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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why I think the debate should be less about "how can we as humans stop affecting Earth's natual climate" and "how can we as humans gain control over Earth's natural climate".

Climate change happens with us or without us. If we're going to protect our huge investments in climate-dependent infrastructure (i.e. cities) then we're gonna want (say) giant space mirrors to compensate for any zany things that nature might throw at us.

The political problem of who gets to control the Earth's thermostat is, of course, a tricky one.

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Attempting to exercise control over such a chaotic system with simplistic solutions like giant space mirrors strikes me as a very bad idea indeed. Until we have a complete understanding of how the climate is regulated naturally I really don't see how we can do any good at all.

Not to mention that, as you say, the politics are beyond us at the moment anyway (global consensus? yeah, right...)

The nice thing about space mirrors is that of all the climate mitigation methods I've heard, they are by far the most controllable. Solutions like "let's stuff the oceans full of iron to grow plankton to absorb CO2", even assuming they work as intended, have the problem that they are irreversible. Space mirrors can put heat where we want it, and remove it from where we want it, and can do so on hours of notice. It's actually the least simplistic solution. It also actually allows some reasonable engineering experimentation with commensurate levels of commitment.

Unfortunately, it is also the easiest to turn into one hell of a weapon.

Then, following that logic, climate control in general is one hell of a weapon. If anybody actually can control the climate, can we allow them that power? Things like "turn it over to the UN" aren't a magical answer to that problem because "the UN" is ultimately just another group of people, not particularly imbued with magical resistance to the temptations of power. (Arguably, quite the opposite.)

But assuming the massive political problems can be solved, problems which all climate control schemes have equally, space mirrors are actually the one I favor most. Too many of the other ones have a failure case of "triggering an ice age", and for all the words spent on explaining how bad global warming is, ice ages are several orders of magnitude worse than the worst global warming story I've heard. A true ice age is the end of civilization.

What makes it simplistic for me is really the idea that we can make the climate better by tinkering with a single variable (temperature in this case) - I'm not convinced we even know what 'better' is, let alone have enough understanding to predict what the side effects would be. What if we cause some imbalance that doesn't immediately manifest any problems but has a detrimental longer term effect?

I do take your point about space mirrors and the ability to experiment, though - certainly more appealing than man-made plankton blooms shudder - and I think you hit the nail on the head with respect to the political issues!

Temperature as a single variable doesn't deal with /known/ problems.

Besides the well-known effect on temperature, CO2 also causes ocean acidification, which among other things kills coral. In its own way, ocean acidification is far scarier than global warming, because there is absolutely no question that it is taking place. While you need a PhD to analyze climate data, you only need high school chemistry to demonstrate ocean acidification. Moreover, you have to deal with the carbon dioxide directly to solve this problem; you can't just try changing the albedo of the Earth, through mirrors or surface reflectors or particulates in the upper atmosphere. And worse: simply stopping where we are may not an option. The current levels may already be long-term undesirable.

Honestly, by analyzing fossil records of CO2 in past times, like the Jurassic period, I believe that somewhere in the ocean there are creatures with genomes adapted or rapidly adaptable to an increased acidic ocean.

The geological average of CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be about 20 times the current amount.

Not necessarily corals are the optimum staple life form of the oceans.

I do not claim to know anything about what would the optimum staple life form in the ocean, I'm simply open to the possibility that an increase in CO2 could lead to a improvement in photosynthesis ability for algae and therefore an increase in ocean life.

IIRC, plankton blooms were debunked. They tried it and the number of predators just a level removed from the plankton increased to offset the bloom.

They were; I just picked that as a convenient example of a non-reversible idea. Once you dump the iron in, you're committed. It turns out that in a dynamic system (ahem) that just smashing one of the inputs doesn't guarantee a linear response, but regardless, you're committed once you've done it.

(It turns out that in this case the system tends towards stability. There are good reasons to believe that most changes we can make will also be neutralized. But there's no a priori reason that the same experiment couldn't have experienced a wildly disproportionally large response instead.)

Ah, but with space mirrors we don't get "temperature", we get temperature in locations. You don't just point the mirrors "at Earth", you point them "at Utah" or, well, engineering-wise there's nothing really stopping us from getting it down to a few hundred square meters or even tighter, which is why this can be such a weapon. But it's also why they really are the best solution, they have fine-grained control over many things and can even be used to do things like significantly increase evaporation in oceans or something, not just control temperature directly.

You're not following Lean Climate Control practices.

Failing Fast seems suboptimal, here.

The morning weather forecast will promise that "some weather" will be delivered but they don't know what form it will take or how much of it there will be. They will go on to say that if you're not happy with the weather that is delivered then you shouldn't worry because they can guarantee that some more weather will be delivered the following day.

