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 Thebooedocksaint
Dead Dictator
Registered: 05/11/09
Posts: 5,729
Loc: Wild & Free
Last seen: 1 month, 13 days
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 albedo modification 
#797907 - 11/02/15 11:28 AM (9 years, 1 month ago) |
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I need to come up with some cool/unique ideas to suggest about how to increase earths reflectivity to cool the planet. I've already been looking into cloud formation, changing roofs/roadways more white than black/using white balls to flow on reservoirs of water to reflect sunlight much how they used balls floating on water to reduce evaporation in California.
Anyone have any cool/unique ideas related to this? Thinking of benefits to any method would also be useful (like white roofs reducing cooling costs or something like that. There would also be negative implications though (imagine driving on a super reflective roadway).
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"Je pense, donc je suis (I am thinking, therefore I am)." -Rene Descartes
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 Magash
The Feminizer
Registered: 04/21/08
Posts: 6,634
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Couple thousand space shuttles. Millions of rolls of tin foil. You take it from there. 
 
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All creatures tremble when faced with violence. All creatures fear death, all love life. If we can only see ourselves in others, then how could we possibly hurt another creature?
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pizzeria
Stranger
Registered: 10/19/14
Posts: 565
Last seen: 8 years, 7 months
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Re: albedo modification [Re: Magash] 1
#797922 - 11/02/15 05:45 PM (9 years, 1 month ago) |
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What the fuck else could be said hanging CDs from trees to scare birds
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Chemical Addiction
Registered: 11/20/14
Posts: 1,681
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Re: albedo modification [Re: pizzeria]
#797927 - 11/02/15 07:23 PM (9 years, 1 month ago) |
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What if you were to change out the chemicals in airplanes that leave chem trails to something that will filter, absorb, or reflect the light but at the same time stays in the atmosphere instead of settling to earth? I guess that would kind of be grouped in with cloud formation unless it mixed with the atmosphere and was distributed equally across the earth far above the air we breathe.
Or maybe we can blow up mars, I remember on stargate SG1 there was a race that shared their technology with a civilization on a neighboring planet. It was an energy source they tried to weaponize and ended up destroying themselves. Anyways the destruction of their planet caused the planet of the more advanced species to move slightly out of their orginal orbit.
It ended up destroying all life on that planet and had to be abandoned but maybe if we could change our orbit intentionally and we get the math right it just might change the climate for the better?. Seems unlikely though, if we fuck up we have no way of getting to another planet like ours
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Sure. Don't expect me to compensate your wife and five retarded kids after I've drowned your exposed brain in my semen.
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drawde
Registered: 11/15/09
Posts: 5,268
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Was actually thinking about this very topic while doing a climate course last winter.
The only thing that is likely feasible on a mass scale is altering the atmosphere somehow.
But who knows how that could effect other things.
Or if it is being done already 
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King Koopa said:
The amount of pot that Gask smokes is equivalent to a guy shooting heroin on weekends
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Thebooedocksaint
Dead Dictator
Registered: 05/11/09
Posts: 5,729
Loc: Wild & Free
Last seen: 1 month, 13 days
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Re: albedo modification [Re: drawde]
#797958 - 11/03/15 05:48 PM (9 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
drawde said:
Was actually thinking about this very topic while doing a climate course last winter.
The only thing that is likely feasible on a mass scale is altering the atmosphere somehow.
But who knows how that could effect other things.
Or if it is being done already
Yea. Sea based cloud generation seems useful (most of earths surface is ocean). And i could see possible military interests depending on the technology that might come out of a few years of industry. Alternatively using the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point to have a platform of some kind to reflect/refract the light from the sun to reduce the incoming light. I'm not sure if that wouldn't be feasible from an engineering perspective. One has to get it there, and keep it there with the forces nicely balanced out.
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"Je pense, donc je suis (I am thinking, therefore I am)." -Rene Descartes
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poor boy
Village Idiot
Registered: 06/07/13
Posts: 16,230
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A cross breed. Foil paper a grand daddy purp. Outdoor grows cover 32.3% of earth.
