From the UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Proposals to reduce the effects of global warming by imitating volcanic eruptions could have a devastating effect on global regions prone to either tumultuous storms or prolonged drought, new research has shown.
Geoengineering – the intentional manipulation of the climate to counter the effect of global warming by injecting aerosols artificially into the atmosphere – has been mooted as a potential way to deal with climate change.
However new research led by climate experts from the University of Exeter suggests that targeting geoengineering in one hemisphere could have a severely detrimental impact for the other.
They suggest that while injections of aerosols in the northern hemisphere would reduce tropical cyclone activity – responsible for such recent phenomena including Hurricane Katrina – it would at the same time lead to increased likelihood for drought in the Sahel, the area of sub-Saharan Africa just south of the Sahara desert.
In response, the team of researchers have called on policymakers worldwide to strictly regulate any large scale unilateral geoengineering programmes in the future to prevent inducing natural disasters in different parts of the world.
The study is published in leading scientific journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, November 14 2017.
Dr Anthony Jones, A climate science expert from the University of Exeter and lead author on the paper said:
“Our results confirm that regional solar geoengineering is a highly risky strategy which could simultaneously benefit one region to the detriment of another. It is vital that policymakers take solar geoengineering seriously and act swiftly to install effective regulation.”
The innovative research centres on the impact solar geoengineering methods that inject aerosols into the atmosphere may have on the frequency of tropical cyclones.
The controversial approach, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, is designed to effectively cool the Earth’s surface by reflecting some sunlight before it reaches the surface. The proposals mimic the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, when aerosols are naturally injected into the atmosphere.
In the study, the researchers use sophisticated simulations with a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean model to investigate the effect of hemispheric stratospheric aerosol injection on North Atlantic tropical cyclone frequency.
They find injections of aerosols in the northern hemisphere would decrease North Atlantic tropical cyclone frequency, while injections contained to the southern hemisphere may potentially enhance it.
Crucially, the team warn however that while tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic could be suppressed by northern hemisphere injections, this would, at the same time, induce droughts in the Sahel.
These results suggest the uncertain effects of solar geoengineering — a proposed approach to counteract global warming — which should be considered by policymakers.
Professor Jim Haywood, from the Mathematics department at the University of Exeter and co-author of the study added:
“This research shows how a global temperature target such as 1.5 or 2C needs to be combined with information on a more regional scale to properly assess the full range of climate impacts.”
The research, Impacts of hemispheric solar geoengineering on tropical cyclone frequency, is published in the journal Nature Communications.
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The study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01606-0
Impacts of hemispheric solar geoengineering on tropical cyclone frequency
Abstract
Solar geoengineering refers to a range of proposed methods for counteracting global warming by artificially reducing sunlight at Earth’s surface. The most widely known solar geoengineering proposal is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which has impacts analogous to those from volcanic eruptions. Observations following major volcanic eruptions indicate that aerosol enhancements confined to a single hemisphere effectively modulate North Atlantic tropical cyclone (TC) activity in the following years. Here we investigate the effects of both single-hemisphere and global SAI scenarios on North Atlantic TC activity using the HadGEM2-ES general circulation model and various TC identification methods. We show that a robust result from all of the methods is that SAI applied to the southern hemisphere would enhance TC frequency relative to a global SAI application, and vice versa for SAI in the northern hemisphere. Our results reemphasise concerns regarding regional geoengineering and should motivate policymakers to regulate large-scale unilateral geoengineering deployments.
Didn’t one of the “Highlander” movies do something like that?
It was Highlander II: The Quickening. Invented a machine to keep the Ozone from depleating and caused a red cloud that blocked out the sunlight.
Artificially screwing with our atmosphere is a bad idea. Sure. That was just a fictional movie but it shows how stupid people can be. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.
“Artificially screwing with our atmosphere is a bad idea.”
And before any CO2 hating twerp comes along and says something about CO2 being artifical.
NO.
We are just returning MUCH NEEDED but accidentally sequestered carbon back into the Carbon Cycle WHERE IT BELONGS.
Where all plant life can use it and thus feed and nourish ALL life on this glorious carbon-based organic Earth of ours.
You know the funny part is Oxygen is also a pollutant under the strange definition they use. There is also the other perverse way of looking at it, that plants only dump oxygen into the atmosphere so they can respire it back again at night when they can’t photosynthesize. We are stealing the plants nightly oxygen reserves and should be ashamed of ourselves.
It’s amazing how many stupid social editorials you can build if you have a fertile mind and there is a bucket of cash at coming up with a good story.
I remember the Mad Scientists of old movies.
Why tinker with the little stuff? Geoengineer the Sun.
So by definition that would be polluting the earth to control the climate. Can’t make this stuff up.
No, it is not ‘pollution’ when they do it.
Yeah pollution is a very flexible definition, you may well call oxygen pollution of plants.
