From RUTGERS UNIVERSITY and the “don’t start” department.
Rutgers researchers co-author first study on biological impacts of abruptly ending efforts to cool Earth’s climate
Facing a climate crisis, we may someday spray sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to form a cloud that cools the Earth, but suddenly stopping the spraying would have a severe global impact on animals and plants, according to the first study on the potential biological impacts of geoengineering, or climate intervention.
The study was published online today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper was co-authored by Rutgers Distinguished Professor Alan Robock, research associate Lili Xia and postdoc Brian Zambri, all from the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Other co-authors were from the University of Maryland, Yale University and Stony Brook University.
“Rapid warming after stopping geoengineering would be a huge threat to the natural environment and biodiversity,” Robock said. “If geoengineering ever stopped abruptly, it would be devastating, so you would have to be sure that it could be stopped gradually, and it is easy to think of scenarios that would prevent that. Imagine large droughts or floods around the world that could be blamed on geoengineering, and demands that it stop. Can we ever risk that?”
Geoengineering means attempting to control the climate in addition to stopping the burning of fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming, Robock said. While scientists have studied the climate impacts of geoengineering in detail, they know almost nothing about its potential impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, the study notes.
The geoengineering idea that’s attracted the most attention is to create a sulfuric acid cloud in the upper atmosphere as large volcanic eruptions do, Robock said. The cloud, formed after airplanes spray sulfur dioxide, would reflect solar radiation and cool the planet. But airplanes would have to continuously fly into the upper atmosphere to maintain the cloud because it would last only about a year if spraying stopped, Robock said. He added that the airplane spraying technology may be developed within a decade or two.
In their study, the scientists used a global scenario with moderate cooling through geoengineering, and looked at the impacts on land and in the ocean from suddenly stopping it. They assumed that airplanes would spray 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide a year into the upper atmosphere at the Equator from 2020 to 2070. That’s the annual equivalent of about one quarter of the sulfur dioxide ejected during the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, Robock said.
The spraying would lead to an even distribution of sulfuric acid clouds in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. And that would lower the global temperature by about 1 degree Celsius (about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) – about the level of global warming since the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-1800s. But halting geoengineering would lead to rapid warming – 10 times faster than if geoengineering had not been deployed, Robock said.
The scientists then calculated how fast organisms would have to move to remain in the climate – in terms of both temperature and precipitation — that they are accustomed to and could survive in, he said.
“In many cases, you’d have to go one direction to find the same temperature but a different direction to find the same precipitation,” Robock said. “Plants, of course, can’t move reasonably at all. Some animals can move and some can’t.”
He noted that national parks, forests and wildlife refuges serve as sanctuaries for animals, plants and other organisms. But if rapid warming forced them to move, and even if they could move fast enough, they may not be able find places with enough food to survive, he said.
One surprising side effect of rapidly starting geoengineering would be an El Niño warming of the sea surface in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which would cause a devastating drought in the Amazon, he said.
“We really need to look in a lot more detail at the impact on specific organisms and how they might adapt if geoengineering stops suddenly,” he said.
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The study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0431-0
Potentially dangerous consequences for biodiversity of solar geoengineering implementation and termination
Abstract
Solar geoengineering is receiving increased policy attention as a potential tool to offset climate warming. While climate responses to geoengineering have been studied in detail, the potential biodiversity consequences are largely unknown. To avoid extinction, species must either adapt or move to track shifting climates. Here, we assess the effects of the rapid implementation, continuation and sudden termination of geoengineering on climate velocities—the speeds and directions that species would need to move to track changes in climate. Compared to a moderate climate change scenario (RCP4.5), rapid geoengineering implementation reduces temperature velocities towards zero in terrestrial biodiversity hotspots. In contrast, sudden termination increases both ocean and land temperature velocities to unprecedented speeds (global medians >10 km yr−1) that are more than double the temperature velocities for recent and future climate change in global biodiversity hotspots. Furthermore, as climate velocities more than double in speed, rapid climate fragmentation occurs in biomes such as temperate grasslands and forests where temperature and precipitation velocity vectors diverge spatially by >90°. Rapid geoengineering termination would significantly increase the threats to biodiversity from climate change.
I have to admit that I don’t understand this, although it appears on a second look to be another hands-out for “grant money to complete the study”, which is no surprise.
