From the journal Atmospheric Science Letters press release:
Could Dimming the Sun Change Teleconnections in Weather Patterns as we Know Them?
Solar radiation management projects, also known as sun dimming, seek to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth to counteract the effects of climate change. Global dimming can occur as a side-effect of fossil fuels or as a result of volcanic eruptions, but the consequences of deliberate sun dimming as a geoengineering tool are unknown.
A new study by Dr Peter Braesicke, from the Centre for Atmospheric Science at Cambridge University, seeks to answer this question by focusing on the possible impacts of a dimming sun on atmospheric teleconnections.
Teleconnections, important for the predictability of weather regimes, are the phenomenon of distant climate anomalies being related to each other at large distances, such as the link between sea-level pressure at Tahiti and Darwin, Australia, which defines the Southern Oscillation.
“It is important that we look for unintended consequences of any sun dimming schemes,” said Braesicke. “We have to test our models continuously against observations to make sure that they are ‘fit-for-purpose’, and it’s important that we should not only look at highly averaged ‘global’ quantities.”
Dr Braesicke’s team believes that the link between tropical temperatures and extra-tropical circulation are well captured for the recent past and that the link changes when the sun is dimmed.
“This could have consequences for prevailing weather regimes,” said Braesicke, “particularly for the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) teleconnection. Our research allows us to assess how forced atmospheric variability, exemplified by the northern polar region, might change in a geoengineered world with a dimmed sun.”
A dimmed sun will change the temperature structure of the atmosphere with a cooling throughout the atmosphere. In the troposphere, temperatures drop because less solar radiation reaches the ground and therefore less can be converted into heat. In the stratosphere, less shortwave radiation is available for absorption by ozone and, therefore, heating rates in the stratosphere are lower.
“We have shown that important teleconnections are likely to change in such a geoengineered future, due to chemistry-climate interactions and in particular, due to changing stratospheric ozone,” concluded Braesicke. “In our model, the forced variability of northern high latitude temperatures changes spatially, from a polecentred pattern to a pattern over the Pacific region when the solar irradiance is reduced. Future geoengineering studies need to consider the full evolution of the stratosphere, including its chemical behaviour.”
The Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project
In an accompanying paper Ben Kravitz, from Rutgers University, reviews the new project to coordinate and compare experiments in aerosol geoengineering and evaluates the effects of stratospheric geoengineering with sulfate aerosols.
Since the idea of geoengineering was thrust back into the scientific arena many have wondered whether it could reduce global warming as a mitigation measure. Kravitz’s team argues that one of the most feasible methods is through stratospheric sulfate aerosols. While geoengineering projects are not yet favored by policy makers this method is inexpensive compared with other such projects and so may prove more attractive.
However, stratospheric geoengineering with sulfate aerosols may have unintended consequences. Research indicates that stratospheric geoengineering could, by compensating for increased greenhouse gas concentrations, reduce summer monsoon rainfall in Asia and Africa, potentially threatening the food supply for billions of people.
“Some unanswered questions include whether a continuous stratospheric aerosol cloud would have the same effect as a transient one, such as that from a volcano, and to what extent regional changes in precipitation would be compensated by regional changes in evapotranspiration,” said Kravitz.
A consensus has yet to be reached on these, as well as other, important issues and to answer these questions the team propose a suite of standardised climate modeling experiments, as well as a coordinating framework for performing such experiments, known as the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP).
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Stacey says:
January 26, 2011 at 2:52 am
fit polar bears end penguins? But I thought they were on opposite ends of the planet.
Great,
On one hand the Nutcases wish to push Solar Energy as a viable green (nearly CO2 free) alternative then in the other hand they seek to block the light that is needed to make it viable at all
Geoengineering…. HA!
They talk utter rubbish. Dimming the planet for a significant amount of time to have a significant and long lasting effect on climate????…. I think these numbskulls have come to think of themselves as Gods…. We all know what happens next.
…. Just keep ’em away from the Kool Aid, fer cryin’ out loud….;-)
Shades of the “Needles Project” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford). And all three of our (U.S.) citrus growing regions have shrunk considerably. And the Bolivian jungle suffers unprecedented winter cooling, killing millions of ectotherms and making the rivers stink. The space needles are still falling.
