Dam the Bering Strait, use nuclear-powered propellers to melt poles (2020)
weathermodificationhistory.com
weathermodificationhistory.com
In the U.S., as a non-government organization, if you’d like to modify the weather you need to fill out the NOAA form 17-4(a).
All weather modification projects that have been filed can be found here: https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections...
• tetraethyl lead under Thomas Midgley Jr. and Charles Kettering
• chlorofluorocarbons (also Midgely and Kettering)
• Chernobyl (I would include other nuclear disasters in this bullet as well)
• [90% probability] 1977 Russian flu pandemic
• a [50%] probability research-related leak for the current pandemic (simply calling this 50% for this post's purposes because nobody knows and probabilities are difficult to weigh absent more data)
They all involve insufficient, blinkered, or mis- or overly-incentivized oversight of the activities at hand. At some level, they all employ an attitude of "prove the work is likely to cause harm" rather than "prove the work carries acceptable level of risk".
I don't necessarily know how to solve this without causing scientific and technical progress to slow to a crawl. But I think that stakeholder incentives to the green-lighting of any given project with a remotely global scope, and committees who could intervene to stop it in case of overwhelming safety concerns, should be mapped out in excruciating detail to ensure there isn't the faintest of COI (conflict of interest) that could influence decision-making however subtly.
So circling back to the parent comment, the idea that one can modify weather, presumably confined locally or temporally, seems innocuous enough - - it would be impossible for that to have global-scale consequences, right? Fact is, I really don't know, and this article is a good example of such an artificial climate-shifting project. What I would want to be assured of as a member of the public, though, is that the oversight for considering such a project wouldn't unduly benefit in some way - financially, career status, family nepotism, etc. that could cloud sober judgement on whether/how the project should be allowed to proceed.
To first-order, I'd like to see a problem-domain-agnostic approach to ensuring the human incentives across all aspects of approval couldn't possibly be operating out of the wrong place. I don't want to have to be able to understand the underlying respective technologies involved to feel assured that the risk-to-public-benefit reward trade-off has been undertaken through an irreproachably sober lens.
Basically, when you use a term like "seemingly likely", you do have a number range in mind. Always. Be it 50%-70% or 40%-60%. It's impossible not to.
And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you.
I don't see how this is supported in the article. And the experiments they discussed -- asking people what probability they assign to certain expressions -- can't possibly support this statement. If you ask people to assign a number to an expression, they'll give you a number, but that doesn't mean they were originally thinking of one, or that the one they come up with is meaningful.
> And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you.
My experience is with these sorts of number-like estimate things is that I should try to figure out what plain English phrase they are trying to over-specify. I mostly come to this conclusion by talking about current events with people (elections outcomes that they thing are sure things, for example), and comparing the numbers reported (by 538 for example) to odds that they are familiar with (D&D critical hits are a good one, as an event that is rare but memorably encountered). This tends to lower confidence, which indicates to me that people don't really have a feel for these numbers.
I don't really think 70% and 60% are different from an operational point of view anyway. They are both events where we think the outcome has some skew but must plan on seeing the less likely outcome pretty often.
Or when a certain country applies pressure to other countries to dismiss the idea as "racism" while destroying evidence for international neutral investigators to shed light on what really happened.
Frequentist: "How the hell should I know?"
The coin is then flipped 10000 times, and it lands on heads exactly 5000 times.
Frequentist: "Definitely not 50%, the coin's gotta be biased".
A bayesian is shown a coin and is asked what's the probability it will land on heads.
Bayesian: "It's 50%!"
The coin is then flipped 10000 times, and it lands on heads exactly 5000 times.
Bayesian: "It's 50%!"
This two-strawmen thought experiment clearly demonstrates the superiority of the Bayesian approach in learning useful information from the real-world observations.
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1838947,0...
This just puts such a smile on my face in the middle of reading such otherwise bland government prose.
Start getting a greater than 50% success rate, and I'll bet you see changes real quick. The Supreme Court case will be amazing.
