-expensive and risky measures like mucking around with either atmospheric chemistry or space blankets in the sky or even massive (and hence expensive) rail projects. They make sense even if AGW is nonsense or sensible but not a real threat or even beneficial. It's a lot healthier for me to ride a bike into work -- or would be if it weren't for the substantial risk of injury along the route and the fact that I'd have to ride down a mile of country road with an inadequate bike lane during rush hour in the dark because of the silly time shift. Bike lanes, losing most of the street lights and regulating commercial light pollution after hours, and some clever use of electronics to control crime instead of light. They make sense even if Lockheed-Martin does have commercial fusion (as they claim that they will) within five years.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Major city? More like those of us who live within easy driving distance of civilization.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
But who buys these Chinese products? It's not the Chinese.
How about companies manufacture reliable goods like computers, TVs, cars, other electronics so that they don't break easily, and so we don't have to replace them constantly? But companies intentionally build inferior goods that get damaged easily or go obsolete quickly so they can keep selling various micro version updates of the same product (at a huge environment cost of mining raw materials and then manufacturing the product).
Then they cry about global warming -- hypocrites. How come there's no regulation about minimum standards for long a product should last? That would cut the so-called global warming effect by half.
Because there were no planes blocking out the sunlight. Duh!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I suppose the first thing to ask is "What can go wrong?"
Answer: Not much. Volcanoes already do this, so it is not something unprecedented. If we change our mind, we can stop spraying the aerosols, and everything will return to normal in a few months.
Our planet maintains a balance so far
Well, the whole point of AGW is that we are already out of balance.
I don't really like the aerosol idea. It doesn't actually remove any CO2, so things like ocean acidification will continue to get worse. If we are going to do geo-engineering, then iron fertilization of the oceans seems like a much better idea. That removes the CO2, and boosts fishing yields. But we should be doing lots of research on ALL feasible solutions.
Comprehension failure on your part. "Solar forcing" refers to the planet warming up because the sun is putting out more heat. Well, the sun isn't putting out more heat; the Earth is warming because it's trapping the heat better due to the increased amount of CO2 in the upper atmosphere. That is indeed settled science.
Now, reducing the amount of heat from the sun that reaches the surface will obviously cool down the planet. That's in no way in contradiction with the accepted science behind AGW models. I fail to see how you can misunderstand that, unless you desperately want to.
http://youtu.be/eWG-nHuuCRc
And if they change those building codes, we'll see headlines reading something like "GOVERNMENT FORCES CHANGE ON ALL HOMEOWNERS". Just like we did here when that fuckwit with a partisan axe to grind posted a story about EPA requiring all *new* wood-burning stoves to have cleaner emissions, except he worded the submission so it sounded like *all* stoves would have to be so modified and then kept arguing that way after he'd been shown to be a liar.
So the solution to too much pollution in the air is... to put more pollution in the air! Brilliant!
And I thought the chemtrails people were just paranoid.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Yeah, and did you notice that nobody -- nobody at all -- is calling for street lights to be turned off for good.
Except for ever amateur astronomer ever.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Actually, reminds me more of this movie. Better buy a ticket soon!
The problem is actions like this put the burden individuals and smaller municipal governments.
Wait - what burden? A white roof would lower cooling costs and at the same time likely last longer (esp. if it were metal instead of asphalt shingle) due to the smaller heat envelope. Sure you'd have to wash it once in awhile, but damn... that's not really much of a burden.
Also the small local governments have limited funds, such actions will mean that the local government will need to make a serious sacrifice.
Didn't realize that ink was that expensive these days. He said they could merely change the local building codes, not pay for that change. It would effect new construction and renovation.
By the way - one would have to keep it sane; making the freeways and parking lots white may keep heat down and increase albedo, but I damn sure wouldn't want to drive on such a glare-factory, let alone try to navigate it in the Winter.
I doubt it would do much of anything to affect climate though, since (aside from tenured profs seeking prominence, politicians making megabucks off of AGW, and quasi-religious zealots who refuse to admit otherwise) most climate science is still grossly incomplete, too immature to predict much of anything with any accuracy. Show me a complete (enough) and (more importantly) competent working computer model of the Earth's climate, and a sufficient series of correct predictions made from it... then we'll talk. Until then, the field still has a very long, hard row to hoe.
