Silly Qatari; if you want to lower sea levels, you have to get the Planetary Council to vote to deploy the solar shade.

The nation of Antarctica refuses to limit it's greenhouse gas emissions!

Oops. Forgot a decimal point ;)

GAT_00: I saw in NewScientist last month that they had a list of ideas to help mitigate global warming, after giving a scenario of what the Earth would look like as 4C warmer, which is midline IPCC prediction for 2100. They suggested throwing dust into the upper atmosphere to drop insolation. It would have to be continuous and worldwide, but it might work.

By that time, I think we can just have all the robots vent their exhaust simultaneously to push the earth further from the sun.

Weaver95: i'm waiting for a couple developing nations to just say 'fark it' and start pirating everything ever made by anyone in the first world. everything from AIDS medications to identical duplicates of the iPods. All of it made cheap and reliable.

I wonder how we'd react?

Doesn't China already do this kind of crap with constant cloud seeding? I doubt they would have inhibitions about taking it to the next level.

someone beat me to it. sounds like a james bond movie. one of the crappy ones. only real. would that validate crappy james bond plots?

ahem...


/let's think this through, people

Gotta practice terraforming somehow.

/dnrtfa

Robo Beat: ahem...


/let's think this through, people

I love this chart, it never gets old, (this FARK people!)

UNC_Samurai: Silly Qatari; if you want to lower sea levels, you have to get the Planetary Council to vote to deploy the solar shade.

A SMAC reference to start off a thread? I like the direction FARK is heading.

The 1960's (project stormfury) called and wants to know whatcha mean, 'rogue' nation?!

GAT_00: I saw in NewScientist last month that they had a list of ideas to help mitigate global warming, after giving a scenario of what the Earth would look like as 4C warmer, which is midline IPCC prediction for 2100. They suggested throwing dust into the upper atmosphere to drop insolation. It would have to be continuous and worldwide, but it might work.

Yes, but who will play the quirky scientist, the brazen military captain, and the evil corporate mole who is bent on sabotaging the mission?

Zamboro: Suppose for a moment that automation technology progressed to the point that it was reliable and affordable enough to perform every "people powered" job. Meat packing, warehousing, fruit picking and so on. That's a huge chunk of US jobs right there, and there's no kind of job we could create to employ the displaced workers which could not just as easily be automated.

Setting aside the issue of how displaced workers would get by, imagine that automated labor facilities could be powered renewably. With minimal overhead (cost of land, initial cost of equiptment, maintinence) the goods produced by automated labor would be of the finest quality, but they could be profitably sold at prices that no other nation on Earth could compete with.

Imagine these goods flooding the global market, devaluing similar goods manufactured by competing nations and devastating their economies as a result. All other nations would be forced to develop similar automated labor facilities or face economic ruin.

Food for thought.

So ... the advent of mechanized labor largely surpassing human-intensive production and a project to seed the atmosphere with particles for the purpose of reducing how much sun light the Earth receives. Why does this sound oddly familiar?

They'll protect us when it all goes rogue.

Ted Kennedy's Brain Tumor: Weaver95: i'm waiting for a couple developing nations to just say 'fark it' and start pirating everything ever made by anyone in the first world. everything from AIDS medications to identical duplicates of the iPods. All of it made cheap and reliable.

I wonder how we'd react?

Unless they own our currency, like China. Then we'd sit back and let them copy whatever, like we do for China.

/Mandarin is hard

Zamboro: Suppose for a moment that automation technology progressed to the point that it was reliable and affordable enough to perform every "people powered" job. Meat packing, warehousing, fruit picking and so on. That's a huge chunk of US jobs right there, and there's no kind of job we could create to employ the displaced workers which could not just as easily be automated.

That's pretty much the plot of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. The machines do pretty much everything. It takes a few people to maintain the machines. Everyone else is either in the military or this WPA-type thing.

UNC_Samurai: Silly Qatari; if you want to lower sea levels, you have to get the Planetary Council to vote to deploy the solar shade.

