ok so people are making fun of this but adding this with other anti-global warming tactics will work
This isn’t adding ice just for the sake of denial, it’s adding to the Earth’s albedo. This in turn actually makes the Earth’s climate cooler, and then more ice will be produced naturally because of this.
It isn’t a process we need to continue forever, in fact it’s one that needs to be calculated so that we don’t do it TOO MUCH. The only worry would be cooling down too much.
So yes, this is a good idea. It simply isn’t the only thing we should do because we still have gross pollution.
For the love of god do it . anything just do it. Give us hope.
Here’s the thing: Most environmental catastrophes humans have ever or are currently creating can be fixed. It’s not just a matter of “oh no, things are ruined, and maybe we can stop the degradation so that things don’t get any worse, but we’re stuck with how things are.” There are some things we can’t do, like bringing back extinct species. But there are a lot of other things we can definitely do, many of which are being done right now. The problem is that most of our willpower and effort is spent on bullshit tiny things that won’t solve the problem (individual recycling, etc.) and not on the large-scale things that can and will make a large-scale difference.
Ice caps are melting? Guess what! We know how to make ice. It’s not that hard. Designing mostly-automated robot ships to go to the poles and rebuild the ice caps is well within our current technical capabilities. We just need to fund it.
Deforestation on a massive scale? Destruction of other biomes? Guess what! We know how to plant trees. We know how to plant grasslands. We know how to take barren, lifeless land and turn it back into a viable biome. It’s not that hard. In a lot of cases, if there’s neighboring areas where that biome still exists, all you have to do is dump a few tons of biomass (plant clippings, food waste, etc.) on the barren land and stand back and wait. The biomass will provide nutrients and keep the topsoil from blowing away, and the plants and animals from the neighboring biome will move in. In two decades, even if you don’t do anything besides dumping the biomass on it, you won’t be able to tell what was the barren area and what was the still-existing biome.
Coral reefs dying? Now, coral reefs are a bit more fragile than most biomes, but guess what! We still know how to replant/rebuild them, and in fact are working on that in places affected by coral reef die-off! And we’re learning how to do it better every day.
Desertification? Guess what! We know how to turn desert back into green space. They’re doing it on a large scale in China and sub-Saharan Africa. There are several different techniques, none of which are even very technology-intensive. It takes money and time and labor, but it’s perfectly doable. We know this because we’ve done it.
Plastic in the ecosystem, particularly in the ocean? Guess what! There’s a lot of people working on this, both on “how to remove plastic from the ocean” and “how to reuse/recycle it more efficiently.” And the techniques are improving by leaps and bounds every year. This is a solvable problem. These are all solvable problems.
So if you’re crushed by the weight of the coming environmental catastrophe … don’t be. These are all solvable problems! We can stop things from getting worse, and we can fix the things we’ve broken. The issue is political, not practical.
On the political side, of course, is the need to tighten up environmental regulations across the globe. (What’s the statistic, that 90% of pollution is caused by 100 corporations?) And then of course, we need to fund these programs on a large enough scale.
In some ways the political aspect is the hardest, but consider this: we are at a tipping point. Things are changing about the way politicians talk about climate change and ecological degradation. More ordinary people are concerned about this, which means more pressure on politicians. One of the ways that things are changing is that people–even conservatives–are starting to talk about “job opportunities in new green fields” and switching the conversation so that it’s not “rainforest vs. jobs” makes political action a lot more possible. And no, it’s not going to happen on its own, but it can happen.
This is a solvable problem.
I *needed* this. Climate change has had me feeling SO helpless, having a list of things that can actually potentially be done is beautiful
We seriously need to increase the albedo of our cities. We tend to build our rooves dark; terracotta, slate, even dark stained wood for you American weirdos. Dark materials absorb sunlight (that’s why they look dark) which ends up diffusing as heat. But if our rooves were white much more of that energy would reflect back into space. It might also be worth increasing road albedo, although I wouldn’t suggest bright white roads because we don’t need snow-blind drivers.
You’ve probably heard before about plans to limit sunlight reaching the earth, but that is a sloppy approach. It will negatively impact plant life, both wild and cultivated, and economically impact poorer communities. Whereas increasing urban albedo will have the same target effect (reducing energy absorbed from sunlight) without those undesirable side effects.
The key thing here, though, is to achieve this without excessive greenhouse gas emissions. There are bound to be some, because we can’t magically transform our global industry before undertaking mitigation projects, they just mustn’t be so much as to render the project futile.
