White House Science Advisor Holdren suggests "climate engineering with particulates"

It was the calculations of Nuclear Winter after the Russians lit off Tzar Bomba (50 MTons) in 1961 that scared both sides into treaties to disarm.
Now, a politician wants to create Chemical Winter on a scale that would result from a Nuclear Exchange. This kind of stunt only works in comic books.
And I am quite sure that using Nuclear Weapons to deliver the chemicals at scale will totally cheese off the Russians and the Chinese. Might even provoke the real deal.
Absolute MADness.

Among all of the above posts, no one has posed the question of why Holdren is proposing such an unrealistic solution to AGW and what is the urgency.
The reason involves the understanding that most astute politicians and agenda-driven scientists understand very well. The general public has no concept of orders of magnitude. Whenever I ask a group of people, “How long is one trillion seconds?” the answers vary widely. Most of those asked think it’s less than a year, a much smaller number of answers are in the low hundreds of years, and a very few answers are larger than 1,000 years. The real answer is that one trillion seconds is about 31,689 years! (An average Tropical year is about 365.24 days, so you can do the math.)
The inability of people to comprehend the exponential realities of increasing (or decreasing) orders of magnitudes makes them easy targets for offering them seemingly logical solutions to large problems from a qualitative standpoint that are simply untenable were the quantitative relative magnitudes of the causal agent and proposed effect to be considered.
This is how politicians can bamboozle the public into thinking (viscerally) that a trillion dollar budget is only a little more than a billion dollar one.
The reason for Holdren et al’s urgency is that we are near, to use one of the alarmists’ favorite expressions, a tipping point in their need to take action now. This tipping point is not the usual one that refers to the global temperature rise getting out of hand, but quite the opposite, it’s the point at which the public support of the AGW hypothesis will shift irreparably negative. With an apparent hiatus in the warming trend over the past 8+ years it will be increasingly harder to keep the public from becoming skeptical.
Here’s their problem. Three things can happen with global temperatures over the next few decades: Temps can rise, stay about the same, or decline. Of these options, two of them are bad for the AGWers and one of them, the first option, is supportive, but not irrefutable as to whether it justifies the hypothesis.
If they take no action, the odds are that they will be a loser.
However, what if they do take some action, any action? If temperatures remain the same or fall, they will claim that their action(s) were responsible. If temperatures rise, they will claim that they did everything they could, but it wasn’t enough. No matter what happens they will claim that the results justified their efforts.
In other words, it is important that they take some sort of action immediately in order to preserve their AGW hypothesis. The real scientists among them (those that may favor the AGW hypothesis for a number of non scientific reasons ranging form personal recognition, to funding, to simply keeping their job in academia, or for political purposes) probably realize that their theories are on increasingly shaky ground. They may note that certain natural processes are coming together to turn temperatures colder. These include the change in the PDO to negative (which I believe is a primary predictor of temperature trends), hints of a premature turn in the MDO in the Atlantic which will also favor cooling, the eruption of Mt. Redoubt in Alaska that’s spewing megatons of SO2 into the stratosphere which will hydrolyze and oxidize into micrometer-sized H2SO4 particulates across the Arctic which, given the low sun angle, will reflect a significantly higher amount of S/W radiation (perhaps 6%-8% more than normal) back into space. Finally there’s the sun. The current exceptional quiet period portends (for some) a diminuition in TSI which albeit small, could only have a negative effect on global temps.
On the political side, urgency is needed because as Rahm Emanuel speaking about the financial collapse and the recession said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”. The increasing burden on the taxpayers will render passage of draconian propositions re AGW less attractive to anyone outside of the environmental movement and even the atmospherically impotent cap-and-trade legislation will likely fail in this Congressional session.

George E. Smith (08:18:27) :
Sorry George but I missed your comment. My point and well explained by hotrod is that the temperature of the inanimate object is not affected by wind chill. The speed at which it reaches that temperature may be quicker the greater the wind speed, but its temperature will be that of ambient.
David

Give your wife a million bucks with instructions to spend a thousand bucks a day and she’ll run out of money in less than three years.
Give her a trillion bucks with the same instructions, you won’t see her for almost three million years…
Chump change.

aurbo (20:42:49) :
 Good post.  I have been wondering about the end-game for the AGW crowd.  All those who have put politics before science are in a terrible bind.  When the CO2 hypothesis is widely understood to have been disproved, science as a whole will take a terrible hit.  Who will take scientist seriously?
It will be a crisis. Hmm, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste“.  Interesting ….
🙂
–Mike Ramsey

Apparently Holdren and the others are big fans of sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and his Mars terra-forming books. He also wrote a couple of books on massive eco-engineering stunts to combat global warming effects.
Among the devices Robinson used for the earth:
Dumping zillions of tons of rock salt into the Atlantic ocean to restart the conveyor, which supposedly will stop when all the Arctic ice melts.
Pumping vast quantities of sea water onto the Antarctic plateau to allow the water to freeze and reduce sea level caused by out-of-control global warming.
Planting CO2-absorbing lichen (genetically engineered) to reduce CO2 levels from the atmosphere; the planting areas are to be the Siberian forests.

How long before they realize that this nutty scheme would all but neutralize the solar power industry. Maybe we should all invest in dirty carbon spewing coal.

Holdren’s Boss likes his Pizza so much!
http://greenhellblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/obamas-hypocritical-pizza-order-extra-carbon-footprint/
Presidential pizza order: Extra carbon footprint
April 11, 2009
The Sun (UK) reported to day that,
BARACK Obama liked a restaurant’s pizzas so much he has flown the chef 850 miles to make some at the White House.
Assuming the chef took a commercial flight, the air travel from the air travel alone produced 645 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions!
To underscore Obama’s do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do ethic, let’s recall his famous avowal from the 2008 campaign:
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
Don’t forget how our Hypocrite-in-Chief kept the Oval Office warm enough in the winter to grow orchids.