5 ms·

I hope I'm not in the minority here -- plans like this terrify me. I'm currently a scientist by trade, and experience has taught me that while we have a mediocr

by wwwtyro 14y ago

I hope I'm not in the minority here -- plans like this terrify me. I'm currently a scientist by trade, and experience has taught me that while we have a mediocre grasp of very finely tuned experiments, to be frank, we don't know shit about predicting the chaos and unintended consequences of our actions within the complexity of the natural world. When dealing with nature, it's never as simple as do A to get B and that's it. There's some slim chance this guy's plan could work, but I am pretty confident it is infinitely more likely to either do nothing or do something really awful.

lukeholder 14y ago
Couldn't the same be said for many worth-wild things? Didn't people say the Large Hadron Collider would cause a black hole?
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Those people were provably wrong, as the Earth is bathed in high energy particles from the Universe all the time and particle collisions on the same scale as in the LHC have been happening routinely for the entire lifetime of Earth with no catastrophic effects.
  - lukeholder 14y ago
    Wow, dont understand why I was downvoted. I was agreeing with you. My point was people were scared of the LHC without scientific reasoning.
DennisP 14y ago
I think there's a cognitive bias at play here. We're already doing a massive experiment on the Earth's atmosphere by adding greenhouse gases to it. But for some reason that accidental experiment doesn't seem to freak people out nearly as much as doing an intentional experiment, even one that would partially compensate for the effects of the accident. I'd bet that most people would accept geoengineering without a second thought, as long as we convinced them it was a side effect of a for-profit venture unrelated to global warming. Because, heck, they're putting up with all the other crap we do. But tell them we're intentionally changing atmosphere and they'll riot in the streets. This particular approach wouldn't be completely unprecedented, because the same thing happens when large volcanoes erupt...and we've observed the temperature decrease when that's happened. It's far from a complete solution, but there's real concern that feedback loops will soon tip the Earth into an unstoppable warming cycle. The planet has gone into a hot state before, and rather quickly, with very little input to kick it off. Albedo adjustment could be a way to hold off that cycle while we figure out a way to reduce CO2.
- wwwtyro 14y ago
  After rats were accidentally introduced to Macquarie Island and started ravaging the local ecosystem, efforts to rebuff them -- which included introducing cats -- only made things worse; the cats -- and the rabbits later introduced for food -- have since "resulted in the annihilation of two native bird species and the stripping of Macquarie Island's vegetation." (http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/epic-fail-efforts-to-fight-invasive-species-could-cause-ecosystem-meltdown.html http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/epic-fail-efforts...) In case my analogy is not perfectly clear: the rats are the greenhouse gasses, and the cats are your sulfate aerosols. > This particular approach wouldn't be completely unprecedented, because the same thing happens when large volcanoes erupt... The implication here is that because volcanoes spew sulfates into the atmosphere and it results in lower temperatures is that it is okay for us to do so, considering only the first-order temperature-lowering result (or some tiny subset of the practically infinite number of variables involved). This is a dangerous hubris, and I reject the naïveté of it. It is absolutely not the same. One is a volcano exploding, another is aerosols sprayed from an airplane. Just because something in nature has been imbalanced because of our actions does not mean that we must respond - especially when we cannot predict the results of that response! I'll say it again: this sort of tinkering with our biosphere based on first-order predictions terrify me. They are far more likely to result in something awful than something beneficial.
  - DennisP 14y ago
    A big difference between sulfates and cats is that cats reproduce. Once you've introduced them, they're really hard to stop. With sulfates you just turn off the spigot and they're gone in a year or so. It's not my favorite method. Another, which got some funding from the Gates Foundation, involves seeding low-altitude clouds. You can shut that one down in a week. We already know the second-order effects of doing nothing to counteract warming, and they really are awful. The earth will quite naturally shrink the icecaps, release a large amount of methane, along with CO2 from drying forests and peat, and tip into the state it was in fifty million years ago, when crocodiles were swimming in the tropical seas at the north pole. The whole thing was kicked off by an orbital variation that very slightly raised the temperature. > Just because something in nature has been imbalanced because of our actions does not mean that we must respond True, but in this case, if we want civilization to survive we'd better do something. I haven't seen a single argument against albedo adjustment that was more substantial than "something bad might happen, I don't know what."

by wwwtyro 14y ago

lukeholder 14y ago

Couldn't the same be said for many worth-wild things? Didn't people say the Large Hadron Collider would cause a black hole?

