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it's the geoengineering one

🕑 Added 2021-09-29 15:24:46 +0000 UTC

Comments

Moderately Dinosaur

I used to work up a geotechnical engineering lab and can confirm it is more of an art (albeit an art with all the most fun parts of chemistry, biology, and geology).

Ciarán

On the subject of geotechnical engineering I'm reminded of my lil brother whos a engineering undergrad talking about having to take the modules Dirt and Dirt 2 for his course

Adam Detrick

"Lake Superiorer" really got me

Claire

Also climate Stalin in the sense of “ build a habitable earth in one earth” kind of way.

Great opportunity to plug Neal Stephenson's recent novel Termination Shock, a hilariously stupid book of which I enjoyed every page.

we have a hole - the Grand Canyon.

Japan has the right idea - encourage increased alcohol consumption.

Alaeriia

Can we do this, but pump all the water into the southern US states instead?

Off-label Botanist

Alice for Climate Stalin. Please check out carbon farming and soils sequestration, the perennially forgotten geoengineering

sven terje bang

Here's what to do - dredge the Atlantic and the Pacific, use the dredged material to build a wall that goes around the entire planet, then pump all the sea water rise in the south into the north bit and drown the west under twice as much sea water rise. As a bonus you can run a train on top of the wall where the southerners can point and laugh at the northernes. Maybe give out free guns so they can shoot at white boat refugees.

Aral sea would be a good full episode

I think about this a lot

"climate stalin or nothing" is the most concise summary of the fate of humanity.

Escort earth to the edge of town or buy it a one way bus ticket somewhere more comfortable. She's a marine!

Are you saying its time earth should just "move along"?

En Bee

It's TOO FRAIL. We need to MAKE IT MORE RIGID first.

If/when you do atlantropa, might call upon Cody of alternate history hub, wrote a damn book about it

WHY don't we just TAKE the earth and PUSH it somewhere else!??!??

William Chamberlain

Yay, Science! Where's the Space Laser's role in this - could it convert some old satellites into light-absorbing particles for us?

Nathan

The Wandering Earth.

Douglas Graebner

Ok but consider: yeet suburbs and bring back prairie ecosystems

i love you guys. this episode was genuinely deeply distressing. i couldn't finish it. real bleak shit in our future huh.

How do we feel about trolleybuses as a low carbon mode of transport?

Thaddeus Wojack

On the subject of NAWPA, reading Cadillac Desert cannot be recommended enough. Alternatively, you could also watch the excellent documentary adaptation by PBS-KQED: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0444F9186975498D

Okay, just want to say that Alice didn't get enough love for her comment on how Stalin's a complex man, "but no one understands him like his woman." I couldn't stop laughing.

Great episode as always....looking forward to the next one.

Laur Skelly

hello just popping in to say that I DVR'ed Shake Hands With Danger when it aired on TCM yesterday morning. it's now a rainy afternoon in Chicago, I made some yummy lunch, I'm 2:00 into this masterpiece, and the guy just sang the titular admonition, in its original context & in all its twangy, tobacco-laced splendor. I'm just having a lovely time and I'm so glad to have this weird podcast in my life. thanks to all of you for being you and making this 💛

Aaron Thomas

Absolutely love this. Was talking to a coworker who until then had no knowledge of my politics, and he recommended this podcast.. When I checked your Twitter we had like 40 moots. Spot on recommendation, comrade-in-wages.

Tyler Moran

The move 'Hijack' is a flying type move and as a rock/ground type Geodude is immune.

Ash Rose

Sometimes! The 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption caused a haze layer to cover the earth for several years, net effect? The haze blocked some light and diffused the rest, leading to record plant growth everywhere on earth that wasn't a boreal forest and about the only meaningful pause in the Keeling curve (that is derived from measurements of atmospheric co2). Diffusion good.

One of the best shows ever made.

The moving earth thing reminds of the show Frisky Dingo where the bad guy tries to crash the earthnwith a big rocket but just ends up nudging us far enough from the sun to fix global warming.

Gyro

Hey wait if you reduce incoming light that means less photosynthesis is happening, right? Photosynthesis removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and is also required for us to *eat*. I might be missing something here. Do the aerosols only reflect infrared or something?

