Last-ditch solutions to halt climate change.

[Lord of Cats]

This is my first post in a debate forum so please bear with me if I screw up.

Article

Block the sun? Dam the sea? Last-ditch solutions to halt climate change if all else fails. What do you guys think? Feasible? Worth while? Or just plain silly?

[Phier]

For popular science that article just seemed, well awfully poor, which is saying a lot being how bad popsci can be at times, so I look and find...

Damon Tabor is a Brooklyn, New York-based journalist who has traveled widely in Asia, South America, and Europe and covered subjects ranging from surviving kidnapping in a failed state to search and rescue robotics to the the last outpost of Manhattan's old Bowery neighborhood. He holds a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and Backpacker.

So a freelance non-science writer and its at least understandable then how horrible it is.

There have been very fanciful ideas to "stop climate change" exposed in the past and now. One plan in the late 70s was to cover the arctic in soot so it would absorb more sunlight to warm the planet. Now its rather obvious why that plan from the 70's (and the article I read had the journalist lamenting how governments would never do something useful like that but ignore the "problem") would not have worked out very well thinking about today.

And thats the problem with crazy radical plans to alter the environment. We really have NO idea what we are doing. The cure can be worse than the disease.

[Blau&Gruen]

We should save as many as possible life forms and document every thing we can. Anything else is out of range of what humans can do. Well, try to keep your carbon dioxide footprint low that's something what everyone can do.

[Lord of Cats]

@Phier: so in the future I should check who wrote the article to see if he/she knows what he/she is talking about? Makes sense. I've should of done that. I agree that we really have no idea what we are doing and the cure is sometimes worse than the disease. Why did people want to warm up the planet in the 70s? Wasn't the concept of global warming founded in the 70s and so wouldn't people want to cool down the planet like they do today? So if popular science isn't so great, what other science magazines/websites should I look at that would be better? Thanks for the feedback.

[Phier]

@Phier: so in the future I should check who wrote the article to see if he/she knows what he/she is talking about? Makes sense. I've should of done that. I agree that we really have no idea what we are doing and the cure is sometimes worse than the disease. Why did people want to warm up the planet in the 70s? Wasn't the concept of global warming founded in the 70s and so wouldn't people want to cool down the planet like they do today? So if popular science isn't so great, what other science magazines/websites should I look at that would be better? Thanks for the feedback.

When I was a wee lad it wasn't global warming that was going to kill us all. It was global cooling. I was taught about it in early grade school. By the mid 90's there would be MASS famine and advancing ice sheets again. Or not, as we can see. Global warming as a topic didn't start to take off until the 80's.

As for what science magazines to read, thats a fair question that can't really be answered. The only way I'd do it is read everything you can, the good the bad the ugly, read what others call junk, but approach it all with a critical eye.

[Timefool]

I know this is off-topic but I just realized last-ditch solution and Latter-Day Saints have the same initials.

[GrnEyedDvl]

This is my first post in a debate forum so please bear with me if I screw up.

Article

Block the sun? Dam the sea? Last-ditch solutions to halt climate change if all else fails. What do you guys think? Feasible? Worth while? Or just plain silly?

Since you asked, just plain silly.

If man didnt exist, the climate on this planet would still change. This is one thing you hardly ever see the global warming crowd mention. They want to accuse man and his inventions of all this stuff, but they never give a baseline (because they cant) for a true comparison.

For instance if you look at this graph by NASA, it claims the average ocean temperature has changed about .8 of a degree Celcius since 1980.

So lets accept that as gospel for the sake of this argument.

How much would it have changed if man didnt exist? We KNOW it changes, as we have had a couple of ice ages, a mini ice age, and periods where half of the world was tropical, all before man climbed out of the ooze. In fact if you use the ice core studies that the global warming crowd is so fond of citing, you can clearly see temperature changes over a 400,000 year period. With slow inclines, then sharp declines, then slow inclines again. And you can see the same change in carbon dioxide levels, and in dust levels.

