What could possibly go wrong?
By John Fialka, E&E NewsJan. 23, 2020 , 10:00 AM
Originally published by E&E News
BOULDER, COLORADO—The top climate change scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said he has received $4 million from Congress and permission from his agency to study two emergency—and controversial—methods to cool the Earth if the U.S. and other nations fail to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
David Fahey, director of the Chemical Sciences Division of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, told his staff yesterday that the federal government is ready to examine the science behind “geoengineering”—or what he dubbed a “Plan B” for climate change.
Fahey said he has received backing to explore two approaches.
One is to inject sulfur dioxide or a similar aerosol into the stratosphere to help shade the Earth from more intense sunlight. It is patterned after a natural solution: volcanic eruptions, which have been found to cool the Earth by emitting huge clouds of sulfur dioxide.
The second approach would use an aerosol of sea salt particles to improve the ability of low-lying clouds over the ocean to act as shade.
This technique is borrowed from “ship tracks”—or long clouds left by the passage of ocean freighters that are seen by satellites as reflective pathways. They could be widened by injections of vapor from seawater by specialized ships to create shading effects.
Research in both techniques, Fahey emphasized, are recommended in a forthcoming study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine titled “Climate Intervention Strategies that Reflect Sunlight to Cool Earth.”
But in a sign of how controversial the topic is, Fahey recommended changing the nomenclature from geoengineering to “climate intervention,” which he described as a “more neutral word.”
Fahey also emphasized this is not an approval to move forward with geoengineering. Rather, it’s to prepare the U.S. government for a political decision if the world fails to adequately limit the rise of global warming.
“Geoengineering is this tangled ball of issues and science is only one of them,” he said.
“One of the things I’m interested in doing is let’s separate the science out,” he added. The idea is to give policymakers a clear view of how a hurry-up bid to save the planet would work.
Even then, the results likely wouldn’t be immediate. Fahey showed slides and graphics that noted that a Plan B might take until the next century to complete the cooling.
Still, better science might “buy time” to improve the efforts, he said.
There would be drawbacks, he noted, after being asked by a researcher whether injections of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere might reduce seafood by acidifying the oceans.
“When you put aerosols up into the atmosphere, it does a lot of things,” Fahey, a physicist, responded. “That opens up this whole menu of things that you’d have to worry about.”
He said other aerosols such as calcite or titania “might have less impact, but nobody knows. We want to look at them in the laboratory.”
Several smaller nations have complained that the use of aircraft to inject aerosols into the atmosphere might alter the weather or destroy the ozone layer, which protects humans from some of the more harmful radiation from sunlight.
Fahey suggested that a scientific approach would require solving a list of unknowns, including tests to find out what’s in the stratosphere today and how to get aerosols to spread there homogeneously. Another likely area of research: unintended consequences.
“We have to use atmospheric observations to find out what we’re doing,” he added.
At the moment, the government has no planned experiments and NOAA’s authority does not extend into the stratosphere. But there is a bill in Congress called the “Climate Intervention Research Act” that would broaden its jurisdiction.
“There could be more than $100 million attached to this, I’m told,” he explained.
HT/Peter B
re: “The top climate change scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said he has received $4 million from Congress ”
And we’ve got a cast of “bright boys” on here who insist a certain Dr. Randell L. Mills is pulling ‘a fast one’ (WITH private investor funds!!!) regarding his ‘venture’ with a Hydrinos …
Gentleman, can I suggest you “adjust your fire” to where it is really needed?
At least two Nobel laureates in physics have called Mills ideas poppycock or worse. Are they “bright boys?”
And you, are you an employee of BLP, investor, relative? All the so called reports of Mills that you posted and which are within my areas of expertise are shit, i.e. it shows that he or his technologists are incompetent at best.
re: “All the so called reports of Mills that you posted … ”
You’re a most determined idiot, aren’t you? You haven’t even begun TO SCRATCH the surface of the reports written by Mills over the past two decades plus on a VARIETY of subjects, so blinded by RAGE and OUTRAGE as you presently display the most obvious symptoms of.
LET”S go back to a question I posed earlier – WHAT are Dr. Mills achievements academically, THEN we’ll move onto his technical achievements, and breakthroughs. BTW, you can’t compare to what he has achieved, NOT EVEN A FRACTION thereof in the academic sphere.
Actually, I have a Ph.D. in chemistry and I am not an idiot.
