Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The US Senate is considering funding for albedo modification geoengineering experiments – pumping particles or aerosols into the stratosphere, to reflect sunlight back into space, and counter the alleged impact of elevated CO2 levels on global climate.
According to ScienceMag;
To fight global warming, Senate calls for study of making Earth reflect more light
Budgetmakers in the U.S. Senate want the Department of Energy (DOE) to study the possibility of making Earth reflect more sunlight into space to fight global warming. Earth’s reflectivity is known as its albedo, and the request to study “albedo modification” comes in the details of a proposed spending bill passed by the Senate appropriations committee to fund DOE, the Army Corps of Engineers, and related agencies for fiscal year 2017, which begins 1 October. The bill does not specify how much money should be spent on the research.
Critics argue that albedo modification and other “geoengineering” schemes are risky and would discourage nations from trying to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas that comes from the burning of fossil fuels and that is causing global warming by absorbing increasing amounts of energy from sunlight. Still, climate researchers say they should find out what its potential of albedo modification might be.
“The recommendation is great,” says Joyce Penner, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Albedo modification “is not a solution to global warming, it is only a way to avoid, perhaps, a tipping point in the climate.” David Keith, an atmospheric physicist at Harvard University, says, “Ignorance is not a good basis for making decisions, so learning more about this is extremely valuable even if we find out that it will never work.” Keith adds, however, that the few existing studies suggest albedo modification could help ameliorate some effects of global warming.
The call for further research comes in a bill that would provide $5.4 billion for DOE’s Office of Science next year. It also builds on the recommendations of a February 2015 report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) entitled Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth. That report warned explicitly that albedo modification shouldn’t be deployed now because the risks and benefits were far too uncertain. Still, the committee urged further research to find out what those risks and benefits might be.
It is difficult to imagine a more ridiculous waste of taxpayer’s money.
The US spends taxpayer’s money regulating coal plants, forcing any coal plants which survive Obama’s war on energy, to fit expensive scrubbers, to remove particulates from their emissions.
If this measure is passed, the Department of Energy will get to spend even more taxpayer’s money, burning sulphur and other compounds, to generate and emit the same types of particulates which the US government previously forced domestic US coal plants to scrub.
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I remember reading about Intellectual Ventures in Superfreakonomics some years ago:
http://www.intellectualventures.com/news/press-releases/intellectual-ventures-answers-about-geoengineering
The problem with a “solution” like this is the lack of a government revenue stream…
thanks DB – good link
I read about this too. I like the Freakonomics guys, they don’t mind shooting a few sacred cows…
particles of concern from coal
==========
those would be CO2. there are already regulations for everything else.
This doesn’t surprise me. When it actually cools, they’ll say they instituted the plan and claim it is working. The kool-aid drinkers will drink the kool-aid.
Therein lies the great risk. They will believe they know what they are doing, and proceed with even greater “adjustments” to the atmosphere. Incremental steps will give way to oblivion.
Nothing could of course go wrong in a chaotic non-linear stochastic system in which the politics is settled and the science is politics. Crimes against humanity springs to mind.
Beautifully said, Manfred!
I am quite satisfied with the albedo where I live in Australia so I do not want foreigners changing it thank you!
I couldn’t agree more.
I had hoped Willis Eschenbach would have visited this thread to tell us what will happen if we partially block the sun with aerosols…..why, the clouds that form in the afternoon in the tropics will just form later and we will get the SAME amount of heating that we got before the geoprivateering experiment. Aw just give 1% of the 5.1B budget 50M!!! What in hell kind of experiment is going to cost 5B? I’m worried with 20trillion deficit that future government will only think in minimums of a few 10s of Billions.
Read Niven and Pournelle’s “Fallen Angels” (http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Angels-Larry-Niven/dp/0743471814/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461296339&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=Niven+Poirnelle%27s+fallen+angel ) to find out where this is going!
(Greens take over and “clean up the air”; turns out that CO2 was the only thing holding back the next ice age.)
Fallen Angels is one of my favourite sci-fi books, did a writeup of it 🙂
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/22/prescient-fallen-angels-a1991-satire-of-climate-alarmism/
Except that for this to be true, CO2 would have to be having some large effect on the temp of the Earth.
Which the near twenty year pause, during a time when atmospheric CO2 increased by more than ever, would seem to disprove.
We may not need any “cleaned up air” to see a harmful cooling trend, and “cleaning up the air” may have no effect on climate, but will almost certainly have a huge toll on human lives, comfort, and prosperity.
Worldwide depression, widespread famines, massive depopulation via starvation, and a near total economic collapse sound appealing?
Not to this kid it don’t.
Excellent idea. Once the albedo is changed above the US then the rest of the 7 billion people on Earth can watch how this changes the CO2 around the 323 million in the US and perhaps conduct the same experiment to change the albedo above their location. Perhaps the odd cantankerous person or so might choose to keep the albedo above their house as it is!
It’s naive to single out the US. Every place on earth where the US has allies and/or military bases is already inundated with the subject of this thread. They know the world is beginning to cool and they need either to be able to say “Look, we did it” or “See, we told you it would get warmer.”
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
We are there.
Given that climate “forcing” by CO2 is much less than these fools think it is, any scheme of this kind, if it were successful, will drive the climate system into an ice age.
Not to worry Ed. If their plan does go overboard and cools to much they can just drag out an old scheme they came up with during the 1970s next ice age scare. It was to add carbon black to the polar ice to reduce the reflected energy. Should cost no more than 5 billion to study.
This scare me more than all the crazy greens put together.
Who can assume that man knows every answer about nature?
