Terraforming Earth: Geoengineering megaplan starts now (New Science Magazine)

[Lodestar]

The term “terraforming” was invented by author Jack Williamson in his 1942 short story “Collision Orbit,” published in Astounding Science Fiction. In the intervening decades, its literal meaning (“Earth forming”) has shifted. It still commonly refers to the speculative act of altering non-Earth planets to make them habitable by humans. But anything that drastically changes geography to suit human interests can be called terraforming, even if it happens here on Earth. If only we all had the same interests.

An older article (2013). Revealing.
New Science Magazine:

THIS is how we will hold off disaster. To help us avoid dangerous climate change, we will need to create the largest industry in history: to suck greenhouse gases out of the air on a giant scale. For the first time, we can sketch out this future industry – known as geoengineering – and identify where it would operate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now considers geoengineering to be respectable. The reason is simple. Unless our greenhouse gas emissions start falling soon, Earth will probably warm this century by more than 2 °C, at which point things get nasty – because human society might not be able to adapt. But emissions are still rising. The upshot is we urgently need ways to suck CO2 out of the air. This was the subject of the Oxford Conference on Negative Emission Technologies, held last month in the UK.

In conjunction with scientists attending that meeting, we’ve assessed the effectiveness – and cost – of the most likely methods. They include planting trees, shovelling crushed rock into the ocean, and building millions of chemical “sponges” to pull gas out of the air (see diagram to find out about each technique).

Alone, such CO2-suckers can only handle a fraction of emissions. So we will need several. “If we don’t employ some of these technologies, we will go above 2 °C,” says Richard Lampitt of the UK National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. “A programme of multiple negative emissions technologies could perhaps store a few billion tonnes of carbon per year by mid-century, and conceivably as much as 5 or 10 billion tonnes,” says John Shepherd, also at the UK National Oceanography Centre.

cont'd
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029382-500-terraforming-earth-geoengineering-megaplan-starts-now/

[Lodestar]

1. Terraforming Earth: How to Wreck a Planet in 3,000 Years (Part 1)

Wired Magazine (excerpt)

There’s only one sure thing about terraforming: when you change a planet, there will be consequences, and not always the consequences you expect. We’ll get deeper into unintended consequences in part two of this series, when we examine more constructive terraforming methods.

http://www.wired.com/2010/09/terraforming-part-1/

Terraforming Earth, Pt. 2: The Law of Unintended Consequences
Humans can rearrange the shape of our planet almost as easily as the furniture in your living room (or the deck chairs on the Titanic). Of course, it doesn't always work out as planned.

A lot of Earth terraforming is a simple matter of moving water to places where there was no water, and moving land to places that were previously landless. On the surface, this kind of terraforming seems generally beneficial, especially compared to some of the more harmful methods mentioned in part 1.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5646575/terraforming-earth-pt-2-the-law-of-unintended-consequences


Slate
Terraforming Earth
Geoengineering doesn’t have to be science fiction.

The term geoengineering is relatively new. It follows and alters the word terraforming, coined by a science fiction writer 70 years ago to denote the act of making another planet more Earth-like. When I was writing my own Mars trilogy of novels in the 1990s, I described the deliberate alteration of that planet to give it an Earth-like biosphere; as I did so, it occurred to me that we were already doing to Earth what my characters were doing to Mars.

But to say that we were “terraforming Earth” was painfully ironic, suggesting as it did that we had damaged our home planet so badly we now needed to take drastic steps to restore it to itself. When geoengineering entered the lexicon, many bristled at the word’s hubristic implication that we had the knowledge and power to engineer anything so large and complex as our planet. Still, the term has stuck, and it has essentially come to mean doing anything technological, on a global scale, to reduce or reverse the effects of climate change.

Defined this way, the idea makes almost everyone uneasy—including the scientists who introduced it, most of whom agree that the best solution to our climate problem remains rapid decarbonization. But these scientists have also noticed that our progress on this front hasn’t been good. We lack the political mechanisms, or maybe even the political will, to decarbonize. So people are right to be worried, and some of them have therefore put forth various geoengineering plans as possible emergency measures: problematic, but better than nothing.

cont'd
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/onearth/2012/12/geoengineering_science_fiction_and_fact_kim_stanley_robinson_on_how_we_are.html

[Ghost Dog]

2. The New Scientist has become a 'junk science' outlet.

(Hey, gotta pay the bills).

Planting trees snd other such semi-natural measures can certainly help to mitigate the consequences of the changes now underway and soon to become catastrophic; other artificial methods would almost certainly have harmful consequences.

It is very dishonest to say, as here in this article, that CO2-suckers reduce emissions. Of course they do not.. Proponents of such strategies might receive funding from some of the usual sources precisely because they can enable the polluters, giving the impression that greenhouse gas emissions can safely be allowed to continue under a 'business as usual' model. This is absolutely not the case.

As Pope Francis recently and memorably put it, we need to 'rewire' our economic systems. There are no excuses. The alternative is mass (auto-)genocide.

