cloud seeding?
Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
121–130 of 146 posts
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the use of watts/day instead of joules here because we have some intuition about watts. Earth must dissapate 170 exawatts per day of sunshine, in addition to letting off some amount of heat from the molten core. (Life has evolved on the edge of a knife, at the narrow balance point between enormous energies that cancel out just so . I often think that at the beach, looking out across the ocean, marveling that t…
>watts/day instead of joules You mean watt days (watts * days).
I don't see what's wrong about OP's use of the term in the context they are using it. In the context given the number of days in the denominated unit is 1. Which means as dividend or factor it is going to give you the same result. Again in this context watts per day is much more intuitive for most people too reason about.
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#123How large a scale and with how many countries participating would cloud seeding be able to reverse these effects? Last I remember it was only a few countries in Asia that were attempting anything of the sort.
There's a serious proposal to do that with a fleet of wind-powered ships, seeding low-lying clouds with seawater. Wikipedia cites a cost of $5 billion/year for a large deployment, and a maximum potential of offsetting two-thirds of our current anthropogenic warming. If we stopped doing it then things would be back to "normal" in a couple weeks. There would be local weather changes, but less than what's caused by unab…
IMO implementing solar shielding measures, while still pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a recipe for a rapid climate apocalypse, an epic dilemma, probably worse than adapting to progressive climate worsening.
We've just got a taste of it, when we realized the sulfur contamination by crude oil burning cargo ships was unknowingly off-setting climate effects by solar shielding, because cleaning up emissions apparently accelerated climate change. So there we have a horrible scenario: Pollute the environment or suffer rapid global warming.
Imagine the fun, if we engineered and employ a shielding "solution", intentionally. Comfortably sitting around 1.5°C, at some point, me may notice out there is some horrible chemistry happening in the upper atmosphere due to our "inert" shielding agents, where the fallout increasingly sterilizes every mammal on the planet, but we also kinda, uppsie-doopsie now additionally have 4°C worth of CO2 in the atmosphere waiting for prime time, so... stopping with the shielding emission would cause extremely rapid warming acceleration collapsing every ecosystem on the planet.
Caught between a rock and a hot plate.
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
terawatt is not an energy unit.
I like the use of watts/day instead of joules here because we have some intuition about watts. Earth must dissapate 170 exawatts per day of sunshine, in addition to letting off some amount of heat from the molten core. (Life has evolved on the edge of a knife, at the narrow balance point between enormous energies that cancel out just so . I often think that at the beach, looking out across the ocean, marveling that t…
Watts/day are not comparable to joules. One is a measure of change in power and the other is energy.
It's the opposite: joules/day and watts are both units of power.
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
terawatt is not an energy unit.
Nevertheless the meaning is clear, and it serves to illustrate their point about reduction in cloud cover.
The meaning is not clear at all. As a reader, what I got is "the writer made such a basic mistake that what they claim cannot be trusted."
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
>watts/day instead of joules You mean watt days (watts * days).
I don't see what's wrong about OP's use of the term in the context they are using it. In the context given the number of days in the denominated unit is 1. Which means as dividend or factor it is going to give you the same result. Again in this context watts per day is much more intuitive for most people too reason about.
I don't mean to be rude, but anyone who thinks watts/day and watt days are ever interchangeable will have severe problems reasoning about anything electricity-related or energy-related.
It is akin to thinking that "2 apples" and "an apple divided by 2" are interchangeable because both expressions involve the concept of an apple and the number 2.
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#127My pet theory is that we are only a few decades away from turning earth into venus 2.0 at this point. It feels like we keep finding new catastrophic tipping points every few months at this point. It is worth mentioning that we are already in the last few hundred million years of earth's lifespan -- the sun was much dimmer last time the planet had this much GHG and warming going on. We may have already set the conditi…
> My pet theory is that we are only a few decades away from turning earth into venus 2.0 at this point. It feels like we keep finding new catastrophic tipping points every few months at this point. Given that the glaciers should’ve all melted by now, and that we can’t even predict with certainty whether it will rain tomorrow, I wouldn’t pay much attention to predictions.
Anyone that has revisited a glacier they visited 10-20 years ago can see with their own eyeball(s) that the glaciers might still be there, but not for long at this rate. Besides, it begs the question of who made this “prediction” to begin with (yes, the U. S. National Parks Service at Glacier NP, which they’ve since corrected after much-deserved ridicule.)
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that the US has removed itself from the world stage, I think it's possible something useful about climate change can happen. Likely? Still no. But, possible? Yes, in a way that was never going to happen before. China and the EU are taking over the leadership position that the US inexplicably resigned from. China and the EU take climate change and renewable/sustainable energy technology investment and adoption waa…
This is a basic reductionist take, it's really easy to group hundreds of millions of people into one group, right? We're all mourning the loss of the US government, but the people are still here, we're just blinking for help.
Oh. Is the blinking working?
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the use of watts/day instead of joules here because we have some intuition about watts. Earth must dissapate 170 exawatts per day of sunshine, in addition to letting off some amount of heat from the molten core. (Life has evolved on the edge of a knife, at the narrow balance point between enormous energies that cancel out just so . I often think that at the beach, looking out across the ocean, marveling that t…
Your comment still reads like watts are energy, which they are not. Maybe you mean "watt-days instead of joules". Watts/day is nonsense, and joules/day are watts. (With some coefficient)
You're right and I'm sorry I didn't catch it before the edit timer expired. I made another mistake - 100k terawatts is .1 exawatts.
Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are going to need geoengineering solutions to manage solar radiation, and we are going to need to deploy them relatively soon. I don’t know if this will undo the cloud effects, but there’s no more time for screwing around.
And yet screwing around is exactly what is going to happen. We've just guaranteed four years of exacerbating the problem from one of the major greenhouse gas producers. I'm not a fan of geoengineering, which I see as "screwing around" because we don't know nearly enough to predict its effects. Nonetheless, we may well reach a point where it cannot make things worse, and that point just became even more likely.
I don’t know if we should actually deploy geoengineering. My fear is that we will soon reach a point where we’re pretty certain that we’re headed towards a major tipping point, and even aggressive GHG reductions won’t be enough. (It’s possible that the findings in TFA are the literal representation of that realization.) We need a hail-Mary option at that point and we might need it in a hurry.
BTW I am actually cautiously optimistic about the GHG reduction piece. We’re way past where we should be at this stage, but rapid decarbonization now looks like it will be at least technically possible. Most global emissions are in China and Asia, and China is actually deploying the technology we need to eliminate those emissions. The US shouldn’t be screwing around the way it is, but I’m hopeful that what’s happening with renewable technology costs in Asia will eventually be more meaningful than any short term political interference that’s limited to the US. (This is very much a lemonade-out-of-lemons opinion, but the alternative is to be very depressed.)