Climate Scientist Pioneer Talks About the Furture of Geoengineering 140
First time accepted submitter merbs writes At the first major climate engineering conference, Stanford climatologist Ken Caldeira explains how and why we might come to live on a geoengineered planet, how the field is rapidly growing (and why that's dangerous), and what the odds are that humans will try to hijack the Earth's thermostat. From the article: "For years, Dr. Ken Caldeira's interest in planet hacking made him a curious outlier in his field. A highly respected atmospheric scientist, he also describes himself as a 'reluctant advocate' of researching solar geoengineering—that is, large-scale efforts to artificially manage the amount of sunlight entering the atmosphere, in order to cool off the globe."
Re:Furture? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's right after the parst and prersent.
Didn't these people watch Futurama? (Score:4, Funny)
All they need to do is follow the example set forth in those tomes of knowledge. First you start by putting larger and larger ice cubes into the world's oceans.
When that no longer works (or you run out of ice), you construct a very large mirror in orbit about the Earth which will reflect large amounts of sunlight. Just make sure a piece of space debris doesn't run into it and point it down towards the planet. Ants under a magnifying glass anyone?
Finally, if all else fails, have every robot on the planet point their exhaust vents skyward and at a predetermined signal, furiously vent their gasses to move the planet slightly further away from the Sun.
Simple really.
Re:Thing is, we know what we have to do (Score:1, Funny)
4. Spel real good
Re:NIMBY (Score:2, Funny)
Practice makes perfect, so try it out on Venus first.
They already did.
If you've ever read Robert Heinlein, you'd know that - back when he was writing stories in the 50s and 60s - Venus was a temperate (albeit still very cloudy) planet.