This week’s Question: A report released last week in London and addressed at the U.N. climate conference in South Africa said that reflecting a small amount of sunlight back into space before it strikes the Earth’s surface would theoretically have an immediate effect on the planet’s climate. This kind of geo-engineering and solar radiation management, some say, would be a more cost-effective and efficient way to combat global warming, and would be less disruptive of business activity. Geo-engineering the planet’s climate, however, needs further research, and skeptics say that political concerns and unknown side effects, including changing weather patterns and rainfall, are too much of a risk.
What do you think? Are geo-engineering efforts a promising way to address climate change?
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A difficult question to answer w/o a clear consensus as to whether or not there’s a problem requiring a Geo-engineering solution to begin with…
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Amen!
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There is certainly a problem with climate change, due to increased CO2 and other chemicals in the atmosphere. To make a significant impact you would need to reflect a big percentage of incident radiation. To achieve 10% you would have to cover 10% of the earths surface, and since you would have a hard time doing that over water with ocean weather, that might mean 40% of the land area – while we humans will be hard-pressed to find enough land area to farm, to fee the increased population.
Although we understand the climate better than we used to, we are not ready to make predictions based on covering this area versus that area, and we might end up distorting weather patterns into a dangerous form.
So, no chance.
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When man decides to play god, he usually discovers his partner is the devil. It’s just be 40 years since these people wanted to modify our climate to prevent “global cooling”. Climate is not a constant – the only constant thing about global climate is that it changes. We are not significantly warmer now than we were during the renaissance. We have a higher probability of making things worse than making things better if we jump in too early to try and modify climate. We obvious don’t even understand the current dynmaics of climate.
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Implementing geo engineering schemes now, with our current profound ignorance of climate fundamentals, would be an act of hubris in its purest form.
The fascinating story of geo-engineering proponents and proposals, going back as much as 100 years, is well-told in “Fixing the Sky,” by roger Fleming.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14412-4/fixing-the-sky“There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris” (McGeorge Bundy).
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Considering how clueless we were about the effects of fossil fuel burning in the first place, shouldn’t we have learned that the likelihood of unintended consequences makes geo-engineering very risky? Life on Earth needs sunlight; artificially decreasing the light incidnet on the surface is not going to be helpful to life, including humans. For those that think changing to non-carbon-emitting forms of energy are bad for business, wait until they see how bad it will be for business to continue burning fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate. It’s a shame that those who want to push for more fossil fuel development probably won’t live long enough to see the real effects of that on future generations. And, let’s take a realistic look at cost/benefit for fossil vs. renewable energy sources, which means looking at so much more than just the dollars per gallon at the pump.
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I submit we are NOT clueless about the effects of fossil fuel emissions, otherwise, we would not have had increasingly stringent regulations, laws, and standards. In addition, air quality is infinitely better today, overall because of those laws. The tone of this post is however, typical of proponents of the alarmist viewpoint; you’d think there are no pollution controls on anything. The regulations and obstacles governing coal-fired power plants for example are monumental.
Sorry, but the realistic look at renewables vs. fossil fuel from a economic standpoint, IS that fossil fuel are STILL the most efficient (BTU’s per unit), cost-effective source AT THIS TIME. Forcing technologies (thru’ subsidies or whatever) that are simply not yet advanced enough is just foolish. Their time will come, but there must be a rational, reasonable approach taken , that will focus our research funds where true benefits will be derived.
Finally, consider this; If it is getting “warmer”, frankly , I’d prefer to have my windows open for more months of the year, than to need another sweater and burn more heating oil. But that’s just me.
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If we have learned anything from climate studies (and perhaps that is the real question), then it should be obvious that we do not understand and cannot adequately model the earth’s complex climate system. Such an effort seems overly risky from execution to possible side effects.
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Of course , this requires acceptance of the premise that the climate is changing (which it likely is, to some extent), but more importantly that human activity is the cause. I absolutely DO NOT.
