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)."
If you dump al that light on crops, (Score:2)
Don't you dump the heat on it too, a la Bender in "Godfellas" which set the crops on fire, not to mention increased global warming because how you have a mirror instead of gasses trapping light in?
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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.
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Photosynthesis is more effective in diffuse light.
Great... "whiter skies." I absolutely HATE a white sky -- you know, when it's cloudy? If they do this there's going to be a hell of a lot more murders and suicides, because folks with clinical depression cheer up a bit when the sky is blue and become more depressed when it's gray ("whiter").
DO NOT WANT! I know far too many mentally disturbed people. I'd hate to see them get worse.
Re:If you dump al that light on crops, (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
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.
This is one of the worst ideas I've heard coming from Californian scientists in a long long time. Makes me glad to be working with better-educated European horticultural companies.
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"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
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"Yes, chlorophyl absorbs blue and some red, and reflects green"
WRONG.
http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/4/684.full [oxfordjournals.org]
And that one link right there blows the rest of your argument away.
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I don't really see how it does. He got the color spectrum of light absorption by chlorophyll wrong, but he's correct that you got the law of conservation of energy wrong. Claiming that a single error disproves everything someone said, even the parts unrelated to the error, is a logical fallacy, and claiming so in an arrogant manner just makes you sound like an ass and makes people more inclined to distrust what you have to say.
Do yours
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WRONG.
http://www.trump.com/Donald_J_Trump/Biography.asp [trump.com]
And that one link right there blows the rest of your argument away.
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That sounds like you haven't been listening to the presidents, but I suspect that you just aren't counting malice as stupidity.
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This comment was so off-topic I was expecting that somehow they were going to weasel MyCleanPC in at the end.
Night lights. (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Re:Night lights. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
You must have some phenomenal eyesight there. I don't know about you, but my eyes don't cope very well with extremely high contrasts. If a screen were so bright as to be usable as a light source in a dark room, I would be unable to read the text on it because of the overall ambient darkness to which my eyes would be adapted under the circumstances.
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Yup, I'm a dad and one of my sworn duties is to turn off lights. Tempted to get the light switch sensors like we have at work.
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IF you have a 60 watt bulb, and you are charged 10 cents a Kw, that's 10 cents very 16 hours. How much do sensors cost?
OTOH, standing a little more on a sensor to simple use less energy, even at a high cost, then you should do it.
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Yup, I'm a dad and one of my sworn duties is to turn off lights. Tempted to get the light switch sensors like we have at work.
Ah yes, it's true that children brighten up the home.
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Yup, I'm a dad and one of my sworn duties is to turn off lights. Tempted to get the light switch sensors like we have at work.
Ah yes, it's true that children brighten up the home.
When you light them on fire.
Re:Night lights. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people don't like feeling they live in a cave.
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You feel like you're in a cave if all the lights in the house aren't on?
Weird.
And expensive.
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Just how expensive is electricity where you are?
There are 15 rooms in my house (I'm counting the garage and two outside lights as rooms since we really care about lights). If I put a 100W light in each and left them on 24x7 I would use 100W * 24*365.25 = 877kWh.
The highest rate for my electricity (which is the summer one) is $0.187 so that gives a yearly cost of putting 100W bulbs in every socket, leaving them on 24x7, and paying the summer rate all year of $164.
$14 a month isn't "expensive", it's less than
Posting to undo moderation (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah I missed the 15x.
So all the lights all the time with 100W bulbs adds less than 10% of the mortgage+taxes, or 56 minutes a day at mimimum wage.
Not quite as trivial, but still tiny compared to the running costs of the house.
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.
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I didn't say that, but go ahead and make stuff up.
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Maybe you have night blindness or something. When the door's open enough light escapes for me to see as far as I can see.
Or maybe you have a house with rooms the size of basketball courts. I dunno.
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It isn't weird at all if you don't make a point to try and misunderstand what he means. If you are in a lit room, and the next room over is dark, you cannot see that the other room even exists because your pupils constrict to let in only enough light to comfortably see in a lit room.