That's assuming that there is any kind of natural 'regulation' of the earth's climate. It appears to veer erratically from mini-ice age to heatwave. However it's true we do need to vary carefully consider the downsides of any potential interventions and be flexible about it. There's far too much dogma and polarisation of debate in climate science at the moment.

That is indeed an assumption on my part, although there is evidence of such regulation that I, at least, find compelling; for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insol...

and it's worth pointing out that long term regulation and the shorter term variations that you mentioned aren't necessarily incompatible.

IANA Climate Scientist though!

"The political problem of who gets to control the Earth's thermostat is, of course, a tricky one."

Understatement of the year. Can you imagine?

I could imagine it, as always, being the guys that paid for it.

Might test the BRIC alliances. Russia and Brazil probably won't agree on this one.

What BRIC alliances?

BRIC countries are just clumped together for being developing economies that are going through similar experiences, but it is far from being a political-economic group.

Quite the opposite, actually.

There has been an annual BRICS summit attended by the leaders on the 5 nations since 2009. Clearly it's a bit more than a clever media acronym.

Correct, but I wouldn't say this can be called an "Alliance". Even the members of this group are hard to precise. Some would put Korea, some would put Nigeria, some would put Indonesia, etc.

"BRIC" is no NATO, or anything that resembles some formal structure. The "BRIC" countries are getting into multi-lateral agreements, yes, but there is no "BRIC" organization. While the summit is used to conduct agreements between Russia and China, or Brazil/China/India, there is no "BRIC alliance".

Minor changes in the suns output have a tiny impact on earths climate. The vastly simplified reason is black body radiation increases as the 4th power of temperature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law). And the sun is vary stable when you average over a day sitting at +/- .05% since we have been able to detect it. And unlike earths climate astronomers have plenty of other vary similar stars to directly compare the sun to and they are also vary stable.

PS: Now a gigantic increase in the suns output relative to the norm of say 0.11% = an increase of 1.0011(288K)^4 = (288K+x)^4 = ~0.08 degrees C.

Your sentence should read: Minor changes in the suns output THEORETICALLY have a tiny impact on earths climate.

Real empirical data refutes your conclusion based on one equation.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627640.800-whats-wro...

I worry that you underestimate the complexity of the problem.

Drastically reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by reducing fossil fuel usage AND increasing sequestration by natural systems is by far the easiest and most predictable approach to strive for.

However, even that is proving beyond the abilities of our struggling political leaders.

For instance Canada may want the earth warmer, whereas Indian would want it cooler. (Since it benefits their respective latitudes.)

You'd think but as a Canadian who hates the cold but lives on a flat (400ft is the highest spot) island I won't be living here if the sea rises even a bit more.

Well, I think this would be the simplest: the temperature at any given latitude will be the average of the last n years. Period. But maybe I'm too naive.

Simplest, but not optimal. Ideally you'd want to settle on a mean that:

a) Maximizes arable land, b) Minimizes climate-based natural disasters such as hurricanes, and c) Is as near to self-sustaining as possible. That is, the global mean should not lead to significant growing or shrinking of ice caps and glaciers, nor significantly alter carbon uptake by the oceans. While some degree of human control could make up for heterostatic forces, a swing too far in either direction would quickly exceed our ability to compensate.

> While some degree of human control could make up for heterostatic forces, a swing too far in either direction would quickly exceed our ability to compensate.

Exactly. That's why I'm suggesting that the "not worse" solution could be to artificially heat up the earth to the actual temperature for every latitude. Politics aside, a different temperature would probably disturb the current equilibrium and potentially cause some side-effects worse than the suspected mini ice-age.

do people really believe that rapid climate change will reveal some new mass of desirable farm land? maybe in 5000 years as the soils adapt to new climates, but not fast enough to feed a hungry planet.

there are some lands on the periphery of existing arable zones that might become desirable in the short term, but certainly there will be a net loss worldwide...local economies have grown around existing arable zones, you have to transplant all that too

That's what I was getting at. Too big a swing could, for example, hasten the expansion of the Gobi Desert, destroying millions of acres of arable land and endangering the food supply for a billion people.

Who gets to define n?

I don't know actual statistics, but I think that in every place there is something like a "normal temperature" each season.

