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Geoengineering Is a Recipe for Disaster
This Climate Plan B approach could cause wars and mass starvation.
Think you've heard enough about climate change? Chances are you haven't heard anything about the dangerous and costly sci-fi climate fixes known as geoengineering.
Geo-what? Geoengineering is a set of speculative, massive-scale technologies that would have humans intentionally modify the climate--rather than accidentally, as we've been doing since the Industrial Revolution. Many U.S. lawmakers are starting to take it seriously as a climate change Plan B.
Yet, proposed geoengineering schemes are absurd and potentially devastating for the Earth.
Here are a few examples of how you could make the Earth cooler by "managing solar radiation" (i.e. manipulating the sun):
- Put trillions of tiny mirrors between Earth and sun to reflect sunlight back to space.
- Whiten the clouds over our oceans by increasing the droplet size, making the Earth more reflective.
- Blast sulphate particles into the stratosphere to simulate volcanic eruptions, again to block sunlight and diminish warming.
Then there are technologies under development to actually suck carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it, either:
- In oceans through growing algae, which feeds on CO₂, or
- On highways, by lining them with giant synthetic trees (which use chemical processes to suck CO₂ out of the air).
Yeah, right.
You'd think that only mad scientists could conjure up these schemes. That may be true with some of them. But in a world where carbon--whose excess is causing the climate to change in ways that endanger human health--has become a tradable commodity, there's money to be made out of contrived carbon business ventures.
Neither national laws nor international negotiations are making much progress to halt the accumulation of atmospheric carbon. Technophiles are taking advantage of that void by promoting their own schemes.
Logically, since these schemes will cost incalculable billions of dollars, there's a geoengineering lobby comprised of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs. It includes a few eminent scientists like geochemist Ken Caldeira and businessmen like Richard Branson. This lobby is seizing the moment, loudly proclaiming that there's no alternative and that they're only coming up with these proposals out of their duty to save the world.
Their ideas are nuts, but prestigious science academies, the media, and Congress are listening to them.
Several reports examining geoengineering options have been published in London and Washington over the past year. Congress has held hearings. The Government Accountability Office has called for a coordinated federal strategy. Bill Gates is funding research. The National Academy of Sciences is devoting attention to it and scientists are looking at "voluntary standards" for tampering with the climate.
Experts expect the federal government to announce plans to spend much more money on geoengineering research.
Ironically, some of geoengineering's most ardent advocates are best known for their arguments against climate action, including outfits like the American Enterprise Institute and individuals like Bjørn Lomborg of Denmark. Somehow they're now urgently calling for a massive techno-fix for a problem they have spent their careers saying is exaggerated.
Fortunately, a few cooler heads are prevailing. The pace at which these technologies were being pushed to the fore so alarmed participants at a UN meeting in Japan in October, that the 193 countries present adopted a moratorium on geoengineering experiments.
The world's governments, which had convened to discuss the alarming decline of natural biodiversity, rightly saw geoengineering's potential for ecological disaster.
They saw the possibility of these harebrained schemes destroying the oceans, disturbing weather patterns, concentrating unprecedented power to control the Earth's thermostat in a very small number of hands, and the possibility of unilateral deployment of unsafe technologies.
Geoengineering's potential political fallout could include war, mass starvation, and an inability to ever "switch off" the technological systems these crazy operations would deploy. Plus, think of the chaos that would result if our ecosystems never returned to anything close to their natural state.
Of course, we can't even predict the most serious consequences because we don't even fully understand the complex climate system geoengineers propose to manipulate.
Our planet's health is at stake. Geoengineering is a reckless gamble we can't afford.
66 Comments so far
Show AllJust another form of self-obsessed Western arrogance. It might well be the case that nothing but technology can help solve these problems, but it seriously should not be in the hands of the type of people who created them in the first place: the type with unconditional, religious love for and belief in application of technology, without any kind of critical thinking about the possible consequences. Goddamn technocratic idiots.
Pretty much my first thought as well.
Brainy boys, growing up into men who think they can play God with their toy, planet Earth.
All scientists, medical practitioners and psychologists/psychiatrists should be beholden to Hippocratic-style oaths to humanity, and all Earth's inhabitants, upon receipt of their diplomas and degrees. Upon breaching this oath, their accreditation would be revoked, and requiring a repeat of their studies to reinstate them.
People claim that "chemtrails" are evidence of these programs already in place with the government spraying particulate aluminum and barium into the sky.
Don't know exactly where I stand on this issue but:
1) I have observed the non-disappearing contrail-like clouds that diffuse across the sky, many times in a grid or criss-cross pattern that people claim are chemtrails.
2) I've seen video of people claiming the results for tests they've done on their soil/water show super-high percentages of aluminum and barium.
3) I've seen video by supposed government officials stating that they were doing the above described to geo-engineer a solution to global warming.
