Group Seeks Test For Geoengineering Tool To Fight Climate Change 127
An anonymous reader writes: A group of retired engineers and scientists has been meeting for several years to develop techniques to fight climate change. They've now reached the point where they want to actively test a machine that shoots water droplets into the sky in order to supplement existing clouds and increase the planet's albedo. The group is not aiming for full deployment — in fact, it's not even unanimous in support for prevailing theories in climate science. But they all agree that it's important to learn about such technologies before the situation becomes a crisis. "We need to understand whether this approach is even possible and what the risks are, in the event that we find ourselves looking for ways to extend time and mitigate warming damage."
If we're eventually forced to deploy large-scale geoengineering projects to combat climate change, it's not a good idea to grab whatever technology is cheapest or most readily available without knowing how well it works. The group is aware of the ethical concerns surrounding such research, but its director notes, "The fact is humanity is already engaged in unplanned climate engineering. We're doing it through coal plant and shipping emissions every day without understanding it very well."
If we're eventually forced to deploy large-scale geoengineering projects to combat climate change, it's not a good idea to grab whatever technology is cheapest or most readily available without knowing how well it works. The group is aware of the ethical concerns surrounding such research, but its director notes, "The fact is humanity is already engaged in unplanned climate engineering. We're doing it through coal plant and shipping emissions every day without understanding it very well."
Same agencies. (Score:1)
Re:Same agencies. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody is asking for governmental control... they're asking to perform an experiment. Geez.
In all seriousness, I like that they're just looking at the technology, and studiously avoiding any attempt to take a political side in any of this. There are practical applications for this in the macro sense that have approximately bupkis to do with the whole debate, after all.
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I do not even remotely understand and do not care to find out any facts about the current mechanisms of our changing climate. To think we can proactively alter the climate with our childlike understanding of climatic systems is testament to the arrogance (and greed?) of climate "scientists"
FTFY. Plus, it seems like your "solution" is to lay down and die. Great plan!
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Very forcefully agree.
Look what happened to Yellowstone when the "more knowledgeable and learned white man" took over the "management" of the wildlife in the newly-designated park from the American Indians in the late 1800s. I understand that experimentation is an important step in the learning process, but to have the audacity to think that we can control something as complex as the climate of the planet is arrogance of the highest order.
Why does this species not learn from it's past mistakes???!!! Some
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So long as they stick to technology that can't run away, I don't see a problem. Aerosols to increase the Earth's albedo, ocean algal growth that is tied to a nutrient we have to supply, many approaches have been suggested. What they are trying to do is characterize early attempts at sequestration before the carbon problem becomes acute. Because the climate models we have now do a poor job of predicting weather, we don't know yet how big the carbon problem is. Prudence dictates that we prepare for a "major i
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I disagree, if a geoengineering tool is found to work, eg sequestration (which strikes me as a completely dodgy proposition), it'll be the people-haters in the warmist camp who'll be against it.
If nothing else this project may allow some refinement of cloud/albedo modelling, thereby improving the hopeless climate models that the warmists take so seriously.
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Because the climate models we have now do a poor job of predicting weather, we don't know yet how big the carbon problem is.
It takes a special brand of ignorance to put down climate models for doing a poor job of predicting weather when that is something they were never intended to do in the first place.
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Is the predictive power of climate models the reason that Warmists predict that every contradictory kind of bad weather that happens in the world, including record cold and snow, is proof of warming?
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There may be some idiots who make those sorts of claims but if you asked a real scientist about it they would probably say that it is not proof that the Earth is not warming. That it's just another piece of data in the growing accumulation of weather data. That part of studying climate is looking at aggregates of the data over time to discover how the climate is changing.
And a word about snow. In general the warmer it is the more snow you get (up to the point where it gets too warm to fall as snow of cou
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I'm not claiming that the mangled predictions of weather invalidate carbon warming as a hypothesis; rather, they point to the need for an improved model. They should also be telling the apocalyptic political activists who run the movement to back off and leave the modeling and the weather predictions to the real scientists.
After all, if you don't want denialists to take over the debate, why are you giving them ammunition with those contradictory weather warnings?