Progress can still be good, just like it never was if it also means there are severe downsides and they are just ignored for the sake of progress.
What I think many people are lamenting is that their own society is not optimistic enough about novel technology for their liking. Given that many of the people on Hacker News are near the vanguard for technological innovation by global standards it would seem there's a desire for more permissive amistics than currently exist. If anyone knows where those kinds of subcultures could be found I'd be interested in knowing about it.
Nothing is perfect, but only the most delusional think these projects were not MAJOR improvements for humanity.
It might be healthy for any large project to have a well informed skeptic in the room telling people it won't work. That person could be wrong, but figuring out how to deal with their projected outcomes can be the difference between success and failure. Or outright disaster.
Ah, I found the problem. We have the skeptic, and they effectively stop major projects dead in their tracks, but rarely are they well-informed.
An uninformed naysayer with decision making authority will kill just about any initiative.
Also see the "Northern River Reversal" project which thankfully was abandondend eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal
China seems to be doing fine with large-scale projects. People didn't get jaded. Certain cultures did.
If you look at the planet on google earth, you can see a lot of human structure. Mines, fields, tree farms, deforestation, waste-water runoff - these things are often vast. I don't know if giant engineering projects really move the needle that much; we're already engaged in a giant engineering project, it's just a completely blind one with no actual goal.
It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...
The Russians, the US government, the Chinese government, the British government, and most other governments around the world.
>It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up
That's true. And when you have a huge number of operatives, like the CIA, it's even easier to escalate nascent conflict. Read up on Conintelpro and watch the Church Committee hearings to get an inkling of what we were (and are) engaged in on a global scale.
We are coming out of one of the most lenient -- in terms of public health administration -- periods in the modern era. The mental health system up until the 70s, 80s, was frequently used to just "commit" people (even unruly "hysteric" housewives) without regard to liberty at all. Vaccination campaigns were done on a huge scale, and rationing was a part of life for many people in the west not just during the war but in post-war periods as well.
[Some] people may have lost sight of what it truly means to live in an (even mild) emergency and what kinds of decisions we need to make as a collective to solve certain problems.
But I don't think that's exactly what's going on; I think it's a clumsy attempt at a rehash of Lyndon Johnson-Great Society-style governance. And it's obviously not working, so there's a rush to find the most plausible people to blame.
The main problem is that the planet when viewed as a whole is rather squishy. We're gonna have to apply a lot of energy with extraordinary gentleness somehow. Still working on that part.
* Cultural baggage.
So, we don't have to totally dry up the Med; just turn it into an almost-fresh-water lake! Randall, calculate how many thousands or millions of years that would take.
This will eventually result in salt and minerals from the water concentrating in whats left of Mediterranean - so basically the exact opposite effect.
Here's a link about someone who actually seriously wanted to blow up the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian
He wanted to get rid of lunacy?
https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00...
Could this be part of an answer to massive sea level rise?
You could make the see less salty though, over a sufficiently long time and get a WHOLE LOT of rock salt.
As a layperson it seems to me you'd need to channel a vast area already below sea level (3500km^2 at ~100m deep?) to put a dent in the rise.
Again, napkin math. Reuters claims "75.6 trillion gallons of water added to the ocean each year" and a Panama canal history page says the French dug 30M cubic yards and the Americans dug 238M.
> Proposed that the United States and Soviet Union build a gigantic dam across the Bering Strait and use nuclear power–driven propeller pumps to push the warm Pacific current into the Atlantic by way of the Arctic Sea. Arctic ice would melt, and the Siberian and North American frozen areas would become temperate and productive.
was a sound idea, then why are we being so confident about current ideas that are being forced into adoption worldwide?
45m x 88km length = 4,000,000 m^2 times whatever thickness.
Makes sense the strait is shallow given the whole prehistoric migration, but in my mind it was much deeper, probably because of its proximity to the Pacific (max 30k+ ft) and the Bering Sea (max 12k ft).
