Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Gambling with only 1 throw of dice...on the Earth's Future

The BBC reports that one could engineer to save the planet

while many of the proposals make some sense (e.g. mirrors in space) in basic physics terms, what they totally fail to capture is the risk. We really don't know what happens if we block a significant amount of the spectrum/sunlight hitting the earth's upper atmpsphere, while continuing to fill the biosphere with too much CO2 and other stuff

what we do kow is that homeostasis works in Very Large Systems whereas messing with basic parameters/operating points might change a whole set of sub-systems stability and is completely reaching in the dark - scientists (especially scientists, not engineers) making these proposals are wholly dishonest and irresponsible to claim these are "stopgaps" until we figure out how to re-stabilize our own behaviour (switch to sustainable culture) since the timescales to understand the impact of massive geo-engineering projects are precisely the same as the timescales to fix the fundamentals in our societies. Frankly, I am dismayed to see the re-emergence of 1950s style naive optimism in the Men in White Coats.

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home