Geoengineering to reverse global climate change: good or bad idea?

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   ptosisposted 7 years ago

   Geoengineering to reverse global climate change:  good or bad idea?
   
   Scary? Or maybe filling the sky with chemicals that would partially block the sun would be a solution? Or is it too risky & fraught with potential unintended consequences? What would be worse? Global warming or a mini-ice age? The Little Ice Age is a period between about 1300 and 1870. Is climate change all just a recovery from the Little Ice Age?  Mad-made carbon dioxide emissions have only been large enough since 1940—yet the warming trend was in place for well over a century before that.
   
   

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   CWanamakerposted 7 years ago

   It depends on the extent of the geoengineering application.  Blocking out the sun is a really bad idea. It will have too many adverse effects and will cause more problems than it will solve.  The balance of systems that function together on earth will be push further out of sync.  However, if by geoengineering we are talking about sustainable behaviors or impact mitigation than that's a different story.  Reducing man's impact on the planet is a generally a good idea in most cases.

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3. 78

   junksellerposted 7 years ago

   Geoengineering is like going to the doctor for leg pain and them coming in the room with a chainsaw to hack your leg off at the hip. It is wildly excessive and irresponsible, does nothing to understand the system or understand and treat the underlying problem, it may or may not work to solve the problem (there is no way to know without a full understanding of the system), and it very may well kill the patient.
   
   Climate change is a very solvable problem. All it would take is a group of adults to gather in a room. If we can not do that, then quite frankly, humanity deserves no future.

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   Express10posted 7 years ago

   With the understanding and daily reminders of the fact that we can't trust man to do even the most mundane and responsible of things, I certainly have very little trust in man's use of this. Never have, never will.

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5. 67

   ptosisposted 7 years ago

   
   
   What would happen to the climate if we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide 100% today? Once CO2 is already released, it would take eons to return to the rocks.  It does not go away, unless we, ourselves, remove it. Stopping deforestation of carbon sinks such as the Amazon is required.
   
   The ineffectiveness of laws alone to protect the environment is going nowhere. On the other hand: record-breaking rains triggered so much new growth across Australia that the continent turned into a giant green carbon sink to rival tropical rain forests
   
   The Quixotic lunacy of useless gestures such as reducing carbon emissions - unless there is a 90% reduction in human production - must look towards creating environmental carbon sinks.
   
   Aquifers beneath deserts are theorized to hold more carbon than the entire Earth's plant life. Since fracking destroy aquifers, it does appear that lowering emissions and carbon credits is merely rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.
   
   The only reason why political control via the propaganda that it is reversible is merely to socially engineer the wage slaves into having lower expectations of living standards.
   
   Without this propaganda, we would all go berserk as in Sodom and Gomorrah where everyone goes crazy raping & pillaging. Perhaps the people of Sodom and Gomorrah knew their time was up and had their one last hurrah before the Lord rained down burning sulfur.
   
   Which is eerily coincidental since sulfur-rich particles in the stratosphere leads to a global cooling effect.

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6. 86

   tamarawilhiteposted 7 years ago

   We haven't even warmed since 2000 - but this could trigger an ice age assuming the cooling in the North Atlantic at some of the buoys isn't already the start of it.

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7. 61

   B M Gunnposted 7 years ago

   I'd say some of the less extreme measures of geoengineering should be cautiously tested to observe their effect. Ultimately, geoengineering, done responsibly and precisely, may be one of the most effective ways to combat climate change.

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