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 sphar (18:18:17) :
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.
Since SETI is looking for intelligent life, what do you want? A world we can colonize after getting rid of the native intelligent life, or one we could colonize because the intelligent life died off after sending the signals thus saving us the hassle?
Neither case seems good, and we should avoid any planet we get such broadcast signals from. Except for certain simple extinction events in the second case like a plague, it seems likely that any intelligent species technologically advanced enough to broadcast such signals, will likely have used up all the nice resources by the time we get there, provided at some point they weren’t made unobtainable by chemical or nuclear pollution.
This prediction is based on the historical record of all known radio-broadcasting intelligent species.
Benjamin (19:22:03) :
Create and breed a new animal called a woc. The woc would soak up all the farts left behind (well, I guess so, huh?) by it’s more primitive cousin, the cow…
A woc isn’t a genetically-engineered animal — a woc is something you thwow at a wabbit…
ALLEN CICHANSKI (16:11:30),
You’ve heard of latent heat, haven’t you? All I hope is we are just going through a phase of latent stupidity, which I hope means that people are about to wisen up. Just needs a bit more time for the delayed reaction to kick in?
Bruce Cobb: (replying to:”Politicians need a way out.”)
They have one – the door. Many will be booted out it come election time.
—————-
Unfortunately in the UK, as in most countries of the world, there are no mainstream parties i.e. likely to get into power, which are not completely sold on AGW.
I hope that there are solutions after the Copenhagen Climate conference.
I’ll agree that implementing any of these ideas today is pretty stupid. Almost as stupid as planting 2.5 wind turbines in the sea off britain every DAY at the end of the next decade. In 5 or 10 years time, we’ll have a better idea of where the climate might be going (if it is indeed changing significantly) and some of the more controllable concepts might be valuable, say we had a big mirror which could be deployed only at mid-day in heatwave locations.
Costing these alternative solutions is an ideal way to put a cap on the cost which could be deemed acceptable to provide a fix by enforced energy poverty. If it is cheaper to build this fleet of 1500 cloud forming ships than some white elephant windfarm – is that really a bad thing? It might have bad side effects, but equally we might be able to mitigate the effects of droughts. If the argument is ‘we must do something, just in case’, why not do something which could be useful. Who knows, cloud forming might even help if it ends up getting cooler, only the clouds would be needed at the poles.
Putting millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the air? That’s the stupidest of the lot. (It was also floated as a “solution” in one of the CRU e-mails.)
Sulfur dioxide + water vapor + solar energy = sulfuric acid. Acid rain. But almost all rain and other water precipitation is mildly acidic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
Lots of money and time have been spent over the past half century reducing SO2 emissions, and here’s some kooks wanting to deliberately spew millions of times more of it into the air.
We have had much higher levels of CO2 and temperatures in the past and the Earth stabilised itself without the help of man. Stop this insanity and remember the law of unintended consequences.
For the readers in Britain:
“German companies have won contracts worth more than €100 billion to build Britain’s planned network of offshore wind farms in the North Sea.”
Read all about it:
http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100109-24461.html
Like it’s not enough to subsidise the industry, now you’re paying others to build it too! No wonder Ms Merkel is such a staunch green energy supporter.
I can also forecast more climate scam from people like Al Bore investing in companies willing to spray crap into the atmosphere, no joking :o(.
Better idea, why don’t we just find a baker’s dozen of unscrupulous “scientists”, maneuver them into key positions monitoring temperature, pay them well, and have them coordinate to manipulate the temperature data – this time we give them a secure communications back channel so they don’t get caught. Feasible?
“The real wacky idea is the belief that climate change is a problem in the first place – it isn’t.”
No that is wrong, climate change IS a problem, witness the dying turtles in Florida and struggling wildlife in the UK. But it is not a change to warm that is a problem, but a change to cold!
As for geo-engineering, all these proposed “solutions” should be resisted with all urgency, the environmentalists are right on this one. We know so little about climate and the ecosystem of the Earth that any of these interventions could have disasterous unknown un-anticipated outcomes. Like mild warming turning into a snowball earth, for example!
http://www.france24.com/en/20100108-google-asks-government-authorisation-buy-sell-electricity-united-states-renewable-energy-environment-internet
Google now wanting to buy and sell electricity. Nothing to do with Mr Gore I presume? :0)
Bill Tuttle (00:33:45) : “A woc isn’t a genetically-engineered animal — a woc is something you thwow at a wabbit…”
http://www.whatdoesthatmean.com/node/2157
Scwewy wabbit! Had it comin’… 🙂
wesley bruce (00:08:35) :
I’ve read about that before, except without all the AGW spin attatched. It’s been a while, though, so I’ve no comment. Got any links?
Sorry for being OT
But this is interesting.
One could devote an entire blog to the Mother of Meteorlogical Laughing Stocks – the MetOffice.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2010/01/a-frozen-britain-turns-the-hea.shtml
My predictions in order of likelihood:
1. The temperature will stabilise for a few decades as it seem to after each warming bout. People will scream dire warning that the warming will continue, worse than before. This will be blamed on CO2. We will be taxed & our freedom (eg travel) curtailed).
2. The warming will continue as it has since the little ice age. This will be blamed on CO2. We will be taxed & our freedom (eg travel) curtailed).
