Anthropogenic Climate Change

I watched a 2011 NOVA program that was talking about dealing with climate change. One of the things mentioned was a CO 2 scrubber that looked and acted like trees. I don't know what the current status of that is though.

Damn pagetopper

edited 18th Dec '13 2:09:35 PM by Alichains

cant save existing forests, but lets got ravage ANOTHER ecosystem and put trees there.

yea, no. Too much effort, your much better off saving existing forests. Instead of costing millions of billions, it cost the police going "hey! stop that"

I'm baaaaaaack

This is what happens in Florida. When my father moved there, he purchased a lot in a neighborhood still under construction. What they did was plow under the wetlands that were there, then, after the houses were built, went back in and dug a series of artificial ponds. That way the amount of surface water remained the same. Oh, and then they charged the homeowners for planting new trees.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

^^^ I know there's a guy named Klaus Lackner who's working on that; you might find his and others' projects by searching for "artificial trees" along with "CO 2 scrubber" or something.

^^ I think I remember seeing an article about the Chinese actually doing this with a desert.

The place my grandmother used to live is now one of the largest artificially-planted forests in the country. It's a thing we can definitely do, but it plays havoc with existing desert ecosystems and it's generally more expensive than just not fucking up the ones we already have or helping it retake deforested areas.

edited 18th Dec '13 8:33:04 PM by Pykrete

That is who it was.

I thought by turning "desert into forest" they meant around the Amazon where the forest would support its own rainfall so by removing it the space turns into a desert. In other words making deserts that were previously forests back into forests. But they're taking deserts that were always deserts...?

If playing God is what got us into this mess, then by jove, we're gonna play God to get ourselves out of it.

I'm a skeptical squirrel

Well we didn't exactly "play God" to get us into this mess. We played externalities.

I don't know what that word means

hashtagsarestupid

It's an economics term that basically means unintended side effects. Externalities are effects of a transaction that are "external" to the transaction, and thus are not accounted for by the parties involved in the transaction.

edited 19th Dec '13 11:14:36 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

The good old Law of Unexpected Consequences. Or, what it turns into in the social sciences: Hunt the Web of Factors and Effects!

There's a simpler name for it where I come from: Pass the buck.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Sure, that's one way of putting it but lots of times people aren't even aware that there's a buck they're passing around.

Trust me, the very large corporations with extensive legal, marketing, and R and D teams know very well what their "externalities" are.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

There's actually a lot of territory in the Middle East and Africa which is considered desert or arid now (and popularly seen as regions of perpetual sand dunes and camel skeletons), but was much greener thousands of years ago before humans started in farming there.

Join my forum game!

there's also an old, but extremely ambitious plan on how to help liven up the region again, while also creating lots of hydro electric power.

I'm baaaaaaack

You know, has it been proven that global warming drastically reduces snow levels worldwide? The anecdotes people give seem really weak. From what I've heard, it actually causes more severe snowstorms in many places.

melts more of it though so it doesn't last.

just a personal anecdote, the lake near my house use to freeze solid every year. We'd got out to the middle and it'd be frozen two feet straight down.(we'd drill through it to try ice fishing. never caught anything but it was fun)

Now we're lucky if it can hold our weight.

edited 21st Dec '13 12:13:42 AM by joesolo

I'm baaaaaaack

I think it's more some kind of regional thing.

Hotter areas in some places bring in warm air currents and makes other parts colder somehow.

I dunno, I'm not a weather scientist. I do know I've heard it'll make some places colder though.

Oh really when?

Snow cover depends on a few things — precipitation amount, precipitation timing, and air temperature during and after precipitation. Whether there's more or less snow probably depends on your region — some places with longtime permanent snow cover are seeing that decrease (I think this would also apply to snow deserts), while other places are probably getting larger precipitation events that in the winter in sub-freezing temperatures mean bigger blizzards.

^^ The pond behind where I'm staying right now has been like that. My landlady has lived here for about thirty years and she remembers when skating was an annual activity on the pond, but now it rarely ever freezes over.

Which also changes the hydrology of the pond a bit, as I've been learning this past semester. Frozen lakes can stratify but ones with no ice cover are coninuously churned by the wind. Not sure how much difference it makes for this one, though, since since it's probably only like a couple feet deep anyway.

edited 21st Dec '13 3:07:41 AM by GlennMagusHarvey

Toronto's gotten a lot more snow a lot earlier than normal this year, and last winter was just kind of pathetic. Aside from that freak rainstorm that flooded the subways. (Not the hurricane, the freak storm came out of nowhere.) Global Warming can really screw with weather patterns.

If the Gulf Stream is altered, Europe, and especially England, can expect a cold winter. Maybe not Iceland so much.

Not Three Laws compliant.

More moisture equals more snow. Places that don't get a lot of snow (such as Antarctica and the Arctic) won't really get much more until it's starts warming up due to cold temperature's drying effect.

"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."

basically, the planet heating up doesnt mean less snow. It means more volatile weather patterns (see Venus, which is a case of global warming gone to its ludicrous extremes, and is basically a hell world of constant rain and storm), which includes severe rainstorms and blizzard.

Keep in mind, the drivers of the weather, even snow, is hot and cold air intermixing with varying levels of temperatures and moisture.

edited 21st Dec '13 11:09:07 AM by midgetsnowman

And it snows metal there!

I'm baaaaaaack