Here’s an excerpt of an AP story posted on Brietbart by President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, suggesting putting particulate matter into the air to reflect sunlight.
It seems like we’ve already tried that and then cleaned it up in the last century.
Excerpt:
The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.
John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.
“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”
Full story here
Note to commenters, while this is a political story also, please keep the discussion limited to the science. – Anthony
h/t to Mark Danner
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…shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays…
But I thought the sun had nothing to do with the current warming?
Oh well – at least we’ll know who to blame for the global cooling.
There’s a favourite tabloid newspaper expression here in the UK that seems apposite: “You couldn’t make it up”…
checkout an April 8, 2009 article by Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as http://www.worldclimatereport.com.
Seems arosols may not be so important after all – “So if aerosols don’t play a large role in the 20th century temperature behavior, then the models get things right for the wrong reasons and, when fed the right reasons, they would get things wrong (i.e. produce too much warming—an indication that their climate sensitivity is too large).”
d
This is an attempt to take credit for the natural cooling for whatever reason that has been seen in the past 9 years. See, we fixed it now give us your money and stop doing anything that we don’t tell you to do.
They had better be careful because it might backfire and cause something else much worse like an ice age.
These guys obviously never watched any Japanese Sci Fi from the 60s. What morons.
lol, particulate matter. That’s what we had for few hundred years, lots of it pollution until the 1950s- 70s. As it cleared up with advances in technology and the Clean Air Acts, sunlight penetrated more and more to ground level. That’s where a third of the warming trend has come from over the last 150 years. Now some idiot says “Hey let’s put particulates back in the air!”
If the person in question was a decent science advisor they would know that a third of the global warming trend is from cleaning up our smog filled towns. That heat was always around (solar activity) but couldn’t penetrate the pollution.
Then we’ve got another third that comes from poor surface stations that pick heat up from buildings, vehicles and asphalt. The last third of the warming trend is anthropogenic greenhouse gases and natural terrestrial cycles.
So should I drive my car and pollute and dim the sun or should I ride my bike, reduce pollutants and let the sun shine brighter? A rock and a hard place.
Is it ok if I summarize things like that:
– Holdren never said the sentence which is proclaimed in the title
– He only said that at last resort, geoengineering should be considered.
What is the scientific word for “trying to spread a rumour by lying about someone’s declarations”?
Reply: Flagged for possible deletion because contents not discussing the science, but politics ~ charles the moderator
So, we have spent the past 30 odd years removing particulates from the atmosphere that were put there from the industrial revolution and now they want to put them back????
Yet another possible 2012 doomsday scenario.
When will they ever learn?
I guess this years winter was not bad enough.
How could this be, the science was settled?
Holdren is the president’s science advisor?!? We are in deep guano, folks.
Holdren’s astonishing idiocy will no doubt make him propose that China should build a new coal-fired power plant every week until at least 2024. Oh, wait…
Reply: Flagged for possible deletion because contents not discussing the science, but politics ~ charles the moderator
My brilliant idea — What we really need is a giant atmosphere washer that can wash all the atmospheric CO2 out and turn it into rocks. Rain? .. Hey wait, oh never mind.
Brings back an old story from the 70s when the plan was to spread carbon black made from old tires on the polar ice caps and Greenland to stave off the ‘for sure coming ice age’. WOW, you know what, that sounds about as stupid today as this plan does.
What goes up will come back down, in what form… who knows!!!
The dinosaurs were wiped out because of too much particulates in the atmosphere.
But let me see… particulates will offer more nucleii for chemical reactions and precipitation… hmmm, more clouds… possibly faster warming or cooling, depending on the altitude of those clouds. They will offer also nicely catalytic surfaces for atmospheric chemistry.
If you don’t know what the consequences could be, don’t ever do it.
Leave the science to grown men.
[snip – OT, no science in this comment]
Sorry off topic,
This may be a subject already discussed on this site but if not then it is piece to the puzzle definately worth it’s own post.
I came across the subject by chance while looking at brett andersons latest post on accuweather.
The question is what effect would a large ozone hole over the arctic have on temperatures, weather patterns etc etc.
