Climate Engineering As US Policy? 355
EricTheGreen writes "The Associated Press has an article featuring Obama administration science advisor John Holdren discussing potential climate engineering responses to global warming. Among the possible approaches? His own version of Operation Dark Storm — shooting micro-particulate pollution high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. I'm sure the rest of the world would have no issue with that at all, of course. Yikes ..."
Sorry About the Ice Age... (Score:4, Interesting)
Jeesh, Obama doesn't work here anymore, you know that was years ago.
What do you mean the entire northern European Continent's former residents now want reparations now that their countries are under an ice sheet?
After all it was just a little dust, not even what a volcano produces.
It must have been the fault of the relative lack of Solar sun spots.
Oh, what? 100 million people are now claiming they "own" the U.S.? Ice reparations?
You'll destroy us just like, well, the Treaty of Versailles did to Germany a century ago...
These ideas are not new. (Score:5, Interesting)
The real problem with any such approach, they argue, is
This religiosity in climate-change politics fascinates me - it's why I like the Michael Crichton essays/speeches on the topic even though he says "climate change is fake!" and it's pretty much Not Fake. More recently, I've seen stuff in that same Libertarian magazine [reason.com] comparing the current climate-change political scene to "denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. [It] is every bit as callous and irresponsible."
Ah, but is it reversible? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of these Dire Global Warming predictions are based on computer models which are known to be flawed.
Any measure taken to counteract perceived Global Warming must be reversible if found ineffective (or worse, a hindrance). Injecting more particulate pollution into the atmosphere to counteract Global Warming doesn't sound to me like an easily reversible thing. Far safer and easier to do, me thinks, to park a large asteroid in synchronous orbit between the Earth and Sun to occlude solar radiation. If it's "too effective" then it can be (comparatively) easily moved or removed, if it's "not enough" then more can be gathered.
Re:1/2 Acre of Trees = 1 Car's Pollution (Score:3, Interesting)
250,851,833 cars in the US
2,428,202,240 acres in the US(less 6% water)
Your right, theres nowhere near enough space to plant 250 million acres of tree's.
Re:1/2 Acre of Trees = 1 Car's Pollution (Score:3, Interesting)
I like that idea. The problem with that is you're more likely to be funding a 30-year corporate investment than genuinely offsetting the pollution. Eg $1000 charged to consumer returns $30,000 when the "crop" is harvested. That's a brilliant scheme if you have a car factory... until the wood market is flooded, I guess.
I am a Troll (Score:2, Interesting)
Preventing a cancer before it starts is far more effective than attempting to treat it after years of abuse. But yeah in these types of topics I generally get modded Troll for telling people they need to give up their cars and ride bicycles if they want to stop (or slow down) climate change. Yes there are certainly a very great deal of reasons why, for example, people can't ride bikes: weather is too hot, weather is too cold, work is too far away, biking causes sweat, etc. Yep, just mark me Troll.
Re:These ideas are not new. (Score:3, Interesting)
Reason definitely has an open bias, but as long as you know that while reading it, you can call them on their BS, but still benefit from a lot of the other really good stuff there.
Just out of curiosity... (Score:1, Interesting)
Let's fix the problem that doesn't exist (Score:5, Interesting)
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
But either way, this is kind of stuff is confusing. Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?
I guess it's the same as fixing the the huge credit problem in the U.S. by telling banks to issue more credit to more at risk lenders?
Or by cutting the country's deficit by increasing spending?
Or by decreasing unemployment by giving illegal immigrants legal status so they can compete for the already limited number of available jobs?
Or by fixing solving the global nuclear threat by reducing our nuclear arsenal while Iran and North Korea continue to push theirs.
Is his Administration pulling these ideas out of their asses or what?
(I know I'll be rated a troll by all the kool-aid drinkers, that's okay)
Re:Jurisdiction (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It doesn't matter... (Score:3, Interesting)
But then again why bother to think things through when it's much more fun to make fun of the US. I mean it's not like the rest of the world depends upon us to actually get things done.
It really doesn't. Unless by 'things' you mean inflationary bubbles.
Re:1/2 Acre of Trees = 1 Car's Pollution (Score:3, Interesting)
Some folks spend their entire life walking on paved over ground. I suppose some of them will never ever set foot on ground that's not been bull-dozed flat, planted and manicured. They've only ever seen nature through a car window or a TV screen, and every word the announcer utters is gospel, and the constant message is "Be afraid, be very afraid". By the way send money to our lawyers who will help save the cute-furry critters.
