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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."
The March for Science seems focused on earth's bleak environmental future. Fortunately, science has some sure fire answers:
1. Nuclear energy
2. Geo-engineering
3. Carbon dioxide extraction
4. Albedo modification
5. Solar radiation management
You get the idea.
However, you probably won't hear much during the March about the world's population as the root cause of climate change. Nobody wants to face the obvious fact that we are having too many babies. If you suggest that population growth is the fundamental problem behind climate change, the science loving marchers will reply with their timeless response.
Despite a flood of scientific data illustrating human overpopulation, people refuse to accept it. Where is the March for Birth Control? Boys and girls, if you want to stop climate change, get your tubes clipped/tied.
So, can a March for Science change anything? Oh sure! Because it is backed by the democratic process, and Americans can always send a message at the ballot box. (ROTFL)
Politics is a pay-to-play game, and Citizens United has etched that rule in granite around the Capital Rotunda. Which means the environmental crisis will not be addressed until Big Money finds it more profitable than the status quo.
In the meantime, there is really nothing to worry about. Even the long term crisis caused by population growth will soon be a thing of the past.
Science teaches us that if we don't solve our problems, mother nature will
do it for us.
I will eat a leather shoe if you can convince me that climate models have even half the predictive power necessary to justify blowing several hundred billion dollars on this nonsense.
If we can build light sails to get to Alpha Centauri or Serius why can we just put up a giant sunshade?
http://www.airspacemag.com/dai...
We would only have to use it during the day as well so it could be half as big.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I mean the human race cannot even control its carbon emission, despite having known about the problem for more than 30 years now and despite alternatives being known. Get that sorted and then maybe we can talk about large-scale geo-engineering. As a technological civilization, this one is still in its infancy and geo-engineering that matters is well beyond reach.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
To be fair, it isn't North American, European, Australian or Japanese scientists who are contributing to overpopulation. Limiting their reproduction won't actually have much of an impact.
We've already seen birth rates drop so low in nearly all civilized nations that populations will soon start shrinking quickly once those born during the post-WWII baby boom start to rapidly die off. It's already been seen first in Japan and Russia, which experienced a much smaller post-WWII baby boom than most other nations.
Let's be realistic about the source of overpopulation today: it's Africa, and to a lesser extent India and the Middle East.
China was once included, but they really managed to get their population growth under control a while ago. Those other places, however, have not.
I know that a lot of those on the left want to turn this into a matter of race, but it really has nothing to do with race. It doesn't matter what skin color somebody born in Africa or India or the Middle East has, the problem is that such a person is one more mouth to feed in an area that already cannot sustain itself.
Flooding these third-worlders into Europe or North America surely won't help. It will just ruin the only societies that are currently propping-up Africa, the Middle East, and even India. If these people can't manage to sustain themselves in any meaningful way in their home lands, they won't be able to in Western nations, either.
Aside from Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, we're already seeing much of Europe slip into chaos thanks to huge numbers of third-worlders flooding into places like Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, and even the UK. North America is facing a similar problem due to third-worlders from Mexico, Central America, and South America.
Long-term climate change will soon be the least of our concerns. Within a few decades we'll likely see the collapse of Europe. Third-world populations just won't be able to sustain the first-world conditions Europe has come to know over the past 70 years. Things will get very bad in Africa and the Middle East, with one of their main sources of food and medicine (aka Europe) being gone.
North America and Australia just won't be able to support and even more overpopulated Africa and Middle East, combined with an overpopulated Europe filled with third-worlders. We'll likely see them shut their borders and do their best to isolate themselves from the rest of the world destroying itself through overpopulation.
There really are bleak days ahead, but it isn't due to climate change. It's due to third-world overpopulation destroying not only Africa, India and the Middle East, but also Europe. Western nations are unintentionally doing their part to help prevent this disaster, through their naturally-falling birth rates. But we just aren't seeing the same thing happen in Africa, the Middle East and India. Those places are getting worse every day, and there's little to suggest that will change.
Just what we need: a plan that makes the chemtrail loons even more sure they're right.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
by describing a physicist as lanky and soft spoken. If the guy is skinny, what the hell does that have to do with anything? His brain is what's important. I can do it too: "Paralyzed old guy that talks with a computer is ironically good at physics." Sound familiar? -_- Almost sounds like a weird attempt to open up conservative readers by making fun with stereotyping and still talk about climate change.
This comment right here is what's wrong with the alarmists. It is just plain Not Even Wrong to think that you can capture all the relevant physics with a simple energy balance equation that fits on the back of an envelope.
Not sure I can speak for alarmists, but hope you understand that back of envelope calculations are not meant to capture all relevant physics, just meant to give a big picture view. For a more refined analysis you can look to models - but models aren't necessary to understand whether action is required.
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.
Over the time scale of the next century, only one input signal will dominate: the amount of added greenhouse gases. All of that other stuff either oscillates too fast or has an insignificant effect. Other signals that would have a big impact, such as changes in the earth's orbit that drive ice ages, or movement of mountain ranges due to continental drift, are too slow to have an impact over the next couple of centuries.
Relative to the greenhouse gas signal, the climate *was* very close to an equilibrium on a human timescale. It certainly isn't any longer; it's being strongly driven into ranges hotter than it's been for millions of years.
And this is where the analogy between gravity and climate fails. Yeah, you can tell me how dead I'd be, but if the real question is what temperature the sole of my shoe is exactly one second before impact and to a precision of mili-Kelvins, you're in not in as good a shape as you think you are.
To be fair, it isn't North American, European, Australian or Japanese scientists who are contributing to overpopulation.
To be fair, we're telling the rest of the world you can't be like us because we aren't sustainable. Sorry, we used up the resources, you don't get modern life.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You seem awfully bent on "appeal to analogy" type arguments. Is that because you want to create unjustified confidence in one particular set of climate models and policy proposals?
> Nuclear isn't a viable alternative.
The last 40 years beg to differ. That's how long nuclear has *already* been providing 20% of our electricity in the US. In Sweden, nuclear provides 38%. Today, not "Elon Musk predicts that maybe 30 years from now". It's quite possibly running your house right now, and has been for decades.
Yes natural gas and coal have been a bit less expensive, in most areas, AFTER accounting for the 10-year licensing delay afor nuclear and probability of complete loss if the license isn't approved (and nine were approved for 35 years). Suppose I offer to pay you $110 tomorrow if you loan me $100 today. You get a $10 profit, so you'd probably do it, if my credit is good. Suppose I offer to pay you back TEN YEARS from now, rather than tomorrow. How much profit do you need to make *ten years* from now in order to make it worthwhile to invest today? A lot more than $10. That's a significant extra cost to nuclear - the cost of capital is much higher when you can't even start paying it off for ten extra years - and that's hoping that after ten years the license is approved. The US government didn't approve any new reactors from 1977 to 2013. It's awfully expensive to get capital for a project that will probably never be approved. Would you loan your money in a company knowing that they'd probably never be approved to begin operation? They'd have to offer you an awfully high return to make it worth that risk, wouldn't they?
With an objective, standardized approval process for the standarsized designs that we already sell to other countries, nuclear can be cost-competitive with natural gas, given volatility of natural gas prices. Stability of costs is worth something.
Africa is not overpopulated.
Where did you get this idiotic idea from?
And per capita they are probably the ones who produce the least CO2.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah. That's my point. More of the same BS we have in our tax code already, except now "it's good for the environment" instead of "it's good for The Children." This right here is why I call bullshit on the entire global warming industry: it is the latest in a long line of excuses for more government and more control of people. And you are a willing participant. Shame. On. You.