Whoever has the most firepower.

no one. we do not have the technology to rapidly alter the climate. our current climate change is the result of thousands of years of population growth and industrialization. concepts for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere in short course are just that, concepts

mother nature is still in charge, and needs only shrug slightly with a temperature change of 10 degrees on average in either direction to eliminate humans and our society

Somehow I doubt a 10 degree shift (F) would eliminate humans altogether, since humans have likely gone through a population bottleneck of 1,000-10,000 breeding pairs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

why do people throw these arguments around? i don't know of any nation whose scientists find any rapid climate change desirable. who are they? the notion of a polar thaw is tossed around as being desirable for canada as a shipping route....BUT this would decimate the living biosphere of 90% of canadians who live within 100 miles of the US border. i've never heard a serious canadian climate science talk about rapid climate change as desirable...nor any other

I've seen studies pointing out more land access for Canadians [0] but hardly anything about affecting the 'living biosphere of 90% of Canadians within 100 miles of US border'. What's the source?

[0] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=farm+climate...

you don't need a study. most of the population of canada is situated far further south than most americans understand. the lowest point of ontario, for example, is south of the most northern point of california.

most of the inhabited areas of canada already have very hot summers. in southern ontario you can expect weather like washington DC in july

if most of the united states is set to be victimized by climate change (which everyone accepts) then it is a trivial deduction that most of the population of canada will also be

Southern Ontario dips down to just north of PA/Ohio and next to Detroit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Canada#Extreme_poi...

I'm nitpicking, but unless I'm misunderstanding you, what you're saying about Southern Ontario having weather like DC in July is a little off. Average high July DC is 88F. Average high July Detroit (close to S Ont) is 83F. It's similar, but 5F is definitely a difference. Sharing the facts because I find this stuff interesting!

Opinion: DC often feels hotter than it actually is due to the high humidity, which gets worse the farther down the east coast you go. I've never been to Southern Ontario in July though.

DC: http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/U...

Detroit: http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/U...

A nice idea but I don't think it's really practical. Humanity itself doesn't really have the capability to bring that level of energy output and control to bare on a planetary scale.

Moreover, I don't think it's really a very interesting problem. To use an analogy, your idea is similar to the approach used in AI in the 70s or 80s -- computer scientists trying to build a complete artificial intelligence from scraps. In the past 30 years we've learned that this isn't the right approach to a massive problem that we don't truly understand. Instead, we should focus on building small advances -- pieces which get us toward our overall goal. Instead of attempting to control the weather, we need to focus on smaller goals like practical fusion power, a highly advanced national electrical grid, or advanced solar power.

It's probably easier to just colonize other planets than it is to go farting around with something as delicate as Earth's climate.

It's obviously easier to "fart around with" the Earth's climate considering we're doing it now to some extent.

Assuming you meant the much higher bar of improving the Earth's climate (sidestepping the obvious question of what we mean by improve), I'm still not convinced colonizing another planet is easier. There's a number of theoretical plans for reducing CO2, or decreasing surface temperature by reflecting some of the sun's light. These plans are much less sci-fi fanciful than building a viable colony (especially if you mean largely self-supporting) on other planets.

"sidestepping the obvious question of what we mean by improve"

This, by the way, is rather a massive problem with current discourse. Anyone who wants to talk about "damage" to Earth's environment ought to be required to specify their definition of "optimal". It turns out to be rather tricky, but without it a lot of this debate is politics, not science or engineering.

Point being that making a mess on another planet is more preferable than making a mess of the only one we have - and I have much more faith in our ability to make a mess of things than I do in our ability to "improve" the Earth's climate.

That's odd since the evidence we have so far points to humanity adapting our environment and improving our living conditions with breathtaking success.

Well yes and no - great short term success (of the order of decades or centuries), but we still don't know what the longer term impact of our activities will be; that's one of the big questions of climate science.

Um, we wouldn't be discussing climate change if that were the case.

I don't know if the Earth's climate is as delicate as we fear. Our infrastructure is far more delicate when it comes to the Earth climate. The Earth is able to function within a homeostatic range (say, established over the past billion years) far more effectively than our infrastructure (established over the past few hundred years). The biosphere may also be involved with this, which has been raised in the Gaia theory line of argumentation.

Wouldn't this then require us to "fart around" with the climate of the planets we colonize to make them more like Earth's?

See last week's submission, "Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

The difference being that there is nobody living on a planet like say, Mars.

Last I checked, there are a whole bunch of people with nowhere else to go on Earth as it stands.

> The difference being that there is nobody living on a planet like say, Mars.

Stop right there. You don't know that there isn't anyone living there. We've sent a couple rovers, dug down a few inches, and looked at it from telescopes. There are millions of dollars poured into the search for life on Mars every year, as there should be. But we don't know very much yet!

I am totally in favour of terraforming and colonizing Mars if we can (reasonably) prove that nothing is alive there. But we aren't anywhere near that point. The greatest crime the human race could ever commit would be the annihilation of the (perhaps only?) living ETs found, even if by "accident" as we moved in there.

Don't think that Mars is your dead playground for you to do as you wish. Treat it and its unknown past with deep respect. There's a small chance that something, somewhere, is living there, perhaps under the surface, perhaps in caves.

