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More Climate Scientists Now Support Geoengineering
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Jan 03, 2009 01:15 PM
from the this-earth-is-busted-let's-build-a-new-one dept.
from the this-earth-is-busted-let's-build-a-new-one dept.
ofcourseyouare writes "The Independent is a UK newspaper which has been pushing hard for cuts in CO2 emissions for years. It recently polled a group of 'the world's leading climate scientists,' revealing a 'growing support for geoengineering' in addition to cutting CO2 — not as a substitute. For example, Jim Lovelock, author of The Gaia Theory, comments: 'I disagree that geoengineering the climate is a dangerous distraction and I disagree that on no account should it ever be considered. I strongly agree that we now need a "plan B" where a geoengineering strategy is drawn up in parallel with other measures to curb CO2 emissions.' Professor Kerry Emanuel of MIT said, 'While a geoengineering solution is bound to be less than desirable, the probability of getting global agreement on emissions reductions before it is too late is very small.'"
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What Could go Wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What Could go Wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, not every time. The introduction of the cactoblastis moth to Australia [asgap.org.au], to deal with prickly pear, was very successful. But I'm not so keen on the modern attempts at geoengineering -- dumping gazillions of tons of chemicals into a chaotic system without any chance of running a realistic trial first (only a simulation that by definition can only deal with known variables), and where you haven't got a spare atmosphere if you muck this one up.
Parent
What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
If attempted this will likely turn out to be as stupid a decision as it was to introduce western predators to Australia in the hope that they would help fix the problem caused by introducing rats and rabbits. When it comes to nature and our ecosystem the rule of thumb ought to be "leave it the fuck alone".
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
When it comes to nature and our ecosystem the rule of thumb ought to be "leave it the fuck alone".
Well, technically, the rule of thumb should be "understand first, act later" and in any event if you decide to act do it in a controlled environment first.
Parent
Gaia == Biosphere. (Score:4, Informative)
James Lovelock [wikipedia.org] has been called the the father of Earth Science [wikipedia.org], climate science is a subset of Earth science. The term Gaia [wikipedia.org] is more or less interchangeable with the term Biosphere [wikipedia.org]. The hippies picked up the idea and made Gaia into some sort of god that has feelings, this initially confused the hell out of many of his scientific peers (eg: gaia was initially critisied by Dawkins & Gould). Those who have a vested interest in fucking up the planet still encorage that mis-informed view and consequently the term has fallen into disrepute since the general population now see gaia as the God of the bush-bunnies rather than the glue that holds the Earth sciences together.
The term "climate scientist" was not invented when he gained his Phd. He was initially trained in medicine so it's no surprise that he proposes that problems with the Earth's biosphere be tackled the same way as a doctor treats a patient (patient = unique living system), "first do no harm". However, Lovelock is no Hippie, he has upset Greenpeace and other like minded political organisations for proposing nuclear reators as a short term (50-100yr) solution to AGW. In my book he is a genuine "giant" of the 20th century who's theories/ideas have allowed others to see further and have upset both sides of environmental politics at various times over the last four or five decades.
There are piles and piles of papers available that treat the biosphere as an oragisim (unique living system), eg: life makes it possible for methane and oxygen to exist together in atmosphere, plants and plankton consume C02 and produced the ALL the available oxygen currently in the atmosphere, limestone and peat are produced by life, islands are built from coral, rainforests create their own rain, etc, etc, etc. It's definitely not crackpottery, in fact the idea that the biosphere is a unique living system is now so entrenched in modern science that most papers don't even bother defining "biosphere".
BTW: In TFA (which I have not read), I believe he is not speaking as a climate scientist but as a "futurist", futurists are confined by their imagination not by practicalities (eg: Dyson).
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
We exist, so leaving the environment "alone" is a bit of a moot point, unless you happen to be down with just offing all of humanity. The contingencies this story are describing are for the case that we're already fucked and cannot fix the environment insofar as it supports human life simply by changing our emissions and outputs.
We're a parameter in the worlds biosphere, not external observers. The only way to have NO impact on the environment is to not be a part of it.
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, right, that's as if early physicians said "hmmmm it did no good when we tried to bleed these sick guys or give them leeches, maybe we should just leave the human body alone". Oh noes we made mistakes in the past when trying to fix a problem! Let's all stop trying to fix problems!
Besides, we've already done a bunch of geoengineering by releasing all these gases in the atmosphere. Emitting less of them is also geoengineering, so we're knee deep in the shit we created and we have to do something anyways. Instead of pondering "to geoengineer or not to geoengineer" maybe we should look for geoengineering ideas and use all our imagination and knowledge to find out why they wouldn't work or why they would be a bad idea.
