In a Fareed Zakaria interview on CNN.com, Nathan Myhrvold discusses the geoengineering solutions we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics.
(And, Nathan being Nathan, there is a brief discussion of penguin poo.)
Hat tip: Daniel Lippman
Nathan Myhrvold on Geoengineering (and Penguin Poo)
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I tape the GPS and did not get to watch it until yesterday. Most interesting gentleman. For once I heard a scientific approach rather than eco-bigot ranting. Now if those that matter listened…
Geoengineering is a really bad idea for so many reasons
1) We don’t know what the unintended consequences would be when we start pumping gigatonnes of SO2 into the atmosphere. It’s not a good idea to experiment with our atmosphere since we only have one of those.
2) It doesn’t address the acidification of the oceans which is also caused by increased CO2. I’ve heard that dubner and levitt have advocated adding massive amounts of base into the ocean to address this.. however at realclimate they did some calculations and showed you’d need 20 gigatonnes of limestone per year to do this.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/why-levitt-and-dubner-like-geo-engineering-and-why-they-are-wrong/
#1 I am not so sure you are a very good engineer, many systems are routinely controlled at much lower levels than you describe – as a concrete example doping of semiconductors can change the electrical properties of silicon by a factor of 10000 for a 0.001% of an impurity. There is no general rule that a 0.01% change in a system will or will not have an significant impact so it is best to stick to specifics… Furthermore the scale of the system and the dyanmic range of your input dictate to what level individual parameters can be controlled – as the atmosphere is a very large system it is not obvious to me that the CO2 concentration cannot be controlled at the fraction of percent level or better.
I think Matt’s cookie example is a wonderful analogy. Ryan has a great response (though my math is a little different):
From:
http://allrecipes.com/howto/perfect-cookies/detail.aspx
Tblsp_to_tsp =3;
C_to_tsp = 48;
butter = 1*C_to_tsp;
white_sugar = 0.75*C_to_tsp;
brown_sugar = 0.75*C_to_tsp;
eggs = 0.25*C_to_tsp + Tblsp_to_tsp *2.5;
vanilla = 1.5;
flour = 2.25*C_to_tsp;
baking_soda = 1;
salt = 0.5;
choc_chips = 1.5*C_to_tsp;
nuts = 1*C_to_tsp;
Cookie = butter+white_sugar+brown_sugar+eggs+vanilla+flour+baking_soda+salt+choc_chips+nuts
Cookie = 370.5000 teaspoons
100*baking_soda/Cookie = 0.2699 % by volume
100*salt/Cookie = 0.1350 %volume
I think subjective taste will be different. I also think the cooking process (moisture evaporation, chemical reaction) will cause differences. Regardless, if you didn’t like the entire batch of cookies, you could throw them all out. You can’t do that with the planet. You will be stuck with the unintended catastrophe.
Dr. Manak also makes a good point, and has sniffed out that I am not an electrical engineer working on the doping of semiconductors. It’s not my field.
But I will guess the first attempt at semiconductor doping wasn’t done with the skill we are demanding today. And it was/is done in a beneficially controlled environment, with precision equipment, and research/discovery to ascertain cause and effect.
With geoengineering it will be a different game. The attempt is the discovery.
And I wasn’t just worried about the difficulty of removing CO2 or adding the proper amount of something else. What if we were to take out too much CO2? In a short period of time? We spent 100+ years putting it in. The system reacted. Then we take it out quickly? Shock? Greater oxygen consumption at night by plants? Consequences?
What happens to your semiconductor when your added impurity is accidentally doubled? Do other properties of your silicon change when you dope it to be a semicondctor? Because temperature control might be nice, but I want other properties of my planet to stay the same.
And c’mon, what we’re talking about is on the order of Civil Engineering, not electronics component manufacturing. And we aren’t trying to scrub a system clean of an element (such as lead in water below 15 parts per billion) but instead add an unknown amount of something and/or remove not too much of something else to acheive a balance. On the scale of Civil Engineering, that has to be difficult with such precision demands.
This will be the first attempt at geoengineering. In the mass production of electronic components, quality control will throw out those semiconductors not showing the proper results. We can’t do that here.
Aloha! black friday shopping