If its already too late to stop global warming by reducing greenhouse gases, what are our other options?
So, what do we do next? I have heard of crazy plans to reflect the sunlight using white dye in the oceans, and others that are even more nuts.
Of course there is always the option of leaving the planet and destroying a new one somewhere else.
What are your ideas to help save the world if conventional means fail?
Answer:
The problem is that we won't know it's too late until it actually is.
My thought is that we continue to reduce our impacts on the planet by conserving resources, making everything more efficient and finding different ways to power our devices.
We may not see a change for 50 years, we don't know yet. I think this is our best first step, and if we continue to do that, at least we tried.
Worst-case scenario in my mind is that we have to find ways to shield ourselves from the hot atmosphere and extreme weather events. I'm thinking underground cities, or cities that are mandated to be a certain number of miles from any coast plus strict building codes to save us from tornadoes and earthquakes.
We would need to drastically change our lifestyles to let the earth regenerate itself; or just let the problem spiral totally out of control and let the earth solve the problem. (Probably by killing off 3/4 of the population of the earth and starting over.)
But that's just my opinion.
These nut jobs are going to end up doing more harm to us than good. I am more worried about people buying into their ideas and actually implementing them than I am about a small increase in temperature.
I dont think is too late, but we as creatures of this world should unite and set a day for everyone to stop using things that effect the environment, it seems like little but one day of no pollution would really be big. We could even do better and make it a week, cuz when is too late we would be too late to do anything, and we are screwed.
OK Now something more realistic:
It´s not too late to take action (and a lot of countries have already started). But decisions leading to actions have to be taken now.
* Global warming also happened: +0.7°C
* Global warming can´t be totally stopped soon
* It can be reduced compared to what would happen in the "no action" scenario
* economical calculations strongly recommand to limit GW to +2°C to avoid large costs of the consequences.
* This 2°C path corresponds to a limitation to a 450ppm concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
What are the sources of greenhouse gases emissions ?
http://cait.wri.org/figures.php?page=wor...
What is the path to achieve the mitigation scenario ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mitigation_...
And on the 7th page of:
http://www.ccap.org/presentations/fad/20...
The world does not need saving. It will survive regardless of whether it becomes inhospitable to man. If you had a chance to go back in time to "save the world" for the dinosaurs? How about all the anaerobic lifeforms that flourished before Earth's atmosphere before it became oxygenated? Those lifeforms DESTROYED the world as they knew it.
We all are going to die. Period. And we are not going to be the last species on this planet. Try not being so self-centered in radically changing global climate in order to eke out a few more moments of life. Sure, do what you can to reduce your negative impact on the environment, but don't go playing mad scientist on ALL of us by ROYALLY screwing with the natural cycles of the globe.
So, just to see I've got it straight: we're not sure if man has an effect on global climate, but we're going to go balls to the wall to make sure that we do?
OK..let,s invent a machine to scoop up all the ozone in the city,s...[ on ozone warning day,s].then shoot it up to fill the hole in the upper atmosphere..problem solved.
It's too late to totally stop it. It's not (yet) too late to reduce it to a level where we can cope with it.
Here's a plan:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/worl...
http://www.ipcc.ch/spm040507.pdf...
when you tell someone it is too late, that is when the majority of the people feel obligated to tackle a problem.
Humans are always at there best performance to complete a project just before the deadline, or when a problem appears too big!
if you lolly-gag and tell them we can do this and this and this to fix the problem, most people will procrastinate and drag their feet to make any real difference until the deadline is right around the corner.
well scientists have put our deadline, right around the corner, so nature doesn't have to.
Fertilising the ocean is a possibility. By seeding the ocean surface with iron, phytoplankton plants could made to flourish and, as they grow, absorb the CO2 that is dissolved in the water; the newly depleted water should in turn draw the CO2 from the air. Last year an international team of scientists took to the stormy Southern Ocean, around Antarctica, and showed iron fertilisation does create a bloom there. But even under the most optimistic scenarios, it would take fertilising the entire Southern Ocean to extract even a fifth of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere.
Other scientists have thought about pumping CO2 directly to the bottom of the ocean. At deep-sea pressures, CO2 is a liquid, and once on the sea floor would sit there indefinitely, and slowly dissolve into the water. However in altering the make-up of the seabed scientists must consider other life forms. Putting more CO2 into the water may also do nasty things to some of the creatures living there. For one thing, it can make the water more acidic. Deep-sea experiments have also shown that the liquid CO2 can knock creatures out.
The alternative to burying CO2 under the sea is to put it under more solid ground; ground that perhaps could help put a real lid on the CO2 problem. Whilst some scientists argue that the technology to store CO2 underground has been with us for several decades, others believe that what has been missing is the motive.
Under the floor of the North Sea, off the coast of Norway, carbon sequestration has already started. For five years now the Norwegian State Oil and Gas Company, Statoil, has been injecting CO2 into an aquifer, a void in the rock currently filled with water.
The motive was simple - finance. Norway has a carbon tax - companies which emit the gas have to pay for the privilege - and the natural gas which Statoil is extracting from the Sleipner field contains almost 10% CO2. The company had a choice - release this into the air and pay the tax or sequester it. They chose the latter, proving that carbon taxes can make a difference to the businesses they act on.
Statoil draw out their natural gas, extract the CO2, and pump it through a pipe over four kilometres long into the bottom of the water-and sand filled void. That far down it's a liquid, which means it takes up much less space than it would as a gas.
The project started in 1996 and is the only one of it's kind in the world. The Statoil project is now storing a million tonnes a year - roughly 3% of Norway's annual emissions. Experts believe the aquifer is so vast, it could comfortably take all Europe's power-station emissions - a billion tonnes a year - for 600 years before it was full.
Nothing comes free, and the biggest expenditure in these burial schemes is the cost of extraction - separating the CO2 from the other gases. Although so-called carbon-capture technologies exist, they are currently so pricey that burial schemes solely for protecting the environment: Statoil has to extract the CO2 from its natural gas, even if it didn't bury it, just to make their product marketable.
However, scientists are working hard on new technologies that should make carbon capture more affordable. New approaches such as using membranes, porous fibres, to entice the CO2 out of the gas stream are being tested; other researchers are turning to nature for inspiration by introducing CO2-eating algae into the smoke stacks of power stations.
Long Term Storage
Putting CO2 into deep reservoirs can only help if it stays there for geologically meaningful times … at least until we stop burning the fossil fuels that make the CO2 in the first place, or even until the next ice age some experts suggest. That could be tens of thousands of years away. Apart from a few natural examples of CO2 locked away in deep reservoirs, we have no proof that the new stores could do that. And as one sequestration researcher has put it … wouldn't having CO2 stored away beneath their homes make many people nervous in these environmentally sensitive times?
Another burial alternative has a different kind of drawback. Oil companies are pumping CO2 into half-exhausted oil fields, to force the final reserves out. Although the carbon dioxide flush remains trapped, the extra oil that is brought up will only be burnt up to make more, which would undo the good work for some campaigners.
Reducing emissions in the first place is probably the safest way to tackle the problem of greenhouse gases, but in the opinion of some climate researchers, current attitudes would only allow for marginal savings that way. Until attitudes change, and radical new carbon-free technologies mature, such scientists argue that sequestration does have a role to play. And if you think that the negative outweighs the positive and that the effort going into sequestration research should go into other avenues, ask yourself - what are the real alternatives?
the damage is done. All we can do now is limit the aggression of the damage. If the long term affects had of been known years ago what nuclear testing and all other testing and fabrication does and did to our atmosphere things would have been much different. It's always been said that man will be the destruction of our own and so far it's turning out to be true. Just take a look around. We are killing ourselves, not to mention the very foundation of our existance.
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