All said and done, keeping good custody of the environment is a worthy goal and should be aimed for - I have no problems with building codes that aim for this, at all. But seriously, let's just do it because it's the right thing to do, not because of some pronouncement from yet another klaxon-happy hyperbole factory looking to get his name in the papers.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This is like letting a five year old play with matches because the child is "cold".
The level of competence exhibited by climate conjecturists doesn't inspire faith in allowing them to take such drastic measures with such little understanding of what is actually taking place. The earth has withstood humanity for millennia, and while we have at times made things worse I believe we are on track to make things better.
We need to continue with small, more subtle changes, like converting to electric vehicles. Stepping away from releasing vast amounts of carbon for the sake of stemming pollution alone. Putting out fires that would have burned coast to coast just centuries ago. Using legislation to thwart mass polluters who seek to turn a larger profit at our planet's expense.
Doing something the so drastic with such a pathetic understanding of our world is how humanity can destroy it. This risks throwing ourselves into an ice age by attempting to manipulate a balance that was here long before we arrived on the scene and will be here long after we have killed ourselves off.
I'd hope stories like this are merely attention grabbing in intent. Much like the idea of making butt plugs mandatory might be in effort reduce methane in the atmosphere.
Including me...;-) But we are what, 0.001% of the total population? Not exactly a plurality to be taken seriously.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
What could possibly go wrong? Not like anyone made a movie about it. Oh wait. Better buy a train ticket soon. :P
The easy way to turn things white is to make roads out of concrete instead of asphalt. The catch is that the process used to make cement in most of the world involves heating calcium carbonate enough to bake out a CO2, leaving calcium oxides / hydroxides, so it's a surprisingly large generator of greenhouse gasses, more than making up for any albedo gains. Oops.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It doesn't actually remove any CO2, so things like ocean acidification will continue to get worse,
The ocean is getting more neutral if anything, but absolutely not "more acidic".
And whatever changes come from CO2 are far less than natural variance over the course of a month (read article)...
I despair that alarmists can't understand even the most basic aspects of material science.
Kind of makes you sweat that people who can't even understand the pH scale are casually fine messing with the atmosphere for the entire Earth because "volcanoes already do it". Well if a volcano jumped off a cliff would you do that too?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you'd certainly be killing off many animals. I'm not sure if nocturnal animals who hide at night would be worse off than the diurnal animals who hide at night.
Scratch that, it'd probably be worse for the animals who navigate and migrate by the stars.
Same observation as with the other AC: you say that like there'd be a different reaction for a guaranteed fix.
What the fuck happened?
Nothing, you merely confused "changes in the sun's brightness" with "changes in the Earth's albedo", added an exaggeration, and then pretended climate scientists are idiots. Same sort of thing that has been going on for millennia; don't like the news, shoot the messenger.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Commenting to remove accidental mod.
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I've got to say that there has been fairly annoying fallout from that decision. The house I rent has a very efficient and clean-burning stove if you operate the damper correctly, but it's possible to do it wrong so you can't sell these stoves any more. So the manufacturer pulled out of the USA and now they don't even want to talk to Americans and it's impossible to get parts.
It's really too bad that people aren't held personally responsible for their behavior, so that we could have nice things
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
By the way - one would have to keep it sane; making the freeways and parking lots white may keep heat down and increase albedo, but I damn sure wouldn't want to drive on such a glare-factory, let alone try to navigate it in the Winter.
Is there even anything that roadways can feasibly be made of that isn't black? We have a long stretch of concrete freeway very near where I live, which I drive on regularly. It's the US 101 between cloverdale and someplace around healdsburg or santa rosa, I forget when it goes back to blacktop since I so rarely head down that way. And it is, bar none, the absolute worst stretch of freeway in the state, for a lot of reasons which ought to be obvious and have to do largely with repairability. About the only way to get a smooth ride out of it is to get into the left lane and go 75-80, at which point a vehicle with decent suspension will sort of float and sort of bounce over the bumps. You can't go slower because you'll just be an obstacle, and anyway it's not smooth at lower speeds.
I doubt it would do much of anything to affect climate though, since (aside from tenured profs seeking prominence, politicians making megabucks off of AGW, and quasi-religious zealots who refuse to admit otherwise) most climate science is still grossly incomplete, too immature to predict much of anything with any accuracy.
