Brace yourself for the geoengineering hype

It's a'comin'

Posted by David Roberts at 12:38 PM on 16 Jan 2007

There's a big, big debate brewing about "geoengineering" -- messing deliberately with the earth's climate to tweak it to our liking. This article in The Economist is a decent primer.

You can already see the shape of the debate emerging, and it's strikingly similar to the nuclear debate. A massive, unproven, problem-ridden, techno-utopian solution is advanced as representing Science!, and critics who warn of hubris and point to more human-scale solutions are derided as ... you guessed it ... dirty hippies.

I'm going to write a lot more about this soon.

For story: Brace yourself for the geoengineering hype
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Talk to the Australians (or Pandora)

I don't know the exact sequence but wasn't there a whole chain of animal introductions that went awry in Australia. Each was intended to address the previous, but only ended up creating a new problem - because

they didn't understand the uncertainties involved in messing with the environment!

by Kif Scheuer at 12:48 PM on 16 Jan 2007

If you dislike swallowing cats to catch rats,

you should not ignore the barf-the-rat-out proposal.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around B fire, car goes

by GRLCowan at 6:17 PM on 16 Jan 2007

geo-engineering ain't for wusses

OK, you dirty hippies have made your point. Fixing Global Warming is serious stuff: time to get 'er done.

Lemme think. Uh, here we go. Give GE a few bazillion dollars in tax money (borrow it from China, duh, blow off Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to pay the interest) to develop the Global Air Conditioner^TM. Step up the military so we can collar all the world's oil reserves to feed the thing (no reason to stop at the Mid-East). Make it a fully zoned system so we can selectively inundate, say, Bangladesh if they get uppity without dumping on our Miami real estate investments. Step up the military some more so we can be real certain it's our hand stays on the thermostat.

Now that's geo-engineering for real men.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

by spaceshaper at 6:41 AM on 17 Jan 2007

Geoengineering is what we do...

Before we throw the baby out with the bath water on the concept of Geoengineering let's stop and consider a few things. First off everything we do as intelligent beings does something to alter the environment around us. When a big corporation dumps toxic waste they are engineering the local environment. When we create a wild area we are engineering the local environment.

So, on a global level we have already been engaged in Geoengineering for quite some time although somewhat without our own awareness of it. We did this by altering the composition of the atmosphere of our planet. Yes we did it accidentally but we did do it and it COULD have been done intentionally if we wanted to.

NASA and sci-fi buffs have for some time been looking forward to Terraforming other planets to make them suitable for human habitation. I think that our modification of the atmosphere on this planet serves to validate the Terraforming process in a real world situation.

So then whether we call it Terraforming or Geoengineering we have to realize that we are already doing it. The idea of putting a label on it simply signifies that we are taking responsibility for our actions and pre-planning their outcome so that a positive result will occur.

Mike Johnston

by enki at 1:54 AM on 18 Jan 2007

The difficulty of doing things, without energy

David Roberts wrote: A massive, unproven, problem-ridden, techno-utopian solution is advanced

Engineering difficulties have a tendency to vanish in the face of exponential energy-production growth. Myriad things possible today were impossible 100 years ago. In the mean time, energy production has continuously grown ~2.75% per year.

by Nucbuddy at 2:43 AM on 18 Jan 2007

Utopias are not dynamic

By the way, David, utopias are by implication static. There cannot be such a thing as a utopia featuring continuous exponential energy-production growth.

by Nucbuddy at 2:47 AM on 18 Jan 2007

Go nuke-you-ler

"geo-engineering for real men"

A series of nuclear detonations over axis of evil countries would throw up a layer of fallout in the stratosphere blocking sunlight. Like a mild nuke-you-ler winter.

If it's not enough cooling, declare a few more nations evil and blast away again, until the climate feels right.

That's a manlier solution. Clouds of particulated evil-doers!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

by amazingdrx at 7:48 AM on 18 Jan 2007

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