Now, I know none of this is hard evidence, but it's not as implausible as it all sounds.
With what we've seen in just the last 10 years, I'm sorry to say nothing our government could do would surprise me.
edit for typo
Seen all that stuff. Crazy. Scary to think about. What IS up?
Has anyone on this forum read about HAARP?
A friend told me about it several years and I don't know what to make of it. There's some unsupported scare stuff on the web but there's no way to determine the truth since the project is completely shrouded in secrecy.
One of the allegations is weather control, another is generating earthquakes.
The only thing certain is that the facility is there and the PWB are intent on keeping it secret.
Any ideas?
You can read about it online.
There are a number of theories about how scientists have been able to generate larger and larger storm systems, with some ability to steer them. But I don't really know of too many experts coming out and claiming this. Like chem-trails, much theory, little solid facts that I'm aware of.
This diatribe is just more of the usual oversimplified, touchy-feely junk I've come to expect on CD. It paints with far too broad a brush and provides no technical details or anything remotely enlightening--just sophomoric assertions. The top of the troposphere is receiving about 1 watt per square meter excess watts of power from the sun that aren't going back out again--that's a total of over 500 trillion watts. About 170 watts per square meter is reaching the earth's surface, where albedo enhancement via reflective materials could thus plausibly be implemented to diminish global warming. Should scientists continue to seriously investigate such technologies or just toss them all aside because some know-nothing says so? Is there some reason why progressives by and large are so non-technical, anti-science, and just plain New Agey? If you can't take the time to study what you're talking about then why contribute an article in the first place? Anthropogenic global warming is a serious issue, perhaps the most serious issue humanity has ever faced. It deserves to be treated as such. Misinforming the readers on this topic is as irresponsible as being a denialist.
I'm a progressive, I have a degree in engineering and another in environmental science. If I'm "anti-techology" it's for good reason, many of which are stated in this "know nothing" article, mainly having to due with the unknown consequences, the ability to put the "genie back in the bottle" and the control such technologies give the plutocrats over our existence. I sometimes wonder, though, at the blind acceptance and orgasmic delight most engineers have for any technology - a faith in it no different than a religion, itself.
Yeah, cell phones, for example, are a great idea - so Star Trek, but I don't want to risk brain cancer just to gab to someone anytime the whim strikes me, don't want to see towers proliferating across the landscape - especially if the radiation is cytotoxic, and I don't think the new necessity of them, due to the ostracism one experiences for not having one - thanks to marketiing, is worth the cost or the risk.
Acording to you, about 150 watts/m^2 of solar enegy reaches the surface of the earth - a good 150 times what the earth reradiates to space, after absorption in the statopshere, reflection by clouds, refraction and a few other processes. So to you, it seems, we have a vast excess and ample room to play with. As if the earth can toss away 149 watts/m^2 without a problem.
But you can't just drop this number, by increasing ground albedo, rig up some calculated new energy balance that is a pleasing number, and then call "all is well". That's because that solar insolation level is doing things beside making it uncomfortable for humans. It's driving net primary production - so now, for one, you need to figure out if the higher CO2 levels drives primary production up to compensate for lower sunlight. Are you up for it? It's probably doesn't, because without that photon, photosynthesis won't happen no matter how much CO2 there is.
What about the geochemical cycles - the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, what about atmospheric circulation and hydrospheric circulation? How about effects on soil chemistry of lowered visible photons and local ground temperatures?
All these systems are affected by not just the mean temperature, but the local insolation levels and gradients as well. Do you have the background to calculate the effects there, or just a "blind-faith" in technology and a planet as your test lab?
Here's a down-to-earth example even we progressive "new-agey" types can understand, so you should have no trouble. You have too many blankets on your bed, so you turn down the furnace, in the morning you find mold growing all over the walls and the window sills because as you were snuggled under 5 blankets in your 40F room, the excess water vapor condensed all over your double-pane windows and mold started growing. Damn those conservationists, if only I didn't geoengineer my bedroom!
We've have thousands of scientists working for 40 years now modelling the atmosphere and we can't figure out the actual consequences, just some gross-effects, of altering one driving variable - the [CO2] on the system, but you think any criticism of altering another major driver of climate - solar insolation - is "non-technical, anti-science, and just plain New Agey". And to think, if we had heeded the climate scientists 40 years ago, we wouldn't be in this mess now, and, in the end, those "dirty, fucking 'non-technical, anti-science, and just plain New Agey', hippies" were right!
Score one for "our" side!
So take your own advice: If you can't take the time to study what your are comnmenting on, turn the word processor off and pick up a book!
