Betting the farm against climate change

[XemaSab]

Leon Trotsky is reputed to have quipped, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Substitute the words "climate change" for "war" and the quote is perfectly suited for the governors of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, all of whom have ridiculed or dismissed the threat of climate change even as their states suffer record-breaking heat and drought.

In his book, "Fed Up!," Texas governor and presidential aspirant Rick Perry derided global warming as a "phony mess," a sentiment he has expanded on in recent campaign appearances. Susana Martinez, the governor of New Mexico, has gone on record as doubting that humans influence climate, and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma dismissed research on climate change as a waste of time. Her solution to the extraordinary drought: Pray for rain (an approach also endorsed by Perry).

Although they may dismiss climate change, a changing climate imposes costs on their states and the rest of us as well.

In Texas, the unremitting heat has been straining the capacity of the electric grid, killing crops and livestock, and threatening water supplies. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the grid's governing body, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, bases its forecasts on the average demand over the previous 10 years. In a world without the threat of global warming, this is an entirely reasonable approach. But what if climate change makes the past an unreliable guide to the future? Then Texas is left with the present situation, in which the grid operator is forced to procure power in a tight market where wholesale prices have skyrocketed to 60 times normal.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-linden-climate-20110828,0,879690.story

[sam11111]

1. cool earth- orbital sunshades would do it

No need for Kyoto or shutting factories. Kyoto a flop but shades WILL work. Physics says so.

Google ariz U.'s prof. Dr Angel (yes his real name). Cost about 3 trillion. US wealth 154 Trillion.

Source: Fed Reserve site table L5 bottom right cell.

That famous "L 5" Table that no one seems to have heard of.

Wealth .. I just looked..." 153698.0 " in trillions.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/accessible/l5.htm

Consider cost if we do NOT do this....

[Speck Tater]

2. And if we deliberately tamper with the climate absolutely nothing can possibly go wrong.

:sarcasm:

The law of unintended consequences would likely destroy the whole planet if such a scheme were set in motion.

[izquierdista]

3. It's not that we don't know what works

Unintended and unforeseen are not part of good engineering, in this case, geoengineering.

Even the problem with Fukushima and the near flooding of the Nebraska reactors was not unforeseen. There were plans to build Fukushima higher up, on a hill above where tsunamis could reach, but that would have cost more money, so the managers nixed that idea. There are scientific articles from the '60s and '70s foreseeing the possibility that reactors on the earth's surface could crack open and spill their contents. The articles discuss the possibility of geological containment -- building the plants hundreds of feet underground, and how that would provide for much better safety in the event of a problem.

Anyway you look at it, humans HAVE engineered the climate, just not with any goal in mind. They have engineered a rise in the atmospheric CO2 level, and if they don't engineer either (1) a decrease in atmospheric CO2 or (2) less solar radiation hitting the planet, they will not be able to return it to the climate that was so beneficial for the species.

There are a lot of plans that could work; fertilizing the oceans to grow more algae, regreening the Sahara desert, shading the planet from space, etc. But they are BIG plans which would require global cooperation from all countries. Getting everyone singing the same tune and working to the same plan is more of a problem than the adverse consequences of such a plan.

[GliderGuider]

4. Let's say we do crack the big nut and get global cooperation on a geoengineering project

We'd still be left with the next level of the problem - the unintended consequences.

In a way, the only thing standing between us and possibly planet-wrecking consequences of geoengineering is our inability to get along. Unfortunately it's becoming clear that our inability to cooperate itself increases the possibility of the planet-wrecking consequences of climate change.

Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

What might we do instead of trying to engineer our way out of the global predicament? Perhaps we could refocus the attention, energy, time and money of 7 billion people on the problems where they live, and try to fix the fixable. If we do that, then no matter what happens we will be better able to cope. And it has the major advantage of not needing the Chinese, French and Bolivian governments to agree to me forming a group to protect local riparian habitat, start community gardens or protect a local chunk of wilderness ecosystem.

We can either crack one or two big nut or a billion small ones. I know which approach I'm putting my money behind.

[hatrack]

6. Or, to put it another way . . .

We're already geoengineering the fuck out of the planet with an existing project.

We understand the basics of what that project is likely to do, and are seeing projections of those likely consequences borne out by real-world data. However, we are also aware that there are likely to be surprises and unintended consequences as our investment in project infrastructure continues to increase.

Now we're prepared to discuss starting up a second geoengineering project to run in tandem with the first.

We have some idea of what it's likely to do, but beyond that don't really care too much about what the consequences of firing it up may be, so long as we get to extract maximum "value" from the investment made to date in Project #1.

[GliderGuider]

7. Nice framing!!!

:thumbsup:

[sam11111]

5. sam corrects 2 errors in his post above...was sleepy

1. US wealth is 154 T. But my second reference to it showed exact amount and should have said "in billions" not trillions. The exact amt. was given as a number in the thousands....so multiply that by billions and one gets the accurate wealth in trillions.

2. Cost of sunshades....one newspaper said "350 trillion" another just "several trillion". Hmmmmmmmmmmm??
Sulfur particle method only costs one billion/yr. De acidifying the oceans looks attractive to me now.

Sorry for my sleepy errors. Most embarassing!

But fact remains....... Kyoto won't do it. Geoengineering is a must.

[Nihil]

8. Nuts.

> Sulfur particle method only costs one billion/yr. De acidifying the oceans
> looks attractive to me now.

Sounds like someone has never heard of acid rain.

> Geoengineering is a must.

:crazy: