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Sore Throat
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Scientists Admit Chemtrails Are Creating Artificial Clouds
 Sat Jul 03, 2010 6:13 pm
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http://www.prisonplanet.com/scientists-admit-chemtrails-are-creating-artificial-clouds.html
Scientists Admit Chemtrails Are Creating Artificial Clouds
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Scientists now admit that emissions from aircraft are forming artificial clouds that block out the sun, precisely what geoengineering advocates like top eugenicist and White House science advisor John P. Holdren have called for, but the article tries to insinuate that the effect is caused by natural “vapours,” when in reality it can be attributed to chemtrails that contain substances harmful to humans.
“The phenomenon occurs when aircraft fly above 25,000ft, where the air temperature is around minus 30C. This causes water vapour emitted by the engines to crystallise and form the familiar white streaks across the sky, known as contrails,” writes Oliver Tree for the Daily Mail.
“Reading University’s Professor Keith Shine, an expert in clouds, said that those formed by aircraft fumes could linger ‘for hours’, depriving those areas under busy flight paths, such as London and the Home Counties, of summer sunshine.”
“Experts have warned that, as a result, the amount of sunlight hitting the ground could be reduced by as much as ten per cent. Professor Shine added: “Over the busiest areas in London and the South of England, this high-level cloud could cover the sky, turning bright sunshine into hazy conditions for the entire area. I expect the effects will get worse as the volume of air traffic increases.”
The report also makes reference to a 2009 Met Office study which found that high-level winds did not disperse contrails that later formed into clouds which covered an astonishing 20,000 miles.
Of course, this is no natural phenomenon as the article claims. Ten years ago, contrails from jet aircraft disappeared within minutes, yet apparently we are led to believe that the same substance is now causing the trails to linger for hours and form into clouds. This is impossible without something within the substance having been changed.
Mainstream science and academia has gone from dismissing chemtrails as a fantasy of paranoid conspiracy theorists to now accepting that they exist but claiming that they are natural and not artificially induced.
In reality, chemtrails are the consequence of the agenda to geoengineer the earth in the name of combating climate change, a science vehemently backed by people like John P. Holdren, who in his 1977 book Ecoscience advocated poisoning the water supply to involuntarily sterilize humans as part of a “planetary regime” that would control every aspect of our existence. The fact that such eugenicists are now in control of geoengineering programs that will have a direct impact on our health is alarming.
Geoengineering programs have also been promoted by the Council on Foreign Relations, which is one of the main steering committees behind the implementation of global governance.
A recent report issued by the UK government also calls for the UN to exclusively regulate world wide geoengineering of the planet in order to stave off man made global warming.
Discussion of geoengineering technology is often framed as a future consideration, yet governments are already conducting such programs at an advanced stage.
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program was created in 1989 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Science and managed by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research.
One of ARM’s programs, entitled Indirect and Semi-Direct Aerosol Campaign (ISDAC), is aimed at measuring “cloud simulations” and “aerosol retrievals”.
Another program under the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program is directed towards, “developing comprehensive understanding of the atmospheric processes that control the transport, transformation, and fate of energy related trace chemicals and particulate matter.”
The DOE website states that, “The current focus of the program is aerosol radiative forcing of climate: aerosol formation and evolution and aerosol properties that affect direct and indirect influences on climate and climate change.”
U.S. government scientists are already bombarding the skies with the acid-rain causing pollutant sulphur dioxide in an attempt to fight global warming by “geo-engineering” the planet, despite the fact that injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere carries with it a host of both known and unknown dangers.
The proposal to disperse sulphur dioxide in an attempt to reflect sunlight was discussed in a September 2008 London Guardian article entitled, Geoengineering: The radical ideas to combat global warming, in which Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, promoted the idea of injecting the atmosphere with aerosols.
“One approach is to insert “scatterers” into the stratosphere,” states the article. “Caldeira cites an idea to deploy jumbo jets into the upper atmosphere and deposit clouds of tiny particles there, such as sulphur dioxide. Dispersing around 1m tonnes of sulphur dioxide per year across 10m square kilometres of the atmosphere would be enough to reflect away sufficient amounts of sunlight.”
Experiments similar to Caldeira’s proposal are already being carried out by U.S. government -backed scientists, such as those at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, who last year began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere.
The project is closely tied to an idea by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who “proposed sending aircraft 747s to dump huge quantities of sulfur particles into the far-reaches of the stratosphere to cool down the atmosphere.”
Such programs merely scratch the surface of what is likely to be a gargantuan and overarching black-budget funded project to geo-engineer the planet, with little or no care for the unknown environmental consequences this could engender.
What is known about what happens when the environment is loaded with sulphur dioxide is bad enough, since the compound is the main component of acid rain, which according to the EPA “Causes acidification of lakes and streams and contributes to the damage of trees at high elevations (for example, red spruce trees above 2,000 feet) and many sensitive forest soils. In addition, acid rain accelerates the decay of building materials and paints, including irreplaceable buildings, statues, and sculptures that are part of our nation’s cultural heritage.”
The health effects of bombarding the skies with sulphur dioxide alone are enough to raise serious questions about whether such programs should even be allowed to proceed.
The following health effects are linked with exposure to sulphur.
- Neurological effects and behavioral changes
- Disturbance of blood circulation
- Heart damage
- Effects on eyes and eyesight
- Reproductive failure
- Damage to immune systems
- Stomach and gastrointestinal disorder
- Damage to liver and kidney functions
- Hearing defects
- Disturbance of the hormonal metabolism
- Dermatological effects
- Suffocation and lung embolism
According to the LennTech website, “Laboratory tests with test animals have indicated that sulfur can cause serious vascular damage in veins of the brains, the heart and the kidneys. These tests have also indicated that certain forms of sulfur can cause foetal damage and congenital effects. Mothers can even carry sulfur poisoning over to their children through mother milk. Finally, sulfur can damage the internal enzyme systems of animals.”
Fred Singer, president of the Science Environmental Policy Project and a skeptic of man-made global warming theories, warns that the consequences of tinkering with the planet’s delicate eco-system could have far-reaching dangers.
“If you do this on a continuous basis, you would depress the ozone layer and cause all kinds of other problems that people would rather avoid,” said Singer.
Even Greenpeace’s chief UK scientist – a staunch advocate of the man-made global warming explanation – Doug Parr has slammed attempts to geo-engineer the planet as “outlandish” and “dangerous”.
Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who recently proposed a bizarre plan to send spaceships into the upper atmosphere that would be used to block out the Sun, admits that geo-engineering could cause “conflicts between nations if geoengineering projects go wrong.”
Given all the immediate dangers associated with bombarding the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide, along with the unknown dangers of other geo-engineering projects, many people are concerned that “chemtrails” are a secret component of the same agenda to alter the Earth’s eco-system.
The fact that chemtrails are blocking out the sun, which is precisely what the geoengineering advocates call for, strongly indicates that they are an integral part of this dangerous and wide-reaching program.
This graphic proposes, “Spraying aluminum powder and barium oxide into high levels of the atmosphere, again delivered by aircraft, to increase planetary reflectance (albedo) and cloud cover.” High levels of barium have been found in substances associated with chemtrails.
Reports of chemtrails, jet plumes emitted from planes that hang in the air for hours and do not dissipate, often blanketing the sky in criss-cross patterns, have increased dramatically over the last 10 years. Many have speculated that they are part of a government program to alter climate, inoculate humans against certain pathogens, or even to toxify humans as part of a population reduction agenda.
In conducting Google searches, one finds discussion, such as this example, of using sulphur dioxide as a jet fuel additive to be dispersed over the world during routine commercial flights.
“I suggest that both the sulphur dioxide and the silica particles could be delivered into the stratosphere by dissolving an additive in jet aviation fuel,” writes engineer John Gorman, who has conducted experiments to test the feasibility of such a scenario.
“We would want to burn fuel containing the additive specifically when the aircraft was cruising in the lower stratosphere,” he adds.
In 2008, a KSLA news investigation found that a substance that fell to earth from a high altitude chemtrail contained high levels of Barium (6.8 ppm) and Lead (8.2 ppm) as well as trace amounts of other chemicals including arsenic, chromium, cadmium, selenium and silver. Of these, all but one are metals, some are toxic while several are rarely or never found in nature.
The newscast focuses on Barium, which its research shows is a “hallmark of chemtrails.” KSLA found Barium levels in its samples at 6.8 ppm or “more than six times the toxic level set by the EPA.” The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality confirmed that the high levels of Barium were “very unusual,” but commented that “proving the source was a whole other matter” in its discussion with KSLA.
KSLA also asked Mark Ryan, Director of the Poison Control Center, about the effects of Barium on the human body. Ryan commented that “short term exposure can lead to anything from stomach to chest pains and that long term exposure causes blood pressure problems.” The Poison Control Center further reported that long-term exposure, as with any harmful substance, would contribute to weakening the immune system, which many speculate is the purpose of such man-made chemical trails.