Ok, let's take it literally ... you're in a light place looking into a dark place.
Isn't that like living *outside* a cave...?
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What I did was install one of those motion detectors in the kitchen and hooked the normal lights to it. It works great. While you are in there the lights come on, stay on and you can do anything you need. You can then take your food out with you and the lights turn off so you never worry about having to go back and turn them off. You can even use LED lights for greater efficiency.
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" The lights in the kitchen burn for hours with nobody using them. Why is that?"
It means electric energy is too cheap.
Add a tag to the story (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong? (Score:2)
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/31/what_gets_declassified/singleton/ [salon.com]
alienz, really?!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Seriously, have these guys never seen the matrix or highlander?
So we need to avoid any potential sequels ?
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Hose astronomers, sandblast jet planes... (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks, guys.
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We at the Monsanto corportation don't feel that you're sarcasm is warranted
We who are not Monsanto don't think that the GP is sarcasm, either! His post, maybe, but not him.
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:The haze is white in the city, violet from afar (Score:5, Funny)
You're not suggesting that humans could possibly affect nature or the weather, are you? As all the AGW will tell you, there is absolutely no way we puny humans could possibly do anything to change weather patterns, affect rain or pollute the air.
What you're seeing is a natural event, something that comes and goes over the centuries. It happened in the past and will happen again (sorry for the BSG reference).
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I knew there were still humans posting here --- not every comment is from a chatbat!
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Yeah, gotta watch out for those nocturnal mammal keyboard users!
next you'll be saying..... (Score:2)
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.
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Let's all be grateful for leap years!
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I'd like to leap somewhere out here. 4 more hours.
Re:The haze is white in the city, violet from afar (Score:4, Informative)
You haven't seen a fucking forest fire, have you?
Nope. The people around me cut down all the forests in this area decades ago.
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?
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Re:The haze is white in the city, violet from afar (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like the cons outweigh the pro's. (Score:2)
I really don't know why this is even being considered.
For reason that should be plainly obvious, it also reminds me of the Matrix... just with the opposite color.
Re:Sounds like the cons outweigh the pro's. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like the cons outweigh the pro's. (Score:4, Interesting)
This idea should be considered idiotic :)
Clearly the correct (and most feasible) approach to us putting too much CO2 into the atmosphere is to put less CO2 into the atmosphere, not embark on some other massive experiment with mother nature whose outcome we can't really predict. 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.
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.
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Actually Nuclear doesn't seem popular with anyone right now, but seems the least bad of all possible choices at hand.
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
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Actually, that's a better analogy than you give it credit for. If you eat less than you need, the only choice is to burn fat. Exercising makes you need more calories, but it's not strictly necessary to do anything if you always eat slightly less than you use. Much like CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants need CO2 to live, just like we need calories, and they "burn" it by converting it to biomass. We're putting more into the atmosphere than they use, so we're gaining CO2. If we put less into the atmosphere than th
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if we stopped produce CO2s, right this moment, it would be 100 years before a decline would begin.
So considering ways to offset it's effects are not idiotic.
Yes, we need to reduce, a lot. Yes, having a way to scrub the atmosphere would be great.
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"Yes, we need to reduce, a lot. Yes, having a way to scrub the atmosphere would be great."
So plant more trees and crops and algae farms.
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Yes that would be the correct approach, but at some point it will be too late to use that because we already put too much in. I'm not all that confident that we can get our act together before that. Heck - I'm surprised this hasn't deteriorated in yet another "global warming skeptic" debate by now.
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Correct, yes. Most feasible, probably not, because there are plenty of people making money on the status quo, and a fair amount of "economic value" depends on burning fossil fuels that are still in the ground (a scary amount -- http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175499/ [tomdispatch.com] -- search for "value" to skip chit-chat about the climate). Assume that something similar holds in China. Given this, there's going to be a powerful economic incentive to stick with business as usual, and plenty of money whose jobs, wealt
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.