Pol R

I think this must be the blog Rocz was talking about... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-alchemists-turn-airborne-co2-into-diamonds/ Diamond-encrusted challenge coins anyone?

MusƎEqual

The Moving the Earth slide gives me weird existential Tower of Babel vibes

Xavier

The Saharan dust also fertilizes the Caribbean so you would lose several other rainforest as well as alot of coral reefs.

Joe Arnold

With our luck, a few years after we start pumping stuff into the air to simulate volcanoes, fucking Toba or Yellowstone will pop off. I’m gonna go build a cabin in that one single valley in Greenland that has forest in it. Qinngua, it’s called.

Though not as continent-scale as Atlantropa, I'd like to mention the geoengineering proposal of Walter Loudermilk (FDR era soil scientist). Which was to dam up the Jordan River to irrigate the Negev, and replace the inflow to the dead sea by digging a canal from Haifa on the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, with Hydroelectric Plants along the way.

On the dig a big hole issue, very little digging if you just pump sea water into "The Great Basin" of the desert south west of the United states. Sure we would loose a few cities like Las Vegas, Reno, and Salt Lake as well as a number of much smaller cities. The great thing about "The Great Basin" is that many of the lakes are already very salty, and unless you over fill the basins, the water never drains into any ocean.

V Astra

Hi! I just wanted to say thanks to Alice, listening to her gave me the confidence to jailbreak my gender. YAY Alice. ~❤️~

A_Aphelion

Important question - would the Earth beep while it's backing up, or make that white noise pulse that's supposed to be more attention grabbing?

etienne

yeah no everyone wants to do that. sometimes they just forget about the "planting new trees" part but that's fine, we'll get there some day.

Guy Pradel

Great episode. I really don't get why we should bury the trees underground tho, can't we just use them as lumber or to make chairs ?

Robert Connor

Er, cw: depression, suicide, etc

Robert Connor

Found the thing Rocz was talking about on climate grief: https://streamdumper.com/videoEmbeded/24?autoplay=0&controls=1&loop=0&mute=0&t=0

MusƎEqual

Having cleared the free ones multiple time this is my birthday present to myself and its the best possible gift. Simply thank you, I havent laughed or cried so hard for that matter in some time going through the content I have. A lot hits close to home, family in the UK, highschool in Warwick, my college roomate from Germantown, roadtrips from Hartford to TC and J to Pitt to Syracuse in a blizzard over a long weekend. Thanks for the nostalgia and some education along the way, I love you all for what you do, my life is less of a Station fire for it.

Evan Scott

look at this fucking idiot

heffa

The problem is population. Enforce world wide limits of child births

Pol R

The playing pool with planets thing is literally a bit from Red Dwarf.

Christopher Edward

Wait, its not Geocaching?

Its the depression one!

heffa

So is it "GeoDude" or "GeodeOod"? :D

Sarah

I saw the prefix 'geo' and assumed this was about the dirt wizards roz worships.

Andrew Clark

Ok hear me out: Greenpeace has a big ass boat What if we got em to do guerilla dumps of iron filings

Taxi Rob

This might sound crazy, but I think that maybe if we cut down on driving cars and built more trains, we could cut quite a bit of carbon emissions from the transportation sector. What do you folks think about that?

Teddy k.

Plus, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Land Reclamation are the primary villains. The writing style is also super approachable, even if it's definitely From The Nineteen Eightees.

The real solution to sea level rise is to soak up the extra water with a super absorbent polymer then chuck that shit on top of Antarctica, its white, will give that snow look we are all used to... can put it on top of mountains to make the planet more festive. This is a solution that has no drawbacks

Teddy k.

"Cadillac Desert" is a masterpiece of a book, and a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the "development" of the American West.

Harrison Sanchez

Plainly Difficult is a saint!

Kasz

Look man, if you start looking at these things under a microscope...

Noblesse Oblahaj

When Roz finds the bit so annoying he can't even finish more than half of it

lake s u p r e m e

Kevin Bodel

Real question here. Wouldn’t aerosols inhibit plant growth and lead to crop failures?

“Rain follows the plough”, a thought process that happened here in Australia during the 19th Century. The township of Farina in South Australia was set up in an area that was completely unsuitable for farming (desert etc) because of several successive winters of excessive rain. By the time the railway arrived there in 1881, the fields had all shrivelled away and the town sparkly died. A preservation group has now restored the former bakery to operational order.