Indeed, barium oxide has cropped up repeatedly as a contaminant from suspected geoengineering experimentation.
KSLA also put aerosolized-chemical testing in its historical context, citing a voluminous number of unclassified tests exposed in 1977 Senate hearings. The tests included experimenting with biochemical compounds on the public. KSLA reports that “239 populated areas were contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969.”
One of the accepted truisms of scientific study is the fact that if scientists are proposing an idea, then those scientists with access to the bottomless pit of black-budget secret government funding are already doing it.
It is highly likely that chemtrails are merely one manifestation of “geo-engineering” that is taking place without proper debate, notification or any form of legality, and with a callous disregard for the potential dangers to both our health and our environment. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Geoengineering with Space Particles, Artificial Volcanoes, a
Tue Jul 13, 2010 5:08 am
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http://www.good.is/post/geoengineering-with-space-particles-artificial-volcanoes-and-special-k/
Geoengineering with Space Particles, Artificial Volcanoes, and Special K
Jim Motavalli is a New York Times contributor who blogs about green transportation for MNN.
I ran into author and Rolling Stone contributing editor Jeff Goodell at Arizona State in Phoenix, where he was a speaker at the Covering the Green Economy conference (I also spoke). Though he had just published a book, the rumpled-looking Goodell didn’t talk about it until prodded by his fellow journalists. The book is How to Cool the Planet (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), and it’s about geoengineering—scientific approaches to reduce the Earth’s temperature that can achieve positive results without actually reducing the carbon dioxide (CO2) we seem unable to stop pumping into the atmosphere.
Goodell’s book is not science-lite: There’s not a lot of pages devoted to crazed schemes and the dreamers who advance them. Instead, he focuses on some key scientists—including a bleeding-heart liberal who used to organize anti-nuke rallies and a former Dr. Death who created weapons systems with H Bomb designer Edward Teller—who might actually be on to something. The book’s message is that there’s no substitute for reducing CO2 emissions, but given the results of the underachieving Kyoto Treaty and the dramatic failure of COP 15, it doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon. And if we continue to ignore the Earth’s dire warnings, geoengineering may be a Hail Mary pass for a planet in trouble. I talked to Goodell after the conference:
MNN: How do you define geoengineering?
GOODELL: The British Royal Society defines it as large-scale, intentional intervention in the climate system to offset global warming. It’s figuring out ways to reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the planet in order to cool things off. It’s also about developing new technologies that could suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in artificial ways in order to reduce concentrations in the atmosphere.
Most people would think that was an impossible task. Did your research in how to cool the planet show that these kinds of things are really achievable on such a big scale?
One of the things that’s really surprising is that when it comes to cooling off the planet by blocking sunlight you don’t have to block very much, only 1 or 2 percent. That could offset a doubling of CO2 emissions, and doubling is the common yardstick you’ll find scientists use to talk about climate sensitivity.There are simple things that would mimic natural processes. For instance, we know that big volcanoes like Mount Pinatubo, which erupted in the Philippines in 1992, put a lot of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The particles act like tiny mirrors. Mount Pinatubo actually lowered the temperature of the Earth by about a degree for several years.
One of the most promising and interesting ideas here is to mimic nature — build an artificial volcano that would put small amounts of such particles high into the stratosphere, higher even than a volcano would do, and reflect away a small amount of sunlight. That has not been done yet, but it is very doable, and it could have the effect of cooling off the planet. It does not eliminate the need for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but if you wanted to find a way to cool off the planet quickly, this is one way to do it.
If I took these ideas to leading climate scientist James Hansen or to environmental writer and350.org founder Bill McKibben, would they scoff at them?
I was on a panel with Bill McKibben a few weeks ago inVermont. Bill says the fact that we’re even talking about this seriously is a measure of how desperate things have become. One of the reasons I got into geoengineering was that I wrote a book about coal ["Big Coal"]. I realized that the world was not going to stop burning coal anytime soon, and the technology to remove CO2 from the coal stacks is not likely to work on a large scale. And so that means we’re going to be pumping a whole lot more CO2 into the atmosphere for a long time, and we’re going to blow through a whole lot of the targets scientists have set in order to avoid the risk of dangerous climate change.
And so what might we do, what are other ways of dealing with this problem? I think people like Bill McKibben and James Hansen would say this is very dangerous, manipulating the climate on this level. And we really should focus our intentions on reducing CO2 levels. And I totally agree with them. But despite what Hansen has been saying for 30 years and McKibben for almost as long, we’re not doing a very good job of it. Emissions are going up, up, up, and by any meaningful measure we’re not making progress.
So I think it’s important to at least think about geoengineering, to at least articulate what the risks and dangers are so we can better understand it.
What are some of the more far-out geoengineering concepts for reducing global warming effects?
There are basically two categories of techniques, one of which is reducing the amount of sunlight that hits the planet, which would work very quickly — it’s like popping a parasol on a beach. And in that category are things like pumping particles high into the stratosphere, and also brightening marine clouds. We know that can work because ships do it — particles from diesel exhaust stimulate cloud growth and reflect away sunlight. Other ideas are about changing the reflectivity of the Earth — even Energy Secretary Steven Chu has talked about painting roofs white, and roads white, which would have a small effect.
The other category encompasses ideas that would suck CO2 out of the air, ranging from dumping iron into the ocean to stimulating plankton blooms (which would pull carbon out of the surface waters and out of the air). There is also using a chemical process to build machines called artificial trees that will pull CO2 out of the atmosphere directly. Think of a kind of iron lung for the planet that would allow us to dial in the kind of climate we want. Those are some of the more practical things.
One of the far-out, science-fiction ideas is putting mirrors in space—I don’t take those ideas very seriously because they’re very expensive and would take hundreds of years to implement. Researchers also have had the crazy idea of dumping plastic balls or Styrofoam into the ocean in order to change the reflectivity of the Arctic Ocean. Some have even talked about launching a nuclear weapon at the moon to create a lot of moondust and reflect away sunlight. There are a lot of wacky ideas.
Isn’t there some idea involving the breakfast cereal Special K?
Yes, one researcher has talked about dumping thousands of millions of tons of Special K into the ocean with the idea that it would change the reflectivity of the oceans while also adding nutrients and creating plankton blooms—so it would be a lot of bang for the buck. These are the nutty ideas that a lot of garage thinkers are putting out there. I tried to not focus too much on that stuff, because it just makes you laugh and this is a really serious endeavor. To focus too much attention on those things undercuts the seriousness of the science.
I think you were a bit surprised that the fossil fuel lobby actually loves your book.
When the galleys of the book came out, the first call I got was from one of the big fossil fuel lobbying firms, inviting me to Washington and offering to sponsor talks. They love the idea, because if it’s positioned for them in the right way, which for me is the wrong way. They hear the message, “We don’t have to worry about cutting back on oil and coal and other fossil fuels if we can just put some sulfur particles up in the sky and continue on our merry way.” It’s a diet pill for our climate problems. But in reality, that’s kind of a nightmare scenario because reducing the sunlight that hits the planet is not a cure-all for the problems of high CO2 levels. Among other things, we’d still have to deal with the most important consequence of those high levels, which is the ongoing acidification of the oceans.
Jim Motavalli is a New York Times contributor who blogs about green transportation for MNN. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Is the cure (geoengineering) worse than the disease (global
Mon Jul 19, 2010 10:48 pm
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=is-the-cure-geoengineering-worse-th-2010-07-19
Is the cure (geoengineering) worse than the disease (global warming)?
By David Biello
If there's one thing more potentially contentious than the international politics of global warming (which the world has spent at least the past 20-plus years dithering about), it's the politics of the most radical suggestion to solve it: geoengineering. After all, he who controls Earth's thermostat may well control Earth. And what's good for one nation (i.e. Bangladesh and its shoreline prefer today's climate, fearing sea level rise under a warmer one) may not be good for another (i.e. Russia might enjoy a balmier Arctic Circle).
That's exactly what some new computer modeling suggests, as published July 18 in Nature Geoscience. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) Geophysicist Kate Ricke of Carnegie Mellon University and her colleagues show that one of the more feasible geoengineering methods—injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere to mimic the world-cooling effects of a volcanic eruption—will have effects that vary from place to place. So, for example, India might be rendered too cold (and wet) by a level of particle injection that's just right for its neighbor China while setting the levels to India's liking would toast the Middle Kingdom.
What's worse, the computer models that show that such injections might work in the short term also show that they will change global weather patterns by making part of the atmosphere more stable—and therefore less likely to promote storms. That means less rainfall to go around—and these side effects become worse with time.
"The generic results—what's good for the goose may not be good for the gander—is robust," says climate modeler and geoengineering expert Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, whose own computer modeling in the late-1990s proved that such sulfate injection could work, at least in the short term. "I would not believe the specifics regarding India versus China in this one model."
