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Stop Global Warming With Smog?
lkypnk writes, "The AP is reporting that Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen has suggested deliberately spreading a layer of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere to help reflect some of the sun's energy in an effort to combat global warming. He reminds us that the eruption of the volcano Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the planet by as much as 0.9 degrees; he believes his computer simulations show a similar effect from deliberate injection of sulfur into the atmosphere by humans. Whatever the feasibility of the idea, as the president of the National Environmental Trust has said, 'We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.'" From the article: "'It was meant to startle the policy makers,' said [Crutzen]. 'If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this.' ... Serious people are taking Crutzen's idea seriously."
The effects of the eruption were felt worldwide. It injected large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere--more than any eruption since that of Krakatoa in 1883. Over the following months, the aerosols formed a global layer of sulfuric acid haze. Global temperatures dropped by about 0.5 C (0.9 F), and ozone destruction increased substantially.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo
We're already doing this, though again, it's in an uncontrolled way. It's called "global dimming", and it's already an environmental disaster in some parts of the world.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
Photochemical smog is the product of reactions between hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and ultraviolet light. Smog contains ozone. This has almost nothing to do with smog.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
When will people stop using this silly argument?
Do you know if in ten days it will be warmer or cooler than now? Probably not.
Do you know if the next summer will be warmer than the next winter? If you live in the northern hemisphere, at a sufficient distance to the equator, I'd bet on it.
So how can we know that the summer will be warmer than the winter if we can't even tell the temperature change in about ten days? Think about it!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Global dimming either from this or other means (like sulphate aerosols) will only result in less light reaching the surface. Yes it will result in less warming. But also there's less photosynthesis, less crop production, and a reduction in fixation of CO2 from the atmopshere, causing CO2 levels to rise yet further. Instead of trying to fix the symptoms, we should be trying to fix the underlying problem and that is ceasing to burn carbon. The fix is simple. Replacing it with something else is the real problem and that is where efforts should be focused (like a decent fusion reactor and hydrogen economy but that's a whole new debate)
Without light surely our plant friends won't be able to soak up the CO2 at ground level.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Ever been outdoors on a clear spring or winter night? It's colder without clouds. Clouds hold in heat on the night side.
Low-level clouds shade the ground but the reflected sunlight just warms up the lower atmosphere on its round trip. Very high clouds have a cooling effect, though.
Fortunately, the work on climate change is being done by people who understand these effects and who observe and refine numbers for them.
If I had mod points it would be -1 for "Utter Bullshit".
There is much evidence of a general warming trend occurring in the southern hemisphere, pretty much the same amount as that occurring in the northern hemisphere. There are also many recordings of record freak occurrences associated with the gentle warming that appears to be occurring all around the globe; record sized icebergs breaking off from Antarctica and record draughts in the Amazon rainforest are just a couple of recent examples.
Questions about data handling for solar forcing
The remaining uncertainties and where they come from
We now wait for the traditional round of excuses.
We'll save the excused for actual facts, shall we? The Southern hemisphere is warming, despite recent assertions to the contrary from certain unreliable sources.
graph
context
You are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.
mt
Most green house gasses stay in the atmosphere for a long time (10-100 years). "Smog" stays up for a much shorter period of time so we would have to keep pumping ever larger amounts of it into the atmosphere daily to offset the green house gasses. That is very unlikely to tenable for a significant length of time.
Predicting climate is different from predicting weather. I cannot tell you whether Chicago will have a white Christmas (weather prediction), but I can tell you with a lot of confidence that Christmas will be colder than the 4th of July even a million years into the future (climate prediction).
Climate models are not tricks. The physics goes in. The climate comes out. It's not a trivial curve-fitting exercise the way you seem to think. We call them "primitive equation" models not because they are primitive, but because we *don't put the answer in* in any way. The model isn't told that Chicago winters are cold and Florida winters aren't. It *figures that out* from the physics.
mt
I live in Australia, here are some recent anecdotes:
We are currently experiencing the "worst drought in 1000yrs", the Murray-Darling Basin has dried up, our major cities have permenant water restrictions and some rural towns are being abandoned. This years forecast grain harvest has been reduced by 50% (-12,000,000 Tonnes), our dairy herd has been culled by 20%, and half starved livestock have flooded the markets in expectation of an even drier summer.
We had a record heat wave in october (37C) followed by two cold snaps with snow falling on bushfires and hail the size of cricket balls. The unseasonal frost killed, apples, pears, grapes and other temperate fruit crops that flower in spring. Oh yeah, a cyclone wiped out our bannana crop earlier this year.
As for TFA: The Earth is not a fucking toaster, the last thing it needs is a "darkness knob".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Anyone who needs evidence science is an inexact science need only remember Carl Sagan and his wrong prediction on the Kuwait oil fires.
Sagan famously predicted on ABC's Nightline in 1991 that smoky oil fires in Kuwait (set by Saddam Hussein's army) would cause a worldwide ecological disaster of black clouds resulting in global cooling. Retired atmospheric physicist and climate change skeptic Fred Singer dismissed Sagan's prediction as nonsense, predicting that the smoke would dissipate in a matter of days. In his book The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan gave a list of errors he had made (including his predictions about the effects of the Kuwaiti oil fires) as an example of how science is tentative.