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, right, that's as if early physicians said "hmmmm it did no good when we tried to bleed these sick guys or give them leeches
Actually, in the right circumstances bleeding and the use of leeches are effective treatments. Particularly leeches: the compound they use to keep blood flowing acts like a blood thinner, like Heparin.
But otherwise yeah, I tend to agree. It's a matter of risk/benefit analysis, really. Is doing nothing (or rather, maintaining the status quo ante) more risky than trying to fix the problem? There's apparently considerable risk whichever way we jump, so we're going to have to something sooner or later.
The real problems here are (and will continue to be) shortsighted politics, more than scientific or technological issues. Right now, nobody can agree on a solution because any such agreement requires that someone take a hit, and nobody trusts the highly-politicized science involved sufficiently to make that possible. Best guess? We're going to march right over the cliff.
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, that we only have one earth. You can't just try something, an if the patient dies, know not to do it to the next one. There is no next one for a very loooong time.
You deciding otherwise does not change this fact.
So we have to live with what we've got and be as careful as we can. What would you do when you would have to put a kernel update on the world bank server? Either you would try to avoid it, or you would make damn sure it works, by setting up a controlled mirror environment which comes as close to the original as possible. Which is nearly impossible for global effects.
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Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
And as the man said, getting 85 million barrels of oil per day from the ground and turning them into CO2 is geoengineering. And a consensus to stop doing it seems unlikely.
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
nothing we do can be unnatural.
Depends upon your perspective. A ecosystem which has not evolved an intelligent but not particularly responsible species will follow a different path than one which is not so blessed. One might argue that said ecosystem might survive a while longer.
On the other hand, that intelligent species might be able to fend off an extinction-level event (such as an asteroid strike) that would otherwise wipe out most of the life in that system. I suspect we'd find that far easier to accomplish than truly wide-scale geoengineering. Truth is, we're not as advanced as we think we are, and nowhere near advanced as we need to be. And either way this goes, there is no escape from a truly global catastrophe. Heck, we don't even have the ability to leave and go elsewhere and start over.
Parent
So wait (Score:3, Insightful)
schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms
that doesn't sound like a real great idea. Bonus points to the article for misspelling "fertilizing".
Re:So wait (Score:5, Informative)
Bonus points to the article for misspelling "fertilizing".
OMG troll. It's from a UK newspaper. Your local dialect and its alternative spellings are irrelevant to them.
Parent
Re:So wait (Score:5, Informative)
Then of course there is the ph problem with fertilizing the oceans discovered in the past 2-3 years. Forcing the absorption of CO2 into the ocean tends to cause the creation of carbonic acid, which eats calcium. Calcium provides the building blocks and protective shells for many simple microscopic oceanic plant/animal life. It also will eat away at the sells of crustaceans.
Just a small pH change in the ocean can collapse the entire food chain.
Of course you can counter this by adding quicklime to the ocean (which is pretty costly). And you can balance the nutrition loss by adding more nitrogen to the water. Of course that means that you essentially have dumped a bunch of materials you mined (by producing a lot of CO2) into the ocean to re-balance an already balanced ecosystem.
Considering just 5 years ago the prevailing thought was that the ocean could sequester an almost unlimited amount of CO2, its pretty obvious that we don't fully understand how badly tinkering with it could f-things up.
Parent
Re:So wait (Score:4, Interesting)
Adding Fe to fertilize the algae, causes the algae to consume the dissolved CO2 in the water, so your argument is nonsensical. Fertilizing the algae will not only not effect the mount of CO2 absorbed by the seawater from the air, but will reduce the amount of CO2 in the water.
Parent
Does anyone remember... (Score:4, Funny)
Highlander 2? Yeah, I tried to forget it too...
Cost/benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something tells me that if you do the math, cutting CO2 emissions will be way cheaper and safer than any of the options listed in the article. Seeding the oceans with iron, one of the more reasonable sounding ideas... OK, but how much iron would have to be mixed into the oceans to get rid of billions of tons of atmospheric carbon? At what cost?
Just brilliant (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, is this science or fucking American Idol?!?
With any poll, you also have to consider who commissioned the poll, who implemented it, what the agendas are, etc. Because nobody does this shit for free, and there's always an angle.
Sounds like a bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
The article was pretty short on details. First, I would hardly call 54% of 80 experts a statistically significant number. Also, who are these experts. I recall the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed some 2500 scientists and experts but when you actually looked at the make up of the group there were huge numbers of non scientists. Additionally, a good number of the scientists who were listed requested their names be removed from the list.