I'm not sure you followed my numbers about irradiance. We're getting an extra 1 watt per square meter that we'd like to get rid of into space. At the surface of the earth we get about 150 watts per square meter from the sun, thus artificially reflecting sunlight at the surface, in areas where it is not normally reflected much, would be very effective at making a dent in this extra 1 watt per square meter that we'd like to get rid of. If you could change 1 square meter from 0 visible light reflectance to 100% reflectance (for the sake of argument), that would offset 150 square meters of power coming in at the top of the troposphere. We're still talking about needing to reflect from an area of about 1,000 kilometers on a side, which is difficult to imagine actually being able to accomplish, but to argue that such approaches should not even be studied or considered is impossible to justify. And to group all such engineered responses to global warming under one broad umbrella is also not justifiable. This is especially true in light of two obvious facts: 1) The international community (and the U.S. in particular) is, unfortunately, not going to cut greenhouse gas emissions at anywhere near the level we need to offset catastrophe and 2) Even if no more greenhouse gases were emitted beginning today, we'd still be suffering from the long term consequences for decades or centuries to come from the CO2 we've already released into the atmosphere. So, not studying and considering CO2 sequestration and albedo enhancement would be utterly irresponsible in the face of the coming climate catastrophe.
Unrepentant technophiles like Billy will never acknowledge that their schemes are reckless gambles with the living systems of the Earth.
i mean, no other major technological or engineering endeavor launched by humans has ever spun out of control or spawned vast unforeseen consequences, so hey, let's reduce the sunlight hitting the Earth and see what happens!
No Billy, we need LESS massive human intervention in the living systems of the Earth, not new layers on top of the disasters we already hatched. We need humility, not your standard-issue boundless arrogance.
We should need less, and we might have needed less, but we might actually need more.
No need to cast aspersions at technophiles, as if being a technophobe is a better idea.
Not all technology is harmful, or 'unsustainable'. The best technologies are those that integrate seemlessly and beneficially into our lives. Nothing wrong with that.
Same thing with the technologies that might save us from a potential distaster. Just because ignorance, arrogance and bad technology have brought our world to the brink of disaster doesn't mean that certain good technology can't help us pull away from that precipice. And please don't accuse me of being a technocrat, or something else. I'm just speaking reason here.
These Geoengineering experiments may fall into a number of categories. Some effective, some not, some dangerous and harmful to humanity, some potentially could be our saving grace.
Best to not draw generalizations about things like technology, or even things like 'touchy feely' spiritualism (as another commenter did) before you really know what you're responding to.
Not all 'schemes are reckless gambles', though I myself hold with highest reverence the living systems of Earth. Certainly the main point of the article holds its own merit, but dismissing people that raising potentially valid points just because they don't outright reject technological approaches to problem solving seems very counter-productive imho.
SS,
Sorry to go off, please see my reply to vorpalmusic below.
Also, maybe you don't know Billy, but he is well known to long-time CD posters. He comes here to defend nukes. He's a one-note poster who defends nukes in every thread that critiques them. He loves big techno-industrial "solutions" and he dismisses anyone who offers critiques.
And i'm not about to agree that we need big techno-industrial solutions to problems caused by big techno-industrial systems. We need to reorient human systems, to adopt permaculture design principles in all our creative work and all our economic activity.
We need to accept the living systems of the Earth as the fundamental framework for our economy, our science, and our technology. We need to reject "free-market" capitalism (or any other totalizing human ideology) as the fundamental framework.
Again, this is realism. Our civilization HAS DESTABILIZED the living systems of the Earth. "Realistically" accepting the ideological and economic frameworks that have put us in this situation, is "realistically" pouring more fuel into the engine that is hurtling us ever-faster toward civilizational collapse.
I'm not familiar with him. And I am no friend of nuclear weapons (worst things on earth?).
RE "We need to reorient human systems, to adopt permaculture design principles in all our creative work and all our economic activity.
We need to accept the living systems of the Earth as the fundamental framework for our economy, our science, and our technology."
Amen to that.
RE: " We need to reject "free-market" capitalism (or any other totalizing human ideology) as the fundamental framework."
The natural force that capitalism represents is like a team of powerful horses. It must remain properly bridled and harnessed to maintain full control, and to ensure the carriage of state (I think a better metaphor than ship) doesn't go off the side of the cliff.
That is a very bad thing, but the horses themselves are not bad. Erratic, skittish, ready to charge, trample, even stampeed sometimes, but representing a natural force. One that needs to be worked with.
Of course, bad people can drive the carriage, and ride shotgun. They need to be removed, and replaced with good drivers, with valid destinations. But the horses do not. They need to stay (and shouldn't be replaced by a metaphorical internal combustion engine).
"You have too many blankets on your bed, so you turn down the furnace, in the morning you find mold growing all over the walls and the window sills because as you were snuggled under 5 blankets in your 40F room, the excess water vapor condensed all over your double-pane windows and mold started growing. Damn those conservationists, if only I didn't geoengineer my bedroom!"
What?? What?? Are you saying that running the furnace is an example of *not* geoengineering, and putting some extra blankets on when you are cold is?
True, the technofixes as mostly get rich quick schemes and each requires huge inputs of energy to get going. Still though the concept of re-capturing and sequestering some or all of the 100 billion tons of excess CO2 is essential in the long run.
One of the ideas is to produce mechanical trees that scrub CO2 and line the highways with them. Why not just let the roadsides grow organically rich grasslands. The potential rates of carbon sequestration due to improved range land management practices have been shown to rise from 50 to 150 (kilograms carbon per hectare per year). There's millions of hectares along our highways.
Then if farmers could make the transition to organic farming the landbase could, passively, become a significant sink or sequestration pool for greenhouse gasses, literally sucking excess greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and sequestering them safely in the soil, where they belong.
For one, grassland is not a net carbon sink. You'd need to reach the sucessional stage of tree growth to sink carbon. Then you'd need to cut all the trees down when they are mature and dump them into the deep oceans. That is because terminal stages of sucession are not net carbon sinks either.
As for sequestration, CO2, being the end product of exothermic reactions in the atmosphere, is a direct measure of the entropy increase of the process. It can't be removed without additional energy inputs that should, in the long run, make the removal irrelevant.
The best thing to do would have been to leave it in the ground in the first place.
How to remove it now? Trees, lots of fast growing trees, that will leverage sunlight as the "anti-entropy" agent. Then, as stated, dump these trees into the deep oceans when they reach the end of their growth periods.
This, however, is not without consequences. See, there is always a catch. The limiting nutrient in the biosphere is phosphorus and with all that carbon in the trees goes a large chunk of the phosphorus in the biosphere.
As an end note, the argument of growing algae in the oceans seems ridiculous. Sure maybe we can produce fast growing algae, but it will suck up nutrients, will need to be collected and sequestered somehow, a daunting process, to remove it from the food chain and the biopshere, or all that carbon won't be going anywhere either.
Either, way, we lose a lot of phosphorus from the biosphere in any biological sequestration method and in all methods we need to supply vast quatities of energy to collect all the entropy we've been adding to the system.
But surely, some of us will get rich along the way, and isn't that really the whole point!
Gee. Of course we could simply decrease our hoggish (not to offend my porcine brethren) consumption of fossil fuels. We could do this by increasing efficiency and by simply not producing so much useless junk. By living more simply, in other words. By living better.
But that would be too easy, wouldn't it? I mean, when you've got the chance to create a lot of CO2 and then invent complicated, demented methods to re-sequester it, who could pass up that opportunity? Thanks for the points raised here, phineas.
Also, while I appreciate the considerable thought and scholarship in your post, the assertion that grasslands are not a carbon sink is open to question. You may wish to follow the nugget of advice expressed earlier...
(I also find it hard to fathom why one would wish to ship trees to be dumped in the deep ocean, apart from the phosphorus considerations.)
http://www.biocity.cn/Column/UploadFiles_7536/200703/20070302104207896.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010111073831.htm
Well, the way we are headed only some kind of geoengineering will be able to save us from the runaway effects of global warming. You assume we have time enough and enlightenment enough that politicians will be able to act in the best long term interest of humanity. From what I see of the US Congress this is false. They will only acknowledge global warming when it is beyond our power to stop it by normal means- putting less CO2 in the air. Then they will preach about the Final Coming. It's either that or geoengineering.
From what I read, CO2 emissions are going to increase many times over as population increases and people want what is presented to them as "better lives". Technofixes are unlikely to compensate for the realisation of such aspirations and many could well cause further catastrophic disruption of the natural environment and systems.
We could all do well to reduce our individual impacts on the environment, but the only long-term solution is to reduce the human population of the world. The most equitable way of doing this is to institute a policy of one child per family, worldwide, for the next three or four generations - and to empower women. This option needs to enter global consciousness, but is still somewhat taboo.
Geoengineering is already in full blown use; it's called chemtrails.
Radical geoengineering is fully available for launch now and a refurbishment program is being accelarated today in the US, to keep it as their number one option.
The "nuclear winter climate change cure" is guaranteed to quickly abolish the main cause of climate change, this being the overgrowth of human civilization. It will cool the earth at the same time, although perhaps the cooling only occurs after the fires have gone out.
Nuclear deterrent (US defence trademark, all other attempted and alleged reproduction attempts will be vigorously persecuted, and will even carry out false accusations ) will send soot into the high atmosphere to block out the sun, and starve all plants, trees and crops. The ice cap and glaciers will grow back. The radiation and lack of food will kill all larger species. If anyone survives till conditions become habitable again, they will have the planet to themselves. Its just the thing the US has always wanted. No more expensive long drawn out wars.
