Solar Geoengineering Could Lead To Whiter, Brighter Skies 165
cylonlover writes "We've heard reports that placing small, reflective particles into the upper atmosphere could actually improve crop yields, but would also significantly reduce the amount of electricity generated by solar power plants and do little to arrest the acidification of the world's oceans. Now another potential side effect has been theorized by Californian researchers, who say that solar geoengineering could lead to brighter, whiter skies, and sunsets with an afterglow (abstract)."
Add a tag to the story (Score:5, Insightful)
The haze is white in the city, violet from afar (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we need to be more concerned with pulling crap out of the atmosphere than putting more stuff in it.
Re:Sounds like the cons outweigh the pro's. (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans F-up everytime they toy with nature (Score:5, Insightful)
Well almost every time. Like the damming of rivers which kills fish and blocks the natural flow of sediment. Or levees that make rivers flow faster and, when the flood happens, is far worse than a natural un-leveed flood. Or putting-out forest fires such that, when a fire happens now there's massive overgrowth that turns a small blaze into an inferno that makes the ground into glass.
Isn't it about time we learn to LIVE with nature, instead of trying to engineer it and screwing up? Over millions-of-years nature has reached a natural balance with its flow-of-rivers, floods, and the occasional fire (trees developed fire-retardant bark). All we humans manage to do is frak it up.
Re:Sounds like the cons outweigh the pro's. (Score:5, Insightful)
Between solar, wind, and nuclear it's not hard to do, it's just not very popular with the big oil interests that control our politics.
It's also not popular with the people that protest against oil and oil interests. They won't let us invest in new nuclear reactor technology or build new plants, then complain when all the nuclear plants we have are old and outdated.
Re:Sounds like the cons outweigh the pro's. (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly the correct (and most feasible) approach to us putting too much CO2 into the atmosphere is to put less CO2 into the atmosphere
Yep. That's why I never exercise. Clearly the correct and most feasible approach to putting too much food into my mouth is to put less food into my mouth.
~Loyal
Re:The haze is white in the city, violet from afar (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, the difference is the forest fire eventually goes out. The smog from Atlanta is being produced 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Re:Night lights. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've noticed people have a tendency to turn-on lights when they don't really need them. Like turning on all the lights in the kitchen, and then sitting in the living room watching TV. The lights in the kitchen burn for hours with nobody using them. Why is that?
I turn-off the lights when I'm not in a room..... and even if I'm in a room, I typically just use the glow from the TV and my computer's CRT. That's probably why I have a lightbulb that's nearing 20 years old and still working.
Re:Night lights. (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually people do this for the indirect lighting though. You probably don't want the light on in the room with the TV, but you don't want the house to be completely dark either.
Another stupid nonreversible geo-engineering idea (Score:4, Insightful)
... rife with unintended consequences. If you're going to turn UP the lights, you'd damn well better have a way to turn them back DOWN again. Large repositionable mirrors in space would do this. Throwing crap into the atmosphere because it's cheaper would not.
Re:Night lights. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people don't like feeling they live in a cave.
Re:If you dump al that light on crops, (Score:5, Insightful)
RTFA
Photosynthesis is more effective in diffuse light.
Easy to imagine that with light coming in from many angles the particles in plant cells that have the chlorophyll are illuminated from more sides therefore more efficient.Also leaves that aren't perfectly lined up with the sun get more light than they otherwise would.
Re:The haze is white in the city, violet from afar (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you understand what you're talking about:
It seems like you are make a reference to the Urban Heat Island effect, but "the Greenies" are aware of it, however, according to the Koch-funded BEST project, areas under the Urban Heat Island effect actually show a slightly lower global warming trend than other areas. See the important thing to now is that when the Urban Heat Island effect raises the temperature in an area by 2 degrees it does so continuously. So both the urban area and the rural area around it will show a very similar global warming trend.
It's not that "the Greenies" don't know about the effect, it's that it's probably not important in context. Frankly, I've never heard of an environmentalist denying that humans can change the local environment, maybe this is something you're projecting?
Re:If you dump al that light on crops, (Score:2, Insightful)
"Photosynthesis is more effective in diffuse light."
No, it's really not. Chlorophyll has a neat mechanism by which light tends to (usually) work in one direction. You can test this for yourself. Obtain a test tube of chlorophyll in a suspended liquid solution. Take an incandescent light. If you put the test tube directly between you and the light at eye level, you will see it as mostly red. Any other direction, you see it as green.
Absolutely true...
But what the hell do you imagine that has to do with how effective photosynthesis is for a particular illumination environment? Yes, chlorophyl absorbs blue and some red, and reflects green -- no matter WHAT direction it comes from. You can test this for yourself -- same experiment as above, but rotate both the light source and the observer around the tube (or rotate the tube, if you like), and note that the color effects depend on the relative angle of the incident light and your eye, and nothing to do with chlorophyl "work[ing] in one direction".
Also, making the skies BRIGHTER (as per TFS and TFA) means increasing photon flux density. The current limit for most plants to withstand light falls between 1500-1800umol. After that, you rapidly begin approaching photosynthetic poisoning (AKA bleaching0 of plant tissues. Many food crops, especially vegetative ones, don't tolerate very high light levels. Most lettuces prefer roughly 300-600 umol, and start doing undesirable things at anything much higher, like bolting and not creating a compact head, or outright turning white.
The point went that-a-way, if you hurry maybe you can head it off at the pass.
Yes, making the sky brighter, and the sun dimmer, means increasing diffuse photon flux density. But (since all that light is reflected away from its original path) that means decreasing the direct photon flux density. And since some of the light gets reflected off to space, the total photon flux density is reduced.
Net result? Leaves directly facing the sun (at any given time of day) see much less photon flux density. Leaves in oblique sun, or in shade, get more. Net result for most plants, in most situations, is a reduction -- it's only a net increase for plants that spend most of the time in shadow, and those can be dealt with by providing additional shade (either from the sun for more hours, or from the sky as well)...
Yeah, it'd (maybe) be a problem for lettuce, that would cost some amount to deal with. Over all crops, it'd be a definite win, and it would save us from global warming for a century (plenty of time to run low enough on fossil fuels that the scarcity reduces their use to planet-friendly levels). So... though it's surely not to be undertaken lightly, I'm not seeing any reason to write it off. But maybe that's because instead of "working with better-educated European horticultural companies" (what a qualification!), I actually took a couple B.S.es and a M.S. in engineering, and picked up enough physics to understand light propagation... Oh wait, everything I needed to write this post came from fucking high school.
Re:Posting to undo moderation (Score:4, Insightful)
56 minutes of every day of your life to pay for light? You think that's better than, say, I dunno, pressing a button when you go in a room?
I was right. You *are* weird.