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| Global Warming: Ring Around The Earth |
| 2005-06-28 |
| A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes. There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example. And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops. But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work. All scientists agree that Earth gets warmer and colder across the eons. A delicate and ever-changing balance between solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases controls long-term swings from ice ages to warmer conditions like today. Those who are often called experts admit to glaring gaps in their knowledge of how all this works. A study last month revealed that scientists can't pin down one of the most critical keys: how much sunlight our planet absorbs versus how much is reflected back into space. Nonetheless, most scientists think our climate has warmed significantly over the past century and will grow warmer over the next hundred years. Various studies claim the planet is destined to warm by anywhere from 1 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the next few centuries. Seas will rise dramatically, the scenario goes, inundating coastal cities. But another group of scientists argue that the temperature data supporting a warming planet is not firm and that projections, based on computer modeling, might be wildly off the mark. Either way, perhaps our fate is more in our hands than we might have imagined. "Reducing solar insolation by 1.6 percent should overcome a 1.75 K [3 degrees Fahrenheit] temperature rise," contends a group led by Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc. "This might be accomplished by a variety of terrestrial or space systems." The power of scattering sunlight has been illustrated naturally, the scientists note. Volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, pumped aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the global climate by about a degree. Other researchers have suggested such schemes as adding metallic dust to smoke stacks, to flood the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight back into space. In the newly outlined approach, reflective particles might come from the mining of Earth, the Moon or asteroids. They'd be put into orbit around the equator. Alternately, tiny micro-spacecraft could be deployed with reflective umbrellas. A ring created by a batch of either "shades the tropics primarily, providing maximum effectiveness in cooling the warmest parts of our planet," the scientists write. An early version of their idea was presented but not widely noticed in 2002. Those researchers who don't buy the argument that global warming is occurring at any significant rate nor that humans are largely to blame may warm up quickly to the new idea. Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, tracks climate research and the resulting media coverage. He's among the small but vocal group that goes against mainstream thought on the topic of global warming. "I don't think that the modest warming trend we are currently experiencing poses any significant or long-term threat," Peiser told LiveScience. "Nevertheless, what the paper does show quite impressively is that our hyper-complex civilization is theoretically and technologically capable of dealing with any significant climate change we may potentially face in the future." Peiser also notes that the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is estimated to cost the world economy some $150 billion a year. He also sees a broader rationale for supporting the seemingly bizarre manner of managing Earth's temperature budget. "I believe that this mindset, despite its apparent eccentricity, is actually rather reassuring," Peiser said. "It provides concerned people with ample evidence of the extraordinary human ingenuity that, as so often in the past, has helped to overcome many predicaments that were regarded as impenetrable in previous times." He also sees an ultimate big-picture reasoning to look favorably on the notion of controlling Earth's climate. "Whatever the cost and regardless of whether there is any major risk due to global warming," Peiser said, "it would appear to me that such a space-based infrastructure will evolve sooner or later, thus forming additional stepping stones of our emerging migration towards outer space." Of course, the astronomical cost would be if NASA did it. If private enterprise did it, it would probably cost around $200B. The mistake is confusing "the idea" with "you have to do it our way". |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #15 I've been thinking more about my original proposition, and I think I could improve on it considerably. While ordinary persistant smoke is good at obscuration, if it was a very fine dust, literally a specially made "nano-dust", the effect could be much stronger. That is, particles that are *mirrored* on one side, the "light" side that points up. Instead of diffusing the light, they would reflect a lot of it back into space, which is far more efficient at reducing radiation getting through the atmosphere. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-06-28 22:28 |
| #14 perhaps they could use Pepsi cans, a la "Twister" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-06-28 21:44 |
| #13 An expenditure of $600 trillion would require the literal enslavement of most of the world's population for several generations, an eco-activist's dream come true. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-06-28 21:40 |
| #12 Handing out tins of reflective metal paint so people could paint their roofs and any other surface would be at least as effective and a hell of a lot cheaper. Note, that as Kyoto is now costing in the trillions, only alternatives that cost more are proposed, in order to make Kyoto look like a bargain. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-06-28 17:43 |
| #11 I say give it a try, because if it works it'll really piss off the Kyoto wackos, and be good for my lawn as well. |
| Posted by: Spacemuppet 2005-06-28 15:00 |
| #10 Excuse my phrench, but it has to be said: These f*cking morons have far too much time on their hands. And not two brain cells to rub together among them. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2005-06-28 14:24 |
| #9 Stupidist idea I've heard in a long time. It would be much better to build solar satelites to suck up that great solar power up there and get us off of the oil economy. If we're gonna spend a ton of money we might as well get other benefits out of it. |
| Posted by: RJ Schwarz 2005-06-28 12:22 |
| #8 Seems like a bad idea. What happens if they've done their math wrong and we end up knocking twenty degrees off the Earth's mean temperature? Planetary engineering seems to be too risky for us at our present stage of development. |
| Posted by: Captain Pedantic 2005-06-28 12:07 |
| #7 Uuuhhhh, I can smell the grant money. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2005-06-28 12:05 |
| #6 Stupid idea. And unnecessary besides. |
| Posted by: mojo 2005-06-28 12:01 |
| #5 This reminded me of a book I read about 20 years ago... Check out Rings of Ice Piers Anthony's first book: The idea behind this story is an interesting one, but you can tell this is his first novel. The idea is that a large comet(s) are exploded and diverted in such a way as to bring some additional rain to Earth. The ill conceived plan goes drastically wrong, and the earth is once again deluged with non-stop rain. Cilivization and the environment break down, and Anthony's band of misfits - being led by a man with a vision in a Winnebago - try to survive. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2005-06-28 11:55 |
| #4 Much easier to just spread rust (iron oxide) in some of the southern seas in the summer. Acts like fertilizer and would eat up lots and lots of CO2. (Gov even has a plan to do it if things ever got rough.) |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-06-28 11:13 |
| #3 And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops. That's okay - the Americans can easily afford this. |
| Posted by: Kofi Annan 2005-06-28 11:01 |
| #2 Consider a more bio-friendly approach: Perhaps we could collect the dung from male cattle and distribute that in a ring above the tropics. Sort of symbolic of the never-ending cycle of global warming bullshit. |
| Posted by: Tom 2005-06-28 11:00 |
| #1 For example, a tiny amount of obscuration can go a long way. One great big Russian spaceship with an extra stage just for "polluting" the high atmosphere, could cover a large area with a thin layer of 'smoke'. There doesn't have to be just one layer, either, several layers multiply the effects. Also, lateral diffusion isn't too much of a problem, even though you want concentration around the equator--because it still obscures, but in the higher latitudes. Best of all, you have a very powerful ally in the Earth itself, which tries to create a "cooler" equilibrium. The whole project can be inexpensive if you just shoot for incremental change, and not try and brute force a five degree drop in temperature overnight. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-06-28 10:32 |