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This is Mother Nature we're screwing with. Man is not the measure of all things as the Greek put it. The sooner you understand this, the fewer posts of this kind you will make. This, in turn, will restore some clear thinking as to what we're going to do about it. Hint: we've got to cut GHG gas emissions right now and going forward because a significant volume of those emissions end up in the atmosphere. This warming melts ice, warms the oceans and generally causes longterm surface warming of the planet as it attempts to come into radiative heat balance.
Just because we can make ipods and cellphones doesn't mean we can 1) increase world-wide oil production without limit and 2) stop climate warming. Technology has its limitations as humankind is about to learn (and is learning) in a very disruptive way.
Time to powerdown and take the problems associated with exponential growth (of people and energy consumption) seriously. The arrogance of people to think that they can do anything they want. The Fossil Fuels Age is a 300 year window in the whole of human history. Time to think about what we're going to do as it winds down in a realistic way right now and not spend our time thinking we can engineer the climate and geophysics of planetary processes.
Take a deep breath and, as in The Matrix, take one of these pills.
We have been forced to lower our sites, and peak oil will mean lowering them even more.
You don't have your facts straight. You can condemn and quibble, but you haven't grasped the bottom line of our situation.
Your emotional outburst is an understandable response, but it's clear in my judgment that you understand little about refrigeration theory and the operation of heat pumps, or the principle of delayed effect.
Taking global emissions to ZERO tomorrow morning will not save the northern ice cap. Call NASA and any experienced climatologist and ask them that question. The answer is no.
Similarly, the cleaning up of the air in the atmosphere has further complicated the problem with temperature increase.
The question is simple. The ice cap is melting rapidly. What will the nations of the planet Earth do about it? The cap still serves as a refrigeration center or thermostat, and it's still functioning. If we were to experience massive increased snowfall on the northern cap for the next few decades, it's rate of meltdown would decrease. Absent that potential, we can add artificial snow or simply freeze more water on the existing remaining ice fields, whether on ocean or land. That initiative, in turn, will help stabilize the cap until emissions reductions kick in over the longer term.
We have no choice in attempting to supplement the ice fields of the northern polar cap. A large undertaking, yes, but not insurmountable.
We could initiate a few Plinian eruptions, but then we would have the problem of ash clean up. But the planet climate would change rapidly.
It wouldn't be overly difficult to light off a few volcanoes, but that's hardly the first course of action that I would recommend. And if you believe that they won't try that later on, probably after we're dead, I would think again. They will get desperate after we also lose the southern polar cap.
Anyway, here's a brief overview:
DYNAMICS OF A PLINIAN ERUPTION
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/
ASH PROPERTIES & DISPERSAL BY WIND
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/ash/properties.html
- Be fatalistic and accept the loss of much of the coastline and some countries.
- Explore how we can arrest or slow ice cap melt.
Movieguy's assertion is at the heart of his case for at least thinking about delaying the melt. How much is NYC worth?Global Volcano List
http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/sorted_by_country.html
.
I am not a scientist by any means, but would a gazillion white ping-pong balls lower the Albedo Effect enough to create more ice? They certainly would be easy to suck up if they started drifting too far south. Or would this be too dangerous for the Arctic wildlife?
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Assume that the area we need is comparable to the size of the arctic ice sheet or ~10 million km^2 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_ice_cap)
A ping pong ball has weight 2.7g and diameter of 40mm. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_tennis#Equipment)
If we assume that the balls are square packed, the amount of area covered by a single ball as 40x40 = 1600 mm^2.
1 km^2 = (1000 mm/m x 1000 m/km)^2 mm^2 = 1e12 mm^2
Square mm in the polar ice cap ~10e6 km^2 x 1e12 mm^2 / km^2
= ~1e19 mm^2
Number of balls required = 1e19 / 1600 = ~6e15 balls
Mass required = 1.7e16 grams
... or about 17 billion tonnes of ping pong balls!
Please think about the scales involved.
Where would we make them?
How would we ship them?
Where would the energy for this exercise come from?
How long would it take to do?
How long do we have?
There is a book called The Arrogance of Humanism by David Ehrenfeld which is "an inquiry into the origins, dissemination, and consequences of the modern belief that humans can solve any problem and overcome any difficulty, given time and resources enough."
We've got a fairly good handle on what anthropocentrism has and is doing to the Earth so far--exponential growth is a powerful thing--do you think we could possibly know enough to reverse the processes we have set in motion? Or have the psychological wherewithal and will power to do so?
Have you ever seen the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still?
I'd hate to see mitigation treated the same way.
It's not a binary. There are more choices than "do nothing, or launch large, costly, and risky mega-engineering projects."
Some things are so natural it's hard to fault them (planting trees). Others have been suggested which, while costly, seem harmless enough (paint all roofs white). At the furthest extreme there are things like dumping iron in the oceans which, while possibly effective would strike me as quite risky.
Obviously there is a scale to these things (in both cost and risks).
If a logical sequence seems false, demonstrate it. Simply saying that some issues cannot be framed this way is not enough. Is this one of those issues?
Psychologically, I know that considering world-scale projects is very, very uncomfortable. People will think that you have gone off the deep end. It will be one more reason they will not heed the danger. You will be a true Cassandra, looking very, very silly, more like a Chicken-little clown than anything else.
