Scientists Blocking out the Sun

Ashtangiman writes to tell us The New York Times is running an article about geoengineering in which many solutions to global warming include decreasing the amount of sunlight that the planet sees. The ideas are not new, many have been around for quite some time, however they have been relegated to the fringes of science and many have never been published because of this. From the article: "Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding."

and....

[zxnos]

...this impacts floura/fauna how? last i checked a lot of stuff here needed the sun to live... start shortening the growing season by enough to cool the planet. sounds like a bad idea.

more insurance!

[Anonymous Coward]

it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding ...and what will be our insurance policy against what happens when you fuck around with with nature on a massively global scale?

Blotting out the source of almost all energy for life on Earth doesn't seem smart to me, perhaps we should be working on ways to adapt to new and changing environments instead of trying hopelessly to preserve this one exactly the way it is now.

Re:and....

[Anonymous Coward]

They already do; Look at d.c.. Can you not feel your life being sucked out?

Flawed assumptions...

[__aaclcg7560]

Seems like a lot of people want to avoid the one fact that sticks out like a sore thumb. Just as nature adapts to the environmental effects of humans, humans need to adapt to the environmental effects of nature. Instead of trying to stop the ice caps from melting, maybe it's time to move the houses on the shorelines back a mile or two and put in better flood control.

Trees Hug Back

[Doc Ruby]

What's wrong with spending that money on engineering to reforest the huge deforested areas of every continent? Just replanting the native vegetation sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere, increases energy absorption by the greener surface, and produces material to consume. And lets the plants do all the hard work. Without another risky meddling in the poorly-understood, vastly complex feedback system we all depend on.

Instead we should blot out the Sun? That's insane, and therefore even more likely to burn us harder and faster.

Holy Cow...

[chipset]

Some people just don't get it. Perhaps the earth is supposed to get warmer. What happens when they decide block the sun and the earth cools too fast, or photosynthesis doesn't occur like it's supposed to?

The same people who can't get beyond the Rule of Unintended Consequences want to something like this?

Can I take the next ship to another planet now? Either let it evolve or destroy it, but try not to do both.

Why is it the same people who love evolution are the same people who want to keep everything the same?

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Re:Trees Hug Back

[Doc Ruby]

Currently participating in the carbon cycle is not the problem. Carbon clogging the atmosphere is the problem. Reforestation is an extremely effective way to sequester the carbon [google.com] out of the atmosphere, where it's safe. Without expending much energy to clean up the pollution. In fact, absorbing lots of warming energy in the sequestration process instead.

It's nontrivial, but less nontrivial than leaving the CO2 in the air, leaving the deforested areas bare, or messing with the basic source of practically all energy used by Earth's life, including us.

Re:Flawed assumptions...

[russotto]

Seems like a lot of people want to avoid the one fact that sticks out like a sore thumb. Just as nature adapts to the environmental effects of humans, humans need to adapt to the environmental effects of nature. Instead of trying to stop the ice caps from melting, maybe it's time to move the houses on the shorelines back a mile or two and put in better flood control.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw

Because people don't like change

[Sycraft-fu]

You can see that in all facets of life, and thus in weather as well. However the weather used to be that's "normal" in the minds of most people so when it changes in any way that's "abnormal" and thus a problem. Even if they intellectually understand it most people don't really grasp that the only constant on the world is change.

I will say that such a plan, as a last resort isn't a bad idea because regardless of what the Earth would naturally do we want to keep it habitable for humans. The Earth may go through a natural cycle that would kill us off and we want to stop that, if we can.

However in general we shouldn't screw with things like this because it's clear we have a very poor graps of how climate actually works.

Re:So did Highlander 2 (was Re:One comment.)

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find there never was a Highlander 2.

It was just a collective hallucination. We're better now. We just have to keep telling ourselves that, OK?

Re:Warming

[Gnavpot]

Note that even over the 14-year sunspot cycle [nasa.gov] the variation is less than 1%.

Huh? When I was a child, that cycle was 11 years. If it is 14 years now, something is definitely changing.

And the level of ignorance is also astounding

[TheAxeMaster]

To think that dumping billions of tons of CO2 (and slightly less H20) into the atmosphere over the last 30 years alone (rough calculations indicate around 130 billion tons from early 70s to early 00s), while simultaneously deforesting much of the world's forests as fast as they can be cut, has little to no effect on the environment is the height of ignorance. CO2, the #2 greenhouse gas out there, right with H20 (which also comes from that gas combustion). And lets not forget that even modern gas engines aren't 100% efficient, so there's all that waste heat and energy dumped into the atmosphere that was previously buried underground. And this is only considering gasoline produced in the past 30 years. Figure the long-term gas use/production, not to mention coal and natural gas, and it is enough to make you sick (if you care, that is).
 