Maybe the US needs Trump!
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
“We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” ( fix something that isn’t broken)
NOT
No good can come of this.
With more resulting asthmatics being produced and dying from particulate inhalation, this will solve the overpoulation problem too. What a win win prospect! /sarc
This is all nuts. The entire thread and comments on chemtrails, geoeng,… Just nuts.
Man and his hubris, only outdone by his stupidity.
Makes me wonder if any of these chem trail peeps have a pilots license, or enough money to rent a private jet and go up and take some samples.
I think the answer must be no to both questions.
Contrails affect albedo. The evidence is that they affect the temperature difference between day and night rather than the average. ie. They don’t make it cooler overall. link link
Do the proponents of the Albedo Modification Geoengineering Proposal give any evidence that their results would be different?
“Do the proponents of the Albedo Modification Geoengineering Proposal give any evidence that their results would be different?”
They just need $5.4 billion. They’ll get what ever evidence they pay for.
Funding to fund a solution to a non-problem.
Your taxpayer at waste…er…work!
Without getting into wacko chemtrail speculation, airliners burn kerosene which, amongst other things, contains sulphur. When burnt it will produce sulphate aerosols and like vehicle engines lots of small particulates.
The planes spend most of their time cruising in the lower stratosphere, just above much of the visible cloud cover near the tropopause.
If atmospheric conditions are close to the point where condensation into cloud will happen, the presence of these pollutants ( which act as condensation nuclei ) will cause an increase in cloud. So yes there are trails of chemicals released by commercial aircraft that on some days will lead to persistent and even spreading light cloud.
The experiment is already in place, all we need to do is measure it.
We also have data from the last two major statratospheric eruptions showing what climate reaction to a massive injection of sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere is :
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/uah_tls_365d/
Note the blowback: after the initial disturbance the has cleared the stratosphere cools, permanently, indicating that is more transparent or ‘clearer’ that it was beforehand.
What any such experiment is likely to do is CAUSE EVEN MORE GLOBAL WARMING at the surface.
Now before we start playing at being the sorcerer’s apprentice we’d better make sure that there is even a problem that needs addressing.
So far it looks like the warming that happened between 1975 and 1997 was probably due to volcanoes now AGW, if the “well-organised multi-billion dollar campaign of dis-information” that has hijacked climatology would get of their butts and do some real science instead of spewing out an endless stream of spurious correlations and projections from defective climate models, maybe we would have a better understanding.
sorry: “volcanoes, not AGW”
@ur momisugly Greg, 11:17, April 21. I will never forget the 2 days after 911, no air traffic for 2-3 days, the sky was clear and I kid thee not, we had birds sit our laps as if they were saying thanks for no noise/pollution etc. I have pics of a blue stellar jay eating out of my hand. never happened before or since we live rural and have animals around us all the time but that had never happened to us before or since.
Too bad the airports resumed flights. You could have had the birds make you a dress so you could go to the Ball with your stepsisters. I’m hungry, can somebody pass me a slice of unicorn?
Yes, the birds must have felt in instant benefit from the reduction in all that CO2 “pollution” , no wonder they were happy.
A study did find stronger incoming radiation on those days. Sadly there was not control for how much of that was due to weather variability, so it remained inconclusive.
‘So yes there are trails of chemicals released by commercial aircraft’
That insidiously dangerous dihydrogen monoxide that kills thousands of people every year.
Worse still…it won’t wash off!
A little learning is a dangerous thing – the children’s story about the Sorcerer’s apprentice comes to my mind. And would the Americans really have the gall to try it out without the rest of us agreeing to it??
Unhappily, the answer to your question is “Yes”.
Seems a better solution might be to tax global warming zealots according to their degree of green nutdom… If taxing stuff leads to less of it, that would be a win for common sense.
Pretty sure we’re already doing this.
…Mother Nature will not be impressed !
Didn’t we use to do this with manufacturing in the 70’s? Wasn’t all the noise back then about aerosols killing us? Didn’t we talk about acid rain and create EPA regulation to clean up the air with mass particulate reduction?
Environmentalism starts with you – so the greens tell us, and they are right – each of us should play our part. What I propose may sound “politically incorrect” but no disrespect is intended, so please bear with me.
Geoengineering solutions might come from an unlikely sourse – the late pop legend Michael Jackson. He made a bold individual contribution to lowering albedo, by whitening the color of his own skin.
The POTUS himself should consider doing something similar, to back up his green rhetoric by making a personal contribution to increasing global albedo.
Citizens of the UK could likewise banish their unfortunate reputation for poor dental hygiene, and get busy chemically whitening their teeth, following the example of their environmentally responsible North American cousins. When it comes to green – or green whiteness – we all have our own part to play.
The parts of the body that are exposed really aren’t enough. If we follow your line of thinking, we would all have to go around naked to maximize our albedo enhancingness. We also should dye our hair silver.
Actually, you have it backwards. More albedo means more reflection so Jackson raised his albedo.
Just have everyone wear white shirts.
But not before labor day.
huh? There’s actually some ozone layer left and they want to kill that too?
Yes ozone is part of the equation too. NASA estimate the stratospheric ozone dropped by 5-8% after Pinatubo, presumably the same thing happened after El Chichon. Nothing to do with CFCs.
Much of the drop in TLS I showed above was due to ozone depletion.
This current idea is so screwed up it should be laughed at. The most likely result would be even more global warming as happened as a result of the those volcanoes. They will then say OMG , AGW is worse than we thought we need to do even more “corrective measures”. This will continue until they reach a tipping point and trigger the next glaciation.