Re-Engineering the Earth

[XemaSab]

If we were transported forward in time, to an Earth ravaged by catastrophic climate change, we might see long, delicate strands of fire hose stretching into the sky, like spaghetti, attached to zeppelins hovering 65,000 feet in the air. Factories on the ground would pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide up through those hoses every second. And at the top, the hoses would cough a sulfurous pall into the sky. At sunset on some parts of the planet, these puffs of aerosolized pollutant would glow a dramatic red, like the skies in Blade Runner. During the day, they would shield the planet from the sun’s full force, keeping temperatures cool—as long as the puffing never ceased.

Technology that could redden the skies and chill the planet is available right now. Within a few years we could cool the Earth to temperatures not regularly seen since James Watt’s steam engine belched its first smoky plume in the late 18th century. And we could do it cheaply: $100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum could suffice. To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly. If this idea sounds unlikely, consider that President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, said in April that he thought the administration would consider it, “if we get desperate enough.” And if it sounds dystopian or futuristic, consider that Blade Runner was set in 2019, not long after Obama would complete a second term.

Humans have been aggressively transforming the planet for more than 200 years. The Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen—one of the first cheerleaders for investigating the gas-the-planet strategy—recently argued that geologists should refer to the past two centuries as the “anthropocene” period. In that time, humans have reshaped about half of the Earth’s surface. We have dictated what plants grow and where. We’ve pocked and deformed the Earth’s crust with mines and wells, and we’ve commandeered a huge fraction of its freshwater supply for our own purposes. What is new is the idea that we might want to deform the Earth intentionally, as a way to engineer the planet either back into its pre-industrial state, or into some improved third state. Large-scale projects that aim to accomplish this go by the name “geo-engineering,” and they constitute some of the most innovative and dangerous ideas being considered today to combat climate change. Some scientists see geo-engineering as a last-ditch option to prevent us from cooking the planet to death. Others fear that it could have unforeseen—and possibly catastrophic—consequences. What many agree on, however, is that the technology necessary to reshape the climate is so powerful, and so easily implemented, that the world must decide how to govern its use before the wrong nation—or even the wrong individual—starts to change the climate all on its own.

If geo-engineers have a natural enemy, it is the sun. Their first impulse is to try to block it out. Stephen Salter, a Scottish engineer, has mocked up a strategy that would cool the planet by painting the skies above the oceans white. Salter’s designs—based on an idea developed by John Latham at the National Center for Atmospheric Research—call for a permanent fleet of up to 1,500 ships dragging propellers that churn up seawater and spray it high enough for the wind to carry it into the clouds. The spray would add moisture to the clouds and make them whiter and fluffier, and therefore better at bouncing sunlight back harmlessly into space. Salter, who has investigated the technical feasibility of this idea minutely (down to the question of whether ship owners would mind affixing spray nozzles to their hulls with magnets), estimates the cost to build the first 300 ships—enough to turn back the climatological clock to James Watt’s era—to be $600 million, plus another $100 million per year to keep the project going.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/climate-engineering

[Dogmudgeon]

1. ANYTHING but N-N-N-Nukes!

Sulfurize the atmosphere, shoot frisbees at the Sun, develop cars and planes propelled by enormous rubber bands, and stick tubes in everone's ass and trap their farts -- ANYTHING but N-N-N-Nukes!

:sarcasm:

--d!

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. FWIW: "Re-Engineering the Earth" would be quite difficult compared to altering the climate ;-)

We've apparently already succeeded in altering the climate, without even trying to! The big question is, "If we put our minds to it, can we intentionally alter the climate in a helpful fashion?"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geoengineering-how-to-cool-earth

From the http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciammag/?contents=2008-11">November 2008 Scientific American Magazine

Geoengineering: How to Cool Earth--At a Price

Global warming has become such an overriding emergency that some climate experts are willing to consider schemes for partly shielding the planet from the sun's rays. But no such scheme is a magic bullet

By Robert Kunzig

When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter global warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels might cause “marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious.” Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: “spreading very small reflective particles” over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space—“a wacky geoengineering solution,” Keith says, “that doesn’t even work.”

In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe—they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream.

First, despite years of talk and international treaties, CO2 emissions are rising faster than the worst-case scenario envisioned as recently as 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “The trend is upward and toward an ever increasing reliance on coal,” says Ken Caldeira, a climate modeler at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif.

Second, ice is melting faster than ever at the poles, suggesting that climate might be closer to the brink—or to a tipping point, in the current vernacular—than anyone had thought.

…