Meet the Man with a Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming | Hacker News Reader

Meet the Man with a Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming

technologyreview.com

29 pointsAnon8458 comments

I hope I'm not in the minority here -- plans like this terrify me. I'm currently a scientist by trade, and experience has taught me that while we have a mediocre grasp of very finely tuned experiments, to be frank, we don't know shit about predicting the chaos and unintended consequences of our actions within the complexity of the natural world. When dealing with nature, it's never as simple as do A to get B and that's it.

There's some slim chance this guy's plan could work, but I am pretty confident it is infinitely more likely to either do nothing or do something really awful.

I think there's a cognitive bias at play here. We're already doing a massive experiment on the Earth's atmosphere by adding greenhouse gases to it. But for some reason that accidental experiment doesn't seem to freak people out nearly as much as doing an intentional experiment, even one that would partially compensate for the effects of the accident.

I'd bet that most people would accept geoengineering without a second thought, as long as we convinced them it was a side effect of a for-profit venture unrelated to global warming. Because, heck, they're putting up with all the other crap we do. But tell them we're intentionally changing atmosphere and they'll riot in the streets.

This particular approach wouldn't be completely unprecedented, because the same thing happens when large volcanoes erupt...and we've observed the temperature decrease when that's happened.

It's far from a complete solution, but there's real concern that feedback loops will soon tip the Earth into an unstoppable warming cycle. The planet has gone into a hot state before, and rather quickly, with very little input to kick it off. Albedo adjustment could be a way to hold off that cycle while we figure out a way to reduce CO2.

After rats were accidentally introduced to Macquarie Island and started ravaging the local ecosystem, efforts to rebuff them -- which included introducing cats -- only made things worse; the cats -- and the rabbits later introduced for food -- have since "resulted in the annihilation of two native bird species and the stripping of Macquarie Island's vegetation."

(http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/epic-fail-efforts...)

In case my analogy is not perfectly clear: the rats are the greenhouse gasses, and the cats are your sulfate aerosols.

> This particular approach wouldn't be completely unprecedented, because the same thing happens when large volcanoes erupt...

The implication here is that because volcanoes spew sulfates into the atmosphere and it results in lower temperatures is that it is okay for us to do so, considering only the first-order temperature-lowering result (or some tiny subset of the practically infinite number of variables involved). This is a dangerous hubris, and I reject the naïveté of it. It is absolutely not the same. One is a volcano exploding, another is aerosols sprayed from an airplane.

Just because something in nature has been imbalanced because of our actions does not mean that we must respond - especially when we cannot predict the results of that response!

I'll say it again: this sort of tinkering with our biosphere based on first-order predictions terrify me. They are far more likely to result in something awful than something beneficial.

A big difference between sulfates and cats is that cats reproduce. Once you've introduced them, they're really hard to stop. With sulfates you just turn off the spigot and they're gone in a year or so.

It's not my favorite method. Another, which got some funding from the Gates Foundation, involves seeding low-altitude clouds. You can shut that one down in a week.

We already know the second-order effects of doing nothing to counteract warming, and they really are awful. The earth will quite naturally shrink the icecaps, release a large amount of methane, along with CO2 from drying forests and peat, and tip into the state it was in fifty million years ago, when crocodiles were swimming in the tropical seas at the north pole. The whole thing was kicked off by an orbital variation that very slightly raised the temperature.

> Just because something in nature has been imbalanced because of our actions does not mean that we must respond

True, but in this case, if we want civilization to survive we'd better do something. I haven't seen a single argument against albedo adjustment that was more substantial than "something bad might happen, I don't know what."

> With sulfates you just turn off the spigot and they're gone in a year or so.

There's no "just" about this. The sulfates may be gone, but the effect of their presence will never be, no matter how tiny or great it is. Again, your consideration of this is first order. I can make this clear with this question: what are the long-term effects of releasing sulfate aerosols into the air, and how do you know?

> True, but in this case, if we want civilization to survive we'd better do something.