WTYP has taught me one thing and that is cars are the enemy of human happiness.

Adam Fairris

On the plus side, many memes.

Adam Fairris

“Paradox Alternate History Vibes” I’ve actually played this one! TNO mod for HOI IV. Atlantropa is a thing in it! It tends to fail very quickly and also it turns out a salt desert the size of the Adriatic Sea is not economically viable farmland. Womp womp.

This episode reminded me of the Two Elk Saga here in Wyoming. It's a story of grift, hubris, unexplained government misappropriation, and features a political failson.

FortressPlotter

Am I correct in assuming that the giant Fresnel lens in space will be floated on an enormous vat of mercury?

Be likely easier to just make, like, very shiny light coloured wheat and soy beans, so we could grow normal crops and reflect sunlight away. Same for just, making algea or similar that reflect more light by being a different colour, so long as we also made them super easy to kill if things got out of hand. Weird new ocean algea have fucked up the earth several times before in history so its a good one to be careful off, but its also an option that has genuine proof of concept as its happened naturally before.

At least in that case a very large proportion of the price is the telescope itself, and the heavyness of a payload. IF we built the right infrastructure (we probably wont, but like, magnetic accelerator boosted small launches which we do have the technology for) we could reduce the cost a lot by just launching thousands of *tiny* expanding reflective sheets up to there. Fuel money can also be saved by spending most of it on some more large aimable near earth mirrors that would not reflect a usefully tempreture lowering amount of sunlight, but could focus that sunlight on the back of the little mirrors at the lagrange point to stop them drifting out of orbit. We wont tho because you cant launch rich tourists on a mag boosted launch without incidentally turning them to jam, or, depending on the scale of the launches, possibly chopping them into three or four parts first, though this could also be a point in its favour in some ways (obviously i am talking about that it cant be coopted for tourism and nothing else, it wouldnt even *work* in minecraft).

Aidan Sullivan

yea B1M is pretty neolib. I support the beef.

J Brandt Buckley

Funny enough, we have an example of a $10 billion USD satellite with a sun shield that operates at a Lagrange point: The James Web Space Telescope. I suspect a fresnel lens 6.7 million times its area is gonna cost a smidge more.

Lesley

One of the most disgusing ideas I've ever heard is planting trees so they can be buried with nuclear waste to stop them rotting, even though fungi and bacteria can and will still live in those conditions. I know what other carbon-based lifeforms we could bury there, though. Grab your pitchforks, everyone!

skedazzle

If we genetically modified protins or algae, it seems like it could work (maybe so they make shells out of Co2???) Or even a high iron algae to fertilize as it dies off

Evan Scott

the beginning of the anthropocene is commonly defined by geologists as starting where you can see compositional shifts in soils from the invention of slash and burn agriculture around 12-10kya

Niky

I hadn't heard about the little ice age being a feedback loop started from the black death. That's kind of wild. I didn't expect pre-industrial age humanity to have that much of an influence on the environment.

James Craft

Making the sun blocking Fresnel lens but launching it from the surface with thousands of huge rockets that negate the blocked solar energy with their exhaust

Niky

Time traveling Podcasters who cause disasters to mine for content.

Who are these people? What is this?

not gonna lie... kinda shocked to see this episode come out this month. love to see it, thanks.

Marjorie Zeager

If you’re gonna do an MCR reference you could at LEAST go for Thank You For The Venom

Tom Hsia

Wow, that was fast!

Jack Deeth

can you find them by going back through the posts here?

is there a youtube playlist of all the bonus videos? I would love to catch up on the ones ive missed

Nightingale33

B I G H O L E

Brian Stewart

Is this gonna go on the RSS feed as audio?

Allen

hell yea mofos

ZombieDwarf

It's THE DIRT ONE. And also THE ENVIRONMENT ONE in general.

Twi

IT'S THE BONUS

Nenna

Yay Liam

niloc

if you click the 'youtube' on the bottom of the screen while it's playing, it will launch the video at the youtube site and save your place in your watch history, if you're signed in

Thanks pod gods. I might be dumb here but is there anyway to listen to these bonus episodes NOT on a browser? The page just reloads and I lose my place everytime.

Dammit no sleep for me

Yuppers