Posted: 6/21/2006 1:22:12 PM EDT
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If we discovered tomorrow that by raising the average temp on the Earth by 5 degrees it would solve the hunger problem, energy problem and cure AIDS how would we go about it? If we are causing it now what could we do to increase it? |
How do we add mass to the sun? We can barely put a 370 ton space station up in low orbit. And anyway I'm really talking about what man can do to the Earth to raise temps. |
Want to raise the tempature on earth, get every one to fart at the same time. 
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High output, heavy duty nuke reactors emplaced on the bottom of the ocean. Heat the ocean waters from below. Paint more land surfaces black or darker colors. Kill all trees and vegetation preventing transpiration. Wouldn't want to do most of these, but they'd be a start. Merlin |
Do you know how BIG the planet is? Nuke reactors wouldn't even come close to what the magma sea vents do already. Paint part of the Earth? How long would the weather let that stuff remain even if we had the material to do it? |
I think the key words in all of this is: "play along with me here....". Read a sci fi book one time about a Navy program that was changing the weather. They put a huge nuke at the bottom of the sea in the North Atlantic. Went out of control and the world went into another ice age. Ice sheets in New York type of ice age. OK book, have no clue what the title was or who wrote it, but this post reminded me of it. Now I'll probably have to go figure what a 10 GW nuke will do to so many cubic miles of water temp-wise, just for kicks. Merlin |
It would take years. And some method must be found to deorbit Jupiter. Another thing that would be a bit easier would be to build a huge latticework into a parabolic shape along earths orbit around the sun, only opposite the sun. This latticework could be skinned by a several nanometer thick foil of gold which would reflect a large portion of solar energy back in the direction of earth. Obviously this reflector would have to be at least double the size of the diameter of the sun to allow the reflection to pass by the sun itself on the way back to earth. The reflector could itself have the center cutout, since the energy will be wasted anyway. Of course, light pressure would attempt to push the reflector away, so a countermass would be suspended in a lower orbit to offset the thrust generated. |
I don't think we are quite their technologically yet. 
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Even though global warming isnt really happening! I know it isnt cause the Shell answer man told me so. If you wanted to you could just pump as much CO2 AND methane into the atmosphere as possable. Burn coal, oil, get cows to fart, release natural gases etc etc at a very large rate. Then The Co2 and others will trap the heat which will cause the earth to warm up. That's just basic chimical science in reguards to how well Cartain gasses absorb and emit heat. But i must note that even though we are doing that now and releasing TRILLIONS of tons of excess CO2 into the atmosphere we are NOT causing global heating with that. How do i know? Well all the scientists at Arfcom set me straight! OH and i also belive in creationism now............ AHH the wonders of the hive mind. 
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Oh. I thought that maybe we were getting into some supervillain scheme to extort money from the major world governments... |
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It could be done in rather short order if we really wanted to, it wouldn't take nukes or big solar reflectors either. Matter of fact it could probably be done with a concerted effort to burn off the worlds forests, well placed napalm in the summer time worldwide on a continuous basis for a few years would probably do it. There's a great deal of carbon bound up in the old forests, Siberia in particular could cause a lot of trouble if we created a firestorm and got the peat burning. |
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You would need to start by using nuclear bombs at certain exact locations on earth. The location must be exact in order to produce the needed effects in the atmosphere. If done correctly we shouldnt have a care in the world. 1. Paris 2. Tehran 3. Mecca 4. Caracas 5. Mogadishu 6. Pyongyang 7. Beijing 8. Mexico City 9. Ramalla |
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I suggest you read the 'Mar's' Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. The three books, Red mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars, are primarily about the terraforming for Mars. A large, perhaps the largest, hurdle to doing that is raising the temperature of the planet. Many methods are p reposed, ranging from the silly (wind powered space heaters) to the effective (mo holes). While not everything is applicable to Earth, it gives you an idea of just how difficult a task influencing something like planetary weather is. Most of the ideas are beyond us, in a practical sense at least. What could work is to release gases, halocarbons perhaps, into the atmosphere that would create a powerful greenhouse effect, raising temperatures. It would require a massive effort to achieve and maintain and a great deal of time, but theres no technological reason why we couldn't. As damaging as CFC's are to the ozone, they are also very good greenhouse gases. There are other, technically possible, ways to add heat, but most would involve wiping out most of the human race. Of course, a 5 degree raise in temperature over a short term would probably catastrophic in ways we couldn't predict. So it's not something we want to try. -Local |