Let’s see, what would we make those nano-disks out of? He says (see PNAS paper below):
Silica-alumina ceramic hollow microspheres with diameters of 1 μm. (aka 1 micron)
Do you think putting nano-sized silicon based pollutants into the atmosphere will go over well? Silicosis anyone? From this report:
The micron-sized silica dust, which is ingested through the normal breathing process, coats the inner lining of the lungs (alveoli) and forms fibrous scar tissue that reduces the lungs’ ability to extract oxygen from the air.
…
Respirable particles, which are less than 10 microns in diameter, are invisible to the naked eye. They travel through the respiratory system, eventually depositing themselves in the air sacs (alveoli).
I’ll give him points though for saying geoengineering is “inherently imperfect”, but I think his “cure” is worse than the “disease”. Just have a look at the material safety data sheet (MSDS) for the 3M Zeeospheres he’s proposing (see link below) and you’ll see what I mean.
From a press release at the University of Calgary.
Stopping global warming
There may be better ways to engineer the planet’s climate if needed to prevent dangerous global warming than mimicking volcanoes, a University of Calgary climate scientist says in two new studies.
Releasing engineered nano-sized disks or sulphuric acid, a condensable vapour, above the Earth are two novel approaches that offer advantages over simply putting sulphur dioxide gas into the atmosphere, says Dr. David Keith, a director in the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy and a Schulich School of Engineering professor.
Geoengineering, or engineering the climate on a global scale, “is inherently imperfect,” says Keith, who is in the vanguard of scientists worldwide investigating the topic.
“It cannot offset the risks that come from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he says. “If we don’t halt man-made CO2 emissions, no amount of climate engineering can eliminate the problems—massive emissions reductions are still necessary.”
Keith suggests two novel geoengineering approaches—‘levitating’ engineered nano-particles and the airborne release of sulphuric acid—in two newly published studies, one he solely authored and the other with scientists in Canada, the U.S. and Switzerland.
Scientists investigating geoengineering have so far looked mainly at injecting sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. This approach imitates the way volcanoes create sulphuric acid aerosols, or sulphates, that will reflect solar radiation back into space—thereby cooling the planet’s surface.
One advantage of using sulphates is that scientists have some understanding of their effects in the atmosphere because of emissions from volcanoes such as Mt. Pinatubo, Keith says.
“A downside of both these new ideas is they would do something that nature has never seen before. It’s easier to think of new ideas than to understand their effectiveness and environmental risks.”
In his study in the Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences, a top-ranked international science journal, Keith describes a new class of engineered nano-particles that might be used to offset global warming more efficiently and with fewer negative side-effects than using sulphates.
In a separate new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Keith and international scientists describe another geoengineering approach that may also offer advantages over injecting sulphur dioxide gas.
Releasing sulphuric acid, or another condensable vapour, from aircraft would give better control of particle size, thereby reflecting more solar radiation back into space while using fewer particles overall and reducing unwanted heating in the lower stratosphere, they say.
=================================
I’ve located the PNAS article here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/09/02/1009519107.full.pdf
here’s the section on “nanodisks”
The Cost of Engineered Particles. Is it possible to fabricate such particles at sufficiently low cost? Any definitive answer would, of course, require a sustained broad-based research effort. The following argument serves only to suggest that one cannot discount the possibility: Approximately 10^9 kg of engineered particles similar to the example described above would need to be deployed to offset the radiative effect of CO2 doubling.
Assuming a lifetime of 10 years, the particles must be supplied at a rate of 10^8 kg∕yr. A plausible upper bound on the acceptable cost of manufacture can be gained by noting that the monetized cost of climate impacts and similarly the cost of substantial reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are both of order 1% of global gross domestic product (GDP) (28). Suppose one demanded that the annualized cost of particle manufacture be less than 1% of the cost of abating emissions, that is 10−4 of the ∼60 × 1012 global GDP.
Under these assumptions, the allowable manufacturing cost is 60∕kg. Many nanoscale particles are currently manufactured at costs significantly less than this threshold.
Silica-alumina ceramic hollow microspheres with diameters of 1 μm (e.g., 3M Zeeospheres) can be purchased in bulk at costs less than 0.3∕kg. Moreover, bulk vapor-phase deposition methods exist to produce monolayer coatings on fine particles, and there are rapid advances in self-assembly of nanostructures that might be applicable to bulk production of engineered aerosols.
10^9 kg is one billion kilograms, or 1,102,311 short tons. I don’t have figures on how much silicon dust makes it into the air globally, but 1.1 million tons of silica nanospheres seems a bit hard to come by for a process. Cost may not be the biggest issue. Deployment and potential health effects are much bigger considerations.
LINK: Material safety data sheet (MSDS) for 3M Zeeospheres (PDF)
Here’s the company website: http://www.zeeospheres.com/
Do I want these in the free air? Heck no.
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It’s one thing to argue about climate, but something else entirely to attempt its manipulation. Fortunately, nature will deal with such folly in the same way as she does a volcano’s temporary local concentration of various matter.
