Reprinted from totallytopten.com
The solution to climate change lies not in the hands of politicians, but some seriously nutty scientists.
For the uninitiated, Geo-engineering is easiest explained as the plan B in the fight against climate change, in case our politicians and world leaders fail. And as the Kyoto agreement is due 2012, with both Bali and Copenhagen settled disappointments, it is perhaps time for drastic action.
Scientists all over the world are already on it.
10. Ocean Iron Fertilization
“Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age” ~John Martin, discoverer of the Ocean Iron Fertilization Idea.
Introduce iron into the ocean’s upper layer and increase the amount of phytoplankton (plant plankton) in the ocean. This in turn will increase the amount of food for ocean life, strengthen the ecosystem and most importantly, take in CO2 and release
oxygen. The problem however, is not just the process but the scale on which it has to be done to make an impact.
9. Cloud Reflectivity Enhancement
Making clouds whiter. How? Apparently the “viable plan” by Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh is to have 1500 special ships known as Flettner ships to spray ocean water into the atmosphere. The ocean spray would work within a concept known as the Twomey Effect. The biggest problem is the lack on ocean nuclei needed due to pollution.
Problem: 1500 honkin’ ships shooting water into the air.
8. Scatterers – Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosols
Release microparticles into the atmosphere at the rate of 1 million metric tons a year through the use of jumbo jets and military artillery. The idea is to reflect some of the sunlight entering our atmosphere, thus reducing warming effects and helping us keep nice and cool. Read more at Wikipedia.
Read the rest of the article here
I propose the US unilaterally resume above-ground nuclear weapons tests. This would cause the Russians to do the same. This in turn would cause all the loonies currently freaking out about global warming to freak out about background radiation instead, leaving the earth to regulate its own temperature unmolested.
I give Credit to all those WUWT folks that contributed. Thanks
By Summer: Global Cooling And All That.
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/121050
Question Numero Uno: Is the really a dire necessity?
Question # 2: What are the downsides to massively altering the Earth’s Climate?
Question # 3: What happens when the reaction goes too far (now what?)?
Before even considering which options there are available, the above questions need hard answers. If you don’t have them, then you don’t have any business messing with things you don’t understand/can’t control.
And besides all that, there isn’t anything going on right now that has not happened at least twice already in the last 120 years. 1 degree F is peanuts compared to the range of which climate is known to have spanned.
Leave the climate alone.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Correction:
I give Credit to all those WUWT folks that contributed. Thanks
Food Prices to Double And Triple By Summer: Global Cooling And All That.
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/121050
I work with an English teacher who is essentially too young to know about the Clean Air Act. He believes that everything that has been emitted into the air in the last 50 years is still there and must be dealt with. Wow! He also spouts a different alarm phrase every time anyone starts to explain why his statements are too broad or uninformed.
He thinks that naturally emitted nitrogenous compounds break down by natural means, but how could it be possible that nitrogen compounds that we emitted in the 60s and 70s be broken down by natural processes? How could it possibly be effective?
He also thinks we lose thousands of species a day to extinction and how could planting trees in rows possibly be good? He is against cutting down virgin forests and so am I, but planting trees in rows and having tree farms apparently cannot be good.
The new green idea appears to be not to use wood for anything. So, using renewable resources is not green? I am so confused! What do they want us to use for toilet paper? Plastics, saw grass, or their arms?
I saw something on the Green channel I think. It had this billionaire Kevin O’Leary (or something like that) funding this guys effort to create billions of little refractor discs to scatter sunlight. They even made the discs and were seeing if they could withstand a rocket launch (they couldn’t.)
What a bunch of whackos. I agree with the above poster that we need to address the world’s idiots first.
“eo (16:14:39) :
Mitigating global warming should be a good excuse for people who dont want to remove the snow from their side walks and pathways. Local government could tax payers money and even claim credits for leaving the snow as it falls in their terriotries. Snow is very effective in reflecting solar energy back into space. Any estimate ?”
Write a proposal to the UN. You might earn some carbon credits under the CDM framework (clean development mechanism).
Better yet, paint your walkway white…
What amuses me is that it was only a few years ago that the alarmists were four square against any geoengineering proposal as a solution, as they evidently wanted their socialist agenda implemented to put us all back in serfs smocks instead. I suppose now that they’re vested in geoengineering joint stock ventures, they have changed their tune.
I think I like the reflective space ship idea the best. The quotes price tag, $100 billion a year, which wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the cost of cap and trade/carbon tax schemes. Not only that, it should be completely reversible and it would greatly increase our technological savvy.
Not at all Doc
“So add a bit of copper to your iron, and the sea’s will bloom, but the whole eco-system will respond in strange ways.”
Nitrogen can be fixed – atmosphere.
Phosphorus is limiting in all open oceans. It’s made that way. It it didn’t, it wouldn’t work.
Nitrogen fixation is done by things that also are limited by P.
When you add anything like Cu, Fe, etc you just cause something else to become limiting.
Liebig’s law of the minimum, which states that growth is limited by the factor that is present in minimal quantity.
Adding Fe without adding P will not work.
It just causes something else to become limiting.
How about some really big pumps at the equator to keep the gulf stream going and prevent the coming ice age?
If you read the article, solution #1 is a knee-slapper: A tank for cow farts. Question is how would they separate out the gas from the solids?… Didn’t I know that someone would come up with that. The real kicker is the writer’s solution, just put the cows into space to reflect sunlight, and then use a space shuttle to retrieve them when we need some meat. 🙂 I don’t think that would work. As I recall the vacuum of space causes the water in biological organisms to expand and the body would explode, that is if it doesn’t freeze first.
If the cost of adding iron to the oceans where it is needed is less the increase in the value of the fish that can harvested, then it is a good idea. The CO2 is irrelevant.
“lmg (16:20:50) :
I propose the US unilaterally resume above-ground nuclear weapons tests. This would cause the Russians to do the same. This in turn would cause all the loonies currently freaking out about global warming to freak out about background radiation instead, leaving the earth to regulate its own temperature unmolested.”
Even better, we could get a finely balanced nuclear winter effect. As we’re being silly here, a wikipedia link should be allowed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
About as efficient and cheap as it gets. You want cold? Have some.
The best geo-engineering idea is to flood the Qatar (Qattara) depression. This would reduce sea levels, increase Earth’s albedo (more clouds and a large area of reflective water) and generate huge quantities of carbon free electricity.
Interestingly, this idea was given serious scientific consideration until global warming hysteria came along, then it was quietly forgotten about.
Cooling the planet and decreasing sea levels through some straightforward engineering is a seriously bad idea to the Warmingistas.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q771849x20120898/
lmg (16:20:50) :
I propose the US unilaterally resume above-ground nuclear weapons tests. This would cause the Russians to do the same. This in turn would cause all the loonies currently freaking out about global warming to freak out about background radiation instead, leaving the earth to regulate its own temperature unmolested.
**********************************
As a bonus, atomspheric testing might also trigger a Nuclear Winter, or maybe just a Little Nuclear Winter. I’m surprised this idea didn’t make the list.
Oh, Carl (Sagan), where are you when we really need your PR savvy, I mean expertise, on planetary warming and cooling? Carl, phone home!
They’d better get to work real fast because “climate change” AKA global warming (a rose by any other name…) is threatening to turn Florida into a winter wonderland.
“Unusual weather event”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100110/ap_on_re_us/us_winter_weather
mikelorrey (15:56:53) :
Cost benefit. It would cost quite a bit. And the benefit? If you turned on concave mode then it might mitigate the summer in one hemisphere but excaberate the winter in the other. If you switch it to concave mode to make a winter less savere in one hemisphere then the summer hemisphere gets toasted. And if terrorist get a hold of it ….
And all those charged particals in the solar wind. What kind of force would they exert?
I don’t think that messing with mother nature is a good idea.
Mike Ramsey
How did #4, the Sulfur Dioxide hose, get pegged at a “300 trillion dollar bill”?
When mentioned in SuperFreakonomics, as mentioned here, it was $20 million initial, $10 million annual budget. The linked Treehugger article talks about another guy who proposed it with a $50 billion cost.
However, as to how “wacky” it really is, well, first off here is an Oct 16 2009 article (before Climategate!) from the Freakonomics site describing the smear campaign against them over it.
Lastly, from this Treehugger article, I present examples of the prestigious and authoritative critics arrayed against the concept. Consider them as you will.
(…)
From there, the book goes on to make misleading claims about solar panels, geoengineering, and about the nature of climate change itself. The book’s authors, Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner, even misquote the only climate scientist they interviews. Prominent climate blogger Joe Romm of Climate Progress caught the book’s many errors while reading through a review copy, and posted the high voltage (and lengthily titled) critical post Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places.
Romm’s post (well worth a read) was inflammatory but mostly right on–almost immediately, luminaries like Paul Krugman, Berkley economist Brad DeLong, the scientists at RealClimate, and countless others sided with the view that SuperFreakonomics mangles climate science.
(…)
poke fun at these scientists if you will, but they are trying to save the world. it’s not all about government funding.
until they get it.
@Dale Rainwater. Bob (16:30:17) :
Sometime ago i made an back of the envelope calculation about launching sunshades into space, that it required some 200.000 launches in 5 years time, that’s about a 110 launches a day and with a failure rate of about 2.5% (wich is about the rate at wich Russian R7 rockets fail) would result in 2 or 3 failed launches each day.
To bad for those living under the launch trajectory.
Other solutions:
3. A dam in the Beringstrait, cold water into the pacific, warm can not flow back.
2. Nudge the Asteroid Apophis to hit the earth instead of missing it.
1. The most simple solution would be off course to launch a few nukes, you don’t need a full exchange of the nuclear stockpile.
Richard S Courtney (16:07:31) :
People here are missing the point.
Politicians need a way out.
They have one – the door. Many will be booted out it come election time.
Just a heads up – a nice article again in the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6958093/Climate-change-the-true-price-of-the-warmists-folly-is-becoming-clear.html
The idea to fertilize the ocean with iron was the subject of a controversial 1991 paper by Fred Singer and Roger Revelle. It was the last scientific paper to be published with Revelle’s name on it prior to his death in July 1991. The controversy stems not from the ocean seeding idea, but from a statement made in the paper’s conclusion: “The scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time. There is little risk in delaying policy responses.” This contradicted what Al Gore had claimed in his book, _Earth in The Balance_, that Revelle was essentially an alarmist who inspired Gore to carry on the fight to stop global warming while Gore was his pupil at Harvard. It’s a fascinating story that ended with a libel lawsuit. Fred Singer gives his account of the story here: http://media.hoover.org/documents/0817939326_283.pdf
The man who lost the libel lawsuit, Justin Lancaster, has since released his own version of events that is contrary to Singer’s. Not surprisingly, Lancaster’s account is viewed uncritically by alarmists:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/11/the_real_truth_about_the_revel.php
http://home.att.net/~espi/Cosmos_myth.html
It’s interesting to note that Lancaster posted a complete transcript of Singer’s deposition but neglected to post any record of his own.
There are three limiting elements for plankton: Fe, P, and Cr (B12).
Idea #11: Get everyone on the equator to jump up&down at noon, putting earth into higher orbit.