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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These scientists should have a FULL understanding of how this planet operates totally before doing experimentation in a lab that does not include MANY interacting factors.
This is their way of taking credit for a cooling planet even before they spray anything.
Imagine trying to cool an already cooling planet can do especially if it has a cascading effect to worsen into a solid Ice planet. Many past experimentation has failed due to “oh I didn’t think of that” or “it worked in the lab and should have worked here”.
These bumblers have yet to even understand the mechanics of this planet and they help encourage the policies…who da thunk!
So in 1975 they didn’t want to tinker with DNA because of uncertainties/risks of outcome, even though there were some clear benefits of improved food production and nutrition, for example.
…but now they do want to tinker with “DNA” (of the planet) when there is uncertainty/risk in the outcome, and very unclear “benefits”.
What happens if the experiment backfires and REALLY create a global warming that keeps warming until the oceans boil?
I suppose, behind the curtain they might say this is closer to basic research then applied research and that they would never intend to deploy unless and until the real world demonstrates catastrophic CO2 induced warming in 100 years or so.
If they do call, it applied research, wikipedia has them almost covered, but they are thrown a curve ball:
Wiki says; “… strict research protocols must often be relaxed.” which should make many of the folks happy,
but Wiki also throws a curve; “… Thus, transparency in the methodology is critical.”,
but Wiki bails them out on that one by allowing them to apply the bread and butter (BS) of climate alarmism; “Implications for interpretation of results brought about by relaxing a more or less strict cannon of methodology should also be developed.”
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 30, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Your are absolutely right, acid rain was natural, and very local due to erosion and over-fertilization from agricultural NITROGEN, not sulfur. The trees got prematurely fertilized during January thaws and the young leaves killed by frost.
That aside, remember when they said the earth was entering an ice age (right call – premature timing), and that they could spread soot over the Arctic to warm it? Same “geoengineers” (like the goofy train engineer head of IPCC, Pachauri – “I think I can, I think I can!”) came out of the woodwork then. Are they the same Calgary guys? Anyone?
Has anyone read Ender’s Game by Orson Card? They put young geniuses in an asteroid where they fought aliens for real, but the geniuses thought at the time that it was a computer simulation so they would not feel bad when they wiped the aliens out?
I suggest the converse alternative: we abduct and trick all these warm-earthers into thinking they are on a secret mission, and are chosen to save the earth. We place them in a dome in the Arctic where they have all types of controls that they think are dispensing all types of panaceas, like SO2, carbon nanoparticles, silver iodide, nuclear missiles (for asteroids) etc. We give them medals and prizes. They go into these group-thinking mutual masturbatory committee meetings, and Keith or Mike Mann or Al Gore get to pull the levers they by “consensus” agree will save earth from ice, cold, asteroids, viruses, etc.
They could look out the big igloo windows and see mechanical polar bears and penguins frolicking together under a horizon of windmills as far as the eye can see! Whenever a lever would be pulled, of course the “climate feedback” we supply their computers would show the hazard was averted! It would be cheap, we just feed them tofu and carrots and stuff. A coal-fired generator over the horizon would provide the energy needs they think is coming from the windmills (which are powered by simple electric motors supplied with electricity from the coal reactor).
Whatcha think?
I still wonder why those scientist have to brainstorm in the first place, afterall we are still sitting on a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, even a exchange of a few hundred warheads will make temperatures drop by several degrees for years and solve the overpopulation problem because of massive starvation in the years to come.
Tried and tested. O_o
If scientists understood the complexities of one drop of water and all the diverse processes it carries and contains with the different chemical and mineral content in it, would be one step closer to understanding how the science they were educated with is full of it.
It doesn’t matter if you use an artificial volcanic cloud or a mess of nuclear blasts to simulate Global Winter to cool off the planet in order to save it. Doing such things will surely collapse the ecosystem, and such people who advocate catastrophic means are NOT evironmentalists.
A better name for this type of thinking is Eco-Suicide.
Bryan Clark says:
May 30, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Move to around the equatorial region and start farming.
There is no way to stop an Ice age process once it starts as science still has no clue as to how it activates. The ignore physical planetary changes is in effect unfortunately even here.
@ur momisugly Stop Global Dumbing Now May 30, 2010 at 12:02 pm:
And the one with a stationary satellite with a zipline. HAHAHAHAHA.