I would genuinely love to see people agitating for this, because it’s something that everyone could feel a part of. To see our constructed environment transformed around us, from urban centres to rural communities, might give people the glimmer of hope that we so badly need.
None of this is really a matter of funding that’s a viewpoint of looking at the problem which remains trapped in the systems which caused it to begin with. The real issue is social engineering and mass mobilization labor and resources have to be allocated to undertake these gigantic projects but we shouldn’t treat that as equivlant with funding. That’s not the solitary way to stir societies to action in fact it’s our reliance on this technique alone which is accountable for our inability to resolve global warming up till now. All people need their basic necessities fulfilled they need to feel stable and prosperous but this has nothing fundamentally to do with receiving money as an allowance to purchase commodities off a market its directly just about those physical means of sustenance being distributed so they receive what they need. The profit motive is behind our present disaster its not profitable to invest in ecologically sustainable practices even with government subsidies the motive is lacking nor does the desire exist for a polluting company to voluntarily cease their destructive activities. It must be forced not just by efforts at regulation which have for decades proven to be a failure our corrupt governments are incapable of adequately implementing but by the seizure and liquidation of their assets and by the direct undertaking of these requisite projects by an independent movement of the people themselves armed and organized as the ruling class using guns to stop the handful of actors responsible for the majority of emissions.
^^^^^ Anything less will do absolutely jack shit btw
Nov. 3 – The Unemployed Workers Union strongly disagrees with Circuit Court Judge John Nugent’s order to dismiss our lawsuit, Harp v. Hogan, which addressed the State of Maryland’s failure to distribute much-needed federal and state unemployment benefits.
The Maryland Department of Labor’s refusal to distribute already-paid-for federal benefits is an absolute disgrace. The fight will continue. The Unemployed Workers Union will utilize every means necessary to secure the benefits thousands of people are still owed.
Since October, the water temperatures on all five of the Great Lakes have hovered at record-high autumn levels, about five to six degrees above average. This comes after abnormally large spikes in temperature over the summer, as well.
The record-warm water temperatures over the Great Lakes fit into a pattern of warming lakes all over the planet, forced upward as human-caused climate change pushes air temperatures to record highs.
“I’m not surprised at all that the water temperatures are so warm,” said Sapna Sharma, an associate professor at York University who has studied ice for more than a decade. “Lakes are experiencing more extreme warm years.”
Sharma and her colleagues analyzed 60 lakes in the Northern Hemisphere in a September study and found a pronounced warming trend over the past 100 to 200 years. The lakes have warmed six times as fast in the past 25 years compared with any other period in the past century. Previous work shows lake warming trends extend to the Southern Hemisphere.
The warmer water temperatures are pushing the onset of ice to later in the year, as well as ending the ice season earlier. The study found that on average, lakes are losing about 17 days of ice cover per century. The lakes were freezing about 11 days later and thawing about seven days earlier.
Sharma says the cause is a sharp increase in abnormally warm weather. Since 1995, several lakes have begun to experience winters with minimal or no ice cover.
“If we continue at this same rate, over the next 75 years we’ll lose 106 more days of ice cover on average across our lakes,” said co-author Dave Richardson, a professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz. “That is losing the entire ice period for many of these lakes over the next hundred years.”
Today, researchers study ice cover to help track the health of the ecosystem. Less ice cover means more lake water can evaporate, reducing the amount of freshwater available to aquatic organisms and people. Less ice also allows the surface of the lake to warm earlier and more intensely, resulting in more algal blooms that can sometimes contaminate the water for humans. Changes in ice cover also have an economic effect on those who use the lake for fishing, sports and transportation for goods.
On this day, 6 November 1903, Hilde Radusch was born. She was a German anti-fascist, feminist, lesbian, postal worker and communist activist. She was jailed by the Nazis in 1933, then released under the supervision of the Gestapo. They tried to arrest her again in the 1940s but she went underground and evaded capture until the end of the war.
Following the war, Radusch worked for the Department for the Victims of Fascism, and began to question some of the practices of the Communist Party, for example asking if “the goal of socialism be achieved via a bad, totalitarian path?” These concerns eventually led her to decide to resign from the party, but before she could they expelled her for being a lesbian, while other CP officials denounced her to her employer, leading to her dismissal. She later recalled that this incident “It was really the end of all my illusions… A piece of my life’s dream was destroyed.”
However, Radusch remained politically active, later setting up Germany’s first lesbian newspaper and a group of lesbian elders in West Berlin called L74, living to the age of 90. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1847653935419748/?type=3
