In this perspective-shifting talk, Danny Hillis prompts us to approach global issues like climate change with creative scientific solutions. Taking a stand for solar geoengineering, he looks at controversial solutions with open-minded curiosity.
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Amazingly amazing
this dude works for mr. burns.
Plant trees.
Stop cutting existing trees down and burning them.
CO2 hasn’t been linked as a significant source of global warming. Furthermore trees scrub an insignificant amount of CO2 when compared to algae in the oceans.
Trees also literally shade the planet (look at google maps and see how much forest turned into crops world wide. Checkerboards everywhere!). Besides providing shade so the earth does not warm up (rock and earth are good in absorbing heat) leafs cool the planet by evaporating moisture. It’s like trees are sweating and channeling the cool into the ground through their roots. The main reason for all of earth’s problems are the missing trees. We cut more than half of our planet open so that we can populate some naked areas. It’s disgusting and what is even more so are people who point their fingers at rainforests and blame them while we all live on ground that was a forest once.
Except we can’t keep up with deforestation for animal husbandry.
Chris
Untrue, land based forest do reduce CO2 and produce oxygen by about the same amount
Zoo phytoplankton.
No Way!!!
Waste energy causing a problem then spend energy solving the problem you created when you could’ve just done the right thing from the beginning. -humanity
Yes I am
No, we are using fossil fuels to solve one problem, (eg growing more food, transporting stuff faster, sanitation, ect), but creating another problem as we do so. This is a partial solution to the second problem.
Donald Hobson, Yeah. I like what I recently heard Jeremy Rifkin, an economist, say. Knowing what we know now, it is really foolish to use fossil fuels to ship a tomato across the ocean.
9009 S LOL
9009 S
Evolution, not humanity.
You can literally just reflect radiation away just like ice does
Carson k its why california wants to paint roads white… few decades late. Simple math…
It’s called the albedo effect, ice is of course the best bit clouds and micro particles in the air are also efficient.
We see that all the time. Patch instead of fixing the problem.
Christian Gendreau we have to stop destroying the forest and start to plant trees. Yes plant trees.
What we need is a very comprehensive solution. Plant trees yes, reduce emissions yes, put up dust particles to cool us down yes. I agree if we use this technology as “patch” and ignore the problem we will get no where.
This is like hitting yourself repeatedly in the face with a hammer and deciding to keep a cushion on your face at all time because you can’t be bothered to stop hitting yourself in the face with the hammer.
That said this is pretty fascinating.
Eh, sorta. “Hitting yourself in the face” is more of a direct destructive behavior that only has the intention to be destructive, rather than just being a destructive adverse effect.
We aren’t intentionally causing climate change, it’s just a destructive adverse effect of the way we live our lives.
A better comparison would be getting cancer from smoking cigs and then getting chemo while still smoking.
The metaphor works anyway.
DJSkunkiebutt that’s right, but I like the hammer idea because we could very simply change things by changing our ways of life, yet we don’t.
BOBOUDA it’s not simply just “stopping” though. There’s a lot of infrastructure changes and products that would have to be produced and distributed, along with forcing the people to exchange their products for new ones to simply, “change our ways of life.” It does not map the same to, “just stop hitting ourselves.”
Wouldn’t this have any heat trapping effects?
I live where its cold so lets not do this.
Apollo, the sun is cooling its expected to get colder in the coming years if you actually look at the science instead of the propaganda.
Chris Then global warming is my last hope.
lol
Chris
The effects of the sun cooling down won’t be until in a million years or so, you muppet.
No.
No, you shouldn’t.
Popular mechanics released an article a few years ago about this. They said it would be proposed as ‘an increasingly viable sounding option’ when the effects of climate change become clear. The article proposed that China would be its largest supporter. It then pointed out that the extremely large, complex and dynamic nature of the problem would cause the solutions to be out-of-scope in terms of possible collaborative efforts, or even the good faith effort of participant nations, and added that a half-executed solar dimming plan would be even worse than doing nothing.
So yea, I guess I’ve been waiting for this Ted talk for a year or two, just to get a sense of ‘where we’re at’. Bummer.
hmm interesting. But why would a half executed plan be worse?
Do you have the link for the article
COOL YOUR OWN AREA. We have had 5 straight months of winter, cold, snow and ice in an area in which SPRING used to mean warmth and flowers. Go figure!!
earth global warming doesn’t heat all places, some are colder.
Solving this problem would probably revert you climate back to it’s original state
You have been spraying the skies for the last 30 years…Man made global warming is fake…
no
Traolach Even if one believes that, it doesn’t change the fact that extraction, production, and consumption of petroleum products has multiple adverse effects on the environment and health. No reason to cling to it.
Some great ideas here. I suspect we’re going to need a combination of things.
“They blinded me with science…” pretending to inform and solve when in truth- there is no truth…
Go back to lesbian dance theory than.
At first I was like: How about fixing the problem instead of concealing the consequences?!
However, we know about climate change for decades and decades and no serious solution is in sight. The constant warnings are answered by the industry by green-washing their products without actually doing something about the problem. That’s all happening while the climate is getting warmer and warmer, poles are melting, sea levels rising, coral reefs dying, weather extremes increasing, etc…
So, how about facing the reality that we’ve failed collectively here so far. Solar geoengineering could reduce the drastic consequences and literally save lives.
It’s like extinguishing a fire that is already burning while we keep talking about fire precautions.
Thytos That assumes all would go as planned without environmental side effects. Petroleum fueled air planes are a known problem to the hypothetical solution that includes them.
BUT sunlight hitting the water is how we get rain. Using solar geoengineering to cool some parts of the Earth could trigger extreme weather events on other parts.
You could potentially be increasing the drought affected areas in sub-Saharan Africa, which would expand the size of the desert and displace millions of people.
This is just one example of what could go wrong
I think we’ve been dragging our feet for so long, climate engineering is probably our only option at this point.