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Earth Science

Geoengineering Wouldn't Be Enough to Stop Greenland From Melting (gizmodo.com) 286

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: When the Greenland ice sheet went into a record meltdown in the summer of 2019, it raised a very terrifying specter of the future. Here was a 12.5-billion-ton mass of ice -- one that's been melting at a quickening pace since the 1980s -- melting in a way scientists didn't expect to happen for decades. While the ice sheet won't completely disappear for centuries, any further increase in its melt will put coastal communities at risk of inundation.

There's an argument to be made that we should do everything possible to save the ice, and a new study explores a very controversial idea to that end: cooling the planet.

The findings, published last month in Earth's Future, explore what would happen if the world pumped particles high into the atmosphere that would reflect sunlight back into space. This high-altitude air conditioning scheme, known as solar radiation management or SRM, would bring down the global average temperature. The paper's results show that cooling would help slow -- though not stop -- the melting of the ice sheet. That could buy coastal regions time but also change the climate in other ways that may end up hurting other regions around the world...potentially pitting nations against each other.

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Geoengineering Wouldn't Be Enough to Stop Greenland From Melting

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  • by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @10:43AM (#59588892) Homepage Journal

    imho, we should be moving the toxic and heat intensive industries into orbit anyways, mine asteroids, smelt in space, parachute to earth, use the planet for living and for biology, keep the heavy stuff off planet, use the moon, it's an ideal manufacturing base if you go underground, machines don't need amenities

    I can't believe this obvious stuff isn't already in the works, come on people

    • As a concept if we had the tech, sure. But we don't. Putting stuff in orbit is -hard-. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to put stuff in space. Also, once there, bringing stuff back is hard, too. Why? Gravity and atmosphere. Going up you're fighting gravity. Coming down gravity is pulling you hard through the atmosphere causing friction and therefore high heat. Maybe one day long after we're all dead Captain Kirk will just beam stuff up n down but today? No. Not feasible.

      Another issue is he
      • As a concept if we had the tech, sure. But we don't. Putting stuff in orbit is -hard-. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to put stuff in space.

        Do we have to go into orbit?

        The earth's albedo changed a lot when air travel was banned after 9/11:

        https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

        Can't we just come up with a simple aircraft fuel additive that solves the whole global warming issue for us?

      • I think you missed the line in the parent that said "machines don't need amenities", which IMHO means automation. Let the robots take care of much of the tedious stuff, sending in the astronauts only when there's a glitch that needs a hard reset or an upgrade. There could be a small space-based crew on rotation, figuratively and literally, for quick deployment should the need arise. Regular crew replacement will reduce the health risks caused by long-duration space flight, until space science figures out a
    • by Livius ( 318358 )

      Heavy industry could be located in cold climates where the potential for environmental damage is reduced. There's already plenty of land where the soil and/or climate is not conducive to agriculture and already have sparse populations.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Gee, that won't take what, just a few billion $. Hell, you ought to lead the effort. What do you figure it will take you? 2 yrs, 3yrs? And moving tons of material to and fro space should take how many space elevators do you figure? Surely, they can be built quickly. And no sneaky forgetting the physics of doing what we know how to do down here on Earth up there in almost zero gravity. Maybe it will take giant spinning factories. Should be piece of cake.

    • by bobs666 ( 146801 )

      There needs to be a thumb's up button for this parent article.

      I am not sure about sunshades. Lets test Geoengineering on a planet we are not living on. This planet has been warm before and it will be warm again. We may have to relocate some people away from the coast line. And some farming to the south. We may have to breed less. All thing to cry about, but change happens, embrace the change.

    • I can't believe this obvious stuff isn't already in the works, come on people

      Oh sorry my bad, I was goofing off on slashdot. I'll get right on it after this post.

  • You are talking about do something MORE dangerous and expensive than nuclear energy. No, of course it is not as captured by this meme: https://www.genolve.com/design... [genolve.com]
    • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @11:59AM (#59589074)

      Back on the table? It's been the only realistic answer from day one.

      Gen 4 nuclear [wikipedia.org] is far safer and it consumes waste from older reactor designs.