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Climate models may not be perfect but there's nothing else that can do a better job than they can. There is plenty of evidence they are doing a pretty good job given the constraints they have to live with. For instance it's currently impossible to predict the state of the El Nino/La Nina (ENSO) cycle ahead of time. So climate models have a random cycle that mimics the real cycle. Over many model runs the ENSO cycle varies and if they cherry pick the model runs were the state of ENSO matched the real wor
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Funny but most of the people I see bringing that up are on the contrarian side of the anthropogenic global warming debate. There may have been some idiots who said that but I doubt they were scientists. What I've heard from scientists lately is they expect the number of hurricanes to remain about the same but the average intensity may increase over time. There have been some bad hurricanes in the past decade but by chance they haven't hit the US mainland. It's been a very active year for typhoons in the
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The classical period for climatological studies is 30 years and has been for a long time. And there hasn't been a 19+ year pause in warming anyway. If you analyze it statistically there's no significant difference in the rate of rise before or after the 1997/1998 El Nino. 2014 was the warmest year in the historical record and the rest of 2015 would have to be quite cold for 2015 not to blow that record to smithereens. An unlikely occurrence with the El Nino still building.
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" actively test a machine that shoots water droplets into the sky"
This is what trees do. Maybe if we hadn't removed half the world's trees in the last 100 years maybe carbon wouldn't have gone wonky. Just a thought.
Curiously, Beck 2008 shows Co2 40 ppm higher than now. 200 years ago.
SMH
Not If, When (Score:2)
If carbon emissions were suddenly and miraculously reduced overnight, it would still be too late to reverse the warming trend. So we either need to accept and live with warming, or geoengineer.
The debate has now officially moved on. Please do not rehash the past, or find an excuse to parrot your SJW whinings.
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The debate has now officially moved on. Please do not rehash the past, or find an excuse to parrot your SJW whinings.
Hear that, everyone? The debate has now officially moved on: Tokolosh hath spoken. None of your "SJW whinings"!
Man, you can practically hear the Fedora and the neckbeard...
Kind of hearing hipster bs coming off of you.
Forget Carbon: Natural Change Happens (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes. Of course at some point we have to decide what the target temperature/global climate pattern is and whether it is feasible to attain it. I'd be far more worried about a trend towards an Ice Age than a warmer world.
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Actually, it wouldn't.
We have the technology today to launch a massive fresnel lens to L1, at an estimated cost of only USD$20B over its lifetime.
For a manned mission to Mars - Not even talking about colonization here - NASA estimates it will cost over USD$100B and we won't have suitable technology available for a good 30 more years (though they could li
capture the high ground, make 'em pay dearly (Score:2)
you are theenkenk I am making joke.
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We're nearing the point that just solving the C02 problem isn't enough due to the "in the pipeline" heat budget already on its way. Looking for GeoE
Primitive Terraforming (Score:2)
How about we invest in getting off this planet and learning to live/survive in space? Bet it is cheaper, easier to accomplish, and better for everyone.
Think of this as primitive terraforming: adjusting our own climate should be a far easier thing to do than creating such a climate from scratch on a barren rock. If we are going to survive off-Earth then we will need to be able to do this since living in underground tin cans is not really going to attract many colonists and is extremely expensive and very hard to achieve with current technology.
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If you stop users running their programs then nobody gets anything done and your server might crash anyway. However if you successfully patch the problem and then you might be a
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I can't imagine lifting several billion poor people into space is ever going to happen. So while you may solve the problem of humanity's extinction it doesn't actually solve the problems (if any, grins) here on Earth.
I have one already (Score:2)
It's in my back yard and shoots water into the sky 24/7
I also have a supplemental system that does it twice a week over a much larger area.
We already have a great tool (Score:4, Informative)
Plants... they consume CO2, which seems to be the big issue in climate change.
How about projects to plant more plants in cities globally? Like forcing coal-powered power plants to surround their plant with plants? Plan to plant more plants in your plants.
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If you say the word "plant" a few more times, and add in a couple other buzzwords like "sustainable" and "holistic", you're sure to get funding!
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I think it's a play on this meme [knowyourmeme.com]. Like, I heard you like power plants (e.g. a coal firing electricity factory) so I put some powerful plants (e.g. CO2 absorbing members of kingdom Plantae) in your power plant (e.g. coal firing electricity factory) so you can power (verb) your plant (noun) while you plant (verb) plants (noun).
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And when the plants die the CO2 is released. You only hold the CO2 for a while in a plant unless it gets buried in special circumstances or someone comes by and turns a tree into a house.