Is it not bewildering these days that some folk, not necessarily scientists of whatever colour, feel behoven to meddle with unknown quantities on a grand scale, with no real conception of the outcome? Where on earth do these people obtain their funding?
REPLY: Who? Joe Romm gets his money from George Soros. CRU gets its money from BP and Shell Oil. Jim Hansen gets money from natural gas interests and of course rigged US government grant money and NASA funding to reach a predetermined result… – Mike
76 responses and no mention of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis?
I know an old woman who swallowed a fly!
More stupidity from the alarmists! But no worse than switching to so called eco-friendly light bulbs and polluting the planet with more mercury.
I am pleased you’re back and on deck, Anthony.
This proposal seems to fit a working definition of clinical madness; how do (supposedly) responsible university authorities get to employ this sort of baying-at-the-moon lunatic and provide him with somewhere to work, funds to further his mad schemes and lecture theatres in which he can infect young minds?
My mind is boggled!
“too much funding” …
Does Noone remember the Difference between Million, Billion, and Trillion ?
A $20 million project to put the PART of Pinatubo’s Sulfur that caused the Cooling up, ONCE, = $ 20 MILLION.
OECD says the Full CO2 reduction ( – 5/6 in 2050 not just the 1/6 planned for 2020) = 7% of GDP = $1000 B/year for the USA.
= $ 20 TRILLION over 20 Years.
The Sulfur “Insurance” Gizmo is a MILLION times LESS.
In fact, it should be PART OF THE MILITARY … a TINY part.
PS: NOT the nano-tech. Why ? Take an analogy: SDI Costs a Lot. But, there is a suggestion the First time one is deployed, it might Trigger a War rather than stop it. Now contrast something … DONE BEFORE:
If SDI cost 1/15,000 th what it does …
AND one or more had BEEN put up, every few years, of similar or larger size, and every 20 years or so, ones 100s of times larger …
… for Million of years ! … and nothing happened.
Millions of times. Like the Millions of Volcanos over the years.
Wouldn’t you spend 6 cents per American … just to be safe ??
This thought isn’t new. As far as I know the first man who suggested blocking the sunlight and such cooling the planet is Ken Caldeira who is a big shot director at Stanford University. Intriguingly, this fellow was a Post Doc at Penn State Geoscience Department. His ideas of blocking the sun light with particles placed in the upper atmosphere brought him tenure, relatively large salary, dining with Bono, and large funding from Gates. The scary part is that the funding is so large that this work can and will go beyond just theoretical stage. They will actually do it.
See http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Plans+cool+planet+heat+geoengineering+debate/3014922/story.html
A ( hopefully hypothetical ) review:
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/GRLreview2.pdf
The EPA has just put out a barrage of new regulations to decrease the amout of fine particulate (read nano-silicate particles) and acid gases (read sulfuric acid) in power plant emissions. As some have alluded to in previous posts, reversing these changes would lead to more of the suggested products in the air, also avoiding the billions of dollars that will have to be spent by utilites to comply. Of course, this is asinine. One more thing, have the atmospheric models accounted for the influence of such particles?
Charles Wilson says:
September 8, 2010 at 5:26 am
Wouldn’t you spend 6 cents per American … just to be safe ??
_________________________________________________________
How about the “precautionary principle” – FOR REAL.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution expresses it better than I in Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
“Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth vs climate can shift gears within a decade….
But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…“
Hopefully you have been here long enough to be aware there are natural climate cycles. Such as the Milankovitch cycle that ushers in an ice age.
Joe Romm over at Climate Progress states:
Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, …
This peer reviewed paper, also agrees that we are at the point in the earth’s Milankovitch cycle that ushers in an ice age. The biggest question of course is why we are not covered in ice yet.
Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
So what happens if some of the recent natural changes and not man made CO2 have a major impact on climate? If you look at the strength of correlation to warming since 1895, you can see CO2 .43, the sun .57, the oceans .85. (Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo)
We know there are half century ocean cycles. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation has turned cold
So what about the sun?
During the last century the sun has been very active but with cycle 24 the sun has now gone into a long minimum with “unusual characteristic”s according to NASA and the Solar Dynamics Observatory Mission News
“We want to compare the sun’s brightness now to its brightness during previous minima and ask: is the sun getting brighter or dimmer?”
The answer seems to be dimmer. Measurements by a variety of spacecraft indicate a 12-year lessening of the sun’s “irradiance” by about 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at EUV wavelengths.”
This is in contrast to what was happening to 20th century solar cycles before cycle 24.
Solar activity reaches new high – Dec 2, 2003
” Geophysicists in Finland and Germany have calculated that the Sun is more magnetically active now than it has been for over a 1000 years. Ilya Usoskin and colleagues at the University of Oulu and the Max-Planck Institute for Aeronomy say that their technique – which relies on a radioactive dating technique – is the first direct quantitative reconstruction of solar activity based on physical, rather than statistical, models (I G Usoskin et al. 2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 211101)
… the Finnish team was able to extend data on solar activity back to 850 AD. The researchers found that there has been a sharp increase in the number of sunspots since the beginning of the 20th century. They calculated that the average number was about 30 per year between 850 and 1900, and then increased to 60 between 1900 and 1944, and is now at its highest ever value of 76.
