Space Ring Could Combat Global Warming 955
telstar writes "Though the debate continues around global warming, a new proposal suggests building an artificial space ring around the Earth to block the light of the sun and bring a balance to solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The ring could be comprised of particles which would scatter the sunlight, or be built by an interconnected ring of spaceships aligned to block the light. The former proposal is estimated to cost anywhere from $6 trillion to $200 trillion dollars, while the spaceship solution would run approximately $500 billion. Halo fans rejoice."
well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of the 6 trillion, why not spend the$ 3 trillion on environmentally safe energy (fusion plants, geothermal, solar panels in the deserts) and spend $3 trillion to buy off all the oil megacorporations.
Besides, moving the earth further away from the Sun is a much more hair brained idea, so why not do that?
Solar Cells (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:$6-200 Trillion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:well... (Score:1, Insightful)
The people with real power, the CEOs and the owners, keep you all happy with high tech dreams and high tech illusions - what the US did to the USSR with Reagan's fake Star Wars, they are doing to you.
Vapourware as political tool.
Don't worry about the world decending into chaos, or the billions without power or running water. We'll keep on with our selfish lifestyle, and if it gets too bad we'll put a ring around the world to keep us cool.
If there's any chance... (Score:3, Insightful)
"If there's even the tiniest chance that global warming is NOT happening, then this would be an extremely foolish thing to implement, as it could trigger the next ice age..."
c.f. Niven's "Fallen Angels"
Re:well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:200trillion can do a lot of things... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you meant to write "finding a way to eliminate dependence on foreign oil."
In other words, let's start using the energy we get from the sun to meet our current needs.
It's unbelievable that someone would suggest that we should restrict future energy delivery from the sun just so that we can keep on consuming energy stores from the past (oil) and pollute our sky with the smoke. Pure laziness. It's like a teenager cleaning his room by hauling his dirty laundry out of the house and burying it, wasting all the effort he ought to be using to just clean the clothes. Not that I've ever done this.
yeah...sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Posting from the People's Republic of Fantasia (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Posting from the People's Republic of Fantasia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and why aren't there any diesel hybrids?
Re:Um. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to, I don't know, build energy systems that don't release carbon? Just a thought.
Sure. Solar Power Satellites. Large arrays of solar cells assembled in earth orbit and the energy beamed to earth via microwave. And no, it will not be a "death ray". The beam footprint would be miles across with a power density a mere fraction of sunlight. See Geoffrey Landis papers [sff.net] and The SSP Monitor [wronkiewicz.net], or do a google.
hello! What about the politics/risk? (Score:1, Insightful)
Please.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Um. (Score:3, Insightful)
The human-caused global warming myth. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sheesh (Score:3, Insightful)
Every day is a fool's day... on slashdot (Score:1, Insightful)
Debate?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
What an excellent opening sentence. The problem is, which debate is he referring to? Is he talking some real scientific debate? Or maybe a politically motivated debate based on non-science in which the powers that be try to confuse the public into believing there is no scientific consensus, with the goal being to maintain the status quo and avoid angering the energy lobby.
Because, scientifically, there is no real debate anymore over whether or not man is impacting the climate and causing global warming.
Re:Um. (Score:1, Insightful)
And bear in mind, Chernobyl was a bad old design, the new ones are much safer. Now they're looking at pebble bed designs, which don't require any active safety systems at all.
There is the waste issue...I guess if you put all the world's nuclear waste in one spot and had an earthquake, you might have a big problem on that continent, but short of all-out nuclear war, it's hard to imagine nukes doing as much overall damage as fossil fuels.
Re:well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, how about... jet engines are not 'clean burning' by a long shot. Yes, the hot exhaust causes condensation. However, depending on air conditions, that condensed moisture can either: be reabsorbed into the air from whence it came as humidity very quickly, or very slowly. If it is not absorbed then it simply keeps clinging to the tiny specks of carbon and other particulate matter in the exhaust, becoming -- you guessed it -- directly-seeded cirrus clouds.
Why do you find them higher than commercial jetliners go? Because they RISE, being much hotter than the frigid air around them.
Why do you find them over areas where there is no commercial air traffic? Why do they spread out and fan out?
Please, focus your energy on more realistic conspiracies. There are plenty of very possible ones happening right now. While you're dreaming of "chemtrails" the republocrats are stealing your country out from under your nose.
Re:Posting from the People's Republic of Fantasia (Score:3, Insightful)
this sounds like a dumb idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:well... (Score:1, Insightful)
Face it, in reality you are a small techie with a moderate income. You are bossed around by whole heirachies of people, who are not at all interested in allowing you to get to their level.
The CEOs and management look at you and say "Sorry, I'm not interested in a system that will cut me off at the knees because I happen to be a bit more clever than the next fellow."
And the worst part is, you buy into their worldview and parrot their line.
Re:Debate?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Awesome. Have you a link to a paper in a reputable journal that discusses this finding? Who was it that finally, conclusively, proved this?
Re:Debate?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably the same guy that modded him informative...
Seriously, everytime I see a study that "proves" one thing, someone else comes out and "proves" the opposite. And then that gets rebutted. And so on until it resembles an old Breck commercial except with uglier people in white lab coats. As far as I can tell, everyone is still bickering at about the same level as they were 10 yrs ago.
Estimate (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, sure, if you're off by a couple million then it's not a big deal in the scheme of things but has there ever been a more "pulled out of our ass" estimate ever?
Sounds like saying "We don't know but it'll be lots!"
New and FABULOUS science (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at it this way... You've got $6 trillion to $500 trillion dollars burning a hole in your "save the earth" pocket. Dontcha think that maybe, just maybe you could put that money to better use by throwing it at something that doesn't require lobbing multiton roman candles into orbit? I mean $500 trillion . You honestly can't think of an industry or two here on the ground you could revolutionize overnight, let alone in the time it'd take to assemble THIS project?
Speaking of that, what sort of time frame are we talking? Any mention of such is amazingly absent. And we haven't EVEN gotten into the fact that the scientific community is still deeply divided on the exact cause of global warrming. Everything from man's impact to the natural warming and cooling cycles of the earth come into play. Hell, there are even published scientifc reports that say the Sun is hotter than previously measured. We still don't have a conclusive clue and these people want to throw a reflective tarp over a portion of the earth. What is the damn environmental impact of THAT? What happens to the plant and animal life UNDER it? Not as much heat or sun, that's for sure. Draw your own conclusions.
I'm sorry, but this is a prime example of what happens when people who think they're smart smoke crack. They find implausible and extrodinairy ways to waste our money.
Re:Um. (Score:3, Insightful)
Like what?
Solar Power? Solar is not efficient enough to surve the needs of the world, nor does it solve the problem of what to do when the sun goes down. Sure you can use batteries and charge them but then you need both more power overall and to do something with the batteries, and last I checked, batteries weren't high on the list of environmmentaly friendly products, especialy those rechargeable ones. We're not talking just short term headaches, we're talking long term.
Wind power? Not counting the enormus amounts of window power you would need to actively power the world, there was also that study a few months back which estimated that wind power enough to cover the continent of australia could produce global climate changes on the same order of the worst case senarios from global warming. We're talking massive global temperature shifts from fucking with global wind patterns, never mind a complete change in the earths currents leading to a complete change in the ecosystem.
Nuclear power? That seems like one of our best options but Nuclear is a political bomb, socialy the worls has a NIMBY attitude (you think it's hard gettign a cell tower in your town, try getting a nuke plant) doesn't solve the problem that we're still using a limited resource and merely shifts the waste and byproducts from the air to some bunker under a mountain, not exactly a good solution.
So what is the good solution? No one is asking to do our homework for us, we're asking you to do your own homework.
Should we focus on and use alt energy where we can and where it's efficient? Of course. But that doesn't mean we should go full stop either.
Re:Posting from the People's Republic of Fantasia (Score:1, Insightful)
People like their SUVs. But they don't give a sh*t what fuel the SUVs run on.
Build more nuclear plants, and people won't have to burn gas to operate their SUVs.
Re:Posting from the People's Republic of Fantasia (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Biofuels are relatively inefficient compared to solar cells, but fairly simple as well and carbon net-neutral. Biofuels and solar hydrogen could meet our mobile and nightime needs easily.
We can live as we do, with all the juice and cars and whatnot, so long as we do not too grossly expand our population, in a closed loop, steady state system. We could live quite comfortably if we overturned the Ford coup of the 1920s and reversed the graft-based decision to build roads and the 1950's military decision to build suburbs. With a predominantly urban population moving by train (or working close to home/at home) we could buy the solar cells with a few year's oil expenditures.
Unfortunately Solar doesn't have the profit margin of oil, so there's no political/industrial interest. There's $10 trillion worth of oil in Iraq we took ownership of for a mere $1 trillion in military expenditures (at the current burn rate, given the time it will take to pump it out). The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Nobody building solar factories is going to see that kind of profit, and without it they can't compete in the congressional auction. Laws aren't bought flat rate, they're sold to the highest bidder and no industry can outbid the oil industry.
It would be far cheaper to convert the global energy economy to solar (as a combination of solar-thermal, solar-electric, and solar-biofuel with the only other long-term viable power source as a backup--breeder nuclear, which (not ignoring the very real waste problem) is the only other energy source we have that can meaningfully contribute to our long term power needs) than to build a great space ring. The low range costs are small compared to the current value of the known oil reserves (roughly $80 trillion, proven plus mid-range USGS unproven estimates at $40/bbl).
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
Re:$500 billion? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess thats what happens when you let oil companies fund election campaigns.
It didn't happen last time (Score:3, Insightful)
Then it cooled off some time later, and the colony was all but abandoned.