Irrelevant. We don't need to make specific predictions to predict that things will be bad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The easy way to turn things white is to make roads out of concrete instead of asphalt. The catch is that
...concrete roads are bullshit. They are basically unrepairable. When they start to go to hell, and they will eventually because everything does, then they are the worst things ever.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
local government will need to make a serious sacrifice.
Didn't realize that ink was that expensive these days
I assumed he meant sacrificing a golf game to actually do something productive.
It's probably the safest, yet more expensive ways to reduce the sun's energy hitting the earth. If we're smart enough, we could put a big programmable sun shade up there.
Plants will grow less. Humans will burn more to stay warm. This does not sound like a good plan.
Irrelevant. We don't need to make specific predictions to predict that things will be bad.
Not irrelevant, because you can't impose these kinds of burdens (financial and otherwise) on people without the certainty that they'll make things better.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
We'd become xenophobic omnicidal recluses and have to be locked away in a time lock...
It's a shame the company didn't offer a retrofit kit to bring the old design into compliance.
Not irrelevant, because you can't impose these kinds of burdens (financial and otherwise) on people without the certainty that they'll make things better.
Why not? Of course you can. It's done all the time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's a shame the company didn't offer a retrofit kit to bring the old design into compliance.
They don't have to do this stuff to sell their stoves anywhere else, so why bother? Just drop the market, and keep selling the old design which works fine as long as you don't overdamp it. But sadly, most of us have no idea that overdamping is what causes excessive wood stove emissions. I mean, nobody ever taught me anything about starting a fire, or maintaining one, even though I grew up in a house with a fireplace.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which neatly illustrates why we need environmental regs in the first place: if you're not going to make me, I won't bother doing something that'll benefit everyone. There must be a way to sell "makes your existing stove less polluting for a relatively low price" but they didn't want to bother.
uh... contrail albedo, actually.
Clouds reflect sunlight straight back into space. The Earth cools. According to that programme, for three weeks after 9/11 ground temperature average across the continental United States was UP by THREE DEGREES.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
http://news.nationalgeographic... earliest I can find.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
would explain why there's no molecular hydrogen gas or free helium in our atmosphere.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
If there are clouds then the sunlight mostly wouldn't make it to ground level to begin with - on sunny days the reflected sunlight will mostly make it back out of the atmosphere, especially on roofs and other fairly horizontal surfaces. Whitewashing vertical surfaces is more relevant to cooling the individual structure, but a cooler structure is also one that likely runs less air conditioning, which until we get off fossil fuels will make an even bigger difference than whitewashing on solar thermal retention.
The problem is that at present we have lots of dark surfaces absorbing that sunlight and re-emitting it as thermal infrared - most of which gets reflected even by clear skies.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
no it didn't.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The point that this thread descended from was that the regs weren't going to affect current stoves. What you're arguing now is that it's the manufacturer's fault (and a foreign one at that) for not supplying parts to address the affect on current stoves. This illustrates exactly what people mean by regulatory end runs.
Well, yes, hence the current suspicions of any large scale reworkings of society. They've pretty much every one fallen on their faces. Perhaps he should have said "You *shouldn't*...".
Irrelevant. We don't need to make specific predictions to predict that things will be bad.
Hell, forget specificity - it would be nice if it could even make a good/bad prediction, or at least *something* close enough and concrete enough. We've seen predictions of an ice-free Arctic by now (nope), sea levels that should have risen at least 5-12" by now (nope), swarms of killer hurricanes (nope)... and mostly we see a lot of authorities having to go out of their way to explain why their 10-year-old predictions have turned to crap. It doesn't help that some of them have resorted to long circuitous loops of semi-logic to try at an explanation.
Seriously - this isn't about quibbling over a fractions of a degree here, it's about getting the trend predictions workable, at least enough that later events come to within at least the same zip code of confirming them. Put this way: According to Dr. Hansen's infamous 'hockey stick', we should have seen something affirmative by now... and instead of revisiting his hypothesis to see why it didn't stack up against the facts on the ground (which would be the scientific way to deal with failure), we see Dr. Hansen actively litigating against any big-name critic that hurts his ego by pointing out that he was (*gasp*) wrong. And no - don't get me started on the IPCC; it's become little more than a propaganda organ these days.
