111–120 of 254 posts
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I am sure it's possible to engineer particles as a space pollutant to shield earth from some unwanted wavelength but allow the wanted ones.
It's also possible to reduce the use of carbon based fuels. We know how to do that.
Geo-engineering projects could not come too soon. Because of how grand they are in scale, they don't seem to get much attention from the mainstream scientific community, but it seems feasible technologically (albeit expensive) to put forth major projects to reflect sunlight over deserts and capture significant amounts of carbon from power plants and oceans, amongst numerous other creative approaches. https://en.wikip…
I fear humanity may be in a race condition between our ability to engineer solutions and the problems that come with scaling our population.
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I recall a proposal to put sulfate particles (I think!) in the upper atmosphere, sort of like what happens with a big volcano, to try cooling things off. The downside is you have to do it constantly, the upside is that if you don't, it fades relatively quickly. So we could try it out on a pretty large scale and stop if we don't like where things are going. But that's from memory, and I could be recalling the details…
A lot of that technology relies of aerosols which would exacerbate the ocean acidification process. Get engineering is really hard to get right
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Bacteria-ulcers weren't proven by people who really really really wanted them to be true, they were proven by a doctor, using (fairly unconventional) scientific methods. If you've got compelling historical sources for holocaust denial or compelling scientific evidence against climate change, let's see it.
or compelling scientific evidence against climate change Oh please. No one would even try in this political climate. As you said "don't believe in climate change? you are a nazi".
> No one would even try in
> this political climate
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Although I'm not Dutch I profess a lot of affection to the Netherlands and I lived there for a bunch of years. Having said that, it is IMHO possibly the worse place to be in case of a massive increase in the sea level. My house in Den Haag is 10ft below the sea level, maybe 5 miles away from the sea. That's scary no matter how you put it, despite the best engineering effort from my friends at Rijkswaterstaat.
So I am Dutch and currently living in the Netherlands. I think it's something the Netherlands will definitely survive. As a general rule of thumb, a country can spend 50% of GDP for a few years - and end up OK afterwards - on something that's threatening the survival of the nation. The US spent 40% of GDP on WWII, for example. The Dutch GDP is almost a trillion dollars. I think that half a trillion dollars is enough…
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The common objection I've heard to geo-engineering projects is that they are incredibly difficult to reverse should the need present itself due to detrimental effects discovered part-way along. Does this objection still apply to the current popular proposals?
I recall a proposal to put sulfate particles (I think!) in the upper atmosphere, sort of like what happens with a big volcano, to try cooling things off. The downside is you have to do it constantly, the upside is that if you don't, it fades relatively quickly. So we could try it out on a pretty large scale and stop if we don't like where things are going. But that's from memory, and I could be recalling the details…
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Isn't a 5 - 8 degree rise catastrophic though? Genuine question.
Depends on what you consider catastrophic. 5-8C means you lose both the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, so you get 60m (200 ft) sea-level rise, so you totally lose all the coastal cities, and the current round of civilization is almost certainly done for. But homo sapiens will probably survive, and so civilization will probably eventually be rebuilt. It won't be the end of life on earth under any circumstances. Act…
But homo sapiens will probably survive, and so civilization will probably eventually be rebuilt
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I'd love to hear people's proposals for this. There's of course natural methods such as reforestation and soil building, but I have a feeling that we'll want to augment that with more synthetic means. Carbon chains, or in the simplest case, methane, are expensive to produce, as one might expect. By far it's better to never have burned that fossil fuel than to try to reclaim it from the atmosphere or ocean. Setting a…
If we are already past the point where conservation will help, a carbon tax seems like closing the barn doors after all the cows escaped. the market is already going down the alternate fuel route. What I want to know is there any concrete plan to build something that will remove excess CO2 from the air and ocean that can be built by the government. Build this is going to go over a whole lot better than tax this.
As no one has mentioned it in the comments, the belief that this is concerning is related to the "Clathrate gun hypothesis"[1]. Essentially, low temperatures have allowed vast quantities of methane and carbon dioxide containing compounds to accumulate for millennia. If the temperatures rise above a critical threshold, a positive feedback loop would exist between temperatures and global warming. Positive feedback loop…
The feedback loop peaks out at a global temperature increase of 5-8 degrees celsius, if the models and past events are to be believed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maxim...
Geo-engineering projects could not come too soon. Because of how grand they are in scale, they don't seem to get much attention from the mainstream scientific community, but it seems feasible technologically (albeit expensive) to put forth major projects to reflect sunlight over deserts and capture significant amounts of carbon from power plants and oceans, amongst numerous other creative approaches. https://en.wikip…
This is why I love HN. So much of global warming discussion is about reducing our current effects on the environment. If we can geo-engineer effectively and safely it won't matter. I fear humanity may be in a race condition between our ability to engineer solutions and the problems that come with scaling our population.
That's a big if. The global climate is an extremely chaotic and complex system; ur ability to accurately model it is still extremely nascent. (Scientifically, understanding the global climate seems at least as hard as deciphering the architecture of the human genome, say.) If you are at all skeptical of our ability to master geoengineering in time for it to matter -- I'm talking a few decades here -- then it behooves you to opt for conservation instead. Literally the only system that we know for a fact is sustainable is the one that existed before industrialization.