Are we not doing this process in urban areas — that occupy around one-third of the land area –? We are injecting pollutants [particulate matter] in to the atmosphere — not CO2 –, which is increasing with the time and intensity of urbanisation. The two critical issues in urbanisation are destruction of green belts and water bodies. All these change the energy balance.
I published an article “Effect of air pollution on radiation and human comfort over six Indian stations”, Indian J. Met. Geophys. (1974), 25: 441-444.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Yes people = parasites, we don’t have a balance with anything in nature. The problem is any solution requires radical change that most of us cast that problem forward to the next generation.
Absolute rubbish Dr Jeevananda.
What if Everyone Lived in Just One City?
Interesting video RexAlan, but absolutely nothing to do with the statements that Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy was even talking about. How come you trash someone as you did referring to their comment as rubbish and don’t even address the issue they had mentioned?
Apologies Earthling2. I took exception to Dr Jeevananda’s assertion that urban areas occupy around one third of the earths land area. Maybe if we include areas under agriculture the one third figure could possibly be correct. That is why I linked to the video to show how little space all the urban areas would take up if they were all combined.
I don’t think you meant to imply that urban landscape occupies one-third of the planet, it doesn’t. Our footprint on the planet is much smaller than the eco-psychotics like to imagine.
Urban areas are 1/3rd of land surface?
Not on any planet that I’m familiar with!
More like 1%, if that high.
Cities and adjacent suburbs/rural are 1% of the land area globally. Land use change is a further 10%, so 10%-11% is only a 1/3 of the claim that 1/3 of total land surface is touched by humans. This was in a WUWT article just last month. 11% is still significant and adds a fair bit of UHI convection heat, which adds to the LWIR radiation that H2O and CO2 delay, all of which must balance and lose heat (cool) on its way out to space.
“climate experts from the University of Exeter “. Now that’s what I call an oxymoron.
We don’t dare try to modify tropical cyclones for fear we’ll make them worse or point them on a course for even more devastation and risk assuming the implied liability that accompanies such unintended consequences, Yet we dare talk about geoengineering the world? Sure.
In certain parts, the major source of water is through cyclonic activity. If they are weakened or destroyed the system, precipitation will be severely affected in downwind direction. Because of this reason, I sent a report to AP state government in India to stop cloud seeding practice as the seeding company invariable was seeding such systems only. When we questioned the seeding agency on this at a technical committee meeting, they replied back saying that it is not part of their agreement. With my report, government stopped granting funds for that project. In fact China Olympics, they used this technique to stop rains in the games arena and farmers downwind direction fought with the government..
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
This game is insanity. I can’t fathom the hubris of anyone thinking they can manipulate global temps. Wow!!
And how many angels do live on a pinhead, you said?
and how many Gods live inside computers?
Climate Models are the contemporary ultimate buck-pass.
All they have actually done is hold some sort of brain-storming session, maybe at a nice hotel owned by Mr Trump, and decided what they imagine is: What sorts of ‘y’ are going happen if we do ‘x’
Then they program up a computer thus
10 Print ‘Hello World’
20 Print ‘If aerosols then less hurricane and more drought’
30 End
Right, there’s me set up as a Climate Scientist although admittedly not a ‘distinguished’ one, need to produce a crappy little graph for that. Hang on a mo, watch this space.
My job’s done, where’s my £60,000 annual salary, Ivory Tower office-space, trips to Paris and solid-gold pension to look forward to?
Love how the hapless Sahel gets a mention – obviously everyone’s Dream Holiday to go there..
A long time ago there were semi-nomadic herders, cows, not sheep or goats. Sheep are like goats and will eat anything/everything and came from Syria originally. We can all see what a fertile green idyll that place is nowadays.
Why don’t Climate Scientists go there for COPs – and admire the lovely forests of Cedar trees?
The nomadic herders basically followed the sun as it went back and forth across the Equator on an annual basis, leaving a trail of wet weather as it went. This grew grass and the cows ate it.
Then came the politicians and divided up that part of the world into their sweet little countries – putting up fences and border-posts & controls and armed policeman & soldiers.
The cow herders couldn’t then ‘follow the sun’ and were stuck on the same old patch of ground which got eaten bare by the cows, until they died, then sheep until they died, then goats until they died and then, surprise surprise, people died.
And Climate Change did it, but we all (round here at least) knew that.
Total fools
WE have been doing stratospheric aerosol injections since WWII. Its called aircraft, that leave contrails high in the atmosphere.
Not chemtrails, contrails.
It almost certainly has had an effect on global climate, though what that effect is and how great is highly debatable.
Probably an albedo cooling effect.
A lot of white that otherwise would not be there.
Maybe not. I believe they imitate stratospheric clouds, which have a warming effect
Remember after Sept 11/11, when the air traffic was shut down over North America for 3 days, that daytime temps were a bit warmer (about 1 degree) and night time temps were lower also about a degree. No effective change over the 24 hour day, but a 2 degree difference between daytime highs and nighttime lows.