Those are the folks who worry most about the environment.
One solution might be... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:These ideas are not new. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh so there are some others out there who have also thought of this. I've always thought this would be quite effective ... just go outside after a hot day and feel how dark asphalt roads keep radiating heat pretty much all night long.
My thoughts always turn to villages in places like Italy and Spain, where the buildings are whitewashed/painted white and overwhelmingly the towns have a very high albedo (bring your sunglasses if you go there!). You don't feel anywhere near as much of that heat island effect at night, and even in hot Spanish summers, the interior of these houses stays pretty comfortable, with no AC needed.
Using concrete for roads instead of asphalt would be the most obvious way to increase urban albedo. Problem is, concrete roads cost a lot more (but they also last a lot longer too). That's why highways are often built from concrete but small urban roads aren't - they aren't expected to have as much traffic. I suppose one has to look also at the relative energy and cost to create an asphalt road vs a concrete one.
An alternative approach is to go for the 'shade' approach. Rather than paint things white, try to plant a metric buttload of trees over the city, such that most paved surfaces are shaded most of the time. Even if they are dark surfaces, if there is no sun hitting them, it's not a problem. Trees themselves have quite a low albedo of course, but they don't hold anywhere as much heat overnight as pavement. Plus trees have other benefits too (sucking up CO2, making places more pleasant to be in etc).
Re:Just out of curiosity... (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to be a skeptic as a rule but the more I've read on this the more I see of the opposite: that is, the scientists generally agree, but the few that don't get played up in the media because the politicians love to give them undue credit. And of course there are a whole raft full of people (usually House reps) who have opinions on these matters but aren't actually scientists or citing scientific journals.
Even on this board I see that: the couple of actual climate scientists that frequent slashdot are damn sure of AGW, while people afraid of the political implications trot out already-debunked links to Watts' blog or what have you. I don't know if it's the underdog effect or a general dislike of Al Gore and his ilk, but somewhere in all this people seem to be ignoring the science and just assuming it's a liberal vs. conservative thing.
Most of the arguments I see and hear, and CNN is no exception, include things like "it's a cycle", "it's the sun", "it's water vapor", "it's orbits", "it's volcanos"...these have all been accounted for. Then you get your "the models are flawed" (how?), "there's no consensus", and so on. Again, the sort of thing a quick googling will fix. But much like with evolution vs. creationism, the anti-science crowd gets the benefit of using these quick arguments that take a long time to properly debunk, and they circle around like memes forever as new groups of people say "guess what I heard on CNN! I knew all those scientists were full of it!"
I'm not saying that you're wrong for questioning anybody, since that's always the right approach. But I have to point out that what I have seen in terms of money and politics with this issue has been the opposite. There is big, big money in showing that global warming science is flawed. Probably a Nobel prize too. No one has stepped up to the plate.
And you're right...I'm sure there are a number of politicians who'd love to use climate change as a vehicle for pushing one policy or another through, just as every single company this year miraculously "went green". But who said we had to listen to the politicians in the first place? This research has been out there, in some cases for decades, and all I say definitively is I'm doing my best to catch up on it now and IMO there is a massively solid case for AGW. Which is unsettling.
You remind me of hurricane seeding (Score:3, Interesting)
If we drastically alter the Earth's climate not in accordance with the international community, we'll be blamed(rightly) for causing longer and harsher winters.
Here's and idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a simple solution I haven't heard anyone propose. Extensive renewable thinning of the forests.
Forests only absorb co2 as they grow, once they reach maximum density they become carbon neutral. When a forest reaches maximum density all carbon absorbed by new trees is offset by the trees that died and provided the room. But by continually thinning out our forests and allowing them to regrow we'd gain a infinitely renewable supply of zero net carbon fuel in the form of the harvested wood.
The wood produced could be used to generate electricity, or could be even chemically converted directly to combustible fuel. In addition, the wood could be used for cheap carbon negative building material.
The infrastructure for this would be cheap, the technologies available, and most importantly, it would be immediately profitable. I'm not surprised this hasn't been seriously considered though, both sides in this controversy seam more interested in using it for political leverage than approaching the problem with any sense of logic.
Re:Not reversal (Score:4, Interesting)
Contrary to all the 'sky-is-falling' BS that people who produce bad computer models to scare the public enough to make government give them more money to find scarier and scarier models, the global average temperature is in a pretty good place.
