By Joanna Zelman
DURBAN, South Africa - Brighten clouds with sea water? Spray aerosols high in the stratosphere? Paint roofs white and plant light-colored crops? How about positioning "sun shades" over the Earth?
At a time of deep concern over global warming, a group of scientists, philosophers and legal scholars examined whether human intervention could artificially cool the Earth - and what would happen if it did.
A report released late Thursday in London and discussed Friday at the U.N. climate conference in South Africa said that - in theory - reflecting a small amount of sunlight back into space before it strikes the Earth's surface would have an immediate and dramatic effect.
Within a few years, global temperatures would return to levels of 250 years ago, before the industrial revolution began dumping carbon dioxide into the air, trapping heat and causing temperatures to rise.
But no one knows what the side effects would be.
They could be physical - unintentionally changing weather patterns and rainfall. Even more difficult, it could be political - spurring conflict among nations unable to agree on how such intervention, or geoengineering, will be controlled.
The idea of solar radiation management "has the potential to be either very useful or very harmful," said the study led by Britain's Royal Society, the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund and TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world based in Trieste, Italy.
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Showing posts with label Earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Earth. Show all posts
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Sunday, 10 October 2010
China moving heaven and Earth to bring water to Beijing
It might be the most ambitious construction project in China since the Great Wall.
The Chinese government is planning to reroute the nation's water supply, bringing water from the flood plains of the south and the snowcapped mountains of the west to the parched capital of Beijing. First envisioned by Mao Tse-tung in the 1950s and now coming to fruition, the South-North Water Diversion - as it is inelegantly known in English - has a price tag of more than $62 billion, twice as expensive as the famous Three Gorges Dam. It is expected to take decades to complete.
"This is on a par with the Great Wall, a project essential for the survival of China," said Wang Shushan, who heads the project in Henan province, where much of the construction is now taking place. "It is a must-do project. We can't afford to wait."
Even by the standards of a country where moving heaven and Earth is all in a day's work, it is a project of enormous hubris. In effect, the Chinese are "replumbing" the entire country, says Orville Schell, a China scholar and an environmentalist, something "no country has ever done successfully in the past."
China is plagued by extreme weather. Vast river deltas in the south are inundated each year by deadly flooding, while the steppes of the north are swept by sandstorms. To remedy this, the engineers are creating a vast, hydra-like network of canals, tunnels and aqueducts that will extend thousands of miles across the country.
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The Chinese government is planning to reroute the nation's water supply, bringing water from the flood plains of the south and the snowcapped mountains of the west to the parched capital of Beijing. First envisioned by Mao Tse-tung in the 1950s and now coming to fruition, the South-North Water Diversion - as it is inelegantly known in English - has a price tag of more than $62 billion, twice as expensive as the famous Three Gorges Dam. It is expected to take decades to complete.
"This is on a par with the Great Wall, a project essential for the survival of China," said Wang Shushan, who heads the project in Henan province, where much of the construction is now taking place. "It is a must-do project. We can't afford to wait."
Even by the standards of a country where moving heaven and Earth is all in a day's work, it is a project of enormous hubris. In effect, the Chinese are "replumbing" the entire country, says Orville Schell, a China scholar and an environmentalist, something "no country has ever done successfully in the past."
China is plagued by extreme weather. Vast river deltas in the south are inundated each year by deadly flooding, while the steppes of the north are swept by sandstorms. To remedy this, the engineers are creating a vast, hydra-like network of canals, tunnels and aqueducts that will extend thousands of miles across the country.
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