When air traffic is busy as it is now always, then the incoming solar insolation in the daytime is partially reflected as wispy albedo and the nighttime outbound LWIR is partially delayed through the same medium, therefore warming at night. High altitude air traffic may be more potent at a higher altitude just because it is introducing new water vapour residue. It would be good to see more research is this field, because there does seem to be a cause and effect by human activities.
I always wondered where the well-known expression came from, but I didn’t realise that it was talking about man’s contribution of CO2: “might as well fart in a thundersorm”
Before they tell us about the predictions their models make they might at least prove that the models are accurate. They haven’t even done that yet.
Well, to be fair, you can’t prove that the models are accurate when…the models aren’t accurate. LOL
Exeter at least manages a sensible answer- don’t screw about with geo-engineering because there is zero evidence that the sort of loons who have created today’s fashionable panic have any understanding of what they claim or are doing.
To be fair, Exeter is no worse than the Looniversity of East Anglia which has just been admonished for making misleading claims to prospective students about the league table excellence of its courses. While of course many of its courses are excellent, the antics of its absurdly named climate department continues to be an embarrassment to any notion of academic integrity.
Bit late in the day for this article to get an airing: Stratopheric Aerosol Geo-engineering (SAG) has been used since the 1970s (possibly before that), & it’s already mucking up the weather; see Geo-engineering Watch. Plus, hving lived under the direct flightpath for Bentwaters I do know the difference between “chem-trails” & con-/vapour trails: the latter never formed dodgy looking cloud cover but disappeared (time taken for this depended on temperatures)
Stupid humans think they can get one over on Mother Nature? This, along with our perceived cleverness in developing artificial intelligence might just be the end of us.
When they say aerosols, they mean sulfate aerosols. Not clouds, which only last for minutes but long-lasting sulfate molecules which can stay up for a year or longer.
Sulfate aerosols will destroy Ozone if injected into the stratosphere.
All this effort went into the south pole Ozone Hole, yet these scientists are so obsessed with this idea, that they are perfectly ready to just go up and damage the Ozone layer.
They are the definition of “mad scientist” and should be locked up as soon as they try anything. There is also a UN Convention signed by all countries that prevent one from even experimenting with this so we can lock them up.
So what about the danger of destroying all means of CO2 production and returning to the days of
pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels, which are not great enough to provide enough crops for
the world’s population? If more CO2 is needed, where is it going to come from? Global warmists only worry about too much CO2, never thinking of what will happen if they actually succeed if they remove all or most human CO2 generation. No PLan B, one would say. Not even an acknowledgement that a PLan B is needed.
Anyone asking about the components of the “aerosols”? A little information …
“Climate change is the greatest threat we face in the 21st century.”
Geoengineering makes that a true statement. Billions will die.
“Artificially cooling the planet is a ‘risky strategy’”
Yes. So would be having nuclear armed space stations manned by monkeys to ward off any attacks by space aliens.
Good effort Bruce but I don’t really think you can effectively parody something quite this stupid and run always headlong into Poe’s law. Poe likely had climate alarmism is mind when formulating his universal law.
Climate models. The synthetic CDOs of science, creating actual risk out of unfounded certainty heaped upon a whole barrel full of assumptions.
And yes we keep giving these guys too much money.
Ive read The Big Short many times and listen to the audio book. Even have the movie. Such a fantastic display of stupidity. More layers than an onion.
The Alarmists love piling Stupid on top of Stupid on top of still more Stupid, hoping we’ll knock down the top layer of Stupid, and dust off our hands and say, “there, that’s done”, not noticing the even bigger, deeper layers of Stupid underneath. It’s really a stupid ploy though on their part.
Bruce – you have now put a picture in our minds of a nuclear armed space station manned by a bunch of chimpanzees playing poker with bananas to decide who gets the first go at pressing the big shiny red button. Larson would love it.
It’s Stupid all the way down.
Climate “expert”? I guess ‘science’ has neg connotations in the communications fraternity. We have to keep all these lucky-to-be-highschool-science-teachers-in-earlier-generations types (thanks S. McIntyre) from adventures with Geo or any other kind of gerryrigineering the planet. Engineering deals with properly calculated outcomes, not botched SciFifantasy.
Wasting trillions on computer games is one thing, this is something else! Thank goodness Trump cancelled global warming before they graduated their first geogangreeneering professionals. Once you create a title in wifty-poofty disciplines for someone, idiосу is closer to happening. The momentum of the dead ‘science’ of global warming is entirely due to titles like Chair of Global Climate Alarum, Ministry of Tipping Points and the like, what else can they do? They have mortgages, and children in uniperversity, too.
… it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
As a Canadian living on the prairies, I would consider any attempt to lower temperatures further, an act of war.
Heh-heh. As a Minnesotan, I have to agree. But SO2 is not a well mixed gas. How would you feel about Qatar using SO2 to lower their local temps (and incidentally global avg T) so as to increase their food security?