Scientists Blocking out the Sun 428
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."
One comment. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One comment. (Score:2, Funny)
Here is definitive proof, at last, (Score:3, Funny)
Re:One comment. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One comment. (Score:2)
If I remember correctly, I think Suzanne Summers did the voice of the blonde pussycat on that show. Was Casey Kasem a voice on there too? I know he was shaggy on Scooby Doo..but, I think he was like the manager on Josie too?
Re:One comment. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One comment. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it is about creating artificial scarcity for a naturally abundant resource - sunlight - so you can then sell it at premium prices. Imagine a giant shader that only lets enough sunlight through for plants to grow if the owner of a field paid a suitable extortion price.
And if you think that this is unlikely, just watch what kind of laws the copyright conmen have gotten through. After all, it is only right that the
Re:One comment. (Score:5, Funny)
Smithers: Well, Sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies: the Elementary School, the local tavern, the old age home...you must be very proud.
Burns: [stuffing money into his wallet] No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy...the sun.
Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing...block it out!
[another button raises a shield over the model town]
Smithers: Good God!
Burns: Imagine it, Smithers: electrical lights and heaters running all day long!
Smithers: But Sir! Every plant and tree will die, owls will deafen us with incessant hooting...the town's sundial will be useless. I don't want any part of this project, it's unconscionably fiendish.
Burns: I will not suffer your insubordination. There has been a shocking decline in the quality and quantity of your toadying, Waylon. And you will fall into line, now!
Smithers: [pained] No...no, Monty, I won't. Not until you step back from the brink of insanity.
Burns: I'll do no such thing. You're fired!
Burns: [laughing] Take that, Bowlerama!
[stomp] Take that, Convenience Mart!
[stomp] Take that, Nuclear Power Plan --
[stomp] oh, fiddlesticks.
So did Highlander 2 (was Re:One comment.) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So did Highlander 2 (was Re:One comment.) (Score:4, Insightful)
It was just a collective hallucination. We're better now. We just have to keep telling ourselves that, OK?
Highlander Highlander 2 Highlander 3 (Score:3, Funny)
I was trying to get Keanu's butt out of my mind....thx man...thx.
Re:One comment. (Score:4, Funny)
Screw this, I'm going to Vegas to get drunk and married!
Alpha Centauri to the rescue! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Alpha Centauri to the rescue! (Score:3, Funny)
Plasma shards would be cool though. Best part of course is that if we increase the shade too much, we can just melt the polar ice caps a bunch!
"Nothing for you to see here." (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
slashdot already did it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:slashdot already did it... (Score:3, Informative)
-molo
Warming (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Warming (Score:5, Interesting)
O/t:-your ID/sig (Score:2)
(I'm guessing/hoping you're also a fan)
Re:Warming (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Warming (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Warming (Score:5, Informative)
"In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by
The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does."
Note that he doesn't claim that changes in the Sun's energy output have caused most of the observed global warming, just that such changes could explain global warming.
soviet solar scientists (Score:3, Interesting)
The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev of the Irkutsk Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics think that recent warming is directly tied to the sunspot cycle and the planet will soon start cooling again. They are so sure of this that they accepted a $10,000 wager [guardian.co.uk] to that effect with climate scientist James Annan. The bet is that the
Re:Warming (Score:5, Informative)
There's a good week's worth of reading in there, and I am far from finished. But it is quite informative. Really, the only question is when will this become a problem. Because even if you eliminate mankind, the earth is in a warm cycle, and historically, those cycles tend to wipe out major organisms.
Re:Found one: Stephen Hawking. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Warming (Score:3, Informative)
And speaking of effects on Earth's temperature, if it weren't for greenhouse effect, the average temperature of the Earth would be quite a bit colder (close to freezing) -- and water vapor contributes far more to that greenhouse effect than does CO2. (This is the reason that humid climates are warmer at n
Re:Warming (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I am pretty sure that Martian global warming is caused by those two little SUVs [nasa.gov] we have driving around up there.
Re:Warming (Score:2)
Re:Warming (Score:4, Funny)
Think of the effects this will have on the Buggalo!
Re:Warming (Score:3, Funny)
Totally not New (Score:5, Funny)
The only problem is, last time we simulated it, humanity ended up enslaved by robots. [warnerbros.com]
Re: Totally not New (Score:2)
Yeah, Mr. Burns did it on an episode of The Simpsons.
Reg. Required / Article Text (Score:5, Informative)
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said the focus should be on reducing greenhouse gases and preventing global warming in the first place.
But now, in a major reversal, some of the world's most prominent scientists say the proposals deserve a serious look because of growing concerns about global warming.
Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.
"We should treat these ideas like any other research and get into the mind-set of taking them seriously," said Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.
The plans and proposed studies are part of a controversial field known as geoengineering, which means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability. Dr. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist, will detail his arguments in favor of geoengineering studies in the August issue of the journal Climatic Change.
Practicing what he preaches, Dr. Cicerone is also encouraging leading scientists to join the geoengineering fray. In April, at his invitation, Roger P. Angel, a noted astronomer at the University of Arizona, spoke at the academy's annual meeting. Dr. Angel outlined a plan to put into orbit small lenses that would bend sunlight away from earth -- trillions of lenses, he now calculates, each about two feet wide, extraordinarily thin and weighing little more than a butterfly.
In addition, Dr. Cicerone recently joined a bitter dispute over whether a Nobel laureate's geoengineering ideas should be aired, and he helped get them accepted for publication. The laureate, Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, is a star of atmospheric science who won his Nobel in 1995 for showing how industrial gases damage the earth's ozone shield. His paper newly examines the risks and benefits of trying to cool the planet by injecting sulfur into the stratosphere.
The paper "should not be taken as a license to go out and pollute," Dr. Cicerone said in an interview, emphasizing that most scientists thought curbing greenhouse gases should be the top priority. But he added, "In my opinion, he's written a brilliant paper."
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.
"A lot of us have been saying we don't like the idea" of geoengineering, he said. But he added, "We need to think about it" and learn, among other things, how to distinguish sound proposals from ones that are ineffectual or dangerous.
Many scientists still deride geoengineering as an irresponsible dream with more risks and potential bad side effects than benefits; they call its extreme remedies a good reason to redouble efforts at reducing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. And skeptics of human-induced global warming dismiss geoengineering as a costly effort to battle a mirage.
Even so, many analysts say the prominence of its new advocates is giving the field greater visibility and credibility and adding to the likelihood that global leaders may one day consider taking such emergency steps.
"People used to say, 'Shut up, the world isn't read
Of course, the next problem is.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Off hand, all the solutions (CO2 sequestering,etc) that allow us to keep our oil/coal dependancies will probably come back to bite us. Far better to bite the bullet now, and switch to nukes(fission and fusion) and alternatives.
If global warming hasn't started yet... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:If global warming hasn't started yet... (Score:2)
I should caution you that the hot air coming from your post is CO2.
Oh yeah, that's exactly what needs to be done... (Score:4, Funny)
Climate Control (Score:2)
Now I'm off to read TFA, and see whether I'm on-topic or not
Re:Climate Control (Score:2)
Better late than never, I suppose, although a true slashdotter never bothers to RTFA. After all, it's so much more fun commenting when you have no idea what's going on other than the (usually inaccurate) summary.
Insurance policy? (Score:2)
Great... (Score:3, Funny)
Finally... (Score:4, Funny)
Everybody will be as pale as we are! Yey!
i like... (Score:2)
Re:i like... (Score:2)
Re:i like... (Score:2)
Re:i like... (Score:2)
And even if you solve the corrosion problem, occasional precipitation would just cover it up anyhow.
Good that we haven't lost our ability to think in hyperbole on
Life imitates art (Score:2, Redundant)
This plan has already been covered [wikipedia.org]
Ob: Futurama quote (Score:2)
"Wormstrom!"
Simpsons? What about Futurama? (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
NASA has confirmed that it was an error converting metric to imperial measurments that caused the death of almost seven billion people and the started our current ice age.
In other news; Today's high is expected to reach -65 celcius.
Insane arrogance! (Score:2)
Re: Insane arrogance! (Score:3, Funny)
So, I gather that you don't go for the idea of importing weasels to destroy the snakes that you imported to destroy the frogs that you imported to destroy the flies that you imported to destroy the...
Re:Insane arrogance indeed. (Score:2)
Flawed assumptions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flawed assumptions... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progre
Whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Flawed assumptions... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't believe this kind of trite unreasoning nonsense gets modded 'Insightful'.
Dumb Idea by Dumb people (Score:2)
Even the "think tanks" and scientists do not know enough to start tinkering
with the weather on a large scale. It is not understood fully.
One screw up and we have the next disaster movie, in 3-d.
Trees Hug Back (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead we should blot out the Sun? That's insane, and therefore even more likely to burn us harder and faster.
Re:Trees Hug Back (Score:2, Informative)
Which is a non-trivial task. Although perhaps less non-trivial than making the sun set...at three PM!
