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Scientists Plan "Artificial Volcano" Climate Experiment
First time accepted submitter tonyt3 writes "Scientists plan on conducting an unusual climate experiment at a Norfolk airfield next month. They plan to spray water into the air about 20 km high to mimic volcanic particles, hoping that their findings could lead to a solution to global warming. From the article: 'Pouring 10 million tonnes of material into the stratosphere each using 10 to 20 giant balloons could achieve a 2C global drop in temperature, the scientists believe. Sulphate emissions from the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in June 1991 reduced world temperature by 0.5C for two years.'"
"But we do know it was us that scorched the sky"
- Morpheus
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Indeed : Why bother doing this test ?
A lot of methods are known for artificially influencing earths temperature. But let's face it, this is "artificial" and anything artificial just can't be a "green" policy, right ? So it'll be rejected as a policy option. The target of global warming policies is not to actually slow or stop global warming, since they are simply totally incapable of doing that. So why do we have those policies at all ?
Imagine we're killing 500 elephants yearly, and for a stable population you can only kill 10 yearly. Current policies are the equivalent of putting a "strict" quota of 499 elephants, then grant exceptions on it. (of course, in the case of climate policies, enforcing them strictly would mean people die, and millions of people have already died because of obsolete-but-still-law biofuel policies. Needless to say, those policies are still in place. You'd think a black president would have more qualms about killing Africans, by letting them starve no less, but that's apparently not the case)
On the plus side : Of course, if we want long-term climate stability, we will need to take control of the temperature.
On the con side :
It's irreversible. Start the pumps, and in 24-48 hours an effect that will last decades will have started. Nothing to do but see it happen, and count the damages. Which brings us to the second point :
This is a weapon. Worse: it's like an atomic bomb, it's a potential world-ender : you cannot realistically hope to stop any larger entity from doing this, especially if that entity has territorial waters, it would be impossible. If it works, it's much more scary than hydrogen bombs. If, say Saudi Arabia would do this, they could easily make most of northern europe and canada completely unlivable. You can't stop them from doing this without invading, or at least executing areal bombing.
It's artificial. And gaia is apparently supposed to fix itself. Ask yourself, do you think greens would accept this artifial temperature lowering coupled with returning to increasing co2 output until oil runs out ?
It will create a legal "responsible entity" for changes in world temperature. Lowering the earth's temperature by even minute amounts will create victims, and there's a clear responsible entity. So, say 2-3 cities have to move southward as a result of doing this. Do they get to sue whichever country does this for damages ? (I would think yes). So you're screwed.
We don't actually have a good way of predicting what the exact results of this will be. We don't know the exact effects of temperature variations "on the ground", we don't know them when temp goes up, we don't know what will happen when temp goes down