What could possibly go wrong~ctm
Public Release: 22-Nov-2018
IOP Publishing
A program to reduce Earth’s heat capture by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere from high-altitude aircraft is possible, but unreasonably costly with current technology, and would be unlikely to remain secret.
Those are the key findings of new research published today in Environmental Research Letters, which looked at the capabilities and costs of various methods of delivering sulphates into the lower stratosphere, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI).
The researchers examined the costs and practicalities of a large scale, hypothetical ‘solar geoengineering’ project beginning 15 years from now. Its aim would be to halve the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing, by deploying material to altitudes of around 20 kilometres.
They also discussed whether such an idealized program could be kept secret.
Dr Gernot Wagner, from Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is a co-author of the study. He said: “Solar geoengineering is often described as ‘fast, cheap, and imperfect’.
“While we don’t make any judgement about the desirability of SAI, we do show that a hypothetical deployment program starting 15 years from now, while both highly uncertain and ambitious, would be technically possible strictly from an engineering perspective. It would also be remarkably inexpensive, at an average of around $2 to 2.5 billion per year over the first 15 years.”
The researchers confirm earlier studies that discuss the low direct costs of potential stratospheric aerosol geoengineering intervention, but they arrive at those numbers with the help of direct input from aerospace engineering companies in specifying what the paper dubs the ‘SAI Lofter (SAIL)’.
Wake Smith, a co-author of the study, is a lecturer at Yale College and held former positions as CEO of Pemco World Air Services (a leading aircraft modification company), COO of Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings (a global cargo airline), and President of the flight training division of Boeing. He said: “I became intrigued by the engineering questions around SAI and the many studies that purport to show that modified existing planes could do the job. Turns out that is not so. It would indeed take an entirely new plane design to do SAI under reasonable albeit entirely hypothetical parameters. No existing aircraft has the combination of altitude and payload capabilities required.”
Mr. Smith said: “We developed the specifications for SAIL with direct input from several aerospace and engine companies. It’s equivalent in weight to a large narrow body passenger aircraft. But to sustain level flight at 20 kms, it needs roughly double the wing area of an equivalently sized airliner, and double the thrust, with four engines instead of two.
“At the same time, its fuselage would be stubby and narrow, sized to accommodate a heavy but dense mass of molten sulphur rather than the large volume of space and air required for passengers.”
The team estimated the total development costs at less than $2 billion for the airframe, and a further $350 million for modifying existing low-bypass engines.
The new planes would comprise a fleet of eight in the first year, rising to a fleet of just under 100 within 15 years. The fleet would fly just over 4,000 missions a year in year one, rising to just over 60,000 per year by year 15.
Dr Wagner said: “Given the potential benefits of halving average projected increases in radiative forcing from a particular date onward, these numbers invoke the ‘incredible economics’ of solar geoengineering. Dozens of countries could fund such a program, and the required technology is not particularly exotic.”
However, in the authors’ view, this should not reinforce the often-invoked fear that a rogue country or operator might launch a clandestine SAI program upon an unsuspecting world.
Mr Smith said: “No global SAI program of the scale and nature discussed here could reasonably expect to maintain secrecy. Even our hypothesized Year one deployment program entails 4000 flights at unusually high altitudes by airliner-sized aircraft in multiple flight corridors in both hemispheres. This is far too much aviation activity to remain undetected, and once detected, such a program could be deterred.”
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If they want to get aerosols into the atmosphere, wouldn’t it be cheaper to just start drilling deep wells in places like Yellowstone, Lake Toba, Taupo, ….
Willis E. showed that the SO2 outpouring recently from the big Hawaiian eruption didn’t cool the local thermometers. Cloudcover was reduced locally and more sunshine was let through during the event.. Ya know, we don’t really know a lot about climate, but for goodness sake kets not ignore the precious bits we do know! The only step forward I see in this is at least engineers are geing consulted and costing is being done. If they had done this with renoobles we wouldnt have tufted the planet with windmills and glazed it with glass at a cost of trillions and for a negligible contribution to our piwer.
