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| Science & Technology |
| How to Cool the Planet - whether it needs it or not |
| 2010-03-29 |
| While humans have unintentionally been altering Earth's climate for centuries, some scientists have begun to study how to intentionally hack the globe to cool the overheated planet. Eli Kintisch's new book, Hack the Planet provides a thorough and nuanced portrait of the development of geoengineering. Through long acquaintance with the field's biggest names, Kintisch, a staff writer for Science, paints a deep sociological portrait of a radical new scientific discipline bursting messily into the world. Apparently, this writer is paid by the adjective. He reminds us that even though the techniques may be wild and global, many of the people dreaming them up are regular scientists trying to deal rationally with a carbon problem that they don't see society solving. Faced with a warming world, they are torn between watching nature die or trying to surgically kill it themselves. Wired.com: What are some of the basic geoengineering options being discussed? Eli Kintisch: The main geoengineering techniques fall into two basic categories: One, the ways to block sunlight at different points in the atmosphere and earth system to lower the temperature rapidly in that way, and the other is enhancing the planet's ability to take up carbon dioxide through a variety of techniques. So, sun-blocking and carbon-sucking are the two main ways. With sun-blocking, what you are essentially doing is brightening the planet, increasing the earth's albedo. That can change the amount of total radiation that the planet experiences. Scientists have proposed ways of intercepting solar radiation at every single point from the surface of the earth by whitening roofs or brightening the ocean's surface itself with tiny bubbles, to brightening low-lying and high clouds, to one of the most radical and discussed geoengineering techniques: adding particles called aerosols to the stratosphere. That technique has many names, but I like to call it the Pinatubo option, because it was influenced by the rapid cooling that follows volcanic eruptions. The Pinatubo option involves spraying some kind of particles (usually people talk about sulfur) into the upper atmosphere to form a kind of haze that blocks a small percentage of the sun's rays before they can enter the lower atmosphere. The carbon methods involve generally enhancing natural systems to take in more carbon, perhaps genetically modifying plants so they have more carbonaceous cells or growing large blooms of algae in the ocean by using some sort of key nutrient that can catalyze and fertilize their growth. The main way has been to use iron. You could also build machines to suck in the carbon dioxide. Wired.com: One fascinating connection you draw is between scientists developing the atomic bomb and scientists working on geoengineering. "You hope to God this is never used but if you have to use it, you better know how it behaves," David Battisti tells you. That argument runs throughout post-war science. Does anyone have a better answer than the atomic scientists did? Kintisch: At this point, a lot of scientists feel the cat is out of the bag. If anything, a desperate politician 30 years form now may suddenly decide, "I need to cool the planet." And if we don't study it, scientists won't have any way to warn this leader of what the consequences will be. From that perspective there is a Pandora's box that has been opened. Geoengineering is a bad idea whose time has come. It is something that you have to study and hope to never use. [For the atomic scientists], the other side has nuclear weapons and they are pointed at you, so you have no choice but to develop a deterrent. In this case, the nuclear weapons are the unknown chance that the planet's sensitivity to CO2 is very high and will respond to some of these worst-case tipping points. Scientist feel they have no choice but to develop this response that viscerally is almost sickening to many scientists, especially someone like David Battisti, who thinks a lot about the internal dynamics of the climate system and understands how hard it is to understand how the parts fit together and then predict its behavior. But, they're going to go ahead anyway. For the children. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #5 IMO read, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE/LATITUDES given various MSM-Net Artics on how the same will bear the brunt of any Natural [Sun + Volcanism + SPace] + Human-induced/caused temperature change now thru Year 2100, espec the former + vee also the lesser-devloped SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE??? |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2010-03-29 18:54 |
| #4 Right....the only thing I see happening from any sort of government attempt to drastically alter the climate on purpose is one of two things. 1. Nothing and they waste truckloads of money. 2. They /really/ screw it up and put us in actual dire peril. Since when we do trust the government to actually fix things, especially ones that we don't understand and aren't broken? |
| Posted by: Silentbrick 2010-03-29 17:58 |
| #3 Aluminum foil. Lots of it. |
| Posted by: ed 2010-03-29 15:17 |
| #2 watching nature die WTF? "Nature" is dying? Give me a f*cking break. Climate change - been there, done that. Ditto ecosystem change, mass extinctions, and on and on. The only thing constant on Earth is change. Always has been, always will be. |
| Posted by: Spot 2010-03-29 11:03 |
| #1 Let's put a giant beach umbrella up in the sky between us and the sun. And if it gets too chilly we can close it for a while. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2010-03-29 10:10 |