Keepin' real with geothermal engineering

February 22, 2009 7:04 PM

Global warming quick fixes roundup, featuring the new water spray cooling method. There's also biochar carbon sequestration for the soil, or perhaps growing reflective crops, or growing crops with seawater in barren deserts. For the oceans, we have iron fed green algae management, and crop waste dumping too. In the skies, there's sunshading to reflect the problem rays, or perhaps a volcano simulation by filling the atmosphere with sulphur. Finally, there's an idea for a three-mile high superchimney that does it all.
posted by Brian B. (57 comments total)

I like it.
posted by oddman at 7:15 PM on February 22

I like the superchimney idea, mainly because I want to spit on George Will from the top of it.
posted by turgid dahlia at 7:26 PM on February 22

Lisa, I would like to buy your super chimney.
posted by localhuman at 7:32 PM on February 22

Your link for "sunshading" is wrong. Perhaps you meant this?
posted by aheckler at 7:33 PM on February 22

The seawater irrigation of salt-tolerant crops is very cool.
posted by maxwelton at 7:38 PM on February 22

Your link for "sunshading" is wrong. Perhaps you meant this?

Many thanks, aheckler. It got lost in the editing. Oh, and the water spray method deserves this link as a potential objection to overcome, although not sure it applies to the proposal.
posted by Brian B. at 7:38 PM on February 22

Thanks, I've spent the last 15 minutes exploring Cornell's Science of Natural & Environmental Systems - it's inspiring to an aimless geo-minded non-traditional student who just returned to school a year ago. The Terra Preta Research project is interesting, it's sustainable slash-and-burn("char") research in Brazil.
posted by thylacine at 8:05 PM on February 22

You know, if you were causing yourself some harm because you were hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, you could design and build all sorts of special helmets that were both fashionable and protective, or you could, you know, stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.

Just a thought.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 8:05 PM on February 22 [16 favorites]

Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.
posted by Vectorcon Systems at 8:08 PM on February 22 [3 favorites]

It annoys me when people say "Carbon" rather then "Carbon Dioxide", which leads to people getting totally confused about how to remove carbon, there was a metafilter thread a long time ago where someone was saying we ought to take excess carbon and turn it into diamonds. With the biochar thing, you do remove CO₂ from the atmosphere by growing plants, but the 'biochar' thing is actually just extracting the carbon from the hydrocarbons in the plants. And that's great, but once the carbon is extracted it doesn't need to be 'sequestered' it doesn't matter what happens to it at all, it's totally inert.

Anyway, here's an interesting idea: use nuclear energy to heat up plant matter in order to break up hydrocarbons then take the resulting hydrogen gas and use that as a fuel, and you'll end up producing a fuel that can be stored in high-density (unlike electricity) and remove carbon from the air and not produce any greenhouse gases in the process.
posted by delmoi at 8:14 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

I like how we're willing to do practically anything but stop reproducing quite so much. Especially since how even these monumental efforts only serve as arithmetic gains against our exponential growth. "And on the 29th day, the lilies found another five square meters of pond they had totally overlooked."
posted by adipocere at 8:15 PM on February 22 [3 favorites]

I like filling the air with sulphur dioxide- I wonder when the USA is going to unilaterally pull that one on the rest of the world
posted by mattoxic at 8:16 PM on February 22

Would a super chimney attract super santas?
posted by sien at 8:16 PM on February 22 [5 favorites]

You know, if you were causing yourself some harm because you were hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, you could design and build all sorts of special helmets that were both fashionable and protective, or you could, you know, stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.

the lesson from your allegory is... stop burning fossil fuels?

why didn't i think of that? how silly of me. I'll go disconnect the mains and sell my car now.
posted by magic curl at 8:24 PM on February 22

apols to the OP for my derail. good post.
posted by magic curl at 8:31 PM on February 22

You know, if you were causing yourself some harm because you were hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, you could design and build all sorts of special helmets that were both fashionable and protective, or you could, you know, stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.

I think I'll just change to a neon pink hammer that goes "squeak!" every time it hits something. Cheaper than helmets, and more fun for everyone else involved than just stopping.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 8:32 PM on February 22

Apologies for succumbing to the derail. Hearty cries of "I say, good post!" from this corner too.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 8:33 PM on February 22

You know, if you were causing yourself some harm because you were hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, you could design and build all sorts of special helmets that were both fashionable and protective, or you could, you know, stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.

What if you got a dollar every time you hit your head? You could find a pretty slick helmet, and make thousands a week with nothing more repetitive than replying to posts on Metafilter.
posted by setanor at 8:40 PM on February 22

adipocere - I too was hoping to find in that set of a links a proposal for mass sterilisation through spiking the public water supply. I wonder if we have the means to hypothetically do that...
posted by magic curl at 8:41 PM on February 22

I like how we're willing to do practically anything but stop reproducing quite so much.

