Geoengineering To Cool the Earth Becoming Thinkable

johkir writes "As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels might cause 'marked changes in climate' that 'could be deleterious.' Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space — 'a wacky geoengineering solution.' In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe — they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream." We've discussed some pretty strange ideas in the geoengineering line over the last few years.

Comments

No they didn't

[Any Web Loco]

This is a complete myth. Read this and be enlightened - http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94

Re:No they didn't

[night_flyer]

I was in school in the 1980s and that was all they were talking about, so it may have been a "myth", but they sure were pushing it for some reason...

Re:No they didn't

[theaveng]

I read the article, but I was also ALIVE at that time. I remember folks like Carl Sagan rallying the troops to stop the cooling of the planet (from suspended pollution). No article can erase the memory of the people watching their televisions during the 70s and early 80s.

Another reason to do nothing

[CuteSteveJobs]

> they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space

Or we could just pollute less? It's less risky than turning the Earth into a big science experiment.

There's another risk: That the same same people promoting "Clean Coal" (a big hello to you Australia) hop on this bandwagon as another reason not to do anything?

Re:Like something out of Robinson's work

[spazdor]

There was an excellent TED Lecture on the topic of geoengineering, given by David Keith. It's a little over 15 minutes but well worth the time, and it skips all the sci-fi platitudes.

Re:It was Global COOLING in the 70s.

[Ambitwistor]

In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling.

I'm sorry, but the scientific literature disproves your claim. If you don't believe me, go look for yourself at the papers published back then. Web of Knowledge will find them for you. Or just read this paper, written by a group of scientists who got fed up with claim and did a full literature review from 1965-1979. See, in particular, Figure 1. During that period, there was only one year in which cooling papers than warming papers were published (1971), and more warming papers than cooling papers were published in every year after 1971.

In another comment you respond,

I read the article, but I was also ALIVE at that time.

That's nice. Did you read scientific journals back then? Or go to climate conferences? Somehow I doubt it.

The mainstream media isn't the scientific community, and neither was Carl Sagan. Yes, back then some scientists did think that cooling was going to win out. Most of them didn't. The fact is, throughout the 1970s and certainly into the 80s, the scientific community — as measured by the papers they published on the subject — was definitely projecting warming more than cooling.