If you do not want nuclear winter geo-engineering, talk to your military friendly congress representative, and arrange for nuclear disarmament soon. Letting things go on as they are makes it more likely, given time and genuine stupidity.
The slightly longer geo-engineering scenario that we do excel at in all respects, is called earth exhaustion. This is the one we are implementing today, and it has been accelarating at full strength for the past 35 years. This is the harvasting of each and every high quality energy, food and materials resource, and distributing at great energy cost to those who need it the least, and therefore waste it the most, and pollute the most.
As each of the raw stocks and flows seriously fail, those with the most weapons will ensure that their harvast continues while the increasing majority of losers dwindle into poverty beyond the possibility of sustained existance. This is the ultimate rationale for US empire. It explains the contempt it has in its wars on the poorest nations, its contempt for truth, plus its contempt for ameliorating climate change. It has the weapons and territory, so it only has to wait for the rest of the world to succumb. It wishes to become its own self chosen people who will survive the final reckoning.
The strongest definition of a US citizen is someone who thinks they deserve to inherit whats going to be left of the earth. The downside to the plan is that when earth exhaustion really begins to work, the economy will not support military extravaganzas like Iraq and Baddystan. The collapse will be in every over-consuming human civilisation everywhere, especially those that are currently foreign-resource dependent.
So what can we do but stop the incredible waste, and start using land, energy, nature and materials carefully as if it is our very last? When do we pull back to use the least necessary resources to support a health life? Before or after they are all gone?
Coal Oil and gas plus their carbon waste are limited now both at their sources and their carbon sinks. Nuclear power is not time, safety or cost competitive with Solar/renewable. Solar energy is forever, at least compared to the life expectancy of human history. Given enough time and collection, there is more available than all the humans ever to live will ever need, but possibly still less than our infinite want.
When I first heard of putting sulphuric acid in the stratosphere I couldn't help but wonder if that was the solution that was tried by the ancient Venusians!
Hello, fellow Montrealer.
You better hope that you're wrong about every single geoengineering tactic being worthless or harmful (and I believe you are). The world continues onward in its endless pace toward self-destruction. There isn't the slightest indication that the current levels of consumption will end, and many scientists believe the environment will basically be destroyed in the next 50 years even if we all stop right now.
Geoengineering may be the only hope left when that happens.
If i were taking odds:
The odds of space aliens saving us;
Are better than the odds of geoengineering saving us.
How you spend your money is of no concern to me.
For every technology that exists right now, there were thousands of people saying it would never happen.
Yes, and the results?
One of the results is that you and I are discussing the topic, and we don't even know where the other is in physical space. Another result is that you even understand the concept of environmental impact. You don't really believe you would understand what that is if we still lived in caves, do you? And yet our campfires and our cutting of trees would still be having their effects on that environment that we could not comprehend.
The fact is that climate change has already passed a critical point, and despite this sad attempt at caricature that passes for an article, geoengineering will also come to pass. Not all of the ideas can be so easily dismissed as the author, or you, pretend.
Let's be honest with each other. Your position is essentially that all technology is bad, yet without said technology you would not even know enough to be able to come to such a conclusion. Indeed, you may never have been born, because the survival of your ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years has been intimately tied in with the kind of technology that was available to them, whether that has been vitamin supplements or a specific technique for beating clothing against rocks in a river to rid themselves of parasites that could have weakened them.
I don't deny that there are terrible possibilities inherent in attempting to adjust the atmosphere. The fact remains, we ARE adjusting the atmoshpere, so the intelligent and responsible thing is to learn how to do it in a better way.
Your argument is akin to telling people to stop breathing so that they don't absorb any toxins from the air, toxins which will always be there because it is not even remotely possible to convince all the people in the world to cooperate well enough to assure the end of their release. You are preaching abstinence-only, and we all know how well that works.
Is this a perfect world? Not even close. But it won't get better by pretending that the problems aren't there.
You're free to mischaracterize my position. My position is not that "all technology is bad" or "problems aren't there." You are placing such words in my mouth.
My position is that human arrogance and intervention and engineering ARE the cause of the disastrous destabilization of the living Earth. My position is that to see this disastrously destabilized world, and then plan geoengineering projects to ameliorate the destabilization, is human arrogance multiplied. Cure the disease with more of the disease. It's madness.
Living into my sixth decade, watching the grand technological and engineering projects of civilization very predictably undermine the living systems that make our lives and projects possible, my position is that it is boringly predictable that the grand schemes we bring forth under the banner of heroic geoengineering will only further destabilize the living systems of the Earth.
You want heroic projects to save civilization and future generations? Practice permaculture, in which every human project is purposefully designed to work in harmony with natural living systems, and all surplus is shared or reinvested, never hoarded. Go about transforming the way humans live on Earth. Make our lives and our systems and our civilization life-positive, not death-delivering.