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Did you ever have an ant farm as a kid? Did you shake it? Of course you did. Because balance is boring. Maybe after God got tired of looking at dinosaurs, he flicked a big asteroid this way. Then, he created a special kind of ant that made far more intricate stuff than ever before. Then, when he tires of us, he'll shake things up again.
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Maybe nature isn't meant to be in balance. Maybe God likes it this way. It's more interesting to watch.
No. Nature was perfectly balanced before EVIL HUMANS came along; just look at the 'Hockey Stick' temperature graph... long straight line for centuries until EVIL HUMANS started burning coal.
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What is a balanced temperature?
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it would have to be a malicious god as you describe to be congruent with the situation on earth.
You're assuming that you're not insignificant.
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"Isn't it about time we learn to LIVE with nature, instead of trying to engineer it and screwing up?"
no. We control fire, make beams of light, send people to space because we engineer things. Otherwise we would all be living in a cave.
"Over millions-of-years nature has reached a natural balance with its flow-of-rivers, "
incorrect. Natures has not 'balance'. It's just a system. And it changes, and it respond according to the laws of physics.
EVERYTHING changes the environment around it.
You can feel free to c
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Nature corrects itself. It's called mass extinction or ecologic disaster.
It's a simple control loop: The environment will get worse until the number of humans on the planet is cut way down, one way or another.
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Nature has absolutely no compunction about killing humans in large quantities regardless of whether we want to live with her or not. It seems like people who talk about "natural balance" perhaps don't consider (or don't care about) the fact that towns now exist in flood plains. While it's really nice in a 20/20 hindsight sort of way to say "well, you shouldn't have build your town there", it's not really practical to just pick up and move entire cities to the hills (which, btw, are subject to other "natur
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Building in flood plains is pretty stupid. Rather than deal with that stupidity, humans are trying to redirect rivers around the towns...... and then they whine-and-moan when it doesn't work, and the river wipes out the town. DUH. Maybe after the river wipes-out your town, you should remove the wreckage and plant some crops there instead. The humans can live elsewhere.
Give me back my sky! (Score:3)
Re:Give me back my sky! (Score:4)
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You just made me miss Firefly again...
Bastard.
The Destruction of the Sky (Score:4)
solar geoengineering could lead to brighter, whiter skies, and sunsets with an afterglow
It would probably also interfere with ground-based astronomy and our view of the night sky, by direct absorption/scattering of starlight, and by worsening Skyglow [wikipedia.org] effects, increasing scattering terrestrial sources of light back at us. Life-long urban residents already have no idea what a proper view of the Firmament looks like (not even knowing the Milky Way is something you can see with your own naked eyes!), never having seen more than the moon and a pathetic handful of dots.
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It would kill potato yields (Score:3)
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>>>destroying the staple crop of much of the world's poor. I think there is a huge arrogance popping its head up again
Given a recent RT News report about the UK government & other NGOs funding sterilization in poor countries like India, I don't think they care about killing potato crops. It's just another long-term method of reducing the world population to a "sustainable" level. (About 1 billion.)
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it seems the point would be to make less sun hit the ground(thus less solar cell efficiency).
anyways.. about 10 hours. ever heard of the arctic circle? you know, nightless nights? where they grow potatos too? it's just a variety thing(omg pre-industrial bio-engineering).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond_potato [wikipedia.org]
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Would never work. Potato tubers can be cultivated vegitatively.
Buy a common idaho sput from the store. Let it start to sprout from its eyes. Slice the potato so that each slice has an eye on it. Plant the slices.
OMG! Cloned potatoes! (Sarcasm)
Because of this monsanto would never do it. Unless the potatoes also "featured" a state of being totally eyeless, and therefor totally useless as a perineal, they couldn't control supply and jack up the prices like they do with GE cereals and corn.