Re:Trees Hug Back (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Trees Hug Back (Score:3, Insightful)
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 experie
Holy Cow... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Because people don't like change (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Holy Cow... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it is. Perhaps human civilization isn't supposed to continue. Ultimately I for one don't care much about supposed to. There are rather serious consequences for us if the earth does continue its current—and unprecedented in the history of human civilization—rapid and accelerating warming.
I don't mind at all that people are researching potential ways to prevent those disastrous consequences before they materialize. Some of them might have unintended consequences, but that's more, rather than less, reason to investigate them as far in advance of the need to implement as is possible.
Its not about "loving" evolution. People who acknowledge the demonstrated reality of evolution are, however, unsurprisingly also likely to recognize that drastic changes in environment can be very bad for life forms that are very successful in the old environment.
OTOH, people that believe in invisible fairies devoted to protecting them from all material harm as long as they clap hard enough—a kind of immature religious faith that is sadly common in the US—are prone to ignore the facts and just ask everyone else to just clap harder.
Re:Holy Cow... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuckin' Luddites.
Re:Holy Cow... (Score:3, Interesting)
Number 1 priority (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some ideas aren't to bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
It wouldn't have to be a solid shade, either -- just truck a lot of water out there and spray it out through a nozzle, and create a cloud of ice crystals. They'd diffuse the incoming light rather than blocking it completely, and as a "fail safe," perhaps you could put them in a slightly unstable orbit, so that over time they'd stop shadowing the p
One day? (Score:2)
Sorry dude, but the Great Meltdown has been in progress for years already. Go count the glaciers at Glacier National Park, and then look up how many there were a few decades ago.
Not the way I've looked at it previously (Score:2)
Which implies that, turned around, power generation could be a side-effect of blotting out the sun. Although you'd have to exclude the
Bad Idea . . . (Score:2)
Scrith (Score:2)
Heaven forbid... (Score:2)
Re:Heaven forbid... (Score:3, Funny)
Global Dimming (Score:2)
Here's a (google video) link to a Nova program on the topic:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7369424310 394553407 [google.com]
It's possible that as we remove contaminants from our e
Uh terraforming (Score:2)
The answer is obvious (Score:2)
In fact, I've taken the liberty to place one in orbit right now! Certainly, no small thing such as a pebble in space would disturb this gigantic mirror array, turning it on the unsuspecting populace in the form of a giant space laser.
I'll take my moon sapphires now, thank you very much.
A few years later.... (Score:3, Funny)
The Overlords (Score:3, Funny)
Time Magazine: Another Ice Age? [24 June 1974] (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps we should give the scientists a cooling off period before we start messing with climate control?
Hugely dangerous! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a historian, and I can tell you for a fact that the earth has been much warmer in the past than it is now, and I really do not think that we are responsible for the climate warming that we're observing now. Applying systems theory to the data doesn't work because our instumentation hasn't been good enough for long enough to really tell us much; we could be looking at a perfectly natural rise in temperature that cycles every few thousand years. The astronomers up the hall from me say that the surface of Mars has been increasing in temperature at the same rate as Earth's for as long as we've been able to observe it. They think that our climate is reflecting a cycle going on in the Sun. It could be so. In any case, a warmer climate is nothing new and nothing to worry about as long we can adapt.
Can the reverse work? (Score:3, Interesting)
A certain amount of the flora and fauna of the north depends on low temperatures, as I've understood it, and there are repercussions in that regards. On the other hand, it's a relatively easy sell environmentally--a 20 degree increase in temperature for the Northern United States (during winter) would reduce the resources used to heat homes and offices significantly--thereby reducing the accompanying pollution.
Re:and.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:and.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and.... (Score:2)
In other words, nothing they don't handle already.
Re:and.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:and.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:and.... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh FFS... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's one thing to say something ignorant; it's another to raise that stupidity above my reading threshold.
Bemopolis
Re:and.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The gravity of the situation becomes crushing ?-)
Well, what actually happens is that the BH will vaporize into pure energy near-instantly due to Hawking's radiation. This creates an explosion whose size depends on the mass of the hole.
Re:Matrix (Score:2, Funny)
Re: The level of arrogance is astounding (Score:5, Informative)
Amazingly, thousands of climatologists have the brass to disagree with you.
Re: The level of arrogance is astounding (Score:5, Informative)
According to the University of California, Santa Barbara [ucsb.edu]:
And the level of ignorance is also astounding (Score:5, Insightful)
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:You Bet (Score:2)
Re:more insurance! (Score:2)
I was kind of thinking the same thing...what if what we put up there to 'block' the sun a little...got stuck??
I think the earth might be fucked at that point...