I'm not following your logic. As I've outlined with the rats and cats example, doing something can cause a larger problem than the initial one. If we want to do something, it should be scaling back our effect on the natural environment, not giving it a good whack and hoping that the trajectory we send it on turns out correct.

> I haven't seen a single argument against albedo adjustment that was more substantial than "something bad might happen, I don't know what."

The unintended consequences of actions in chaotic systems is a damned good argument, no matter how simply you try to state it. If no one offered an argument against the cats on Macquarie Island other than "something might go wrong here, though I can't predict what", would they have been wrong? No. They'd be recognizing that they were turning knobs on a system that they did not understand, and that unpredictably bad reactions could result.

There's no "just" about this.

Gerald Weinberg once suggested that whenever you hear the j-word ("just") you should mentally swap it out for "have trouble". For example, "we'll just add that feature" means "we'll have trouble adding that feature". I think that may apply to "just" turning off that spigot.

He also recommended that the s-word, "should", be replaced be "isn't". Funny rules, but they work: you learn to notice those words as signs that we don't have a clear view of what we're talking about.

Behind door #1 is a hungry tiger. If you choose door #1 it will jump out and eat you.

Behind door #2 is something else. There's no particular reason to think it will eat you, but who knows, it might.

Which door do you choose?

If there's a door #3 that will definitely not eat you, then choose it. But so far we don't seem to have found a door like that. Just "scaling back" to any realistic degree is unlikely to be sufficient to avoid door #1, unless we succeed soon in converting our energy supply to advanced fission or cheap fusion.

Geoengineering approaches that pull carbon back out of the atmosphere are another avenue, which I prefer to albedo adjustment since they simply return the atmosphere to its original state. But those are much bigger and more expensive, and in some cases have their own side effects.

Couldn't the same be said for many worth-wild things? Didn't people say the Large Hadron Collider would cause a black hole?

Those people were provably wrong, as the Earth is bathed in high energy particles from the Universe all the time and particle collisions on the same scale as in the LHC have been happening routinely for the entire lifetime of Earth with no catastrophic effects.

Wow, dont understand why I was downvoted. I was agreeing with you. My point was people were scared of the LHC without scientific reasoning.

Here's what bugs me about the whole story.

The Headline:

    (Meet the Man with) A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming

Key point made by David Keith:

    “I’m not saying it will work, and I’m not saying we
    should do it.” But “it would be reckless not to begin
    serious research on it,” he adds. “The sooner we find
    out whether it works or not, the better.”

And people wonder why I am so ungenerous in my assessment of journalists and editors.

This had me twitching right from the start:

    Increasing what scientists call the planet’s albedo, or
    reflective power ...

What scientists call? How about what everyone calls when they need to measure reflectivity.

I don't know if this is just unfortunate choice of language or the author exhibits an bit of an us-and-them attitude towards science.

I really hate the term "scientists", the way it is used is like they're this abstract homogeneous mass of not quite people who hand down decrees from on high. Instead of what they really are which is a very inhomogeneous group of hard working people working in a very broad number of fields with a vast array of ideas.

So fucking true. It bugs me no end when I read news reports that mention "scientists". Do we read articles where "policemen say" or "politicians say" or "priests say"?

This article is mostly about geo-engineering technology, but I can't help but feel like the technological side of the venture is the easiest part. Who is going to make the go/no-go decision? The UN? By majority vote? How much do we lower the temperature by? I can't imagine an agreement being reached on something like this in my lifetime.

For this reason I think we're far more likely to see this problem 'solved' by renegade geo-engineering efforts like what Russ George did (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-ir...) and that has me deeply worried.

According to Keith’s calculations, if operations were begun in 2020, it would take 25,000 metric tons of sulfuric acid to cut global warming in half after one year. Once under way, the injection of sulfuric acid would proceed continuously. By 2040, 11 or so jets delivering roughly 250,000 metric tons of it each year, at an annual cost of $700 million, would be required to compensate for the increased warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide. By 2070, he estimates, the program would need to be injecting a bit more than a million tons per year using a fleet of a hundred aircraft.