Pardon me, but f*#k these grandiose schemes. It is not "intelligent and responsible" that we will blow up the mountains and burn all the coal and pump all the oil and continue by whatever means necessary with our murderous wasteful monstrosity of a civilization of mega-death that we are all in the belly of. Please read all of today's Common Dreams articles.
What is "realistic" is STOPPING this practice of mega-death. Anything else is madness.
That's the problem that YOU are pretending is not there, that you want to solve with magical thinking about geoengineering that does nothing to address the toxic death machine that our present civilization is.
March ahead, seed the atmosphere, dust outer space, build carbon-eating machines, burn oil and coal and build weapons and fight wars and drive cars that outweigh you by a factor of ten and pave one percent, two percent, three percent of all land, slice all the habitat into tiny chunks and drive everywhere and mine everything and control all life forms in service to humanity and experience the extinction of ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent of all life forms but don't make your primary task stopping this death machine, make your primary task "realistically" protecting the giant game of extraction exploitation money death war. Oops we screwed up the planet, well don't stop what you're doing we'll go adjust the thermostat!
We will burn all the oil and coal, there is no "intelligent and responsible" way to imagine us stopping that so hey, we better do something about the fact that we will destroy us. Let's NOT stop burning oil and coal, that would be unthinkable, let's play games with the sun and the air! F*#king brilliant humans.
None of these observations make me any sort of technophobe. i'm a biophile, and the techno has to serve the bio. Science, and civilization, need to serve the living Earth.
I had no choice but to guess at your full position. You were attempting to pass off quips and one-liners as substantive arguments.
You, on the other hand, are wildly mischaracterizing my positions even though I have described them in more detail. You sound hysterical suggesting that I support the explosion of mountaintops and pumping all the remaining oil in the world. I do not.
Obviously permaculture (which by the way, is a technology) and living in tune with the environment would be better, but until you discover a way to compel all living humans to do that, it's just a "grandiose scheme" too. Since you're in your 60s, can you tell me how much success you guys have had in making progress on this front so far?
Wait, I forgot: None! That's why we're having this discussion.
Do you actually have a plan for compelling the entire world to do the right thing?
Even alternative power sources such as wind and solar leave their impacts on the environment. What I am advocating is merely learning about those impacts and seeking to minimize them in responsible ways.
One man in Siberia has a plan to introduce 1000 carribou to a small region of the snowy plains where they used to live but no longer do. The idea is that the snow is melting, and when it is gone, the sunlight that it reflects will further heat the earth. On the other hand, if carribou are constantly eating the grass down to nubs, the grasses make more shoots, spread further, and anchor and protect the snow. There is a tower collecting methane samples there, and this data is avidly followed by environmentalists all over the world. In this small, enclosed experiment, in a decade or less we will have hard data about one technology that will help counteract global warming. This is not driven by profit motive and does not seek to underpin any type of resource extraction.
It's a guy who cares about the world and is trying to help preserve it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40396941/ns/world_news-world_environment/
It's not all about shooting aluminum particles into the sky, despite the fever dreams of a lot people on this list. It's not all about profit-motive, and it's not all conducted in shadowy undisclosed locations by dark men hunched over frothing beakers that spit poison into the air.
My reply to webwalk is here as well, since he/she referred me to this part of the discussion anyway.
Good answers vorpal... and nice nym.
RE: "Obviously permaculture (which by the way, is a technology) and living in tune with the environment would be better, but until you discover a way to compel all living humans to do that"
Yup. Technology I definitely hope to see more of.
RE: "Even alternative power sources such as wind and solar leave their impacts on the environment. What I am advocating is merely learning about those impacts and seeking to minimize them in responsible ways."
Yes.
RE: "This is not driven by profit motive and does not seek to underpin any type of resource extraction.
It's a guy who cares about the world and is trying to help preserve it."
Yes.
I too am a biophile, and this is no contradiction to being a technophile for certain technologies.
And for technologies that do not well integrate with the environment: The answer is materials handling and recycling systems that ensure we are not destroying the ecosystem. It is possible to have the things we want, and need, and not concurrently destroy the planet.
Thank you. It's difficult to argue with people who refuse to be rational.
There's a guy here telling me that the introduction of carribou into the tundra for the specific purpose of keeping the ambient temperature lower does not qualify as geoengineering. Why? Because he can't argue with it; therefore he redefines it in his own terms.
Again, you seem to be arguing with someone else:
"Permaculture (which by the way, is a technology)..." Um, thanks for informing me that my reference to the technologies of permaculture is a reference to technologies. That was my point.