Please reflect deeply about the approahes you are pushing here, Lodestar, and their wider context.

(edit - And so thanks for your #1 above).

[Lodestar]

3. I'm not 'pushing' anything nor do I necessarily agree with that article.

It's revealing of a mindset relative to mitigating the effects of climate change.
For better or worse, it's how people are approaching the issue that interests me.

[Ghost Dog]

4. Yes, I see now, Lodestar. Open debate on these vital existential issues

is good, as is observation and learning.

But we must stop the pollution NOW.

A vote for Mr. Sanders is the only way, politically at the highest level, most Americans will be able to help.

Local initiatives are also of the essence.

Carry on!

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. Where does it say "CO2-suckers reduce emissions"? (nt)

[Ghost Dog]

12. Not exactly, in precise language (as was my impression at first sight), but here:

Unless our greenhouse gas emissions start falling soon, Earth will probably warm this century by more than 2 °C, at which point things get nasty... But emissions are still rising. The upshot is we urgently need ways to suck CO2 out of the air.

Rather than: The upshot is we need to cease emitting.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. It does seem to be a "we need both" message

The bulk has to come from stopping emissions; but if the level could gradually decrease after the emissions are stopped, that will help too.

[Ghost Dog]

16. Yes. Any CO2 sucked as a gas should be transformed

into a more stable compound for storage &/or use. Gas storage eg. underground would be at risk of leaks.

Rewiring economic systems such that societies cease to overconsume, overexploit natural resources and people, and pollute should be the overriding priority.

[GliderGuider]

17. Emission reduction (preferably to zero within the next 20 years) should be priority #1.

Any CO2 we don't emit doesn't need to be sucked back out of the planetary atmosphere. Reducing our CO2 flow to zero would give us a head start of 35 gigatonnes per year. Once we have take care of those 35 gigatonnes/year we could begin to concentrate on sucking the trillion tonnes of resident CO2 out of the atmosphere that it would take to get us back to a safe level.

How the hell are we going to do any of it? Technically, economically, politically it's such a daunting task that people don't even want to think about it. And so we probably won't even begin.

We're in for big, bad changes no matter what. Adaptation will be the name of the game, especially once the changes start to bite. It's the only effective response we have left.

To make matters worse, as bad as global warming is, cutting the CO2 but not our overall energy consumption still leaves us with a world that is being deforested, strip-mined and denuded of other plant and animal species. It's not the CO2 production that gives those effects, it's the energy consumption. Cleaning up the CO2 but leaving our energy use intact just leaves us with a carbon-neutral Business As Usual.

We have screwed ourselves six ways from Sunday.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. The “terraforming/geoengineering is bad” meme

All life affects its environment.

[font size="1"]Termite mound in Namibia[/font]


[font size="1"]A beaver on its dam[/font]

Humans may have created the “Great Wall of China” but coral created the “Great Barrier Reef” which is even larger. Humans are changing the makeup of the atmosphere, but microscopic cyanobacteria did it long before we even existed, and did it much more dramatically than we have.

We have changed the Earth. Sometimes, intentionally (by burning down forests, cultivating crops, or damming rivers) sometimes unintentionally (by burning down forests, cultivating crops, damming rivers, or burning “fossil fuels.”)

All life affects its environment. Many people have a knee-jerk reaction to “unnatural” solutions. Any solution we develop will be natural, unless, of course, you consider humans to be unnatural.

We could plant vast swathes of forest; would that be natural? or unnatural? We could plant vast swathes of forest; burn them and bury the charcoal; would that be natural? or unnatural?

We could (in theory) build fusion-powered carbon sucking machines; would that be natural (or unnatural?)

Why?

Either one should be done with care. Our goal in either case is to change the makeup of the atmosphere. That’s not something to be undertaken lightly.

[MisterP]

6. just FYI, that's exactly what the coal flunkies say

that we're Earth's gametes and are heating the planet so we can leave it and seed, uh, the planets that can't hold their atmosphere

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. They’re not completely wrong

However, here’s the thing, we can change the environment. We’re proving that rather dramatically, however, we can also do something about it. (We can try to clean up our mess.)

[MisterP]

8. that's how we got into Iraq for the 4th time

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. OK… so, your solution is…

Now that we’ve knocked the atmosphere out-of-whack, we should…? (What exactly? Sit back and watch?)

“Do nothing” is not an answer which will be accepted. As time goes on, people will become more desperate, and desperate actions will be taken.

[GliderGuider]

10. We're now into "rearguard action" time.

We're not trying to advance so much any more as to keep from being overrun by climate chaos, collapsing ecosystems and human desperation.

[Ghost Dog]

14. Exactly this. n/t

[Ghost Dog]

13. Certainly we should try to clean up our mess, carefully.

But let that not be taken as a way to continue contaminating through 'business as usual'. The top priority has to be the redesign of our economies such that intelligent, progressive societies can survive and flourish (in the cultural sense) without polluting.