Mitigating Global Warming Using Space-Based Approaches

Abstract

Conservation, recycling, more efficient machines, altered lifestyles and new sources of energy are all needed to reduce the growth rate of our greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, the best all of these actions combined can achieve is a reduced rate of emission growth. If humans are truly causing global warming by profligate use of fossil fuels, then we need to do far more than reduce the growth in our emissions. We must reduce the absolute amount of these gases in the atmosphere to levels below those of the last century. With more and more people entering the global middle class, and their commensurate use of more and more energy, it is unlikely, perhaps even impossible, that we will be able to stop global warming. We almost certainly will not be able to conserve our way back to pre-twentieth century atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We should do all that is necessary to slow down the rate at which we dump CO₂ into the atmosphere, but we are kidding ourselves if we believe we will be able to actually reduce the amount already within it. Conservation, recycling, more efficient machines and altered lifestyles are all band aids for a problem that requires reconstructive surgery.

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,

Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the Moon

—From the poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(Adapted from an article by Robert G. Kennedy III, PE, Kenneth I. Roy, PE, Eric Hughes, David E. Fields, Ph.D.)