Peter Piper will be able to actually pick a peck of pickled peppers!

--imm

Don't take me serious

The human race is already experimenting with geo engineering in epic ways. And most of those methods have a negative outcome.

The first rule of holes: "When you realize you're in one, stop digging."
That seems like a good beginning to me.

Not doing anything means we are going to hell in a hand basket at an epic pace.

I'm in favour of not speeding things up any more than we have to.

White clouds do reflect light and heat.

The idea is to use a natural feature of clouds as a brake on an accelerating greenhouse affect.

They are not proposing we throw dog biscuits in the air, and perform an Indian Rain Dance, or sacrifice a million goats to George Bush.

From everything I've read, they have not suggest we go balls to the walls and seed the entire planet.

Experimentation could be used to test the theory.

Doing nothing is not working. Changing to greener forms of energy will not be sufficient to stop the warming.

Humanity is already doing random things with carbon and other greenhouse gasses. Creating clouds and using a fundamental feature of clouds to reflect heat and light away is not random.

As in, shut down the global economy and let Mother Nature sort it out - she does such things best.

OTOH, we will not succeed in doing anything to ameliorate the situation in the time we have left, so we might as well just keep on doing what we're doing.

of the human race that must drink that last glass of Kool-Aid to save the planet? That's noble.

I think that even if we can not succeed, the only humane thing to do is to try to do something to fix the problem. Better to rage against the dying of the light than to go willingly into the dark.

Rage all you want! I don't like the feeling of rage, so I try not to. I do enjoy mentioning from time to time that there are other options besides rage and screwing with Mother Nature more and more.

Mother Nature will have things sorted out by herself in 500,000 years or so.

(Assuming there’s a correct response. “Doing random stuff,” might produce the correct response by pure chance.)

In any case, that’s the whole point of this exercise: i.e. to not do random stuff, but well thought out stuff.

At this point there is nothing we can do to fix it, so by doing things - planned or random - we're just amusing ourselves to death.

Why not try to do something positive. Even if it is just to amuse ourselves?

I'll do whatever I think is right for my own amusement, thanks.

I think it's OK for people just to do whatever they think/feel is right.

Doing nothing is not doing something positive.

It is doing nothing.

As you say, doing "nothing" isn't positive, it's doing nothing. That's what I would prefer, but we won't do nothing, will we? We can't stop doing things. So act away, don't pay any attention to me.

However, it appears that any such similar inaction, such as failure to mine, refine and ship tar sands crude, failure to frack, failure to capture CO2 and use it to reinvigorate old oil wells - all are inactions we're not capable of doing (or not doing, if you prefer).

Inactions like these are very possibly the only chance we've got at preserving even a pale shadow of the biosphere as we have known it.

See anybody - corporate, governmental, scientific, technological sectors - boldy taking inaction these days? Yeah, me neither.

We do whatever we do, and have to deal with the consequences. That's it. It just goes on and on like that. Some of those consequences are positive, and some are negative. Of course anyone's particular definition of positive and negative can be different than that of someone else.

That's what makes it all so...I don't know the right word for it. We can't do nothing, as existing requires doing something. We can't escape that. Whatever we do though, doesn't fix anything. It just changes it. There's an upside to the change, whatever it may be, but always a downside as well. Again, upside/downside, subject to personal perspective.

There is no perfect state of existence that we can get to where everything will be fine, because we can't take every variable into account. Nature, or whatever someone wants to call it, can't even do it. The balance is always changing. Life also requires death. We don't like death, and actively try to prevent it, everywhere, all the time. No form of life likes death, which is why every form of life will struggle for its life if need be. However, no other species fights the reality of existence the way we do, because they can't. We can't either, but we think we can, which is how we've found ourselves in this predicament.

I trust you will agree that there are things which can be done which produce little if any effect, that anyone would consider to be positive.

For example: Let’s solve the problem of climate change by sanitizing the planet with high-yield thermonuclear weapons (say wide use of the “Tsar Bomba.”)

I just don’t see where there is much of an upside to that.

So, in my view, it does matter what we do.

Why would they be done? Who would do something, get X as a result, then change what they're doing, get the same X as a result, and consider that a positive?

Write something on a piece of paper with a blue pen, then write something on a piece of paper with a red pen. Is that a positive step?

I agree with you that what we choose to do can and does matter, all I'm saying is that what we choose to do won't fix anything. It just changes the equation. Domestication of animals, a positive for human beings over time, but now we have a hell of a lot of people that need to be fed and need jobs. Plus we have to maintain the animals and all the infrastructure required to maintain them.

Or… “If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.” — Sir Sidney Fudd

The thing is, we have already interfered with the natural functioning of the system. So, before we jump into a “solution,” we need to think really hard about it first. That’s what these guys are doing.

The complexity of the global weather system hasn't been modeled to any degree of accuracy. Putting more random variables into the mix to "experiment" is not science, it's gambling with all life on earth.

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Your point is that this measure would do nothing to address the problem of ocean acidification. (Correct?)

That is a horse of a different color.

“And it's Ocean Acidification FTW!”

This tactic would not address the problem of ocean acidification, and, so, is, at best, a “partial” solution.

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