Caldeira notes that Ricke and her fellows relied on just one model to make these predictions. Nor does he think that any geoengineering will be tailored locally: "The world is inextricably linked economically, so the idea that each location will be trying to optimize local weather is not right," he says. "The process of globalization of our economy will lead people to consider a more global optimization of climate."
Of course, international negotiations to cope with climate change—the environmental side-effect of such globalization—have proven intensely regional, national and even classist. And even Caldeira admits that "in the case of a real climate emergency, where leaders are trying to save their citizens from famine and starvation, the leaders will simply deploy a system and treat damage from breaking international guidelines as a cost to be considered."
Or, as economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University, puts it: "It's something to have on the shelf in case you look up and say 'We're really going over a cliff here. We have to do something.'" |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
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| 'Aerosols can only temporary fix global warming'
Tue Jul 20, 2010 12:29 am
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Home/Environment/Global-Warming/Aerosols-can-only-temporary-fix-global-warming-/articleshow/6187668.cms
'Aerosols can only temporary fix global warming'
LONDON: Injecting aerosols in the upper atmosphere is believed to be a method that can quickly counter global warming. However, this is not the case, new research reveals.
In a paper appearing in Nature Geoscience, Kate Ricke, a climate physicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and her team show, by modelling, that solar-radiation management could not only reduce rainfall in the long term, but its effects will also vary across regions. Some places will be over-cooled by atmospheric changes, which are too minor to be effective for their neighbours.
The gases under consideration are sulphur compounds that would produce sulphate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. Geoengineering advocates have suggested injecting large quantities of these materials into the stratosphere, either by shooting them up in artillery shells or releasing them from high-flying aeroplanes. Once there, they would disperse into a thin, bright haze that would reflect enough sunlight back into space to partially or completely offset global warming.
According to the new study, it is quite easy to design sulphate-injection scenarios that keep the temperature stable until 2080. But, the change in sunlight alters other weather patterns.
"It changes the distribution of energy in the troposphere so that it becomes more convectively stable," Nature quoted Ricke, as saying. Consequently, precipitation decreases.
Regional effects are also important. For example, Ricke said, her research demonstrates that levels of sulphate that kept China closest to its baseline climate were so high that they made India cold and wet. Those that were best for India raised the mercury levels in China. However, both countries fared better either way than under a no-geoengineering policy, she said.
The researchers also found that all of these effects get worse with time.
Ricke said: "The compensation is imperfect. The longer you do it, the more imperfect it becomes."
This type of geoengineering is at best a temporary fix - something people working in the field had always known because it does nothing to prevent the accumulation of CO2 and the resulting acidification of the oceans.
"But it might be even more temporary than people had expected," Rickie said. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Ever Wonder About Chemtrails (chemical trails) in the sky ov
Mon Aug 02, 2010 2:23 am
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http://www.thecitywire.com/index.php?q=node/11083
Ever Wonder About Chemtrails (chemical trails) in the sky overhead?
Submitted by Monte Smith
The first I ever heard the term "chemtrail" was in the month of July during the summer of 01' when my wife and I stopped at a little health food store in Harrison, AR. (we were visiting AR at the time and on a camping trip). While doing a bit of shopping we struck up a conversation with the woman working there and, at some point in the conversation, the lady introduced us to the term "chemtrail" followed by a lengthy explanation. The subject was new news for my wife and I and both were instantly interested in the subject. It wasn't but a couple of hours later when we stopped at a State Park by Norfork Lake to have a swim when we looked up and directly overhead was this big X in the sky. Our first chemtrail sighting! Actually, not so. Upon seeing this X that, by the way, just lingered in the sky for a couple of hours or so, realized that we had been seeing these "chemtrails" for years. As it turns out we had been remarking on these incredible contrails and unusual patterns of contrails in the FL skys and throughout our drive from FL to AR. But, we had all along been seeing them as being "jet-trails" or contrails (condensation trails). But, once the different characteristics between the two had been pointed out to us by the lady in the Harrison health food store, it was easy to look up in the sky and distinguish between what were contrails and what were chemtrails.
Since the time of my chemtrail enlightenment I have attempted to pass the enlightenment onto others. However, I have been continually surprised to find that more people than not, that I brought the topic up to, quidkly rejected the information without personal inspection, consideration or discussion. Instead, of a display of curiousity and interest I would generally experience the person throwing out the thought-stopping word...CONSPIRACY as if they were Captain Kirk ordering "Sheilds up!" In any case, once that word was out there it was the empahtic period to the subject being addressed.
This morning I received in my inbox, a credible article that finally acknowledges (and more) the existence and purpose of chemtrails. As I have seen the word chemtrail referenced here on TCW on a few occasions (usually in a derogatory way), I thought I would paste an excerpt from the article and, of course, also include a link to it.
Atmospheric Geoengineering: Weather Manipulation, Contrails and Chemtrails - A Review of the "Case Orange" report
Rady Ananda
Excerpt:
At an international symposium held in Ghent, Belgium May 28-30, 2010, scientists asserted that “manipulation of climate through modification of Cirrus clouds is neither a hoax nor a conspiracy theory.” It is “fully operational” with a solid sixty-year history. Though “hostile” environmental modification was banned by UN Convention in 1978, its “friendly” use today is being hailed as the new savior to climate change and to water and food shortages. The military-industrial complex stands poised to capitalize on controlling the world’s weather.
“In recent years there has been a decline in the support for weather modification research, and a tendency to move directly into operational projects.” ~World Meteorological Organization, 2007
The only conspiracy surrounding geoengineering is that most governments and industry refuse to publicly admit what anyone with eyes can see. Peer-reviewed research is available to anyone willing and able to maneuver the labyrinth of scientific journals. So, while there is some disclosure on the topic, full public explanation is lacking. A brief list of confirmed cloud seeding events is produced at bottom, starting in 1915.
Going under a variety of names – atmospheric geoengineering, weather modification, solar radiation management, chemical buffering, cloud seeding, weather force multiplication – toxic aerial spraying is popularly known as chemtrails. However, this is merely one technique employed to modify weather. The practice of environmental modification is vast and well funded.
Hosted by the Belfort Group, which has been working for the last seven years to raise public awareness of toxic aerial spraying, the Symposium included chemtrail awareness groups from Greece, Germany, Holland, France and the U.S. Belfort published five videos covering only May 29,[1] when filmmaker Michael Murphy (Environmental Deception and What in the world are they spraying)[2] and aerospace engineer Dr. Coen Vermeeren [3] gave the most dramatic presentations.
Dr Vermeeren, of the Delft University of Technology, presented [4] a 300-page scientific report entitled, “CASE ORANGE: Contrail Science, Its Impact on Climate and Weather Manipulation Programs Conducted by the United States and Its Allies.” [5]
Case Orange notes it was prepared for the Belfort Group by a team of scientists but presented anonymously. It was sent to embassies, news organizations and interested groups around the world “to force public debate.”
Note: the entire article is lengthy and does include several photos.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20369
Worth looking at full report.
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Geo-engineering studies: Not a panacea, rather a darker ...
Wed Aug 11, 2010 8:00 pm
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http://www.openleft.com/diary/19780/geoengineering-studies-not-a-panacea-rather-a-darker-picture-of-the-global-warming-problem
Geo-engineering studies: Not a panacea, rather a darker picture of the global warming problem
by: Paul Rosenberg
Yesterday, in "Losing the 'war on terror' via the Pakistani Monsoon", I wrote about current news on the global warming front, and how its impacting the ongoing "war on terror," quoting from Democracy Now! among other sources. Today, I want to start off looking back a month to another Democracy Now! program, which began with a segment with geopolitical analyst and columnist Gwynne Dyer talking about his new book, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats. Dyer painted a very dire picture, arguing that goengineering was the only way to avoid catastrophe. Then in a followup segment with Vadana Shiva, they debated whether this was a sensible approach. Philosophically, I've always been deeply skeptical of geoengineering. But Dyer made about the strongest impression on me of any geoengineering proponent I've ever listened to. Then, last week, I saw a summary of three recent studies, which not only revealed seemingly fatal flaws--such as regional impacts that will persist, even if global mean temperature can be controlled--but that also served to show that global warming is a much more serious, more intractable problem than even I believed.
Let's start by going back a month. First Dyer paints a picture of the possible world to come--one of deep conflicts:
AMY GOODMAN: Your book begins to say the least, a nightmare scenario, the year 2045. I was wondering if you could just read us the scenario.?