More importantly, when we try to "engineer" the atmosphere we are asking for trouble. We don't understand how all of this works and in fact, it may not be a problem at all. There is some evidence that suggests carbon FOLLOWS warming buy several hundreds of years. There seems to be a small but growing group of people that feel the sun's activities are far more responsible for warming and cooling that carbon.
Additionally, Methane and water vapor are far more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon.
Finally, I just read that temperatures peaked in '98 and have actually cooled by about a half degree or so. It seems that the earth has always warmed and cooled in cycles. I think it is far more effective to effect local solutions than to risk geo-engineering with processes that we don't understand and really can't control.
I see so many examples of mankind engineering something and then later finding out it was a mistake.
Re:Sounds like a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheesh, do you get all your climate science off skeptic web sites? Your whole post is nothing but a laundry list of long-debunked talking points.
There is some evidence that suggests carbon FOLLOWS warming buy several hundreds of years.
You're talking about the glacial-interglacial cycle. That's long been a prediction of Milaknovitch theory, well before any such lag was actually measured. It doesn't mean that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that it doesn't cause warming. It means that there are feedbacks between the climate and the carbon cycle. When glacial temperatures rise, CO2 levels increase (due to, e.g., outgassing from the oceans), as predicted by theory. Increased CO2 levels, in turn, add to the temperature rise. If you leave out the CO2 greenhouse effect, you can't reproduce the amount of warming observed in the glacial-interglacial cycle.
There seems to be a small but growing group of people that feel the sun's activities are far more responsible for warming and cooling that carbon.
If you're talking about the modern warming period, there isn't a growing group of climate scientists who believe that; far fewer believe that now than they did 10 or 20 years ago. The evidence is strongly against it, since the Sun's activities during that period don't actually agree with the warming which is observed.
In the past, solar activity has indeed had significant effects on climate. It can explain a substantial amount (but by no means all) of the warming in the early 20th century. However, solar irradiance simply hasn't changed very much since the 1950s, and can't explain the warming since then, even if you appeal to speculative indirect effects like cosmic ray modulation of cloud cover (as comic rays also haven't changed in a way to explain the observed warming).
Additionally, Methane and water vapor are far more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon.
Once again, that has nothing to do with the fact that CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, and we're adding a lot of it to the atmosphere.
Finally, I just read that temperatures peaked in '98 and have actually cooled by about a half degree or so.
That's wrong. January 2008 was 0.5 degrees cooler than 2007 on average, but a monthly fluctuation in temperature does not mean the Earth is experiencing a cooling trend.
It seems that the earth has always warmed and cooled in cycles.
The Earth has natural cycles, but there isn't any natural cycle which predicts what we've observed in the modern warming period.
I think it is far more effective to effect local solutions than to risk geo-engineering with processes that we don't understand and really can't control.
Global solutions may be required to global problems, but geoengineering is indeed riskier than other alternatives.
Parent
Fruit Cake is Served at M.I.T. (Score:3, Insightful)
My reply to professor Kerry Emanuel, M.I.T.
Fine. You want to do geoengineering?
Get yourself on a probe launch to Mars and do it there. Leave the EARTH ALONE.
It is my belief that when we ON PURPOSE start trying to tune the atmosphere is where the real problems will begin.
People like this are so full of themselves, they are willing to risk the entire biosphere over crack pot, unproven ideas.
-Hack
Re:Fruit Cake is Served at M.I.T. (Score:4, Insightful)
You are perhaps unaware that choosing an "acceptable" CO2 level, and trying to make that level the actual one (by, say, reducing emissions of CO2) is an attempt to "tune the atmosphere".
Or did you perhaps think that the amount of CO2 in the air the last ten thousand years is the "correct" amount, and the CO2 levels at other points in history (it's been both higher and lower than it is now) are somehow wrong?
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Re:Fruit Cake is Served at M.I.T. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or did you perhaps think that the amount of CO2 in the air the last ten thousand years is the "correct" amount, and the CO2 levels at other points in history (it's been both higher and lower than it is now) are somehow wrong?
Yes, as far as current civilization is concerned, which has adapted itself to a particular climate over the last ten thousand years. We can re-adapt to a new climate, but it's going to be expensive if the change happens within a century or two, and there are very long-term consequences (e.g. sea level rise) that we may or may not prefer to commit future generations to.