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And then other plants grow to replace the dead ones.
The more plants (especially trees) you have growing on the planet, the more CO2 is sequestered.
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So then you are going to be using up more and more land to sequester carbon temporarily for the CO2 that we continue to emit and for the plants that die. There is a limit to the amount of land that we can use for this.
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Plants... they consume CO2, which seems to be the big issue in climate change.
How about projects to plant more plants in cities globally? Like forcing coal-powered power plants to surround their plant with plants? Plan to plant more plants in your plants.
Plants can help but considering that we're daily burning an amount of fossil fuels equivalent to centuries or millennia of plant growth accumulation it can't fix the problem in any relevant time span.
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Plants... they consume CO2, which seems to be the big issue in climate change.
How about projects to plant more plants in cities globally? Like forcing coal-powered power plants to surround their plant with plants? Plan to plant more plants in your plants.
*facepalm*
That will jack shit because you and others like you have absolutely no concept of scale. If you completely covered every square meter of earth the densest fast growing trees, you wouldn't even come close to counteracting a single year's worth of carbon emissions. And I don't mean just the land. I mean even square meter of surface area. We're burning through the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of years worth of ancient global forests, grasslands, etc. every year. No amount of greenery is going
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How do you know he lives someplace where moving north doesn't get hotter still? Or that where he lives this year isn't already someplace more south than where he lived last year? I know you are just trying to help but sometimes you need to gather more facts.
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How is it that anyone supports this? (Score:5, Interesting)
* Does absolutely nothing to prevent ocean acidification
* Provides only masking - if they ever stop (lack of funding, discovery of profound negative consequences, or whatever), all the warming that they've been hiding comes rushing back
* They're just as likely to increase temperatures by increasing IR reflectance as they are to decrease it by increasing albedo. The least well understood aspect of the planet's climate, by a large margin, is clouds; they make up the vast majority of the error bars in the IPCC projections.
* There's a whole raft of staggeringly huge potential downstream disruptions, many of which could increase the problem - for example, reduction of photosynthesis.
I'm actually a moderate to slightly pro-geoengineering. But this is one of the dumbest geoengineering ideas out there. No, I don't think it's worth even wasting the money to try, that money should go to other more worthwhile projects.
Re:Actually you can (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, for all we know, historically Earth has seen higher temperatures and much higher CO2 levels, and life on the planet was flourishing, much bigger and much more diverse than it is today.
And we also know that when the planet has rapidly transitioned between climactic periods, it's been associated with mass extinctions. So I'm not really sure what your point is.
To reiterate, the issue is not that the planet is changing, but how fast the planet is changing. Life takes time to adapt.
Boron is also needed by all complex life, but that doesn't mean we should be digging up huge amounts of it and dumping it into our air, either.
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And we also know that when the planet has rapidly transitioned between climactic periods, it's been associated with mass extinctions.
It appears more likely that dramatic climate change is one of the biggest drivers, if not the biggest driver, of speciation. I expect that over the next few centuries or millenia humans will develop various techniques to stabilize the climate, and that will make the Holocene extinction permanent. Earth will never again see tremendous natural diversity; we're killing off a huge number of species and then we'll prevent climate change from jump-starting an explosion of new speciation. We'll begin introducing n
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Re:How is it that anyone supports this? (Score:5, Informative)
* Does absolutely nothing to prevent ocean acidification
The fact that one technology doesn't address all the problems doesn't make it worthless.
* Provides only masking - if they ever stop (lack of funding, discovery of profound negative consequences, or whatever), all the warming that they've been hiding comes rushing back
Nonsense. Decreasing insolation doesn't "hide" warming, it reduces energy input into the system. Sure, when you stop blocking the energy you'll begin warming again, but the energy you reflected away will not come "rushing back". Vacuuming my floor only keeps the floor clean as long as I continue doing it regularly, and when I stop the dust and dirt will begin to accumulate -- but the crud I removed is gone and not coming back.
Artificially and temporarily boosting the albedo isn't a permanent solution -- but there is no permanent solution. The climate is not stable even without geoengineering, intentional or unintentional. If we want it to remain comfortable for us, we're eventually going to have to take a hand in it, and any technique we use is going to be temporary in nature. Actually, I'd argue that's a feature, not a bug; less chance of a runaway effect.