Its a natural cycle.

[Ember]

Long time lucker here, compelled into my first post.

First, a quick response to the OP: Geoengineering is an interesting topic. I think we will eventually reach the point where we will seriously have to consider one of the more feasible methods outlined in the article, because there's certainly no appetite for prevention. There's no way to know the full consequences of our actions before we do so, though, and that would be an experiment that would likely be irreversible. I'd be deeply, deeply uneasy using any one of those methods. In fact, I'd be downright opposed. It wouldn't surprise me if we start seriously considering it, though.

@Phier: so in the future I should check who wrote the article to see if he/she knows what he/she is talking about? Makes sense. I've should of done that. I agree that we really have no idea what we are doing and the cure is sometimes worse than the disease. Why did people want to warm up the planet in the 70s? Wasn't the concept of global warming founded in the 70s and so wouldn't people want to cool down the planet like they do today? So if popular science isn't so great, what other science magazines/websites should I look at that would be better? Thanks for the feedback.

Personally, the best place to go is always the scientific literature itself. Sadly scientific journalism these days is usually piss poor. Probably due to all these journalists having degrees in, well, journalism, and not science.

When I was a wee lad it wasn't global warming that was going to kill us all. It was global cooling. I was taught about it in early grade school. By the mid 90's there would be MASS famine and advancing ice sheets again. Or not, as we can see. Global warming as a topic didn't start to take off until the 80's.

That may have been what you were taught, Phier, but I'm afraid it's not entirely true. Global cooling was a concern for some of the scientific community, yes, but the sort of consensus which has grown up around global warming in the intervening period simply didn't exist in those days. In response to this claim, so often made by amateur skeptics, that the science of climatology has made a 180-degree turn since the 1970s, a literature review was conducted in 2008 and published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (download full text). It's there to read in full if you like, but the key conclusion is as follows;

"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales."

In particular I would like to draw your attention to table 1 in the paper, reproduced below;



So that's 7 - 42 to global warming. A respectable rugby score in anyone's book.

Since you asked, just plain silly.

If man didnt exist, the climate on this planet would still change. This is one thing you hardly ever see the global warming crowd mention. They want to accuse man and his inventions of all this stuff, but they never give a baseline (because they cant) for a true comparison.

For instance if you look at this graph by NASA, it claims the average ocean temperature has changed about .8 of a degree Celcius since 1980.

So lets accept that as gospel for the sake of this argument.

How much would it have changed if man didnt exist? We KNOW it changes, as we have had a couple of ice ages, a mini ice age, and periods where half of the world was tropical, all before man climbed out of the ooze. In fact if you use the ice core studies that the global warming crowd is so fond of citing, you can clearly see temperature changes over a 400,000 year period. With slow inclines, then sharp declines, then slow inclines again. And you can see the same change in carbon dioxide levels, and in dust levels.

Its a natural cycle.

That's a terrible non-sequitur. If you've found that the "global warming crowd" doesn't like to talk about natural climate change, then you've not been talking to the informed part of that crowd, and have certainly not looked into the science yourself. If you had, you would know that it is a well-established fact that climate changes naturally, and the causes are often well understood. The 400,000 year cycle you cite, for example, is related to orbital eccentricity, and is one of the Milankovitch cycles that have been the predominant driver of climatic change through the most recent geological epochs. Climate can also change naturally through a change in insolation, in planetary albedo, a catastrophic event such as a meteorite impact or, yes, a change in the strength of the greenhouse effect.

Just because climate changes naturally, however, it does not follow that this current change is natural. The only way to induce climate change is to alter the Earth's energy balance - the climate system must be forced externally; i.e., one of the factors listed above has to change before the Earth warms up or cools down. Such a change cannot be forced internally; the climate does not intrinsically switch between periods of warmth and cold. Therefore, it is fairly easy to conduct a process of elimination to figure out which factor is forcing the change. There has been no correlation between insolation and global average temperatures since the middle of the last century - as irradience has declined, temperatures have increased. Planetary albedo has not reduced significantly; at least, not before the current warming began. There has been no supervolcanic eruption or significant bolide impact in the past 150 years. Therefore, we're left with only one possibility: the greenhouse effect is initiating the change, and indeed this is corroborated by data collected over a fifty year period by stations all across the world which all show the same thing: concentrations of greenhouse gases, in particular CO₂, increasing.

