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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.
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.
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.
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.