[extropy-chat] Energy & Global Warming [was: Partisans and EP]

[Anders Sandberg]

Robert Bradbury wrote:
> I stopped paying any attention to the "global warming" problem after I
> realized that you could solve it seemed that you could solve it simply by
> fertilizing the oceans [2].

Experiments in doing so have shown that it is harder than it looks. Those
pesky algal blooms seem to misbehave quite a bit. Probably not impossible
to do, but it would require a lot of work.

My own current favorite carbon sink is fertilizing soils and lakes with
olivin. It both neutralizes overly acid soils (making it a good candidate
for cleaning up eastern europe) and absorbs carbon dioxide.

R. D. Schuiling and P. Krijgsman, Enhanced Weathering: An Effective and
Cheap Tool to Sequester Co2, Climatic Change, Volume 74, Numbers 1-3 /
January, 2006
http://www.springerlink.com/content/78528604337v3773/

I noted that Nature this week (or was it last week?) in their coverage of
the IPCC admitted that research into climate change adaptation had been
woefully ignored. The stated reason was that the emission reduction people
felt that any alternative to reducing emission would only encourage 'bad
habits', so they did their best to cucoo out geoengineering and attempts
to figure out in how to live in a climate changed world.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University