Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
“Climate engineering: exploring nuances and consequences of deliberately altering the Earth's ener…”
Last edited Mon Nov 17, 2014, 08:53 PM - Edit history (1)
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/current[font face=Serif][font size=5]Climate engineering: exploring nuances and consequences of deliberately altering the Earth's energy budget[/font]
Published 17 November 2014
[font size=3]Our planet is warming, largely from the ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels. If this continues, serious consequences to our planet are likely to occur within the second half of this century. The objective of Climate Engineering (hereafter CE, but also referred to as ‘Geoengineering’, and sometimes as ‘Solar Radiation Management’) is to offset the warming and some other climate consequences that would otherwise result from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface or by increasing the outward transmission of long-wave radiation from the Earth. These strategies might be used throughout the period required to replace fossil-fuel burning with globally distributed clean energy and even be continued while CO[font size="1"]2[/font] concentrations remained too high.
Five years ago, the Royal Society published a report titled Geoengineering the Climate (1) summarizing many of the issues associated with CE. The Society's article-tracking software records a large number of downloads and citations to an earlier Phil Trans A theme issue on Geoengineering (2) (to which a significant number of the authors involved in this Theme Issue also contributed). This fact underlines the wide scientific concern about the issues raised by global warming, and an appreciation of the urgency of charting a credible path to avoid some of its worst consequences, should efforts to shift to a very-low-carbon society progress too slowly (as appears likely). There is not yet, however, a good understanding of CE and the nuances which need to be explored.
To have any chance of developing and—should it ever be necessary—deploying a globally acceptable CE technique for temporarily countering the rising temperatures induced by continually increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 (and other contributors), there needs to be open, continuous and concerted discussion between experts and interested groups from many fields. An optimal assessment of any CE method requires a dialogue between three communities: (i) leading scientists and engineers from the arenas of meteorology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and the biological sciences to evaluate the issues from a physical point of view; (ii) experts in governance, ethics, sociology, psychology and related topics who focus on societal issues and (iii) citizens and policymakers who, in the end, must be involved in the decision on whether to deploy or not. These communities must understand the impacts, trade-offs, risks and benefits, both to the planet and to society, of the effects of CE compared with those of other choices in dealing with climate change.
This Theme Issue explores details of (i) the fundamental physics and chemistry of what we (the editors) perceive to be the most feasible of the announced CE methods; (ii) possible field experiments that can be used to examine science's understanding of those processes and (iii) societal issues associated with the testing of CE and its impact on the planet. Indeed, the issue seeks to draw together research relevant to these disparate areas. Our primary focus is on global issues, but attention is also given to possible amelioration of significant regional-scale problems.
…[/font][/font]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0050 (Currently not functioning…)
Published 17 November 2014
[font size=3]Our planet is warming, largely from the ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels. If this continues, serious consequences to our planet are likely to occur within the second half of this century. The objective of Climate Engineering (hereafter CE, but also referred to as ‘Geoengineering’, and sometimes as ‘Solar Radiation Management’) is to offset the warming and some other climate consequences that would otherwise result from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface or by increasing the outward transmission of long-wave radiation from the Earth. These strategies might be used throughout the period required to replace fossil-fuel burning with globally distributed clean energy and even be continued while CO[font size="1"]2[/font] concentrations remained too high.
Five years ago, the Royal Society published a report titled Geoengineering the Climate (1) summarizing many of the issues associated with CE. The Society's article-tracking software records a large number of downloads and citations to an earlier Phil Trans A theme issue on Geoengineering (2) (to which a significant number of the authors involved in this Theme Issue also contributed). This fact underlines the wide scientific concern about the issues raised by global warming, and an appreciation of the urgency of charting a credible path to avoid some of its worst consequences, should efforts to shift to a very-low-carbon society progress too slowly (as appears likely). There is not yet, however, a good understanding of CE and the nuances which need to be explored.
To have any chance of developing and—should it ever be necessary—deploying a globally acceptable CE technique for temporarily countering the rising temperatures induced by continually increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 (and other contributors), there needs to be open, continuous and concerted discussion between experts and interested groups from many fields. An optimal assessment of any CE method requires a dialogue between three communities: (i) leading scientists and engineers from the arenas of meteorology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and the biological sciences to evaluate the issues from a physical point of view; (ii) experts in governance, ethics, sociology, psychology and related topics who focus on societal issues and (iii) citizens and policymakers who, in the end, must be involved in the decision on whether to deploy or not. These communities must understand the impacts, trade-offs, risks and benefits, both to the planet and to society, of the effects of CE compared with those of other choices in dealing with climate change.
This Theme Issue explores details of (i) the fundamental physics and chemistry of what we (the editors) perceive to be the most feasible of the announced CE methods; (ii) possible field experiments that can be used to examine science's understanding of those processes and (iii) societal issues associated with the testing of CE and its impact on the planet. Indeed, the issue seeks to draw together research relevant to these disparate areas. Our primary focus is on global issues, but attention is also given to possible amelioration of significant regional-scale problems.
…[/font][/font]
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/2031/20140050.full
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Set in a future where a failed climate-change experiment kills all life on the planet except for a lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, where a class system emerges."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620
