Greening the world's deserts and reversing Climate Change

[LordFerret]

24 minutes ago, LordFerret said:

Please practice on some other star. Thank you.

 

[PB666]

57 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Well, we could just put a giant fresnel lens in between Earth and the Sun, diluting the light around the Earth. For Mars, we could do the same, only focusing the light onto Mars and increasing the irradiance. 

Still, not in anyone's lifetime. 

We've been through that, the problem is that the amount of fuel required to launch the craft into a L1 orbit and block just a few percent of the suns light exceeds the benefit. To be able to do this would mean the wholesale redirection of asteroids into an L1 orbit (not only risky but hard to do) and ISRU conversion of aluminum, nickle and silicon (not the preferential materials for a blocking agent) into a solar screen. It may be possible, trapping carbon would probably be easier. Another strategy that may have longer term benefits is to use induction to move the orbit of mars and earth further out and away from the sun. The problem with this right now is some parts of the world that are in deepest trouble rely on insolance levels (pan-evaporation rates) as the energy source that drives precipitation inland. If by either means sunlight falls, East Africa could go into a deep prolonged drought killing 10s of millions of people.

The best solution is to educate the worlds most vulnerable populations that their behaviors (environmental exploitation) effect them and their neighbors, and their neighbors actions likewise. If we can get a country like china to markedly decrease coal utilization and India to reduce the burning of firewood for cooking and heating, to stop burning of forest in Indochina, Oceania and  Latin America as a means of generating cropland then there is some flexibility in the technique used to cool the Earth.

[PB666]

18 hours ago, Scotius said:

Go with the flow? Really? But everything we did since one of our ancestors cracked two rocks together to make first stone tool is going against the flow We make our living by forcing the flow in the directions we want it to go. Is it wise? Certainly not always. But it does work so far - we're doing pretty well for a species descended from small apes roaming through african savannahs.

No species is moving itself faster from global domination to extinction than ours. Of course we still do not know what cause snowball earth.

One has to remember that Lystrosaurus represented a higher percentage of vertebrate fossils following the Permian-Triassic extinction event, within 10 million years neither they or their descendants have been observed.

In finance, past performance is no indication of future success.

 

[Green Baron]

6 hours ago, PB666 said:

No species is moving itself faster from global domination to extinction than ours. Of course we still do not know what cause snowball earth.

First part is true imo, but we do have quite reasonable explanations for the causes of the carboniferus/permian glaciation, for example a supercontinent in the southpole area cut off from global circulation, Antarctica XXL sotosay + glacier dynamics + atmospheric composition + albedo change ...

Quote

In finance, past performance is no indication of future success.

True. But finance is driven by statistics of what the masses run after today and by shifting a humongous amount of depth into the future. This isn't exactly a sustainable technique for a species, but nice for a month long reporting term. It is extremely short sighted and reality frequently disrupts the folly and will surely do so next time.

Concerning climate and its change, ice retreat for example is accelerating even faster than the worst estimations 20 years ago estimated. Maybe the coming months will produce some work on ocean warming, i doubt its looking better there ...

 

Edited October 23, 2017 by Green Baron

[mikegarrison]

The IPCC recently agreed the outline for the sixth assessment report, due in 2022. There will be three working groups. One for the physical evidence, one for the impacts, and one for mitigation.

https://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/PR17-IPCC46_Press.shtml

(Side note: I don't know why UN bodies say they "have agreed" a thing rather than "have agreed on" a thing.)