So yeah - it is relevant to have a working model that can at least predict a trend, especially in light of what these scientists are demanding of society as a whole. As long as the science itself remains broken, no one should take stock in it.
Before anyone comes swooping in to express their hurt little feelings via downmods, note that I *want* these scientists to have a working model, and to have some sense of accuracy, no matter how it turns out otherwise. So far, not only is there a lack of one, but a religious and ideological fervor has swept the whole damn field, making it a mess that has lost credibility (partially in some cases, entirely in others).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No, it doesn't. There's no active mechanism nor guiding intelligence that maintains any "balance". The current conditions are pure happenstance.
There are some negative feedbacks in the system. So, in a way you could describe that as a balance. For instance, CO2 is a negative feedback. Higher temperatures increase rock weathering, which sequesters CO2. Over the history of the earth, the increasing heat output of the sun has been counteracted by lowering CO2 levels on earth, keeping the temperature in a relatively narrow band.
See, I knew some libertaritard was going to interpret it that way.
I mean in the sense of why the mfr doesn't develop an upgrade kit and sell it worldwide instead of simply pulling out of the States so they didn't have to deal with it, that illustrating how companies tend to not give a shit about the greater good until they're compelled.
The reaction to this idea would of course be HOW DARE YOU SPEND MONEY AND TELL ME WHAT TO DO WHARRGARBL, because 'murrica.
Of course the land surface area of "America" is relatively small compared to the rest of the world, so you don't really need "America" on board with a albedo modification plan...
Oh, you want "America's" money to spend how you please... I see the problem now ;^)
Just paint the earth white - works during ice ages.
one point, as has been said before, the US trying to tell china to lower its carbon emissions, is kinda like the alcoholic telling the casual drinker he's got a problem.
apparently we triple china's carbon emissions per capita... so yeah.
It won't solve the problem, no, but it's a start. And we *really* need to get people starting on a large scale. Short of someone pulling a cold-fusion reactor out of their nethers there won't be any magic bullets to this problem, and white roofs are cheap step we could take today, one that's absolutely cost effective anywhere that employs significant air conditioning: return on investment of *you* painting *your* roof white is probably a few years, tops. And done on a large scale in cities it would also reduce the heat island effect by at least several degrees, lowering cooling costs even further.
And all that lowered cost translates directly to lowered CO2 emissions. Not by much, but it's one of the few things that can be done without massive government intervention. And as people actually start taking a measure of personal responsibility for climate change, even if largely symbolic, then we can start to hope to gather the sort of popular momentum necessary for more sweeping changes. Or would you rather wait for the puppet masters to decide that business as usual is causing things to get bad enough even their obscene profits won't protect them? Because personally I don't think they're far-sighted enough to recognize that point, and even if they are, the rest of us will still be screwed.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
My city is putting in LED lighting for the streets and traffic signals.
Also, where are you getting your LED lights? I just picked up a bunch for $12 and had coupons from the provincial power provider for $5 off each one.
Even if not, mitigating the heat island effect is a worthwhile goal, especially since lite colored roofing is no more expensive than dark.
We've had traffic signal LEDs for a while, but AFAIK no overhead street lights. I'm not sure they are bright enough to meet their "standard" or whatever.
I'm just quoting over the counter prices I see in my grocery store or local hardware store. So far Duke power hasn't offered any killer deals on them (although they do periodically with CFs, but I'm already using CFs throughout the house). Also, I need/want 100W equivalent brightness and the best Harris-Teeter can do is 60W equivalent for around $25-30. Online Cree bulbs (Cree is right down the road and some of my ex-students work there) are around $24 for 100 W equivalent, Eco-bulbs around $23, save a bit if you buy in bulk.
That's a lot of money for a single bulb. Yes, they claim 25,000 hours. Yes, the bulbs haven't existed for any reasonable fraction of that much time so we have no idea how long they'll last. My garage has a whole bag of CFs that are rated for 8000 hours and didn't make it to 3000.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Not sure where you live, but here they've NEVER used Halogen, they use sodium vapour, and before that Mercury vapour. and are actually in the process of replacing the old ones with new LED lights. the Christmas lights have been LEDs for the past 5 years.
