Thanks for the comments. Some matters arising from them: And the last (so far) shall be first: Ray: yes, love it: geo nurturing! Some ideas, albedo enhancement, ocean pipes, just seem to be more ‘earth-friendly’ & lower input than others—the criteria are an attempt to capture why that might be—so not really a matter of starting from definitions, pace Gregory’s comment, more trying to define that which seems intuitively preferable. ‘Environmentally friendly geoengineering’—no longer an oxymoron, now an objective!
Eugene asks: why not novel processes? Novel processes, being novel, have to be freshly integrated into, absorbed by, already in-place biosphere processes. Putting it another way: there are problems enough without introducing new ones. Re the silliness or otherwise of ‘stoppability’: consider the introduction of rabbits to Australia, Nile perch to Lake Victoria, nuclear fallout to our atmosphere: some processes, once started, are difficult, perhaps impossible in practical terms, to stop. By contrast e.g. the cloud albedo enhancing yachts can be stopped at the push of a button, in principle anyway. A process that we can control (and, of course, constantly monitor) in such a way is, to my mind at least, obviously preferable to one that we can’t. Andrew points out that SO2 and iron are occur naturally—well yes—the problem here is our use of them in a novel manner to affect earth systems. The ‘natural’ occurrence of SO2 and iron in earth systems is in dynamic equilibrium. Our novel use of CO2, itself naturally occurring, is what has landed us in our current mess. Re CO2 sequestration not being reversible and that is its point: yes, quite right, but ‘carbon stock management’ is distinguishable from ‘solar radiation management’ and the criteria would primarily apply to SRM. Thanks for pointing that out. Again Gregory is correct to point out that I have no clear definition of ‘pollution’. In fact all the terms that I used— ‘novel’, ‘polluting’ ‘reversible’ are, or can be, rather slippery and imprecise, vague even, but they have core meanings which, IMO, make them, and others like them, usable in a general discussion of options. Well, ordinary discourse tends to be imprecise but is, as it were, a platform from which we can proceed to the more precise discourse of science. ‘Pollution’ is a nice one—from being a magico- religous concept to now being incorporated as an element of systems thinking. Dressed initially in a spotless white robe and now in a spotless white lab coat....what a big change.... ‘Unforeseen events can and are dealt with by doing experiments, perturbing systems etc. as physics has done for centuries.’ Surely some but not all unforeseen events? Else how are they unforeseen? ‘Unknown unknowns’ & all that. And is it the case that e.g. nuclear waste somehow slipped through the safety net of what ‘physics has been doing for centuries’? As, presumably, did global warming? Perhaps it is more that ‘science proposes, power disposes’ and science doesn’t have the final say in what goes down. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
