Guest essay by Eric Worrall
If you block the sun, you hurt food production. There’s even a study. But this terrifying problem has not stopped climate enthusiasts from pushing forward with an attempt to recreate the end of the dinosaur age, to “save” us from 1C of global warming.
Before geoengineering to mitigate climate change, researchers must consider some fundamental chemistry
By University of Pennsylvania
NOVEMBER 22, 2021It’s a tempting thought: With climate change so difficult to manage and nations unwilling to take decisive action, what if we could mitigate its effects by setting up a kind of chemical umbrella—a layer of sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere that could reflect the sun’s radiation and cool the Earth?
According to a new study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a collaboration among Penn scientists and two groups in Spain, atmospheric conditions in the stratosphere pose a challenge to generating sulfuric acid, making its production less efficient than might have previously been expected. Thus more groundwork exploring the chemistry of how sulfuric acid and its building blocks will react in the upper atmosphere is required in order to confidently move forward with this climate geoengineering strategy, the researchers say.
“These fundamental insights highlight the importance of understanding the photochemistry involved in geoengineering,” says Joseph S. Francisco, an atmospheric chemist in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and a co-corresponding author on the study. “That’s critically important and it’s something that’s been ignored.”
Using sulfuric acid to blunt the sun’s rays as a means of curbing climate changeimpacts is based on a natural phenomenon: When volcanoes erupt, the sulfur they emit creates localized—or sometimes even far-reaching—cooling clouds that filter the sun. But those clouds emerge in the troposphere, which ranges from the Earth’s surface to about 10 kilometers up. Geoengineering using sulfuric acid would happen a good deal higher, in the stratosphere, from about 10 to 20 kilometers above the planet.
…
“One of the implications of this finding is, if you put sulfur dioxide up there, it’s going to just be recycling around,” Francisco says. “So it opens the door to whether we have a full understanding of atmospheric sulfur chemistry up in the stratosphere.”
…
The findings also highlight the need for a Plan B if the atmospheric chemistry doesn’t play out as expected. “It raises a fundamentally important question,” Francisco says. “If we put the sulfur dioxide in, can we get it out of the stratosphere?“
…
Read more: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-geoengineering-mitigate-climate-fundamental-chemistry.html
The abstract of the study which discusses what geoengineering could do to plant growth;
Estimating global agricultural effects of geoengineering using volcanic eruptions
Published: 08 August 2018
Jonathan Proctor, Solomon Hsiang, Jennifer Burney, Marshall Burke & Wolfram Schlenker
Nature (2018)
Solar radiation management is increasingly considered to be an option for managing global temperatures, yet the economic effects of ameliorating climatic changes by scattering sunlight back to space remain largely unknown. Although solar radiation management may increase crop yields by reducing heat stress, the effects of concomitant changes in available sunlight have never been empirically estimated. Here we use the volcanic eruptions that inspired modern solar radiation management proposals as natural experiments to provide the first estimates, to our knowledge, of how the stratospheric sulfate aerosols created by the eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo altered the quantity and quality of global sunlight, and how these changes in sunlight affected global crop yields. We find that the sunlight-mediated effect of stratospheric sulfate aerosols on yields is negative for both C4 (maize) and C3 (soy, rice and wheat) crops. Applying our yield model to a solar radiation management scenario based on stratospheric sulfate aerosols, we find that projected mid-twenty-first century damages due to scattering sunlight caused by solar radiation management are roughly equal in magnitude to benefits from cooling. This suggests that solar radiation management—if deployed using stratospheric sulfate aerosols similar to those emitted by the volcanic eruptions it seeks to mimic—would, on net, attenuate little of the global agricultural damage from climate change. Our approach could be extended to study the effects of solar radiation management on other global systems, such as human health or ecosystem function.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0417-3
You can just imagine the scenario. Scientists pump a bit of sulfur into the atmosphere and nothing happens. Then they pump some more, the needle still doesn’t move. Then suddenly an extreme atmospheric event, like a large hurricane or a volcanic eruption, throws up some extra water vapour, and the entire sky goes black.
I’m glad at least one of them asked the obvious question, how to get the sulfur out of the atmosphere if it all goes wrong? But I’m guessing if the opportunity arose for a full scale test they would still probably want to try it out.
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How much sulphur dioxide would be needed, and how would we get it up there?
In 1816 Mount Tamburo exploded with the result that world temperatures fell by up to 3 degrees C, giving the ‘year without a summer’ and it took up to three years for temperatures to return to normal.
Meanwhile crop production fell disastrously and many people and animals died.
Would the effect of seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 behave in the same way in falling back over time, and would the seeding need to be repeated at regular intervals.
Would the fallout of sulphuric acid from the upper atmosphere cause a drop in the pH of rain?
The suggest use of iron would seem to be easier and cheaper to do and seems less likely to cause a runaway problem compared to what would happen if a volcano blew up at the same time as the SO2 seeding.
I would hope the modellers who planned the whole operation would be more accurate than the current generation of modellers.
As an aside I see that wind in the UK is providing less than 4 GW, where yesterday we had a peak demand of 44 GW.
I ask you, aren’t there any politicians who see the downside of what they are foisting on us?
The politicans are probably going to see the downside pretty soon.
Idiocracy. We are all living in an Idiocracy.
We don’t understand the climate well enough to know what reducing CO2 emissions will do – apparently nothing frim 2020 but that was a surprise.
So we have already committed to Geoengineering without a map. We just decided to do CO2 reduction instead of Sulphate increase.
This means that the Sulphate idea has a lot of political merit. It doesn’t need to be done now. The CO2 idea does but the addition of a gas can wait. So under the Precautionary Principle we should:
1) Stop trying to reduce CO2 emissions.
2) Prepare to use the Sulphate emissions.
3) Do not use the Sulphate emissions until it becomes absolutely necessary.
Part 3 might take a while.
But you can see why India, Russia and China might like the idea for COP27.
“Part 3 might take a while”
Well, if it cools down in the near future (a couple of decades) to the levels we hit in the 1970’s and the 1910’s, then people won’t be worrying about trying to cool the temperatures.
Let’s give ourselves a couple of more decades before deciding it’s too hot and we need to cool things off.
The present short-term trend is cooling, and the long-term trend is cooling. We should wait a little while before getting too exercised over the temperatures.
Alarmists can start worrying when we get back up to 1998/2016 temperatures. Until that time, please zip the alarmism. We are currently 0.3C cooler than 1998/2016.
It may be a while before we get back to the 1998/2016 highs.
At least you understood what “take a while” means.
The down votes are clearly a sign of people not actually understanding the post.
Thy probably think “a while” may come to an end…
Tom Abbott:
The 1998 and 2016 “highs” were caused by massive decreases in industrial SO2 aerosol emissions:(from the burning of fossil fuels. Temperatures increased because of the cleaner air.
1998: 7.7 Megaton reduction
2016: 29 Megaton reduction.
Because of current efforts to abandon the burning of fossil fuels, it may not be very long before we see temperatures spike again.
Well, just to nitpik a little: The high temperatures of 1998 and 2016 were so close to each other that they were in the margin of error of the measuring instrument, so they are about as near equal as we can get.
Considering that, why didn’t the temperatures climb higher in 2016, than in 1998, when a much larger reduction in SO2 took place?
Tom Abbott:
Temperatures did climb higher in 2016 that in 1998
Using the Hadcrut4 data set, average Jan-Dec anomalous global temperatures were 0.589 deg. C. in 1958, and 0.797 deg. C in 2016, a difference of 0.21 deg. C..
Using NASA/GISS data, temperatures in 1998 were 0.62 deg. C ind in 2016 they were 0.99 deg. C, a difference of 0.47 deg.C.
Both data sets show a higher temperature increase for increased amounts of reductions in SO2 aerosol emissions.
There is A Mechanism ‘out there’ to pull Sulphur down out of the sky.
There must be lest the sky would be full of it (by now after 4+ Billion years of volcanoes
Thus ‘they’ are wasting their time and everyone else’s money
Also surely Shirley, creating Acid Rain and we all know how hideous that was.
linky
But no they are not. wasting time money
Why.. (cut-to-the-quick = Acid Rain Science was/is = Junk, Check the linky)
Reason: Ask any contemporary farmer or simply watch what they do.
The use Sulphur as fertiliser. And especially since, certainly in The West. the air was ‘cleaned up’, farmers have found themselves buying Sulphur mixed into the NPK fertilisers they’d normally buy. After those 3 nutrients, Sulphur becomes the next Liebig Limiter for all plant and microbial life & growth
Those of an enquiring disposition might wonder, is or are the observed changes in Earth temperature following a volcano actually caused by what they think.
Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that The Plants, down on the ground, respond to the Sulphur ## and increase their growth rates, change varieties and in new patterns and places.
Thus they change the colour of Earth (its Albedo) and thus its temperature. When they grow more, they transpire more water and water, when it’s ‘moving’ ALWAYS has a cooling effect.
## Myriad other goodness falls out of clouds of volcano dust. Volcano dust and rock is the most fertile stuff on this planet. It is THE ONLY fertile stuff on this planet
Ask anyone who lives near a volcano.
You will also find that they are some of The Healthiest and longest lived peeps on this Planet.
funny that innit
But no. The Dancing Angels ** always know better
** That’s gotta be the first and last time anyone called Fauci a ‘dancing angel’
haha
edit to PS. For the unitiated and those not in possesion of a solar power meter (ebay is your friend), well-fertilised strongly growing plant-life appears to be a darker shade of green.
Strangely and bizarrely, those strong healthy and darker coloured plants actually have a higher albedo than their less well fed, pale & anaemic cousins.
now that is really is a funny thing.
Bear it in mind when next lecturing anyone on the subject of ‘Radiation’ or what you imagine a Black Body to be
I guess that if we did this then we could put enough sulphur into the atmosphere to allow us to keep burning cheap coal. Have I missed something?
Spot on – we could put more sulfur into the sky by removing the smokestack filters and burning more coal – coal contains lots of sulfur.
But only the poor quality coal 😉
I see some of it comes from Penn State. Since that is where Mann is a “Distinguished Researcher”, there is no need to read further.
They haven’t addressed the real problem. What will China’s response be when this misguided effort reduces crop yields to the point there is famine, life loss and insurrection from a ravaged population? Which of the countries that injected the sulphur gets the first nuclear missile in retribution?
As if it would be possible to get international agreement to perform this experiment. After 30 years of “consensus” on global warming, it hasn’t been possible to scale back CO2 emissions except in those circumstances in which it made financial sense. (Fracking for lower cost natural gas in the US or offshore windfarms in the UK where corporate pals are cleaning up with government subsidies and tax incentives.
I can see anyone who does atmospheric cooling to be the target of every person who has suffered through a bad weather event. Everything bad that happens will be blamed on the foolish SO2 experiment, whether it is connected or not.
These guys better get themselves some good lawyers and they probably ought to get themselves an Army to protect themselves from other Armies of outraged nations.
Deliberate SO2 atmospheric cooling in a cooling world is such a stupid idea!
This is what living in a delusional world will get you.
All this from a bogus, “unprecedented warming” Hockey Stick chart.
From the article: “It’s a tempting thought: With climate change so difficult to manage”
LOL !
Having trouble managing the climate, are you?
From the article: “what if we could mitigate its effects by setting up a kind of chemical umbrella—a layer of sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere that could reflect the sun’s radiation and cool the Earth?”
We already have that. It’s called water vapor. It’s hard at work right now reducing the temperatures.
From the article: “According to a new study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society”
Who can trust anything these guys say? They think Michael Mann is a legitimate scientist. They cover up for Mann and other Data Manipulators even though they know they are supporting a distored temperature record.
Our Science Associations are hopelessly corrupted because they support Charlatan science. They know the temperature record is bogus, yet they promote it anyway for political, social, and monetary reasons.
They are no better than Mann and the rest of the science distorters.
“Mad science is never having to worry about :what is the worst possible outcome?”
from a T-shirt vendor I knew.
Sure. Let’s take a chance of totally blocking the Sun’s light from reaching the Earth. That will extinguish almost all life here. I suppose at that point, global warming will be inconsequential.
These warmunists should all be arrested and imprisoned. That would be the best way to “save” the Earth
From the article: ““So it opens the door to whether we have a full understanding of atmospheric sulfur chemistry up in the stratosphere.”
I think this is the crux of the matter. Global Cooling advocates have been promoting this idea of human-derived SO2 cooling for decades, but they have never produced evidence that human-derived SO2 changes the Earth’s temperatures.
Huge Volcanic eruptions *can* cause a reduction in temperatures. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused the temperatures to cool by about 0.5C for about two years. A temperature drop that the average citizen didn’t even notice.
But Human-derived SO2 is not the equivalent of a huge volcanic eruption, and human-derived SO2 does not go very high in the atmosphere, and it doesn’t stay there very long.
The advocates of human-derived SO2 causing climate change have not proven their case.
Tom Abbott:
In their discussion of atmospheric aerosols, NASA states that “Stratospheric SO2 aerosols reflect sunlight, reducing the amount of energy reaching the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, cooling them”.
And, anthropogernic SO2 aerosols (from the burning of fossil fuels) absorb no sunlight but they reflect it, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface”. Thus, their climatic effects are identical,
Industrial SO2 aerosol emissions peaked in \\the late 1970’s, and affected temperatures to the extent that there were fears of a return to a new Ice Age.
And as mentioned earlier, the 2016 temperature spike was due to a 27 Megaton decrease in industrial SO2 aerosol emissions.
The case for human-derived SO2 causing climate change has been PROVEN many, many times, and is the primary cause of our warming temperatures (decreased atmospheric SO2 levels )due to global Clean Air efforts
“The case for human-derived SO2 causing climate change has been PROVEN many, many times, and is the primary cause of our warming temperatures (decreased atmospheric SO2 levels )due to global Clean Air efforts”
Spurious correlations are not evidence.
The El Nino’s of 1998 and 2016 had nothing to do with the temperatures going higher during those years?
I’ve said for years, that if we just make all cars white and have roofs be made out of the lightest color material practical, we can eliminate at least 20% of so called global warming.
Don’t laugh. They’re doing this in Australia. At least one city has banned dark rooves for all new buildings!
That there are people even thinking about this is terrifying.
Thou shalt not stand in the way of a good tax credit-based climate meme stock, federal grant program for failed ideas, and the next big SPAC IPO. Stand aside or be labeled a denier.
They obviously did not take into account the observation that Atmospheric CO2 decreased after Pinatubo, probably due to enhanced photosynthesis from increased sky indirect solar radiation penetrating vegetation canopies deeper.
Some more pages of pseudo-erudite BS.
Statement #1: “the global agricultural damage from climate change”
First of all, as a …
pre-condition to continue to analyse the remaining of the authors’ elevated ideias,
I have to kindly ask …
for a well substabtiated scientific demonstration of …
the thruth of Statement #1, …
either the postulated being taken as actual, or …
as “expected” (in this case, giving well specified conditions under which that can, not “could“, happen).
Otherwise …
I should classify this publication …
as what it seems: …
pure and simple speculation.
The solution is for all warmistas to immediately wear white hats.
It’s the least they could do to save the planet they so desperately fear is burning up.
Tin foil hats would be more reflective and also repel the space alien hypno control waves. Ought to be mandated for warmunists. I think the Austries and Ozzies are onboard already.
Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, people were (rightfully) blaming SO2 emissions, mostly from coal-fired power plants and diesel engines, for “acid rain” which was damaging trees, which led to the EPA limits on SO2 emissions, which have decreased over the past 50 years despite increases in consumption of coal and diesel fuel.
So now, in the interest of preventing “global warming”, people want to inject sulfuric acid into the stratosphere? Hey, everybody, let’s bring back the acid rain that we worked so hard to get rid of 50 years ago! What a great idea! (sarc)
Steve Z:
Higher temperatures are an unfortunate side effect of decreased atmospheric SO2 aerosol levels
Ideas like this remind me of an H.L Mencken quote, something about spitting on one’s hands, hoisting the black flag, and…
It’ll eat through the dome and we’ll all drown!
According to Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so2-emissions), humanity reached a peak in SO2 production at 151.5 million tonnes per year in 1980. We’re now below 100 million tonnes. I haven’t been able to find an estimate for Tambora’s SO2 output in 1815, but the 1783 eruption of Iceland’s Laki volcano had an SO2 output estimated to be 120 million tons. It resulted in a year long “Laki haze” over Europe. Given that Laki was only a VE3 eruption, while Tambora was a VE7 (it’s a log scale, btw), I’d say it’s a good bet that Tambora put as much as 1E12 tons of SO2 into the atmosphere. While it resulted in a “year without summer,” causing world-wide havoc, Tambora didn’t freeze the planet. In fact, it would have just met the Paris “accords”. Given that humans have, since 1850, only managed to generate 9.6E9 tonnes of SO2, I don’t know how we would ever be able to influence – let alone control – the climate by this means.
Michael S. Kelly:
Since late 1979, satellite measurements of the amount of SO2 emitted by volcanic eruptions has become available.
For a VEI4 eruption, the average amount of SO2 needed to provide 0.2 deg. C of cooling (for example) is ~.0.2 Megatons, of SO2, not an impossible amount.
I read that article. Now I have an unbelievable headache.
The STOOPID. It BURNS!!!!
What part of “Don’t mess with Mother Nature” do these mordant i======es NOT understand????
Can we PLEASE, PLEASE round them up and send them to Proxima Centauri A or B????
Why are they so dead set on destroying a system that works?
GeoEngineering.org offers insight, evidence.