From the UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND, and the unexpected consequence of Geoengineering Department, comes this thesis from a grad student:
Atmospheric aerosols can significantly cool down climate
The study used global climate models to analyse the ability of atmospheric aerosols to cool down the climate, as well as the consequences of their use. The study focused on methods of climate engineering, which intentionally and artificially increase the atmospheric aerosol concentration in order to cool down the climate.
Furthermore, the cooling effects of current atmospheric aerosol emissions were analysed. The study found that aerosol particles injected into the stratosphere proved extremely efficient in cooling down the climate. The method mimics massive volcanic eruptions which release aerosol particles into the stratosphere that reflect solar radiation back into space, thus cooling down the climate even up to years. Atmospheric aerosols injected into the troposphere, on the other hand, can effectively impact the climate through cloud formation. Atmospheric aerosols increase the number of cloud droplets in clouds and make them whiter, which means that they can more effectively reflect solar radiation back into space.
The study also showed that current traffic and industry induced aerosol emissions cool down the climate. However, their cooling effect on the global temperature is significantly smaller than the warming effect of current greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, it would be possible to harness, for example, global airline traffic and ship traffic for the purposes of atmospheric temperature regulation by increasing the sulphuric concentrations of fuels. This would make it possible to significantly increase stratospheric aerosol concentrations and cloud reflectivity in open sea. However, sulphuric concentrations of fuels would have to be increased beyond the levels defined in international agreements. In addition, the cooling effect would mainly be targeted at the northern hemisphere, which is responsible for a far greater share of global traffic than the southern hemisphere.
Climate engineering not enough, greenhouse gas restrictions vital
The study also shows that not even the most promising methods of climate engineering can cool down the climate, unless the growth of greenhouse gas emissions can be brought under control. This is indicated by a study that analysed the climate effects of a volcanic eruption at a time when aerosol concentrations in the stratosphere were increased for climate engineering purposes. The cooling effect of the volcanic eruption was significantly smaller than it would have been under normal circumstances. The sulphur dioxide released in the volcanic eruption combined with the sulphur dioxide injected into the stratosphere for climate engineering purposes leads to relatively larger particle sizes in comparison to a volcanic eruption in current conditions. The ability of large particles to reflect solar radiation is weaker and their life cycle in the atmosphere shorter than those of smaller particles.
In practice, the consequences would be similar in a situation where the stratospheric aerosol concentration is increased for climate engineering purposes. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow, reversing the resulting global warming by climate engineering would require the injection of increasingly large amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere. The consequence would be increasingly large relative particle sizes with a smaller cooling effect, thus weakening the relative effect of climate engineering. This means that climate engineering is not able, not even in theory, to reverse global warming caused by growing greenhouse emissions, if they continue to increase at the current rate also in the future. Moreover, climate engineering can’t fully reverse all consequences of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, such as changes in rainfall. Climate change should be mitigated by reducing greenhouse gases, while climate engineering — even at its best — could provide only temporary relief in situations calling for extreme measures.
The findings were originally published in Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and Environmental Research Letters.
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The doctoral dissertation by Anton Laakso, MSc, entitled Modelling radiative and climate effects of aerosols: from Anthropogenic emissions to geoengineering, is available for download at: https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/161360
These lunatics really should be locked up where they can’t do anyone else any harm.
Entire institutions may need to be built for these crack-pot scientists and their devout cultists once the CAGW meme-machine falls apart.
Re education camps
+1 !
Why “lunatics”? It’s wise to research methods to cool the planet at low cost. I’ve read the thesis and I see a flaw: sulfur can be injected from a separate container into the turbine fuel once the aircraft reaches cruising altitude. This avoids pollution at lower levels, and should enhance cooling from aerosols to such an extent it can offset the greenhouse gas warming effect.
The problem I see is the regional impact, which could hurt local economies and lead to lawsuits. For example, the current climate is very attractive for Spain. The warm weather leads to better crops, and the beaches are much more attractive. Two days ago I went downtown and I had trouble finding a parking spot, this place is crawling with British tourists because the temperature is as high as 25 deg C on the beach.
What could possibly go wrong?
Depends: Are the aerosols benign (to humans)? Are they likely to remain in the stratosphere or settle to earth? Will ambulance-chasing lawyers be building class-action suits for people claiming to be damaged by the aerosols? And, what if the climate naturally reverts to a Maunder – and the aerosols just make that worse?
Like you say, Roger, what could possibly go wrong?
“Another geoengineering scheme plans to use planes and ships to cool the planet”
And plunge us into the next ice age !
What possibly could go wrong?
The effect is controllable. If we cool the climate a bit too much we could just cut back on the aerosol injections. I’m for allowing temperatures to rise another 0.5 deg C and then stabilizing at that level. A parallel effort could be carried out to enhance carbonate deposition in the ocean, and it may be attractive to increase snowfall over the Antarctic peninsula. A slight drop in sea level would give us a wider beach and more tourists.