Like Mills I was accepted to an Ivy League school. I chose to go into physical sciences research and have remained in that field for my entire career. Mills went to medical school and then for whatever reason doesn’t practice medicine. That is strange, but then he invents a theory that says overthrows quantum mechanics. That is very bizarre.
Nevertheless, criticism of his work by Nobel laureates in physics has not been addressed by Mills. And you don’t answer any questions that I ask of you. I am being honest and you are being deceptive.
Mills scam has been going on a lot longer than two decades. Like Rossi, he’s piggybacked onto global warming as a reason/need for his great invention. Like Rossi, it is promises made and promises broken over and over. They both have a cult like following as well as paid promoters.
re: “Actually, I have … ”
Let’s give Mills a fair shake from the academic side first, for the benefit of those ‘watching at home’, then we’ll take a look later (sometime) at what’s he’s discovered and accomplished WITH his education.
Randell L. Mills, in brief –
1973 – 1985 served as CEO and General Partner of Mills Brothers Grain Company while engaging in undergrad studies. While recuperating from an accident (wherein he fell through/into a plate glass window) that required hospitalization Mills became quite interested in ‘things medical’.
Graduated Summa_Cum_Laude, B.A. in 1982 from Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
Member of the Black Pyramid Honor Society and the Phi Beta Kappa National Honour Society where he was the only Junior invited to join in that year.
Received the Willig Pentathlon Prize in Chemistry, one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in chemistry first established in 1912 which is awarded to the senior major who scores the highest on an exam covering the General, Analytical, Organic, Inorganic, and Physical areas of Chemistry.
He also received the:
o Michael A. Lewis Memorial Prize in Physics,
o the Isaac E. Roberts Biology Award,
o the Rawnsley Science Award,
o the Morgan D. Person Prize in Chemistry,
o the Fredrick C. Schiffman Award in Chemistry and
o the Theodore Alexander Saulnier Award in Chemistry.
Accepted into Harvard Medical School on the basis of his outstanding academic achievements and was awarded his medical degree in 1986.
Proceeded to study electrical engineering under Professor Hermann Haus at MIT during his medical internship year to further his technical education.
At Harvard Medical School he was mentored by Dr. Carl Walter, a professor of surgery and a prolific inventor and researcher in his own right who encouraged Mills to focus on invention and commercialization
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ALL THIS is a far cry from A. Rossi.
.
re: “At least two Nobel laureates in physics have called Mills ideas poppycock or worse.”
Oh yeah, and logical fallacy: “appeal to authority”.
Robert L. Park (of APS fame) was, and is a numpty on this subject; refusal to review the experimental data/lab work on the subject earns one that title and distinction.
You do a good job showing that Mills is obviously intelligent. However, a lot of crooks and crazy people are intelligent. Ted Kaczynski went to Harvard at age 16.
You use appeal to authority all the time, but you won’t address the actual criticisms that Park and the Nobel physicists have made against Mills. You won’t answer my questions to you.
Mills has real credentials and is probably smarter than Rossi, who got at least one of his degrees from a diploma mill. Rossi is also a convicted felon and I don’t think that Mills is yet. However, there are many similarities between the scams they are running.
Geoengineering or climate intervention is a bad idea and must be resisted and prevented. The thought of cooling the earth is as insane as pumping carbon dioxide underground or connecting windmills and solar panels to a grid.
They are operating under the presumption that climate is warming and will continue to do so. They don’t want so much to cool the earth but rather to stop it from warming.
Aerosols wash out over time.
Scissor:
“Aerosols wash out over time”
This is true of intermittent sources.
However, most emitting sources, such as factories, foundries, home heating units, internal combustion engines, etc., etc. are quasi-continuous, so that those that wash out are quickly replaced, giving their emissions into the troposphere an essentially infinite lifetime, until they are either shut down, or modified to reduce emissions.
Apart from some natural warming as the Earth warms up after the Little Ice Age, all of the warming that has occurred since global Clean Air efforts began in the 1970’s has been due to our reductions in the amount of Anthropogenic SO2 aerosol emissions–exactly as happens when the SO2 aerosols from a volcanic eruption eventually settles out, and temperatures recover to pre-eruption levels
The simplest solution to our warming problem (which is not caused by CO2 or changes in solar irradiance), would be to judicially relax restrictions on industrial SO2 aerosol emissions to replace some of what we have taken out of the atmosphere.
But injecting into the stratosphere would probably avoid Acid Rain and other adverse effects.
Complete lunacy…
On a related topic, would it be lunacy to use fracking in the most quake prone zones like Calif, on the most “dangerous” spots? Has it been seriously discussed?
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