My point in pointing out the current technological practices that are destabilizing the Earth, is not to blame you personally for them, but to assert that anyone proposing "solutions" that do not address these practices, is proposing band-aids over gaping wounds. Step one is not to seek technological fixes that enable us to live with the vast ongoing destabilization; step one is to stop the major practices that are causing the destabilization. Jumping straight to massive geoengineering schemes is simply continuing on the path we are on. It is NOT addressing the problem, it is a desperate effort to address symptoms without addressing the problem.
And why do you request "a plan for compelling the entire world to do the right thing"? i point out that we are on the road to imminent civilizational collapse, and ecosystems collapse, and that the kind of geoengineering being proposed does absolutely zero to get us off this road, but in fact continues on this road, and your retort is to ask how i will become dictator of the world? Brilliant logic.
Being "in my sixth decade" means i'm in my 50s, not my 60s. Me not having yet turned civilization from its disastrous course, logically means you can belittle anything i say. Of course this "argument" can be used to dismiss anyone including you, since no one has turned civilization from its disastrous course, so we can righteously dismiss all criticism. Again, brilliant logic.
Reintroducing caribou is nice, although the article is not about efforts to restrain shifts in albedo through such permaculture-style efforts. The article is about - let me be blunt - arrogant and stupid ideas. If you feel a gut reaction to my calling the sort of schemes outlined in the article arrogant and stupid, before you retort at me, please question your own identification with the exploitive economic system that is the source of the problem of destabilized living systems and also the source of such proposed "solutions."
My point - and you are free to twist yourself into knots to avoid this - is that if we do not stop the race for Arctic fossil fuel resources that is underway, and stop the entire global resource war based in control of fossil fuels, and immediately put ourselves to the task of changing the civilizational infrastructure that is based on resource wars and control of and burning of fossil fuels, then your friend's caribou - as if this article were about your friend's caribou - do not have an ice cube's chance in hell of making a difference. That's realism.
"if we do not stop the race for Arctic fossil fuel resources that is underway, and stop the entire global resource war based in control of fossil fuels, and immediately put ourselves to the task of changing the civilizational infrastructure that is based on resource wars and control of and burning of fossil fuels,"
You're talking around me. Much research has already established that even if we did stop everything right now, it is already too late. This is not even to consider the bleeding obvious fact that it is not going to stop anyway. We are already doomed.
"Now what?" is the question that people who understand reality are asking themselves. And chanting over and over "we must stop" isn't going to help. The environment has gone well into positive feedback loop territory.
You don't have an argument, essentially.
"Much research has already established that even if we did stop everything right now, it is already too late... We are already doomed... The environment has gone well into positive feedback loop territory."
Absolutely true.
"This is not even to consider the bleeding obvious fact that it is not going to stop anyway..."
Absolute nonsense. It will stop, it is stopping. The only questions are just how and just when will it stop.
You have no argument. You argue that we must continue doing what we are doing because we will not stop. That's known as a tautology.
i'm done going around in circles with you.
No, you conflate geoengineering research with a wholesale continuation of all destructive practices that exist. That is a shameless strawman argument.
i do no such thing. i am saying that the top of our agenda should be to transform the activities that are killing the Earth and ourselves. Any proposal that does not include swift transformation of our murderous economy is magical thinking.
A search for geoengineering "solutions" that do not address the structural insanity in our economy industry and technology is worse than pointless. It serves as a search for a way to enable us to continue our insane murderous economy. You are free to insist that it does not, but it's not about your personal intentions, it is about how our economy works, on what basis, and in whose interests.
A search for geoengineering "solutions" is a distraction from addressing the utterly unfeasible structure of our economy. You are free to identify with this search as if it were some reasonable consensus effort, but get serious: who will lead this effort? What will the parameters be? The parameters will be set by the same interests that set the parameters for our insane murderous economy. Priority will be given to daft, costly, spectacular efforts to adjust the sunlight, the atmosphere, the reflectivity of the Earth. Permaculture and the precautionary principle will continue to be ignored and if necessary demonized, as "realists" prattle on about the necessity to launch untestable interventions in the largest systems that sustain life.
You are free to wallow in magical thinking. Please watch how this plays out and check back with me in ten years, if any of us are still alive.
Note i did not say it would never happen.
i said it would be disastrous.
As I've just said above, the arguments against learning about this are equivalent to abstinence-only "education." They are put forth by people who don't really understand a lot about the topic and are not merely content to be ignorant about it themselves--they demand that everyone else be ignorant of it too.
Nonsense. That's your caricature.
Bullshit. People are just seeing what the dangers of these projects are, and that's not ignorance, but your seemingly primitive belief in technology is.
Your whole claim is idiotic: geoengineering and geoengineering projects are not really a secret and someone who writes about its dangers on CD isn't exactly in any position to spread ignorance, compared to the number of articles in the mainstream press ffs. Ignorance can't be spread by voicing dissenting opinion, but it's fostered by blind belief.