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" included a clip from Futurama, which shows their method of combatting global warming: dumping increasing amounts of space ice in the oceans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqVyRa1iuMc

I'm not criticising the idea, I don't have the required background. But it doesn't sound like a permanent solution.

Poor conspiracy theorists. They already have so many problems with chemtrails, and now somebody proposes this?

I’m starting to believe the only permanent solution to these problems is reducing the global population. We just can’t keep using natural resources at the rate we are today.

I hate this sentiment. It's counter-factual and absolutely poisonous.

Go live in a hut in the middle of nowhere if you're so concerned about resource use.

For me, I fucking relish the day when everyone on the Earth can be as wealthy, or indeed wealthier, as I am today. Can live comfortably and look forward to sumptuous and delicious meals instead of living in fear of starvation or disease or war.

People who want to see a reduction in human population relish the same things you do. We can consume as much as we want if there are fewer of us.

You can to almost anywhere on this planet and you can see human settlement encroaching on and damaging natural habitats. The magnitude of these effects are in direct correlation to human population growth.

This is exactly backwards. The more people there are who are skilled, educated, and working, the more resources are produced. Resources aren't manna from heaven, they are the products of human labor and ingenuity. In 50 years we'll be using robots to pluck Neodymium and Copper from the ground and Iridium from asteroids. We're not going to be running out of resources, we're going to be wealthier and resources are going to be more abundant.

It's easy to imagine that we'll "run out" of "resources" because in theory many resources are in finite supply. But in reality the hard natural limits are so high as to be effectively infinite over extremely long periods of current levels of use and historically humans have gotten more and more clever about finding new methods to extract or produce resources that previously were not available.

Moreover, our increasing wealth and technological capabilities have made it possible to reduce and reverse our environmental impact and encroachment of habitats.

Personally, I like my life and I think it's worth living, and indeed even justified, and I think that denying the ability to live a similar lifestyle to others simply because they were born into a different part of the world is just know-nothing nonsense and veiled racism.

I assume you also believe governments can spend their way out of debt?

    For me, I fucking relish the day when everyone
    on the Earth can be as wealthy, or indeed wealthier,
    as I am today.

I assume that your wealth, unlike that of many Americans, doesn't include a house with a big yard because everyone on Earth will never be able to have that.

Or consuming earth's resources at a rate lower than the production rate.

... And blocking out 1% of the available energy from the sun seems like a poor choice, if the answer is efficiency.

Or start consuming earth's resources in a sustainable manner, e.g:

- heavily taxing gasoline vehicles and subsidising electric vehicles to encourage adoption.

- heavily taxing non-renewable sources of electricity generation, subsidising solar, wind etc.

- Use carbon taxes to fund more research into renewables and maybe Thorium, advanced battery technology etc.

You could have a gradual ramp up of taxes to ease the burden of shifting to renewables.

The biggest problem is getting people and governments to change their old mindsets. Politics, not technology is holding back progress.

We've got some form of carbon tax in Australia and people are up in arms about it. "How DARE they put my power bills up". "Why should we go first if no one else is doing it"? Everyone complains about global warming and wants something done, but not out of their own pocket. Any government instituting these kind of taxes will be booted out, and the opposition will come right along and repeal them.

It's ridiculous.

Who should we start by killing?

Clearly not the solution. But do you really see a future were countries don’t have population control methods in place.

Hans Rosling seems to think we'll top out at 10 billion.

http://youtu.be/fTznEIZRkLg

and the main mechanism is, counter-intuitively, reducing child mortality in the poorest areas.

The number of children between 0-20 has been rather steady for the last decade or two, the only reason the world population is growing is that the average age is increasing, not that an ever increasing amount of children are being born.

Eventually the population will stabilize by itself and possibly also start decreasing as the countries that have the largest population growth continue toward full industrialization and modern ways of living.

Of course. The best population control method in history has proven to be...

wealth.

Yourself. (OK, don't really, but c'mon...)

Personally, I'd try giving away education and birth control first.