GWYNNE DYER: Since the final collapse of European Union in 2036 under the stress of mass migration from the southern to northern members, the reconfigured Northern Union (France, Denmark, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland) has succeeded in closing its borders to any further refugees from the famine stricken Mediterranean countries. Italy south of Rome, has largely been overrun by refugees from even harder hit north African countries, and is no longer part of the organized state. Spain, northern Italy and Turkey have all acquired nuclear weapons and are seeking to enforce food sharing on the better-fed countries of norther Europe. Britain, which has managed to make itself just about self-sufficient in food by dint of a great national effort, has withdrawn from the continent and shelters behind its enhanced nuclear deterrent.-I think that is why they're renewing their deterrent, by the way, right now--. Russia, the greatest beneficiary of climate change, in terms of food production is the undisputed great power of Asia. However, the reunification of China after the chaos of the 2020's and 2030's poses a renewed threat to its Siberian borders for even the much reduced Chinese population of 800 million is unable to feed itself from the country's increasingly arid farm land, which was devastated by the decline of rainfall over the north Chinese plain, and the collapse of the major river systems. Southern India is reemerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, remain swept by famine and anarchy due to the collapse of the flow in the glacier-fed Indus, Ganges, and Bramaputra rivers. Welcome to 2036.
Then Dyer describes geo-engineering:
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what geo-engineering is?
GWYNNE DYER: It is the hole card, the get out of jail free card, the only one I know of, its the only one I know of frankly. I don't know a single scientist nor do I know many policymakers, who in their honest moments think we are going to get our emissions down in time to avoid tumbling into potentially runaway climate change. The two degrees Celsius average global temperature, after that we lose control. Natural factors, feedbacks from the permafrost melting and so on, takeover and carry us to really devastating levels of warming 4-5-6 degrees. You're trapped on this escalator and you can't get off. So, if that's where we are heading, what do you do? We'll do the best to cut the emissions but its not going to happen in time. And the answer is geo-engineering. You cheat. You find ways to hold the temperature down while you go on working at the project of getting your emissions down. It is a long-term solution, but if waiting, just getting your emissions down is your only technique, sorry, you're going to trigger the feedbacks, you're in run away. So cheat. The phrase we're all going to know in two years time is SRM, and that stands for Solar Radiation Management....
Although I'm philosophically sympathetic to Shiva, I found this response rather sloppily argued, particularly trying to connect Iceland's volcanic eruption to its economic woes:
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, three thoughts. The first is, it is the idea of being able to engineer our lives on this very fragile and complex and interrelated and interconnected planet that's created the mess we are in. It's an engineering paradigm that created the fossil fuel age that gave us climate change. And Einstein warned us and said you can't solve problems with the same mindset that created them. Geo-engineering is trying to solve the problems of the same, old mindset of controlling nature. And the phrase that was used, of cheating, let's cheat-you can't cheat nature. That's something people should recognize by now. There is no cheating possible. Eventually the laws of Gaia determine the final outcome. But I think the second thing about geo-engineering is, we've just had the volcano in Iceland, yes it was Iceland. And look at the collapse of the economy. And here are scientists thinking that's a solution? Because they are thinking in a one dimensional way. Linear issue of global warming, anything to do with global cooling. I work on ecological agriculture. We need that sun light for photosynthesis. The geoengineers don't realize sunshine is not a curse on the planet. The sun is not the problem, the problem is the mess of pollution we are creating. So again we can't cheat.
Now, though, there are a set of three new studies of geoengineering, and their results not only cast it in a bad light, they deeply intensify the sense of urgency and seriousness. They show that even if global impacts can be mitigated, it's only temporary, and sever regional effects will still occur. And, of course, that's assuming that things are done responsibly--something there's absolutely no evidence of so far.
Brian Angliss writes at Scholars and Rouges ("Three new studies illustrate significant risks and complications with geoengineering climate"):
Paul Rosenberg :: Geo-engineering studies: Not a panacea, rather a darker picture of the global warming problem
The results of three different geoengineering studies were recently published, and all three found that geoengineering would be fraught with unintended and unexpected consequences.
The first two studies looked into the effects of pumping gigatonnes of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere. This method of geoengineering works by decreasing the amount of energy that reaches the Earth's surface by increasing how much light reflects off the upper atmosphere. Scientists know that this would work because the Earth cooled for a few years after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo blew large amounts of SO2 into the stratosphere in 1991. But what scientists don't know is what the side effects of using SO2 in a long-term geoengineering project would be.
The first study was performed using two different climate models to project what would happen as a result of pumping 5 Tg per year (5 Mt per year) of SO2 into the stratosphere. The scientists ran the models over several decades and compared the results to a baseline CO2 emissions scenario (A1B) assuming rapid economic growth and spread of new energy technologies, a maximum global population of about 9 billion people, and reduced disparities between wealthy and poor nations.
The results showed a number of things that Angliss describes specifically, but all can be summarized broadly under two points: (1) Aimply controlling the global mean does not put an end to regional climate change, which will still occur and have significant impacts. (2) You have to keep pumping SO2 into the atmosphere, or else the global impacts continue as they would have anyway:
The simulations showed several things. First, continuous pumping of SO2 into the stratosphere cooled the average global surface temperature in less than a decade to approximately pre-industrial temperatures. Second, injecting the simulated amount of SO2 delayed the increase in global mean temperature approximately 30 years. Third, when the temperature returned to approximately the same level as the simulation starting point, the injected SO2 had significantly altered the global temperature pattern from the 1990-1999 means. For example, the Amazon basin was about 1 K hotter, the Arctic still showed polar amplification due to losing very reflective sea ice, while Australia was actually cooler and sub-Saharan Africa were generally cooler. As the authors pointed out, this means that
increases in GHG concentrations can still have a profound impact on regional climate even if geoengineering is successful in counteracting any change in global-mean temperature.
Fourth, along with changes in average global surface temperature, there are also changes predicted in global precipitation. For example, the simulation projected that much of the US Midwest would dry out along with the Texas and Mexican Gulf coasts and the northern area of South America. On the other hand, inland areas of sub-Saharan Africa would get wetter along with northeastern Australia and the Siberian coast.
The second study ran different scenarios involving continuous pumping of SO2 into the atmosphere, trying to stabilize the global mean. It found that there was no optimal outcome: some regions would always be impacted more than others, making the engineering choice inherently and tragically political, with dire outcomes for some. First the basics:
While the first study found that average global surface temperatures could be delayed by about 30 years by pumping 5 Tg per year of SO2 into the atmosphere, the second study used a different simulation to determine what would happen if the amount of SO2 was increased continually to keep the average global surface temperature stable.
Like the first study, the second study started from the A1B emissions scenario, but then ran 54 different simulations where differing amounts of SO2 were pumped into the stratosphere in order to counteract and then stabilize the average global surface temperature at various points. In addition, the researcher divided up the world's land area into different regions in order to estimate what the overall effects of geoengineering would be on each region.
Then what it tells us:
What the researchers found was that there appeared to be a fundamental trade-off involved in using SO2 to stabilize the average global surface temperature. Specifically, the results appeared to show that more stability in global temperature meant less stability in regional precipitation. In addition, the researchers determined an "optimal" climate where the changes in both temperature and precipitation were held as low as possible, and then they mapped those climates into Figure 2 (Fig. 4 from the paper, at left [below]). Fig 2a & b show the optimal climate in the 2020s vs. the 2070s respectively, following 15 or 65 years of non-stop SO2 injection into the stratosphere. The red and orange regions represent those areas where "optimal" is achieved using less SO2 pumping while the blue and dark green regions are those areas where more SO2 pumping is "optimal."
Figure 2
What Figure 2 shows us is that there's a number of clear differences between those areas where more SO2 pumping would be preferred vs. those areas where less SO2 is better. For example, the northern hemisphere generally wants more SO2 than the southern hemisphere. But perhaps the most significant is that the developing world, especially western Africa, India, and the island nations of south-east Asia are all going to want less SO2 pumping, while the developed world (the US, Europe, China, Russia, Japan) will all want more SO2 pumping.
This split between north and south, developed vs. developing is very likely to cause conflicts between regions and nations that will complicate any SO2-based geoengineering system. As the researchers point out, these results
suggest that as our understanding improves, serious issues of regionally diverse impacts and inter-regional equity may further complicate what is already a very challenging problem in risk management and governance.
Summarizing these two studies, Angliss notes:
The results of the two SO2 studies agree broadly with each other - pumping SO2 into the stratosphere will cause unintended changes in precipitation globally but with some regions faring better than others. The second study, however, only ran their simulations until 2070. In reality, unless some method of accelerated CO2 removal was implemented, the geoengineering of the stratosphere with SO2 would have to go on for centuries.
Finally, the third study posited an unknown ideal system that could remove all the CO2 in the atmosphere at once. There were three variants:
The third study investigated the effects of an ideal system that was able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to project what effect it would have on average global surface temperature.
The researchers ran three different simulations. The first, baseline simulation followed a high CO2 emissions scenario until 2049 and then, in 2050, dropped the emissions instantly to 0 but did not otherwise reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. In the second simulation, the emissions not only dropped to 0 but all the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere was also instantly removed, but any extra CO2 later released into the atmosphere by the ocean or the biosphere were not removed. The third simulation also removed any extra CO2 added to the atmosphere by the oceans and biosphere as it was added, simulating continued CO2 removal by some geoengineering technology.