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Re:Fruit Cake is Served at M.I.T. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh right, I forgot about all those times in history when innovation completely ceased and everything stayed where it was for ~200 years. Sure, we can't assume that there will be some miracle, but you can assume that in 200 years we will have enough technology to deal with the problem,
No, you can't. Economists who study this problem include technological innovation in their models (mostly in terms of reduced costs of abatement, but also sometimes in adaptation), but that still doesn't get rid of economic damages either now or in the future or the need for abatement as a risk management option.
The fact is, we don't know what will be possible in 200 years. It's even possible that the world will be poorer, more war torn, or otherwise in LESS of a position to deal with the problem.
Even if technological improvements exist, that still doesn't mean that we want to commit to a certain level of climate change. Suppose we can build artificial islands to replace lost shorelines. Hell, we can probably do that with existing technology. And for the sake of argument, even assume that they cost nothing. That still doesn't mean we want to have to build them. Maybe we want to keep our existing coastal cities. By committing to, say, sea level rise now, we eliminate options for future generations. There are a whole host of ethical questions and impacts that can't be waved away with technology, the dreams of utopian technophiles notwithstanding.
Climate change has large global impacts. 200 years ago we didn't have the technology to avert those impacts. In 200 years we may not either. The climate system is huge, has huge inertia, and affects everything on Earth. It's not easy to control, nor are its changes easy to adapt to, even with high technology. And, my main point, just because we can introduce technological "fixes" doesn't mean that those "fixes" are more desirable than just mitigating the problem in the first place.
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Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
Because we have done such a wonderful job in the past. Things like killing off the wolves in Yellowstone, and changing the hydrology of Florida. Yes, we are so good at "geoengineering" that this could not possibly go wrong.
*snirk* I crack myself up.
Snake Oil (Score:4, Informative)
Most of these people are not "climate scientists". Many are activists and science bureaucrats who haven't done any real science in decades. The best that can be said of them is that they are well-connected mathematicians, engineers and scientists with an opinion on Geoengineering. One of them is a lawyer.
For the rest, David Archer, Steven Sherwood, Frank Schwing and Andrew Gettleman are not too keen on the idea. Kevin Trenberth and LuAnne Thompson are dead-set against it.
Steven Ghan stands pretty much alone as a practicing geophysicist and climatologist in favour of geoengineering (as long as it is constrained to CO2 reduction).
Finally, it's notable that only half, 22 out of 44, of the respondents come out in favor of the idea.
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you should be wary of a law... the one that talks about unintended consequences.
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's being optimistic [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you abolish medicine because it sometimes has side effects? Meanwhile, we have a raving addiction to crack (coal and gasoline) which definitely do have known negative effects, which we are not treating at all. I doubt the unintended consequences will be nearly as bad as completely uncontrolled consequences we are headed for.
With over 6.5 billion people on the planet, we DO have an environmental impact, so opting out is simply not an option. The only choice is whether to (1) run headlong into disaster (which I predict is a good description of mankind will actually do); (2) minimize the impact; or (3) counterbalance the impact. You can't simply rule out (3) on a vague generality.
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Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, we are addicted to coal and gasoline... just as I am addicted to food and water. We need energy to have a modern civilized society. I am not convinced that eliminating the use of coal and oil is such a great idea. That is because that cheap energy derived from coal and oil has brought about the lifestyle that we (in "western" society) enjoy and other nations tend to want to have.
Those of us with the luxury of nuclear technology, silicon refining capability, and computer controlled manufacturing can experiment with things like wind, solar, and nuclear sources of power. Those that are living in grass huts and have primitive (by our standards) metal working capability do not have the luxury to experiment. If they have coal and oil in the ground they are going to use it. Telling them that they cannot have internal combustion engines because of some distant threat of global warming, sea levels rising, and the terrific storms that tend to follow will fall on deaf ears. The global temperature rising by one degree and sea levels rising by one foot in the next decade does not compare to the next meal.
The unintended consequence of the efforts to save humanity through reducing CO2 induced global warming is that people will die because they do not have access to electricity, heat, transportation, and refrigeration.
I have a better idea than experimenting with geoengineering, deal with the climate change regardless of the cause. The reason I say that is not only because I am not convinced of human induced global warming but because even if we stop producing CO2 (outside of actually breathing) today the effects of that CO2 will be with us for a very long time.
Sea level rise could be because of increased insolation melting glaciers, or increased greenhouse gasses, or because the Earth's core is cooling (and therefore shrinking). The solution in my mind is the same, move inland.
The same with climatic temperature rise, adapt the crops grown in the area, get air conditioning if you don't already, etc.
