Reengineering Earth to stop climate change
The Economist has a great feature on geo-engineering, approaches to tweak the environment on a planetary scale to help stop human-induced climate change. The article is a survey of the Royal Society's special journal edition on "Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change." Some of the proposed approaches to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or block some of the sunlight hitting Earth sound straight out of the pages of science fiction. Extreme times might call for extreme tech though. From The Economist:
Reflecting sunlight back into outer space (increasing the Earth’s albedo, as it is known) would also cool the planet, and the Royal Society’s authors consider two ways of doing so."A Changing Climate of Opinion?" (The Economist, thanks Timo Hannay!)
One, which has been widely touted in the past is, perversely, to increase the amount of pollution in the atmosphere. Governments have spent the past half-century trying to reduce the amount of sulphur compounds in the air. These compounds are the main cause of acid rain. They also, however, have a tendency to form tiny particles that reflect sunlight back into space. That effect is most noticeable when a volcano erupts explosively, as Mount Pinatubo did in 1991, or Tambora did in 1815. Those eruptions put sulphate particles into the stratosphere, and because that is above the part of the atmosphere where weather occurs, these particles tended to stay there rather than being washed out by rain. That cooled the whole climate. The year after Tambora’s explosion was known for a long time as the “year without a summer”.
The reverse is also true. When civilian flights over the United States stopped in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the lack of sulphur-laden contrails led to a perceptible rise in temperature. Philip Rasch, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues are therefore exploring the idea of deliberately polluting the stratosphere with sulphate in order to reflect solar heat back into space....
Besides polluting the stratosphere, there is another way of changing the atmosphere to make it more reflective. This is to tinker with cloud cover. One person working on this idea is Stephen Salter, a marine engineer at the University of Edinburgh best known for seeking to replace fossil fuels with Salter’s duck, a device for turning ocean waves into electricity.
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We clearly understand the planet well enough to pull this off. NOT.
What we need to engineer is the smallest possible footprint for each of us, and a way to humanely limit our numbers.
Otherwise we're just so many bacteria in a very small petri dish.
Look, I aint no environmentologist or scientologist, but you really can't mess with the Earth on this scale for a few decades of respite. It's stupid to think that man can actually do any of these things without contributing to seriously fu$king a lot of other things up that are related to each other. I mean, geez, I can't believe these smart ass scientists don't comprehend the grand scale of things.
Look, it's like Apple can fix iPods, and AT&T can fix phone lines, and Sony can fix TV's because they have all created these things, but Man cannot fix the Earth.
He has not created it, and his "trying" to fix things might just fu$k things up more.
But oh well.
The anthropogenic-global-warming crowd would have it that we are already re-engineering our climate, but unintentionally and for the worse.
But regardless of the actual magnitude of climate change from human activity as opposed to natural variation, it's a good thing that we are looking at ways to take control of our climate.
(At least until someone decidesto weaponize it.)
I'm pretty sure there are no cases where man has successfully, deliberately meddled with nature, without causing problems at least as big as the ones they were trying to fix in the first place.
At least not on a scale bigger than a garden.
Wow is today the government stupid day or what?
That was rhetorical.
All we need to do is get all of the world's robots on one island, and all at the same time, get them to vent their exhaust....
Wernstrom!
@3: Just because "The anthropogenic-global-warming crowd" believe we broke it ourselves, doesn't mean they think we can fix it ourselves.
A cat can knock delicate china off a shelf and break it by accident without being able to glue it back together.
Well I think that an ionospheric heater would do the trick...but they can do myriad of other "fun" things.
"I'm pretty sure there are no cases where man has successfully, deliberately meddled with nature, without causing problems at least as big as the ones they were trying to fix in the first place."
While the Law of Unintended Consequences demands that we get our collective ass kicked from time to time, we've pretty much done okay.
