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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CAGW lunacy goes from idiotic to downright dangerous.
Oh brother…Holdren was talking about doing this years ago. His choice of particulate? Sulphur. (Seems to me if he wanted to do that we should have let the coal-fired plants continue to pollute.) Seriously, though, the volcanoes will take care of this. If man starts tinkering with it, we’re going to end up doing the same thing they did in Yellowstone. Didn’t they learn their lesson?
It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. They would have to compensate everyone who might benefit from warming.
The arrogance of the idea that the earths ecosystem is something one country gets to tinker with is pretty breathtaking.
Only an imbecile would do uncontrolled experiments on a planet they were still living on.
SRM is at the very least being experimented with make no mistake.
Sulphur in fuel has increased over the past years hasn’t it? I was under the impression that the extra sulfur in fuel that provides more fuel pressure was the cause of the whole “chemtrails” hysteria on the internought.
Contrails do last hours and spread out over the sky, I have seen this first half in an afternoon, I wonder what causes the change in reaction, there must be a change in the emissions from the jet engines.
Why is no one even noticing the change in the skies.. and that silver sky that used to be dark blue, and all those fluffy clouds have made way for this white whispy mist stuff
of course it is always precarious bring this up incase one gets boxed up with the crackpots lol.
I watch jets fly by above my house at all levels here in Florida.
I live under the approach for RSW…the planes fly close overhead when the wind is from the West, or has a Westerly component.
And Florida has a LOT of air traffic.
I see the same thing here that I saw when I lived in Orlando, and on the East coast in Deerfield Beach…the atmosphere here rarely lets condensation trails form…it just evaporates after leaving the plane.
The sky is a deep blue most days, and the clouds are fluffy and white.
If you do not like the sky where you live, best get moving to somewhere you will like it better.
Hurry though…Florida is nearly full up, like Tuscany!
Geoengineer is another “climatologist” area where there is no real science just postulating.
David Kieth is a self professed Geoengineer, and talks of killing another 10% of pollution related deaths with sulfur and aluminum to keep us cooler.
Yet another one, and yes scientists discussed this a while back, setting off a nuke in a volcano LMAO
This is the hysterical thinking CAGW has created.
But Solar Radiation management via aerosols is widely discussed the major scientific institutions.
As for messing with weather, didn’t the US military cause floods and storms in Vietnam?
As far as I know (not entirely certain) China used the process to put smaller particles into the air that were more stable when they attracted moisture so preventing rain.
If these technologies are around, how on earth do we know who is doing what and what effect it has on climates and weather.
We don’t…but as this thread shows, we (collective we) sure can imagine just about anything we want, dream it up and project it onto reality…right out of thin air!
Okay, here’s my counter-proposal. Replace all asphalt surfaces, streets, highways, parking lots, driveways, with concrete. Bingo! Instant albedo and millions of jobs and a boom in the paint industry. No chance that any other nation would be affected by our corrective measure.
I was flying across the country the other day and looking down the whole time, trying to keep track of where the plane was using my memory of road patterns and shapes, and where various rivers and dams and lakes are.
But I noticed something else while I was looking down…the roads are tiny thin pencil lines, widely spread outside of the smallish urban areas…a tiny fraction of the land surface.
Ditto for buildings.
Most of the US is fields and forests, and I mean the vast majority. Roads only look big on maps.
A Frightening prospect. If successful it would probably result in a rapid re-entry to the ice age. After all the hot spot, which is crucial to the hypothesis , does not exist. There is also a total failure of the alarmist mob to recognise that the warmth from el ninos such as the 1997/98 and the present one has absolutely nothing to do with CO2.
Apparently some of the Senators have relatives and friends who own businesses in the geoengineering/albedo modification field. And then when the grants are awarded these Senators retire to be consultants there.
It is high time we repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to the original Constitution where Senators were appointed by State legislatures.
Surely that would exacerbate the situation, perpetuating the buddy-buddy system?
No, Senators would then be beholden to the States rather than private interests. If the State legislature changes to reflect the changes in ideals of the voting populace, the incumbent is out at the end of the term and a new Senator is appointed that better reflects the current voice of the people. Of course Senators would fight this tooth and nail because it would not be in the best interests of the incumbent or his/her backers.
That the senators would represent the interests of the states in Washington was the original purpose of the Senate.
90% of the garbage that is passed these days wouldn’t see the light of day in such a situation.
They are totally insane. “Let’s deliberately pollute the air to make it colder as if there is a volcanic eruption or dirty coal burning’.
Imagine what the “carbon footprint” will be as a result of the endless travel miles from burning thru $5.4Bil in research and meetings….. And we know how the DOE likes to travel around to meetings to make sure that “progress in all areas is excellent”.
I thought that’s what the ‘paint all the rooftops white’ flap a few years ago was all about. Then someone realized that all that weatherproof white paint would have dumped thousands of tonnes of VOCs into the atmosphere… 🙁
There are very few things that are certainties in science, bu one of them is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Unintended consequences can be grouped into three types, in increasing order of likelihood:
RARE – Unexpected benefit: A positive, unexpected benefit (also referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
COMMON – Unexpected drawback: A negative, unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
PROBABLE – Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended, when an intended solution makes a problem worse (e.g. welfare programs that lead to increasing populations dependent on government). This is sometimes referred to as ‘backfire’.
As if we understand the climate well enough to “engineer” changes. Oh, the greens think they already do understand the climate, and this site has been going on at great detail why that makes “Fallen Angels” seem like a documentary.