Electric cars... transfers the carbon footprint from the gasoline in the car, to the coal fired power plant... there is still a carbon footprint, until we completely abandon coal, natural gas, and oil for electricity generation.
making street lights motion sensitive instead of light sensitive, isn't all that useful, a car driving down the road, by the time the motion sensors pick him up he's already past it. the vapour lights used by street lamps take a long time to warm up and give off adequate light. far longer than it takes to drive past them. so that is a problem. And you say it like it's never been discussed or thought of. when I worked for a municipal gov't, the engineers got those calls on a fairly frequent basis. people don't want the lights on all night, so they complain, and ask about motion sensors. when it takes 30 seconds to 1 minute for the light to turn on... only to stay on for 30 seconds then turn back off... it doesn't fulfil it's need. not just about crime prevention but also safety. without the lights it can be difficult to see pedestrians crossing the road ahead of you. It only takes one kid to die before the lights come back on for good.
Now you make a decent point about "warming" But that is the biggest fallicy touted by climate change deniers... It's not so much that the air temperature warms 1 degree... the oceans have warmed significantly more, and that is more troubling. the oceans warming affects currents, affects wind, affects the water cycle. The Climate is changing. severe weather events are more common.
Now is torching the sky the right thing to do? Hell no. in fact there is no "quick fix" for this. The best things we can do is limit energy usage, (by switching to LED lighting for one example) reducing our carbon emissions (more fuel efficient cars,) etc. once we start to reduce the amounts we are putting in the air, we need to then start making it go in reverse... i'm not suggesting it's an over-night fix, it took hundreds of years to do the damage it'll take hundreds of years to fix it... They thought the emissions were too insignificant to be harmful before, we will think the fix is to insignificant to really help... and that will be the downfall.
re: street lights Some communities have done this to save money and energy. An even larger number are aware of the potential. So it may be a small minority, but it isn't nobody at all. It's an idea I've advocated for a long time, for energy, cost, and its a gross violation of the night. And of course researchers have studied whether street lights deter crime or just let criminals see better. Results are inconclusive. re: the excessive waste caused by petty vanities and stupid choices. Yes.
Fall On Me
Song by R.E.M.
There's a problem, feathers, iron
Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys
Feathers hit the ground
Before the weight can leave the air
Buy the sky and sell the sky
And tell the sky, and tell the sky
Fall on me (what is it up in the air for)
Fall on me (if it's there for long)
Fall on me (it's over, it's over me)
There's the progress
We have found a way to talk around the problem
Building towers
Foresight isn't anything at all
Buy the sky and sell the sky
And bleed the sky and tell the sky
Fall on me (what is it up in the air for)
Fall on me (if it's there for long)
Fall on me (it's over, it's over me)
Fall on me
(Well I would keep it above but then it wouldn't be sky any more)
(So if I send it to you you've got to promise to keep it home)
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I'm not saying there aren't effects that make it appear as if a "balance" is being maintained - only that they are happenstance, the appearance of "balance" an artifact of the human tendency to see patterns where there are none.
Yeah and what if we lost the earth??
Then perhaps we should look behind the couch cushions. You'd be amazed at the kind of things you can find there.
So we are lamenting not having enough Ozone (the chemical)? Then how about we produce some & release it. The sky then stays blue.
But if that's still not enough, then find "dark places" on Earth and coat with something white and permanent (Limestone).
Just requiring a formula change for Asphalt roadwork would go a long way here.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Of course when we block and how much is hard, I'm sure the scientists will find a want to put a semi-pourous screen in solar-syncronous orbit.
Although the rising levels of acidity and CO2 in oceans is benefiting CO2->O2 and acidity absorbing bacteria and algae, so we might want to block out the sun over land in specific places. The Sahara, or Australian outback seem like good ideas (CHEAP arable land! WOO!) Australia has the advantage of being close to the worlds population center, so an extra breadbasket would be fantastic.
Of course the world's energy problems (mirrored solar, is gooood), food problems (recycling, and composting, more arable land... we really did urbanize the best farm land), and transportation problems will be improved as we like each other more and urbanize more densely and closer together (what is with the pressure differentials in condominiums, why is no one ever blasting rock music on their balcony [guess I'm young], and the dry air from the air vent!). Two of these seem to be happening a bit. It's hard to imagine a world where all three have happened so much that we want to scale them back, and I suppose that makes them good things.
you can't impose these kinds of burdens (financial and otherwise) on people without the certainty that they'll make things better.