What is actually the most disturbing aspect of this issue (beyond the obvious revelations of cherry-picked data, flawed analyses, and clearly social and political agendas and motivations), is the degree to which otherwise reputable and respected organizations (such as the National Research Council and the National Academies) have embraced the initial premises, but in the face of conflicting evidence and data, will not see fit to question or even consider alternative theories. There is grant money to be had; there is “research” to be funded. The result is this runaway train mentality that has spawned the wildest, grandeous, and comenserately expensive “solutions” to a problem that may or may not really exist. Carbon sequestration, “geo-engineering”, painting all roofs white, government subsidies for technologies that simply have not yet reached a level of viability and sustainability to be practical economically. NASA is now pushed to have as it’s primary function “earth science”, and we have no active INTERNAL method to get the ISS ? When will clearer, more rational heads prevail?-
Excellent points, Mr. Shrimper.
In answer to your last question: I am not holding my breath.
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Geo-engineering sounds a lot like some of the hare-brained schemes proposed over the past 100 years, including the supposed Nazi plan to focus sunlight (with mirrors from orbit) at their enemies.
To be viable it would need to be a constantly expanding program if there is no attempt to stop the underlying causes – greenhouse gas emissions among other things.
AS such it is almost certainly not realistic. A treatment of the symptoms with no relief for the cause makes little sense.-
Speaking of Greenhouse gases, Has anyone else noticed that in the last few years Volcanoes have pumped far more of them into the atmosphere than humans?
All this garbage about Global Warming is pure number juggling. It’s like saying a fly has moved your house by landing on one side.
Sure, some places are warmer than a hundred years ago, others are colder, it balances out.
And the SUN has more impact on it in a week than all the efforts of man totalled up over History.
Check out the JPL report on the Outer Planets temp over the last decade…
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Any action that is intended to have global consequences, can have unintended global consequences and could be disastrous. We do not understand anywhere near enough of all of the earth’s feedback mechanisms to attempt Geo-engineering with any degree of safety.
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I must say the results and comments are heartening. Maybe this runaway train can be stopped , or at least slowed down to a reasonable pace.
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Trying to regulate the earth’s warming by reducing the sun’s power is best described as “stupid”. If global warming is really being caused by humans, we already have actions we can take to help reduce the problem without needlessly risking our future.
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we have been geo-engineering the planet for centuries. What we are talking about here is a planned and calculated effort to effect a desired change versus a consequential change.
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It seems a safe bet that any climate change due to man so far has a side effect of other unrelated activities and was not planned. Therefore the statement that “we have been geo-engineering the planet for centuries” is inaccurate.
What we are talking about here is calculated without a valid model or basis – we simply can’t model the current climate much less effects of would-be human-induced changes. Even with vastly more data at hand, weather forecasts, much less climate models, are only incrementally better than they were 50 years ago. We, the technical community, so far don’t even agree on whether climate change is occurring or, if it is, how much of the change is due to human activity. How can we hope to ‘calculate’ the effect of more human activity on our climate?
If geo-engineering is engineering it is irresponsible engineering.
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I am pleasantly surprised that most respondants – even with differing opinions on global warming and whether human activity is a significant cause/factor – see the foolhardy hubris in geo-engineering ideas.
Also, I wonder how we could be sure of maintaining a reliable capability to control such geo-engineering systems. I am reminded of the spectacular failures of so many of the first rocket launches.
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We can protect against most of the bad stuff by requiring:
1. no government programs – only allow private hands and money dinking with the climate.
2. only incremental reversible methods can be used.
3. dinkers must be funded to be able to carry out their reversal plan.
4. methods to be tried, expected results, and reversal plans must be published in the public domain well ahead of implementation.
5. all plans must be individually approved by the Vogon bureaucracy … -
Yes, but first we need to better understand effects and side effects, then we need to have less adverse control of our society by litigation and politics, nationally and internationally.
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We have a pretty bad record for fixing things without knowing the end effects. Lets fix this one by fixing what we know has caused it.
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So man can not control his behaviors within his atmoshphere which impacts he and his environment, so now he wants to control outside his atmosphere to ultimately control the things that he can’t control within the atmosphere? This is a trick question, correct?