* They're just as likely to increase temperatures by increasing IR reflectance as they are to decrease it by increasing albedo. The least well understood aspect of the planet's climate, by a large margin, is clouds; they make up the vast majority of the error bars in the IPCC projections.
That just increases the value of studying it.
* There's a whole raft of staggeringly huge potential downstream disruptions, many of which could increase the problem - for example, reduction of photosynthesis.
Again, that just means we need to study it rather than guess. You can acquire scientific knowledge through careful passive observation or through active experimentation but the latter is much faster and more effective.
I'm actually a moderate to slightly pro-geoengineering. But this is one of the dumbest geoengineering ideas out there. No, I don't think it's worth even wasting the money to try, that money should go to other more worthwhile projects.
That's an argument I could buy. However, I don't see anyone else actually proposing to do anything. What we should be doing is funding many different areas of research. More promising avenues should get more funding, but we shouldn't dismiss anything that is potentially useful out of hand.
Re:How is it that anyone supports this? (Score:5, Informative)
When its alternatives do address acidification, yes, that is an argument against it.
Wrong. Earth is at 400ppm milestone, and we're doing on artificial albedo increases. We'll call this status X. Now let's say we begin this process tomorrow. Earth's CO2 keeps rising... 450... 500... 550... 600. But we keep increasing the albedo so that the temperature stays the same as it is today.
What happens when the machines get shut off?
Water vapor has a very short atmospheric residence time. Everything will be back to its no-albedo-boosted state within a couple weeks. So all of the sudden we go from 400ppm temperatures to 600ppm temperatures. There will be some delay because of thermal inertia of course, but the issue is, you're just hiding the problem, not actually doing anything about it. And when you stop hiding it, it comes running back.
Every dollar spent on one thing is a dollar not spent on something else. There are geoengineering processes which don't have all of these problems and are more worthy of study, and need more study (I'd put forth, as one example among many, ocean seeding). And that money could also go toward advancing the technology to reduce carbon emissions or capture emitted carbon.
That's just advertising how little you follow this topic.
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The whole water vapor thing has the nice effect that it should be reasonably reversable, and if it works might buy us a little time.
Time to do what? That seems to be reasonably straight forward at this point, the problem is the political will and the costs involved.
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You don't want to put water VAPOUR into the air you idiot -- that's one of the worst GHGs there is!
This stupid plan is to put water droplets into the atmosphere.
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If additional water vapor only makes clouds then global warming is _not a problem at all_. CO2 isn't a big greenhouse gas, the only way it's a problem is if CO2 raises the temperature a tiny bit, which puts a higher equilibrium amount of water into the atmosphere, which is a serious green house gas.
If the water vapors effect in making more clouds outweighs it's green house gas effect, then CO2 induced global warming is no problem.
albedo (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
I am going to seek funding to paint the poles black.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:sincere skepticism. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it could spell the difference between a dented bumper and slaughtering everyone in both cars.
goodby bluesky (Score:2)
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
Great idea (Score:2)
Let's put a bunch of salt water into the sky where it will probably fall down on land as rain. Granted it will be a very small amount but if it's done a lot and only from one spot you could start impacting some crops.
Water evaporates from the ocean leaving the salt behind (and a bunch of other things). If they are going to do this they should at least evaporate the water before sending it up even though it would require a lot of energy. I just think that tossing up a lot of salt water into the atmosphere
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OMFG who let this moron on the net? Go study some middle school earth science.
Again, false solutions ... (Score:2)
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Very poor citations: "Livestock systems occupy 45% of the global surface area" Really? Let's assume that they were stupid and really meant 45% of the LAND area of the globe. Even then estimates from 2000 put all agriculture usage (not just animal agriculture) at 30% of land area:
http://www.unep.org/resourcepa... [unep.org]
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Re:Again, false solutions ... (Score:4, Informative)
The big problem with addressing global warming is that the ability (and cost) associated with mitigating global warming is not located in the same places that are most likely to be adversely affected by global warming.
Asking individuals to change their behavior (or pay a tax) for social programs even in their own backyard is hard enough, yet the climate change folks want to impose costs for people literally on the other side of the globe.