Some links for you too get your teeth into.
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html
http://www.theozonehole.com/arcticozone.htm
Hope this starts a healthy debate 🙂
Great website Mr Watts and co.
Well since the current U.S. administration is going to run the American automobile companies, they can just put dirty diesel engines in all our vehicles. Although I’m not sure that the particulate pollutants from those engines will have the desired effect.
The longer this government operates the more obvious it becomes that “astonishing idiocy” is becoming its SOP.
Damn you’re fast. Just mentioned this bit of silliness on the preceding post.
I just took another look at that AP story and it’s interesting the way Holdren says one thing, yet it comes out a bit different the way the wire service reports it. No matter which way you slice it {or spin it}, it’s still a lame idea. We spent decades cleaning up real pollution and this guy wants to dump tons of it back in the atmosphere? This fantasy is really getting out of hand.
Look at how delusional these people are
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/apr/08/climate-change-environmentalists
They act like they came up with global warming on their own and have been trying to convince politicians, scientists, industry and the public about it. You know, the grassroots myth.
We know that global warming hysteria was initiated by top brass for political reasons and then fed to environmental groups.
The easiest way to do that would be to go back to high sulfur jet fuel for intercontinental jet flights who fly at or near the stratosphere.
Some how I suspect the Green Lobby would have a problem with that.
Remember all the gnashing of teeth over the “pollution” the SST would pump into the stratosphere?
Not to mention how many tons of sulfur particulates would you need to inject to dim a world wide shell of atmosphere enough to make any difference?
Even if you could what is the back out option if they see too much cooling from such an attempt (same goes for similar options involving small mirrors in space etc.).
How much fun will it be to get consensus in the UN over who puts how much particle matter in the atmosphere. Russia will want to keep the warming to improve wheat harvest, as will Canada, the near desert countries in Africa will want to cool things to slow down desertification — except for that minor problem of less precipitation during cooler periods.
Simply suggesting that is a viable option indicates to me that some of our senior advisers are in never never land when it comes to reality.
You think carbon cap and trading is expensive wait until you see the bill for lofting all that stuff into the atmosphere and the bureaucracy necessary to manage the concentrations to fix an undefined and poorly understood problem that may in fact not even exist.
Larry
So how precisely are Holdren’s daft experiments going to be confined to American territory? For example, we have naturally pure air and clear skies in New Zealand, in the main, and are working hard on eliminating the small pockets of urban air pollution by banning open fires and the like. We don’t need this kind of ‘help’, thanks.
Perhaps the Obama administration might like to focus on saving America from its economic difficulties, which are real, before worrying about ‘saving’ the rest of the world from a non-problem.
I don’t think we have to worry about them pulling this stunt. They’d be absolutly terrified that we’d get a cold snap, like last week for instance, and everybody would blame it on them. In about 30-40 years if, and only if, temps have gone up at a rate of .2-.3c or more per decade in actual observations, then we can have that discussion.
When Saddam ordered the oil fields of Iraq set on fire, what was the estimated volume of soot particles spewed into the atmosphere during that time? How much of that got into the upper atmosphere and spread? What effect did that have globally? Are we talking about many times that volume?
A year and a half ago, when I was with the hoi polloi trusting the science of the AGW crowd, my first thought was that if there was such a great danger, geoengineering would be the solution.
Even animals engineer their environment so why not humans? But I would hope for smarter solutions that would take into account that one should not go onto an irreversible path. Suppose that there really is a danger of over heating, and they do fill up the atmosphere with particulates in the stratosphere, like volcanic debris. What would happen if a real volcano of Cracatow size errupted? An ice age?
I think the most rational geoengineering solution is the one where artificial cloud seeding is done, the one with the screw type robot ships spewing sea water on the cloud level to increase albedo. That can be turned off on a penny, if necessary.
I know now there is not problem of overheating, but since the administration does not know this, it is best they are advised on nondestructive solutions.
These new explorations might be building a way for giving up on cap and trade gracefully, since the economy is so bad and the legislating bodies recalcitrant.