Who's we?
posted by setanor at 8:42 PM on February 22

Can we use the chimneys as a stop-gap and then refurbish them into o'neill cylinders once we've reached catastrophic population?
posted by setanor at 8:47 PM on February 22

I like how we're willing to do practically anything but stop reproducing quite so much.

The only group that's demonstrated a willingness to do anything as a society is Western Europe, whose birth rates are barely at sustenance levels as it is.
posted by !Jim at 9:25 PM on February 22

birth rates are barely at sustenance levels as it is.

Yeah you can hardly get a decent feed of the europeans, they're all too skinny and there aren't enough of em.
posted by wilful at 9:32 PM on February 22

China.
posted by magic curl at 9:38 PM on February 22

The only group that's demonstrated a willingness to do anything as a society is Western Europe, whose birth rates are barely at sustenance levels as it is.

Japan

One child policy in China
posted by dibblda at 9:42 PM on February 22

Well maybe not Japan.
posted by dibblda at 9:45 PM on February 22

So how feasible is the Super Chimney idea? I just want to see one of those in action.
posted by afu at 9:58 PM on February 22

Can we combine the super chimney with a space elevator and get a super space dumbwaiter?
posted by TwelveTwo at 10:04 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

I had some friends in college who used to clear the smoke from their dorm rooms by waving wet towels over their heads. Maybe if we constructed a giant towel - say, 1500km by 1500km square, dropped it into the ocean, hitched it up to a fleet of nuclear-powered airplanes and dragged it up into the sky, the planes could circle the planet and soak up all the pollutants from the atmosphere. I can't tell you how many times I've fired off this idea to the EPA and haven't gotten so much as a "Thank you very much for your suggestion." It's like they're afraid of anything new and daring.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 10:20 PM on February 22 [2 favorites]

delmoi: You can't get the CO2 out of the air without extracting and sequestering it. Plants extract it, but normally the CO2 just gets returned to the air as the plants decay or are eaten. Hence the emphasis on sequestration of the carbon.
posted by hattifattener at 11:11 PM on February 22

MSTPT, the EPA doesn't party much. Try sending it to the Department of the Interior.
posted by ryanrs at 11:43 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

I was talking to a guy a while back who was suggesting very earnestly that we start using transistors as an energy source, since they're already used to amplify signals in radios and such.
The guy was saying this, even though he had an Extra-class ham radio license that you have to study theory to get.
posted by dunkadunc at 11:54 PM on February 22

Try sending it to the Department of the Interior.

Those park rangers a rowdy bunch are they?
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:26 AM on February 23

Oh yeah, and here's a chart comparing postulated effectiveness of various techniques. Too bad ocean fertilization ranks so low; I like the idea.
posted by hattifattener at 2:03 AM on February 23

From hattifattener's link: "The study did not calculate the costs or environmental impacts of any of the techniques, but for most of the climate hacks, they could be large. For those reasons, the authors of the paper recommend reducing the amount of our emissions, not just banking on geoengineering to bail us out."

In other words, what Kid Charlemagne said above about hammers.
posted by imperium at 2:15 AM on February 23

Continuing Kid Charlemagne's analogy, though, we've already given ourselves a concussion with the hammer, which, even if we were to stop hitting ourselves right now, we don't know how to treat yet. Worse, our only source of income is in a sideshow as The Amazing Guy-Who-Hits-Self-In-Head-With-Hammer, and we're probably going to need that income to pay the doctor to treat us for the concussion…
posted by hattifattener at 2:31 AM on February 23 [1 favorite]

I too was hoping to find in that set of a links a proposal for mass sterilisation
I suggest we stop hitting ourselves on the head with hammers and start hitting ourselves in the genitals instead.
posted by Phanx at 3:47 AM on February 23 [2 favorites]

If I owned a really big bong, I'd name it the superchimney.
posted by orme at 5:29 AM on February 23

The Ronco Super Chimney! It slices. It dices. It can cut through a steel can and is still sharp enough to slice through a tomato!
posted by norm at 5:32 AM on February 23

Why can't we build the superchimney into the side of a mountain? For example, begin with the airflows in the Mojave, connect them to a vent in a hollowed-out a mountain in the Sierras and you will have a 4 out of your 5 kilometers.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:33 AM on February 23

Speaking of reflective crops, I think I just discovered yet another benefit to the Slim-Suit! Right?
posted by orme at 5:34 AM on February 23

That superchimney link is the awesomest bit of crazy I have seen on the 'net so far in 2009. I'm normally pretty anti-geoengineering, but that whole idea is just fabulously zany.
posted by butterstick at 5:41 AM on February 23

What's wrong with good ol' annular fusion? We don't really need New England.
posted by shakespeherian at 6:48 AM on February 23

I like how we're willing to do practically anything but stop reproducing consuming quite so much.