I would suggest that emotionally we have yet to grapple with this issue. Our intellect says "Danger," yet we look around and everything seems fine. Daily experience challenges what we intellectually know.
I for one experience this bifurcation every day. Consequently, I wait. In the last analysis, I am not sure. I cling to daily experience, hoping it will stay the same. So, too, do the deniers. We are not so different from them, I think.
Last year, or the year before, I was struck by two parallel trends. On the one hand this binary view of global warming was strong, and on the other hand poker was becoming a very popular game.
I've always thought that this would be a good teaching opportunity for global warming. Maybe someone who is a better writer than I could take a crack at it ... but basically, sometimes it's a good idea to fold after just seeing a few cards. You have not "proved" who will win, but you a good idea of the odds.
Abusing the analogy, the stereotypical global warming denier wants us to play out the game, prove who wins ... and then bet.
Unfortunately it's too late then, the game is over.
either they believe in binary counting or not.
OK. Kidding aside, a large majority of the deniers can be broken out into 2 extreme camps: those who know no science and think it's just quirks of the "weather" as always and those who know too many scientific attacks on the details and are waiting for the unassailable ultimate proof. Like you said, that proof will come when it is too late and a Category 6 hurricane is blowing humanity off the face of the Earth (yes, I know there is no 6. It's a figure of extremist speech.)
But which big fish?
When the cod disappeared recently, the lobster catch boomed. Was it connected? Causal? No idea, but lots of theories.
So maybe the former cod fishery gets replaced by a herring fishery?
http://tracer.env.uea.ac.uk/soiree/
From what I recall it was not a huge success (for reasons of scale, once more)
Since we are adding the feritiliser, we have an economic incentive not to overfertilise.
And remember, the alternative is global warming, malaria in your town, and storm surges wiping out the coastline.
We may not know we have overfertilized until it's too late. The problem often happens when the fertilizing stops. A dieoff occurs with the sudden drop in nutrients, which does bad things to the water quality.
Always, always, always, no matter what the threat, whether it be wayward meteors, ICBM attacks from outer Flubenia, global warming, or peak oil -- the solution is another moon shot, a vast mobilization of resources, big money for big contractors, with no responsibility for results, no clear definition of results, no concern for results.
But the real threat is our inability to rein ourselves in, reduce our footprint on the planet, and say goodbye to ever increasing growth. At this point we ARE going to take some blows from nature, unavoidably. But if we become nimbler and lighter on our feet, more cooperative,less locked into war, we can get through it, get on a path to sustainability.
Unfortunately, this approach which is objectively quite conservative, cautious and reasonable is made to seem nutty -- while the megaproject approach seems like it is doing something, like it's addressing the problem. But it seems that way only because we're been brainwashed.
Even within within the limits of our system as it is, there is so much that could be done RIGHT AWAY with practically NO capital expenditure, and with SOME a whole lot more. 55 or 50mph - enforced!
Carpooling enforced! No car zones in cities. Rewarded job swapping to reduce long commutes.
Like almost instantaneously we could cut our energy consumption in half -- if there were a will. Other countries maybe not so easy because they've done a lot of the easy stuff. We've done almost NONE of it. But there is no will because there is no MONEY in doing the right thing. And there is a lot of money in doing the wrong thing. So things will get worse and worse until we establish a social order in which profit is not allowed to trump common sense, rationality, science, and even the survival instinct of species. Is there such a thing? I hope so. I'd like to see it start kicking in.
The mega projects are over?
Note what these guys are considering:
Climate Control Requires a Dam at the Strait of Gibraltar
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/eosrjohnson.html
In another hundred years there may be mega projects that make everything accomplished in the last 75 years look very small.
--
"Man is the measure of all things."
He was a sophist, one of those hated and despised by Socrates and Plato, because Protagoras explicitly denied the possibility of finding truth (objective solid scientific knowledge or genuine knowledge of any kind).
Protagoras is important in the history of philosophy as perhaps the first clear advocate of extreme subjectivism as a view of the world. His spirit is alive and well today in various anti-science schools of thought, e.g. the deconstructionists.
In my opinion Plato decisively refuted Protagoras, but it is hard to bury the stinking corpses of false ideas, because they keep rising up as zombies in different clothing.
The issue is fundamentally one of epistemology (How do we know what we claim to know?), and let's not go there.
Me-self, matey never did do too well in philosophy. Got spun and off-balanced by all those shadows on the cave wall. However it sounds as if there is quantum truth to Protagoras' view. IOW, his view is true at the same time that Plato & scientific unification theory is true.
For some people, the world seems to operate according to a valid, subjective truism model (especially if they never took any science laboratory courses). So yes, the markets always provide for them. Yes, humanity always finds a way a far as they see it. Optimism triumphs over pessimism. Chicken Little was always wrong. (They never heard of Easter Island and never will.)
Optimists fail more than they succeed.
Therefore . . . ?
Are you a quitter?
I doubt that. Because if you were, then why post anything?
By definition, if I quit being a pessimist and become an optimist, I'm a quitter.
This pirate, arggh, never stays the course. We may be walking down the plank one way on Sunday, matey, and then we's turns ourselves about and heads the other way on Monday.
Staying the course is for sissies.
Only the brave and independent, cut and run their film against the establishment.
George Clooney for President 2008.
Pass it on.