And who decides what it gets set at? The people of Equatorial Africa or the people of Alaska?
You dont need to shade the entire planet to cool it.
I believe that the point of the sun- shade (which would be of limited size)would be to block sun in specific locations, that if cooled down, will benefit world climate most.
I also think that one shade probably wont be enough. You will have multiples used in certain locations.
Now please I am not saying that this should be done (it would probably have bad effects rather than good), but to give an example: One could try to cool certain ocean currents, like the gulf current by shading the water at a specific location of the ocean. It might not change much, but enough to cool everything that is located nearby the gulf current.
This is just one - probably silly- example. I hope it emphasizes what I am trying to say though.
So I dont really think that there will be arguments over who gets the shade.
Skipjack wrote:
You dont need to shade the entire planet to cool it.
I believe that the point of the sun- shade (which would be of limited size)would be to block sun in specific locations, that if cooled down, will benefit world climate most.
I also think that one shade probably wont be enough. You will have multiples used in certain locations.
Now please I am not saying that this should be done (it would probably have bad effects rather than good), but to give an example: One could try to cool certain ocean currents, like the gulf current by shading the water at a specific location of the ocean. It might not change much, but enough to cool everything that is located nearby the gulf current.
This is just one - probably silly- example. I hope it emphasizes what I am trying to say though.
So I dont really think that there will be arguments over who gets the shade.
I don't think that would be possible. If you tried to shade a specific point on the earth, the Shade would be in some kind of typical orbit, and virtually useless.
In my minds eye, the sun shade would either need to be in some lagrange point, or balanced with it, such that the sun shade would appear as a sunspot, appearing on the west side of the sun at dawn, moving across the face of the sun, and showing on the east side of the sun at dusk. The sun shade would be seen that way all across the earth, except that in the deep northern hemisphere it would appear further south on the face of the sun, and in the southern hemisphere, further north.
Hmm, you might be right Helius.
I was assuming a geostationary orbit with corrections to keep the shade roughly over the same spot.
I guess that would be to difficult though (would need lots of fuel).
So yeah, it would wander. At the lagrange point, I think it would have to be bigger though for the same effect, no?
Maybe it would be more efficient to have them in LEO and instead have more, smaller ones?
Yeah, what I dislike about that idea is that it would be rather hard to pick up 1 trillion reflectors again, once earth has cooled down enough, or when we need it to be warmer again.
Skipjack wrote:Yeah, what I dislike about that idea is that it would be rather hard to pick up 1 trillion reflectors again, once earth has cooled down enough, or when we need it to be warmer again.
Have patience before the sunscreen gets deployed we will be in a severe cooling trend.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Msimon. I am not in the position to judge the climate situation either way.
There are smarter and more qualified people than me butting their heads over it.
I do however believe in the ingenuity of our scientists and engineers and in their capability to find a solution to either problem, be it warming or cooling.
In that sense, the solutions interest me more than the problems.
1) The current warming is unusual (this only began to be claimed in the mid-1990s, when Mann and others used flawed data to claim the MWP didn't happen)
...
"Mike's trick"
"... hide the decline"
For the record, they hide the decline in the proxy data after 1960 for two important reasons. (1) because they need to show the above, that the current temps are unusual and (2) because if the proxy data doesn't align with real data during periods when real temperatures are known, then the proxy data is full of shit. They are basically admitting that the proxy data doesn't line up where it is most important that it does - when temperature is proven to actually be going up.
How the heck can you claim that temperature was never higher in the past when your themometer, the proxy data, is proven to not register rising temperatures. You "hide the decline". That is what you do.
Okay, so all that's really left to suggest AGW is a concern is the correlation with CO2 and temperature in the ice core data to suggest an amplification factor.
I still don't buy the argument that CO2 can either be shown to lag or lead the temperature consistently. Since degrees celsuis and part per million are of completely different units, you have total freedon to fine tune independently scale and offset your graph in anyway to prove a point. (200 years is quite small compared with the data noise)
I've looked at the data carefully, and while there is a slight majority of CO2 lagging to leading its something like 65% to 35%, not enough to draw any firm conclusion. And regarding the downtick in temperatures from 1998 to 2009, in the ice core data you can get downticks lasting for 1000's of years, where the temperature doesn't appear to be correlated with CO2.