“We need to understand this unprecedented level of activity,” Usoskin told PhysicsWeb.”
Svenmark Sun temperature graph
Now some idiots want to mimic a volcanic eruption. Given the phase of the Milankovitch cycle, a cold PDO, and a very quiet sun after a century of extreme activity, do you REALLY want to go messing with something no one knows anything about or what the repercussions are? What if CO2 build up, a highly active sun, and a warm ocean is the only thing keeping us out of a major cooling period? What if a quite sun, a cooling ocean coupled with major volcanic activity is the trigger causing climate to ” shift abruptly and dramatically” in to a cold phase?? Do you really think a few ppm of CO2 is enough to trump the Milankovitch cycle and the rest? Don’t you think the best thing to do is to see what the changes in the natural cycles actually do over the next decade before doing major harm?
Great, this is from my alma mater. How embarrassing. I may be forced to drop the U of C an email letting them know how stupid this makes them look.
Two points looking at both sides.
1 Silica is not silica-alumina any more than quartz is feldspar (also silica is not silicon). It is not the element that is the problem, it is the silica minerals and their properties. The fracturing of silica particles into sharp-pointed respirable micro-particles during mining is part of the reason that silica becomes trapped in the lungs and causes the disease. While silica-alumina micro-spheres may not be good to breathe (according the MSDS) this is probably not akin to decades of hard-rock mining.
2 Why does the “precautionary principle” relate to the supposed effects of AGW but not to the proposed remediations? I find no mention of the precautionary pricinple in Keith’s article.
John F. Hultquist says:
September 7, 2010 at 6:43 pm
Thanks! That Mont…..thing entangles any tongue.
Since they think that Venus is just like earth, maybe they should try their Geo-engineering solutions there first.
BTW, these geoengineering schemes remind me of the planet Miranda in the “Serenity” movie.
Ray September 8, 2010 at 10:41 am
What do you think makes Venus so white and bright? Sulfuric acid aerosols have soaked up the remaining little water vapor that hasn’t escaped to space. The amount of sun light reflected does not compensate for the amount of heat retained in a sulfuric acid smog. The active ingrediant in our smog is sub-micron sulfuric acid aerosols.
Gail Combs:
1. Milankovitch is Dead. OK, we have nothing to replace it so we still teach it to Kids, but Vostok’s 740 K year core revealed that for cycles 5,6, and 7, the Milankovitch years proved to be progressively worse until #7 was half way in between Ice age Start & Stop ! The Cycle is 101 K. Not 108. The 41 K Milankovitch cycle shows up fine and as M. himself said, the 108 K cycle Should _NOT_ dominate the ice Ages because it is much weaker. PS Jupiter works fine. Problem is: “dust” has been disproven — so see the Wilson August Sea ice Update for an idea that works.
2 We Geo-Engineer every time we cut a Pollutant. Blindly
.. whereas Sulfur is well known.
3. The PLAN is only to drop the temp <1 degree, back to what was OK in 1900. And that only when the Ice threatens to Melt Off … EARLY. (July's Sun would heat the Arctic warmer than the North Atlantic, reversing the Currents = that Disaster Movie FOR REAL) .
4. Again, this is an OFFSET
… of the Soot that "Cap & trade" has so enhanced, thus melting the Ice with dark little Polka-dots. We had Soot in the 1920s, but fortunately also put out lots of Sulfur.
… Offsets do not create anything New = NO RISK.
… Besides: it'sALREADY BEEN DONE ! In the 1920 Era of Coal-heat.
… That is, for Sulfur Dioxide. One would have to test the Acid idea VERY intensely & as for the nono-stuff : ! ! ! There, Silicosis is just 1 risk – – we could indeed trigger an Ice Age, just as you say, from an unexpected detail causing Too Much effect – – as we have no Experience to draw on.
… but given the MILLIONS of examples of Sulfur-Volcanos in History: I say Sulfur is _ZERO_ risk to 50 decimal places !
… Now if you want to be Afraid: think of some Terror country putting up 100 times the Sulfur discussed here .
Enneagram says:
September 8, 2010 at 10:24 am
Some years ago I watched a video of the history of porcelain and the discovery of china clay. Some of the story is told here:
http://www.nbh.hu/oldpage/english/bmenu94.htm
Another time a VP of a mining company and a very good public speaker explained his career as being the kitty litter captain of the company.
And then Mt. St. Helens exploded and I learned that instead of it being really hard rock there was much “weathering” of the minerals to clay. At the chemical level it is interesting material.
Take a look at this site discussing expansionistic clay soils (montmorillonite):
http://www.professionalinspector.com/Home%20Inspection%20Process/Expansionistic%20Clay%20soils.htm
By the way, “montmorillonite” is named after the place of it first major find and description (a common practice in such naming): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montmorillon
I rather think you would have to be raised French to feel comfortable pronouncing it.