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Can Geoengineering Drones Fight Global Warming? (technologyreview.com)
MIT Technology Review reports:
David Mitchell, a lanky, soft-spoken atmospheric physicist, believes frigid clouds in the upper troposphere may offer one of our best fallback plans for combating climate change... Fleets of large drones would crisscross the upper latitudes of the globe during winter months, sprinkling the skies with tons of extremely fine dust-like materials every year. If Mitchell is right, this would produce larger ice crystals than normal, creating thinner cirrus clouds that dissipate faster. "That would allow more radiation into space, cooling the earth," Mitchell says...
Increasingly grim climate projections have convinced a growing number of scientists it's time to start conducting experiments to find out what might work. In addition, an impressive list of institutions including Harvard University, the Carnegie Council, and the University of California, Los Angeles, have recently established research initiatives... By this time next year, Harvard professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch hope to launch a high-altitude balloon from a site in Tucson, Arizona. This will mark the beginning of a research project to explore the feasibility and risks of an approach known as solar radiation management. The basic idea is that spraying materials into the stratosphere could help reflect more heat back into space, mimicking a natural cooling phenomenon that occurs after volcanoes blast tens of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky.
"I don't really know what the answer is," says a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "But I do believe we need to keep saying what the truth is, and the truth is, we might need it."
Increasingly grim climate projections have convinced a growing number of scientists it's time to start conducting experiments to find out what might work. In addition, an impressive list of institutions including Harvard University, the Carnegie Council, and the University of California, Los Angeles, have recently established research initiatives... By this time next year, Harvard professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch hope to launch a high-altitude balloon from a site in Tucson, Arizona. This will mark the beginning of a research project to explore the feasibility and risks of an approach known as solar radiation management. The basic idea is that spraying materials into the stratosphere could help reflect more heat back into space, mimicking a natural cooling phenomenon that occurs after volcanoes blast tens of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky.
"I don't really know what the answer is," says a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "But I do believe we need to keep saying what the truth is, and the truth is, we might need it."
Hush. There's a narrative to uphold.
When you're looking at climate, your looking at how the characteristics of the system change. Though the weather is chaotic and sensitive to initial conditions, the boundaries are not. Dr Gavin Schmidt (NASA) explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This illustrates. Change Sigma and the system changes predictably. We can't predict the weather in New York 100 years hence, but we can know how the probabilities will change in a globally warmed world.
As another reply above points out, this is about making predictions about specific behaviors and trends in a super-massively-chaotic system. The number of variables able to substantially change outcomes is staggering in a system as massively-chaotic as the Earth.
If it's really quite as chaotic as you say, then we should be very careful about any changes we make. Even the slightest change in initial conditions could result in drastic and unpredictable outcomes. Frankly I think you're being a bit alarmist.
The problem is not over population. It's the pollution that comes from the energy they need. You can have 2 people and still produce too much CO2 for the earth to handle or 10 billion and not produce any above the natural norm. Same for waste and trash. It's not the number of people, it's the amount of output.
You simply aren't going to have modern society without billions of people.
And you simply aren't going to revert 7 billion people back to an agrarian economy.
So working to reduce our waste volume is the only realistic plan.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people