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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Isn’t it amazing how these “scientists” think they can play God?
G. Edward Griffin Talks Candidly About Chemtrails/SAG
[snip sorry no chemtrails discussion here -a]
How appropriate that they met in an ex-chapel! I wonder if they got Al-Gore to consecrate it with His holy water? The new high church of Al the Saviour would surely expect nothing less.
Suppose AGW theory got it partially right and we are looking forward to 2 or 3 C of warmig and not just 1 C or less. To me that sounds like good news for planet earth. Actually, melting all of Greenland and Antarctica sounds like a good long term project too – maybe we can avoid futher ice ages? It will take thousands of years, so moving cities as sea level rises is really not a big issue.
Being as we don’t really know how much the earth has warmed due to measuring errors, and that we don’t know if the models are even remotely correct due to deficits in knowledge and understanding about climate, the thought of acting on something that you don’t even know is happening, with the catestrophic potential that exists from gerrymandering with things you don’t understand is rather frightening.
In the South Island of New Zealand, we’ve just come through a summer of little warmth – cool, overcast conditions through summer. We then had a brilliantly decent autumn (fall) milder and much less wind than is common, but the last few weeks we’ve had cold and wet (flooding in parts). Temperatures not that low because of the wet, but many days with maximum temperatures more like we expect in August, in the 6-10degC range. Sure just weather, but we don’t want it any colder thank you.
3×2 says:
May 30, 2010 at 11:16 am
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?
I’ll fess up.
I built an “analog computer” from a kit at about age 9 or so. The “computer” used nichrome wire. I lost the batteries, so I plugged it into the wall outlet. Let’s just say fire was involved – didn’t burn the house down, but my parents did get me an old TV to take apart.
But, doesn’t Venus have a sulfur compound band in its atmosphere??
Maybe the Venusians went the same way we did and realised too late they had all that physics backwards!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
These guys should try first with a low concentration sulphuric acid solution COLONICS.
I find it funny, and scary, that there are people out there who think the fix for humans that have altered the planet is to alter the planet.
Just so you are aware of it, most of the AGW crowd are equally appalled by these proposals. The vast majority of them would say the only reasonable way to combat the effect of increasing CO2 is to remove it. These proposals are coming from an entirely different mindset.
Why not biological geo-engineering?
We hear that if the Arctic ice sheet were to go, then the Polar Bear, the poster child of global warming, would go extinct. At least, this is what is being claimed.
Why not introduce Polar Bears to Antarctica? Plenty of Seals and plenty of Penguins to feed on.
I mean, just in case!
The Royal Society is very keen on geo-engineering to stop CAGW, but we can safely say it’s now on the back-burner.
Geo-engineering from another era, for another purpose ….The Atlantic Jetty-melt the Arctic and bring summer resorts to Siberia..
http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com/2010/05/before-bluebirdthe-atlantic-jetty.html
“It truly is asking giant questions which nobody really knows the answers to,” Keith says — “like how we manage the whole Earth.”
And understood is, since we really don’t know the answers, grant us billions so we can study it.
Absolutely pathetic. It’s a comment on our entire education system that he can get away with such crap.
I dunno, if we accept that the climate is so easily manipulated that the minimal amounts of CO2 produced by humans can cause disastrous warming, than it surely follows that it should be just as easy to use simple , nay simplistic, techniques such as these to change the climate as desired. You only have to worry about unintended effects in complex systems, which would not seem to apply to the climate as presented by the CAGW crowd (the word is “presented”, it is not “understood” or “believed to be” or “debated” – a simplistic model of climate is the one presented to the public).
“…David Keith suggested saving the world with spy planes spraying sulfuric acid.”
Yes…yes, and sterilants too! Haha hoho hehe !
http://tinyurl.com/2a6gqq2
David Keith really believes he can solve Global Warming. This is an advertisement displayed in Toronto airport.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandurleach/4564400594/sizes/l/
Here is David Keith’s homepage http://people.ucalgary.ca/~keith/
They are completely serious about managing the whole Earth.
This all brings to mind Michael Crichton’s litany in “State of Fear” about how well well-intentioned efforts at managing wildlife in Yellowstone National Park over the decades, beginning with culling wolf populations. That effort was one disaster after another, and caused terrible die-offs of fauna populations.
A second point would be to ask if spraying sulfuric acid into the sky wouldn’t turn into acid rain.
I don’t have an agenda one way or another – if global warming is real – but if it hasn’t been proven that:
then such efforts are unnecessary and a waste of time, effort and money.
And even IF ALL THREE of those are true, the specific effort in itself needs to be well thought out and well tested before investing our time effort and money in it.
Every time I think of government funded scientific efforts I see in my mind Lilienthal’s plunge into the water, at a time when the Wright Brothers and Richard Pearse were inventing the aeroplane with their own money. It isn’t that the public money isn’t a good idea – it is that sometimes it corrupts the process. It certainly draws attention to the government funded efforts and tends to characterize the smaller efforts as quacks, denialists and misguided.
Since the days of Eli Whitney and the government contracts for better rifles – which ended up in the first interchangeable parts (which I consider the single most important development in the history of technology), government contracts and grants have drawn a hoard of inventors and researchers. When a single contract can make many millions for the awardee, of course people are going to throw their ideas into the ring. What have they got to lose?
That 95% of the ideas aren’t very good? Par for the course.
Ask the ghost of Lilienthal.
David Keith is an American recruit of the University of Calgary set up green institute paid for by guilty retired oilmen…
with the propensity to litigate I wonder who the heck will be the deep pockets when their meddling fouls something up
Hmmm… Aren’t we paying a fairly hefty premium (tax) on our evil internal combustion powered vehicles to avoid the SOx and NOx in exhaust, including a huge premium for ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel, “clean” gasoline/petrol, catalytic converters, fancy EGR and other engine intake plumbing,
and these clowns now want to spray sulfuric acid. Beautiful.
But, but, but, what about acid rain and the precious pine trees in Euro forests???
Ah, never mind, I’m sure they’ve thought through all the consequences and possible outcomes. Climate is such a simple, well understood, linear, static system, surely they have.
I think it’s time to consider the effect of the Clean Air Act combined with UHI on the perceived increases in temperature during the latter half of the twentieth century. I believe that removing the aerosols from the air in pursuit of Clean Air has resulted in some warming.
I would not advocate changing the benefits of the Clean Air Act, but it should be considered as a factor.
The only reason the current crop of organisms are here, is because they have adapted to the environmental (among other) challenges.
Some, it appears, have done so well that they are looking for additional challenges/drama/profits to enhance their existance.
If climate change is anywhere near the top of your list of worries, keep it to yourself, because the rest of us have real problems to deal with.
Most of us are still using the time proven technique of adaptation.
It’s been working for the last 500,000 (or so) years, why change now. Assuming we could.
rant off/
I’ve been told that, theoretically, “climate change” applies to both warming and cooling. I know all about the “solutions” to combat global warming, but what the heck does the average citizen do to combat Global Cooling?
Do we simply do the OPPOSITE of what Al Gore tells us? Buy icepicks? Drive SUVs? Turn up the heat? Stop recycling? Eat meat? Generate power with fossil fuels? Buy incandescent bulbs? Cut down the forests? Drive everywhere? Leave your appliances on all the time?
Help me with this, there are some smart people here, I think.