They are assuming they will keep the particulates out of the lower atmosphere, where they will do chemistry – good luck with that. Many claim the drop in temps that occurred in the 70s was due to particulates. Of course, in the same breath they use the increase in temp from the 70s as proof there is not been a pause.
I would look into the design of a slow flying high altitude craft capable of carrying a 200 ton payload to 25 km. This craft would be able to lob missiles into space and eventually be used in a sulfur dioxide emission experiment taking off from Australia.
So long as there is money for nonsense, it will be produced.
And if there isn’t money available, we’ll borrow it.
Might as well drop nukes into volcanoes. It’s cheaper, might actually work and will have about the same level of unintended consequences. Plus, it the volcanoes are chosen carefully, they can address the population problem as well …
Or an underground nuke test at “Yellowstone, Lake Toba, Taupo, ….”.
One test should do it. 😎
It was just a dumb joke, but there were scientists who wanted to blow an nuke on the Moon.
Wasn’t that “Space 1999”?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but…if you just dumped some of this sulphurous stuff into the coal used to generate much of the world’s power…
You’ll get the same amount of acid rain.
I googled “funding sources for harvard’s Solar geoengineering research program”
And got a promising link
with a table that might provide clues
https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/blog/funding-solar-geoengineering
Better yet spike all aviation fuel with LSD. Then when it gets hot people will smile and say “look at the pretty rainbows” and the crackpot climate scientists who want to control the weather will be outside running around trying to catch raindrops on their tongues. The environment will benefit.
Not neccessary any longer, thank Vishnu for that! The atmosphere this morning where I am now self-identifies as geo-engineered.
This was after overnight absorbing acoustic waves of intersectional intervention blather which revealed it’s empirical state was, in fact, a form of oppression perpetuated by a sub-set of old melanin challenged cis-gender carbon life forms hypocritically expelling CO2 into it.
Mainstream media is just starting to put this on to electronic media. Reports are coming in USA president Trump has already composed a tweet ridiculing the atmosphere. Spokes-people for other world leaders are assuring their populace that they have a wet finger in the air to ascertain the situation.
Why not just go back to regular freon and CFCs in spray cans? Oh, yea, this guys would not get bucket loads of tax dollars that way!
So assuming our climate control idea works, who gets to decide what temperature to set the “thermostat” at ? Roman warm period temp?…oops, too much sea level rise….Maybe a couple of degrees colder….oops, world bread baskets have a higher risk of failed crops…maybe have everyone vote….oops, majority wants the thermostat to be set at “Singapore”…..and so on…
The biggest risk of such anti-warming geo-engineering projects is that they will work too well.
This is all the result of misguided thinking. The realistic situation is that within a year we will be forced to apply the solution realistically regardless of the state of the research and the expected side effects. The situation is so serious that we should be awakened as soon as possible.
malkom700
What are you assuming ANY credible threat occurring “within a year”? There is no threat from global warming at all from man’s release of CO2 within the next 1000 years (even assuming fossil fuels could be burned that long at today’s rates!), much less 1 year.
If you do not know about people burned in a California fire, then you are personally responsible for their deaths.
No. Those enviro’s who chose to prevent California brush and woodlands from being trimmed and pruned out (logged and cut with fire access trails and roads) so they could bask in their warm glow of “feeling good” about “pristine forests in the wilderness” are responsible for those deaths.
And the loss of the forest.
I’m sorry, I was too rude, but in content, this is a very obvious relationship and is widely accepted all over the world.
malkom700, the climate in that part of California dries out enough to burn every year, and has for a very long time. So if you are buying into Jerry Brown’s “Climate change did it”, you are beyond reason.
Ironically, aggressive fire prevention is one of the biggest problem as it allows the fuel load to grow to the point where a small fire can quickly become a catastrophe. Without man getting in the way, lightning often resulted in parts of the Sierras burning all summer long until the rains came in the Fall and put it out. Many of the trees adapted to the presence of frequent small fires and some even require fire to propagate. The more frequent small fires kept the undergrowth under control and discouraged trees from having lots of foliage close to the ground which tended to keep fire out of the canopy.
What happened in Paradise was a tragedy, but to blame it on climate change related to CO2 emissions displays ignorance beyond reason, especially when used as a political dog whistle, as Brown does constantly. The level of fiduciary irresponsibility to the citizens of California he has show with regard to climate change is unconscionable. Unfortunately, our next Governor may be even worse.
Dang!
Now I feel guilty about the 300 that died in the The Great Chicago Fire and the 800 that died in the Peshtigo, Wisconsin fire. Both on October 8, 1871. There were also other fires that day.
(I read one estimate that 1,200 died that day.)
Even Orwell’s imagination did not anticipate the madness that is going on in the world right now. Around the year 2000 the world lost it’s capacity for sensible reasoning. We stopped listening to Feynman because he was dead.
https://ca.video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-rogers-rogers_001&hsimp=yhs-rogers_001&hspart=rogers&p=feynman+youtube+hypothesis#id=3&vid=2274eb564df9805abe7518be46773a54&action=click
OP: They have been playing with SRM for at least a few years. The ability to gaslight people and have them not believe their own eyes, is very useful it seems.
Northern Europe and the US have seen SRM for sure.
I am NOT into nutty chemtrail “they are trying to kill us all” nonsense, this is SRM, and its using fuel to do it.
http://coconutrevival.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/9u-300×254.jpg
Given what we actually KNOW about the planet, to do this based on the poor level of understanding we have of the climate systems (there is no one system) it is the utmost arrogance and ultimately dangerous what they are doing.
Of course, scientists who end up killing people with their junk science, never ever pay the price. I’d like to see scientists be held directly accountable for their failures.
Wasn’t this idiotic scheme first proposed 25 years ago?
The reality is that, based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of rationale that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. We do not really know what the optimum climate is in terms of temperature so we do not know whether we should be trying to make things warmer or cooler. We should be able to make things a tad cooler by increasing the Earth’s albedo or by decreasing the surface pressure. We would be better off trying to paint surfaces white then polluting the atmosphere. However the primary surface on the Earth is some form of H2O and trying to cover it up with a reflective coating may have dire consequences.
The bad news is that, if we expect the vastly more powerful natural cycles to continue as they have for 1 Million years/10 repeatable and average 8 degree cooling ice ages, any significant effect would be to hasten the end of the current short warm interglacial we prosper in and accelerate the descent into the next glaciation phase of the coming ice age. No doubt if it was seen to be having this effect they would say the data must be wrong, we must trust the models, and do it some more.
This article is like the Emperor’s New Clothes on steroids…
Let’s all pretend that geo-engineering is not yet happening
Look up at that clear blue sky
Let’s all pretend that the globe is warming
And ignore the Solar Minimum cycle
And reach the draconian world government goal of energy restriction via UN Sustainable Development. Feudalism with robots. Good times.
Let’s see, an airplane loaded with 25 tons of molten sulfur… What could possibly go wrong?
Cool off the planet? What could go wrong? What the hell. Lets set off the next ice age early.
History tells us that interfereng with nature never turns out well.
An expensive way to make sulfuric acid rain. To keep sulfur molten, temperature must be 115 C. The airplane is a flying oven. It must have a combustion chamber to burn sulfur into SO2 before releasing to the stratosphere. The oven and combustion chamber will increase weight of airplane and reduce space for molten sulfur.
In 2013 whistleblower and former USAF Environmental Specialist Sergeant Kristen Meghan Edwards predicted exactly what is now happening..
5:37: “[David Keith] is actually a geo-engineer, Canadian, he works at Harvard, he just wrote a book on climate engineering and inadvertently he’s brought more awareness to this, because I feel they’re getting ready to admit it and they’re trying to sell it to us, you know….I think that they’re trying to, now, kind of admit it and act like they’re gonna start doing it, and they’ve already been doing it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XjLzPivKp8
A short lecture by whistleblower Kristen Edwards..