And that prediction explicitly about the effects of something on our atmosphere, ostensibly by one of our most noted intellects. The notion that we have any notion of what the effects of this effort would ulitmately be is indeterminant, and could introduce far more disastrous and devastating unforeseen results.
If you'd like to do some of the experiments discussed in the article yourself, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM. Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Space and Computers.
If everybody prayed and asked the LORD nicely, and thanked Him for what we HAVE, that global warming would just vanish.
It might or might not. But I suggest you instead pray for the souls of your fellow man, instead of praying for the earth. This is a fallen world, and it will all eventually pass away. But people accepting or rejecting Christ will live with their decision for forever.
If you want to combat global warming by getting less sunlight on Earth, I'd much prefer the NASA way where they'd put a variable size dark disk in orbit at a Lagrange point between the Earth/Sun, because you can always click "undo" on that, or just tell it to shrink the umbrella to nothing realtime. Injecting more crap into our atmosphere will just make things more complicated, and taking the stuff back out is not at simple, let alone getting realtime control on the effects.
Doesn't work that way I'm afraid. Trees slow the problem, but they don't solve it.
There is a global process called the "carbon cycle" that I invite you to research on your own. Essentially, all organisms excrete carbon dioxide, which is then reused by plants during photosynthesis, releasing oxygen and storing the carbon. What you may not realize is that plants are not exempt from the first part of the carbon cycle; they still release the carbon they absorb. A closed system that included plants, but no animal life, would still have airborne Co2, which would be absorbed by plants during the day, and released during the night. Planting more trees adds a carbon "sink", since it's that much more carbon locked up as biomass, but they don't magic it away.
As long as the amount of carbon in the system doesn't change, the greenhouse effect will remain where it is (at least over human timeframes). What we've done with fossil fuels is taken hydrocarbons that were outside of the carbon cycle, and burned them (increasing the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere), thereby increasing the existing greenhouse effect.
To solve this permanently, we'd need to create carbon sinks that are outside of the carbon cycle, to replace the fossil fuel carbon sinks we've already burned. This is possible, but not as simple as planting trees; such artificial carbon sinks would have to be inorganic if they're to be permanent. Any carbon locked up in in organisms is going to find it's way back into the air.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Second, he did a further analysis of a practical mechanism to introduce SO2 into the upper atmosphere. I think he settled on balloons or artillery shells, and the cost was something like tens of billions of dollars a year. Since the stuff only stays up there for months, it would be a reoccuring cost.
Finally, it has the unpleasant side effect (per earlier replies) of raining down on the planet in the form of acid rain. Since the ocean is already getting more acidic due to increased CO2 levels (which combined with water get you carbonic acid-i.e. soda water), this might be a fatal drawback. The one thing worse than global warming is an oxygen deprived ocean, which ironically leads to sulfur coming back up as hydrogen sulfide (which at least once killed over 90% of the life on earth during a particularly spectacular episode of runaway global warming called the "Great Dying.")
Anyway, we probably won't have time or money to develop or impliment such a idea (nor another idea using a space shade to partially block the sun hitting the earth) because of abrupt climate change: when the climate is forced, it doesn't respond smoothly and gradually. Instead, proof in the form of ice core samples show that the climate at first resists changing, then abruptly changes to another stable state. In other words, it is predictable that within a decade or two our climate will abruptly change from the mild Holocene of the last ten thousand years, to a hotter dryer climate that has resulted in mass extinctions many times in the past. Here is a link to an article I wrote if you want a further explanation http://www.planetsave.com/ps_mambo/Independent_New s/Science/Abrupt_climate_change_predicted_within_2 0_years_200609117794/
We won't have the resources to launch SO2 into the upper atmosphere, particularly repeatedly, especially if it didn't make an immediate dramatic difference. Furthermore, we aren't going to pull the hammer back by getting an "SO2" program all ready to pull the trigger if things get really bad. Instead, typically we'll wait until catastrophe hits, then we'll be looking for the silver bullet yesterday. Neither a SO2 program, or the space shade program will be seriously on track until after the resources are unavailable. Any resources will be used up for consequence management, not to institute some expensive technologically spacious global warming pie-in-the-sky program that won't have immediate results for years and years.
On the other hand, I have an alternate suggestion (the advantage is it wouldn't need a great deal of resources, a large team of scientists, or a great deal of time to impliment):
It is unreasonable to expect that mankind will so dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) fast enough to avoid abrupt climate change. A fast growing population combined with growing per capita energy use, plus trillions of dollars in fossil fuel infrastruction means we are on track to double our CO2 emissions by 2050.
Furthermore, a warming earth means that carbon sinks will become carbon emitters bigtime. In other words, it is predictable that soon the earth will start emitting far more GHG than humans, at the same time it is able to absorb less of mankind's CO2 pollution. Nature absorbs about half of mankind's 8 billion tons of CO2 emitted each year. By 2030 it is predicted that nature will only be able to absorb 2.7 billion tons a year.
The only solution for global warming is to remove the CO2 from the air after it has been emitted. I suggest using genetic engineering to improve nature's ability to absorb CO2. Perhaps seeding a GMO into the ocean.