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
Mike Ramsey (16:52:30)
Correction :
If you turned on concave mode then it might mitigate the summer in one hemisphere but exacerbate the winter in the other. If you switch it to convex mode to make a winter less severe in one hemisphere then the summer hemisphere gets toasted.
Sorry about that. The morale? Don’t post when the wife is calling you up for dinner.
DocMartyn (15:49:36) :
after Iron, copper is the next limiting metal. Crab’s, lobsters and the like use a cooper oxygen binding protein instead of an Iron one and are copper limited.
Actually, they’re trying to eliminate copper anti-fouling agents in the Chesapeake bay because of alleged copper toxicity in the wildlife. So, we’ve been adding copper to crabs & it hasn’t helped.
Geoengineering is an insurance policy in the event global temperatures rise significantly (say 6 or 7 deg. C) regardless of the cause. There has been next to no federal (US) funding for basic engineering work. The environmental left (who most of you call “alarmists”) hate the idea because its use would forstall the need for carbon reduction by decades, if necessary. That time would be used to transition off carbon.
It is the perfect insurance policy as it is only used if needed. Its cost is so much less than carbon reduction that it would allow for significant economic growth (everywhere), another thing the environmental alarmists don’t want (because their basic agenda is Malthusian).
Richard S Courtney (16:07:31) :
People here are missing the point.
Politicians need a way out. They have ‘nailed their colours to the mast’ of AGW. And the AGW scare is coming to an end.
Richard
The way out is via the ballot box. Politicians will never leave of their own volition. They must either be voted out, hung, or shot. Based on what they have been doing to us, I’m not so sure but what the last two options are to be preferred.
Oy…
“Mike Ramsey (17:15:58) :
[…]
If you turned on concave mode then it might mitigate the summer in one hemisphere but exacerbate the winter in the other. If you switch it to convex mode to make a winter less severe in one hemisphere then the summer hemisphere gets toasted.”
But if you can switch it from concave to convex and vice versa, you could also control where it focusses the light and thus, for instance, direct more sunlight to the hemisphere where there’s winter.
We all know the ‘world ain’t broke’… it may be a bit scuffed around the edges in parts but how would you be after a few billion years and loads of animals tramping over you Eh??? but to try one of these screwball ideas might just completely #### it … well … you know what I mean… shame they can’t test these on all their models first… Oh… that wouldn’t work either…
Richard S Courtney (16:07:31) :
Hippie is standing on a street corner snapping his fingers. Man walks up and asked what he’s doing. Hippie says, “Man, I’m keeping the tigers away!”
Man say, “that’s crazy, there are no tigers around here!”
Hippie answers “See, it works!”
That’s all the politicians need to do.
IF they need a way out, then they should sign up to Piers Corbyn’s climate forecasts, and check his results with the Warmists models. The Warmists have so badly mangled thier own data and monkeyed with thier models that they don’t know which way is up.
I’m pretty sure Piers would wipe the floor with them, in which case the Pols can proceed to throw the bad boys under the bus…and get it over with.
Let the duel begin. Forecasting at 2-50 weeks.
http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/could-a-300-km-dam-save-the-arctic.html
My favorite nutty idea. Also, dam building is proven technology.
” Robert (16:59:37) :
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.”
Well the levels of halides from the solid rocket boosters would wipe out the ozone layer. The material in LEO would make future manned flight impossible for a 100 years and the amount of vapor in the upper atmosphere would probably tip us into an ice-age.
DirkH (17:32:09) : edit
“Mike Ramsey (17:15:58) :
[…]
If you turned on concave mode then it might mitigate the summer in one hemisphere but exacerbate the winter in the other. If you switch it to convex mode to make a winter less severe in one hemisphere then the summer hemisphere gets toasted.”
“But if you can switch it from concave to convex and vice versa, you could also control where it focuses the light and thus, for instance, direct more sunlight to the hemisphere where there’s winter.”
Quite right. As for the terrorist fear (ghu, theres always a rant about terrorists to excuse not doing something), a plasma lens would not provide a high enough degree of focus to make a death ray of any danger. It would only focus or disperse some percentage of sunlight.
Yes this sort of installation would be expensive. But it would be significantly less expensive than sunshades in space, which would require a massively huge structure (at least a few percent of the earth’s diameter). My concept eliminates the structural demands and replaces it with a magnetic field powered by sunlight itself, so it would likely be less than 1% of the cost of building a big sun shade in space.
” JDN (17:19:23) :
Actually, they’re trying to eliminate copper anti-fouling agents in the Chesapeake bay because of alleged copper toxicity in the wildlife. So, we’ve been adding copper to crabs & it hasn’t helped.”
A bit odd, CuSO4 is normally used to kill algae, and metallic copper has long been used to cover ships timbers to preserve them. Do you mean Tin? Tributyltin is quite a nasty ant-fouling agent and has been or is being banned all over.
David Hoyle (17:37:25) :
Actually, there is something they can ‘test it out’ on. Mars and Venus.
Early 80’s plans were to terraform Mars with lichens at the Poles to warm it up and produce an atmosphere. They could try cooling down Venus (bwa ha ha ha).
But as for Earth, even if sucessful, it’s bound to start WWIII due to the very nature of regional climates. One regions feast is another regions famine, so no matter how well you make things in one region, another will suffer the consequences. The climactically disparaged will resort to force of arms to seize neighboring resources. The whole Planet is likely to erupt in open warfare due to idiots playing with matches.