Cloying as the dread FTFY can be, sometimes it's the only appropriate response. I keep hoping - in vain - for a climate change thread that doesn't devolve into a pedantic overpopulation debate.

Here's a talking point to try and veer the there's-too-many-of-us digression back to the topic at hand: Be it resolved that humanity did not first decide to exponentially increase its numbers and then proceed to adopt fossil fuels as its primary fuel sources but rather exactly the other way around.

Two further data points: 1) Population has increased by 5X since 1850 (the dawn of the age of oil), while global primary energy consumption has increased 45X over the same period; and 2) The period of greatest human population growth (ca. 1960 to present, during which global population doubled) directly coincides and indeed was directly caused by the so-called "Green Revolution" - i.e. a worldwide shift to industrial-scale agriculture driven by petrochemical inputs. (Source of this and much more here - click on "David Hughes" for pdf of the most illuminating PowerPoint presentation on the world's energy future I've yet encountered.)

And finally a quote: "With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that ever happened to the planet" - Richard Manning, "The Oil We Eat"
posted by gompa at 9:09 AM on February 23 [2 favorites]

There's nothing pedantic about an overpopulation debate.

I assume we both recognize a bare minimum per day energy consumption for a human being to exist. If we could somehow be supported with a mere 2000 food calories per day each, we will eventually hit the consumption limit as our population grows. As long as the human population increases, consumption will eventually increase. We could all cut back now to truly miserable levels of existence (anything that does not directly contribute to sustaining human biological process is discarded) and our consumption would decrease over a short period. And that would work ... for a while.

Eventually, the increase in population will erase any gains we make by cutting back consumption. Population increase means that just about anything else we do is only delaying the inevitable; every percent of efficiency we squeeze from solar cells, every SUV we stop driving, every bottle of Fiji water not consumed just pushes the date back a little bit. Unless we have an energy source that will increase in step with the human population, for as long as the human population increases, we'll hit that wall.

So, I am fixing that for you, back. The reason you're hoping in vain is that you're hoping against reason. No amount of quoting and studies performed by thinktanks will beat the simple fact that, for a population which increase monotonically, consumption will eventually increase monotonically as well.
posted by adipocere at 9:26 AM on February 23

There's nothing pedantic about an overpopulation debate.

On a long enough graph I can make almost anything asymptotic. Sounds like the very definition of pedantry to me.
posted by butterstick at 9:42 AM on February 23

anything else we do is only delaying the inevitable

Including trying to enact some temporary moratorium or global moral consensus on reproduction.
posted by setanor at 10:10 AM on February 23

Reproduction (or the ceasing thereof) is not the answer. Eating less meat would have a great and immediate effect - not just on emissions, but also on the health of the over-proteined developed world. A lipitor with your burger, sir?
posted by malarky at 10:49 AM on February 23

Asymptotic is not necessary. Exponential is just fine. And, really, if you can make energy, food, and mineral production exponential or better, there's whole continents full of folks who would like to know, because the only asymptote I can see for those looks horizontal.

The painful truth is that consumption (or really any function you care to name) based on the impact of humanity is multiplied by the number of humans, a number which always grows, but the various proposals to cut personal consumption, insulate water heaters, and the like all save mere percentage points in comparison. If we all went vegan and lived in bamboo huts *Bewitched nose twitch* we'd probably buy some decades out of that, but that inexorable growth in population will finally catch up to it.

And, setanor, you've mistaken me for someone who thinks that humanity as a whole will ever do such a thing. I don't think that. Not at all. I think we're looking at A Canticle for Leibowitz, only we'll have babies and SUVs instead of bombs. Somewhere between that and the Moties. Hence my original comment: we'll cheerfully block out whole sections of the sky versus adaptation of our nature. We'll have localized pockets of zero or even negative growth in population, but even there, people want, as the cat says, MOAR!: two goats good, three goats better.
posted by adipocere at 10:53 AM on February 23 [1 favorite]

One SUPERCHIMNEY! better still!

Just want to put in my vote for SuperChimney! as the greatest, most gloriously hair-brained scheme...

