Geo-Engineering to stop Climate Change

MattSparkes writes "Following the latest report of the United Nations climate change panel, there has been a flurry of renewed interest in so-called geo-engineering. This is the theory of using technological schemes to stop climate change. These can range from sun-shades orbiting the Earth, to pumping millions of tonnes of sulfur into the atmosphere to the bizarre idea of painting the ground white to reflect more light. Let's reduce our emissions now, before I have to go and paint my roof bright white." Thanks to jamie for pointing out another potential solution of seeding the southern oceans with iron to spur plankton growth.

next use for algae/plankton

[nietsch]

Harvest the top layer of them, concentrate and convert them to biofuel using TCP [wikipedia.org] (total conversion proces, a kind of wet pyrolysis)
A biofuel tanker with the appropriate machinery would go out on the ocean with a load of iron (or iron rich earth), spread the iron and at the same time harvest the algae and convert them to biofuel. Since it injects more minerals than it harvests, more carbon will be removed form the carbon cycle than would be harvested with the biofuel.
Just an idea I would not like to see patented.

Cloud-generating barges

[ericdujardin]

There's a simple way to reflect the Sun's light: clouds. So how about putting a large number of barges in the sea: their bottom would be reflective and insulated, they would hold a small depth of water inside, so that the Sun's rays would be used 100% to produce clouds instead of heating the ocean, and the extra clouds would reflect the Sun's rays, and if we're smart enough, some desert areas would get some rain.

Re:next use for algae/plankton

[WindBourne]

Well, groups are already working on just this idea. The funny thing is that others are perusing the conversion of cellulose to ethanol/oil. I find the later one laughable. It is inheritantly a batch process of the feed stock (used by pigs and cattle) then mulched into the ground. Worse, the process is spread over a 2-d area. In contrast, algae is a stream process AND is a 3D. What that means is that it will use a fraction of the land, resources, and energy that cellulose (and other approaches) will use.

Re:anything

[FooAtWFU]

People think up trillion dollar plans like putting up million of tiny umbrellas into geosynchronous orbit to deflect sunlight .... I've never owned a car, and I'm really not convinced that I ever want to.

Thoughts are cheap. Moving to an urban center where there's a grocery store a block away, and decent public transit, is much more expensive. (And there's probably less fresh clean air, fewer trees, less green space, more noise.) If you're already comfortably settled in NYC or Toronto or Los Angeles or something like that, good for you! Cities are neat. And if you're complaining about people who are already in a big city, that's one thing. But I live in a mid-sized city (200,000) and our bus service is... pretty marginal. You could probably use it to commute if you really had to (and were willing to walk a good distance to get there), but you really need to drive if you want to get to half the places worth getting to.

Myself, I drive a little old 1988 Volkswagen Fox that gets awesome gas mileage. Not that I've ever had to drive it very far, either.

Re:anything

[Hamilton Publius]

An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months' time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains "very likely" as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain's top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter's billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask, when you're forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is "Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you're at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it's confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.

What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on

Re:anything

[UbuntuDupe]

Trying to control or influence all of them is nigh on impossible, short of making the things you describe illegal, which would probably lead to a revolt.

False. [slashdot.org] If you just assess the actual costs of these activities on the people that do them, they have a strong financial incentive not to do them -- this is how it works with every product on the market. You don't need to, for example, encourage people to avoiding eating "unnecessary" foods -- the "unnecssary" expense already does that. If food was as socialized as roads and air currently are, I can 100% guarantee you we'd see proposals to give tax credits to people who exercise less than 1 hour per week in the hopes that this would lead them to request less food from the Food Department. (Just as you see proposals for tax credits for switching to specific energy-efficient technologies.) People who eat too much would be derided as "stupid, thoughtless, and self-centered."

If you simply taxed in proportion to the costs imposed on others, people would be free to do whichever energy-saving alternative is least inconvenient for them. Even if they do nothing, hey -- at least you have a huge war chest with which to research better technologies or reduce the impact.

If you can't bring yourself to advocate that, you have to keep in mind any other solution is probably less efficient. And if you can't trust a government to administer that properly, you have to think about what it would do with a less efficient solution.

Re:anything

[qazsedcft]

What would help quite a lot is converting from coal and petroleum to nuclear power generation. That would pretty much solve the problem over-night, slashing our CO2 production by nearly 50%! What impact that would have on the climate... isn't actually 100% clear. It certainly is likely to have some impact, though.

I agree, but the problem is that a lot of these coal plants are in countries where there are more urgent problems to solve than CO2 emissions. For example, here in Poland over 95 percent of power plants are coal powered. And not the efficient 21 st century type, but the 40 year-old post-communist era type. However, nobody is going to invest in modernizing these power plants when there are so many other infrastructure problems, like the lack of a national highway system (ironically).

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Good news, nobody!

[RyoShin]

If we're going to spend a billion dollars, how about doing something that not only helps the planet but also has a longer effect. The main thing we need to focus on is travel. Aside from the pollution that millions of cars spew, the lack of good public transportation is causing quite a few other problems- road repair, obesity, tearing up land to put in more roads, etc. Spend those billions of dollars on the larger cities (and some of the medium ones) to install good bus and/or subway systems (trollies are pretty spiffy, too). This will have the added side effect of creating more jobs (driving the buses, setting up schedules, maintainence, etc.) and making life easier for those who can't afford a vehicle of their own. ...Oh, but the CAR-tel (haha) won't allow that, will they? Anyone know how much it costs to buy a senator? We could use one for this, and I wouldn't mind owning a few of my own.

And, because I couldn't resist:

These can range from sun-shades orbiting the Earth

Brilliant idea! In fact, let's take that one step further and make it a giant mirror to not only block the sun, but deflect the rays back. There's no possible way this will go wrong.

Re:The biological carbon sink idea is a bad one

[Anonymous Coward]

Rainforests are notoriously bad in long-term carbon storage: they are so warm and humid that everything that dies is recycled pretty much instantly. Let's cut them down and replace them with tree farms that preserve carbon in finished products. Yes, I am being facetious, but not completely: as I pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, if climate change alarmists expect the rest of the world to make sacrifices, they need to make sacrifices themselves as well.

And if you are looking for long term carbon storage, check out peat bogs and boreal forests - those places are amazing.

Re:Er... huh?

[UbuntuDupe]

Based on your response, and your apparent level of confusion, it appears you've never seriously thought about this issue or done anything like a cost-benefit analysis. I don't say that to insult you, just to suggest how much you're missing.

Inputs ARE WHAT CAUSE THE OUTPUTS.

Yes, but, to extend the metaphor some more, outputs are caused by *all* of the inputs. When you ban one input, without penalizing the output, you simply change one input into another. So I can't use incandescents? Then I can't relax at home. So, I'll drive around -- which isn't punished -- to other places and increase the energy load there -- which isn't punished. Since CFL's use less, I'll be less persistent about turning them off when not in use -- which isn't punished -- and end up using the same energy for light -- which isn't punished. So I'll move out of my apartment into a larger home that requires more energy to regulate its temperature -- which isn't punished -- and take up more land -- which isn't punished.

If using CFL's makes me less productive -- as they do -- that's a loss to the labor pool. That's labor that can't be used to research better energy-related technologies or abate the consequences. (It doesn't matter that I can't personally do those things; on the macro scale, labor is ultimately fungible. Labor I can't do has to be filled by someone else, which cascades down the line until that stuff is affected.)

All that banning individual inputs does is shift to other, unbanned inputs, while forgoing the tax revenues people would have gladly paid for the extra energy the original input would have used. Sure, you could ban or regulate *all* inputs that you judge as wasteful, but why not just regulate the outputs and let people figure out for themselves what inputs they can do without?

It's not rocket science.

Re:anything

[wrook]

I understand what you are saying, but I think you've missed one very important issue.

If you want to reduce your energy usage, it makes sense to actually look at the impact each of these things has towards energy usage. I did this and was surprised by the result.

Yes, taking an airplane is unbelievably wasteful. We should all avoid it if at all possible. But the biggest ones in my life (in order) are:

1) Car. And this is with a TDI Golf. I got rid of it last week.
2) Heat. Sigh... this one is hard to fix. I'd like to get a ground source heat pump. But I can't afford the $10,000 it will cost right now. After I've saved up some from not driving a car it should be a sinch, though. Since last year though I've turned down the thermostat in the winter 2 degrees and disabled the AC (everything under 40C is tolerable
anyway -- over 40C, I wear a wet T-shirt and it seems to help).
3) Dryer. Air drying clothes isn't actually too painful for me, so why the heck not?
4) Imported food. I live in a cold climate so the grocery stores are full of imported food. But local food is sooo much tastier. I'm trying to improve my diet by only buying local. I've found the easiest way is to contact local organic farmers. Strangely it appears to be cheaper than buying the crap in the grocery store anyway.
5) Electric lights. I've switched over to compact flourescent. I'm also trying to make sure that I only have 1 or 2 lights on in the house at any one time at night.

So far these measures seem to have reduced my personal energy usage to about 1/3 of what it was before. And I don't seem to be unhappy because of it. I *did* have to change my lifestyle. But not in a bad way. Reducing the crap that I buy (packaging, electronic goodies that I don't actually need, etc, etc) should have a positive influence as well.

Trust me... These are *small* measures that will only be difficult for the first few weeks. True, some people need a car. But *most* people don't (there are far more people in cities than not). But even people who must have a car can reduce *a lot* in other ways. Hell, if you are in the country, you can buy your own windmill. That's something I can't do in the city.

why paint the ground?

[drew]

Why paint the ground white? In any decent size city, you'll see thousands of buildings with black tar roofs. For a little extra money, paint those white instead of black. No one will see it, it would have the same effect on global warming, and it will save the building owners a decent amount of money on their air conditioning costs as well. (Whether this would really have any effect on global warming, I have no idea, but it would definitely have an affect on local warming.) Better yet, put a couple planter boxes of hardy plants up there, and you can help take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while alleviating your storm water runoff load.