If we want geoengineering to be successful we will need the cooperation of many nations. Some nations will not participate because of the cost. Some nations will not participate because they want global warming. (Take Canada or Russia for example, large areas of land could turn from frozen wastelands into fertile cropland.) Some may not participate because of the principle of national sovereignty, they don't want some outside influence telling them how to run their country.
I'm OK with reducing our use of coal and oil but not at the cost of reducing our standard of living. I was just hearing on the radio this week about how the coal waste is threatening municipal water supplies. (I don't recall where.) If we can move to solar, wind, and nuclear power then we will no longer have the threat to our water quality. Problem is determining the cost of moving to another energy source vs. dealing with the coal waste in a more responsible manner. It may make more sense to just dispose of the waste elsewhere.
Importing something on the order of one TRILLION dollars of oil per year is an economic disaster for the USA. Solutions to that problem include domestic sources of oil, electric transport (cars and/or light rail), synthetic fuel (which would require another energy source such as nuclear), conservation and efficiency improvements, and probably more I cannot come up with right now.
(Corn ethanol and soybean diesel fuel is just trading one economic and environmental disaster for another.)
I agree that burning coal and oil have known negative effects. NOT burning coal and oil has known negative effects. In my mind the negative effects of burning the coal and oil is nothing compared to the negative effects of not burning coal and oil.
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Interesting)
The only choice is whether to (1) run headlong into disaster (which I predict is a good description of mankind will actually do); (2) minimize the impact; or (3) counterbalance the impact. You can't simply rule out (3) on a vague generality.
Thank you. Yes, we should obviously be *very* cautious with stuff like this, but I really don't understand the prevailing opinion that it's Just Wrong. I suspect many people consider the environment to be a moral issue rather than a practical one, so any solution that doesn't require us to make substantial sacrifices is "cheating".
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Informative)
I'll add one more thing to my post - people old enough will remember back in the 70 and early 80's when we thought we were causing a massive cooling and heading towards and ice age.
"We" (meaning the climate science community) didn't actually think that (see, e.g., here [confex.com]). There were a few papers that got a lot of media hype, but the general view among scientists at the time was "we don't know enough yet, but it's more likely to warm than cool". 30+ years later and the view is "it's very likely to warm, but we're not totally sure how much".
We better be *damn* sure we know what will happen when we intentionally release more change into the world than what we are trying to fix.
Well, one virtue of some of the present geoengineering schemes is that they're fast-acting, and conversely, quick to turn off if they start having side effects. Take stratospheric aerosol injection. Aerosols precipitate out of the atmosphere in a year or two; CO2 stays up for a century or more. If erroneously think the planet is warming and cool it with aerosols, you can turn them off within a few years if you need to. If you erroneously think the planet is cooling and warm it with CO2, your mistake stays around a lot longer. The decision problem is asymmetric.
That being said, your basic point is valid: geoengineering is a lot riskier than just reducing CO2 concentrations back to earlier levels.
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
The side effect of not geoengineering will kill everything.
Geoengineering is a skill we will need to master sooner or later. One day, whether we're the cause or not, this planet will not be inhabitable. We have three options: 1) direct our planet towards a consistently inhabitable state, 2) create an inhabitable world elsewhere, 3) die.
I don't really consider (3) to be much of an option, and (2) is so far beyond our current capabilities even experimentation is not a consideration. That leaves option (1).
Personally I'd rather we start our apprenticeship now by correcting our own effects on the environment rather than waiting until the planet makes it an unavoidable necessity regardless.
It's sad that you think this might not be the case. We've spilled far worse into the oceans than iron, so try not to be offended when people that know what they're doing dismiss out of hand this hysteria over small scale experimentation.
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, all that extra research and development, and all that spending on new technology sure is horrible for the economy.
Yeah, it is horrible for the economy to spend billions inefficiently. Its called the broken window fallacy. If global warming can be mitigated for less than the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then that's what we should do. To do anything else is to throw away money and resources.
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Because that money doesn't disappear from the economy, it circulates? And more money circulated means a stronger economy? Especially since oil profits leave the country, while wind or solar profits wouldn't?
Because more expensive energy means more researching to energy efficiency, driving industry forward, leading to a stronger economy?
Because energy sources don't have static costs, but depend heavily on the amount of utilization and research and development put into them?
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not about money. Its about resources. It takes more of them to build solar & wind farms than it costs to burn more coal and oil. To actually stop global warming, we would have to pretty much stop using fossil fuels entirely. We would also have to do it before the planet heats up to a point at which what we are doing is pointless anyways.