I have to say regarding the other evidence of terror and catastrophy derived from computer models, saying "It's worse than we thought, we only have 2 decades to live!" I'd tend to dismiss it. And the ERBE satellite data is reassuring in the short term. Having said that I don't think we can dismiss longer term positive feedback even if there is short term negative feed back, for example, what if the higher level of CO2 causes more forests with dark green leaves to grow reducing albedo and causing positive feedback that aids warming, that could lag the initial increase in CO2 by 100's of years but might still cause global warming in the long run.
I still say cause and effect is 50-50, though I'd agree the IPCC need to change their attitude.
Carbon credits may yet stimulate funding in energy research that could take the edge off the oil peak, by chipping the demand off on one side through cooling off the economy you get a broader plateau at the peak a shallower decline and the decline won't be so bad as there will be a large infrastructure of carbon free energy to replace the diminishing oil supply.
If on the otherhand climate change alarmists succeed in scaring the government into providing funding for disastrous geoengineering projects that sap our economy of valuable resources by actually burning more valuable fossils fuels to build these megaprojects which change our climate in a manner that could well be disadvantageous then the AGW side will have a lot to answer for....
Funding - They do not need tens of billions a year to fund AE research.
The government - if it was honest - would be hard pressed to spend $10 billion.
Thought experiment - say the average experiment is $5 million (most will be $1 to $2 million in the early stages) A billion buys 200 experiments. Ten billion buys 2,000. I'd say some where in that range is an available manpower limit.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
chipping the demand off on one side through cooling off the economy you get a broader plateau at the peak a shallower decline and the decline won't be so bad
Except for the people at the bottom. Well they are just hicks and rubes. Why bother?
Here is a nice article on why we are always running out of oil:
MSimon wrote:Except for the people at the bottom. Well they are just hicks and rubes. Why bother?
Speaking about us rubes...
I found this - our Climate Czar in 2003 defending Mann in a series of email exchanges with a skeptic and then sharing those emails as a source of 'entertainment' with Mann himself. Holdren seems very proud of his defeat of this peon and wants to do a little chest pounding to his buddies.
It is long but for those really interested in knowing a little more about our Czar, it is a fun read.
In retrospect, I suppose his points might have a different twist to them.
I had never read this before. This is a great simple description of the process that Mann uses to make the hockey stick. It is simple enough for people like me to understand.
Measure correlation between the most recent years of proxy data and the most recent years of temperature data. Throw away everyting that doesn’t at least weakly correlate.
- this step in Mann08 deleted 725 of 1209 proxys.
The author writes the following about this step.
...when I read about step 1 I actually didn’t sleep that night. Throw away the data that doesn’t fit your pre-determined conclusion of a match to temperature. Really, I was so mad I didn’t sleep, remember we’re paying big $$ for this stuff and we must not pretend it’s somehow ok. NOT good.
After the rescaling operation which makes the best possible fit of each proxy to the temperature signal and averaging, the calibration range signal is always found.
Wow.
Read the rest. The author demonstrates that he can find proxies that fit any signal he wants. He creates a negative hockey stick and then finds proxies that correlate to sin waves. Sick stuff. BTW, the author then provides all of his source code - a crazy idea.
So, is the author right about Mann's methods? This comment in the mirror of the Climate Audit site is by someone who has now looked at the actual code. He confirms what is described by the above link is actually the way the code works.
To get back to the topic of ingenuity and clever engineering as a solution for all our problems.
Even if there was a global warming (I am not saying there is, I say "I dont know") this seems like a very cheap solution to me.
The cool thing about it is that it can be localized. So it could bring localized cooling to places that are experiencing a drought, e.g.
Still, it is an engieering solution and it seems to be cheap enough.
4.5 billion is nothing compared to is spent on even promoting AGW to the public at the moment.
Heck at that price, I would do it and have the AGW- believers pay me
