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Pleistocene Park seems like great idea, but unfortunately they do not have plans to use it for meat production, which could dramatically increase the speed of c
by chr1 7y ago
Pleistocene Park seems like great idea, but unfortunately they do not have plans to use it for meat production, which could dramatically increase the speed of conversion of the tundra to grassland, and save the tropical forests.
And this seems to be the problem with other suggestions too, they are not ambitious enough!
At this level of CO2, reducing it is not a very pressing goal to most of the people.
But there is another issue: weather is bad over most of the earth without any climate change, and fixing it would provide immediate benefits to larger number of people, and fix climate change as a side effect, because if we can restore the deserts to a moderately green state, their biosphere would consume all of the CO2 that we have released so far.
A very promising way to build weather controlling machine is building large number of autonomous hot air balloons, which can be used to change the local temperature in several ways: if covered with reflective material they can create shadow;
if covered with dark material they can significantly increase the temperature above the cloud potentially dispersing the cloud; if combined into a structure similar to a solar updraft tower, they can transport dust and humidity to the height where they would not be transported by natural winds and by that either condensate the water or create new clouds.
With a large enough number of devices like this it should be possible to guide humid air to deserts, or to prevent hurricanes by removing convective available potential energy on their path.
And unlike sunshade in the space proposals, these would not require huge effort by the whole planet to become useful, for instance relatively small installations, affordable to the local population, can be used to create more sunny days in Amsterdam, or more clouds in Dubai.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago< At this level of CO2, reducing it is not a very pressing goal to most of the people. If it takes 30 years for 'this level of CO2' to stop climbing, it will be a very pressing goal with no non-drastic solutions. Given that we still can't all agree that we've already f'd it up severely (derp) I see see no reason to think that people will feel secure with 'fooling around with Mother Nature'. The potential for these experiments to go wrong is real, unlike our confidence in our wisdom. Doesn't seem like an opportune time to potentially create more ways to screw ourselves.
- chr1 7y agoOn one hand you have confidence in our wisdom (computational models) to predict climate 30 years forward, on the other hand you do not trust the same models to predict the effect of our modifications applied in a controllable manner? I agree that many people who use climate change as religion (see the insightful comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726497) would be vehemently opposed to climate engineering, but luckily most people care about real issues, that's why i expect the "don't eat meat, don't fly, don't have children" crowd to fail, and drastic solutions like geoengineering to be applied eventually.
- 8bitsrule 7y agoI don't trust any models (too much science background). But I don't need a weatherman to see the obvious result of careless, self-serving philosophies. And I expect more than you do from the human race, and that the rest of the world will shame our selfish willfully ignorant US into doing its share.