Referring to the following graph:
he then identifies four "key features":
The first key feature is that CO2 concentration doesn't fall rapidly even after CO2 emissions have been reduced to 0 (top graph, black dashed line). This is because the lifetime of CO2 emitted into the environment is thousands of years, so the CO2 concentrations fall about 100 ppm over the course of 450 years unless the CO2 is actively removed from the atmosphere. The second key feature is that temperature continues to increase even after all CO2 emissions are stopped (bottom graph, dashed black line). This is because the ocean stores massive amounts of energy and it responds relatively slowly. As a result, the global mean surface temperature in 2500 is simulated to be about the same as in 2050.
The third key feature is that even after all the anthropogenic CO2 is removed from the atmosphere in 2050, the CO2 concentration rebounds within a decade or so to around 360 ppm, restoring almost half of the CO2 back into the atmosphere (top graph, gold line). As a result, the effect of the one-time CO2 removal on global mean surface temperature is to only cut the temperature by about half instead of fully back to the pre-industrial level (bottom graph, gold line). The reason this happens is that much anthropogenic CO2 is absorbed by the ocean and the biosphere, and when the atmospheric CO2 concentration drops, the oceanic CO2 comes out of solution and the excess CO2 held in the biosphere gradually re-enters the atmosphere as the fertilization effects of excess CO2 fall.
The fourth key feature is how fast the temperatures respond to CO2 removal. If it were physically possible to remove all the anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere, then the global temperature would fall by about a degree Celsius within less than a decade (bottom graph, gold line). And if the excess CO2 being emitted by the oceans and biosphere back into the atmosphere were also removed via some technology as they were released, then the temperature would fall to nearly pre-industrial levels within 70 years (bottom graph, red line).
Leaving aside the fact that no such technology exists, he draws two conclusions:
First, merely transitioning to zero CO2 emissions by capturing CO2 from power plants and switching to renewable energy sources won't enough.
This is what we're trying to achieve by transitioning out of the carbon age. It's the standard, non-geo-engineering approach. And without also removing the CO2 already present in the atmosphere, it won't be enough.
How much will be enough? Funny you should ask:
Second, in order to return the global mean surface temperature to about pre-industrial levels, the total amount of CO2 that would need to be sequestered is almost equivalent to the total amount of CO2 that was emitted in the first place. That's a LOT of CO2, and so CO2 removal will be a long-term and difficult process.
Finally, Angliss summarizes the revealed inadequacies:
Combined, these three studies paint a bleak picture of geoengineering that runs counter to some proponents' claims. Pumping SO2 into the stratosphere can generally delay or counteract the increase in average global surface temperature, but at the cost potentially serious changes in precipitation and the accompanying changes in various regions' ability to sustain ecosystems and civilization. There will be other unintended and unexpected consequences from using SO2 to geoengineer the climate, and given the inability of international bodies to presently manage conflicts over climate disruption, it's unlikely that those same bodies will be able to manage the regional problems that will occur as a result of geoengineering.
There are other propblems as well--such as ocean acidification--since temperature and precipitation aren't the only factors we face. But one thing's for certain:
Climate disruption is a hole, and before we consider how best to use geoengineering to build us a ladder out of the hole, we have to stop digging ourselves even deeper.
Reading through the results of these studies, it becomes quite clear that--just as with health care or financial reform--the entire political spectrum is almost completely de-coupled from reality. You may think that James Inhofe is in a state of deep denial. And you're right. But that's only compared to recognizing that a problem exists. Compared to actually doing something that would actually solve the problem, the difference between Inhofe and Obama is surprisingly negligable.
Houston, we have a problem. The spaceship in trouble is Spaceship Earth.
Maybe we can get Robert Gibbs to tell the laws of physics how stupid they are. That should solve everything. |
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Sore Throat
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| Geoengineering: green or garbage?
Sun Aug 22, 2010 7:28 pm
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http://www.reportage-enviro.com/2010/08/geoengineering-green-or-garbage/
Geoengineering: green or garbage?
There is no doubt that our climate is changing. Most of us would agree that it is caused by humans. But what if we have passed the point of no return? James Manning reports.
In climate science, there exists what is known as the ‘tipping point’ – the point at which what has been done to our environment cannot be reversed. Once we have reached this tipping point, the effects of climate change will be permanent, even if we stop burning fossil fuels and switch to completely green energy.
This is where plan B comes in.
Geoengineering tackles the problem from a different angle; like an assault on climate change rather than a defence. It is not a new science, but it is definitely controversial.
It is a more aggressive form of climate change mitigation, broadly defined as the human manipulation of the natural environment on a global scale in order to directly alter the climate and reverse the effects of climate change.
There are two main types of geoengineering: carbon dioxide removal, which aims to leach excess carbon from the atmosphere; and solar radiation management, which aims to cool the earth by deflecting sunlight. Each has their fair share of merits and weaknesses.
Overview
Prevention is the best cure – the scientific community agrees cutting carbon emissions should be the first priority in the fight against climate change. However, like most of the issues facing society today, it’s all caught up in politics.
The global community has been holding conferences and signing treaties for over 20 years. Margaret Thatcher first gave a speech in 1988 outlining the scientific evidence for climate change.
“Even though this kind of action may cost a lot, I believe it to be money well and necessarily spent because the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other,” she said.
And yet here we are in 2010 and little has changed. New technologies abound, real action (ironically the campaign slogan of the do-nothing Coalition) is slow on the uptake. Fossil fuel emissions are still rising from all of the world’s major polluters.
Reducing carbon emissions at this stage may simply not be enough to rectify the consequences of climate change. The severe lack of preventative action may mean that radical theories such as geoengineering are our only remaining options.
Dr Ramsis Salama, a climate and hydrological scientist, is an advocate of geoengineering. “We need to change all our systems – we need to know how to live with climate change. The way we live, the way we use resources like water is all wrong,” he said.
“Are we going to go at the same pace at which we are going now? No – nobody can guarantee that … something might happen, something else that might make the rate of climate change explode,” said Dr Salama.
The Royal Society, a preeminent scientific research society based in London, agrees. Their report Geoengineering the climate: science governance and uncertainty released late last year, states:
“Unless future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are much more successful than they have been so far, additional action in the form of geoengineering will be necessary if we are to cool the planet.”
“Some of these proposals may seem fantastical, and may prove to be so,” said Professor John Shepherd, chair of the geoengineering studies being undertaken at the Royal Society.
It has steadily gained popularity as scientists have become aware of the fact that reaching the tipping point for our environment is not matter of ‘if’, but ‘when. Indeed, we may have already passed it.
As a result, it has risen to the political agenda in some countries, such as Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Closer to home, the Victorian state government recently invested $250,000 in a ‘climate intervention technologies’ conference held in California in March, hosted by the US Climate Response Fund.
The conference, which included scientists from the United States, Europe and a former CSIRO scientist, discussed international guidelines for the application of geoengineering, risk assessment, social considerations and funding opportunities.
“This conference has been important step in determining the special considerations and obligations associated with research on climate intervention and remediation,” said Dr Michael McCracken of the Climate Response Fund at the conference.
Perhaps most important was the discussion of social and legal perspectives on geoengineering, rather than focussing purely on the science and ecological risks involved.
The general consensus reached was that until it is absolutely necessary, and further testing has been done, geoengineering should not be utilised, but that research should continue to be conducted.
Apart from this isolated instance by the Victorian Government, Australia and the CSIRO do not currently research or invest in any form of geoengineering, and declined to comment on an area of research in which they are not involved.
In the UK, however, an inquiry into geoengineering was held before the House of Commons earlier this year. British parliament concluded that regulation of geoengineering was crucial in order to monitor current research and prepare for future applications.
“If we start work now it will provide the opportunity to fully explore the technological, environmental, political and regulatory issues,” said a Government report on the inquiry.
The report states that regulation should be international due to the global nature of the technologies involved, and that individual regulatory frameworks must be developed for different technologies because they are vastly different in nature. The inquiry also called for international disclosure of the findings of geoengineering research.
Carbon dioxide removal
We simply have too much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide removal, as the name suggests, aims to rectify that. While these technologies address the core of the problem, they work slowly over a very large time scale.
The most popular form of carbon dioxide removal is ocean fertilisation, whereby the ocean is fertilised with iron, which stimulates the growth of carbon capturing plankton.
There are problems with this though – the carbon captured does not sink deep into the ocean easily, and once it does, it has a tendency to make the surrounding ocean low in oxygen. Needless to say, this can have alarming effects on marine biodiversity.
Another form of carbon dioxide removal, also known as carbon sequestering, uses mirrors and sunlight to leach carbon out of the air. This method is currently being researched in Switzerland at the Paul Scherrer Institute and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Giant mirrors direct intense sunlight into laboratories, creating extreme temperatures up to 2000 degrees Celsius. When the compound calcium oxide is heated in these extreme temperatures, it leaches carbon dioxide out of the air, transforming it into calcium carbonate, or limestone powder. The powder is then further heated, at which point the calcium carbonate breaks down to calcium oxide and carbon. The calcium oxide can be reused and the carbon can be liquefied and stored.