That's insane. You have to weigh the uncertainty against the consequences if the predictions are right. There will always be some uncertainty... even if just manufactured uncertainty. You're just burying your head in the sand.
You sound a bit desperate yourself.
That whole article was trying to claim that moving a rather large body of water towards the acid side of the pH is somehow not acidifying it. Then he threw in a dash of "but jimmy's doing it".
He might as well claim that swimming in crude oil gives duck feathers a healthy shine.
Then let me be more clear. Do. Not. So. Much. As. Put. Numbers. On. This. We have already modified this plant to a point that - if not tipping - is within sight of tipping to a currently living generation. Work on solving the existing problem, not adding another un-projectable problem on top of the current one. This is like doing brain surgery with duct tape and a soup spoon.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
while reading the first graf, or I would never have gotten to the second. Well done.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
is out of reach. She's making droughts and we're fresh out of reservoirs - I believe to restore California's current water deficit, you would need to clone Lake Mead three+ times.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Volcanos also provide a repeatable aerosol experiment, about once a decade there's an eruption large enough to very slightly dip the global temperature for a year or two after the event, Mt Pinatubo is the classic example.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Can we wait at least until our global temperature is above the average for the Cenozoic era? We are still technically in an ice age.
To get a feel for what it would be like try living in a major Chinese city. I did for 2 years, most nights you would only see 2 or 3 stars. I was a bit depressing to look up at night and I wonder if it was a factor in my having "had enough of it" and coming home to New Zealand. First night home and I could not get over how beautiful a night sky full of stars is.
The plan sounds like a bad idea on too many levels...
Yes, lets go back to the caves and live like Noble Savages.
For another point of view, see this talk by David Deutsch from 2005. He rambles for a while (in an entertaining way) before getting to the point. Here's the ending:
So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die.
Now the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. (Laughter) If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either.
The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature -- and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research. They're not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right -- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely -- is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve: "Problems are soluble." And on the other one carve: "Problems are inevitable." Thank you. (Applause)
I bought the Cree 60W equivalent for $12 and they are quite bright (800 lumens). The Cree 100W equivalent are around $24 here too. Maybe you should buy the bulbs in Canada since our dollar is sitting around $0.80 US. :)
The funny thing is it's not even written by the guy that runs the site - which you would have known had you even bothered to click through once. But you are far too deep up your own info-bubble to risk reading a single word that might pop your carefully crafted iluusions.
The article clearly lays out how water (rain) is a base (not acidic at all), the oceans are alkaline (not acidic at all) and therefore all that happens is the ocean grows more or less alkaline, with zero chance of becoming "acidic". Which element of this extremely basic science concerning pH levels are you challenging exactly?
The ocean "acidification" myth is a GREAT litmus test to see if the person is interested whatsoever in science over dogma. You just failed utterly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which neatly illustrates why we need environmental regs in the first place: if you're not going to make me, I won't bother doing something that'll benefit everyone.
Except it's annoying when you can't control the damper independently on those super-windy nights. If I couldn't do that, then I'd go through firewood stupidly fast then.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
See? This is why we ignore you idiots. You cant even get basic science concepts down.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
We would all have to buy our energy from Mako power plants that would suck dry the life force of the planet and illicit Cloud and his giant sword to come kick some ass and save us all.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Why should they bother. The US will likely move the goalposts again in five years. Your country is a regulatory over-governed nightmare. If you think that company not doing business with you was bad wait till you aint the number one global reserve currency. You will get a rude shock.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Gosh, maybe they could offer a kit with computer control and sensors that will notice these things and handle them automatically.
You're arguing just to argue.
> You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore.
I grew up in northeastern Ohio. I always assumed the notion of the sky being "blue" was a cultural symbolic thing, like how they teach you to draw yellow lines radiating from the sun to represent the sunlight coming from it, or the black lines you draw behind a moving object to show the motion.
When I was in seventh grade we moved to western Michigan. The first day, I got out my camera and took photographs of the sky being *actually* blue (well, sky blue), because I didn't think anyone would believe me, or understand that I was being literal, if I just told them about it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.