Guest essay by Eric Worrall
With the prospect of trillions of dollars of climate cash well and truly fading, researchers seem to be bidding down the price tag for saving the planet.
Blocking out the sun to fight global warming: Bob McDonald
Solar geoengineering is controversial but proponents say we have no choice
By Bob McDonald, CBC News Posted: Mar 31, 2017 5:55 PM ET Last Updated: Mar 31, 2017 5:55 PM ET
In light of the new U.S. administration’s decision to cut back on environmental protection and cultivate the coal industry, carbon emissions are unlikely to go down over the next four years.
So scientists are considering a scheme to shade the atmosphere from the sun and cool the Earth to compensate for global warming. It’s a risky plan.
The concept is called Solar Geoengineering. One of the ways it could work, scientists say, is by injecting tiny particles high into the atmosphere, where they where together they would act as a sun shield, reflecting sunlight back into space and cooling the planet.
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When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, 20 million metric tonnes of sulphur dioxide was blown into the stratosphere. There the molecules reacted with water vapour to form tiny particles that were carried on high altitude winds, producing a global haze. The average temperature of the Earth dropped by 0.5 C for more than a year after the eruption.
The geoengineering project would do the same thing on a much smaller scale, using a fleet of aircraft to spray 250,000 metric tonnes of sulphur dioxide, or some other material such as calcite into the lower stratosphere.
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Scientists estimate that by brightening the atmosphere with these particles, they could reflect one percent of sunlight back into space and provide enough cooling to balance the warming effect of the carbon emissions coming from industry.
Harvard Professor David Keith estimates the project would have to be an international effort and cost about $1 billion to $10 billion per year. That sounds like a lot, but it pales compared to the U.S. military budget, for example, which is expected to increase to $639 billion dollars in 2017.
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Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/bob-macdonald-blocking-sun-global-warming-1.4050149
While it might seem tempting to take this special offer price for saving the world, I suggest if we wait a bit longer, we might see even more extraordinary price cuts. Who knows, next year’s price for saving the world might be a 100K research grant and a few packs of smokes.
They are starting to like the crooked kind of used car salesmen.
(You raised the hood and it doesn’t have an engine? How we lower the price to …)
This would be comical if people weren’t actually trying to do it, and obviously seriously upset.
I mean, it’s not the sun’s energy that’s the problem, but we have to block some of the sun’s energy that’s the problem.
We’re damaging the system via massive inputs whose consequences we don’t understand, so the only solution is more massive inputs whose consequences we don’t understand.
I guess once you get far enough down the rabbit hole, nothing else matters but digging.
I’ll cancel AGW and I’ll do it for only $100 million a year, and I’ll guarantee the results – in 40 years you will see that the sea levels have not risen more than 3 inches, and the temperature has not risen more than .5 degrees F, and we’ll still have ice at the poles and snow in the winter.
I will take a cashiers check, or PayPal. But hurry, this deal won’t be around much longer…
In CA they say we need to minimize particles introduced into the air, be it from a wood stove in your living room, a diesel truck on the road, burning of rice field remnants or a factory smokestack, because the increased risk of cardiopulmonary disease to the populace is just too dangerous…….now it’s OK to spew millions of tons to fight AGW?
Cancelling all “AP Warming” costs literally nothing after the bodies all decay.
I know what scares me more than the ever so slight warming caused by CO2 and that is Eco warriors using geo engineering on planet earth….they scare the poop out of me with there crazy ideas…
“Cleanup, aisle five! “
I would have a much better idea. My idea would be to prescribe to everyone wearing a white umbrella 1.5 meters by 1.5 meters. There are also suits, pants dresses, tennis shoes and blouses only to be made of white fabric and white sharks should swim on their backs. Also the wearing of a white Donald Trump cap (in white not in red) is to prescribe. I do not know exactly what area of the earth can be covered with it, but the amount of radiation emitted into space will be considerable. The OLR will therefore increase by exactly 0.00007 percent. In addition, the search for any solar studios should be prohibited, so that in the eventual beach visit unbroken white bodies can radiate LR into space, at least as long as the color is red. And please also think of white mice and elephants.
We have kidnapped your planet. If you want to see you planet alive again it will cost you 10 Billion dollars. Do not attempt to contact the police. wait by your phone for further instructions.
Polluting the whole atmosphere, in order to reduce CO2, crippling all vegetation and reducing all agricultural output, all on the basis of an unproven connecton between CO2 and temperature, what could possibly go wrong with all that?
Here’s David Keith on spraying aluminum:
Do you have a pithy summary for those of us without a spare one hour and forty five minutes?