Using this method, carbon dioxide could potentially be returned to atmospheric concentration levels not seen since before the Industrial Age.
However, this method also has its problems, such as safety issues and the cost of storing the carbon. Despite this, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology endeavours to build a plant this year that has the ability to capture approximately one tonne of carbon dioxide every day.
Dr Salama explained why geoengineering is still in its infancy: “We have previously conducted a lot of research and geological experiments at the CSIRO on the sequestering of carbon dioxide, liquefaction of carbon dioxide and injecting it underground,” said Dr Salama.
“Research is still going on elsewhere, but to do it we have a long way to go. It is a solution, if you can find an easy way to transform carbon dioxide and inject it underground or into the oceans. It’s very good but it’s still very experimental and is only being done in very small amounts,” said Dr Salama.
Dr Salama warns that geoengineering techniques are only intended as a back-up plan: “Unless we stop the mechanism by which this is happening – humans – we can never stop the cycle.” There is a danger, after all, of creating public disillusion that geoengineering is a quick fix that enables to carry on polluting the way we have been for hundreds of years. This is definitely not the case.
Solar radiation management
Solar radiation management, on the other hand, aims to cool the planet by deflecting the sun’s rays back out to space. Unlike carbon dioxide removal, solar radiation management could act quickly to reduce the temperature of the planet in the event of a crisis.
One theory, developed by the 2006 Nobel Prize winner Professor Paul Crutzen, suggests injecting large amounts of sulphur into the atmosphere, like a volcano eruption.
Some argue that this is just fighting pollution with pollution, as there are side effects to adding copious amounts of sulphur to the atmosphere, such as the acid rain. Large amounts of sulphur also have the potential to destroy ozone particles. Moreover, sulphur does not last long in the atmosphere, and so would have to be continuously added – which does not come cheap.
With all these techniques, there is the possibility of other side effects that are not yet known, and will not be until they are tried. For example, altering the composition of the atmosphere, as suggested by the injection of sulphur, can have devastating effects on global weather patterns.
It is possible that entire seasons could shift, altering rainfall patterns and having unforseen impacts upon crops and global food supplies.
“We are going to face a lot of problems. We have to be certain about that,” warned Dr Salama.
Professor Shepherd agrees: “None of the geoengineering technologies so far suggested is a magic bullet, and all have risks and uncertainties associated with them.”
Other solar radiation methods include placing large mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s rays and the “bleaching” of clouds to increase reflectivity. However, these methods are very expensive and their side effects unknown.
Unlike carbon dioxide removal, solar radiation management does nothing to reduce the amount of carbon already in the air and its associated impacts, such as the acidification of oceans.
The Royal Society report concludes: “Geoengineering methods should only be considered as part of a wider package of options for addressing climate change … used irresponsibly or without regard for possible side effects, geoengineering could have catastrophic consequences similar to those of climate change itself.”
The Royal Society, the British Parliament and the Climate Response Fund have all recommended the establishment of ethical guidelines.
Geo-engineering the future
Many scientists now believe that one day, in the not too distant future, geoengineering may be our only option for survival.
But plan B is not without risk. Are the dangers it brings with it too great? What price do we put on the future of our planet, and indeed ourselves? |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
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| Geoengineering Could Slow—But Not Stop—Sea Level Rise
Tue Aug 24, 2010 7:42 pm
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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/08/24/geoengineering-could-slow%E2%80%94but-not-stop%E2%80%94sea-level-rise/
Geoengineering Could Slow—But Not Stop—Sea Level Rise
by Andrew Moseman
You could plant huge new forests where none have been before. You could blast particles into the sky to block the sun’s radiation. You could put mirrors in space. These planetary hacks could slow global warming, but one thing that none of them could do, most likely, is to stop the rising sea levels that a warming planet will bring.
That’s the contention of John Moore, lead author of a study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Moore’s team examined five different means that scientists have proposed to hack the planet and save ourselves from anthropogenic global warming. The geoengineering schemes—forestation, atmospheric aerosols, space mirrors, biochar, and the use of biofuels plus carbon sequestration—are focused either on reducing the amount of energy the Earth absorbs or pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. So Moore wanted to see what they could do about a side effect of the extra heat: melting ice raising the global average sea level.
The results weren’t terribly encouraging. Sea levels respond slowly to changes in the planet’s temperature, Moore told Nature News, so “you can’t just slam on the brakes.”
Injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere – which reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth – had little effect. If emissions are allowed to grow at current rates, the model showed sea levels rising by 1.1 metres by 2100. Aerosols could reduce that to 0.8 metres by 2100, but with the rate of rise showing no sign of slowing down at the end of the century, this would simply delay greater rises, not prevent them. [New Scientist].
Space mirrors began to reverse the rising sea level trend, but only at about the end of the 21st century. If people quickly developed biofuels and became adept at carbon sequestration, things were even a tad better—but in Moore’s model the sea level still rose by 30 centimeters, or about a foot, mostly because of effects that are already locked into the system. Says Moore:
“I think that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere is the best way to stop sea-level rise before 2100.” That could be accomplished with the biomass power plants and new forests considered in the study, or by massively scaling up CO2 removal techniques currently deployed in spacecraft and submarines” [ScienceNOW].
Given the unintended consequences that could come with tinkering with the planet on such a massive scale, keeping intervention to a minimum would seem like the ideal choice. But Moore’s study reiterates that fear that it might be too late for little steps. It might be time to consider the “extreme geoengineering”—say, atmospheric aerosol injections every year and a half instead of every four years—that potentially could slow down rising temperatures and sea levels… at an unknown cost.
But once you start, you can’t stop.
Once started, geoengineering must be continued or temperatures will quickly rebound to what they would have been without intervention. An attendant surge in sea-level rise wouldn’t occur quite as quickly, but it would follow soon enough, at a rate of up to 1–2 centimetres per year, he says. “Those are speeds that were observed during the last deglaciation,” says Moore, “so we’re not forecasting anything that is out of the geological record” [Nature]. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| New climate disinformer fad: Ocean acidification denial
Wed Sep 01, 2010 6:09 pm
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http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/30/ocean-acidification-denial/
New climate disinformer fad: Ocean acidification denial
As oceanic CO2 rises, pH falls.
The burning of billions of tons of fossil fuels every year is altering our planet — not only by making our atmosphere trap more heat, but also by changing the chemistry of the ocean. For background, see 2010 Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.
Since ocean acidification is one of the most dangerous and best-documented impacts we face on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, the anti-science disinformers naturally have trained their Tobacco-industry tactics on it, as Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson explains in this cross-post.
Much of the carbon dioxide pollution put into the air is absorbed by the world’s oceans. Dissolved as carbonic acid, the pollution increases the acidity of the oceans, which is disrupting the marine food chain, especially by making it more difficult for plankton, corals, mollusks, and crustaceans to form their calciferous shells. In 2009, the Interacademy Science Panel, a network of 70 national science academies, warned that fossil fuel pollution must be rapidly reduced to “avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems”:
Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. To avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems, deep and rapid reductions of global CO2 emissions by at least 50% by 2050, and much more thereafter are needed.
Thus, carbon dioxide poses a double threat to our oceans, by increasing both their temperature and their acidity. The global population of phytoplankton appears to have dropped by 40 percent in recent decades. About a quarter of the world’s reefs have already died, including 80 percent in the Caribbean.
Of course, in the mirror-image world of fossil-fueled climate denial organized by Christopher Monckton’s Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), ocean acidification is just another mainstream scientific conspiracy:
•In 2009, Australian geologist and mining executive Ian Plimer argued in his book “Heaven and Earth” that ocean acidification wasn’t happening, and even if it were, it would be beneficial for ocean life.
•Coal company scientist and SPPI global warming denial advisor Craig Idso, a geographer, wrote in January that “the rising ‘ocean acidification’ scare is just more piffle.”
•Citing Idso, Australian computer scientist Johannes Floris “J Floor” Anthoni believes “the scare for acidic oceans is entirely unjustified,” because “acidic seas are a good thing.”
•Citing Idso, SPPI’s Dennis Ambler claimed in February there is “no evidence of any effects of lowered pH” and that even if pH has declined, “the ocean remains alkaline,” and it “is dishonest to present to a lay audience that any perceived reduction in alkalinity means the oceans are turning to acid.”
•“Ocean Acidification is a Misnomer,” wrote Lawrence Livermore National Labs materials engineer Jack Dini last Friday on a conservative Hawaiian blog, citing Plimer and Ambler. Dini claims that a scientific paper by Elisabetta Erba “contradicts the assumption that ocean acidification leads to species die-offs,” even though her paper found it took 160,000 years for plankton to recover from an acidification event 120 million years ago.