As minds and materials are diverted to this project, there would be less to go around everywhere else. There would be no immediate help (until fossil fuels are actually as costly as alternative energy sources) so people would be less well off. On average, individual standard of living would drop, probably by quite a bit. Since pretty much any business is effected by energy costs, they would all have to increase prices (or fail). As prices increase, and salaries don't (I don't see why they would increase), people would be forced to buy fewer things. Many poorer people wouldn't be able to get by. Many businesses that are more dependent on energy costs would fail.
It might even be worse than doing nothing and just dealing with the costs of global warming later. Eventually we are going to run out of fossil fuels and will need to utilize nuclear, solar, and wind power anyways. Might as well let those technologies continue to develop and get cheaper as the price of oil rises. At some point they will be competitive on their own.
Now, I'm not saying that the solution is to do nothing. I think its important to remember that this is not going to be easy. There is no ideal solution. However, the idea that forcing people to use something that is more expensive would actually help the economy is insane.
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Why shouldn't geoengineering climate (dumping Fe in the India ocean, for example) be a substitute for cutting CO2?
You know, when I was a kid they found out that aerosol spray cans (spray cans!) had eaten a huge hole in the ozone layer. Who could have anticipated that? But obviously nothing like that will happen this time.
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:5, Informative)
the ozone hole that appeared over antarctica and caused all the panic is a natural and annual phenomena.
Uh, you know that's bullshit, right?
the annual ozone hole was first measured in 1956-57, long before the ozone destroying CFCs were in common use.
You're confused. There is a seasonal cycle in ozone concentrations. CFCs have added a long-term downward trend on top of that seasonal cycle, meaning that each winter the hole is on average larger it used to be.
There is no overall or permanent depletion of the ozone layer.
The data disagree [nasa.gov].
Parent
Re:Substitute? Sounds good (Score:4, Informative)
DDT isn't that toxic,
DDT is classified as "moderately toxic" by the US National Toxicological Program[40] and "moderately hazardous" by WHO, based on the rat oral LD50 of 113 mg/kg.[12] It is not considered to be acutely toxic, and in fact it has been applied directly to clothes and/or used in soap.[41] DDT has on rare occasions been administered orally as a treatment for barbiturate poisoning.[42]DDT toxicity [wikipedia.org]
and it's not forbidden all over the world either,
DDT was subsequently banned for agricultural use worldwide under the Stockholm Convention, but its limited use in disease vector control continues to this day in certain parts of the world and remains controversial.[5] DDT [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Like it's the climate scientists who design and implement CO2 abatement policies? No, that's economists and politicians. Geoengineering is an ENGINEERING project. Scientists might tell engineers how much needs to happen, but they're not the ones who would design, build, or deploy the devices.
Besides, if you're insinuating that climate geoengineering is all a scientific conspiracy to get funding dollars, that's pretty lame. Even if you're a conspiracy nutjob, how is inventing a cheaper solution (geoengin
Re:Terraforming Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if "fixing" this we mess things up a lot, we wouldnt be able to run nowhere. How much safety margin we have for playing a bit with the system before it runs wildly out of control? And... how better will be the measures they will take over, i.e. breeding butterflies?
Parent
Re:Terraforming Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
We do not have to , global warming is not proven.
It's rather well established by now.
Even if the oceans rise and all of the poles melt, humans will still survive and thrive.
We'll survive, but that doesn't mean that there won't be economic, social, or geopolitical impacts that we'd prefer to have avoided.
Sure, polar bears might go extinct, but so did dinosaurs millions of years before we were even around driving our SUVs.
Again, a non-argument. Just because species have gone extinct in the past doesn't mean we'd prefer to accelerate the extinction rate. I mean, sure, if you place zero value on ecosystems, maybe, but not everyone does.
And then what happens when we get plunged into another ice age because of something?
Then we'll probably wish we'd have saved our fossil fuels to counteract that, instead of using them up now when we don't need the warming.
Parent
Re:Terraforming Earth (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. All we know is that the general trend of the earth's temperatures have been rising.
We know a hell of a lot more than that. Start here [ucar.edu].
We don't have a clue what caused it, if it will continue, or anything.
We know that the greenhouse effect predicts enhanced surface warming, stratospheric cooling, changes in the diurnal cycle, etc., which have been observed. We know that the warming isn't coming from the oceans (they're gaining heat, not losing it). We know that the heat isn't coming from the Sun (irradiance hasn't gone up to match the temperatures), or reduced volcanic activitiy, etc. Basic atomic physics predicts that the greenhouse effect exists and will grow as CO2 levels increase.