What we need are real solutions to undo what we've done and at least bring the global temperature down a bit. Remember that article about how the temp is as high as it has ever been for as long as we have accurate records? Yeah, what we're doing is real, you can feel it when you walk outside. Blocking the sun just gives us an excuse to keep doing as we've been doing, not to mention F'ing up the ecosystem in the process.

Re:Warming

[got2liv4him]

I am still looking for a reputable scientist that believes in global warming, and isn't caught up in the hype.

Whatever

[xstonedogx]

Do you also advocate moving away from places like Canada and Norway rather than building heated homes?

In the context of humans adapting to nature vs. adapting nature to humans, there is no fundamental difference between preventing the icecaps from melting and putting in better flood control. We are still adapting nature to our needs (i.e. controlling nature), not the other way around. In fact, preventing the ice caps from melting is an example of better flood control.

Re:Warming

[Morinaga]

Here's another citing NASA scientists: http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17977 [heartland.org]

The planet Mars is undergoing significant global warming, new data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) show, lending support to many climatologists' claims that the Earth's modest warming during the past century is due primarily to a recent upsurge in solar energy.

A sad indicator

[treppie]

We finally start to recognize the negative consequences of some change that's happening in nature. There happens to be a preponderance of evidence that certain actions of human society are responsible for this change. So do we all say "Hey, I guess we need to change our habits" and try to fix the problem at it's most probable source? No. Instead, some of us say "Well, if messing around with part of our ecosystem without having a clue what we were doing got us into this mess, then, by golly, maybe messing around with a different part of our ecosystem without having a clue what we are doing will get us out of it!" This really is a sad indicator of human psychology. Even when we recognize our problem, and even when we recognize that we our the source of that problem, we try to fix things by doing anything other than changing ourselves. Mess with the oceans, mess with the clouds, put sun-shades in space, but certainly don't make humans alter their behavior or make society adapt to a new way of meeting our energy needs!

Re:Of course, the next problem is..

[Ramble]

Then the entire planet would be tinted green, what would photoshop junkies do?

Re:Warming

[edis]

Sun provided Earth with energy for a long, long time. This energy was captured and accumulated in certain important degree.

Today, man is looking out for more and more of it (energy), largely to make more and more of shorter lifespan stuff in China, also to satisfy increasing standard daily-comfort-set for expanding participants of global well-being. This wealth is not diamonds and gold - it is very prosaic, material; manufacturing and using this ever growing mass of shorter lifespan comfort tools is accompanied with releasing significant increase of formerly accumulated energy.

Unfortunately, comfort expectations themselves tend to increase, and almost every person would try to extend and protect comfort, he could achieve. Also, mobility, global tendencies in todays world blur former boundaries of who was capable to have what. The same, not long before poor, China is increasingly serving world to get in return chance to convert nearly each fourth human being into consumer of certain sort. Not much against that, principally, but we have to be very careful and insightful to run all this process so, that mankind wouldn't be sorry after a while. People have quite developed brain and elaborated communication tools - all this could be useful.

As a footer note: reading article I was kicked by this idea, that if melting ice is very first and noticable problem to overcome, perhaps focusing on how to protect this very certain geographically and physically stuff could give us time to think over all the other concerns.

Re:Holy Cow...

[QuantumG]

Riiiiiight. Better to modify ourselves to the environment than modifying the environment to ourselves. Oh wait, no, making the world the way we want is what being human is all about.

Fuckin' Luddites.

Re:Found one: Stephen Hawking.

[jelle]

"Sure we do. I definitely would not contradict Steven Hawking in his field of expertise. But global climatology is an area where he's a layman just like the rest of us."

You can say what you want, but a scientist and author as bright as Mr Hawking is not a layman in anything that he talks about as a speaker at a conference.

Do you think that a thorough understanding of math, physics, chemistry, and astronomy, let's say "the universe" has nothing to do with climate? And when a highly intelligent scientist such as Mr Hawking talks about it, he doesn't know what he's talking about?

Wake up and smell the coffee.

A lot of fields of science are quite strongly related. For example, the famous physicist Niels Bohr was definitely not a layman in other fields, say chemistry.

Re:Trees Hug Back

[Doc Ruby]

Where are these studies that show that more woods don't really take up all that much CO2? The more trees are made of more CO2!

Sure a lot of CO2 is sucked up by the ocean. So what? I don't encourage marine cultivation to sequester carbon because the marine ecology is much too misunderstood to mess with today. What we do know shows how fragile it is presently, under great stress from the Greenhouse (eg. fishing to extinction, vast dead coral reefs from temperature rises). But we do have quite a lot of experience cultivating forests, and controlling growth on land. When all we're doing is replanting existing species in their native locations.

I read your post, and all it clearly contains is FUD - in every direction. Reforestation is a safe way to sequester the CO2 pollution. It doesn't need any more FUD than already put out by the petrofuel companies and their cronies.