Aforementioned: aphorisms and questions for 2015
Science wishes things. Geo-technology to draw down the greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. This is about as difficult to actually bring off as greening the Red Planet or getting to a superhabitable earth any time soon. For the pessimistic view, read the great Australian ecologist Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers, chapter 27, engineering solutions
http://www.amazon.com/The-Weather-Makers-Changing-Climate/dp/0802142923
For a good synopsis of this argument you might go here:
http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/important-why-carbon-sequestration-wont-save-us.html
Flannery doesn't really believe that geo-engineering holds much promise. The trouble that he overlooks is that with the greenhouse gasses that we have already released into the atmosphere, with our continually mounting energy mounting demands per capitata, and our rapidly increasing population the atmosphere will continue to warm dramatically and the storehouses of frozen methane will be released into the skies and the oceans with a terminal result for life on earth. Let us imagine that by a miracle of human determination, likely engendered by sheer terror, we succeed in halting the release of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere from energy sources; let us say that our population has begun to fall; let us say that we have given up on most of our artificial energy demands all by the year 2030 - in other words, no new anthropogenic green house gasses. Even then the atmosphere and the oceans would continue to warm and the release of the methane would be unstoppable. Those who die in that year would die knowing that they had left to their grandchildren(our great grand children the horrors of the final collapse of the biosphere. That is not something that Tim Flannery or James Hansen, for example, would deny. Given the degree of certainty that this suggests, I can't see how we can avoid talking openly about geo-engineering.
Probably, the only feasible solution we will find is one that enhances Nature's own processes: vast, stable green-growth on land and sea, along with soil and sea bed sequestration. Nature does not provide quick fixes. We need to start now.
http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/important-why-carbon-sequestration-wont-save-us.html
Flannery doesn't really believe that geo-engineering holds much promise. The trouble that he overlooks is that with the greenhouse gasses that we have already released into the atmosphere, with our continually mounting energy mounting demands per capitata, and our rapidly increasing population the atmosphere will continue to warm dramatically and the storehouses of frozen methane will be released into the skies and the oceans with a terminal result for life on earth. Let us imagine that by a miracle of human determination, likely engendered by sheer terror, we succeed in halting the release of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere from energy sources; let us say that our population has begun to fall; let us say that we have given up on most of our artificial energy demands all by the year 2030 - in other words, no new anthropogenic green house gasses. Even then the atmosphere and the oceans would continue to warm and the release of the methane would be unstoppable. Those who die in that year would die knowing that they had left to their grandchildren(our great grand children the horrors of the final collapse of the biosphere. That is not something that Tim Flannery or James Hansen, for example, would deny. Given the degree of certainty that this suggests, I can't see how we can avoid talking openly about geo-engineering.
Probably, the only feasible solution we will find is one that enhances Nature's own processes: vast, stable green-growth on land and sea, along with soil and sea bed sequestration. Nature does not provide quick fixes. We need to start now.
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