Plus, it isn't even global warming, its local warming some places have higher highs and others don't.
It is global warming, as the global average temperature has increased, as has the average temperature of most locations on Earth.
Just take a look in an Almanac and you will see that the highest temperatures for a given day don't correspond with the CO2 emissions for the year.
Duh. They're not supposed to. The existence of weather doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist.
Ok, so some of the costland is gone and cities must be moved further inland.
Oh, that's all. Let's just relocate some cities. Need to move Manhattan? No problem, technology will solve that, it'll be cheap. Venice goes underwater for good? Who cares, it has no historic value, we can build a new city. 10 million coastal Bangladeshis decide they need to move to India or Pakistan? I'm sure that won't have any political consequences. Technology will just solve that anyway.
That is also assuming that technology will not advance to where that is no longer a problem which my guess is based on technology throughout history is that if there is a problem humans will solve it.
Yeah, that's why there aren't any more problems in the world. Technology solved them all.
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Re:Terraforming Earth (Score:5, Informative)
The IPCC figures are extremely suspect.
And you believe that because a skeptic web site said so. Perhaps you should investigate the science a little more closely and, I don't know, read something written by climate scientists. You might want to re-evaluate your biases if your default response is to automatically dismiss pretty much the entire scientific literature on every climate related topic.
When, for some reason, their modelling produces figures they don't like, there always seems to be an "adjustment" in their favor.
That's nonsense. There are places where models agree with data, and places where models disagree with data, which is the case in any science. There isn't any conspiracy to make everything fit; if there were, there wouldn't ever be any disagreement.
There is an interesting website examining the work on global temperature mesurement, Urban Heat Islands etc somewhere, damed if i can find it though.
You're probably thinking of "Watts Up With That". They were crowing a lot about the urban heat island effect, but got a lot quieter after one of their own contributors analyzed the data from stations with no risk of urban contamination and found basically no difference in the temperature record. This is unsurprising, because the urban heat island effect was already found to be insignificant, and at least one of the surface records cross-checks against rural stations anyway. Not to mention the oceans are also warming (no urban heat islands there), the satellites agree with the surface stations (no contamination there), etc.
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Re:Terraforming Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
What is this 'global average temperature' of which you speak?
The surface temperature averaged over the Earth's surface.
Temperature is an intensive thermodynamic property and as such cannot be averaged meaningfully in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere.
You can average it. It's not conserved or anything like that, so it's not really a fundamental physical quantity like heat is. It's still useful as a climatic indicator: it's not going to directly tell you what the planetary radiation balance is (which is what you really want to know), but it's a starting point in inferring it.
Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful.
It's more meaningful than average temperature, but it's also not measured. That's why people use temperature.
It is perfectly possible for the temperature to fall everywhere on Earth and the heat content of the atmosphere to increase.
It's possible, but please note that what we mostly care about in terms of impacts is the surface temperature, not the total atmospheric heat content.
Global ocean temperature, now... that's meaningful, and increasing, but I would take global warming a lot more seriously if the people who are all het up about it showed an even rudimentary grasp of basic physics,
My Ph.D. was in statistical thermodynamics. I stand by my statements.
A sceptic about the magnitude of the effect of CO2 on global heat content may be reasonable. A person who puts there argument in terms of a problematic quality such as global average temperature is not.
That's nonsense. It is perfectly possible to compare hypothetical forcing mechanisms on the basis of their observed influence on globally averaged temperature, if they give different predictions for that quantity. It's not nearly as useful as heat content, but that quantity is also not known. Certainly ocean temperature changes are one line of evidence, but so are surface temperatures, as well as tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures.
Furthermore, since every single story we have seen recently about global warming has announced loudly and clearly that climate scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate,
That's false. "Arctic ice melting faster than expected" doesn't mean "scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate".
Each of these stories, if read by someone who hadn't bought into a religious belief in the infallibility of climate scientists, would be taken as clear-cut evidence that climate science as a whole is terrible at predicting anything to do with climate,
Climate science is reasonably good at predicting radiation balance, heat budgets, and surface temperatures over large scales and decadal time periods. They're still bad at predicting regional climate, and precipitation is mediocre. Weather events like hurricanes are still terrible.
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Re:Terraforming Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
It is rather shifting to "climate change".
Oh please. I hope this isn't one of those claims that "global warming was re-branded `climate change' because it hasn't been proven". The term "climate change" was used by scientists well before global warming ever became an issue, and is still used.