Only the gods of government are allowed to pollute and call it good. Witness the EPA spill and other such disasters that the mere citizenry would be in jail for. The government can pollute whatever they want, we all know that.
The US Senate is considering funding for albedo modification geoengineering experiments – People in developing countries are using fire wood, cow-dung cake, agriculture wastes as fuel for daily cooking and they also burn agricultural waste to clear their farmland after harvest thereby pumping particles or aerosols into the stratosphere, to reflect sunlight back into space aiding albedo modification. U.N. should fund this effort.
I predicted years ago that if everyone in the country would put light colored roofs on their houses, drive white cars and use sun screens when they park, that would be enough albedo change to completely eliminate the imaginary global warming.
“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.”
Irony is completely lost on these guys.
Oh great! More funding for Ken Caldeira…
Another potential HUGE GOVERNMENT JOBS PROGRAM!!!
tadchem
April 22, 2016 at 5:46 am
“PROBABLE – Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended, when an intended solution makes a problem worse.
Gary Pearse
April 21, 2016 at 8:39 pm
Willis Eschenbach has shown what would happen in his “emergent phenomena” articles: 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. Only we will now have 60s air pollution back with us on top of it.
When blowing topsoil turned the skies brown throughout much of the 1930s, we seem to have broken all heat records – definitely when we cure the climate mania disorder and correct the temperature record, we will have the mid thirties to forties still the hottest decade in the thermometric record (also true of Greenland northern Europe and across Asia – probably in the southern hemisphere, too)
Actually, someone like Paul Homewood should, with a lot of help, get us back the 1930s record by putting it back where it was and removing all adjustments that aren’t truly justified for years since (and before where they cooled the record. He noted the reversal of trends done by adjustment to Uruguay and Ecuador (IIRC) and we know the famous ones in Australia and New Zealand. A good start would be to simply plot the unadjusted land based records as a first pass. It is likely that much of the record would contain reasonably equal plus and minus temperature biases.
The way it is now, they have an algorithm that continuously adjusts previous temperatures each year (or month?). How zany is that. As Mark Steyn remarked during the Senate hearing, climate scientists are predicting with confidence the temperature in 2100 buy we still can’t predict what the temperature will have been in the 1950s!!!
Personally a civilian scientist volunteer project that spans most countries would be worth investing in.
Anthony has done lets be honest for what he has had at his disposal a phenomenal job on the stations.
If the money was there “Hello Exxon, any cheques?” another data set could (with funding) easily be constructed, using a new network of sensors and volunteers, and within a few years we could have an actual honest more complete surface data set.
it is entirely possible, heck I’d volunteer for Helsinki temps immediately many others would too and I would imagine many would actually take pride in being utterly honest. All the stations would be correctly sited and documented.
This issue is not going anywhere, it’s time we had a non slush fund source, and I don’t care if Exxon Shell BP and all openly supply the money. After all the mission is not to disprove anything, it’s to get an unbiased open to review picture of the situation given the low level of trust in existing data
A cubic kilometer of rock smashed to dust would seem the kind of volcanic load that might have an effect for a year or two. But how to get it 7 miles in to the air?
Please tell me they have not been watching movies of cuddly toys going up under weather balloons.
There is getting it into the air but more importantly if we are talking albedo, keeping it in the stratosphere and controlling it’s dose is entirely another matter.
For particles to remain suspended for long periods the size must be artificially created nano particles and then seeing as they are manufactured, make one side heavier and the other reflective which will on average have most particle reflective side facing upwards, volcanic dust is too large to remain long enough plus where do you introduce the payloads and what are your mitigation strategy if things go wrong.
So you see when you approach this from a project perspectives that involve risk management, the task would and should be abandoned for lack of hard data and knowhow.
Not that I am for the nano particles! just in case it read that way.
Worry!!
..No need to worry about the Earth’s albedo , the coming “Little Ice Age 2” will take care of that in 10 or 15 years !
Everyone accepts the next suddenish cold snap is when not if.
We have no mitigation strategy when 2 bad growing seasons in the breadbaskets of the world, mainly the US grain. There is what? a few months of global grain reserve.
Absolute chaos would reign, marshal law everywhere, mayhem.
It is something that should be planned for if not invested in, given the state of science currently, any signs this is happening will not be acted upon, and will in fact be dismissed and resisted.
How frackin dangerous is that for something that is guaranteed to happen again at some point?!
We would literally need to relocate agriculture, ALL OF IT, to the mid latitudes and tropics if we were to see a NH cooling of significance. That is the real danger, guaranteed outcome when it comes, one not disputed by anyone, and the only thing that would have even the slightest chance of effectively dealing with this involves nuke and fossil fuels, end of bloody story, imagine trying to get through even a NH LIA without nuke and fossil! Obviously there are very good reasons most Canadian’s lived near the US border
If we hit a LIA I vote for the KT to be assigned tree cutting duty in perpetuity or until things warmed up, him and Gore, Obama, Mann and Schmidt all, loggers in a frozen thundra, though to be fair Schmidt’s cloud of smug that surrounds him may create a macro GHG effect and keep him warm.
mark says ” We would literally need to relocate agriculture, ALL OF IT, to the mid latitudes and tropics if we were to see a NH cooling of significance. ”
the chinese have already secured their food supply by doing this in africa.
Dafuq are we talking about experiments? What happened to models?
Especially the swim suit models.