      If you are not looking at nuclear to solve this problem then you have other motives.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        As nuclear is economically completely non-viable now, only fanatics and morons will seriously consider it. And only fanatics and morons will believe the empty promises of the nuclear industry about the next gen reactors, when they have blatantly lied every time before.

        Also, incidentally, this stuff id not ready and will take a long time to get ready. Too long. Also, since it is economically non-viable, it probably never will get ready. At some point it will just get dropped quietly.

    • Renewables plus storage are cheaper and have lower initial environmental impact than nuclear, so nuclear is dead regardless of safety concerns. WITH the safety concerns, it's double-dead.

  • by Archtech ( 159117 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @11:03AM (#59588934)

    Anyone remember the SF novel "Fallen Angels"? (Larry Niven, Michael Flynn, Jerry Pournelle)

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... [amazon.com]

    Published in 1991, it is set in a near-future world in which scientists are hunted down and killed, as witches were once. Why? This is a freezing Ice Age world, in which human beings struggle to stay alive. The terrible cold is partly due to well-meaning steps that were taken to avert "global warming" - just in time for the current interglacial to end abruptly. (Remember, we are at present living through an Ice Age).

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
      Fallen Angels was a very amusing novel. Basically, the plot is that the heroic space-dwellers accidentally crashland on totalitarian Earth, and science fiction fans come to the rescue.

      It has nothing to do with real science, however. Here's a secret: science fiction writers just make up whatever they need to in order to make their plot exciting.

  • "We don't know who struck first, us or the machine, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, it was believed that it would save the ice sheets and hence slow down global warming." Morpheus

  • Fear mongering aside, it sounds like we need better models. The real inconvenient truth here is that we have no real idea what is going to happen or when. The only real truth is that we will either be greatly relieved or greatly disappointed.

    So, why are these models so bad? We have the geological record, so what's preventing these models from predicting the future based on past events? Is it a lack of imagination, lack of funding, lack of talent, lack of data, or a combination of these? Until this gets

    • The real inconvenient truth here is that we have no real idea what is going to happen or when.

      The real possibility of a planet-wide catastrophe of this scale is why choosing to err on the side of caution was the only sane course of action from the get-go.

      'Big brains' may well turn out NOT to be the evolutionary advantage it is claimed to be.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        The real possibility of a planet-wide catastrophe of this scale is why choosing to err on the side of caution was the only sane course of action from the get-go.

        Indeed. Unfortunately, most people are _really_ bad at risk management and at accepting inconvenient truth.

    • Clouds. Models suck because they suck with clouds. Per the IPCC itself [archive.ipcc.ch]

      :

      The sign of the climate change radiative feedback associated with the combined effects of dynamical and temperature changes on extratropical clouds is still unknown.

      The role of polar cloud feedbacks in climate sensitivity has been emphasized by Holland and Bitz (2003) and Vavrus (2004). However, these feedbacks remain poorly understood.

      Basically, we don't know what feedbacks come from clouds, how they impact any potential climate change - and we don't even really know how clouds form. So most models assume a static state for clouds and go forward from there (which explains why they almost all tend to run quite a bit hotter than the data shows).

      • Clouds. Models suck because they suck with clouds. Per the IPCC itself [archive.ipcc.ch]

        Interesting. Why did you quote the 2007 IPCC report, instead of a later one?
        Say, maybe https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5... [www.ipcc.ch]

        However, with that said, you are right: at the moment modelling clouds is the factor that contributes most to the uncertainty in the rate of warming.

        I'm not sure why you say that the "models assume a static state for clouds" though -- that may have been true once, but all the models include clouds these days.

        • by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @03:05PM (#59589548) Journal
          From the most recent (page 592) report:

          Currently, neither cloud process models (CRMs and LES) nor observations provide clear evidence to contradict or confirm feedback mechanisms involving low clouds.