And "well established" != "proven".
Nothing is ever proven in science. Sadly, we don't have the luxury of making decisions in the presence of perfect certainty. "Well established" is what we have to work with.
Adapting is probably a lot cheaper than trying to reverse or to compensate any supposed effect,
Some adaptation will be necessary. Mainstream economists find that a combination of mitigation and adaptation is cheaper and less risky than adaptation alone.
And change means opportunity! not disaster: some changes are good, some are bad.
Some changes are good, some are bad, but change which is too large/fast is usually bad since it's harder to adapt to. CO2 emissions abatement is insurance: we don't know things will be bad, but there's a serious possibility they will be, and the damages could be very large. Maybe they won't be, but it's worth slowing down.
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Re:Terraforming Earth (Score:4, Informative)
The term climate change was used original by detractors of global warming to signify that the climate changes but it wasn't because of the political accusations being made. It was to signify that it was natural. After some of the loudest predictions of gloom and doom failed to come true, the science community started using Climate change in an effort to capitalize on the anti global warming crowds momentum. The IPCC actually used the term climate change to seem legit but it was little more then a political effort to justify the Kyoto accords which was more or less a political ploy to relieve third world debt. It would have worked too if the US would have jumped on. Fortunately, about 80% of Americans already have something to believe in so they were running for the next things that makes their life feel meaningful and we wanted more proof.
I'm pretty sure we have talked about this political hijacking of global warming before.
I have no dispute with this answer other then I want to add that I don't think alternate causes have largely been ignored. It was well established for quite a long time that the sun revolved around the earth until someone started looking at other possibilities. Currently, when someone else is brought up, it get dismissed as "something the oil companies want you to believe" or "a crack pot non-believer". I have a feeling that this is more because of the politics that have skewed global warming then the science itself. But there are some scientists I wouldn't take off the blame list. James Hanson from NASA fame comes to mind. He, after getting caught purposely manipulating the stuff he was presenting, said in an interview that he thought it was ok to exaggerate global warming to draw the attention to it that he feels it deserves. As far as I'm concerned, you can't ignore other sources or possible causes and have someone who is willing to falsify things to push the agenda without having some skepticism. Well established is in question about as much as Barnie Frank's claim that Fannie and Freddie were doing a fine job a week before the financial meltdown that they were at the center of. And yes, Frank was in charge of their oversight just like Hansen is in charge of a lot of the American Global warming research findings.
We can't do the changes in Co2 production fast enough without causing too much damage to the economy and stabilization of governments. I agree that Co2 abatement is the ultimate end game but I don't agree that it is the sole cause or even the cause or that the problem is as big as it is being proclaimed.
In either case, it's a catch 22 sort of. We can't really replace our carbon emissions fast enough to not have the damage they claim the emissions are going to cause to geoengineering should be part of the solution is symptoms actually exist. Blaming hurricanes during the hurricane season or other natural things wouldn't necessarily actually be real symptoms. But say things do go haywire, sure, drop some sort of fix into the enviroment as long as it's effects are short terms and know well enough to control (IE, it doesn't survive more then a short time past our efforts).
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Re:Everyone on Board (Score:4, Funny)
Use the same process the U.S. used to get everyone else to help invade Iraq. That worked like a charm!
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Re:So this is how it ends... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why I want to see manned space exploration. It is getting critical that we plant seeds elsewhere, before the energy required is more than we are prepared to expend, due to needing it to keep people alive here on earth. You can already hear it - why waste money on space when there's $problem on earth to fix first.
I believe that the earth is a seed. It has just enough energy encapsulated within it to enable intelligent life to grow, learn and then leave to plant life elsewhere. Once the energy is used up, this earth will die. This is nature. We are part of nature, however much we pretend otherwise. We are supposed to leave this planet. Do young birds stay close to the nest once they're able to fly ? Do plants forsake the light in favour of their own seed ? Why then do so many people desire to hide behind their fears by condemning expense.
More people + same space = less for all. (Wars, plagues, tyranny, misery)
More people + more space = enough for all. (Freedom, Insulation, Happiness, Expansion)
Anybody who complains that manned space exploration is a waste of money, is penny wise and pound foolish.
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Re:So this is how it ends... (Score:4, Interesting)
I ran the numbers the other day for uranium extraction from sea water, the refresh rate of uranium due to erosion, and the energy produced by a fast breeder reactor using a natural uranium isotope mix.
We could produce double the energy output of the earth currently for tens of thousands of years with current technology without lowering the uranium content in seawater below 25%.
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