We have quite successfully diverted rivers, leveled mountains, irrigated farmlands and seeded clouds. We've made lakes, captured lightning and stopped forest fires in their tracks.
We've managed to remake enough of our surrounding landscape that a billion or two of us can live in safety, comfort and relative luxury while the remaining billions can at least scratch out an existence long enough to produce more children than it takes to replace them.
And we've done all this in a (geologically-speaking) short 6 million years without the help of any "God" or a "Mother Nature".
Kinda makes you proud to be an H. Sapiens, doesn't it?
Now, if we can just figure out how to divert the next overdue "dinosaur-killer" meteor, we're laughing.
I think that if we have the power to damage the ecosystem, we have the power to repair it. And I also believe the inverse is true. In short, I don't believe that we can damage the earth beyond repair. And the important part of this is that it acknowledges that if we can engineer the earth, then we will have the moral right to do what we want, and don't have to conserve. We can drive next door in a Hummer, set our thermostats to 78F in the winter and 68F in the summer, not the other way around, and keep massive amounts of equipment on all the time. And that's a good thing.
In a TED talk one of the guys researching this said it was downright frightening how cheaply this could be done. It will probably seem like a Really Good Idea to some (mostly those invested in a hydrocarbon economy) until the next supervolcano eruption helps us along well past the point we meant to reach.
I say, if we're against climate engineering, we should be ~against~ climate engineering, whether intentional or unintentional. But some believe the time to change our ways to stave off 'catastrophe' is past (some that it was already past before we were even aware of the problem) and our only hope at this point is to throw on the emergency brakes.
But if we're against climate engineering, shouldn't we for the same reasons also be against genetic engineering? Or even against agriculture?
We aren't going to fix it. The Earth(including all other lifeforms beside humans) is not a machine made of seperate parts. We will have to find ways to reintegrate ourselves with our planet. We cannot control ourselves, we aren't going to control Earth.
Kim Stanley Robinson has some interesting ideas along this line in his "40 Signs of Rain" trilogy. Restarting the Gulf Stream by dumping a few billion tons of salt into it. Funded by the re-insurance industry. Fighting rising sea levels by pumping the sea back up onto the top of Antarctica. Interesting. But you have to wonder if he had his tongue in his cheek.
I'm not sure I understand the point.
When the cities burned, the ash caused a miniature nuclear winter.
It froze the zombies solid early, but millions died of starvation.
The only reason you don't want to use fossil fuels, is because supplie lines through zombie infested areas is unreliable.
That, and they walk along humming pipelines until they find human habitation.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't.
Oh my goodness, for all the financial, material, temporal, and energy resources we could pile into JUST ONE geo-engineering 'solution' with minimized risk, we could:
Have every man, woman, and child on this planet: fed, housed, clothed, on a bicycle, with a mathematics or science education.
Which do you think will get us good solutions faster?
> ...to help stop human-induced climate change...
pish posh. Our "human-induced" influence pales in the face of even one random volcano eruption.
I have just one thing to say about this: whichever method(s) is or are chosen, MAKE SURE WE AT THE SAME TIME DEVELLOP AND HAVE READY FOR DEPLOYMENT A SYSTEM TO REVERT THE CHANGES.
Stuff like this is way too sensitive to unforseen consequences to not have a working 'ctrl+z' standing by.
Creating such a mess was dumb enough, turning natural processes upside-down to cover the ill effects is just asking for Darwin's BanHammer =P
Phlaming - "In short, I don't believe that we can damage the earth beyond repair. "
I agree, but only because she won't let us.
Earth will eventually become unihabitable if we keep it up, everything bigger than a mouse will die, and the Earth will re-equilibrate in our absence. Life will just continue without us.
Exactly like it did, repeatedly, before we evolved.
I hope the mole-men that follow us can learn from our example, but I doubt it.