Not a bad idea, but maybe we should also educate the people living in the wealthiest nations to consume less and have more sustainable life styles? 80 percent of the world's natural resources are spent by the wealthiest 16 percent after all: http://articles.cnn.com/1999-10-12/us/9910_12_population.cos...

We could start by working less: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours

I don't think I could work any less than I already am, but I agree with you.

I am also convinced that in order to "do more with less" in the future, we will need to actually solve the basic problems that keep prices high on food, clothing, shelter, and knowledge. I'm not sure how to do that when science is a prisoner of copyright, for example, and education costs as much as a house, for example; I just don't see how to solve the physical problems, even for myself, in any big way when we can't collectively solve even the self-inflicted/social ones like copyright (and superstitions, and violence, and, ...). I think working less would be a sign of success, but I'm not sure how to get there from here. People won't do it voluntarily (nor should they be forced to). The government can always tax the wealthy and redistribute, but I'm leery of promoting that and just giving the government more power. (Now they want my guns too.)

It doesn't help that the U.S. defaulted on it's gold debt in the 70's (brilliantly calling it "going off the gold standard") and now U.S. money is just an interest-bearing loan (as opposed to you, the government, just printing paper...), which means people pay interest on public debt, the rich get richer, keeping the pressure on and prices going up. (Most of the world's currencies are U.S. dollar backed, so it's not limited to the U.S..) It's musical chairs: ie, every now and then someone has to lose big (one chair is removed, in the form of interest payments), and the pie gets divided among fewer and fewer (and their children). No one's going to work less with that gun in their back.

That's why, as unpopular as it can be around here (hey, everyone has to make a living), I think we have to fix this idea that we can charge for knowledge (or patent it, or copyright it), because we're really not (IMHO) going to be able to get to the important stuff if we keep fighting over the "how" (most food plants are sterile for goodness sake). I can't justify giving an inventor, even if it's me, a monopoly on an idea if it just means the whole world needs my permission to solve their own problems.

That's why I think open source ecology seems so promising: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggbUh3-8sY

The most logical thing would be to work your way down this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...

We start with the global emancipation of women. Unfortunately we barely seem able to get that going in the most developed country in the world, which makes doing it in the poorest a lot harder.

Wait... wasn't this basically the plan they came up with in The Matrix? ... I don't recall that working out too good...

Seriously; while it's tempting to think of grand plans like this, I think that meddling in ecosystems is what got us into the trouble in the first place. Climate change is an economic problem, not an engineering one, which is far less sexy.

It does sound a bit like Operation Dark Storm from the Part 2 of the The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animatrix#The_Second_Renais...

> Wait... wasn't this basically the plan they came up with in The Matrix? ... I don't recall that working out too good...

Please tell me that you are not relying on The Matrix as a serious resource for ... well ... anything.

Are you implying The Matrix didn't really happen?!

Great. First pesticides, and now this.

No thanks, I don't want to breathe in atomized droplets of highly corrosive acid. I'd rather die from excessive global heat than live with the unknown ramifications of injecting the earth with acid.

The actual plan is preposterous, as well. It's clear that Keith has little understanding of the details of his plan and whether it even stands a chance at working, because there is absolutely no scientific methodology at play here. Where is the evidence? There has been no citation of any source that confirms his assumptions. Where are the small-scale trials? How does someone just take jets to the atmosphere and spray it full of sulfur without even knowing the ramifications? When people were testing nuclear power plants for the first time, they made sure to do so in a controlled environment. Crossing your fingers and carrying out a very complex procedure for the first time in an uncontrolled environment without knowing anything beforehand is not only remarkably stupid, but it's also very dangerous.

Currently, we're in a safe zone with regards to climate change. If we increase the number of carbon sinks, and if everyone switches to electric cars tomorrow and aircraft start using cleaner-burning biofuels with low NOx and CO2 emissions, we can decrease our carbon footprint by a large amount. Planting a lot of trees and stopping deforestation can compensate for the amount of carbon in our atmosphere already.

