Global warming is evidently real. It’s not entirely beyond doubt what the aggregate of causes looks like but in any case it’s not stoppable if its man made, considering that China is heading in no direction to stop it and no one can stop China without stopping the world economy.
We’re just going to have to accept a lot of flooding.
My comment was addressed at what I took the be a suggestion that this was satellite data. Of course that is not the case and it may not have been suggested. But I thought the idea was comical enough.
Atmospheric carbon recycling and very slight (fractions of a percent) redirection of sunlight by one or several massive solar arrays of mirrors would be enough to fix global warming just fine. We simply need global solutions, since it’s a global problem.
One positive side effect will be that our science of weather and weather tech will jump forward by centuries.
True, we should be recycling heat excess into useable energy.
I had an idea that if we expanded solar arrays across surfaces of the earth, I mean like 10,000x the current number of them in existence, this would absorb so many photons and prevent their redirection back into the atmosphere that it might actually have a measurable effect to reduce global warming. It’s a simple equation, incoming light-heat versus ability to use and absorb it. Of course it’s way more complex in reality and there are so many feedback loops, such as absorption and release of CO2 by the oceans, methane and CO2 release from frozen areas melting, agriculture creating more methane and CO2, developing countries increasing carbon footprints, all of this is going to have an impact. It’s a runaway problem, because the worse the problem gets then the worse it’s going to keep getting, exponentially so, since the problem is self-feeding.
I can propose many ideas to help out, but in the end there is little real political will for this. The US refuses to sign environmental treaties or to enact carbon trade policies, which would be tremendously helpful, and the US is also falling behind in solar and other renewable energy research and innovation. Did you know carbon cap and trade was originally an idea proposed by conservatives? Just like with the individual mandate from the Obamacare, these ideas stated out as Republican solutions they ended up abandoning as soon as their wealthy constituents told them to. I would like to see government grants on the order of tens of billions of dollars to science and innovation groups to really get all this going… but obstructionists and ideological climate change deniers like Trump and the GOP are the number one problem preventing it. You have Republicans in the US deeply beholden to huge conventional energy corporations and it’s no surprise that they will fight hard to prevent the world from transitioning out of fossil fuels and into an awareness of ecological and climate problems that are becoming very dire.
Did you know that species extinction right now is nearly in par as it was when the asteroid hit and killed off the dinosaurs? We’ve already seen the first mammals go extinct due to global warming. And even if tomorrow all carbon emissions were reduced to zero around the world, temperatures would still keep increasing because carbon sticks around in the atmosphere and creates a self-reinforcing effect on temperatures. Only a given amount of carbon can be recycled per unit of time by living ecosystems or absorbed into oceans. In fact, one of the most dire situations I’ve heard climate scientists talking about is that at some point the oceans will be one carbon-saturated, meaning the waters cannot hold anymore atmospheric CO2 and will instead actually start releasing more CO2 back into the amosphere.
I would be far more likely to vote for any candidate for US president who takes these issues seriously. Or at least acknowledges their existence. No more children’s games and bedtime stories of pretending this shit isn’t real.