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The bad part about geo-engineering are the unknown unknowns, to paraphrase a certain US politician.
Our climate models are wrong. All models are wrong, but some are useful.. Our models are useful, but not quite useful enough to trust them when they tell us massively spraying stuff into the stratosphere or the oceans is mostly harmless. Our models can't ...
13
This is an interesting question & I've been waiting to see what answers, if any, would be written.
One affect of creating such a lake would be a localized increase in humidity in the vicinity of the new lake, but nothing that would significantly increase rainfall.
By bringing in salty sea water there could be a risk of contaminating existing ...
10
A nuclear explosion in the subsurface will result in ground motion which in theory can trigger an earthquake (due to passage of dynamic waves) if a locked fault has already accumulated sufficient strain over the last few decades/centuries due to slow motion of plates.
Having said that all the nuclear stockpile in the world is not enough to obliterate even a ...
10
Fundamentally your reasoning is flawed because the major composition of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen. "Pumping a few parts-per-million" of some other gas into the atmosphere won't do anything to the relative contribution of GHGs to global warming. GHG's contributions will still be felt the same, regardless of the presence of any other gas. The "...
8
I think the introduction of the paper itself covers this adequately:
… a growing number of studies have investigated regional SG application scenarios, which could prove preferential to a global application by restricting the geospatial magnitude of the climate response or by being used to target specific climate changes8,9,10,11.
The cited references are:
...
8
Nevada is 286,367 km² in area. With a conservative average evaporation of 2500 mm/yr in your desert, a lake of that size would evaporate 22686 m3/s. That is a flow larger than the average river discharge of the Nile.
As you can see in the plot, the best price for pumping water to an elevation of only 50 m above the sea level is 0.131 \$/3.78 m3, so to pump ...
8
Seconding eveything that @gerrit mentioned.
Additionally, another major problem with geo-engineering is that once we've started these processes and essentially borrowed time to offset mitigation measures, we'll have put ourselves in a situation where these measures will need to be continued almost indefinitely, regardless of the risks of negative side ...
8
If this would work, would $O_3$ free-floating in very loose clouds in space help deflect solar radiation at all?
No, for many reasons:
Your cloud will disperse. That's what gases do in vacuum.
And then the dispersed cloud will get swept away by radiation pressure and the solar wind.
So you'll have to be constantly replenishing your loose cloud.
There are 3 ...
7
There are several journal articles on this topic, for example Optimal Sunshade Configurations for Space-Based Geoengineering near the Sun-Earth L1 Point.
Being truly at the L1 point is unsuitable because the radiation pressure of the photons acting on the shade (like solar sail) would disrupt the equilibrium, so the equilibrium point is shifted toward the ...
7
There have been a range of studies on the issue published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and other scientific journals.
The short answer is "yes." The longer answer is "yes, but...."
In Climatic impacts of stratospheric geoengineering with sulfate, black carbon and titania injection, Jones, et. al. (2016) note:
In this paper, we examine the ...
7
I see three issues to be considered and will address them in what I think is reverse order of importance:
3) Cost: you have considered this with solar power and by trying to use mud to reduce infiltration through the lake bed. Fair enough, for now let's assume the scheme could be cost effective.
2) Negative impacts on the environment. You will get ...
7
First things first,
the value of 100 for the greenhousivity of standard air is an average
for a mixture of gases, this necessarily implies the existence of
gases with a value less than 100.
This isn't a good way to look at the greenhouse effect. I mean no offense, but it's simply not accurate.
To get a more realistic understanding, you have to ...
7
Instead of using sodium bicarbonate why not use limestone instead? Limestone is already used on an industrial scale to neutralise acids and acidic solutions. Also, sodium bicarbonate needs to be manufactured, whereas limestone just needs to be dug up. The manufacturing of sodium bicarbonate would unnecessarily use energy and potentially create more carbon ...
7
No, you can't stop an earthquake with a nuclear weapon. You can't even start one.
You asked if you could "obliterate a plate" with a nuclear explosion. Definitely not. Plates are between about 10 and 100 km thick, and as you can see from this map, the earth's 15 large plates are very large indeed:
As you can see at the pockmarked Nevada Test Site, nuclear ...
6
Is it possible to create clouds by pumping water into volcanoes?