The consequences of meddling with a large system like a planetary atmosphere aren’t even considered in this insane proposal. If they’re this concerned, why aren’t they living on Mars? Mars is a permanent freezer state now, its atmosphere is slowly trickling away because it’s magnetic core was blown out by some impact several billion years ago, and now sits rusting on the surface. If these clowns want to do geo-engineering, there’s a perfect spot for it, isn’t it?
The scary part is that they might even try it when, as others have pointed out, something so lame-brained only requires using high-sulfur coal and/or not scrubbing the SO2 out of the exhaust from power station stacks.
Have any of these geniuses even considered that the Sun, which lights our days and warms the planet we live on, is in a prolonged solar minimum and there is no guesstimate underway regarding how long it will last. This is exactly how stupid these people are. Maybe they should spend some time in Yakutia, camped out on the Road of Bones. I hear it’s a balmy -80F+\- over there right now, and the sun is setting in my kingdom.
You have to be married. From my experience all the good ones are taken.
No, Foghorn. It was one of those unfortunate occurrences that happen to people. I wanted him but he didn’t want me, and 45 years later, when I ran across him on another blog, all he did was whine about his wife and having only one offspring. I moved on.
I guess I’m just not mercenary enough.
A number of these studies started coming out a couple of years ago. I think it’s no accident. The great money scam is underway once more.
It always amazes me, and also saddens me, the amount of money and time these people spend studying such nonsense. So much effort for nothing. Imagine if the same effort were employed for real issues in the world.
And that is the true tragedy of it all.
Evidently the mundane facts of life and the earth aren’t sexy/exciting/attention grabbing enough so they must make stuff up. What amazes me is that they get some traction with these goof ball ideas.
It IS just as exciting. It just doesn’t pay as well.
It’s even more upsetting once you realise that it’s your money being spent!
‘…your money being spent.’ THAT is my biggest objection to this speculative nonsense.
There are to date, little if any concrete results coming out of this so-called research. It’s easier to understand how iron concretions formed in the Mazon Creek fossil fields, when the area I live in was the delta of a river emptying into an inland sea. I have a shrimp fossil I collected on a museum trip to Braidwood. It was all tropics up here back then, and tropics are warm, wet and usually thriving with small and large aquatic critters. So if it was okay for the Earth to be wet, warm and full of fish back then (300 million years ago) and life was plentiful, why do these clowns who style themselves “scientists” think it’s so awful now?
Why? Because they get money to say so and it fills a political agenda, that’s why.
All the comments about the insanity of fooling about with the atmosphere in this way are absolutely correct. But if these people don’t even know that there is nothing “surprising” or new about about El Nino’s creating droughts in the Amazon then they expose their staggering ignorance and unsuitability to give lessons or take any action to alter the Earth’s climate by their donkey brain experiments (apologies to donkeys everywhere).
To late …
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaning-up-air-pollution-may-strengthen-global-warming/
That’s all we need. To deliberately increase acid rain thru pumping SO2 into sky. We spend millions and millions of dollars removing SO2 from flue gases. These people are dangerous.
The movie “Snowpiercer” is set on a future Earth where this very thing, spraying something into the atmosphere, produces a “snowball Earth” scenario. It’s also a commentary on social stratification with some interesting plot twists.
Hah! When I first saw this article, the headline was
https://www.wired.com/story/how-engineering-earths-climate-could-seriously-imperil-life/
I admit I didn’t read it (getting fatigue with 30% to 50% of my science news feeds being about CAGW ™ ) but I assumed someone was actually talking sense. Of course “engineering the climate” is a risk!
Silly me. They were saying stopping engineering the climate would be a risk!
What a bunch of maroons!
“stopping the burning of fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming,” I stopped reading right there. Who has determined that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming and where is their proof of such a theory? The anthropomorphic global warming concept is completely unproven. The most recent glaciation stopped 20k years ago and it has been warming, on and off, ever since with no scientific, statistically significant proven relationship to CO2, man made or otherwise. Much indication, in point of fact, that CO2 FOLLOWS temperature. How can idiots like this be accepted for publication? Our educational institutions and scientific journals are completely compromised by the dollar.
Scientific journals are being compromised by fear of Poltical Correctness and the hot breath of the climate alarmists..
If “Global Warming” (things getting hotter by a degree or two) is the problem, then the solution is easy and within Man’s capability.
Just get the UN to make all, I mean all, the nuclear nations to launch all their ICBMs! The targets won’t matter. Just launch them!
A Man-made “Nuclear Winter” may just the thing to counter Man’s-CO2-induced Global Warming.
(At least there wouldn’t be many people left to complain about the weather.)
I think they have been watching too much sci-fi;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
They certainly seem to be living in a La-La fantasy world where science is pure fiction.
The Climate Engineering program has been going on for over 100 years.
Look at how we have greened the Earth.
To stop now would cause millions to freeze in the dark.
CO2, it’s like a Global Chia Pet!
Ha ha. Good one Joel.
The ultimate climate catastrophe story:
For dozens of years, a successful climate geoengineering project had achieved a remarkable (although questionably not needed) stabilizing effect on the global average temperature. Unfortunately, one of the workers responsible for manning the controls accidentally hit the wrong button, distracted while texting a friend about the latest shoe sale. What followed was a series of commands and events ushering in an unprecedented cooling of the globe, killing many thousands of lifeforms of all species.
Were the dead species pudgy guys with mustaches, wearing white lab coats?
(+emphasis)
Assumes a fact not in evidence.
…and as many others have pointed out above — beware unintended consequences.
I think most of you are over reacting about possible unknown consequences. Clearly we could proceed carefully and monitor the results. say start by just spraying the the Southern Hemisphere on the half that is in daylight, then do the night bit and then, later , if it all works out bring the Northern Hemisphere up to speed. A gradual phased approach should guarantee no unpleasant surprises.
I am trying to imagine what kind of rocket scientist moron it would take to think they could place a large planet-size sunscreen could be kept in a stable location at the L1 point?
?w=720&h=338
Solar wind anyone?
F = 1/2 x (rho) x v^2 x Area.
rho of the solar wind is quite small, but |v| and Area would be extremely large. Without a huge chemical rocket engine continuously countering that force, the resulting in solar wind force is such that it would simply sail out into the Oort Cloud poste haste on its way to interstellar space as human galactic garbage.
a new acronym for WUWT readers’ consideration;
AGG: Anthropogenic Galactic Garbage.
The obvious solution is to control the Sun. Or maybe speed up the rotation of the earth so the sun doesn’t shine on any area for too long?
I’m sure with enough funding and conferences that such geniuses as this “Distinguished Professor” Alan Robock from the prestigious and totally super-scientific “Department of Environmental Sciences” can come up with ways to save us.
The only tampering I might consider, reopening of the Central American Seaway when we begin our slide into glaciation. Its closure a few million years ago indirectly produced homo sapiens, but that is another story.
ironic(hu)man,
Oh, but for the stable climate of 4 million years ago. Oh, but for….
Always, the “Oh, but for….” throughout human pre-history. It defines us.
“We come for the climate, and what we get is weather.”
– Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Let’s expand the orbit around the Sun by a few million miles and see if that helps. What could go wrong?
Joel we wouldn’t tamper if it was a mini ice age, as experienced a few centuries ago, but full blown global cooling is another matter.
If you look at the ice cores going back to the previous interglacial its obvious to see our future, at some point terra forming will become fashionable as the Holocene fades.
You mean, like, a new moon? or moving the moon so that we have more eclipses?
“But halting geoengineering would lead to rapid warming – 10 times faster than if geoengineering had not been deployed, Robock said.”
In principle, I am against geoengineering because it would be an unreasonable overreaction to non-existent threats due to the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Sulfuric acid is poisonous to almost all living things and this decades-long fallout from the stratosphere into the troposphere would do far more damage than even the worst scenarios of AGW catastrophe theorists.
However, the above sentence does not reveal itself to me. So far, it was common theory of AGW supporters that doubling the CO2 cause a temperature increase of about 1 degree. The further increases in temperature would be caused by forcing triggered by this temperature increase, such as increase in water vapor in the lower layers, warming of the ocean, and decrease in global ice sheets. How can it be if an SO2 shield around the earth and a subsequent cooling due to the blocking of the sunlight would result in a 10-fold faster warming in case of termination of the action? As postulated by the AGW theorists, the oceans absorb the most energy. When sunlight is blocked, the ocean can absorb less energy, and in the event of the blockade being lifted, it recovers more energy. However, the tempo would never increase tenfold, that’s alarmist screaming. We already have an increase in the CO2 content from 280 to 400 ppm if we want to believe the CO2 theorists of the AGW side. So an increase of 120 ppm, that is about 43 percent. The temperature of the upper layer of the ocean (that is, the layer that can be measured at least with low accuracy) shows a small increase in the linear increase, but this still corresponds to the noise in the data. It is physically impossible for the ocean to absorb energy 10 times faster than today. Why should he do this, the measured radiation into space shows that it has not sunk but has even increased slightly. So even in times of half increasing CO2, Earth has lost none of its ability to radiate heat.
“They assumed that airplanes would spray 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide a year into the upper atmosphere at the Equator from 2020 to 2070. That’s the annual equivalent of about one quarter of the sulfur dioxide ejected during the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, Robock said.”
An airplane that would fit the bill is the 747 Supertanker, used for firefighting. It can discharge 74,200 liters of water. Assuming that the load is volume, rather than weight, constrained, that would equate to 117.6 tons of liquid sulfur dioxide (which is 1.437 times denser than water). Putting 5,000,000 tons per year into the atmosphere would require 42,433 flight operations per year. Assuming 3 flight hours per operation (probably too small, but what the heck?), that adds (according to http://www.carbonindependent.org/sources_aviation.html) about 11,500 tonnes of CO2 to the upper atmosphere. Since (according to the same source) upper atmospheric CO2 emissions have twice the AGW effect as at the surface, so it’s really equivalent to 23,000 tonnes. Wouldn’t that offset the cooling?
Further, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo put more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than human beings have done in all of history. So now human beings are going to add one Mount Pinatubo every 4 years, while coal plants on the ground pay dearly to scrub SO2 out of their stacks. This will result in the equivalent of about 4% of the world production of sulfuric acid being distributed in rainfall around the equator. Acid rain, anyone?
See above: Mt. Mayon in the Philippines has been erupting since 16 Jan 2018. Lots of ash and gases, especially SO2.
Do you hear any of them squawking about that gas emission? No. It goes completely unnoticed, because it is an inconvenient TRUTH waved right under their noses.
Only one “Supertanker” currently exists. You’d you’d a fleet of at least thirty.
In terms of the carbon footprint of the operation you’d need to the fuel usage for the entire flight. Additionally that used by the vehicles used to service the planes and getting the crews to and from work.
There’s also the question of who’s going to pay for all this.
They’re just main-lining climate crack, same as usual. I don’t think they expect anyone to actually read it, and I’m happy to oblige.
These fools can’t even explain how the climate system works as they rely on an absurdly high climate sensitivity they can’t even justify with first principles physics and they think they have a handle on how to stop a naturally variable climate from varying?
Stopping after starting is not what will cause a problem, its the starting part we need to be concerned with.
The law of unintended consequences has kicked our tails too many times for us not to think we will not see some unexpected and potentially harmful effects from any climate engineering…
The number of volcanoes currently erupting should be a factor taken into account in this matter at hand. It seems to me that it is just common sense to account for that, and for the emission volume of gases like SO2 that are known to provide a cooling factor.
If the people who engage in these studies refuse to acknowledge the real-time, real world effects of natural processes such as volcanism, which seems to be increasing a bit, then they are engaging in bad science, or if you will, pseudo science with an agenda.
And that probability alone really annoys me. It almost looks like fraud to me.
if you add loads of SO2 and mix it with water vapour (H2O), don’t you get sulphuric acid (H2SO4)?
Acid rain indeed. Or liquefied lungs.
you need more than water, you need ozone, or oxygen and iron dust as catalyst, but all that exist in the atmosphere. So the short answer is: yes.
Does it matters? As everything, it just depends on the the quantities.
Sulphur dioxide? Particulates? Nitrates? Why not just run more dirty coal power plants? At least you would get something useful in return.
I think if they’re going to start with this sort of lunacy in the first place I think it will have reached the “stop the world I want to get off” stage
James Bull
I’d be interested to know how they concluded “The spraying would lead to an even distribution of sulfuric acid clouds in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.”
Given that the distribution of regular clouds is anything but even.
Such a condition seems unlikely, even at the equinoxes.