By Erika Engelhaupt
None of the scientists in the room so much as blinked when David Keith suggested saving the world with spy planes spraying sulfuric acid.
Keith, a physicist at the University of Calgary in Canada, was facing an audience not likely to be shocked: nearly 200 other researchers, some of whom had their own radical ideas for fighting global warming. His concept was to spray a mist of sulfuric acid high in the stratosphere to form particles called sulfate aerosols, which would act like a sprinkling of tiny sunshades for the overheating Earth.
Keith’s idea may sound outrageous, but it is just one of many proposals for bumping the global thermostat down a couple of degrees by tinkering directly with the planet’s heating and cooling systems. Plans to cool the Earth range from shading it to fertilizing it, from seeding clouds to building massive supersuckers that filter greenhouse gases from the air. The schemes are all part of a growing field known as geoengineering: a subject once taboo for all but the scientific fringe, but now beginning to go mainstream.
So far the tinkering happens mainly in computer models, where researchers are trying to figure out geoengineering’s potential side effects. Yet some technologies are in the prototype stage, governments are starting to consider geoengineering seriously and budding geoengineers are working out how to proceed safely, and ethically, with real-world experiments.
“It truly is asking giant questions which nobody really knows the answers to,” Keith says — “like how we manage the whole Earth.”
In March, Keith and other experts met in a dimly lit chapel-turned-auditorium at the Asilomar resort near Monterey, Calif. In 1975, molecular biologists met at the same resort to write landmark guidelines to regulate DNA experiments. This time around, cloud physicists, legal scholars and government bureaucrats debated the relative merits of brightening clouds versus building artificial trees. In the end, the meeting-goers concluded that geoengineering research should cautiously proceed, in case Earth’s climate proves broken beyond the current means of repair: ratcheting down fossil fuel use.
Researchers have kicked around the idea of large-scale climate manipulation since at least the 1960s, when Soviet scientists suggested damming the Bering Strait as part of a scheme to warm Siberia and free shipping lanes of sea ice. But mainstream scientific attention began only about five years ago.
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“So far the tinkering happens in computer models…” and we are supposed to believe the modeled results are what will actually happen in the real world?
These are not in fact proposals for ‘combating global warming’. You have to see them in a quite different light. They are proposals that we shall as a species get into the business of large scale geo engineering with a view to actively managing the climate of the planet we live on.
The answer to such proposals must surely be that if there is only the smallest chance that such things could go catastrophically wrong and thus extinguish human civilization, the precautionary principle forbids doing them.
Or more seriously, and less ad hominem, that the idea that we know enough and have robust enough technology to do it successfully is totally insane.
These alarmists will be the death of us all.
This Keith guy would be lynched in his hometown of Calgary this week. Southern Alberta is 15 degrees below average and it’s been raining and snowing for days here. Be a tough sell here. What a waste of my taxes dollars. Here are parts of my “letter to the editor” from last January about Keith’s work. Grrrr….
Lethbridge Herald
RE: Sun screen idea floated January 28, 2010
Readers should be alarmed that their tax dollars are being wasted on the likes of U of C Professor Keith. He is proposing that he get grant money for the concept of seeding the atmosphere with particles to block the sun and make our weather colder than it already is.
Yet the world’s climatologists don’t know how climate and weather change. We now know that the role of carbon dioxide has been overblown by the politically motivated UN IPCC, by the sensation-seeking media and by grant-hungry researchers riding the “climate gravy train.” …
Now Professor Keith is proposing to study the addition of “stuff” to our atmosphere to stop climate change when we don’t even know how the climate changes! The arrogance is as amazing as it is frightening.
We know that volcanoes have drastic affects on climate as witnessed by terrible weather following Pinatubo, Krakatoa and Tambora. Now imagine putting a bunch of particles into the atmosphere, followed by an unexpected and major volcanic eruption. If you thought the past two winters have been cold, and if you blinked and completely missed the few days of summer in 2009, you will not like colder weather that Professor Keith is proposing to produce. Sugar beets and summer-loving folks won’t like it one bit. (Here in Lethbridge, 2009 was the coldest year of the century and the coldest since 1996!)
….
“overheating earth”. What baloney. Do I even have to explain why that is a stupid thing to say?
Geo-engineering will probably be the death of us all, when the “fix” lands us right into the next ice age.
Ridiculous. The long term trend over the last 5000 years is towards more and more cooling and there is nothing to suggest any dangerous warming can occur. However, cooling the planet artificially would be genuinely dangerous. We already know what such suicidal dreams have their roots in the eco-religion’s belief that the planet is overpopulated and that killing off a large number would “save the planet”. Talking about cooling the planet is like planning a genocide. I’d actually go as far as prompting people to protest and take up arms against such a suicidal notion.
So let me get this straight. Guys who want to intentionally spray sulfuric acid and other junk into the atmosphere with some goofy idea that they can control the weather are considered mainstream, while those of us who want to examine the original, unadjusted temperature records to see if what is being claimed is actually true are considered enemies of the people? Super-suckers indeed!
Michel – I agree . Unfortunately , it appears that the true believers abandoned their sanity long ago .
Uh, this particular chap is suggesting that we blanket the atmosphere with HsSO4 in order to cool down an already cooling climate to save the planet from global warming? And we sceptics are supposed to be the stupid ones?
bumping the global thermostat down a couple of degrees
Better to keep the fingers of those nuts off the red switch. Couple of degrees means well bellow the Maunder minimum.