As soon as man thinks he is smarter than nature that is when things go wrong
What about acid rain?
….and not one word about ocean acidification
…The study also showed that current traffic and industry induced aerosol emissions cool down the climate. …
So…. all the anti-particle pollution laws since the 1960s have had the effect of WARMING the planet, have they?
Was this corrected for in the model runs? Thought not…..
but no empirical evidence that warming is related to fossil fuel emissions
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
If we all just go out and fly reflective foil kites the world will cool by 0.27834637 degrees C. At least that’s what my computer model tells me.
Ummmm… I think legislation for something similar to your suggestion in the works, Mark; The Tinfoil Hat Act of 2016.
Under penalty of fines up to $10,000 and/or imprisonment for non-compliance, we will all be required to WEAR TINFOIL HATS whenever we are outdoors. Of course our stupid legislators never anticipate the Law of Unintended Consequences. With everyone wearing TINFOIL HATS, the BRAIN CONTROL WAVES from the GOVERNMENT BRAIN CONTROL GENERATORS will be blocked. The sheeple will begin to think clearly again and RISE UP TO THROW OFF THE YOKE OF OPPRESSION and decorate the lamp posts of America with the bodies of our ruling elite political class.
Of course that’s just a rumor at the moment and I might have mixed up things with the GOVERNMENT’S GODZILLA – KING KONG HYBRIDIZATION PROJECT USING ALIEN TECHNOLOGY documented in a SPIRAL-BOUND NOTEBOOK THAT FELL OUT OF A UFO, said notebook being kept by OBAMA in his upper-right-hand desk drawer in the Oval Office.
P.S. Grammar check from conspiracy theorists, please. Did I get the CAPS right? TIA.)
P.P.S. Why are conspiracy theories TYPED IN ALL CAPS? Anybody know offhand?
At least is looks like the sensitivity of the climate to aerosols is overblown, because China should be colder than the Antarctic if it wasn’t.
Someone should validate these models before they get used for something expensive!
The models have been invalidated by twenty-plus years of failure to agree with observation. We even know many of the reasons why the models don’t produce correct results. How much more validation is needed to show the models to be inadequate?
This is really about chem-trails, isn’t it?
In times past, these people would be called mad scientists. Today, their ideas are accepted and celebrated whereas the ones who are rational are thought of as being mad.
i guarantee the unintended consequences would be disastrous. Mitigate and adapt is the rational course of action.
Alexwade-
Too true!!
Ian M
I’ve read that plants are about 3% efficient at turning the energy of photons into plant food.
Is this 3% energy that is no longer available to heat things up?
If so, how does the greening of the planet affect subsequent temperatures?
I find this sort of proposal to be extremely troubling. Many of us are quite convinced that, with solar output falling, we’re already headed for a cooler climate. Increasing albedo via aerosols would enhance that cooling, with serious negative consequences for global agricultural output.
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/climate-advocates-ponder-experiments-in-the-atmosphere.html
Which, in turn, would result in famine, which would result in large numbers dying of starvation, which would reduce the human population, which is where all the GHG’s are coming from to keep us fed/clothed/warm/cool, which is what warmists want as a solution anyway, right? Lowering GHG emissions? We’re never going to achieve that unless we do immediate and large-scale adoption of nuclear power and reducing the human population by half. (Sounds a bit dystopian, wouldn’t you agree?)
So yes, enhancing the cooling is precisely what warmists want, but for the wrong reasons.
It has been said that hunger is part of the human condition, and famine requires government.
“It has been said that hunger is part of the human condition, and famine requires government.”
I am so stealing that, Tony! 😀
So, chemtrails ?
[No: ‘chemtrails’. That subject is verboten here. -mod]
Hmmmm, yet the feature article seems to explicitly call for said verboten topic.
It’s only verboten to suggest that it has already begun.
(Anthony gets triggered . . )
I realize the conspiracy is quite reasonably and rightly forbidden. However, I have to say it seems to be an accurate description of this plan. After all, what else do you call a plan to deliberately put chemicals high into the atmosphere to manipulate the planet on a global level? It’s the sort of thing conspiracy theorists have been talking about for decades.
I still think we can’t do it on a scale that’s actually going to affect anything.
Things is, there’s no law against testing such things. There’s no law requiring acknowledgement of any such tests. And, I have read of imaging systems that enable the defense guys to “see” stealth aircraft if an artificial haze is present, that cannot otherwise be detected, which might mean some C-trails have nothing to do with (intentional) weather/climate modification. Etc.
Except the looming problem is how to warm the earth, not cool it.
How about GMO reflective kudzu?