I mean, these guys make it seem like something that could actually happen. Silly rabbits. SUPERCHIMNEY!
posted by From Bklyn at 11:08 AM on February 23

"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." Gen 1:14-16 (KJV) super Babel.
posted by leapfrog at 12:22 PM on February 23

After years of disappointment with quick fix schemes, I know I'm gonna fix the problems with these schemes. And quick!
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:05 PM on February 23

Why can't we build the superchimney into the side of a mountain? For example, begin with the airflows in the Mojave, connect them to a vent in a hollowed-out a mountain in the Sierras and you will have a 4 out of your 5 kilometers.

The author has a link with proposals using mountains, but note that he proposed a 5000m x 1000 m cylinder.

Here's a link to a sunshade proposal that didn't link correctly.

The seawater irrigation of salt-tolerant crops is very cool.

I agree. It's probably the most ground-breaking discovery concerning the problem, yet, regardless of the problem.

Including trying to enact some temporary moratorium or global moral consensus on reproduction.

Many in this thread have implied that getting diverse cultures to stop doing something they were all bred to do was the easiest, cheapest, most sane and just solution (as if letting disaster strike can't be considered as the easiest, cheapest, most sane and just solution to the overpopulation problem). Up to now, an individual's usefulness has been valued by his or her gullibility, ever since Pharaoh, and that has been the main problem in the last twenty-five years. If massive works projects only serve to convince people there is a problem, then it may be money well spent.

"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." Gen 1:14-16 (KJV)

That story is literarily true. The tower was an observatory, and that's when we discovered predictable order in the heavens, and suddenly became aware, as humans, of the chaos on earth, finally in semi-control of our fate through that self-awareness.
posted by Brian B. at 4:45 PM on February 23

> You know, if you were causing yourself some harm because you were hitting yourself in the head with
> a hammer, you could design and build all sorts of special helmets that were both fashionable
> and protective, or you could, you know, stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.

It's a tempting analogy until you look at it. For the parallel to hold there would have to be some equivalent of "you" that unites umpty billion separate, infinitesimal CO2-generating micro-organotroids into one. And there isn't.
posted by jfuller at 5:18 PM on February 23

No amount of quoting and studies performed by thinktanks will beat the simple fact that, for a population which increase monotonically, consumption will eventually increase monotonically as well.

This debate seems somewhat pointless, because populations do not typically grow monotonically. We have a solution to the population growth problem, and it isn't the one child policy. Education and economic development have both historically lead to declining birth rates. There are many many groups out there trying to provide for education and economic development, exactly in order to stop or slow the effects of overpopulation. The question "Why are we unwilling to do this?" is pedantic, because it turns out that not only are we perfectly willing to do it, we are actually doing it this very moment.

The only group that's demonstrated a willingness to do anything as a society is Western Europe, whose birth rates are barely at sustenance levels as it is.

Japan

One child policy in China

Japan is in the midst of a worsening population crisis, so I hardly see how they should be called upon to limit their birth rates further. You're right that the one child policy in China is a counter-example to my claim, but given the humanitarian problems it has caused, I don't see it as a model for an effective population control method.

Iran has at times actually had a pretty effective population control policy, by mandating birth control classes for couples getting married and making such things more socially acceptable. Here's an LA Times article on it.
posted by !Jim at 5:36 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

We have a solution to the population growth problem, and it isn't the one child policy. Education and economic development have both historically lead to declining birth rates.

Sure, but the "education and economic growth" solution historically leads to vastly increased resource consumption and energy use, practically as a precondition for getting anywhere on the population-growth front. And the big success stories almost all got in while the getting was good; when freshly-explored resources were abundant and externalities could be more safely ignored.

The Western civilizations with low birthrates (or downward-trending birth rates) burn and burned through resources like crazy; it's a hell of a treadmill to try and get on now. Plus, it's got an Underpants Gnomes "step 2" to it, right between "1. Consume vast resources to boost standards of living and decrease population growth," and "3. Sustainability!" So far, nobody has figured out that Step 2; it's entirely possible that Western civilizations — which have already irreversibly committed to this course — won't survive the transition in their current form, or will face massive destabilization.

Naturally, on a personal level I'm rather hoping that resource-intensive Western civilization pulls through; my hunting and gathering skills are a bit rusty, for starters. Since any outcome that involves the downfall, or even major disruption, of Western civilization would almost certainly involve my death, they're not scenarios I bother considering very much. However, for some hypothetical society trying to decide whether to commit to the path America, Japan, and most of Europe have taken, I'd imagine it would deserve very serious thought.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:59 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Massive carbon cuts give only 50% odds on warming rate simulations.

But the Hadley Centre's simulation indicates that even if global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas causing the warming, were to be slashed at a very high rate the chances of holding the rise at the C threshold are no better than even.
posted by Brian B. at 7:56 PM on March 8