……….“It truly is asking giant questions which nobody really knows the answers to,” Keith says — “like how we manage the whole Earth.”
It sounds like I will have to make time to write to the U of Calgary, this guy needs less money to spend.
Fools!
“Know him who knows not when he knows not and shun him!”
Have we become as gods that we think we can control the heavens and the earth? As Keith says — “like how we manage the whole Earth.”???
Absurd. Cockroaches have as much of a chance of “managing” the earth.
This is not to say that we cannot have profound effects on our environment, both good and bad. But control? You have got to be kidding!
If you’d told me 20 years ago that environmentalists would be clamoring for MORE acid rain, I would have laughed my head off.
If they’re actually serious about this, why not let the coal & oil power plants turn off their S02 scrubbers. Oh wait, that would save everybody money. Why do such a foolish thing when we can spend more money?
Just supposing that an effective, affordable control method with no side effects could be found, who is going to decide how much is enough? No two people in an air conditioned office can agree on exactly where the thermostat should be set.
I suppose whoever pays the piper calls the tune, and the rest of the world had better learn to like the music.
Anthony and friends.
Thank you for this great website. I don’t know how you guys do it, but your efforts are truly awesome!
Jeez, these people just don’t know when to call it a day.
So, to be clear here, we take the ill defined CO2 “problem” existing mostly in model results and attempt to fix it by “tinkering” directly with real systems we barely understand based again on what “models” indicate might be the end result. What could possibly go wrong?
“It truly is asking giant questions which nobody really knows the answers to,” Keith says — “like how we manage the whole Earth.”
Hey Keith, I have an idea – like how about you don’t. Arrogant fool.
There are several Engineers here – Q. Have you ever “tinkered” with a system (or device) that you didn’t understand (possibly as a child) and could you describe the end result?
“Keith’s idea may sound outrageous,…”
No, really?
Do we really think we are smart enough to tinker with these natural heating/cooling processes? Who is to say that these “cures” for the disease may actually be worse than the “disease” itself? These “scientists” may actually end up doing more harm than good if they had their way.
Seriously, spraying sulfuric acid into the atmosphere? What are these guys smoking?
Of course, there is such thing as an “overheating earth” so this is all nothing but hype and bad science anyway.
History is full of examples where the West has engaged in environmental engineering only to make things a lot worse. Our program of forest fire management earlier in the 1900’s of extinguishing all fires (including natural fires) as they started led to massive undergrowth, leading to some seriously large megafires later on.
The environmental movement is also replete with “we must act now!” actions which led to worse disasters than leaving the problem alone: some of the worse superfund sites (such as Kalamazoo) were paper recycling plants.
I would have thought that people would have learned that acting without fully realizing the consequences often creates much bigger problems later on–but apparently those who advocate environmental engineering have simply set their sights to bigger things.
UK Sceptic says:
May 30, 2010 at 10:59 am
Uh, this particular chap is suggesting that we blanket the atmosphere with HsSO4 in order to cool down an already cooling climate to save the planet from global warming? And we sceptics are supposed to be the stupid ones?>>
Don’t you see, its the perfect scam. Hey we sprayed some magic stuff in the air and the earth cooled off. See! it Worked!
Which will be followed by… let’s see 15 years flat, slight decline just started should be in full swing cooling in 5 years, alarmism by 10 years…. We sprayed too much magic dust in the air, we’ve triggered an ice age, we need huge amounts of cash to study it and come up with a solution. No! we can’t pump CO2 in we just found out is has a negative feedback due to a reaction with the magic stuff we sprayed and its logarithmic anyway so it wouldn’t make much difference!
Before we try to tinker with the entire atmosphere maybe we should first try to find out how to actually measure surface temperature at the poles. Or in other words: A species that isn’t even capable of measuring what’s happening shouldn’t start messing with it.
Or we could generate lots of electricity using unfiltered high sulfur coal.
Or wait…… we already tried that and it causes acid rain.
Land use issues are one thing.
Tinkering with Geo-Engineering to force the balance of elemental stability is quite another.
Will result in unintended consequences, especially since the world is NOT overheated.
An already resource-stressed world will disintegrate into full-scale open warfare, nuclear included, as whole civilizations are backed against the wall.
This is a solution?
Where does such madness originate?
Keep your eyes peeled for more stuff to come out on David Keith. He is educated just enough to be dangerous, as is evidenced by this article. Part of the Suzuki/Hoggan misinformation PR juggernaut. They say we are well funded and well organized, yet we have none of the govermnent cash that is available to these guys. Skeptics have to find private funding on their own and when they do, it is claimed to be from “polluting industires”. Look at the funding sources for the Suzuki Foundation. Some of the worst polluters in the game, but what is good for the goose is not good for the gander. What a crock.
Funding should be drying up as public skepticism of (C)AGW continues to grow, the great global CO2 regulation regime is not going to happen, and natural trends and events are converging to give us a long extended period of global cooling.
Therefore the rush is on to deploy a quick-and-dirty fix which will require funding for operation, monitoring, and ongoing climate research about its effects. The fix will be deemed a success due to the lower global average temperature anomalies, and the fix working will be cited as proof there was a problem that needed fixing, as verified by the computer models.