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Whenever there is a problem we first try to use managerial controls to eliminate that problem. In this case, is there really a problem? We need to look back through Earth’s history of cycles and real information to determine what its’ natural path would have been without our interference and compare reality to that scenario. We will never have any real information on Earth’s history unless we discover aliens and they kindly provide us their records. The best we can do is guess based on historical Earth sciences and sciences of the cosmos. We have to always remember that just because thousands of people believe in a certain guess, it doesn’t mean it is a correct guess. The masses thought the Earth was flat once…
Lets say that we created global warming. Is global warming a problem? Will species go extinct? (yes) Will new species appear? (yes) What is the ratio of extinct species vs current species in all of Earth’s existence? I would guess less than 10% of Earth’s entire Flora/Fauna are existing right now. I think my guess is unrealistically high. We need to know Earth’s overall extinction rate, evolution rate, and mortality rate to know if we have a problem. Without that information, this is just a distraction.
If we determine and acknowledge a problem, we need a multi-headed solution.
-Part A: Reverse the climate change by undoing what we did. Lets not use the medical approach for this problem. Lets fix the problem, not the symptoms. Reflecting solar energy back into space instead of collecting it to offset carbon output is a bad idea. (assuming carbon output created “global warming”)
-Part B: We have to accept that our economic ambitions contributed to this problem through our energy programs. We would be better off changing our economic situation during a down turn to minimize damages during the change. The change could spark an economic up turn like we have never seen before. (Enter the Energy Revolution)
-Part C: Start Genetics initiatives to capture material from species in danger of extinction. Understand the evolution process. Be able to revive species using only the materials that we collected. Understand food chains and benefits/consequences of reviving species.
-Part D: Not sure, I don’t pretend to have all the answers.-
In problem solving we first use managerial controls, then we use engineering controls if the managing attempts failed. Then I ask if we even have a problem at all to manage. The points here are; how did we determine we have a problem, what did we do to manage it, and why are we trying to jump to engineering controls.
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What global warming? Aren’t we tired of being fed all of this staff by someone trying to profit from artificially created agenda? Historically, there were always variations in global temperature, just keep adapted to it.
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Let’s experiment on Mars first. Start mining and looking for natural resources.
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Yes, geo-engineering can be made to control the climate for a price, but you best be really, really careful what you wish for…
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Those people are really mad, and would likely create a disaster if they were allowed to try. Also – we have ALWAYS had climate change, and it would be futile even to try to control it. Warming is far better than cooling.
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You gotta be kidding, right? Humans can’t even predict Earth’s weather patterns accurately using our most powerful supercomputers and all of the computational fluid dynamics theory we know how to apply, as planetary systems are still beyond our technology and knowledge to command. So, this type of suggestion is way out there and only belongs in a Hollywood movie. And, probably, the actions of any country fielding or attempting such technology might be considered as an attack upon the United States, promting a full retaliatory response with all the tools in the toolbox.
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It ain’t nice to fool with Mother Nature. Maybe global warming is just what Earth needs right now to combat the increasing cycle of ice ages. Perhaps human beings are the means by which all that locked carbon dioxide is released back into the atomsphere. What do we know?
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Global warming is a natural cycle earth goes through. Yes man has polluted this planet, but very little of mans activites has any effect on the warming cycle earth goes through after an ice age. We should clean up our act. But trying to modify our climate could backfire.
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We’ve been ignorantly geoengineering the planet for centuries, modifying microclimates with huge expanses of pavement, farm fields, reservoirs to store water, draining of wetlands to get rid of unwanted water, and creating urban “heat islands” where temperatures are a couple of Kelvin higher than in the surrounding countryside. Meanwhile, solar output has varied unpredictably, geothermal energy output has been increasing while for one century it was theorized that geothermal energy output had to be decreasing so therefore nobody measured the increase, the Sun-Earth interaction is poorly understood, the influence of cosmic ray bursts on the ozone layer and on formation of hygroscopic particulates that reduce the minimum humidity for clouds to develop, and we built then dismantled, a nuclear warfare apparatus that would have filled the atmosphere with the most dust since the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs, had war come between the USA and USSR. Isn’t it time we learned some more about the place we live in, the ways in which it is becoming more or less habitable, and the ways we’re influencing its’ habitability? Children, stop fighting and start learning something!
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Meteorologists can give me an accurate forecast for tomorrow yet they expect me to believe they can forecast the climate decades from now?
BTW, What caused the ice ages and subsequent global warming?
“Going green” to save money is one thing but this is “blowing green”.
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