Climate Engineering As US Policy?

EricTheGreen writes "The Associated Press has an article featuring Obama administration science advisor John Holdren discussing potential climate engineering responses to global warming. Among the possible approaches? His own version of Operation Dark Storm — shooting micro-particulate pollution high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. I'm sure the rest of the world would have no issue with that at all, of course. Yikes ..."

Comments

These ideas are not new.

[FooAtWFU]

Slightly-nutty (but carefully analytical) Libertarian magazines were bandying these ideas around in 1997, and they'd already been around a while by then. I'm a big fan of the "paint it white" approach - increase the urban albedo by using concrete instead of asphalt, using light-colored roofs and paints... Not only does it reflect sunlight (cooling the earth) it also reduces the "heat island" effect so you don't need as much air conditioning in the summer.

The real problem with any such approach, they argue, is

Having sinned against Mother Nature inadvertently, many are keenly reluctant to intervene knowingly. Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California at Irvine who predicted, with Mario Molina, the depletion of the ozone layer, declared, "I am unalterably opposed to global mitigation." This added considerable weight to the abstention cause. At root, such people see mankind as the problem; only by behaving humbly, living lightly upon our Earth, can we atone.

This religiosity in climate-change politics fascinates me - it's why I like the Michael Crichton essays/speeches on the topic even though he says "climate change is fake!" and it's pretty much Not Fake. More recently, I've seen stuff in that same Libertarian magazine comparing the current climate-change political scene to "denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. [It] is every bit as callous and irresponsible."

Let's fix the problem that doesn't exist

[isa-kuruption]

The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?

But either way, this is kind of stuff is confusing. Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?

I guess it's the same as fixing the the huge credit problem in the U.S. by telling banks to issue more credit to more at risk lenders?

Or by cutting the country's deficit by increasing spending?

Or by decreasing unemployment by giving illegal immigrants legal status so they can compete for the already limited number of available jobs?

Or by fixing solving the global nuclear threat by reducing our nuclear arsenal while Iran and North Korea continue to push theirs.

Is his Administration pulling these ideas out of their asses or what?

(I know I'll be rated a troll by all the kool-aid drinkers, that's okay)

Re:Just out of curiosity...

[atraintocry]

I tend to be a skeptic as a rule but the more I've read on this the more I see of the opposite: that is, the scientists generally agree, but the few that don't get played up in the media because the politicians love to give them undue credit. And of course there are a whole raft full of people (usually House reps) who have opinions on these matters but aren't actually scientists or citing scientific journals.

Even on this board I see that: the couple of actual climate scientists that frequent slashdot are damn sure of AGW, while people afraid of the political implications trot out already-debunked links to Watts' blog or what have you. I don't know if it's the underdog effect or a general dislike of Al Gore and his ilk, but somewhere in all this people seem to be ignoring the science and just assuming it's a liberal vs. conservative thing.

Most of the arguments I see and hear, and CNN is no exception, include things like "it's a cycle", "it's the sun", "it's water vapor", "it's orbits", "it's volcanos"...these have all been accounted for. Then you get your "the models are flawed" (how?), "there's no consensus", and so on. Again, the sort of thing a quick googling will fix. But much like with evolution vs. creationism, the anti-science crowd gets the benefit of using these quick arguments that take a long time to properly debunk, and they circle around like memes forever as new groups of people say "guess what I heard on CNN! I knew all those scientists were full of it!"

I'm not saying that you're wrong for questioning anybody, since that's always the right approach. But I have to point out that what I have seen in terms of money and politics with this issue has been the opposite. There is big, big money in showing that global warming science is flawed. Probably a Nobel prize too. No one has stepped up to the plate.

And you're right...I'm sure there are a number of politicians who'd love to use climate change as a vehicle for pushing one policy or another through, just as every single company this year miraculously "went green". But who said we had to listen to the politicians in the first place? This research has been out there, in some cases for decades, and all I say definitively is I'm doing my best to catch up on it now and IMO there is a massively solid case for AGW. Which is unsettling.