The weight of the zipline, how to connect it, how the winds would affect the zipline, how one storm could screw it all up, how it would be a lightning rod, how the speed at the top vs at the bottom would be a huge problem (angular velocity), how ANYTHING sent up on it would change the entire mass balance, how the vertical acceleration of any movement up or down would pull or push the satellite up or down – only about 50 different STUPIDITIES all rolled into one.
The one to the moon – that is a new one on me. Do these people not know that the bottom of the zipline would have to move around the Earth – and not just east and west? The Moon’s path has what is called the declination – it doesn’t travel the same path twice in a row, and some of those paths are REALLY a lot farther north and south than they imagine.
Those who say 6th graders are not even wrapping their minds around the whole story. These sound like ideas from out of HG Wells’ time and before. Have these people ever taken basic 20th or 21st century physics and geoscience courses?
Scary these ideas are not. Why not? They are not even capable of getting off the ground.
And this was all in Science News magazine? Ohmygod – pull the plug on science; it is dead.
Both the article anr the comments are awash with error. Here are a few facts each of you can ponder on geoengineering.
1. Geoengineering is an insurance policy. It would only be used if it became unequivocal that the planet is over Heated. There is a “governance” debate ongoing with regard to how hot that would have to be, and the numbers being thrown around are in excess of five deg C. So, if it never gets that hot, we don’t need to employ this insurance policy.
2. The methods being considered caN be shut off within hours and the effect would end within days, so the risks are small.
3. Science news is an arm of the alarmist community and has not put out a balanced repot on anything related to climate change in years.
There is plenty mOre I could write, but I’m late for dinner.
d
OT: “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.”
The Asilomar conference was initiated by researchers’ safety concerns about the tools they were developing and a moratorium on some work was put in place – by the researchers, not the government until they had a better handle on the safety.
At the meeting decisions were made to develop new strains of bacteria incapable of living outside of lab conditions and several levels of physical containment for the more dangerous experiments.
Compared to climate research, it’s remarkable at how well the recombinent DNA researchers did to work together to reduce the risk of their research.
It is unlikely the recent Asilomar conference will be remembered 35 years from now.
Wikipedia has a pretty good page about the 1975 conference, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombinant_DNA
I wonder if the environmentalists who insisted that BP drill for oil at a depth of 5000 feet below sea level instead at a location near the shore would be willing to admit that this was a bad idea. When it comes to decisions that are solely based on the environment, the unintended consequences of a bad decision always show up on someone else’s doorstep and not at the feet of the environmental lobby. This proposal to disperse sulfuric acid in the stratosphere is preposterous. I certainly hope that no one is giving it serious consideration to this effort to deal with global climate.
“Dr. D. W. Schnare says:
[…]
1. Geoengineering is an insurance policy. It would only be used if it became unequivocal that the planet is over Heated. There is a “governance” debate ongoing with regard to how hot that would have to be […]”
That would surely be global governance, then, as we’re talking about the globe. So i guess the UN would be the one to decide whether to flip the switch? Ban-Ki Moon, right? So nothing to do with this silly democracy thing or national governments, right? Or maybe Ban-Ki Moon delegates the decision to some scientist? James Hansen maybe, as he’s the most experienced climate modeler?
Thanks, feeling better already.
Dr. D. W. Schnare says:
May 30, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere from volcanoes take a year or two to settle out. Is there a different mechanism proposed that cleans the proposed aerosol in days?
losemal says:
May 30, 2010 at 1:19 pm:
“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.”
It’s basically all the same mindset, which is that CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming. If so, then it follows that removing CO2 is one possible response.
But first, you must show that CO2 is the cause of global warming, and that CO2 is not rising primarily as the effect of previous warming. Radiative physics shows that CO2 retains heat. But the more it is looked into, the smaller that effect appears to be globally. The climate’s sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is almost certainly below 1°C. Several respected climatologists suggest that the number is 0.5°C, or lower.
Rash action without substantial confirming evidence is being proposed by different factions in the CAGW debate [there is no constituency for simple “AGW”, because if the effect of CO2 is slight, there is no reason to take any action, or to feed another taxpayer dime into studying a trivial effect. Therefore, the threat must be Catastrophic AGW, for all species of climate alarmists].