          In other words we have no data to confirm or deny the feedback involving clouds. We don't know what they do. But on page 594 of the report:

          There is as yet no broadly accepted way to infer global cloud feedbacks from observations of long-term cloud trends or shorter-time scale variability. Nevertheless, all the models used for the current assessment (and the preceding two IPCC assessments) produce net cloud feedbacks that either enhance anthropogenic greenhouse warming or have little overall effect. Feedbacks are not ‘put into’ the models, but emerge from the functioning of the clouds in the simulated atmosphere and their effects on the flows and transformations of energy in the climate system. The differences in the strengths of the cloud feedbacks produced by the various models largely account for the different sensitivities of the models to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations.

          Essentially, the models all assume a positive feedback - small to large - for clouds. Even though we just finished saying we had no data to confirm or deny the feedbacks. But we'll assume it's positive (bad), and go forth from there.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      If you actually paid attention to the models you'd notice that they produce a range of estimates.

      Why are the models so bad? There are several reasons:
      1) They're done at too large a scale. A cell size in a model is generally several kilometers on a side.
      2) Weather is chaotic. Very small initial differences *can* produce extremely different outcomes, and outcomes different in unpredictable ways.
      3) Collecting data is expensive. The smaller the grid you use to collect the data the more expensive it is.
      4) C

    • by Livius ( 318358 )

      It's not all-or-nothing. There's definitely enough evidence that something is up with climate and there's almost no chance it could anything besides bad. But we may never have models that will make genuinely reliable predictions, so it's not reasonable to ignore the predictions and it's not reasonable to blindly trust them.

      The solution is not all-or-nothing either. Anyone proposing turning back the clock on the Industrial Revolution is not taking the matter seriously. There's plenty of scope for taking

    • by Layzej ( 1976930 )

      we have the geological record, so what's preventing these models from predicting the future based on past events?

      That is of course already done. Models underestimate [wordpress.com] the warming seen in the paleoclimate data. Even still, the warming seen in the models and the modern record is enough to require action.

    • The models are much better than you seem to think, I would suggest you take IPCC-s fifth assessment report and read it. How far the models go, what are the limits etc are all detailed there. And of course there are limits, there is bunch of data that has not been gathered yet, there are feedback loops that activate when climate conditions exceeds certain limits, some better characterized than others and some pretty much unknown. You can only take your predictions so far in a complex system, you can't just l
  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @11:19AM (#59588988)

    People say this is too big to do. But there is a comparatively simple process:

    Make a few ash volcanoes erupt.
    Pick the ones with the most pressure underneath them. And use explosives to break the plug holding them back.

    Choose the right size of volcano, time them so the right amount of ash is in the air at any time, and you're in business.

    Hell, any wealthy person with access to explosives could do it right now, without asking anyone.

    I just have the feelings that the selfish moron crowd would use that as an excuse to keep destroying everything, like a bad pathogen.

    • ... yes, the amount of ash volcanoes might not suffice.

      Then again, we should stop ruining our planet in any fuckin case.

      • Just go back to dirty coal fired power stations and don't filter out the sulphur. That will increase the reflective aerosols in the air and lower the temperature of the planet.
    • Why use explosives when this sounds like a perfect job for fracking?
    • You do realise that it will kill a lot of plants, making things worse in the process?

    • I don't know if it's realistic. I'm no volcanologist. But the problem with this approach is that it's fairly irreversible. The sun shade approach is better because presumably we can send commands to the orbital station or satellite to fold or pack up. If it gets too cold, just fold the umbrella and let the sunshine through. We can't do that with ash or dust, unless we can somehow build gigantic electric fans or ionizers.
    • by epine ( 68316 )

      And use explosives to break the plug holding them back.

      The one flaw in your plan: Bruce Willis has not returned anyone's calls, lately. The incompetent plumbers summoned to unclog the toilet damaged a pipe, turning this whole thing into a much larger project, and he's reported to be in a foul mood lately.

      During his last phone upgrade, somehow he lost his contact for "Archibald 'Harry' Tuttle", so he rang de Niro and for some reason De Niro has turtled and is denying ever having known such a person (maybe he

    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      Thank for letting us know you don't actually understand volcanic materiel.
      dumb dumb

      YOU literally want to dim lights? you know we need light, rights? light isn't the problem, trapping it IR products is.

    • Yellowstone Park is the obvious choice plus has the added benefit of getting rid of most of the biggest polluters ever.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Great. And what do you do if it turns out it was a bit too much ash and earth freezes over? Or if there are unacceptable side-effects? How do you reverse the damage then?