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Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
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Data
That Guy
Registered: 08/12/08
Posts: 4,035
Loc: Southwestern US 
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Re: albedo modification [Re: poor boy]
#797994 - 11/04/15 07:51 PM (9 years, 1 month ago) |
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Is the scope restricted to changing the albedo of the planet?
The reason I ask is that a reduction of visible light means a major disruption in the rate of photosynthesis.
This may not be a problem for rooftops or developed areas, but the estimate for the % of dry land covered by urban development is in the range of 3% max. Thats 3% of the 29.2% of the planet's surface that is dry land. If we take the absolute maximum difference, say assuming all urban development is originally asphalt (emissivity=0.93, and painting it with aluminum paint (emissivity=0.27 minimum)...then that would change the total absorption of visible light on the earth's surface by a maximum of 0.26%  This number gets lower if you don't constantly keep the paint fresh and clear of debris, and if all of the developed areas aren't originally asphalt, like cement, glass, metal (cars in parking lots), or fill materials like sand or clay.
Filling the surfaces of all bodies of fresh water with floating emmissivity modifiers is also a miniscule change for a monumental effort. Attempting to do the same thing over larger areas (like oceans) would result in major disruption of plankton photosynthesis, which would quickly cascade up the food chain. This approach would also reduce evaporation rates from the ocean surface, disrupting weather patterns and the replenishment of our dwindling fresh water supplies (which in turn would adversely affect the land-based ecosystems, which we rely on for food).
Attempting to stimulate cloud formation has proven extremely difficult, being that it would have to be a 24/7 constant effort for years on end, and the energy used up (along with the added greenhouse gasses produced) in sustaining such a constant and long-lived program may effectively negate the cooling effects gained. 
Being that it appears that all options having the potential to significantly alter the planet's albedo also run the risk of majorly disrupting the planet's biome, I will suggest another option along those lines.
Instead of changing the net absorbed radiation of the planet by majorly altering its surface properties (which more than likely utilizes materials that are energy intensive to manufacture and implement), why not utilize readily available mineral resources to significantly alter the way the incoming light is converted into other forms of energy?
The idea involves stimulating phytoplankton growth in the worlds oceans (say with mineral-based sources of nitrogen and phosphorus). This would not only tie up some of the incident visible light into chemical energy (as opposed to heat energy)...but would absorb massive amounts of CO2 that have been slowly building up in the world's oceans over the last 50 years. The nitrogen and phosphorus would remain mostly mobile in the water column, and could sustain high phytoplankton populations for an extended period, allowing for a large effort up front and then sitting back for a while to let nature run its course. The lower concentration of CO2 in the world's oceans would eventually equate to lower CO2 in the atmosphere (as the atmospheric CO2 would more readily dissolve into the low-CO2 ocean surface), and the planet would be better equipped to re-radiate thermal energy off-planet in the form of infrared radiation, due to a reduced greenhouse effect.
The benefit of this scenario is that you aren't changing the amount of light available for farming, or turning urban areas into blinding landscapes of white or silver, or starving an ecosystem of energy at the bottom of the food chain. Sure, you run the risk of upsetting said ecosystem, but providing an abundance of food seems to offer more of a fighting chance when compared to severely limiting the food supply. 
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“The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” -NDT
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Thebooedocksaint
Dead Dictator
Registered: 05/11/09
Posts: 5,729
Loc: Wild & Free
Last seen: 1 month, 13 days
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Re: albedo modification [Re: Data]
#797996 - 11/04/15 08:32 PM (9 years, 1 month ago) |
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Like this?
I think this is the one I'm focussing on.
Do you think creating conditions to cause the thin large volume sea ice we saw a year or so back?
I like your idea.
Along those same lines people are looking at taking crushed olivine crystals and using them to somehow capture carbon dioxide. I'm not much of a mineralogist but my professor in mineralogy seemed to think it to be a cool idea.
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"Je pense, donc je suis (I am thinking, therefore I am)." -Rene Descartes
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