Also, investing more time and money into alternative energy isn't a bad idea. Turbines have been around for centuries; it's about time we started using more of them. Solar power is advancing very quickly and could really offer a good source of electric power. If every state had 10 windfarms and 10 solar power plants, then we could be self-sustaining for as long as the Sun doesn't implode.

A shame, though, that our bureaucratic government would rather invest money into restricting freedom rather than invest money to better our world. It's also a shame that people will be too selfish to give up their hydrocarbon-burning cars and vehicles.

I have always thought it would be interesting to see what affect painting all the roof's of all the buildings on earth white would have on global warming. I doubt there is enough buildings in the world for it have any affect though.

> For the northern hemisphere summer, they found that increasing the reflectivity of roof and pavement materials in cities with a population greater than 1 million would achieve a one-time offset of 57 gigatons of CO2 emissions (31 Gt from roofs and 26 Gt from pavements). That’s double the worldwide CO2 emissions in 2006 of 28 gigatons. Their results were published online in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2010/07/19/cool-roof...

It has been suggested (by people smarter than me) that lighter surfaces have the effect of reducing cloud cover, which allows for more sunlight to reach the ground which suggests it would only exacerbate the problem.

Some suggest using solar panels instead, which comes with many of the same benefits as painting roofs white, but absorbs the light as opposed to reflecting it, and thus wont reduce cloud cover.

Im not a scientist, just a casual observer, but my gut feeling is that the only way to halt or even reverse climate change is to stop producing as much carbon. Any other approach is more likely to come with unforeseen problems.

So get to it! Pop down to your local Tesla showroom and do your bit.

Scientists don't really understand how clouds affect climate (some clouds cause localized cooling, some clouds cause localized heating, it's complicated), mostly they just include an empirically determined fudge factor to account for it.

Solar panels should be mandatory for all new homes - at least in the developed countries to begin with. Imagine how much carbon we'd reduce by effectively killing off the majority of power generation facilities.

I think we do need to reduce the amount of carbon emitted though - it causes ocean acidification + if we kill off the oceans we will be screwed.

Acidification (the state of something becoming acidic) occurs when the pH drops below 7.0 and thus the ratio of hydrogen ions to hydroxyl ions > 1. This has never occurred and we are nowhere near that situation. pH (it's a log scale) of the oceans is roughly around 7.7 to 8.4. This is not to debate future trends!

Seven is not the magic number where things go bad. The pH is dropping about a hundred times faster than at any time in the past 20 million years, and that's already affecting sea life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

"Corals, calcareous phytoplankton, mussels, snails, sea urchins and other marine organisms use calcium (Ca) and carbonate (CO3) in seawater to construct their calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells or skeletons. As the pH decreases, carbonate becomes less available, which makes it more difficult for organisms to secrete CaCO3 to form their skeletal material." http://www.ocean-acidification.net/FAQeco.html

So what do you call a downward trend in pH, when the pH starts above 7? And if there is a downward trend, what makes you think it would stop on its own at 7?

So this will also reduce the amount of power harvested by the sun panels? Therefore increasing the "green energy" costs?

It will also reduce the amount of solar energy available to plants, which will reduce the amount of food we can grow and increase its costs. (And less photosynthesis means that plants will absorb less CO2 from the atmosphere.)

Cheaper solution:

- Make people ride bicicles.

- Reduce work hours to 4 / day.

- Make it expensive to buy gas. So people ride bikes and so that Electric vehicles that are charged by solar panels increase.

- People will be fitter, happier, more producive and more imaginative and with free time to plant trees also.

If they work 4h/day it's still 10 commutes per week

So instead make them work 8h/3days (or 2.5days if you'd rather) then you only have 6 commutes per week

Or just work remotely

Commutes are less mentally draining if you're riding a bike though, you'll actually gain energy for working on challenging problems instead.

Only way to prevent the doom and gloom is to stop fighting it.

Simple plan? Woman should take men that respect our environment and don't eat much meat. Problem solved after some years - evolution for the rescue

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