To: J.Hansford
Well, actually they are going to get under a tree to study he effect. Then maybe stand on their porch, then under a full roof, then in a cave. . . . I mean how much could that cost.
To: Charles Higley
Even if the sun did dim, what could ‘they’ do about it except observe . . . .
“It is important that we look for unintended consequences of any sun dimming schemes,”
That is the first time I have seen that mentioned in relation to AGW. And it had to be in an April Fools piece on the subject.
Sad.
If, as any tolerably numerate person does, you put your error bars in place after studying the uncertainties in the measurement data, you come to the inevitable conclusion that whether there has actually been any warming at all over the last 120 years is indeterminable. It seems to me that this needs to be sorted out before anyone even daydreams of uncontrollable amelioration experimentation on a global scale.
Back when I was working on a Masters Thesis project, I had occasion to use a Vaccuum Tube (valve) pulse amplifier, to amplify signals from a photomultiplier tube. This amp employed two “Ring of Three” blocks; three tube feedback amplifiers. There were frequency selective filters in front, and between the amps , and the output was supposed to be able to put out 100 Volt pulses. It had been around the Physics Department for eons; and nobody knew when it last had had any maintenance; so it was not surprising when I found I couldn’t get more than a 90 Volt peak pulse out of it, and it seemed rather noisy compared to what I expected. So I decided to check all the tubes to see which tube was failing and had low gm; they all seemed to have a faint blue glow; which usually implied some sort of leak.
So I got out the tube checker, and started to measure the gm of each of those tubes, to locate the weak one. Must be something wrong with the Tube checker, because It wouldn’t register much of any gm, on any one of the six tubes in those two stages. they were all shot. So off to the radio store to buy a whole set of new tubes. I checked them all on the checker to make sure they were good, and that it was actually working.
Put it all back together, and I had no trouble getting 120 Volt peak pulses, and magically no noise of any consequence. Those old tubes had almost no amplification capability at all, yet the damn amp almost fooled me into thinking it was OK.
Do these chaps at Cambridge University NOT understand the concept of NEGATIVE FEEDBACK, and how it operates to control the gain of a system, and make it nearly independent of the forward gain in the system.
I predict that when these geo-engineering twirps succeed in dimming the sun; they will find something miraculaous will happen. The average amount of cloud cover on planet earth will drop to something less than it is now.
All those owl boxes will still work though, and they will all read pretty much the same as they do now.
As far as advanced geo engineering ideas go here is a more practical and reversible one:
Current global warming is caused by the low albedo of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N . The area is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.
Re spraying the accumulated garbage with white water resistant paint would produce immediate benefit. By controlling amount of white garbage world temperature could be kept under control.
“What Impact Would Sun Dimming Have on Earth’s Weather?”
The fact that this question is even asked proves just how intellectually vacant climate junk-science truly is, and teleconnection is pure nonsense.
I suppose the next time I go out in the morning and feel the sun apparently warming my skin I should realize it is caused by a glacier calving in Antarctica rather than the sun.
Vince Causey writes @ur momisugly 0542 Jan 26… in reply;
I don’t think that we will have to wait for years in order to realise that we are already on a downward trend to much colder weather, perhaps for many, many years to come.
What worries me, in UK, is that our ignorant government has no idea what is happening because it insists on employing advisors in order to appease other politicians, or, at least, other people with a political agenda, especially those of various hues of green.
None of these well-paid people appear to have any conception that prolonged colder weather is surely much worse than warmer, and so are quite prepared to throw money at possible, man-made (emotive) warmer climes rather than at more probable colder winters (3 in a row, and we’ve another couple of months of this season yet).
The upshot? Well, most of the money for providing energy (to keep the lights on at least, if not a heater or two) has disappeared in building windmills, and subsidising their pathetic output (averaging approx 25% of rated power annually) to the extreme detriment of millions of tax payers; not to mention having to maintain those coal guzzling, CO2 spewing, real power stations longer and longer, in order to maintain the provision of some 40% of the base load of UK electricity demand.