I can imagine this being done by redirecting equatorial sunlight to the poles so the net power incidence remains constant.
But that won't solve that we keep adding big amounts of fossil carbon to the atmosphere, nor the amount of fossil carbon that we managed to add to the cycle so far that is what is driving climate change now.
To stop global warming net zero plus massive carbon capture is needed, moving pieces in a mostly closed (or at least with stable enough inputs) system won't do the trick.
EDIT: ah, rain seems to leach it away from the amazon basin over time. Still wonder where it all goes though, into the sea?
As a side effect, growing in the Sahara would also potentially drastically reduce Atlantic hurricanes. So we have to decide what's more important, trees (move them to Sahara! Or at least replant equal numbers in Sahara and elsewhere) or human lives and infra.
63 years ago, there was a push to warm the arctic. In 1978, doomsayers predicted a new ice age. For all of the predictions of apocalypse, none have materialized. However, throughout history fear has been a powerful tool for motivating and manipulating the public.
"Ice Age 1978 Leonard Nimoy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0
"List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
> We’ll again refer to the 2008 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that found there was not a scientific consensus in the 1970s on the cooling idea. The authors, by surveying the peer-reviewed literature between 1965 and 1979, found quite the opposite.
>(00:12:30) The climatic record in these deep sea cores tells us that there have been eight ice ages in the last 700,000 years. It also tells us when they have occurred. This provides us with a test of various theories of the ice ages. We now have a theory that tells us that changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit act as a pacemaker for the ice age succession. Since this theory can precisely predict when ice ages occured in the past, it also can predict when ice ages will occur in the future. From this theory we can say with confidence that we are currently heading towards another ice age.
Dr. James D. Hays
https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%2...
Somehow, your link was missing a hyphen.
Science is absolutely about consensus. Being right is entirely meaningless if you can't produce enough evidence to convince others of your rightness.
There's a very significant difference between "basically everyone in the field agrees there's enough evidence for X" and "one guy advocates X".
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” -Keynes
Science is about understanding the facts that inform policy.
1) I changed my mind about the facts.
2) I declare that the facts have changed.
3) You must also change your mind or else I'll accuse you of adhering to dogma.
4) My view is now more popular. It is the prevailing dogma. You're against the consensus if you disagree with my "facts".
The word "Facts" does heavy lifting here. Ultimately, facts can't make any assertions, only humans can. At the core of Scientism, there's always a presumptuous attempt to lay claim to objective truth. Science becomes a dogma and belief rather than a method of investigation.
I think you are misinterpreting the word “dogma”. It does not mean “consensus understanding” but rather “incontrovertibly true”. The former can change, the latter cannot; wordsmithing a false equivalence doesn’t turn real science into dogma.
1 usually disapproving : a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted These new findings challenge the current dogma in the field. political dogma 2: a belief or set of beliefs that is taught by a religious organization
1a: something held as an established opinion especially : a definite authoritative tenet b: a code of such tenets pedagogical dogma c: a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds 2: a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church
This is not congruent of science.
>doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith
Again, “faith” is antithetical to science. Faith requires no evidence, science does.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines dogma as:
“a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.”
I.e., dogma cannot be disputed. Science is meant to be disputed.
It seems you are confusing political opinion for science.
This is the point of using this word in this specific context. Scientism isn't science. Hope this helps.
Most new ideas that occur at the margins of that uncertainty won’t initially be accepted, but as more data comes in that uncertainty is reduced
In difference to that, we now have a scientific consensus and while there is a lot discussion about many details there is pretty much an agreement on:
- it's a lot of warming
- it's coming way to fast
- it's man made
- it already started
- the consequences if we don't change the current trajectory will be bad, very very bad
Doesn't mean it's an apocalypse and maybe the thread to the survival of humanity was larger during the cold war (not that ware aren't somewhat at the beginning of a new cold war), but then the a cold war can be resolved by everyone agreeing to not do anything. Climate change needs everyone to do something (change their power production and potential even living style). Which is bad, because people are better at not acting then they are at acting when it comes to hard decisions.
>None of them had anywhere the level "scientific consensus" on the topic as climate change has.
Which is fine as far as that goes. However, consensuses have been wrong before, even when dressed in the pretenses of science. Cannabis prohibition would be a good example where research was exclusively funded to show the harms of cannabis. Today CBD is presented as a cure all. A common thread would be the underlying financial and political incentives for prohibition. Incentives matter. Another parallel might exist in the fear based promotion of prohibition.
>Climate change needs everyone to do something...
Yes, and as we examine the proposed solutions most of them revolve around new taxes and supranational bodies issuing currency in the form of "carbon indulgences" or "carbon credits". We are supposed to believe that those horrible oil companies have every incentive to distort the facts about the climate. Yet simultaneously we should also believe there are no malign incentives for or distortions surrounding the inverse. We should unquestioningly believe there are no ulterior motives for those who would appoint themselves to issue carbon credits, permission slips to consume energy needed by every human on Earth.
That's a bit of a stretch, but it is possible. It is also possible that just like the proposed project in 1958, which was imagined as a boon for the Siberian region, future geoengineering projects will also have unanticipated dangers. It looked good at the time, just like the drug war looked good at one time. Today the climate agenda and geoengineering looks appealing to many.
Maybe not. Maybe we don't know as much as we think we know?
This is why instead of grand projects we should have many smaller projects which combined still have a large effect.
Also luckily many of the changes which are good for the climate are (at least in their idea) also good even without climate change. Like going way from coal power plants, which are not just bad for the climate but also bad for the environment. (Through in practice there might be drawbacks in whatever replaces it.)
> just like the drug war looked good at one time.
I get your point, but I'm not sure that this is a good example, the war on drugs looked from the get to go like it was overly targeting certain communities while even back then it was known that it's unlikely to work due to e.g. previous experiences with fighting alcohol during the prohibition period...
Plants used to be heavier and squatter, and usable material would have been greater, back when the atmosphere was closer to 2000ppm CO2. That is, realistically, and actually, plants get all of their food from the air, and soil amendments make it easier for the plants to grow tall/wide enough to get more usable sun and surface area to get their food out of the air.
Ask anyone who's ever tried CO2 with plants what happens to their fertilizer budget. It goes down, because plants are carbohydrate factories, and more carbon means more carbohydrates.
I'm off in the weeds, but cui Bono is something I ask of nearly everything and other than the carbon credit companies and all the people employed therein, who benefits from less CO2 financially? The Bayer/Monsanto and Dow of the world. Not me or you, not the oil companies, not a Rockefeller or whoever.
We need a huge collaboration of countries.
We don't need a mega project which creation will cause tons of CO2 (building stuff produces CO2 equivalent emissions) have devastating environmental damage, and massive security risks.
Assuming we can fix climate change by mega project is just the wrong approach.
We need a very (very very) high number on mostly smaller changes (and probably some larger law changes).
So that even if some of them fail it doesn't matter in the grater picture, and so that there is actually a realistic chance to pull it of (which for such a hypothetical mega construction is very small for various reasons).
Go ahead we are listening. Who would you go about coordinating and enforcing 'huge collaboration of countries'?
All i remember is world leaders coming together, year after year - shake hands, thump their chest expressing how sorrowful they feel, give great speeches how everything will change - and then nothing changes.
Just because it doesn't happen doesn't mean there is not need for it.
The Bering Strait Dam btw. would have required a higher degree of collaboration then is needed to limit climate change. Sure a few less countries would be involved be the involved countries still would need a much deeper level of collaboration which given that it's effect would have been rather negative for many of the cost countries it would have been rather hard to archive any agreement.
I don't want to go down a political rabbit hole here, but we should at least get the facts straight.
So what you're saying is we need a committee of countries.
I suspect the days of doing major engineering work are mostly behind us. For better or worse.