Gotta Fisk this one, sorry peeps:
We have quite successfully diverted rivers,
until they decide to divert themselves back
leveled mountains,
and left massive piles of acid mine waste tailings to poison the local ecosystem
irrigated farmlands
and watched 5,000 years of topsoil blow away, to be replaced with imported south pacific islands made of guano.
and seeded clouds.
So it rains here, where we need it, and not there, where it's supposed to fall?
We've made lakes,
out of beautiful canyons
captured lightning
Yeah, we did do that. Pretty cool.
and stopped forest fires in their tracks.
for just long enough for the natural fuel load to increase while people build nice houses there that need to be protected at public expense - until they burn anyhow.
Every single thing you mention there covers no more than a couple thousand acres at a time. It's a big big world, there are lots of natural buffers to local disturbaces that make them harmless taken one at a time.
But on the macro scale there are finite limits to the planet.
It's just nowhere near as simple as you want it / believe it to be.
Our "human-induced" influence pales in the face of even one random volcano eruption.
Bullshit. Volcano's do not pump CO2 into the atmosphere. They pump acids in, and the acids react with rock to buffer back to a more neutral solution.
We've put carbon back into the atmosphere that it took the ancestors of modern algae 2 billion years to sequester.
The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere the dinosaurs were just a zit on the ass of the imagination of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I said - "Volcano's do not pump CO2 into the atmosphere."
I meant to add "continuously for 150+ years"
I'm done now. Thanks.
I think this is a great idea. Come on guys, have a little confidence. All this things-with-which-man-was-not-meant-to-meddle rubbish. Hubris is the most overrated sin.
I was starting to get bored with the lets all live good green lives and do good green things that don't change the world at all and are really really boring vibe anyway. I much prefer doing what we want, then paying the price and fixing it.
Even if we don't fix it with the first try hey we'll learn a lot, and how are we supposed to start to understand our planets ecosystem without messing around with it anyway. Learning by doing is the best way as everybody knows.
Besides, think how interesting it will be. It'll keep us occupied until the singularity.
Nature can recover from almost anything, so long as we stop screwing around and let it be. Reducing our footprint is a far better idea than making radical changes to a complex system that we are only beginning to understand.
The problem with any of the "footprint" solutions assumes that we can:
1) implement it world-wide (without regulatory capture)
2) sustain the effort for all posterity (an amount of time as unimaginably long as the ecosystem is unimaginably complex)
Best to work on the smallest, cheapest, most incremental steps, one at a time. And in the meantime, if you have the money, throw it to the research arm of your alma matter.
Hey, what about the plan to excavate Central America and restore the ancient equatorial flow?
Yeah, I know, it'd be politically disastrous, but...
Here, rather than ranting and threadjacking further, I've found a good primer on how the atmosphere REALLY works and how we got the atmosphere we have today instead of one like Mars or Venus (which aside from the extreme temperature and pressure differences have remarkably similar atmospheric composition).
I would like the temperature to be 15 degrees C lower than it is now.
"Besides polluting the stratosphere, there is another way of changing the atmosphere to make it more reflective. This is to tinker with cloud cover. One person working on this idea is Stephen Salter, a marine engineer at the University of Edinburgh best known for seeking to replace fossil fuels with Salter’s duck, a device for turning ocean waves into electricity."
Please corect me if I'm wrong, but didn't they try something like that during the robot wars of the Matrix? That worked out fine right?
...You know, if there's one thing that does need to be geo-engineered, it's the Sahara. Here's how it should be done:
1) Take all the anti-nuke hippies and give them a choice: help with the project or commit seppuku.
2) Build numerous nuclear plants to generate power for desalination plants and pumping stations.
3) Build a canal from the Med basin to the middle of the Sahara.
4) Carve out a large lakebed in the middle of the Sahara where the canal terminates and flows into the lake.
5) Begin terraforming the Sahara from the edge of the lake moving outwards. Start with basic grasslands to hold the sand in place and start the conversion to topsoil, then move to forest-level ecosystems.