Along the same lines, finding something other than black asphalt to surface our gajillion miles of streets and highways with might help too.

inconvenient data

[ElectricRook]

To back this up, there is a large body of "inconvenient data" available at http://www.scholar.google.com./ [scholar.google.com]

Search for global warming. Don't bother with the political analysis, look for the actual data, and more importantly consider the source of the data... Well, actually some of the political papers give good insight into the political intent of the authors.

The source of the historical data (before the "age of instrumentation" before 1900) is "Proxy data". This is proxy data is from the age of early instruments, which were hand made by the slashdot crowd of the day, and home calibrated. This sparse data set is then correlated to tree rings, ice cores, and so on. The Authors state, "little weight should be placed on the accuracy of the proxy data". Of course that does not stop the Politicians from inferring tenths of degrees C on this proxy data.

Here is another tidbit I found in one paper, the averages by seasons indicate that currently warm season averages are lower, and cool season averages are higher than before 1950. This doesn't fit with the major weather influencing gas being CO2, but instead by H2O. If you've ever compared the daily differences of a desert, and a humid area, you will understand.

I have a problem with some of the data from the "age of instrumentation", in that early instruments were located at what were then called aerodromes, where nerdy mechanical types played at their aeroplane hobby. These were cow pastures with the cows driven off for a bit. Currently instrumentation is located at air-ports which are huge heat islands of concrete and asphalt. But all the studies I've seen, do not attempt to correct for the difference in instrument environments.

A lot of anecdotal data is placed on current Glacier retreat, but little emphasis is placed on the fact that many of the glaciers noted are in fact located on active volcanoes. Glacial growth/retreat is a function of glacial mechanics, not the weather.

Re:My crazy solution:

[thoth99]

I have a better plan. The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (I just googled CO2 exhale rate and they sound legitimate) estimates the average person exhales 1 kg/day of CO2. Assuming the world population is 6.7 billion people, this leads to ~2.45 billion metric tons of CO2 a year.

Interesting possibility. I suppose if the militia in Darfur could just step up its efficiency a bit, it would be entitled to collect Richard Branson's money. Where's Mao Zedong now that we really need him? I suspected all along that the IPCC panel had to tie back into communism somehow.

Re:anything

[sponglish]

Clearly such mundane and well-researched explanations for warming as carbon-driven greenhouse effect must not be right, if far-fetched ideas like cosmic rays could be invoked to magically produce clouds that give us the explanation we hope is true.

Shazam! You write it and it appears [telegraph.co.uk]:

A team of more than 60 scientists from around the world are preparing to conduct a large-scale experiment using a particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, to replicate the effect of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

They hope this will prove whether this deep space radiation is responsible for changing cloud cover. If so, it could force climate scientists to re-evaluate their ideas about how global warming occurs.

Mr Svensmark's results show that the rays produce electrically charged particles when they hit the atmosphere. He said: "These particles attract water molecules from the air and cause them to clump together until they condense into clouds."

Mr Svensmark claims that the number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth changes with the magnetic activity around the Sun. During high periods of activity, fewer cosmic rays hit the Earth and so there are less clouds formed, resulting in warming.

Low activity causes more clouds and cools the Earth.

Here's more detail [timesonline.co.uk] on Svensmark's experiment that prompted the larger test:

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

It's a matter of time scale

[alispguru]

All of the examples of natural (non-human-driven) change you mentioned happened on time scales that are vastly different from the apparent time scale of global warming, deforestation, and the current rate of species loss.

There are no doubt environmentalists who want to preserve everything, and some of what they want is written into US law (Endangered Species Act). However, on the human time scale, there is little difference between preserving everything and the natural rate of change.

Re:Democratization of Climate Change Science

[HoneyBeeSpace]

Runs on Mac too, not just Windows. Click on the "Development" link on the main menu and you'd go to our dev site where you can have your source.

Re:anything

[Bigboote66]

Hybrids sound good, but really their efficiency is almost entirely based on their weight

Completely untrue. Compare, for example, the Toyota Yaris to the Toyota Prius:

Yaris [consumersearch.com]: 2288 pounds, MPG: 34/40, with "real world" mpg being about 36.

Prius [consumersearch.com]: 2932 pounds, MPG: 51/60, with "real world" mpg being about 45.

36 mpg is great gas mileage for a ICE car, but it's far short of 45. That's not saying that you shouldn't buy a smaller car if you can. My 1996 Maxima got, at most, 29 mpg (24 mpg mixed driving) when I first bought it, and it weighs only 80 pounds more than Prius. Sure, it's zippier, but did I really need that power? No; my next car will be small & efficient, possibly a hybrid.

Given that the Prius is almost 700 pounds, and 33% heavier than the Yaris, and gets 25% greater gas mileage, I'd say that weight is not really the most important aspect in its efficiency.

-BbT