Now I'm not saying that trying to mitigate effects of climate change isn't worthy - it's just that the way people go about trying to get people to make changes is missing the boat as far as how to convince people to make a difference goes. Instead of encouraging, educating, and unifying people, mostly what we see is almost-dictatorial decrees about "you must stop X" and is very vilifying and divisive. Even the jabs thrown between the "deniers" and "supporters" don't actually get anything done.
Make efforts that are appealing now (both personally and economically) without vilifying people, and we'll get some traction. Saying "we're doomed, and you're evil because you don't want to change X in your life!" isn't a helpful approach.
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You blame the wrong side. It's the deniers who have dragged the debate down into the mud. And it's only the deniers who are vilified by the other side.
Remember CFCs? They were destroying the ozone layer. Yet the human race found a way to come together and stop using them. And now the ozone layer will recover.
We can do the same to combat AGW. You do have a point that the NIMBY factor gets in the way. Finding and encouraging alternatives to carbon-heavy technologies that have a minimal impact on lifestyle wil
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The problem that your idea has is that the 6 billion third worlders who want to be first worlders have no interest in your CO2/climate conspiracy theories and are busy burning as much coal as they can, and building new coal powered generating plants at a breakneck speed. So until you can find a way of getting them on board, your pious attempt to reduce CO2 (which frankly is mostly done by exporting manufacture to the third world) then this is all hot air.
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America is not even the largest meat eating nation [insidermonkey.com]
This is the problem with you far lefters. You scream that America is the one that is all wrong. Yet, you ignore the fact that we are not even number 1 in any of the categories that cause issues. More importantly, the difference is minimal.
This is the same problem with CO2. Many of you, such as yourself, will scream about America's CO2 emissions, yet, ours is at 14% of the world total AND DROPPING fast. OTOH, China's is at 33% and climbing. In fact,
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In particular, it shows with REAL data, and not just guess work, that Americans consume around 110 lbs / person / year in 2009.
IOW, all of the numbers out there from your groups are a great deal more than what we actually (produced - exports) + imports.
what we can do now to make a big difference (Score:4, Insightful)
is silence the deluded gasbags spewing lies on behalf of dirty energy, and move ahead on alternatives on a wartime basis. between coal spew and the denial industry's hot air, that's half the problem solved.
Also can be used to increase rain/snow for water (Score:3)
Or, if we know that a cold front is incoming in one direction, simply increase the humidity in another area, so as to drop plenty of snow/rain.
With this approach, we could increase the snowpack in the western mountains and save it in the numerous reservoirs.
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The rain of salt on the western side of their mountains will, of course, have no unintended effects.
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In fact, Ideally, this would be done at offshore wind platforms.
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The liquid sea water is sprayed in the air, making salty clouds. Clouds drift over the land, and fall as rain/snow on the mountains.
Salty snow. Nice.
Or you could desalinate the water before spraying it, but that would cost a lot more.
Re: Also can be used to increase rain/snow for wat (Score:2)
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No, because normal clouds are produced by evaporation, which, of course, leaves the salt in the water.
This plan is to make clouds by spraying water into the air.
You cannot use a water pistol as a desalination plant.
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Already Proven (Score:2)
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I've seen Highlander 2. I know how this will end.
Fortunately, I have still not seen Highlander 2. There should have been only one!
What are the actual climate impacts of this? (Score:1)
There are plenty of possible impacts to this, and I'm not sure the overall result will be to cool the Earth. There are two obvious processes by which clouds can impact the temperature. Clouds can reflect solar radiation back out into space, which is a cooling effect. However, clouds can also absorb the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth. Some of that gets emitted back down to the surface, which is a warming effect.
During the day, clouds reflect more solar radiation back out into space than they absorb
How to fix climate change? (Score:2)
I read how everyone wants something done to "fix" climate change. What is it they propose? I have not heard of any real solutions.
They talk about reducing carbon emissions. But how to achieve that?
Assuming we are only talking about human based carbon emissions, how do you significantly reduce the production of carbon?
Only one comes to mind. Eliminate a significant portion of the human population. This allows
I saw this movie (Score:2)
Remember, folks, if you're getting on an ice train with Tilda Swinton, pay for first class. [imdb.com]
Classic case of risk compensation. Let's not do it (Score:1)
Does it requires oil? (Score:2)
The funny point is that climate crises is coming at the same time as oil peak. It means any solution to climate change should not rely on oil, and vice-versa.
Hence, how much oil o they need to change climate?