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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.
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.
"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.
--
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."
Subject says it all.
Any fix on this scale will come with many, many unintended consequences.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
“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.
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.
Yeah, but in those countries, they count beer and cider as alcohol. No self-respecting Irishman would do the same.
/duck
/run
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.
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
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.
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
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?