Don't assume we know everything about other planets just 'cause we can see them with our telescopes.

I am in favor of doing with Mars as we wish. When Western Civilization had "first contact" with various "alien"[1] native societies around the world, most of the impact flowed from civilization to the "aliens". Civilization continued on and most of the alien societies became footnotes in history. Might makes right, and unless the Martian bacteria are crafting starships in their caves, I think we should take samples for scientific study and then open Mars to homesteaders. The Martian lifeforms have had just as long to do something productive with Mars as we have had with Earth. It is not our fault if they are still just bacteria.

[1] Meaning literally foreign.

This is our legacy. It's sad in a way, but that lament is the luxury of the victorious.

I don't think it's that big of a deal. Considering the issue of wiping out a species, we do that all the time here on Earth (no that doesn't make it okay, but we do it all the time nevertheless, I don't think it's humanity's greatest crime). Considering the issue of wiping out an ET species, that makes me more worried for Great Filter concerns than about how we'll look back at ourselves in history. If there's life on Mars, or if there was life on Mars, either case is bad news for us.

nowhere to go? really? last time i checked most of the earth's surface was uninhabited. why do people want to go to mars when the land can be had in the mojave desert for practically no cost? its just as dry but has an oxygen atmosphere, and there is virtually no demand for the land

or forget about the mojave. northern canada has a population per square km that is effectively zero. pretty mars-like, but you can hunt for dinner if you're smart. and once again, the land is basically free.

oh i'm not even mentioning a half dozen inhospitable places that no one occupies....why on earth would these people need to go to mars again??

A) Because every dollar invested in the US space program since inception has created about $7 of economic benefit to the consumer economy.

B) (Related to A but worth mentioning separately:) Because the space program has led to major advances in medicine that have improved length and quality of life on Earth. [1]

C) To gain access to essentially limitless energy resources via space-based solar.

D) To gain access to material resources (e.g. minerals) that are scare or absent on Earth. [2]

E) To create an off-Earth breeding population of humans so that one asteroid / plague / nuclear war / whatever cannot wipe out the entire species.

[1] Here's a simple example: When the Hubble telescope was initially launched, it had a small lens defect that blurred the pictures slightly (the pictures were still better than any Earth-based 'scope, though). Image processing software was developed to clean up the pictures until a replacement lens could be deployed. That software then migrated over to MRI machines where it is now used to detect tumors much earlier than used to be possible.

[2] These resources are better accessed from the asteroids than Mars, but going to the latter gives you access to the former.

> A) Because every dollar invested in the US space program since inception has created about $7 of economic benefit to the consumer economy.

This is intriguing. Do you have a reference and/or can you provide an explanation for this?

There were myriad new materials and other technologies developed to defeat the challenges of getting into and surviving in space, many of which launched companies and industries.

Some commonly cited examples: memory foam (TempurPedic Mattresses), better water filters, freeze-dried food, cordless power tools, various plastics, useful solar cells, carbon fiber epoxy.

On top of that, there are all of the benefits of having satellites (telecommunications, GPS, satellite TV, etc).

you raise a bunch of economic issues, but the poster to which i replied simply stated that there was "no where else to go", which is absurd

the rest of your points are dubious. your point B) has been proven false since the launch of the space station...this was one of its apparently initial goals, zero-g bioresearch...except that ended up being replaced with simulating everything in computers with bioinformatics on earth much more easily

C) also has no meaning as we could provide 100% of our solar needs by simply covering a part of any of our major deserts with solar thermal.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/surface-area-requ...

D) maybe, but, for a contrived example, if gold is $5000 an ounce, you have to bring it back from mars for less than $5000 an ounce or its a wash

E) completely bogus, no humans could survive long term with constant support from earth, this has been beaten to death

I second wunderfool's comment. Having driven from Richmond, Virginia, to Anchorage, Alaska, a couple of times, I can attest first-hand that most of North America is unoccupied, empty wildlands. And, don't tell me that I was confused by giant farms in Saskatchewan or something like that. I'm not counting them. Most of the land is simply empty and devoid of humans. (This fact got a little worrisome when it was night, I was low on gasoline, it was snowing, and I was still a good distance from the next "town" on the map.)

Yes. But when Haliburton claims a planet, I don't really care if they fart around with its climate, because I'll never be allowed to go there anyway.

I've seen that movie - Avatar I think.

Which "other planets" do you have in mind that are within easy reach of Earth?

This is like using a tool. It may crash while you are using it for no reason, or may be someone else steal it. But this is not a reason not to be careful of your tool and don't abuse it. Especially when you don't have another one.

This sounds like a horrible idea; you can't backup the planet and revert if shit hits the fan (and it does, it always finds a way).

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