Excellent....
In the category of life imitating art (and the term art being used loosely in this case), i bring you this snippet and link to a truly entertaining article from today's Sydney Morning Herald.
You just can't make this stuff up.
US Urges Scientists to Block Out Sun
"THE US wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming.
It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a UN report on climate change, the first part of which is due out on Friday)."
posted by Shubber Ali at 10:13 PM
6 Comments:
Another example of the sky-is-falling panic mentality regarding climate change. Yes, climate is changing - no, I do not believe that such changes are entirely 100% all the fault of those pesky humans, (although I do believe it is in our long term best interest to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions). It is indeed quite arrogant of our species to presume such, considering Earth has gone from a snowball to a tropical swamp and back again, over and over, for 600 million years without any help from us.
The current climate models can't "reverse predict" the weather 100 years ago, for which we have adequate records.
Given our shoddy record with large-scale quick fix solutions, no doubt the scientists will get the theory wrong, the sun will be blocked too much (assuming such things could ever be achieved, the presumed point of Shubber's post), and Earth will be plunged into an Ice Age. Then everyone will shrug and say, "Oops!"
hmm...
If I help develop such a mirror I will want to charge for letting any sunlight through. I should be able to recover my investors money, right?
8)
-al
Indeed, Al, extortion as the new business model for New Space! ;^)
I'm sure I've have a few relatives from the Old World who would help finance it all.
Actually, Al, if you can develop such a mirror, I know some folks who want to send tourists to Venus. You could recover your investment that way - by cooling the place down and encouraging tourism.
I'd have to solicit investments from a religious faction to find anyone with that long a time horizon. 8)
Besides, tourists to Venus should be pretty happy floating around in the big balloon systems that will grow out of our need to shed interplanetary trip delta-vee's without the use of fuel.
The really neat potential for my old world relatives is to concentrate the sunlight a bit to much. Afterall, everyone and their brother seems to be working on methods to shoot us all down. 8)
I actually do like the big mirrors, but I've come to the realization that they are 5th generation efforts when we need to be focusing on first and second generation tasks. Sails still have a place in my heart, though.
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