It’s notable that ocean acidification denial is coming out of Australia and Hawaii — island states with coral reefs and ocean ecosystems of incalculable ecological, economic, societal, and cultural value now being destroyed by fossil fuel pollution. The bleatings of these fringe deniers have not yet been promoted by the “mainstream” right, but considering how well entrenched denial of climate science has become among conservatives, ocean acidification denial may just become the next great right-wing fad. |
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Sore Throat
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| Tiny 'Flying Saucers' Could Save Earth From Global Warming
Thu Sep 09, 2010 5:42 pm
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http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/tiny-flying-saucers-could-save-e.html
Tiny 'Flying Saucers' Could Save Earth From Global Warming
by Eli Kintisch
New Turn? A phenomenon called photophoresis turns light and dark colored surfaces on a so-called light mill—and could power a new geoengineering scheme.
Using a trick of sunlight itself, tiny metallic disks could be levitated to the stratosphere where they would shade Earth's surface and counteract the effects of global warming, a new paper proposes. But even the scientist who dreamed up the idea says the little saucers should be used only as a last resort, if efforts to stem global warming by limiting the build-up of heat-trapping green house gases fails.
The idea is a novel type of geoengineering—the concept of tinkering with the atmosphere to reduce the effects of global warming. Spelled out online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it takes advantage of a natural phenomenon called photophoresis, in which the movement of a particle in a gas is affect by light shining on the particle and warming it. For example, suppose a disk-shaped particle is warmer than the surrounding air and its top consists of a different material than its bottom. Differences in the way the two materials react with light cause gas molecules to push the object upward. In nature, photophoresis makes particles like silicate dust migrate up and down in the atmosphere, and it explains how "solar mills" like the one in the illustration spin.
Now, physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada proposes using the effect to control the climate. He envisions cranking out scads of 20-nanometer-wide nanodisks whose tops are made of aluminum and whose bottoms are made of barium titanate. Because the barium titanate more readily transmits heat and energy to impinging air molecules than the aluminum, the push on the bottom of the disk would be greater than on the top when it is warmed by sunlight. So that pressure would push it upward to a height of 40 to 50 kilometers, just out of the stratosphere. In addition, because barium titanate can be electrically polarized, electric fields in the atmosphere would stabilize the disks and keep them from flipping over. The particles would sink slowly during the night but rise during the day. And the aluminum tops, protected with a thin coating, would reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the planet. “I've invented a flying saucer,” Keith jokes.
Previously, scientists have proposed a variety of other ways of cooling the planet using various techniques of blocking the sun. The most widely discussed is to mimic the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions of sulfur dioxide, a gas which in the atmosphere is converted into droplets of sulfuric acid, which scatter sunlight away from Earth's surface. But Keith says that the nanodisks technique might have fewer risks. For example, the sulfur dioxide particles can contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer. In contrast, the disks would block the sun above the stratosphere and avoid that danger.
Keith emphasizes that the scheme should be used only in an emergency, as its possible side effects—sun-blocking can alter rain patterns, for example—could be worse than the effects of warming. In the meantime, he says, some laboratory testing—and with proper oversight, possible outdoor tests—could help spell out the dangers and costs.
But volcano expert Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, says that even such testing is going too far. "It's irresponsible to advocate in situ atmospheric testing" before issues such as international governance or environmental risks are spelled out, he says. Ken Caldeira, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California, also urges caution. "I have no idea whether such particles could really be cost-effectively manufactured and deployed," he says. "This study illustrates how we are at the infancy of thinking about the ways in which we might seek to diminish the impacts of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
Keith himself says that it's crucial to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which cause global warming in the first place. The little disks should be the last line of protection, he says. "Seat belts reduce the risk of being injured in accidents," he says "But having a seat belt doesn't mean you should drive drunk at 100 miles an hour." |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Climate change: Can geoengineering satisfy everyone?
Tue Sep 21, 2010 5:11 pm
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http://scienceblog.com/38754/climate-change-can-geoengineering-satisfy-everyone/comment-page-1/
Climate change: Can geoengineering satisfy everyone?
by bjs
Reflecting sunlight from the Earth by geoengineering would undoubtedly cool the climate, but would different countries agree on how much to reflect? Research by climate scientists at the University of Bristol shows that the impact of geoengineering would be felt in very different ways across the world.
Previous studies of geoengineering approaches, aimed at averting dangerous climate change, have shown that although the average global temperature could be restored to ‘normal’ levels, some regions would remain too warm, whereas others would ‘overshoot’ and cool to much. In addition, average rainfall would be reduced.
This new study looked at the impacts of different strengths of geoengineering, from full strength (sufficient to return global average temperatures back to normal), through to no geoengineering.
Reporting in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers looked at how the impacts caused by these different strengths of geoengineering differed from region to region, using a comprehensive climate model developed by the UK Met Office, which replicates all the important aspects of the climate system, including the atmospheric, ocean and land processes, and their interactions.
Their analysis revealed that with increasing geoengineering strength, most regions become drier while others buck the trend and become increasingly wet. For example, the USA became drier with increasing geoengineering, and returned to normal conditions under half-strength geoengineering, whereas Australia became wetter, returning to normal conditions only for full strength geoengineering
Pete Irvine, lead author on the paper, points out there are likely to be disagreements over any future geoengineering schemes: “If there is a large amount of global warming in the future there would be no strength of geoengineering that would be best for everyone: some may be better off without any geoengineering while others may do better with a large amount.”
The team suggest that global average figures are too simple a measure to assess the impacts of geoengineering, and that decision makers of the future need to consider a variety of impacts, such as on regional precipitation, sea-level response, global crop yield before deciding whether embarking on geoengineering would be the right choice.
However, the work does offer some way forward. Co-author Dan Lunt added: “Our simulations indicate that it might be possible to identify a strength of geoengineering capable of meeting multiple targets, such as maintaining a stable mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet and cooling global climate, but without reducing global precipitation below normal amounts or exposing significant fractions of the Earth to unusual climate conditions.”
Paper:
The paper, “Assessing the Regional Disparities in Geoengineering Impacts”, is now available on the AGU Papers in Press site:
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/papersinpress.shtml#id2010GL044447 |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Could precisely engineered nanoparticles provide a novel geo
Tue Sep 21, 2010 5:19 pm
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http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/maynard20100917
Could precisely engineered nanoparticles provide a novel geoengineering tool?
Andrew Maynard
While traveling to the World Economic Forum meeting in China, I came across a new paper that piques my interest. The paper is by David Keith at the University of Calgary (published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science), and is a theoretical investigation of how injecting large quantities of precisely engineered particles into the upper atmosphere might provide a cost-effective tool for climate intervention – geoengineering.
The idea of using aerosol particles for messing with climate change isn’t a new one; the idea of injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect more sunlight away from the earth has been around for a while. But there were a couple of novel aspects of David’s paper that caught my attention.
The first was that he proposes engineering particles as disks a few micrometers wide and around 50 nanometers thick, that are designed to automatically congregate where they are most useful in the atmosphere – in other words, this is a beautiful case of nanotechnology meets geoengineering.
The second aspect of the paper that caught my attention was that I was working with precisely engineered particles not too dissimilar from those that David described back in the 1990s, which got me wondering whether techniques being used then for fabrication of silicon particles could be used for the more complex particles being proposed here.
In a nutshell, David’s idea is to engineer discs around 10 micrometers across and 50 nanometers thick, with a core of aluminum, a top layer of aluminum oxide, and a bottom layer of barium titanate. Injected high enough into the atmosphere (so Brownian motion didn’t muck things up) the discs should align with the lighter aluminum/aluminum oxide side facing up, and the heavier barium titanate side facing down. This is important, because the way these two surfaces interact with air molecules when the particles heat up – as they would do in sunlight – means that there would be a net force pushing the discs up (photophoresis). In effect, the particles would levitate to a stable position in the atmosphere, while keeping their shiny side to the sun – thus reflecting sunlight away from the earth (or increasing albedo).
This approach is a lot more sophisticated than dumping huge quantities of sulfates into the atmosphere, as in principle more could be achieved with less material, and in a more controlled manner. By engineering nanoparticles appropriately, it might also be possible to control where they go even further – by introducing a magnetic component for instance, so they follow the Earth’s magnetic field.
The idea is an intriguing one. The science that David Keith outlines – which admittedly is broad brushstrokes science – is plausible. The forces on discs the size he suggests should be sufficient to keep them aligned in the upper atmosphere – even when the Sun isn’t present for short periods of time. And if sufficient quantities could be produced, they should have a measurable cooling effect. The neat thing of course is that this is a concept that can be tested reasonably easily in the lab, using simulated atmospheres and prototype particles. And with advances in materials manufacturing in recent years, it shouldn’t be too hard to make small batches of the discs.
Which brings me to the second reason the paper caught my eye. Back in the 1990′s I was interested in how non-spherical airborne particles – including discs – behaved in aerosol samplers. One particular source of particles I played around with was precisely engineered uniform discs, just a few micrometers in diameter, formed using micromachining techniques more usually used to manufacture semiconductor chips.