Nice, Alpha Centauri is still one of my favorite games. I play Lal, I have twice the votes.

I could see this working well (assuming no unintended consequences to the biosphere) if countries got together and created a treaty based on mutual benefits necessitating mutual aid. If you got the nuclear powers and major economic powers on board, you could create a treaty whereby all member nations contribute a very small fraction of their GDP to a mutual aid fund. If the geo-engineering projects resulted in weather anomalies (like drought in China as the article mentioned) that negatively impacted one or a few countries, they would have access to the aid fund that other countries contribute to.

It only seems fair, everyone stands to benefit from such a project but some may experience localized negative consequences in the short-term. The hard part would be determining if any weather anomalies were in fact due to the geo-engineering project.

The Z Spot: Saw this the other day and have been waiting for a chance to use it:

Damn. I've been sitting on that link for months.

/ Gotta visit Fark more often.
// Found it while goggling him during an early encounter with him.

GAT_00: I saw in NewScientist last month that they had a list of ideas to help mitigate global warming, after giving a scenario of what the Earth would look like as 4C warmer, which is midline IPCC prediction for 2100. They suggested throwing dust into the upper atmosphere to drop insolation. It would have to be continuous and worldwide, but it might work.

A simillar suggestion I've seen involved using finely ground diamataceous earth, dropped into the upper atmosphere at the poles. Since apparently at some part of the year (The summer, I think?), the wind just sort of circles around there for a while, thus cutting down on the light shining on the poles.

Maddogjew: UNC_Samurai: Silly Qatari; if you want to lower sea levels, you have to get the Planetary Council to vote to deploy the solar shade.

Nice, Alpha Centauri is still one of my favorite games. I play Lal, I have twice the votes.

Getting leadership of the council early rocks.Never relinquish that control.

carbon-sucking machines

also known as "Trees"

Fano: Maddogjew: UNC_Samurai: Silly Qatari; if you want to lower sea levels, you have to get the Planetary Council to vote to deploy the solar shade.

Nice, Alpha Centauri is still one of my favorite games. I play Lal, I have twice the votes.

Getting leadership of the council early rocks.Never relinquish that control.

I was all about the hive. +1 Growth, +1 Industry and free perimeter defense FTW!

Space_Fetus: I was all about the hive. +1 Growth, +1 Industry and free perimeter defense FTW!

I always outdid them on research. I would have photon based units while they were still dealing with silksteal. The Hive is good but they have nothing on The Spartans (and Col. Santiago is hot).

Maddogjew: Space_Fetus: I was all about the hive. +1 Growth, +1 Industry and free perimeter defense FTW!

I always outdid them on research. I would have photon based units while they were still dealing with silksteal. The Hive is good but they have nothing on The Spartans (and Col. Santiago is hot).

The Spartans were my first, and damn, once you got rolling they could be hard to stop. Not low tech like Godwinson's ill educated horde

Fano: Maddogjew: Space_Fetus: I was all about the hive. +1 Growth, +1 Industry and free perimeter defense FTW!

I always outdid them on research. I would have photon based units while they were still dealing with silksteal. The Hive is good but they have nothing on The Spartans (and Col. Santiago is hot).

The Spartans were my first, and damn, once you got rolling they could be hard to stop. Not low tech like Godwinson's ill educated horde

I always thought the University was the best faction. Once you got "The Virtual World" all of the network nodes solved their dissent problem.

I always found that massive expansion from the start was a pretty unbeatable strategy (even with the drop in efficiency). Then just turtle, upgrade cities, and attack during periods when you have an advantage in the reactors. Plus you need the hunter-seeker algorithm to keep your tech advantage....Artillery was the biggest waste of units and I hated how the computer always wanted to auto-produce them.

its political coming-out earlier this month,

LOL idiots. The time when geoengineering became a possibility was when cvhina made certain it would not rain during the Olympics.

They're going to blow up the ocean!

spraying aerosols from jet planes? that's unpossible. sounds like chemtrails or something from coast to coast. sounds like slate has been listening to the tinfoil hat crowd lately.

i'd play that video game