If that what it takes to shut up the greens……I say spend it
Nah. CAGW funding was zero at the green climate ideal, during the end of the 19th century small ice age. Perhaps the funding has changed the climate?
Let’s cut all funding to the last penny. We can even revisit the matter year 2154. Perhaps the average global outside air CO2 concentration and temperature anomalies will be even closer to zero than now. Worth a try.
Gee, this is so inexpensive, warmista governments and allegedly “at-risk” nations can pick up the tab all by themselves, without US funding. Why would they hesitate? Unless they never really believed in AGW, and it always about redistribution of wealth. Am I too cynical?
Remember when some geoengineering “team” was polluting the ocean with iron back in 2009 when El Nino showed how it’s done the right way? Millions of tonnes of central Australian iron-rich silt were blasted into the Pacific by powerful spring westerlies: a Big Dust such as we get every few decades. I doubt Team even noticed as they were too busy polluting. (Those mineral-rich melty glaciers perform a similar service to Big Dusts…but don’t tell Team.)
Here’s a thought. What if a bit of cooling – there were already major cold events BEFORE Tambora – combined with some volcanism on the scale of Laki or Tambora were to occur just as our geo-polluters were going mainstream with their gunky particulates?
A law suit wouldn’t quite cover it, methinks.
Thermalization/reverse-thermalization and the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution of gas molecules explain why CO2 has no significant effect on climate. A potentially more important factor to humanity than failing to acknowledge that CO2 has no significant effect on climate is failing to recognize what actually does.
You sure sound like that Cotton guy that used to post nonsense here a lot.
That ‘Cotton guy’ was right about CO2 having no significant effect on climate but he apparently never understood why, and I agree, he posted a lot of nonsense.
Wow, even the Weather Network is changing it’s tune…
“Underwater drought is unprecedented in human history !”
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/beneath-the-dead-sea-is-evidence-of-unprecedented-drought/80848/?intcmp=twn_promo_news4”
They mention “unprecedented-drought”, but 100,000 years ago…
If I was going to attempt something like this, I’d try putting a tiny amount of a cheap, combustible organo-titanium compound in jet fuel, or inject it directly into the engine exhaust. The Titanium dioxide produced should do the job nicely. I’m surprised some crazy hasn’t already applied for a grant to try it out.
I no longer watch news (except Fox; except on weekends) nor read any newspapers ( except the Financial Post opinion on Tuesday thru Friday) so I no longer know what is going on in my country (Canada), so could someone tell me – Have Canadians been informed by their national media that the west coast of Canada just had a winter that averaged 2 degrees C below normal?
So, alarmists claim that we are conducting a planetary wide experiment by burning fossil fuels releasing climate changing CO2 which is dangerously wrong, but this is OK? Humm…
I have no problem with this idea.
As long as they use their own money, not mine.
And as long as they use their own planet, not mine.
No problem at all…
Why accelerate natural climate COOLING?
We have already had about 8000 years of cooling since the Holocene Optimum towards the next GLACIATION.
See USGS on the Great Ice Age and the North American Glacial Extent
See the extent of glacial deposits.
How are we going to prevent the “Rust belt” from becoming the next “Glacier belt”?
And destroying almost ALL of Canada?
Its far more dangerous to actively cool when we are already well along the trend towards the next glaciation – then to warm and increase CO2 with $ trillions in corresponding agricultural benefits.
Its “Spring Break”! Massive migration FROM northern USA TO FLORIDA where its warmer.
Why the panic over greater warmth when almost all the short term and long term migration is FROM COLDER TO WARMER States?
http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/4500/4546/4546.gif
I bet Steyer, the Rockefellers, Soros and the like wish they could have the 100 B back they spent on trying to get HRC elected. They would pony up the cash for this project, wouldn’t they? So the cost is 1 to 10Billion a year. You can tell a real engineer isn’t making such a stupid estimate, but some jerk in Harvard is without even consulting their own engineers.Sulphur fob is ~$100/t, shipping it and burning it in a dedicated, plant, say 150/t sulphur dioxide. This Keith guy then thinks 250,000t of SO2 is a lot! a calculation in this thread above stated that Pinatubo put out 80 times this amount to achieve an 0.5C drop for a year or so. This means we really need 20million tonnes SO2 for each injection. According to the USGS, Global production of sulphur is 70M tonnes and this is used in making fertilizers, and hundreds of other products. 20Mt SO2 is equivalent
to 10Mt of sulphur.
