Geoengineering To Cool the Earth Becoming Thinkable 419
johkir writes "As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels might cause 'marked changes in climate' that 'could be deleterious.' Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space — 'a wacky geoengineering solution.' In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe — they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream." We've discussed some
pretty
strange
ideas
in the geoengineering line over the last few years.
No they didn't (Score:5, Informative)
Another reason to do nothing (Score:4, Informative)
> they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space
Or we could just pollute less? It's less risky than turning the Earth into a big science experiment.
There's another risk: That the same same people promoting "Clean Coal" (a big hello to you Australia) hop on this bandwagon as another reason not to do anything?
Re:Like something out of Robinson's work (Score:5, Informative)
There was an excellent TED Lecture [ted.com] on the topic of geoengineering, given by David Keith. It's a little over 15 minutes but well worth the time, and it skips all the sci-fi platitudes.
Re:No they didn't (Score:5, Informative)
I was in school in the 1980s and that was all they were talking about, so it may have been a "myth", but they sure were pushing it for some reason...
Re:Yes they did (Score:1, Informative)
This is a complete myth.
The target of your own link refers to a NewsWeek article (April 28:th, 1975) [wmconnolley.org.uk] which supports the cooling theory.
The article warns that important food producing areas of the world would be negatively affected by the lower temperature (North America and the USSR(!)).
Re:No they didn't (Score:5, Informative)
I read the article, but I was also ALIVE at that time. I remember folks like Carl Sagan rallying the troops to stop the cooling of the planet (from suspended pollution). No article can erase the memory of the people watching their televisions during the 70s and early 80s.
Re:Like something out of Robinson's work (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No they didn't (Score:3, Informative)
Sagan did predict global cooling because of the Iraq oil fires. He was wrong. So, I would tend to put this is in "respected scientific opinion" column. I am not sure how this qualifies as anecdotal evidence.
Re:Perhaps? (Score:2, Informative)
Don't design my car to get optimal MPG at 55...target 65, because that is highway speed.
Due to the laws of physics, the only way to make a car have optimal MPG at 65 is to reduce the efficiency at lower speeds.
You ALWAYS need more energy to keep the car running at 65, because of the air drag. The power usage due to air drag is proportional to the CUBE of the speed [wikipedia.org], so it increases very fast.
Re:No they didn't (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Iron is being used to reduce CO2 emmisions... (Score:3, Informative)
Surface blooms that create low-oxygen zones
Toxic algae blooms
Starvation of coral beds
Disporportional stimulation of diatom growth (diatoms are not as good a food source for copepods as algae, and in high concetrations cause gill problems in fish)
Some of these issues can probably be resolved (e.g., blooms limited by the amount of iron (or urea) used to fertilize the surface), but if you limit the fertilization, you in turn limit its effectiveness.
One other thing I'd like to note is that ocean fertilization also has the potential to greatly increase local oceanic biomass, including food species -- this could be a real boon to areas with nutrient deficiencies in their waters (equatorial Pacific, mostly). Interestingly, this was the original purpose of ocean fertilization research, the carbon sequestration is a nice side effect (though, of course, we don't yet know if the carbon would actually be sequestered at the ocean floor, or if it would be converted into methane in a low-oxygen environment, which is a worst-case scenario for the carbon impact).
At any rate, ocean fertilization holds a lot of potential for both food production and carbon impact, but there are significant questions to be answered before we should roll out on a widescale basis... and some of those questions may take decades to understand enough to be confident in large-scale deployment.(like impact on ecosystems/food webs due to differentials in growth stimulation of different species).
Re:No they didn't (Score:3, Informative)
About 25 years ago we really were going to be frozen into a big ball of ice by 2025.
Actually, it was more like 35 years ago. The best climate models available at that time (and using the measurements available at that time) predicted that we were near or perhaps past the maximum of the current interglacial. The exact time of return of glacial conditions depended on how the model was tweaked, and could be centuries to millennia.
The popularizations which followed about 25 years ago exaggerated the rapidity and severity of the projected outcome, of course.
Re:It was Global COOLING in the 70s. (Score:4, Informative)
In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling.
I'm sorry, but the scientific literature disproves your claim. If you don't believe me, go look for yourself at the papers published back then. Web of Knowledge will find them for you. Or just read [isiknowledge.com]this paper [allenpress.com], written by a group of scientists who got fed up with claim and did a full literature review from 1965-1979. See, in particular, Figure 1. During that period, there was only one year in which cooling papers than warming papers were published (1971), and more warming papers than cooling papers were published in every year after 1971.
In another comment you respond,
I read the article, but I was also ALIVE at that time.
That's nice. Did you read scientific journals back then? Or go to climate conferences? Somehow I doubt it.
The mainstream media isn't the scientific community, and neither was Carl Sagan. Yes, back then some scientists did think that cooling was going to win out. Most of them didn't. The fact is, throughout the 1970s and certainly into the 80s, the scientific community — as measured by the papers they published on the subject — was definitely projecting warming more than cooling.
Re:Or maybe... just maybe... (Score:3, Informative)
...this is much ado about nothing, and can be attributed simply to natural cycles in the weather system.
So which "natural cycle" is it? We've looked at the ones which have caused past climate change (e.g., solar variations, volcanoes, changes in ocean circulation), and ruled them out as the cause of the current warming.
People are so damn self-centered they think anything that happens is a direct result of something they did.
It's not self centered, it's physics. The fact is that we are ramping atmospheric CO2 up to levels not seen in millions of years, its effect on the climate is not negligible.
but seeing how I'm experiencing almost record cold temperatures now for this time of year in my area,
Global warming doesn't predict that every location on Earth gets monotonically hotter every year.