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What Happens When Geoengineers 'Hack The Planet'? (thebulletin.org)
Dan Drollette shares an article by an Oxford physics professor who's concerned about the popularity of radical new proposals to fight global warming.
The Christian Science Monitor wonders if it's time to re-engineer our climate. MIT's Technology Review basically thinks the answer is "yes," having described it earlier as "cheap and easy." The Atlantic seems quite smitten with Economist writer Oliver Morton's vision of remaking the planet, which geoengineering booster Jane Long breathlessly called "geopoetry." The idea received recent coverage (much of it favorable) by New Scientist, NBC, and in TED talks; I myself have recently participated in an NPR panel discussion on the subject... But what has really catapulted the idea into the public eye is Harvard's reckless plan for a privately-funded field trial testing some of the key elements needed... Proceeding to field experimentation crosses a thin red line beyond which lies the slippery slope down to ever-larger field trials and ultimately deployment.
Harvard's experiment -- which is partially funded by Bill Gates -- is "subject to no governance save what Harvard chooses to impose upon itself," according to the article. The experiment involves "putting something in the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back out into space," which the article warns will create "enduring" effects -- and require humanity to commit to maintaining the same atmospheric conditions forever.
Harvard's experiment -- which is partially funded by Bill Gates -- is "subject to no governance save what Harvard chooses to impose upon itself," according to the article. The experiment involves "putting something in the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back out into space," which the article warns will create "enduring" effects -- and require humanity to commit to maintaining the same atmospheric conditions forever.
Please don't trust that you understand all of the ways this might go wrong. Ensure that every change can be backed out before you make it.
You're insane or being paid to type this. You can get help with the former, but the latter is on you.
It's a well-written troll and we can see that you have put the effort in. But you are trying a little bit too hard and it shows. Throw some spelling mistakes in their, or a grammatical error to attract a nazi. This will spark the confrontation that you seek and provide that rich and tasty dopamine reward. Tone down the crazy a notch or two until you hook someone properly then crank it up. Keep some of your powder dry and you'll be rewarded for it. This effort is only worth 5/10 but it is good to see the young trying to learn the old ways. I wish you the best in your future trolling endeavours.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Because when engineers had found this safe, non-toxic and stable gas they and the industry were all like hurray, let's use this like crazy because there are no negative consequences. Until many years later scientists start discovering that while locally, CFC is harmless enough, but on global scale it is very negative for the ozone layer.
And it's not because the engineers were careless, stupid or did not care. They genuinely believed that CFC was a safe and harmless product. It was just because no one thought about the potential connection with the ozone layer (and granted, CFC were discovered before the basic physical and chemical processes that lead to the formation of an ozone layer). And while if CFC turned out to be relatively harmless locally, it's not like history is lacking examples of products that are initially considered safe, only to later be discovered to be anything but.
There is exactly zero chance that similar oh, we did not think of that issues will pop up for attempts to "positively" modify the earth's climate on global scale.
The core of the problem is that humans are polluting. We should stop polluting.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
I saw a talk by a colleague of mine who worked at JPL on climate science in which he talked about some work he'd done studying geoengineering. He said that, in his opinion, geoengineering was one of the stupidest ideas he'd ever heard of, but that not studying it was even stupider. (Especially because it can be done by a wealthy private individual or group, as opposed to the usual industry-scale causes of and proposed solutions to climate change. This makes it more likely to happen, and so more important to understand.)
Later in that talk, he laid out five methods for dealing with climate change:
1. Reductions of emissions. Increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the cause of this trouble, so let's stop making the situation worse.
2. Sequestration of greenhouse gases. Even if we stopped emitting CO2 altogether tomorrow, the atmospheric concentration is still higher than it has ever been in human history, and that can still cause serious climate disruption. Absorbing and storing (or repurposing?) greenhouse gases can move the equilibrium back to historical levels
3. Geoengineering. Tinker with the other variables in the climate system (albedo, sunshades, etc.) to keep the global average temperature the same even though atmospheric CO2 is rising. Climate change happened more or less by accident -- just imagine what we can do on purpose!
4. Adaptation. Rebuild roads and buildings, relocate crops, and shift travel patterns to adapt to changes in local climates (temperature, wet/dry/growing seasons, etc.).
5. Suffering. The above solutions are all incredibly expensive in time and money. However, doing nothing will be expensive in human lives.
We built our roads, farms, and economies to fit in the weather patterns of the last century, assuming they would last forever. It is increasingly obvious that this is not the case (largely due to our own economic activity, though climate change also occurs naturally on longer timescales). Something has to give -- either we have to intervene to keep the climate steady, or we have to adjust our societies to move with it, or the human-nature system will tear itself apart (and the Earth weighs a lot more than we do).