6) Explain to the indiginous tribes that they have the same choices as the hippies got in 1) above: you either work on the project and help reclaim the Sahara and forget your tribal bullshit feuds, or face extermination - because if you're not going to help reclaim the Sahara and give the world an extra set of lungs, you don;'t need to be breathing what air there is.
...Even with nuclear power, it's going to take about three decades to even get to the lake and canal stage, but it *can* be done. We just have to -force- people to do it.
[/venting]
@33
Alternatively we could just explain to the US that having 4% of the world population but consuming a quarter of the fossil fuels is just not a viable option.
Either stop consuming so much and forget your bullshit Middle Eastern tribal feuds or face extermination. It *can* be done. We just have to force people to do it.
Our "human-induced" influence pales in the face of even one random volcano eruption.
Yes, in a way...but I personally don't like all the damned people around me and think I'd be better off with them gone.
...I was kidding about that, ya know.
All this talk of Earth "recovering" and "restoring" and "recalibrating" itself suggests that some here believe there is One True Climate, and that Earth can exert some intelligence-driven mechanism to revert back to it.
Add in the prevailing notion that Man is inherently Evil and everything we do is a crime against Nature... well, this sure sounds like another Garden of Eden mythos.
Has Boingboing been invaded by neo-Christians?
Here's a relatively quick thing we can do...
Stop cutting down the forests.
Almost 20 percent of C02 emissions come come from forest destruction. So we set up a global fund that makes forests worth more standing than turned into cattle pasture.
At the same time...
Cut down on our fossil fuel emissions. This one's slightly tougher. Emissions are still going up year after year, despite the scientific warnings.
Improved energy efficiency is the fastest (and cheapest) way. It can even save money while reducing emissions (ie. "cost negative").
Plus, things like solar, wind and geothermal are now fairly proven mature technologies. What we need is a major implementation program - probably driven by a binding international agreement that puts legally binding caps on greenhouse gas emissions.
Tackling the things causing climate change at their source is the most practical approach.
#33 OM -
You do know that the Sahara is not just a big pile of sand? Moreover, people (not the car) like the Tuareg may have incredibly relevant survival strategies for the rest of us. Shame to lose all that in a venting project.
> Bullshit. Volcano's do not pump CO2 into the atmosphere...
Go back and re-read what I wrote.
I said nothing about what we do compared to what a volcano does.
I said our _influence_ on the planet pales in comparison with what it does itself.
@37
I hear what you're saying, but I think it's wrong to lump the emerging eco-consciousness together with religious sentiment.
Just because people are trying to get past purely mechanistic views of the natural world and seeking to understand Earth systems without dominating them
, doesn't mean they need a Jesus-buddy.
I think humanity has a major ego-crisis when asked to accept things which are greater than the individual. That's more psychology than religion.
@37
I hear what you're saying, but I think it's wrong to lump the emerging eco-consciousness together with religious sentiment.
Just because people are trying to get past purely mechanistic views of the natural world and seeking to understand Earth systems without dominating them
, doesn't mean they need a Jesus-buddy.
I think humanity has a major ego-crisis when asked to accept things which are greater than the individual. That's more psychology than religion.
@#41-42
It's what we can't understand intellectually that we make an object of faith.
I've found that it's those who can't "accept things which are greater than the individual" who are more inclined to anthropomorphize.
The concept of "Mother Nature" is much easier for many to digest than the concept of all physical and biological components of our terrestrial environment considered as they have related to each other for 4.5 billion years.
But fewer answers about climate change are likely to come from the former than the latter.
Plants are unlikely to soak up more carbon dioxide from the air as the planet warms, research suggests. US scientists found that grassland took up less CO2 than usual for two years following temperatures that are now unusually hot, but may become common. The conclusion parallels a real-world finding from Europe's 2003 heatwave, when the continent's plant life became a net producer, not absorber, of CO2.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7620921.stm
So much for that theory.