This was a technique described by Mark Hoover (a good colleague from NIOSH) and colleagues, and developed in the UK by Paul Kaye. By using suitable templates, precisely shaped particles could be etched on the surface of a silicon wafer, then floated off and aerosolized. The result was an airborne cloud of precisely engineered discs.
Of course, Mark and Paul were using silicon as their main material. But with modern Chemical Vapor Deposition techniques, it would be easy to use a similar technique to manufacture the particles described by David Keith. The question then is, how expensive would they be?
In his paper, David estimates that around 10 billion kg of these nano-discs would be needed. That’s a lot – but probably economically viable with large-scale investment in production and if the benefits were deemed important enough (David runs the figures assuming the cost of manufacture is less than 1% the cost of abating CO2 emissions, and arrives at a cost of less than $60/kg).
There is another question though, and that is the question of environmental and human health impact. If the use of such particles was ever explored seriously – even at the laboratory scale – it goes without saying that parallel studies would be needed to understand how they might interact with the atmosphere, environment and people in less than helpful ways, and how adverse impacts might be avoided.
Here again, though, David Keith comes up with a thought-provoking idea: What if the particles were engineered to have a finite lifespan, so that potential adverse impacts were minimized? This might be done, he suggests, by designing particles that degrade over time under UV radiation and a constant assault from oxygen radicals in the atmosphere. Safety by design in other words – an idea that has been discussed in nanotechnology circles for a while (including in the 2006 Safe Handling of Nanotechnology commentary in Nature) – but it’s good to see it being explored in this context.
At present, geoengineering the climate using engineered nanoparticles is just an idea – but it is a plausible one, and shows what can happen when different technologies and ideas begin to converge. One to watch in the future I suspect.
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Andrew Maynard is Director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Geoengineering - Agriculture Defense Coalition
Thu Sep 30, 2010 6:50 pm
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http://agriculturedefensecoalition.org/?q=geoengineering
Lengthy reference...worth reviewing in its entirety.Tremendous list of references and relevent video links. A great body of work Rosalind !!!
SOLAR RADIATION MANAGEMENT
ATMOSPHERIC & OCEAN GEOENGINEERING
BY ROSALIND PETERSON
http://newswithviews.com/Peterson/rosalindA.htm
The Congressional Research Service released it new report on Geoengineering for members of the U.S. Congress on August 16, 2010. The U.S. House Science & Technology Committee will release their interim and final reports on their Geoengineering Hearings in September 2010. The U.S. House Science and Technology Committee on Geoengineering is working with the UK Parliament on Global Geoengineering Governance and has released its 5th Report (printed by the House of Commons), on March 10, 2010. All of these published reports are located below in the pdf file section.
Excerpt:
A key AAAS February 2010, geoengineering write-up states: “…Studies show, however, that people make judgments based primarily on their values, belief systems, world views, and emotions. Facts play a much more minor role. This gap cannot be bridged by loading the public with facts, or trying to make the public more science literate…” Thus, a whole series of presentations were made to advise geoengineers and others on how to manipulate the public so that they would support these schemes.
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| Threat of global warming sparks U.S. interest in geoengineer
Mon Oct 04, 2010 5:20 pm
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/03/AR2010100303458.html
Threat of global warming sparks U.S. interest in geoengineering
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
It's come to this: Climate-conscious policymakers are beginning to contemplate the possibility of playing God with the weather in the hope of slowing global warming.
For years it was considered downright wacky in official Washington to discuss geoengineering: altering the climate by reflecting sunlight back into the sky, sucking carbon dioxide from the air - or a host of other gee-whiz schemes. But in the past year the wacky has won a following, spurred in part by the recent collapse of climate legislation as well as by growing interest among private entrepreneurs and foreign officials.
House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), whose panel will jointly release a report on climate engineering with the British House of Commons this month, said the subject is "just now starting to get some attention" even though people recognize the danger in trying to change a complex weather system.
"The more you know about it, the more you're concerned about if we can ever implement it," Gordon said in an interview. "However, there may be a point where we're up against the tipping point, and the consequences of climate change are even worse."
Over the next few months, whispering about changing the weather will evolve into written recommendations. Several key groups - including the Government Accountability Office and a bipartisan task force of experts - will issue their thoughts on how best to start a modest federal research program on geoengineering.
"We're getting a sense that agencies are interested in this topic and would be open, on a certain level, to letting this program go forward," said Jane Long, who co-chairs the National Commission on Energy Policy's task force.
At this point, though, even the experts most seriously looking at climate engineering describe it as a last resort for when climate impacts become a serious threat and the world has yet to wean itself off fossil fuels.
"Geoengineering only makes sense - if it makes sense, and that's an important conditional - as a way to bridge this crisis period," said Steven Hamburg, the Environmental Defense Fund's chief scientist.
Climate engineering can be divided into two basic categories, both of which are untested on a large scale: solar radiation management, which aims to deflect sunlight away from the Earth, and carbon dioxide removal, which takes already released greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
The first approach is relatively cheap and easy to deploy - researchers envision spraying small metallic particles or sulfur into the stratosphere, which could be accomplished with jets or even World War II-era howitzers - but this would do nothing to address the root causes of climate change or some of its worst effects, such as ocean acidification. The second method would address the atmospheric concentrations of carbon that can spur climate change, but it would take more time to develop and be much more expensive.
At this point, many scientists argue that it is worth scrutinizing different geoengineering techniques to see what could work and what will not. At a conference last week sponsored by Arizona State University, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine, University of Maryland distinguished professor of economics Thomas Schelling said "field experiments are going to be essential" to determine whether humans can manipulate the climate in a responsible and effective way.
"If solar radiation management is a bad idea, the sooner we discover that the better," said Schelling, who serves on the National Commission on Energy Policy task force.
Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, has been interested in geoengineering for 20 years, but he said he kept a low profile on it because he didn't want to foster the perception abroad that Americans were looking for a quick fix on climate. Now, however, he said these ideas should be subject to peer review.
"It's important for the federal agencies to get involved and at least solicit proposals," Cicerone said. "The best way to handle these issues is to treat it like normal science."
Those who have been most skeptical about dire warming forecasts, however, are unlikely to embrace climate engineering.
"You'd have to see concrete evidence for the worst case, and that's not there," said Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, adding that it was hard to imagine how any proposed project could satisfy a federal environmental impact statement.
Other countries are already doing that, in part because, as University of Southampton professor John Shepherd explained, the world needs to reach a consensus on geoengineering "before some nut case does it prematurely."
Shepherd oversaw the geoengineering report that the Royal Society issued last year, and he is co-chairing an effort - along with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World - to look at what rules could govern solar radiation management.
This year the British government approved spending $4.5 million over three years on geoengineering research; the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research has a small program, as does the European Union.
There has been some pushback on the idea of even doing research at all: Delegates to the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting this month in Nagoya, Japan, may consider a proposed moratorium on all geoengineering actitivities, including studies.
In a sense, the geoengineering debate mirrors what happened on the question of adapting to climate change, a once-sensitive subject that is now a standard part of policymaking. For years people were wary of discussing how to adapt to global warming, on the grounds that it would reduce the incentive for cutting greenhouse gases. Now, funding for adaptation is a major part of international climate negotiations, and the Fish and Wildlife Service recently detailed how it plans to modify its operations based on the inevitable warming the United States will face in the coming decades.
U.S. officials are reluctant to discuss climate engineering in public: the Office of Science Technology Policy declined to comment on the matter, as did the Energy Department. Gordon, who is retiring from Congress, expressed optimism that staffers would still work on it next year.
In fact, starting to investigate the feasibility of deliberately changing the climate won't require a massive allocation of federal dollars, in part because agencies ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are already conducting related research that could easily be expanded to encompass it.
Long, who serves as principal associate director at large at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, described it as "a tweak with existing funding and existing programs," but added that administration officials "need to be covered by someone telling them to do it, because it's so controversial."
Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who sits on the House science committee and is also leaving office, said he worries about what it means to even try to change the climate on a small scale.
"Once you've done an experiment, you've done it, and you've got to hope for the best. That's generally not the way you want to do scientific research," Inglis said, adding that the world might be better off just cutting greenhouse emissions outright. "Investing in research is like investing in better brake linings, when taking your foot off the accelerator would do just as well." |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1802
Location: x |
| First international ban on geoengineering
Tue Nov 02, 2010 10:59 pm
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http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/01/first-international-ban-on-geoengineering/
So now your skies are clear? Just who is the international criminal?
First international ban on geoengineering
193 countries ban human-induced climate change
Last Friday, delegates from 193 nations approved a ban on geoengineering research. “Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted U.N. consensus,” said Silvia Ribeiro, director of ETC Group, a grass-roots advocacy organization, to the Washington Post. According to the U.S. Congress, climate engineering, also known as geoengineering, is the “deliberate large-scale modification of the earth’s climate systems for the purposes of counteracting and mitigating climate change.” There is a debate between scientists who see geoengineering as the only way to counter the effects of global warming, while others say its too dangerous and even unethical. |
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