Also, just because your job is in technology (like mine), it doesn't exactly mean your thinking is more scientific, materialist, objective, far sighted or whatever than someone's working in education or social sciences or anywhere else. (Read David F. Noble's excellent book on "the Religion of Technology" btw, it's a pretty humbling read and it puts all these ideas to rest pretty quickly.) In fact, for people working in technology, the structural irrationality (or rationality :-/) behind it is less apparent than if you only look at it as a component of society, a tool serving a purpose.
As I said: geoengineering may well be the only solution, but it's a solution for a problem that was created by the same type of thinking, so it's certainly not a solution that should be controlled by business or any other type of private power. In short, Bill Gates and the rest of the retarded evil technocratic shits should stop messing with the world, they've fucked up enough of it already anyway.
If you read my positions above, I'd like to hear you say something substantive about that.
Not every geoengineering research is about spewing aluminum particles into the air. Nor are they all carried out by corporations. I have given one example of a more responsible study being conducted.
You guys are making a ridiculous straw man and failing to discuss the issue with any substance.
You mean your position that people against geoengineering are all dumb? Or the other point, that everyone against geoengineering is against technology en bloc? o_O
I'm not against the concept itself, but its hubris and the blind belief associated with it. I also dislike its philosophical basis and inevitable conclusion - that man should have control, total control, over the earth, and every aspect of the biosphere, because that's what geoengineering is about. There might be no other solution, but what happens after these solutions should not be a business decision.
And seriously, introducing a thousand caribou in Siberia is not exactly geoengineering. Jesus.
"And seriously, introducing a thousand caribou in Siberia is not exactly geoengineering. Jesus."
If it changes the environment, yes it is. You don't get to make up the definition yourself just so you can paint the whole of it with a broad brush.
In this case, every technology ever is geoengineering /o\
Your arguments started out childish and have devolved from there. Here is a definition from Wikipedia: "The modern concept of geoengineering (or climate engineering) is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions."
First of all, your black and white categorization that every technology affects the atmosphere is vapid and inaccurate. Secondly, geoengineering requires that the technology's INTENT be to affect the atmosphere positively.
If you don't have anything of substance to say, please don't waste my time with another response.
Diana,
I'll ask you the same question that I asked you before, which you've so far declined to answer:
This year the temperature in LA was 114. Pine bark beetles have destroyed well over half the standing pine in BC, and now much of the Rockies, and--unabated by cold snaps--stand to march on the rest of our northern pine forests. Russia had to suspend wheat exports when their breadbasket burned this summer-- no doubt causing significant starvation. Pakistani floods, disappearing glaciers.
Is there a point at which you would consider supporting the research the world's scientists (Royal Society, NAS, and now it seems the IPCC) are calling for to better understand whether these options can help us reduce the risks of climate change? How bad does it have to get before you'll admit it's better for us to have more information here? Do we need to lose our breadbasket here in Canada and the US as well? How many wars and how much mass starvation would result from that?
Geoengineering techniques (which are all quite different from each other) cannot be compared against the baseline of the world the way it is (which is probably scary enough) they must be compared against world the way it will be in 25-50 years with all the warming we are facing added in.
Your message is essentially this: I know better than the scientists what the outcome will be.
On what technical basis can you make that assertion?
Dan Whaley
CEO, Climos
The problem is, your kind of people have fucked up the planet on a purely technical basis, which means that you (not necessarily meaning engineers and scientists, but definitely CEOs and CTOs and the rest) should have no say in what should be done and how. You (we) have done enough damage already but haven't ever solved any reasonably complex problem in a sustainable fashion.
To put this in a bit better perspective: what kind of technical basis is there for our overconsumption? For suburbanisation? For militarisation of earth and space? For genetic engineered monocultures? For a culture based on marketing and PR? For an overfinancialised economy?
The common point in these things is idiotic overuse and dependence on and basically worship of technology: respectively, division of labour and automatisation; personal transport; nuclear technology, robotics, rocketry, and anything else that can blow shit up; genetical engineering and chemical based agriculture; modern psychology; and finally computers and mathematics. These are technical issues loved and championed by technologists - all creating much larger problems that they pretend to solve. It's not technology itself that's fucked up, it's the people who believe in it as if it were the word of God, as if just using it somehow divinely elevated you above the masses who just don't get it, who're just stupid unevolved luddites and technophobes.
Technology is technology: a tool, to be used by humans. Science is to be used for gaining knowledge and understanding reality; democracy is to be used for making decisions; technology should be completely subservient to implementing these decisions, not what drives them.
Also, noone in their right mind should believe that you guys are just about gathering knowledge and information. There's never been anything like that. There's no way that businesses who purport to avoid climate change will do it altruistically and will not abuse any of the power and leverage they can get from it. That's ridiculous.
So your contention is that every single study in the world about altering the environment is carried out by monolithic corporatoins and driven by profit motive?