The only enjoyment one gets from this climate gong show is the irony. The big joke is that discretionary sources of sulphur amount to 11% of the total the other 89% comes from cleaning it from sour natural gas, petroleum refining and sulphide metal smelting. That got you laughing or crying? Then how ’bout the fact that the oil sands refining is a major source of sulphur so we will have to crank up output of hydrocarbons, particularly oil sands and smelter gases to get the raw material we need. I would say, this demand could double sulphur prices. 70% of sulphur production goes into making phosphate fertilizers – I guess to save the planet, we will have to starve to do it in a new way they hadn’t thought of.
“The only enjoyment one gets from this climate gong show”
I laughed at that one! “Gong show” is the perfect comparison to the climate change circus.
Look, if you pay me just half a billion a year, I will fix it for you. Aside from the cash, all I need is access to the temperature data, and you will never see global warming again.
+97
So they believe that our climate can be improved by adding more particulate and arisol polution to the atmosphere. A good way to achieve that would be to not allow measures that reduce polutants. They can convert natural gas fired plants to dirty coal fired plants. Force car manufactures to modify engine systems so that they produce more smoke in their ehhaust. Prohibit all measures used to inhibit smoke. To help increase the Earth’s albedo, forests can be replaced with white painted surfaces. We should all paint our roof tops white including solar panels. Everything that can be painted white should by law be painted white in order to increase the Earth’s albedo.
This is the original paper on Geoengineering Cost Analysis prepared by Aurora Flight Sciences (Cambridge, MA) in 2010 that David Keith commissioned when he was at the Univ of Calgary (before Harvard).
http://www.agriculturedefensecoalition.org/sites/default/files/file/pdfs/jet_trails/25_1_2010_University_of_Calgary_Geoengineering_Cost_Analysis_Using_Jets_October_30_2010_Aurora_Flight_Sciences_Final_Report_Keith.pdf
Keith was asked at a scientific conference a couple of years later by fellow scientists what the consequences would be and Keith admitted he had no clue, that no one knew. I downloaded a copy of this response but can’t find it–bad labeling on my part.
Wasn’t the whole CO2 thing started by ENRON trying to figure out how to make multo-bucks from CO2 after they made $20 billion from sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade? That’s what a New Zealand investigative team discovered, published circa 2008, or at least when I encountered it. ENRON expressed the wish in 1990, according to this investigative team, that ENRON would love to figure out how to make CO2 a pollutant in order to repeat these profits. It was before they cornered the great Nobel winner Al Gore to assist them, and before they engineered the Kyoto Protocol in 1996.
An article about Dr. Strangelove David Keith:
https://truth11.com/2012/07/20/gates-funded-experiment-to-spray-atmosphere-with-sulphur-particles-geoengineering-threatens-to-worsen-droughts-starve-millions/
And this:
David Keith is a f**g phony and danger to humanity.
ENRON was certainly a player, but the big push came from Margaret Thatcher.
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
No-one in the real world paid any attention to Al Gore until he made his film.
With Gore’s 50 mistakes that a British judge determined had to be revealed to British schoolchildren before it was aired in their classes.
She wasn’t the smartest knife in the drawer, was she. Of course, her goal was defeating the coal miners and their strike.
What has been unveiled about 40 decades after Maggie’s reign? Well, her opposition blindfolded, with fingers in the ears and megaphones blaring while cheese in the mouth and neck stuck in a mousetrap. Can’t see an easy recovery. For this reason, whatever opinion I hold of Maggie now, dull knife she isn’t part of it.
Meant to write 3-4 decades. But no big deal, green fears are demonstrated immune to precision and magnitude.
Are these guys insane? Even if we actually needed to do something about AGW, this is crazy!
OK, the maximum weight that an Airbus A380 can lift is 640 metric tons (that is, the design alows it, I’m not sure about the engines). The A380 can theoretically reach 12 km high, the minimum for lower stratosphere.
250.000 metric tons of whatever means 391 A380 flights actually per year – because most of whatever is sprayed into the lower stratosphere will precipitate out of the atmosphere in a year. An A380 costs roughly 500 mil. $ and you need several because obviously you need to spread whatever all over the world. Besides, they need to be converted to carry whatever it is instead of passengers and their luggage.
From here on you can play with numbers depending on how many A380 you use (at 500 mil. $ a pop – the more you have, the fewer miles each has to fly) and calculate the use of fuel, maintenance, …. but I’ll bet that it is WAY above 1 bil. $!
If the whatever is sulfur dioxide, it all comes down in the form of sulfuric acid, remember, that’s acid rain – so WTF are coal-fired power stations equipped with SO2 filters?!?!?
I thought this audience would be open to understanding that atmospheric CO2 is a resource, not a problem. 1) More green leaves, saving millions from starvation. 2) Iron seeding to save our fisheries, Are their people who don’t want to declare victory?