The fun part is, the humans didn't go extinct, the gulf stream didn't reverse, ocean fauna didn't all float belly-up because of melting glaciers being sweet water, etc.
Basically that's what gets me pissed off about this _political_ "waah, we're all DOOMED if you don't follow ME" hype about global warming. It's mis-representation and scare tactics.
As was said, it's only the bullshit media and political speeches where global warming is a certainty, and certain doom is just around the corner. The media loves a good scare story. That's what sells. Actual scientific facts don't.
The science part is a lot more ambiguous and not fully understood yet. It's not just that the earth has cooled off just fine before. It's also that:
- The "Global Warming" measured, that started the whole hype, was actually based on limited data from only a tiny portion of the world. And it was only a 1 degree Celsius over a _century_ increase.
- The Earth has periodic warming and cooling cycles, ranging roughly between 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today in the last glaciations, and some 6 degrees warmer in the times of the dinosaurs. Think roughly a sine wave spanning whole ages. With a lot of noise superimposed.
And we're roughly in the middle. It's _normal_ to rise slowly on the average. Not this fast, but basically a century of it might well be measuring just the noise in the real signal. Especially given that:
- Actual satellite data that covers a helluva lot more of the whole globe (you know, the "global" part of "global warming") actually shows a global _cooling_ for the last 20 years straight. There is actually a theory that we might be heading into a "mini ice age". (Not that it will stop journalists and politicians from presenting a _cooling_ as an effect of global _warming_.)
- Also for this last interval, there is data indicating that the average temperature on Earth just faithfully follows fluctuations in the Sun's energy output. Think, for example, how we got a very warm winter between 2003 and 2004, because of solar flares. We can actually observe and measure those things nowadays, and blimey, temperature on Earth seems to just follow them.
Is it that unbelievable, since Sun is where that heat comes from in the first place? We're talking some 0.3% temperature difference in this "global warming." It only takes _minor_ fluctuations in the energy input to produce that.
- Humans never accounted for more than 2% of greenhouse gasses. If not only we stopped driving cars, but if humanity as a whole even stopped breathing, it still just wouldn't make that much of a difference.
Fair and balanced (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand you have something called a study with none of the above features (except the authors often have a TLA in something, though maybe not anything to do with atmospherics or even physics).
But the press thrives on conflict, so it reports both studies as being by 'noted scientists' or maybe one was a fictional tale by some guy who wrote alot of SCIENCE (fiction).
Most folks have no idea what 'falsifiable', 'peer review', or 'reproducible' have to do with anything important like the price of gas, so they believe the press when it tells them that the different 'studies' represent two sides of the issue (fair and balanced).
And with enough money on both sides to support new 'studies' the debate could well go on until every last icecube in Greenland turns into liquid oxygen dihydride.
Then the big controversy will be whether to build giant seawalls around the coastal cities or to run screaming for higher ground.
And you can bet the press will present that story with two nicely balanced sides, as well.
Re:Debate?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
But (apart from the occasional meteor strike) this happened slowly.
We are now talking about change in terms of decades, not millenia.
Also, just because the Earth was much warmer naturally, does not mean we would like to live in those conditions. We have build our cities and farms and industries in conditions which have been stable for thousands of years or more. Even minor shifts in temperature, rainfall or sea level would cause significant and widespread problems for us.
This was before cars or factories. It managed to cool itself down.
Again, this took a very long time. If we help heat things up we will have to deal with the consequences for a very long time.
There is still much debate about global warming in scientific circles. There is much less debate in the media.
I would say it is exactly the other way around. Scientifically, it is pretty settled, but the media continue to report debate.
Re:Debate?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Isotope ratios in ice cores and rocks.
During the times of the vikings in Labrador they used to be able to grow grapes. They found grape seeds in the settlements. Try growing grapes now in Labrador. Not a chance!
These were localised changes (like the 'mini ice age' in Europe). There was only minor impact on sea levels. We are now talking about global changes.
Lets be frank, there have been multiple mass extinctions. And many of these happen in the wink of a eye WRT to the earth.
So let's help make another one?
I know this is going to sound silly, but imagine how much heat is generated by six billion bodies, and their associated infrastructure? Not insignificant!
Yes it is, compared to the heat given off by other animals.
Let's First Prove the Global Warming Theory ... (Score:1, Insightful)
In 1988, the Dr. James E. Hansen mentioned global warming was here and predicted that by 1998, temperatures would have increased .35 degrees Celsius, whereas the actual increase was .11 degrees. By the time that the decade had elapsed (and by the time he made the comment that long term climate forecast is impossible- even TV meteorologists don't try to predict the weather ten days from now), the increase had only been .11 degrees. He was wrong by more than three hundred percent.
NASA launched the Mars Rover claiming that it would land on Mars in 253 days at 8:11 PM, Pacific time. The margin of error was a few thousandths of a percent: it landed at 8:35. An estimate has to be an "educated guess". When a leading scientist in a field is off by three hundred percent, that casts doubt onto the whole field.