In discussing mitigation strategies, we are getting too far ahead of the basic question: should we be worried about CO2 at all? The fact that alarmists don’t want to discuss the lack of evidence for their CO2=CAGW hypothesis is because they don’t have any such empirical, testable evidence.
“bubbagyro says:
[…]
energy needs they think is coming from the windmills (which are powered by simple electric motors supplied with electricity from the coal reactor).
Whatcha think?”
Great idea. But you don’t need a special motor for the windmills; the generator they have *IS* a motor if fed from the grid.
Much cheaper to fix the education system….
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9599/29724150443945088612312.jpg
“Feet2theFire says:
[…]
Every time I think of government funded scientific efforts I see in my mind Lilienthal’s plunge into the water, ”
What gives you the idea that Lilienthal didn’t fund his experiments with his own money?
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
“While his lifelong pursuit was flight, he was also an inventor and devised a small engine that worked on a system of tubular boilers. His engine was much safer than the other small engines of the time. This invention gave him the financial freedom to focus on aviation. “
Actually I’d like to see these guys funded. Every report has to include a mitigation strategy should the go too far. I think it would be fun watching all the shuffling of feet and mumbled answers:
Congressional Committee; OK, let’s say you went 5 degrees too far. How many barrels of oil would we have to burn to counteract it?
Researchers; Uhm…. well it doesn’t work that way.
CC; Sure it does. CO2 heats the planet up that’s why we have to have a cooling thingy spray bomb in the first place. How much oil? 200 million barrels a day? 300?
R; Well you see, CO2 is logarithmic so for 5 degrees, positive feedback included… calculate watts….boltzmann….spray bomb crosses same spectral lines…. we’d need to burn 2 billion barrels a day for 20 years sir.
CC; Well that’s not a problem, 2 million barrels a day…
R; Billion sir. With a B.
CC; Now hold on a cotton picken minute. If we need that much oil to raise the temperature 5 degrees, we don’t have a problem in the first place, do we?
R; Well sure we do, otherwise our research wouldn’t be required, which clearly it is.
CC; But you just said….
R; Er… Uhm… uh oh, how to explain this… kinda stepped in it…. It wouldn’t be the same sir. You see we’re getting the warming out of the CO2 we’re putting in now, but if we put so much in that we caused warming and then negated it with our cooling spray bomb, the additional CO2 wouldn’t work as well because CO2 is logarithmic.
CC; So the CO2 we’re putting in now warms but the CO2 then wouldn’t work as well?
R; (brightens); Yes sir! That’s it! It would be ROTTEN CO2!
Dr. D. W. Schnare says:
1. Geoengineering is an insurance policy.
Maybe AIG can underwrite the process…in case something goes wrong.
DirkH says:
May 30, 2010 at 3:03 pm
I said “simple” electric motors, not big dynamos with brakes, governors, etc. I am trying to save us on costs. More like a Dremel hooked up to balsa blades.
Smokey says:
May 30, 2010 at 3:01 pm
“In discussing mitigation strategies, we are getting too far ahead of the basic question: should we be worried about CO2 at all?”
Most of us are way past that. Of course CO2 should not be abated, but increased. It is good for the planet. Although even if we wanted to, our paltry means would do nothing. The ocean’s sink would dwarf the few percent excess; the earth contains at least three orders of magnitude more than we humans could even put our hands on.
These crazy scenarios again make me think of a book, Fallen Angels, by Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, ISBN 0-671-72052-X. The blurb on the back cover states in part:
That government, dedicated to saving the environment from the evils of technology, had been voted into power because everybody knew that the Green House Effect had to be controlled, whatever the cost. But who would have thought that the cost of ending pollution would include not only total government control of day-to-day life, but the onset of a new Ice Age.
People talk about injecting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere like it’s “madness”.
We already inject sulfuric acid into the troposphere, in the form of sulfur dioxide (from coal combustion, jet fuel, diesel fuel, etc.), which reacts with water in the air to make sulfuric acid and sulfate aerosol droplets. These help reflect sunlight back into space. The problem is that in the troposphere they wash out of the atmosphere relatively quickly, with a half-life of hours or days.
Large volcanic eruptions inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which is one of the ways that large eruptions cool the planet. In the stratosphere the “half-life” of SO2 is more like months to years. So the idea to inject sulfuric acid into the stratosphere is simply an attempt to replicate the effect of volcanoes.