Too bad the folks who are so quick to listen to iffy computer models about the weather are not so quick to listen to what computer models (and common sense) say about the consequences of burdening this country with imponderable debt (the number doesn't even fit on my calculator anymore!). That is sure going to impact my children and grandchildren a LOT more than whether the sea levels rise 3 inches in the next 50 years.
Re:The Chem Trails Conspiracy gets a headline (Score:4, Interesting)
What we need to fix is peoples attitude towards it. It is going to happen, and some coastal areas are going to be flooded. On the bright side, the warming will create new green areas on the planet. (Some deserts will turn green again) All in all, the earth will be much more of a tolerable place to live in a warmer climate.
Re:negative spin much? (Score:2, Interesting)
No. Ordinary people don't even know what "chaotic systems" are. Ordinary people have no idea what the ice caps melting will eventually imply.
But we have a bunch of very smart people who do complicated experiments in controlled environments, who then take the results of those experiments and do their best to extrapolate them to a global scale over a span of decades or centuries. Some of them will be wrong, but some will most likely be right. It only takes one or two "right" scenarios to change our planet beyond the ability to support "life as we know it" (which doesn't imply supporting no life at all, though it could.)
And we have a bunch of people telling us that there's nothing to see here please move along, or promoting cheap quick-fix solutions that could potentially make things worse in the long run. (Often and I'm sure entirely coincidentally, these are the same people who would have to put up the biggest stake in order for a cleanup to really work on a large scale.)
The only things we really know for sure is that we have exactly one example of a planet that supports life as we know it, that its changing faster than current research suggests it should, and that our own actions have a high probability of being a major cause of the fast-tracked change.
So the question is: do YOU want to risk your only planet (or your grandchildren's only planet if it takes that long) on the slim chance that the scientists are the ones who are wrong? Unfortunately there's currently an overwhelming "yes" from the people in charge. I'm sure its another coincidence that they're frequently the same people (or have ties to the same people) who tell us that science is wrong.
Ordinary people believe what they're told. If they're told two contradictory things, they'll take a brief glance at the available information and choose whichever side seems the most obvious to them regardless of the basis of that particular side.
Many, if not most, ordinary people these days will tend to fall on the side of the scientists if you ask them what they believe (its a lot easier to believe that making things hot melts ice than it is to believe a politician is telling the truth!) Then they'll get in their non-carpooled SUV, drive 20 miles to get to their suburban home and turn the AC to full because they don't understand the basis.
I freely admit to falling into the category of "ordinary people" when it comes to climate change. I listen to what I'm told, then pick my side based on what makes the most sense to me (I'd bet the tone of my comment suggests which side that is). Maybe its just the programmer in me, but I like to look at it in terms of worst case scenarios:
- O(science is wrong): Nothing changes and life goes on. A few large corporations have to spend 0.1% of their budget for 5 years implementing cleanup plans that turn out to be useless. Theres a bit less smog in LA.
- O(stakeholders are wrong): All life on earth is wiped out within the next century or two. No one is alive to care about the smog in LA.
Now of course worst case isn't necessarily the most likely case, but I'd still rather not take the chance. I hope to have grandkids someday and I'd prefer if they have a planet to live on. Its a good thing that I'm not really fond of SUVs.
Re:Here's and idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, this is a frequent recommendation by the lumber lobby. They blame large forest fires on federal regulations that prevent the lumber industry from 'maintaining' national forests. Their proposed maintenance is largely what you're recommending.
I understand what you're suggesting in terms of the harvested wood being used in construction that will 'sink' their carbon longer than allowing dead trees to rot on the forest floor. I suppose the only challenge might be in harvesting and processing the trees with less of a carbon footprint than the carbon they contain.
Seth
Re:negative spin much? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who said the climate is a chaotic system on centennial time scales? It's mostly a boundary value problem, not an initial value problem. That's why we can predict that summer is hotter than winter even though we can't predict the weather in 6 months: you increase the net radiation flux, it will get hotter on average. You can't predict the microstate of the system (which city has what temperature on what day), but you can predict the average macrostate (the system absorbs more heat). Similarly, there is molecular chaos in a pot of water, but that doesn't mean you can't predict the water gets hotter when you turn the stove on.
Now, if the climate system happens to be balanced near a bistable threshold, then you can get chaotic effects, where internal variability can unpredictably flip the system to one state or the other. It's possible that we could cross some threshold with help from anthropogenic climate change, but it's unlikely to happen by itself soon, considering the relative stability of the Holocene climate.
"Chaos" is right up there with "entropy" and "quantum mechanics" with most misused scientific concepts.