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Those people were provably wrong, as the Earth is bathed in high energy particles from the Universe all the time and particle collisions on the same scale as in the LHC have been happening routinely for the entire lifetime of Earth with no catastrophic effects.
- lukeholder 14y ago
  Wow, dont understand why I was downvoted. I was agreeing with you. My point was people were scared of the LHC without scientific reasoning.

DennisP 14y ago

I think there's a cognitive bias at play here. We're already doing a massive experiment on the Earth's atmosphere by adding greenhouse gases to it. But for some reason that accidental experiment doesn't seem to freak people out nearly as much as doing an intentional experiment, even one that would partially compensate for the effects of the accident. I'd bet that most people would accept geoengineering without a second thought, as long as we convinced them it was a side effect of a for-profit venture unrelated to global warming. Because, heck, they're putting up with all the other crap we do. But tell them we're intentionally changing atmosphere and they'll riot in the streets. This particular approach wouldn't be completely unprecedented, because the same thing happens when large volcanoes erupt...and we've observed the temperature decrease when that's happened. It's far from a complete solution, but there's real concern that feedback loops will soon tip the Earth into an unstoppable warming cycle. The planet has gone into a hot state before, and rather quickly, with very little input to kick it off. Albedo adjustment could be a way to hold off that cycle while we figure out a way to reduce CO2.

wwwtyro 14y ago
After rats were accidentally introduced to Macquarie Island and started ravaging the local ecosystem, efforts to rebuff them -- which included introducing cats -- only made things worse; the cats -- and the rabbits later introduced for food -- have since "resulted in the annihilation of two native bird species and the stripping of Macquarie Island's vegetation." (http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/epic-fail-efforts-to-fight-invasive-species-could-cause-ecosystem-meltdown.html http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/epic-fail-efforts...) In case my analogy is not perfectly clear: the rats are the greenhouse gasses, and the cats are your sulfate aerosols. > This particular approach wouldn't be completely unprecedented, because the same thing happens when large volcanoes erupt... The implication here is that because volcanoes spew sulfates into the atmosphere and it results in lower temperatures is that it is okay for us to do so, considering only the first-order temperature-lowering result (or some tiny subset of the practically infinite number of variables involved). This is a dangerous hubris, and I reject the naïveté of it. It is absolutely not the same. One is a volcano exploding, another is aerosols sprayed from an airplane. Just because something in nature has been imbalanced because of our actions does not mean that we must respond - especially when we cannot predict the results of that response! I'll say it again: this sort of tinkering with our biosphere based on first-order predictions terrify me. They are far more likely to result in something awful than something beneficial.
- DennisP 14y ago
  A big difference between sulfates and cats is that cats reproduce. Once you've introduced them, they're really hard to stop. With sulfates you just turn off the spigot and they're gone in a year or so. It's not my favorite method. Another, which got some funding from the Gates Foundation, involves seeding low-altitude clouds. You can shut that one down in a week. We already know the second-order effects of doing nothing to counteract warming, and they really are awful. The earth will quite naturally shrink the icecaps, release a large amount of methane, along with CO2 from drying forests and peat, and tip into the state it was in fifty million years ago, when crocodiles were swimming in the tropical seas at the north pole. The whole thing was kicked off by an orbital variation that very slightly raised the temperature. > Just because something in nature has been imbalanced because of our actions does not mean that we must respond True, but in this case, if we want civilization to survive we'd better do something. I haven't seen a single argument against albedo adjustment that was more substantial than "something bad might happen, I don't know what."