From John Tierney.
If we really do have a climate change problem, this seems like a much better solution than a command-control economy. But it doesn’t provide the watermelon socialists with an excuse to run our lives.
5 thoughts on “More Climate Engineering Thoughts”
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The odd thing about climate engineering is that proponents don’t seem to list the huge benefits of ‘Localized’ climate engineering. Treating the entire world as a single room with a single year-round thermostat will always give you results where you might improve conditions in one spot, but make things far worse in other places.
Canada, for example, would gain hundreds of billions in property values if its average temperatures in the October to April timeframe were raised a few degrees.
Much of India, for example, would benefit greatly from reducing summer temperatures by about the same amount.
Imagine you were the government of Texas, and you were called on to evaluate proposals for local climate control. The problem would be much more reasonable than trying to manage global atmospheric CO2 levels, and wouldn’t require you to try to exert authority over China, India, or volcanoes.
Nice idea Charlie, but with problems. The big one is unforeseen consequences. The main one of these is related to the probable fact that localised climate engineering would require things to be done that have global consequences.
For example, take the Canadian example. The only ways to achieve this are to increase insolation (big space mirrors, or quadrillions of small ones) or to decrease the albedo of Canada; the practical solution to this is to spread something dark, such as soot, over the snow.
Increased insolation either increases the total heat budget of Earth or diverts light that would have otherwise hit Earth somewhere else. Both of these affect people other than Canadians.
Albedo change also alters the heat budget of Earth as a whole, with many consequences very difficult to predict.
The conclusion? Localised weather, and even more so climate, control is impossible.
“The conclusion? Localised weather, and even more so climate, control is impossible.”
Impossible is such a strong word.
I vaguely recall that the human race started measurably changing climate via agriculture some seven thousand years ago, but I cannot remember if the effect was in anyway localized.
I might be inclined to say that the degree of localized weather control is a function of the site, the technologies used and effort expended.
OTEC, Irrigation, desalinization, forestation and ocean currents are some of the lower hanging fruit.
If this was purely about economics I would expect to see significant localized weather control in the next few centuries. However there is a philosophical question as to whether or not this would be appropriate. By the time we have the technology to do this, maybe we would also have the technology not to warrant it.
Fletch,
I think you may suffer from a lack of imagination.
There are other ways to raise or lower the temperature of a country other than reflecting in additional sunlight or changing the albedo.
During part of the daylight hours, the temperature normally rises because the incoming energy from the sun exceeds the energy constantly being radiated to space.
During nighttime hours, infrared energy flows from the surface of the earth into the endless void of outer space.
Basically, if you want to warm your locality, you interfere with the nighttime loss of heat. If you want to cool your locality, you reflect the incoming sunlight before it becomes heat.
Aluminized mylar ‘nets’ are ideal for both of these tasks. Not at ground level, not in space, but stretched out about 400 meters over the ground. Imagine a hexagonal array of radio tower masts wired together, with a system to deploy these screens at the press of a button. Obviously, these nets would need to be rolled up when the weather gets too severe – but there are no technical show-stoppers that would prevent a system like this from working.
The plus side of this technology is that you can begin testing it fairly small, and get a good idea of how well you can make it work before you deploy it in a larger area.
However, that’s exactly why the ‘greenies’ would rather institute draconian global restrictions on CO2 – It isn’t really about fixing the so-called problem, it is actually about control – they want to be able to tell everybody what to do, and CO2 restrictions let them control the entire economy.
Charlie – May I suggest that covering an area in highly reflective Mylar might well change its albedo – rather drastically? That’s essentially what the word “albedo” means – the fraction of total incoming light that is reflected. I don’t know the exact figures, but I would think that the albedo of Mylar is around 0.9 at least. Probably rather higher than that of fresh-fallen snow.
By “localised climate control is impossible” I meant that it is impossible to keep it local – except perhaps by putting large areas under a geodesic dome.