Must be IPCC week. When it rains the stupid, it pours. From the Telegraph:
IPCC ‘considering sending mirrors to space to tackle climate change’
Reflective aerosols would be sent into space under a series of radical “geo-engineering” measures being considered by the UN climate science body to tackle climate change, leaked documents disclose.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) papers, leaked ahead of a key meeting in Peru next week, outline the series of techniques in which scientists hope will manipulate the world’s climate to reduce carbon emissions.
Among the ideas proposed by a group of 60 leading scientists from around the world, including Britain, include producing “lighter coloured” crops to reflect sunlight, blasting aerosol “mirrors” into the stratosphere and suppressing cirrus clouds.
Other suggestions include spraying sea water into clouds as another reflection mechanism, depositing massive quantities of iron filings into the oceans, painting streets and roofs white and adding lime to oceans.
Experts suggested that the documents, leaked from inside the IPPC to The Guardian, show how the UN and other developed countries are “despairing” about reaching agreement by consensus at the global climate change talks.
But the newspaper reported that scientists admit that even if the ideas theoretically work, they could cause irreversible consequences.
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Just an FYI, the documents in full are publicly available at SCRIBD here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/57920959/Joint-IPCC-expert-meeting-on-geoengineering-keynote-abstracts
The key buzzphrase is – “solar radiation management”, but there’s a catch they mention:
That, and the fact that it’s batshit crazy and a powder-keg for priming a global explosion of the law of unintended consequences.
Even Joe Romm doesn’t like the idea because of this catch, and when Romm starts rejecting crazy climate ideas, you know it’s bad. I’ll bet Greenpeace has made a recommendation for it though.
h/t to WUWT reader AndiC
Is this simply history repeating itself? I just don’t trust mad scientists. They can’t seem to decide whether the world is warming or cooling and what to do about it.
In 1971, Dr. Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, warned of a coming new ice age and was open to shooting soot into the upper atmosphere. Today, one option raised to prevent tackle global warming a proposal was raised by Holdren and proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/12/obamas-current-science-advisor-warned.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30112396/
for a single pentillion dollars or two I can relocate the whole of humanity to Mars and save Earth forever. Cash only please .
The United Nations has already placed a moratorium on geoengineering experiments as part of the UN Convention on Biodiversity (signed by 193 countries).
Whether it has enough teeth to actually stop the IPCC or one of these crazy scientists is an open question.
I think these meetings demonstrate just how far out there the majority of climate science really is. The fact that the IPCC and card-carrying climate scientists are part of these crazy-geoengineering groups should tell you everything to know about what kind of scientist we are talking about. The careful, objective, proof-seeking kind? Nope.
Seriously the IPCC just ripped off the novel Extinction by Ray Hammond
http://www.amazon.com/Extinction-Ray-Hammond/dp/0330485962/ref=sr_1_29?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308311986&sr=1-29
Too funny
I find it amazing the thought process of people at times.
So let me get this straight, you supposedly learned people. You think humans are altering the earth’s climate. The solution to fix that problem in your minds is to alter the earth’s climate. Brilliant. (Now I do a facepalm – http://www.distroman.com/images/PolarFacepalm.jpg )
Strange, lighter colored crops, white roofs and streets, will lower the temperature…..
…..but land use didn’t raise it
It’s all CO2…………………..
1. Buildings are but a tiny fraction of the surface of the earth. Look at satellite imagery and notice just how much one must zoom in before even seeing structures.
2. Most shingles already contain reflective materials. How much difference will the metal make? Besides there is probably not a need to be any more reflective than natural greenery.
3. Sun-baked metal gets seriously hot and conducts that heat, requiring more insulation.
4. The blinding light from shiny surfaces, especially near freeways, can be dangerous. This was a lesson learned by a local restaurant that had to coat or etch the metal to make it less reflective.
5. With age and exposure, reflective surfaces do not retain reflective properties too long. And, there are more important uses for water than roof cleaning.
Even the simplest “solutions” have consequences. Imagine what large scale geoengineering would do.
Whatever the mad scientists do, the monument to geoengineering has to be very visible to everyone on earth especially schoolchildren. Ideas like reduced albedo crop will just not cut it, that would be like a proud grafitti artist spraying his message on a wall with invisible ink. The geomessage has to be loud and clear … LOOK WHAT WE DID!!. So we can just go through the list and identify which ones they really like and which ones have no chance.
Large space mirrors .. absolutely positively yes!!!
aerosols … no, not visible
dump iron/lime in the sea .. no boooring
low albedo crops … no not visible enough plus too much credit would go to farmers
suppressing cirrus clouds … no, no one could tell the difference
painting streets and roofs white … yes
Apart from sheer stupidity and cost, large mirrors in space, of any kind, have a major flaw. Solar wind. Block or reflect what comes from the sun, and you move a bit. For small things, like the ISS, not even measurable. But, for something really big, as in reducing the incoming energy to cool the earth, very measurable, especially over time. (that’s only one of the many problems with the Solar Power Satellite nonsense)
And our taxes pay for this {SNIPPING} nonsense.
The Imbecilic Planetary Control Crew …
Latitude said: “Strange, lighter colored crops, white roofs and streets, will lower the temperature…..
…..but land use didn’t raise it
It’s all CO2…………………..”
Bam! Why is this so easily dismissed? Land use changes have significant local effects. What do you get when the local effects multiply and get closer together, then you sum up all those effects?