As someone in solar science... (Score:5, Interesting)
...I have to say this is a really stupid idea. It would absolutely prevent ground-based solar observation of the corona, important to astrophysical studies and space weather. To give an idea of how difficult it is already, one must image or analyze brightness levels on the order of a millionth of the brightness of the solar disk to do real science, on time scales of five minutes or less, at very narrow wavelength bandwidths. There simply aren't enough photons to average out the noise with sky brightness levels above around 20 ppm on time scales that are meaningful, and detector noise makes measurements above 30 ppm sky brightness pretty much futile.
There are not very many places on earth with the necessary to make even part-time measurements as it is.
The night time folks will be screwed as well.
The winners will be a few large multinational corporations with the funds to corrupt policy. The losers will be the rest of us.
You are kidding right? (Score:3)
So who in their right mind is suggesting that we even need to do such a stupid thing as adding more sulfates to the atmosphere on purpose? To grow more food? Not likely. Reduce solar heating and counteract Global Warming? Seriously?
Pumping sulfates into the atmosphere is basically what causes acid rain and purposely pumping tones of this stuff into the air is not a good idea for the environment. Besides the quickest way to do this would be to return to burning high sulfur coal for power...
This is clearly just another scientist trying to secure or justify funding for investigating some crazy hair brained "Global Warming" snake oil fix. It is like funding the "free energy" science schemes or searching for the fountain of youth.
This is nothing but a huge waste of money and time..
Contrails and now this!? (Score:2)
your tinfoil is powerless here.
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.
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Depends on the crap. You could create something with a life expectancy. Or something that's easier to collect and store then CO2
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Large repositionable mirrors in space would do this.
NASA studied using mirrors in space to illuminate the jungle at night during the Vietnam War; they would have launched a cut-down LEM with a large folding mirror attached which would unfold when it was in orbit.
I thought that was cool. OK, it was also stupid and insanely expensive, but I'm sure plenty of soldiers would have preferred to spend their Vietnam War service sitting in orbit pointing a mirror at the jungle rather than being shot at down in said jungle.
keep it simple (Score:3)
Painting roofs white could do much more than these risky geoengineering boondogles.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/30/492153/how-painting-roofs-white-can-help-turn-off-the-world-for-a-year/ [thinkprogress.org]
Why? (Score:2)
Crop yields are a non issue. As the earth warms, large tracts of tundra in northern latitudes will become available for agriculture. We might end up having a surplus of arable land.
Now, if you happen to be a farmer in Texas or Oklahoma, you're screwed. But this is a global issue. Some will win, some will lose, but in the final analysis, mankind benefits.
If only there were some device to remove CO2... (Score:3)
Something that could be deployed internationally, something cheap, something that could be initially shipped in a small package, something that only required solar power and water to absorb CO2. Perhaps something that even released oxygen into the atmosphere, provided shade, grew some sort of sweet, nutritious fruits or nuts and and was shaped in a way that small children could climb in the summertime.
Alas, such an advanced device is well beyond the realm of our science, or our scientific imagination.
shades of billie boy gates . . . . (Score:2)
Uh, excuse me.... (Score:2)
... isn't the sky supposed to be BLUE?
Bringing Fiction To Life? (Score:2)
"We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky." Morpheus: The Matrix
Emmissions (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be easier to reduce emissions as recommended by every decent scientist for decades? I am tired of all the oddball solutions that are being put forward instead of a mature response to the problem. The leaders and voters get to avoid the hard decisions because they believe the magic solution is just around the corner. We need to face up to the problems we have created and work towards solving them, not looking for the "magic" solution that will make all the bad news go away.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Informative)
This has been happening for at least the last ten years. They are called chemtrails or persistent contrails.
No, "chemtrails" are an urban legend that claims our government is drugging us from the sky via chemicals dumped from airliners.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Funny)
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My Morgellons always acts up when there's a chemtrail overhead.
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Ha!
I hear the there are more Bigfoot sightings when there are a lot of chemtrails.
pshaw! (Score:2)
This also explains reality teevee.
[*]oh yeah, that's right, I went there.
The alien disinformation smear campaign is just rutheless [google.com].
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I'm concerned with the implication that white = bright, dark = dumb. I thought we'd moved away from such racist views.
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