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All-out geoengineering still would not stop sea level rise http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1282655478
Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space. Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it--or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions. Even replanting trees. All have been mooted as potential methods of "geoengineering"--"deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment," as the U.K.'s Royal Society puts it.... Arguably a more devastating consequence would be the rise of the seas as warmer waters expand and melting icecaps fill ocean basins higher, potentially swamping nations and the estimated 150 million people living within one meter of high tide. Can geoengineering hold back that tide?
That's what scientists attempted to assess with computer models in a paper published online August 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their words, "sea level rise by 2100 will likely be 30 centimeters higher than 2000 levels despite all but the most aggressive geoengineeering." In large part, that's because the ocean has a lot of thermal inertia: it only slowly warms as a result of increasing greenhouse gas levels--and it will only slowly cool down again.... Perhaps the only way to reduce warming enough to minimize the rise of the oceans is an all-out effort that also includes burning biomass as fuel (either to replace coal or gasoline or both) and pairing it with CO2 capture and storage. Together, they could suck down greenhouse gas levels by 180 ppm--more than enough to bring us below pre-industrial levels. As a result, sea level rise is held to just 10 centimers by 2100, according to the author's modeling.
Such extensive geoengineering seems impractical given its economic (and environmental) cost.
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[Read more stories about:
geoengineering, ocean warming, melting glaciers, rising sea level]
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We can't just build an armada of floating refrigerators?
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