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from the we-used-to-wish-for-warmer-weather dept.
Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates:
The heat in the world's oceans reached a new record level in 2019, showing "irrefutable and accelerating" heating of the planet.
The world's oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities.
The new analysis shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record. The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.
[...]"We found that 2019 was not only the warmest year on record, it displayed the largest single-year increase of the entire decade, a sobering reminder that human-caused heating of our planet continues unabated," said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University, US, and another team member.
Journal Reference:
Cheng, L., Abraham, J., Zhu, J. et al. Ocean Temperatures Hit Record High as Rate of Heating Accelerates Adv. Atmos. Sci. (2020) 37: 137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-020-9283-7
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday January 15 2020, @01:20AM (13 children)
Time to start thinking of a solar shade at a Lagrange point between Earth and the Sun. We need to minimise the energy going into the system after the tipping points have been surpassed.
In Australia we have experienced the worst fire season by a country mile on record, and our govt still doesn't want to talk about, or link it to, global warming. I guess it wasn't that long ago that our PM brought a lump of coal into Parliament and waved it around mocking the opposition with it. Telling. He wasn't PM then and shouldn't be now.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday January 15 2020, @02:10AM (6 children)
Problem with a reflector that big...it acts like a solar sail.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:34AM (5 children)
Just how big are we talking? I'm not sure that's even feasible. Wouldn't it need to be the size of a small moon at the minimum? In any case, if the side facing the sun collects energy, then it's enough energy most likely to support station keeping thrusters.
I'm seriously interested in calculating just how much area you would need to reduce the sunlight hitting the planet by any significant amount. I don't think creating too much shade is a good idea anyways. It would affect the eco systems dramatically. It would need to be larger and full of "pin holes" to control opacity.
Anything that big is only something that will happen once we are collecting metals from the asteroid belts and bringing them back to Earth or Moon orbit for processing. Sounds like something that would take decades to build, even fully automated.
Probably pretty useful in millions of years when the sun starts undergoing changes, but not in the immediate future.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:57AM (4 children)
Wonderful idea, love it.
To make it even better, let's make those thrusters photonic; this way you don't need to organize periodic refueling with propellant or reaction stuff. When you need to compensate for the momentum taken from one incoming photon, you just emit another one with the same energy in the opposite direction (very large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:30AM (3 children)
I think the very large grin means that the only way to stop the movement is to cancel it out by being transparent right? You're funny :)
That got me thinking though. Could you create a sail that just bent the light towards the sides of the Earth, at discrete points? If it emitted the energy towards the sides, it could be used like tacking in sailing? Carefully balanced it might maintain position?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 15 2020, @08:31AM (2 children)
Think a bit, tacking works on sailing due to the interaction of the boat with the water; further, changing the sail orientation is still a thing that requires energy expenditure.
Maintaining position in the void of the space (no water resistance there) will require more energy than what you can capture from the Sun.
- If you don't interact with the photon, your sails stays where it is, but failed your "shading Earth" mission.
- If you absorb a photon, you get a kick from its momentum towards Earth - and there's no "water" your sail can push against to "stay in place"; on the plus side, you may use the absorbed energy to reorient the sail, but not to compensate the kick.
- If you reflect a photon, the kick you incur is gonna vary from "double the absorption kick" (if you reflect it back on the same direction but opposite sense) to almost zero (if you deflect it with just an-ant-boobs-ever-vanishing epsilon). In the first case, the "balancing" will result in the emission of more-than-two-photons-of-the-same-energy-just not directed at Earth. In the second case, your sail is gonna need to be humongous to offer a cross-section able to shade the entire Earth - imagine the energy consumption requires to tack your solar sail in the other direction to balance your position.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:45PM
The L1 point is on top of a "gravitational hill". You just put the sail slightly on the sunward side so that the photonic thrust matches and balances the downward drift. Yes, you are still going to need station-keeping thrusters, but the better your navigation the more you can balance things out and reduce their use.
Or if you use gyros to tilt it, you could eliminate the thrusters entirely. Reflect the light at 170 degrees instead of 180 and you have a small thrust that can take you wherever you want. Niven said it best in the integral trees: East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East. North and South bring you back.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:29PM
Then position it just beyond the Lagrange point where the sun's gravity exactly offsets the light pressure.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by evilcam on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:01AM (5 children)
Ugh, Scomo and his cronies are such pieces of shit.
It's so frustrating that the solution is staring us right in the face:
1. Leave carbon sinks (esp. coal) in the ground
2. Transition aggressively away from CO2-emitting energy generation toward non-emitting energy generation (e.g. solar/wind/thermal/hydro)
3. Fire Scomo into the sun.
4. Create more carbon sinks (i.e. plant trees)
Every time I hear people whinge about "but what about jobs" I just can't comprehend the mental gymnastics to look at the above actions and think they're not going to create jobs...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:53AM (3 children)
I'm on-board but I don't think we can go fast enough. This recent disaster to me is also partially caused by poor handling of back burning. The fuel load accumulated to such a degree that created a massive chain reaction.
My mate's wife worked in the department that oversees the resourcing for this. They had about 100 vacancies open to fill to manage this. Guess what not only did they not fill it, they even downsized the department from 6 admin staff to 1.5 (half time for the .5) essentially signalling that this is not important. Well shit happened. Of course this is just this years problem.
The under management of the fuel load over the years accumulated to a tipping point. Mismanagement from the politicians to lobbying from greenies on "ZOMG back burning will cause climate change!". Well looks like no back burning just burnt a hell lot more and then some!
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday January 15 2020, @09:00AM (2 children)
Thing that frustrates me too, is that people want to burn more, clear trees more and even logging companies are suggesting we log native forests.
Are they so selfish that they don't even see that cutting trees down is what's creating this problem in the first place??
What we need is dense, moist forests that create cool microclimates that brings more rainfall to sustain those forests.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:09PM
We should be re-foresting every where we can, but dense moist forests are pretty much impossible west of the Great Dividing Range / South of Longreach. Sparse drought tolerant vegetation is the only option. It's just too flat to get enough rain. Short of cutting a 10km wide channel to below sea level from Karumba to Port Augusta and using the spoil to create mountains you are not going to increase rainfall appreciably.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:32PM
Loggers and coal miners understand the value of the environment in an abstract sense, but if you shut down their industry you just stopped their ability to pay the mortgage and put food on the table. And in most areas, their employers are the only job options available. When given the choice between 'right but homeless' and 'wrong', most people choose the first option and I can't blame them.
I'm a closet free-as-in-freedom software fanatic, and I work for a proprietary software company. I engage in the exact same kind of hypocrisy, though I think working on DRM is probably less of an immediate threat to humanity's survival than cutting forests and burning coal.
I really don't think we're going to solve these problems in a capitalist society. As long as the only employers in hundreds of locations are destroying the environment, you will find millions of voters that will invent excuses to ignore it.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:01AM
Disagree. A shit have a potential positive value if you use it as a fertilizer.
ScoMo and cronies have a negative value, one for which I can't find anything to compensate with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford