Ingenuity or Hubris?
January 13, 2010 Climate Change, Featured, Science, Technology
It seems that every six months or so somebody declares that the human race is at a crossroads and we need to choose which path to travel: one that results in the ultimate good for human kind, or one that is fraught with pain and suffering. As history has shown us time and again, humans often want the former and consistently choose the latter. So it comes as no surprise that, once again, some of the world’s smartest people are going to gather in one place to discuss some of the various options we have when it comes to combating global climate change without affecting our standard of living or insanely wasteful lifestyles.
According to David Adam’s post on The Guardian, scientists from around the world are going to hold a summit to discuss various ways of resolving our environmental conundrum with, eventually, massive-scale technological solutions. Possible solutions include filling the oceans with iron to promote plankton growth, using reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere, installing countless mirrors in orbit of the Earth, and shooting ocean water into the sky where it can evaporate and bring salt crystals higher into the sky. Why are scientists coming together to discuss these options? Because Copenhagen was a failure, and nobody can trust anyone to live up to whatever unrealistic and otherwise crazy “commitments” they may have stupidly uttered in Denmark.
Long time readers might remember that I had discussed the impracticality behind one of the plans that’ll be proposed back in 2007, but are any of these even remotely workable in the long run?
Ignoring Dr. Angel’s ridiculously expensive, unmanageable, and wasteful sunshade proposal, let’s look at the possible pros and cons of the other options mentioned.
Seeding the Oceans with Iron
Have we not destroyed the world’s largest resource enough? This idea has been floating around since at least the 1980’s and has even been given the nickname of “The Geritol Solution”. Scientists discovered that before the start of the last major ice age, there was a spike in the amount of phytoplankton in the southern oceans. Phytoplankton, like many other plants, absorbs CO2 from the breathable atmosphere. Looking at the correlation, some scientists believe that if we start dumping iron into the ocean, huge blooms of phytoplankton will blossom. Not only will this provide food for millions of fish, but it’ll help scrub the atmosphere of the CO2 we humans are hell-bent on emitting.
If humans were to turn the world’s southern oceans into a giant carbon sink, then we could carry on spewing the incredible amount of atmospheric toxins we’ve become accustomed to without having to give up the fancy technologies and products we’ve come to expect every six months. In addition to this, nobody would need to see these huge phytoplankton blooms because they’d be in the southern oceans.
Out of sight, out of mind. Just like the giant recyclable continent we have floating between North America and Asia.
The biggest problem facing us today regarding the feasibility of this plan is the long term effects. To hell with computer models and all that crap that we’ve relied on for so many things and been wrong so many times. It’s one thing to get the weather completely wrong despite the billions of CPU cycles spent trying to guess whether it’ll rain tomorrow or not. It’s another to dump iron fillings into the ocean and drive away hoping nothing bad will happen 10 years down the road. Regardless of how smart people might be, we honestly have no idea what the short or long term effects of modifying such a vast ecosystem might have on the entire planet.
Unfortunately, there is very little regulation about what people are permitted to do on the open seas. All it would take is one overly optimistic organization looking to cash in on the Carbon Credit scam by turning the southern oceans into the world’s largest carbon sink.
Reflective Aerosols
This is a relatively new idea which involves fleets of high-polluting high-flying aircraft leaving long trails of a reflective chemical like sulfur dioxide (the same chemical ejected by volcanoes) in their path. Because the sulfur dioxide would be reflective, some of the sun’s rays would be deflected back into space and the surface of our planet would cool slightly from the loss of solar energy. Essentially, by attaching a canister of this gas onto each and every commercial and military cargo vehicle in operation today, we could easily put the sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere without having to invest in specialized aircraft.
Possible problems of this plan include increased rainfall in various parts of the world as well as littering the ground with a material that is chemically considered an asbestos. Granted the particles would be much smaller than the stuff emitted by cars and factories, but if we were to rely on this solution for half a century then there would undoubtedly be an unhealthy buildup of the chemical at ground level around the world.
That said, this idea would likely be less damaging than the ocean seeding or orbital sunshade options.
Making Our Own Clouds
The final option I’ll outline today is the plan to have fleets of sailing vessels cross the oceans while shooting massive jets of salt water into the air. This plan is particularly interesting in that it’s potentially the least damaging and easiest option we have at our disposal. By shooting massive jets of water into the air, the sun would have the ability to evaporate some of the salty water which would then be carried into the troposphere to create very reflective clouds. The reflective clouds would send some of the sun’s rays back into space, and the earth would be a little bit cooler as a result. In addition to this, humans could combine this practice with the cloud-seeding techniques used to cause rainfall. Not only could we block some of the sun, but we could potentially bring rain back to places that have been suffering from drought.
There’s only one problem: we don’t have enough boats.
In order for this plan to work, coastal nations would need to have massive fleets of cloud-makers. Manned or unmanned, this would require a huge number of resources and a solid commitment from a hundred nations. Who would ultimately pay for these fleets? How would they be managed? Is it even feasible for nations to send a thousand-strong fleet of vessels across the oceans?
This Is No Time For “Guess and Test”
I’ve been actively reading as many geo-engineering documents as possible over the last five years and, while I’m no expert on the subject, many of the proposed solutions have seemed like a poor solution to idiotic behavior. Almost every plan follows the very same pattern of failure, too:
- don’t upset the status-quo, because they fund your academic livelihood
- don’t ask anyone to take responsibility for their decisions, refer to #1 for the reason
- grab the smallest possible coincidence gleaned from the world’s best scientists and just re-factor their findings to “work” on a global scale
- ignore any possible long-term consequences of a plan in order to get something that looks like a plausible solution published in respected scientific journals
- demand anywhere from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars from various uninformed governments to make the fool plan work
- bitch and moan when people piss on the plan saying it’s untenable
Not every possible geo-engineering solution follows this pattern, of course, but it’s pretty darn close.
I am a strong believer in technology and I feel it will play more than a significant role in the future of the human race, but it cannot be the only part of a workable solution to today’s problems; we need to solve this together.
In the next few days I’ll be publishing my own possible solution to the problem of climate change but, unlike many of the solutions that will be bantered about in California, mine includes both global and community-based solutions so that people can feel good about themselves while also leaving behind a cleaner planet after we’ve died.
What do you think of the climate change debacle? Is this something that should be solved by governments, everyday people, or both? Or is climate change just the latest scare tactic created by businesses and governments to take away more of our liberties and freedoms? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.