Any estimation on the co2 output building said walls and surrounding Greenland and Antarctic with them. What about animals the navigate through these waters. This just doesn't seem like a well thought idea to me.
This is going to sound mighty unpopular - it already does to me while I try to formulate the right way to say this in my head...
But at what point do we need to conclude that saving the nearly 8-billion human beings and the overall habitability of the Earth is of greater importance than certain animals living in individual biomes?
I know it's not the contemporary, popular thing to think about. But if the alternative is the mass displacement and deaths of humans, it feels like it's something we're going to have to make a decision on.
I've never lived in the US, so anyone, please correct me if i'm wrong, but anecdotally I have heard that Americans don't generally have (or use) outdoor clothes lines to dry their washed clothes, rather they just use a dryer. I live in Australia and when I learned this I was floored. That approach is unthinkable in Australia due to our astronomical energy costs (South Aus, where I live has the highest energy cost in the world).
With our high prices, we only very occasionally use dryers which are a horribly inefficient way to dry clothes.
Maybe the solution to affect peoples' behaviour is to dramatically increase the cost of (dirty) energy.
That is called a carbon tax. It is supported by every serious economist on the left and right, as well as by the majority of the US population. It is also in place in most EU countries, most Canadian provinces, Japan and India.
South Australia isn't Buffalo in February, nor is it Seattle in every month not ending in -gust.
A very large number of human beings, even among those that accept the science of climate change and it’s likely consequences, have proven remarkably resistant to ANY persuasion to voluntarily moderate their lifestyles even a little to make the kind of changes that, if they were made en-masse, could mitigate the worst impacts. They are even MORE resistant to even mild attempts to impose change by way of a carbon pricing mechanism. God forbid I may have to pay 5% more for certain goods, or that I should sacrifice one of my SUVs.
My main gripe therefore with these geoengineering proposals is twofold.
1. On what planet where we we’re not willing to pay even a modest price on carbon, are we going to be willing to pay trillions for geoengineering projects?
2. Geoengineering is yet another reflection of that innate human desire to externalise costs as much as possible. Whether that be the cost of labour, pollution, or climate change. It’s always the ‘other’ that should bear the worst costs - the third world, the whales, the forests, whatever.
The attitude of placing greater importance on ‘us’ over everything and everyone else is exactly what got us into this fine mess, AND STILL IS. You may think your view is unpopular but only insofar as people don’t actually want to hear the truth about themselves.
Note: I’m already aware that my two points may be slightly contradictory.
So. Much. Fucking. Carbon. Trillions is nothing if it means no consumer-level caps on carbon output for the next generation or two.
So not a permanent fix then. Just kick that can down the road and let your grandkids sort it out. That’s exactly what I meant by externalising costs and getting someone else to pay, in this case the future.
How popular might it be? Like, kill the whole coal industry around the world; who would mind? Make fuel, say, 2x as expensive; who would mind? Make barbecue coals as expensive as the meat; would anyone notice? Also, enforce it globally, including places like India, Russia, or China, the latter critically dependent on coal-based electricity.
Now compare to building some walls around glaciers, maybe mere thousands of miles.
I heard somewhere a great parable. Imagine that some aviation specialist would analyze plane hijacking data and recommend to install strong locked doors to pilot cabins on airliners. It would have prevented 9/11, saved thousands of lives, and would have been incomparably cheaper than all those security measures implemented in the aftermath. But likely every airline would be against this unneeded expense, and it would be very hard to push this measure.
Same thing with the global warming, wars, and various other (impending) catastrophes: people hope that they'll get by somehow; how bad it can really be? You see, nothing is happening! When it hits, the view changes drastically, but it's too late already.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/carbon-pric...
The other point I'll make about huge big-bang projects is that in recent decades they've only ever been achieved by authoritarian regimes that don't need the kind of consensus that kills such projects in western democracies. We live in a world where a significant fraction (perhaps majority?) of the citizenry is largely ignorant, anti-science, distrusts authority, believes in outrageous conspiracy theories and lacks the ability to form coherent thoughts about most things. I put it to you that your chance of getting a large-scale geo-engineering project supported by that majority at a direct cost to them (a cost that can't be moderated by behaviour changes by the way) is practically zero outside an outright dictatorship.
I certainly don't disagree with you. I should make note that while I am a conservationist at heart, this was more a 'devils advocate' position I was bringing up.
Even discounting feeding 8 billion humans, just the maintenance required in keeping Spaceship Earth in a state (reliably) hospitable to humans is a surprisingly extensive task.