“manipulate the world’s climate to reduce carbon emissions” – Surely this a complete turn-around? I thought we were being told to reduce CO2 in order to control the climate?
If we could manipulate the climate, there would be no need to reduce CO2, thereby allowing increased crop production to feed our ever growing population.
Right idea, wrong direction. In order to combat the sudden ice age brought about by volcanic eruptions and solar minimum, we should prepare to pump methane into the atmosphere.
Makes as much sense as the IPCC stuff, doesn’t it? I’d rather adapt to a warmer world than mess with it on the scale they discuss. All of their schemes will involve vast expenditure of energy anyway, so what’s the point?
Friends:
The IPCC Working Group 3 only exists to promote geoengineering of global climate.
This geoengineering consists of proposals to alter GHG emissions and thus – so the IPCC claims – to alter the future temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. Of course, this geoengineering is complete nonsense, but several governments have responded to it by acting to reduce GHG emissions in attempt to conduct this geoengineering.
So, the IPCC having succeeded in getting that geoengineering adopted as policy in several places, it is not surprising that the IPCC would consider the next step in geoengineering considerations. Indeed, I predicted the IPCC would take that ‘next step’.
In a Guest Post at WUWT I made a suggestion to utilise this inevitable IPCC ‘next step’ as a method to enable politicians to reverse policy and to abandon the AGW scare. That Guest Post can be read at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/17/stopping-climate-change/
Ufortunately, most posters in the ensuing thread failed to understand what I was saying (despite my several clarifications) and some refused to concider the ploy.
Thus, LazyTeenager dispays his usual self-induced delusion when he asserts (at June 17, 2011 at 12:55 am):
“The geoengineering stuff is only going to get off the ground if and when mother nature starts beating the human race around the head in a serious way. So stop panicking, it’s just scifi at this point in time.”
Far from being “scifi”, all activities of the IPCC’s Working Group 3 are – and always have been – predicated on promotion of geoengineering the global temperature.
Richard
How is lowering our CO2 emissions leaving all our other impacts constant not also Geoengineering?
And that’s precisely why I’m against massive intervention to reduce human CO2 emissions, along with the fact I’m getting less and less convinced all that CO2 is having much effect at all. It’s seems the greatest folly to assume the planet has a great big thermostat we can move at will by controlling our CO2 emissions – something that’s been amply covered on these pages before.
Other suggestions include spraying sea water into clouds as another reflection mechanism, depositing massive quantities of iron filings into the oceans, painting streets and roofs white and adding lime to oceans.
Of course just about everything proposed here by these nutters is utterly ridiculous – and they know it too. However, I have for a long time been in favour of white (or at least lighter) roads and building materials, not to attempt any effect on climate, but to diminish the urban heat island effect and make city life in the summer more comfortable.
Question from a non-scientist (me): So if the solution to global warming is to reflect the sun’s rays away, while one proposed solution to avoid using CO2 emitting fossil fuels is to put black, non-reflective, solar panels over a significant part of the earth’s surface, does this mean that solar power is, in effect, contributing to the very problem it is intended to solve, by capturing and retaining the very radiation that those mirrors are intended to reflect away?
With one group suggesting plastering the planet with solar absorbers and the other simultaneously suggesting surrounding it with solar reflectors, I sense government at work playing with tax dollars. No doubt I’m missing something obvious here, but on the surface it looks like a typical government-inspired effort.
“bozone layer.”
Oh man. I shouldn’t have taken a sip of coffee before reading that…
Outstanding – adding lime or iron filings to the ocean to mitigate atmospheric carbon dioxide content? Do these loons understand that lime is generally produced by heating limestone, thereby driving off CO2 from the carbonate ions? …or that using steel scrap that would otherwise be recycled has the effect of driving the economies of steel production toward using more virgin ore which requires far more energy input and subsequent CO2 production than using recycled steel?
Eh. Been there, done that. It didn’t work out so well.
But that doesn’t mean I’ll allow you to steal my copyrighted intellectual property, you beatnik hippies! Smithers! Assault them with my walking-stick!
Maybe this is a search for extraterrestrial intelligence project. If there’s anybody out there, they’ll finally have to acknowledge us for flashing them. If you can’t get their attention any other way, annoy them. Being annoying, stupd, self-serving (ASS) human beings is a job the IPCC was made for, by the way.
What such project demands, is the sudden drastic cooldown of northern climes, in order to bring global averages, to what, an elite few, deem an acceptable global temperature.
Don’t the people, who inhabit these lands, have anything to say about this. Does one really believe Canada, Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Russia, and China will agree to the lowering of their climate. This would put them on the brink of survival. For what?? So that people in Florida and California are slightly more comfortable.
I think NOT!… Not if they have any living cells within their collective cranium.
Remember, we are not really talking about world sacrifice, but a northern one. GK
“solar radiation management” ?? where did I put my parsol?
But the newspaper reported that scientists admit that even if the ideas theoretically work, they could cause irreversible consequences.
But these
irreversible consequencesbenefits are really only more evidence of “ecological overshoot”, the very expensive and unsustainable “mad scientist” niche. My bid would have been much lower.Brian Hall says:
June 17, 2011 at 12:12 am
I’ve got a little list, and geo-engineers have places of honor on it.
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So are you being the Grand Poobah here, or the Lord High Executioner? Are you going to use the list to help jorgekafkazar with the new “bozone layer?”