I'm reminded of the policies of the U.S. in managing national forests at the start of the 20th century. For decades the policy of the U.S. was to put out all forest fires immediately, not realizing that forest fires play a role in forest ecology out West. (Some pine trees cannot reproduce, for example, without a fire to help open up pine cones full of seeds. Fire also helps to clear out dry undergrowth which chokes out forests.)
That policy lead to several unintended consequences. Without fire, timber harvests shrank as trees wound up competing with undergrowth for resources. Fuel for fire also accumulated (as it was not being regularly burned off)--and that lead to several incredibly catastrophic forest fires which persist to this day.
It doesn't help that, thinking the risk of fire had been controlled, a lot of homes have been built adjacent to at-risk forests.
Every time I hear of some group wanting to engage in planet-scale geo-engineering, I think of how poorly we understand the ecology of forests, and the forest fires out west which regularly burn millions of acres each year. I think of the 2007 California wildfires which caused the evacuation of towns all over the Southern California area--at one point displacing 1 million people.
But I'm sure today's geo-hackers will do a better job. </sarcasm>
One problem with that First Post is, most of the climate-science deniers are rich, or funded by the rich. The rich like things the way they are, because that's how they got rich. They oppose pollution controls (costs the rich money!) and they oppose reducing the use of fossil fuels (earns the rich money!). The rich want to be free to pollute the air because then they can make money selling purified air, and they want to be free to pollute the water because then they can make money selling purified water. How dare clean air and water be free!
What we're seeing is fad diet marketing applied to the global climate.
Unfortunately, the promise of a quick, easy solution often wins over long term behavior modification and self-control, even when it causes harm in the long term. Expect a plethora of expensive solutions which might appear to provide some benefit if you look at the data just right, but which actually make things worse. At best, they'll cause directly observable harm and be quickly abandoned. At worst, it will appear to work and people will stop worrying about emissions, allowing all progress we've made towards sustainable emissions to be rolled back in the name of profit (although it will be called progress).
Sad futurama jokes are taken as real comments on Slashdot.
Nice theory, but regulation of CFCs began roughly a decade before DuPont's patents on Freon expired.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"Do nothing, and the nanoparticles will return to earth in several years,"
Could be.
What if they don't?
And, incidentally, won't the perpetrators of this scheme be sued for the damages caused by every anomalous weather event on the planet? (or at least in the US where lawsuits are our national hobby)
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Yeeeeah, never going to happen.
Actually, this does happen. Look into what has happened with acid rain the last couple of decades. USA has seen a significant reduction and Europe has seen a massive reduction. This is the result of dedicated political effort into solving this problem. Has it been easy? Of course not. Is the problem gone? No it is not. Has this been free or cheap? No, there have been costs involved for this, including losing jobs for someone, which have had to be spread onto multiple receivers, some possibly unfairly hit. But just because a 100% perfect and fair solution is not possible does not mean that we should not try to do our best.
Of course you have a point in that this is by no means a simple problem, and to some degree possibly unsolvable due to human nature. But framing this as a problem consisting of individual actions is missing the point. Both that industry is a much bigger contributor to pollution than consumers, and that solutions have to be political, giving incentives for wanted behaviour and punishment for unwanted behaviour. Of course that is much simpler in theory than in practice, but that is no excuse for not trying.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
It reminds me of the kid's song, "The old Lady that swallowed the fly", where a woman kept swallowing larger and large animals to catch the animal she swallowed earlier.
Except in this version after swallowing the spider the old lady will probably decide that now she can swallow all the flies she wants, the spider over eats on flies and dies and she now has a fly problem ten times the size of the one she started with.
Should be there. :-) (Grammar nazi regards.)
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
you get sued. When climate is in the control of God, there's nobody to blame when a hurricane kills thousands. Start deliberately monkeying with the climate and you'll be the attractive scapegoat for every weather calamity that befalls. Drought in California? Your fault. Flooding in Missouri? Your fault. Increased desertification in Africa? Your fault.
That's if you're even allowed to continue. It's more likely the UN will shut you down just because many countries will simply fear what will happen. The more paranoid ones like North Korea will probably accuse you of trying to alter the weather to attack them, and decide that you and your operation must be dealt with.
So, astronomy is not science? I think you are wrong. A control makes things easier, but it is not essential.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
What opponents of geoengineering ideas fail to realize (or perhaps intentionally fail to admit) is that continuing to use fossil fuels amounts to continuing an unintentional, unorganized, aimless geoengineering effort that's been running for hundreds of years now. Apparently they prefer this to an intentional, organized effort with a pro-civilization goal.
Burning fossil fuels is as much of a manmade climate-altering action as any shiny new geoengineering concept, and may be exactly what humanity ends up doing in the far future to prevent an ice age.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel