Owen Klinksy
Contributor
Billionaire-backed non-governmental organizations (NGO) behind a bungled experiment to block sunlight using aerosols in California have vowed to continue their efforts, Politico reported on Wednesday.
The initiative, which aims to lower global temperatures by making clouds brighter and thus better able to reflect sun rays, has faced hurdles as local officials in California are hesitant to allow scientists to spray the aerosols, such as liquefied salt, into the atmosphere. Nonetheless many of the program’s financial backers, including Hyatt Hotel heiress Rachel Pritzker, remain undeterred, according to Politico. (RELATED: Climate Scientists Want An Umbrella The Size Of Argentina To Block Out The Sun)
“The Pritzker Innovation Fund believes in the importance of research that helps improve climate models and enables policymakers and the public to better understand whether climate interventions like marine cloud brightening are feasible and advisable,” Rachel Pritzker said in a statement to Politico responding to the public backlash against the Alameda experiment. “We will only get answers to these questions through open research that can inform science-based, democratic decision-making.”
“We remain firmly committed to advancing transparent, equitable, and science-based approaches to understand and potentially mitigate climate risks,” Greg De Temmerman, chief science and programs officer of The Quadrature Climate Foundation – an NGO tied to UK-based hedge fund Quadrature Capital, told Politico.
The Alameda experiment operated for a grand total of 20 minutes despite being slated to last for months, in part because researchers chose to announce the project in The New York Times before notifying the city, according to Politico.
The project is the second billionaire-backed stratospheric aerosol injection project to fall apart in recent months.
In March, a similar Harvard-led project in northern Sweden ended after facing pushback from environmentalists and Indigenous communities who were concerned about the study’s effect on weather patterns, Politico reported.
The University of Washington, SilverLining NGO, SRI International, The Quadrature Foundation and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen’s Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation – all of which were also involved in conducting or funding the Alameda experiment according to Politico – did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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One must surely wonder why California policy makers have not outlawed dark roofing and required everyone to wear white hats.
I do recall one article, published somewhere, where a local (or county wide or state wide?) demanded white roofs. A homeowner’s association forbid white roofs on a “not our style” basis. The homeowner’s association won.
At least we will know who to hang when the world freezes. As little comfort as that will be.
‘The whitest paint is here – and it’s the coolest. Literally’
“Purdue University engineers have created the whitest paint yet.
Coating buildings with this paint may one day cool them off enough to reduce the need for air conditioning, the researchers say.”
“If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. That’s more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses,”
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/the-whitest-paint-is-here-and-its-the-coolest.-literally.html
story tip
I’ve thought about this when deciding whether to have a white or dark colored car. Certainly cooler in the summer. But what about winter? How much “free” heat are we giving away by having white roofs? I suspect that in some climate areas, dark is better in a year round average, especially if you are a person in say Ohio or Michigan who rarely uses air-conditioning. How a commercial building with no openable windows and houses in the south are different.
Dark in winter helps to prevent roof collapse by accelerating snow melt.
If there is enough snow on the roof that you are worried about it collapsing, the snow is way too thick for the color of the roof to make any difference.
It is the pitch of the roof that is used to prevent excessive snow build up. Just make sure ice dams don’t form.
Pitch helps, obviously. But the moment an edge of dark shingles spots the sun, it becomes a runaway roof melt. 🙂
A lot depends on where you live, for large parts of the country, the roofs are covered in snow for much of the winter, so the actual color doesn’t make much difference.
In other parts of the country, say Florida or southern Texas, you are using the AC for 8 or 9 months out of the year. You only use the heater for a month or two.
In other words, the best strategy will be determined by where you live.
It’s possible. Purdue still have a reasonable engineering department.
However, I would like to see the skin depth calculations before agreeing it is viable.
If you do not know what skin depth is, it comes from RADAR. Skin depth is the distance into a solid penetrated by the RF signal and include how much electromagnetic energy is reflected based on the material properties of the solid. Permittivity of air and the solid are the basis of the calculations.
Using lighter color materials reduces heat load.
What a surprise.
Pretty soon they’ll make us all walk around with mirrors facing upwards.
“required everyone to wear white hats.”
A tinfoil hat would serve a dual purpose of saving the planet & stopping the government reading our brains !!
Nb; I am looking forward to being probed by a few aliens ( or was it Alan’s ?? )
Tin absorbs IR.
A few years back, a US politician declared we all needed white roof tops, all drive white cars, and paint the roads white to solve the climate crisis.
As long as it’s a suggestion and not a diktat, I have no problem with this statement.
Oh, wait, I have that backwards ….
Wisdom. The cure could be worse than the disease.
All actions have consequences. A lot of actions being taken disregarding that concept.
So should we go back to higher SO2 fuels?
Recent global shipping regulations slashed the sulfur dioxide emissions from cargo ships by a dramatic 80%. But this rapid reduction in sulfur pollution may have “created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact,” a new study has suggested.
“The warming effect is consistent with the recent[ly] observed strong warming in 2023 and [is] expected to make the 2020s anomalously warm,” the researchers wrote. The warming is equivalent in magnitude to “80% of the measured increase in planetary heat uptake since 2020.”
Would be cheaper.
Oh, NCAR, the home of CESM models, with a 3% underestimation of energy transfer by evaporation from tropical seas ..
What kind of accountability do NGOs have? I think it is time to have a closer look at these organizations and if they are tax exempt we might take another look at that. I don’t like the idea of me paying taxes while others don’t. There is an awful lot of money being thrown around by some of these organizations.
They should see how long they can stay outdoors in a bathing suit in average winter weather compared to average summer weather to see for themselves whether hot or cold weather is worse.
The climastrologists can’t model adequately our current climate [or the past without numerous parameterizations]. What makes them think they can predict the effects of a geo-engineering intervention?
Its not real science, but a fun read on geo-engineering is the scifi novel Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Enjoy!
Exactly how can a small experiment improve climate models that probably can’t even recognize the small area being sprayed? It is simply scientists chasing money from rich folks who don’t care about the expense. I believe it is called pseudo-science.
1815 Mt Tambora eruption – 1815 The Year without Summer.
Sorry 1816
As usual, leftists with solutions to non problems, that create problems that they have solutions for, ad nauseum.
Politicians usually go where the votes are.
A majority of Americans support prioritizing the development of renewable energy sources.
Two-thirds of U.S. adults say the country should prioritize developing renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, over expanding the production of oil, coal, and natural gas, according to a survey conducted in June 2023.
Two-thirds of Republicans under age 30 (67%) prioritize the development of alternative energy sources. By contrast, 75% of Republicans ages 65 and older prioritize expanding the production of oil, coal, and natural gas.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-chang.
I completely disagree but that is where the votes are.
” Politicians usually go where the votes are.”
True, & many Politicians would kill a family member for the cause if it led to another term in power.
In the UK, we have another few weeks of Politicians fighting like rats in a sack; telling lies, making wild claims & promises they can’t keep. But the system is rigged, so most of them will keep their jobs, just move around on their seats, a bit like musical chairs for the rich & powerful. No democracy involved !!!
Unfortunately, many people have been brainwashed by relentless propaganda from renewable energy crooks into believing that wind and solar power are cheap. If the public was informed of the true cost of renewable energy, there would be very little support for it.
Renewable energy crooks, absolutely, but do not forget politicians, politicized so-called science organizations, and, sadly, teachers.
Many teachers these days are union members first, teachers second.
The unions have always been the province of the far left.
Brainwashing is so easy. Just look at Just Stop Oil.
Putting lots of salt into the air, just up wind of a major agricultural area.
No potential problems there.
Well, they could grow kelp instead …
Has Rachel Pritzker turned off the electricity in all her properties?
Thought not!
It’s important to see the big ‘tell’ here. Totalitarians aren’t doing silly climate experiments to save the planet. They are genuinely afraid the planet may not warm dangerously. They’ve had a lot of disappointments wirh anomaly forecasts that proved to be 300% too high on average compared to independent empirical measurement. They suffered thru an 18 yr pause in warming and they know how temperatures were grossly fiddled to deliberately effect warming.
The elites see their diabolical plan to enrich themselves into multi-trillionairws at risk. They want to cool the planet down so they can claim they prevented runaway global warming and saved the planet in the Nick of time,
$200 Trillion Is Needed to Stop Global Warming. That’s a Bargain.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain
Investors Call for Policy Unleashing $275 Trillion for Net Zero
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-21/investors-call-for-policy-unleashing-275-trillion-for-net-zero
Your estimated cost of net zero is way too low. The cost of net zero policies in New Zealand has been estimated to be at least 5 trillion dollars. This is one million dollars a head. Applying this figure to the entire world gives a figure of 8 quadrillion dollars.
https://nypost.com/2019/12/08/reality-check-drive-for-rapid-net-zero-emissions-a-guaranteed-loser/
I suspect the cost will be greater in wealthy countries, since they use much more electricity that has to be replaced or compensated for.
And, once accomplished, they have a new crisis to make gadzillions on. Save us from global cooling.
Well at least they’re not trying to put anything up into orbit. Yet.
Wasn’t this the premise for the film and TV series Snowpiercer?
Is there no environmental polluting and potentially disastrous technology they will not use to protect the environment from ‘pollution’ and ‘disaster’?
If one thinks on this for the briefest of moments, the warmunists’ claim is that man has unintentionally intervened in the Earth’s climate causing it to warm, or “change”. So the solution is to intentionally intervene in the opposite direction .. and this is a good thing? What could possibly go wrong?
Intentionally intervening to cause a complex world wide stable system to perform differently is like attempting to redesign/rebuild the aircraft you’re flying in at 35 thousand feet.
And how is injecting salt aerosols into the atmosphere on a massive scale not “air pollution” as defined under the Clean Air Amendments Act of 1990?
The real solution is to eliminate humans to the tune of 7.9 billion or so.
The real intention is to eliminate most humans anyway. Considering that the poorest will die first and considering the world’s poorest are “brown” rather than “white”, how is this not racist (purportedly the most evil of evils to wokists)?
We’ve been told the climate models are “settled science”. Why would they need improving?
/sarc
Zing.
I think Obama referred to “The Settled Science” but I don’t remember when that term was first used in reference to “Climate” or CAGW.
The good news is it is an experiment.
The bad news is it is a bad experiment.
China, India, and third-World developing nations will not give up their dependence on fossil fuels. Not now, not ever.
But there is another way to cool the earth, one that is all but certain to work, assuming we are willing to accept the risks: climate geo-engineering using solar radiation modification (SRM).
SRM can be done for as little as ten billion dollars annually, maybe a hundred billion annually at the very outside — quickly reducing global mean temperature by as much as 2C in a timeframe as short as five years.
OK, here’s the deal:
Make me CEO of Let’s Keep Our Cool LLC, a government-funded enterprise which will manage an SRM program of injecting fifteen million tons annually of solar-reflecting particles into the stratosphere.
Salary plus incentives would total fifty million dollars annually. I can promise I would earn every penny of it.
Just in case thousands of victims of a series of SRM-induced crop failures decide to seek revenge for what they’ve suffered, my compensation package would include a remote fortress location in Argentina guarded by an armed security force.
Sounds like the perfect opportunity for some meme creator to make an image of Wile E. Coyote, flying a bi-wing crop duster with Michael Mann in the back operating the Acme Aerosol Spreader with its “hockey stick” lever.
Have these geniuses in California thought of what might happen if the aerosols they inject into the atmosphere are carried by the winds northward to areas that would be adversely affected by a cooling of the climate?
There is a historical record of the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, which is blamed for emitting so much rock and ash into the atmosphere that it caused such a drastic cooling of the climate in Europe and the eastern United States that it resulted in frost and snow during the summer of 1816, massive crop failures and starvation.
Would the weather experimenters in California really want to be responsible for another “Year Without a Summer” and crop failures farther north, just so they can be a few degrees cooler? If they’re too hot in the summer, they should open a parasol, or plant trees and sit in the shade. But don’t ruin everybody else’s climate for their comfort!
I wonder if the containers of the stuff their spreading had one of those “The State of California has determined that …” warning labels? 😎
From the above article:
“. . . are hesitant to allow scientists to spray the aerosols, such as liquefied salt, into the atmosphere . . .”
Well, rightly so. Among other “incidental” factors to be considered is that fact that salt (sodium chloride) melts at 1,474°F so when it is sprayed into the ambient atmosphere it will rapidly “freeze” into tiny salt crystals. In the projected sun-blocking plan, the heat of enthalpy of this phase change plus the enthalpy of cooling from the solidification temperature down to ambient atmosphere temperature (a change of about 1,400 deg-F) will be released into the atmosphere.
There you have it . . . man-made global warming!
I just wonder what the long term consequences of aersols in the atmosphere would be ?
Personally, I favor large, electrically operated umbrellas in geosync between Earth and the Sun to experiment with shading the Earth somewhat.