“”””” Ira Ony says:
January 26, 2011 at 12:32 pm
As far as advanced geo engineering ideas go here is a more practical and reversible one:
Current global warming is caused by the low albedo of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N . The area is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. “””””
You’d have a hard time coming up with a large area surface cover that has a LOWER albedo, than what is there now; the open ocean, which has a total reflectance at solar wavelengths of about 3%.
And what is the virtue in spraying whatever rubbish is out there now, with even more rubbish.
And recent reports’ right here at WUWT even have claimed that the Pacific Ocean garbage patch isn’t nearly as vast as we have been led to believe; maybe half vast; but evidently not vast. But the Cousteaus who have spun more miles out of playing in the ocean for the cameras; to raise money for their playing in the ocean; have a vested interest in having us believe that it is a serious problem.
Yes I’m all for keeping such trash out of the oceans; it seems to be taken there by people who are out enjoying the oceans all the time. There’s not a lot of trash being taken there by third avenue wino bums.
The Southern Ocillation (index) isn’t a teleconnection. Which is not to say Tahiti and Darwin aren’t teleconnected.
Although the whole concept of teleconnection is mostly used to provide a psuedo-rationale for spurious correlations. Again, which is not to say climate doesn’t operate across large/hemispheric/global scale. It does.
George E. Smith says:
…….
Hi George
Number of good points there.
All the best
Ir
(a)OnySciFi Film Noir idea: A form of mass hysteria takes hold and the herd starts to believe that run away “Venus effect” global warming is kicking in. A sinister group of people who worship sticks, rocks and smelt, seeing their golden opportunity to eliminate (or at least cull) “the human cancer” step up with a proposed “solution.”
‘Let us dim the sun and cool the feverish Earth!’ they proclaimed. Thus was hatched the ultimate in clandestine mass murder.
As the great era of starvation and advancing ice began, the astute could perceive the vast yawning void ahead. When all was said and done, the mass murderers killed 5.5 billion souls and now play an endless dirge, chained to devilish instruments for all eternity from the depths of Hades.
Ira Ony,
“Current global warming is caused by the low albedo of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
With all do respect……..I was just curious on how in the world you expected anyone to take your comment serious. Do have some Research or Data we can refer to? Climate Change is being blamed on alot things these days, but logically, your statement is easily refuted by pointing out that the vast majority of the “garbage” in these patches that have been discovered is below the surface.
David, UK says: “Actually, ignore my last comment. I really should read things properly before posting. D’oh.”
You are not alone. Unfortunately. Anyway, didn’t read the commment itself, so no problemo.
“Dimming” the sun is the climax of Post-Normal
scientific theoretical group masterbation.
There shouldn’t be a single tax dollar tossed at
furthering tihs plan.
Dim wits.
“”””” vukcevic says:
January 26, 2011 at 1:46 pm
George E. Smith says:
…….
Hi George
Number of good points there.
All the best “””””
Say vuk , I took a look at your decaying oscillation; izzat the sun going out before our eyes, or is that the rotting of the great Pacific Garbage Dump stuff ?
GES
Wasn’t creating a problem to fix a problem, er I meant geo-engineering, the fundamental frakk-up legend of the Matrix trilogy?
Too Sci-Fish?
How about that captain cookish legend of why the kiwis got to be fox meat while the rest of the island got infested with rabbits? It’s about similar I think, mann-people trying to “fix nature” without knowing enough about the nature of the things they’re trying to fix.
I can’t resist, so with apologies:
Some little man-made sunshade can influence the earth’s temperature, but variations in the solar output in all its forms, can’t.
Okay, its all clear now.
Maybe we should just encourage specific volcanos to erupt at selected times. Plants can get their CO2 and the lovers of 20th century weather can get what they want. Problem solved.
AC said:
“Basically the Russians were looking for MORE light for their country and were playing with space mirrors. Prompting the question for both camps… Should we really be adding or taking way solar inputs?”
Why don’t the warmists who want to be cooler and the Russians who want to be warmer just swap houses? Problem fixed.