Aha! A fast growing invasive species incorporating the latest in Aluminum reduction biochemistry. The plant leaves become covered in a thin film of metallic Al which gives the plant a brilliant appearance. This feature earns the new species the moniker “Aluminum Plant”. Unfortunately, this name causes massive confusion within the Environmental movement as thousands of Anti-GMO protesters gather outside Reynolds Corp. “Reynolds Wrap” production facilities, which are also known as “Aluminum Plants”.
Aha! A fast growing invasive species incorporating the latest in Aluminum reduction biochemistry. The plant leaves become covered in a thin film of metallic Al which gives the plant a brilliant appearance. This feature earns the new species the moniker “Aluminum Plant”. Unfortunately, this name causes massive confusion within the Environmental movement as thousands of Anti-GMO protesters gather outside Reynolds Corp. “Reynolds Wrap” production facilities, which are also known as “Aluminum Plants”.
Love how they keep coming up with faux solutions to a faux problem.
You might as well drop a nuke into a supervolcano. The unintended consequences would be about the same …
Probably shouldn’t have let that genie out of the bottle. A big geo-engineering fan like Holdren (see climategate Holdren/MacCracken thread), might think it’s a reasonable solution.
That’s right, don’t give them any ideas!
The main effect will be expansion of the legal services industry in legal actions for damages caused by human caused cooling. That is in addition to the evolving prospects for growth in legal action from self driving cars and trucks. These gains will lead to rising CO2 from lawyers spending extravagantly.
Geoengineering a system they don’t fully understand. Yeah, that’s going to end well. What we really should be focused on is stupidity mitigation.
“The study used global climate models…”?
I’ll wager these are the selfsame global climate models that work on low resolution (250 – 600 km per cell) that is absolutely incapable of forecasting the development of a cloud, which occurs on a scale of 0.1 to 10 km.
I had the same thought:
From the article: “The study used global climate models to analyse the ability of atmospheric aerosols to cool down the climate, as well as the consequences of their use.”
They used failed Global Climate Models to analyse their data. Is there any confidence in their results?
I notice that they don’t identify the models that they used.
Something to hide?
It’s only verboten to suggest that the geo-engineering has already started.
“Something like 55% of the modeling done in all of science is done in climate change science, even though it is a tiny fraction of the whole of science. Moreover, within climate change science almost all the research (97%) refers to modeling in some way.”
Found this quote in a recent article published on the CATO Institute web site:
http://www.cato.org/blog/climate-modeling-dominates-climate-science
If this is an early view of a paper that they are publishing, it would be very interesting to see their data and verify their methodology. If correct, it tells a sad story about climate “science”. Perhaps one day, climate scientists will work out that models do not produce data, and that model results are not observations, therefore have no relevance to hypothesis testing.
Just imagine if we all started wearing tin foil hats – what that would to to the albedo? And the unintended consequences can only be beneficial!
Billions will die.
I seem to remember some results from an “accidental” experiment on this topic. Apparently when all planes in the US were grounded for several days after the 9/11 attack, stratospheric aerosols were drastically reduced, enough, Nature reported, to temporarily raise temperatures significantly over the continental US. A link to the brief article is here:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~rennert/etc/courses/pcc587/ref/Travis-etal2002_Nature.pdf
If that for a few days could raise temperatures, what must have been the effect, from the 70’s onward, of the cleanup of pollution (real pollution, like aerosols, not CO2) on the US temperature during the 80s and 90s?
I don’t know how valid the 9/11 study was, but if you accept the Nature premise, you have to believe that the “man-made” warming during that period had little to do with CO2 emissions and a lot to do with pollution cleanup.
Ironic.
So the claim is that more air pollution is good.
Hm. I guess if they can’t actually FIND a problem, they need to MAKE one (and blame it on global warming, of course). Every Single Thing they touch goes wrong. Their ideas don’t work. Their efforts do enormous damage. This has always been the way. Gang Green seems immune to knowledge. Gang Green is certainly immune to learning. Is there any safe place for Saviors of the Planet? May I propose Mars?
What a great idea to use various forms of pollution to counter ‘Climate Change’, what could possibly go wrong with that great idea? I suppose it is all based on those infallible ‘Climate Models’.
If this crazy-talk ever got green-lit, the Finnish could well be the first real climate refugees, fleeing south to escape the advancing glaciers. 😐
Classic warmist alarmist junk research.
Hand on the joystick, models run on fantasy, data garbage out to the cheers of dipsey media and the alarmist disaster bed-wetters.
Wasn’t there a Project West Ford aimed at injecting iron slivers into the troposphere to help Defense communications? Permanent ? Madness
From Abstract “increasing cloud albedo by increasing the cloud droplet number concentration in the clouds”
This is already being done folks make no mistake
They have been doing it for at least 20 years, spraying alumnium/barium all over the US and oceans