Then what would one do? A Climate Alteration Test Ban Treaty? Too late.
Perhaps we should just ship all those that would like a colder climate to Mars and let them wallow away in the cold. There they would learn that the CO2 they are afraid of doesn’t matter and when they are sufficiently schooled they can come back. Of course they must sign a letter of agreement that warmer is better.
Number 10 – the iron idea – was probably conducted by the Earth about 2 billion years ago. The atmosphere was reducing to only slightly oxidizing, and the sea was full of iron (Fe+2 – ferrous – is readily soluble in water; Fe+3 – ferric – isn’t). Over long periods of years the great iron deposits of the world – Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Mesabi Range and others deposits in the US – were deposited in near-shore environments, sort of like the photo shows. The iron deposits are minutely layered more or less like growth rings in trees (probably summer/less oxygen/less iron precipitated) and winter (the opposite). A few trillion tons of matter (iron, oxygen and silica) is caught up in what’s left of the iron formations. Now where are we going to get multi-billions of tons of ferrous iron to return to the conditions that may have prevailed: “snowball earth”?
Why don’t we just do better science to see what’s going on with our planet? The whole “scientific grant” scheme needs to be entirely changed so that another AGW scandal doesn’t occur.
David Schnare (17:23:32) :
Geoengineering is an insurance policy in the event global temperatures rise significantly (say 6 or 7 deg. C) regardless of the cause. There has been next to no federal (US) funding for basic engineering work. The environmental left (who most of you call “alarmists”) hate the idea because its use would forstall the need for carbon reduction by decades, if necessary. That time would be used to transition off carbon.
It is the perfect insurance policy as it is only used if needed. Its cost is so much less than carbon reduction that it would allow for significant economic growth (everywhere), another thing the environmental alarmists don’t want (because their basic agenda is Malthusian).
=====================================
insurance?, against what.
fear??, fraud??, political agenda??
it’s called extortion.
OT
vukcevic was the first to report last week that sea lions had left the San Francisco port area. The last time that happened was 1989 just before the Loma Priata earthquake.
There was a 4.1 earthquake in Milpitas, California, 30 miles southeast of San Francisco, Thursday, two days ago.
About 1 1/2 hours ago there was a 6.5 earthquake near Ferndale, California, 160 miles north of San Francisco. There’s been five aftershocks ranging 3.0 to 3.7 since then.
Is a bigger one coming to the San Francisco/Oakland area?
list of earthquakes from the USGS, in chronological order:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Maps/special/California_Nevada_eqs.php
I don’t know if it implies that he’s an advocate, but the context of Trenberth’s “It’s a travesty” remark in The CRU-Tape Letters had to do with geoengineering — that if we cannot account for energy flows in the climate system, then there is no way to conclude whether a geoengineering project or experiment was successful or not.
ALLEN CICHANSKI (16:11:30) : “What really baffles me is why (except for fraudulent hustlers like Al Gore) so many people seem to want AGW to be true.”
Addiction to adrenaline, the drug of choice for demagogues, batterers, and lovers of violence.
A novel by Kim Stanley Robinson (40 Below?) had some geo-engineering ideas. Pump ocean water onto the Antarctic ice cap to prevent sea level rise. Release genetically engineered lichen into northern forests, these grow rapidly and pull CO2 out of the air. Dump massive amounts of salt into the North Atlantic to re-start the ocean current conveyor.
My suggestion is to use wind-generated power to irrigate in semi-arid lands. The incremental plant growth absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. Has the benefit of easily turning it off if or when the earth gets colder. This assumes, of course, that atmospheric CO2 has a causal relationship to earth’s average temperature. I conclude that it has no such causal relationship.
http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/02/westward-ho-water-transfer-system.html
We better hope that the SETI search results in a colonizable and reachable alternative. As this cosmic neighborhood may be heading for serious trouble in a short time.
I’ll throw another one on the pile for giggles.
At the actual South Pole, temperatures never come within miles of zero Celsius, and you’re guaranteed massive heat losses all winter long. The heat losses are radiative losses from lack of atmospheric moisture and the six-month-day. Combined with the very high albedo of ground snow.
But radiative heat loss is dependent on the fourth power of the emitter’s absolute temperature. A sealed pipe of twenty degree warmer sea water (think nearly 0C) with insulation on the bottom with a reasonably reflective top should lose heat even more efficiently than just a pile of -20C snow and ice.
So what happens if we picture a box that has a hatch on the bottom like a train hopper, a massive heat sink on the roof – perhaps even an honest cooling tower, but reflective bare metal would go a long way – and a pipe carrying sea water in.
The sea water freezes solid and breaks off of the surface it froze to (the roof). Release the ice to the ground, add more water. Repeat all winter long. For decades. If it makes it easier to visualize, think of a nuclear power plant’s cooling tower operated ‘counterflow’. Usually, the top would be where “warm moist air” escapes, but we’re precipitating out the ice.
The main ongoing cost is pumping the water, but you end up sequestering it as ice.
photon without a Higgs (17:56:40) :
Solar Minimums tend to have more of their fair share of Earthquakes and Vulcanism than the random spread over time. Great Topic.
I’m about 50 air miles due west of the epicenter off the Eureak coast. Didn’t feel a thing (good old Batholith to my immediate north) just noticed the lights kept flickering. People in town got shook as they are on basin fill.
More deaths in Europe from cold:
The bad weather is expected to last for another two weeks…Waterways leading to Berlin have started to freeze, impeding coal and oil deliveries…
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0108/1224261897093.html