So yes, if man wasn't here, the climate would still change. However, the weight of evidence suggests that it wouldn't be changing now. Instead, we'd be sitting in a distinctly uninteresting period in Earth's climate history, until the Milankovitch cycles take over again and plunge the Earth back into an ice age some 16,000 years from now.

[Bolkonsky]

Since you asked, just plain silly.

If man didnt exist, the climate on this planet would still change. This is one thing you hardly ever see the global warming crowd mention. They want to accuse man and his inventions of all this stuff, but they never give a baseline (because they cant) for a true comparison.

For instance if you look at this graph by NASA, it claims the average ocean temperature has changed about .8 of a degree Celcius since 1980.

So lets accept that as gospel for the sake of this argument.

How much would it have changed if man didnt exist? We KNOW it changes, as we have had a couple of ice ages, a mini ice age, and periods where half of the world was tropical, all before man climbed out of the ooze. In fact if you use the ice core studies that the global warming crowd is so fond of citing, you can clearly see temperature changes over a 400,000 year period. With slow inclines, then sharp declines, then slow inclines again. And you can see the same change in carbon dioxide levels, and in dust levels.

Its a natural cycle.

I've actually heard scientists say we're going towards an ice age, if anything.

Fact is the earth's temperature changes naturally. I thought NASA destroyed most of the global warming argument anyways.

[Armatus]

I've actually heard scientists say we're going towards an ice age, if anything.

Fact is the earth's temperature changes naturally. I thought NASA destroyed most of the global warming argument anyways.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

Yeah a totally non-biased article there lmao...

[Lord of Cats]

Earth's climate change is certainly a natural cycle. I knew from what I read that the Earth has gone through several periods of warm (tropics) and cold (ice ages) as GrnEyedDvl pointed out. I never put my own opinion on here about the article. I'll do that now. I think it's silly and not currently feasible to alter the Earth's entire climate. Those are just fanciful ideas in that article. And as Phier and GrnEyedDvl have said, we shouldn't be bothering about it and should just leave it all alone.

[Denny Crane!]

The reality or not of Global Warming is irrelevant. Employment and Growth will always be more important and carbon waste will always increase as long as populism demands it furthermore until there are viable sollutions for energy carbon waste will NEVER decrease.

Fortunately every week brings forward a new idea being worked on for battery storage, new efficiencies in renewables and more news on further efficient improvements in hydrogen catalysts and artificial photosynthesis for hydrogen production.

Science will save the day. Government action will not.

[Aanker]

A good series of videos on the matter was made by this guy on Youtube with a British accent. Extremely dry voice, mind you, but his presentation was astonishingly good:

http://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA4F0994AFB057BB8

A playlist worth checking out.

Furthermore, in relation to what Bolkonsky said about the supposedly imminent ice age:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=plpp&v=kmECHrOcFlc

But my impression has been, Youtube videos aside, that the majority of scientists support the theory that humans are the basic reason for the ongoing climate change. As an earlier poster wrote, climate just does not change arbitrarily - it is, rather, the result of one or several processes or events. Some people doubt that humans could actually have an impact on the climate at all, but it should then be noted that small ocean-living bacteria threw the world into mass extinction events some 2 (?) billion years ago when they unwittingly produced more oxygen than could be used up in chemical reactions on Earth's surface.

[Ulyaoth]

We're already doomed so why bother, everyone go buy yourself a camaro and have fun.

[Aanker]

We're already doomed so why bother, everyone go buy yourself a camaro and have fun.

I prefer them Humvees, but I suppose once I get to that point in life I'll have to invest in one or two additional cars just to keep things varied.