  • 1. Anything injected into the upper atmosphere won't stay there. Back in the seventies when we were pumping sulfur and other particles into the air from our smokestacks, there was a problem with acid rain, even in mountain lakes. we cleaned that up and took out lead from our gasoline and such so we don't have acid rain anymore and our smog is much reduced. Here now we have theories of putting sulfur in the upper atmosphere to make clouds that would better reflect sunlight. But then we will likely have a
    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
      Mostly true, but needs some footnotes.

      1. Yes, sulfate aerosols increase the reflection, and also cause acid rain. A difficulty to keep in mind, though, is that the cooling due to aerosols only lasts for a few months, since they rain out, to a few years at most (and a few years only if you blast them into the stratosphere, which takes a pretty massive volcanic explosion-- not the case for merely burning coal). Carbon dioxide, on the other hand is cumulative. It doesn't rain out.

      But, as you point out, a

    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      About 4 - Stop it, you ignorant fuck.
      Medieval warm period, and the little ice age were fucking local effects, not global you shit eater.

      "But our pollution looks like it is making it worse"
      It's a scientific fact that it's making it worse, and many order of magnitude worse.
      Why don't you mention volcanoes to show us how monumentally fucking stupid you are. Please die in a fucking fire.. wait, you will... we all will.
      Well., not me. I've made all my kids colleges personal loan they are not attached to, and as so

  • We're fucked if we do and we're fucked if we don't.
    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      Nope.
      Were going to be fucked, but massive and drastic action can reduce how much we are fucked and even begin a 100 year turn around.
      |We won't because we live in an are were is somebody said school fire alarms cost to much, so we could pull them out, half the country wold thing that's a good idea because... money is more important then lives, now.

  • I'm sure that geoengineering could cool, or even freeze the planet. I'm not sure that we could do it in a way causing an acceptable level of damage.

    Just as a thought experiment, a large enough sun-shade in orbit could cool the planet as much as you want. The problem is it would have more effect on the equatorial areas than on the polar areas, so the jet stream would shut down, perhaps totally. So might the ocean currents. This would have LOTS of knock-on effects almost none of which would be desired.

    In

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      And in addition, doing anything that has an effect takes at least decades and may take centuries. Now, if it turns out it was the wrong thing to do, it will take about as long to reverse and may take longer. Not a good idea to experiment with the productive system here.

  • Hmm, that's enough to raise sea levels by 0.035 millimeters!!! The end is nigh!

    Get back to me when we're talking decimeters, or even meters of sealevel rise. If all melting Greenland is going to do is raise sealevel by (almost) the thickness of a sheet of paper, it's not worth getting excited unless we run a vacation hotel there....

  • by NicknameUnavailable ( 4134147 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @02:20PM (#59589438)
    By renaming Greenland Iceland and Iceland Greenland, or at least swapping their colors on the maps such that Iceland is the white one and Greenland is the green one.
  • Because so many people are still fucking moronic anti-science douche bags, I Still need to post this:

    1) Visible light strikes the earth Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes

    2) Visible light has nothing for CO2 to absorb, so it pass right on through. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes

    3) When visible light strikes an object, IR is generated. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes

    4) Greenhouse gasses, such as CO2, absorb energy(heat) from IR. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes

    5) Humans produce more CO2(and other greenhouse gasses) then can be absorbed through the cycle. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes

    Each one of those has been tested, a lot. You notice deniers don't actual address the facts? Don't have a test that shows those facts to be false?
    So now you have to answer:
    Why do you think trapping more energy(heat) in the lower atmosphere does not impact the climate?

  • Don't we have CO2 trapping?
  • At least at this time. Maybe the human race can do it in a few centuries (if there is a human race left at that time), but not much earlier. there is both the issue of what do actually do and hot to prevent "emergent properties" of that engineering, as well as one simply of scale. The human race has zero experience with engineering on that scale and it does not have the basis for it. At the very least, it would need a general consent all over the planet. But at this time we cannot even agree to not have war

If all else fails, lower your standards.

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