Maybe, but it's a really bad idea. Here's why:
Volcanoes are unexpected and change with time. You can waste two years building a facility that does it, only for the volcano to cease being active and become dormant. Alternatively, the volcano might blow up and destroy your infrastructure.
You ...
6
How exactly are you planning to mine the lunar regolith for oxygen? The oxygen is chemically bonded to metallic cations and it is very energy intensive to extract as molecular oxygen. You might as well not block the sunlight and use solar panels as an energy source for the separation of oxygen. Mining in itself is a very dusty endeavour, and given that the ...
5
The first thing to do is to stop putting pollution in the air, particularly very small particulate matter that are produced by combustion.
For the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008, the Chinese government forced the polluting plants and factories in the vicinity of Beijing and nearby areas to stop operating for weeks prior to the games and during the games to ...
5
Water has a large thermal capacity.
which is why the temperature change between seasons is gradual rather than sudden, especially near the oceans.
For water to lose heat time is required. By changing the albedo of the ocean just prior to a hurricane/cyclone/typhoon passing over a section of water will not give the water enough time to cool down to have ...
5
Coring is an important method to get detailed information about the formations, however, it's very time-consuming and costive, so it's only applied when geologists and reservoir engineers need high-resolution data. It is more common in ore prospecting and mining, mapping for infrastructure and basic geological understanding of the 3-dimentional structures. ...
4
I will answer the question with some simplifying assumptions that might then provide a coarse guess of the area needed. First lets assume that temperatures have risen $1^{o}C$ and that the cooling film acts as increasing surface albedo effectively reflecting that an additional fraction of sunlight (93/1366) from earth. By following the footsteps of the ...
4
What is the best way to actually make the Earth lose heat?
TL;DR: Stop pumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The easiest approach in terms of human effort would be to let the Earth warm up a tiny bit. Thanks to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, a tiny increase in the Earth's effective temperature will easily rectify the ~0.6 watts/meter2 imbalance in ...
4
It depends on which pole.
The south pole is in the middle of Antarctica, with mean temperatures of -57°C, liquid water doesn't exist there and the air is extremely dry. Therefore, I would say that it is not possible to create more ice due to the lack of liquid water. And if there were any liquid water it would freeze naturally. This will make sense if we ...
4
The arrival of plants can only reduce the total CO2 levels because they metabolize carbon and oxygen. Plants don't make CO2 appear which wasn't there, they only absorb and release ambient CO2. Two ways that the ocean can absorb more CO2 through a higher atmosphere concentration, and through acidification of limestone which can dissolve the limestone. If an ...
4
First things first: This is an extremely, massively bad idea because except for a few places, there are intervening countries between India and the Tibetan Plateau. Those other countries are not going to like it when India blasts a valley through the Himalaya.
More importantly, this an extremely bad idea because it will have exactly the opposite of the ...
3
I add some information here to present the control strategies which have been done by China government.
A series of paper have reported that coal combustion is the main cause of the air pollution in China. This issue usually gets worse in the winter months due to the fact that coal is used for domestic heating.
In the winter of 2017, China ...
3
SO2 is a gas in the atmosphere, which does not cool the atmosphere. However, SO2 oxidizes to H2SO4, which gets involved with aqueous chemistry and often leads to sulfate (SO4). Sulfate is an aerosol that will reflect sunlight (like many aerosols) and block energy input to the Earth. If you increase the amount of sunlight being reflected back to space (...
3
There are numerous ways. Arguably, some we are already doing, but are not intended (such as urbanization and the emission of different pollutants). But I'll suppose you are wondering about intentional modifications. Moreover, this is perhaps too general of a question, as there are a variety of different types of storms, of varying sizes. I'll tackle what I ...
3
On earth, heat can leave an object through conduction, convection or radiation.
In space, conduction and convection do not work because there is insufficient matter. So the only way for heat to leave the Earth as a whole is by radiation.
This works; the planet loses a lot of heat by radiation. However, at the moment we lose slightly less than we gain, ...
2
IRI's (Ionospheric Research Instrument or HF Radio Transmitter) can be used to excite specific areas of the ionosphere. The resulting heat creates a high pressure system that can be then be used to push the jet stream or prevent it from moving. This is the type of equipment that world powers had in mind when they signed the Kyoto Protocol 50 years ago (...
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