3. The next (little, or even big) ice age will start because of the current solar minimum. This will be blamed on CO2. We will be taxed & our freedom (eg travel) curtailed).
4. Someone will do something daft like these 10 barmy ideas. The climate will be affected. This will be blamed on CO2. We will be taxed & our freedom (eg travel) curtailed).
Not to worry about any of these schemes.
Imagine the environmental impact statements one would have to write to cover any of these ideas, if attempted?
AGW is not promoted to provide backing for any programs designed to actually fix a problem. It is designed to set up a scheme of carbon trading on manipulated markets. People pulling the strings; Goldman Sachs, Al Gore, etc., would make billions. Not to worry about whether this actually fixes anything, the insiders will make money.
The generation and trading of derivatives on the financial markets is the principal cause of the current financial depression. The collapse of the dollar is not a business event; it is a monetary event. Trillions fed into our financial systems in an attempt to cover people’s failed bets, based on complicated computer models of financial instruments. These instruments were not meant to be traded in open markets. The ‘fair’ value was to have been determined by computer models. Only problem is, no one was buying anyone else’s derivatives. After all, the programmer gets to set the parameters of the derivative, and who is he to tell us what the parameters should be? No real independent verification of these starting parameters.
See the parallels?
Global circulation models were based on a set of unproven assumptions. Everyone was to have accepted the results of these models and the next set of computer models for trading carbon offsets was all set, with fat boys sitting at the controls.
Only fly in the ointment was mother Nature’s stubbornness in refusing to be modeled. She stuck to her own, apparently secret parameters and non-linear, chaotic processes.
Some of us actually insisted on looking at real world thermometers and the jig was up.
What interesting times we live in.
My favorite among the above is this plan, which could be shut down if bad consequences were noticed, and which could be valuable even apart from cooling the earth:
Climate Alarmism, Green energy, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Green Jobs and wacko Geo-engineering idea’s all serve the sick Green Ideology that is upon us.
Green is the new Red. Watch your back.
Philip_B: I just tested the link above and it doesn’t work.
Hilarious piece in today’s (frozen)UK “Observer” (Guardian group Sunday):-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/10/climate-change-uk-big-freeze
“The resurgence of El Niño means that 2010 could yet be the hottest year on record. Despite the big freeze Britain’s climate is getting distinctly warmer – and we may feel it this summer”
I particularly enjoyed:-
“….It is a bit like playing Pooh sticks, says Betts. “When you throw sticks off a bridge, you know they will all be swept downstream. You just don’t know which one will move the fastest. It is the same with climate and the weather…”
I’m looking forward to Gavin Schmidt’s detailed ststistical proof of the Pooh Stick theory at Real Climate soon.
(For mystified non-brits – Pooh Sticks is a game played by Christopher Robin and his friend Pooh Bear in the eponymous classicsl children’s books).
Have the Cern Hadron Collider crank out a tiny black hole, it should bend the sunlight away from the face of the rest of the globe and warm Switzerland up a little bit. Or we’ll all be Swiss anyway and it won’t matter.
Actually #1 (Cows and Methane) is based on a misconception. Wrong end of the cow. They burp methane. There has been a lot of work done into researching the effect of diet (including adding garlic to cow’s diets; garlic flavoured milk anyone?). Apparently, as we have bred ‘better’ grass species (higher nitrogen content) and improved pasture, there have been unintended consequences.
An article here makes some nice points (although wrapped up in the usual anti-intensivisation eco-rant): http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/26/nhs-meat-menus-carbon
We already have ocean fertilisation albeit at a coastal level, where it is called pollution, and yes phosphate seems to be the issue. France and UK last summer had problems with ‘green tides’: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1207817/Coastal-wildlife-threatened-vast-seaweed-blooms-caused-hot-rainy-weather.html
I agree with anna v (23:47:13) : and for the same reason – easy to stop.
David Schnare (17:23:32) :
“Geoengineering is an insurance policy …..
It is the perfect insurance policy as it is only used if needed. ….”
“the perfect insurance policy” has to be an oxymoron.
Bruce Cobb (17:02:21) :
and
Steve in SC (17:24:40) :
You dispute my point; viz.
Richard S Courtney (16:07:31) :
People here are missing the point.
Politicians need a way out.
And Bruce Cobb states the dispute clearly, saying
“They have one – the door. Many will be booted out it come election time.”
But, as artwest (00:43:04) says;
“Unfortunately in the UK, as in most countries of the world, there are no mainstream parties i.e. likely to get into power, which are not completely sold on AGW.”
Importantly, politicians can – and will – introduce harmful AGW policies before they are “booted out”. And the effects of such policies last. For example, few now remember the ‘acid rain’ scare (unless reminded of it) but it caused the Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) in the EU. The beaurocracy that was established to run the LCPD has to justify its existence so keeps tightening its emission constraints for no scientific reason. The latest constraints are causing closure of the UK’s coal-fired power stations.
BarryW (17:39:35) makes a good point in a humorous way:
He says;
“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.”
Yes, supporting geo-engineering research is a way for the politicians to ‘snap their fingers’.
Julian Flood (23:34:29) goes to the crux of the issue and he gives a good explanation of how and why the geo-engineering ploy provides a political ‘way out’. He clearly and succincltly explains what I have been trying to say. And I thank him for that.
Richard