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Scientists Consider 'Cloud Brightening' To Preserve Australia's Great Barrier Reef (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes MIT Technology Review:
A group of Australian marine scientists believe that altering clouds might offer one of the best hopes for saving the Great Barrier Reef. For the last six months, researchers at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science and the University of Sydney School of Geosciences have been meeting regularly to explore the possibility of making low-lying clouds off the northeastern coast of Australia more reflective in order to cool the waters surrounding the world's biggest coral reef system...
Last year, as El Nino events cranked up ocean temperatures, at least 20% of the reef died and more than 90% of it was damaged. The Australian researchers took a hard look at a number of potential ways to preserve the reefs. But at this point, making clouds more reflective looks like the most feasible way to protect an ecosystem that stretches across more than 130,000 square miles, says Daniel Harrison, a postdoctoral research associate with the Ocean Technology Group at the University of Sydney. Cloud brightening is the only thing we've identified that's scalable, sensible, and relatively environmentally benign," he says... Next month, he plans to start computer climate modeling to explore whether cloud brightening could make a big enough temperature difference to help.
They're collaborating with Silicon Valley's Marine Cloud Brightening Project, which has spent the last seven years "developing a nozzle that they believe can spray salt particles of just the right size and quantity to alter the clouds. They're attempting to raise several million dollars to build full-scale sprayers." The article describes them as "one of several research groups that have started to explore whether cloud brightening, generally discussed as a potential tool to alter the climate as a whole, could be applied in more targeted ways."
Last year, as El Nino events cranked up ocean temperatures, at least 20% of the reef died and more than 90% of it was damaged. The Australian researchers took a hard look at a number of potential ways to preserve the reefs. But at this point, making clouds more reflective looks like the most feasible way to protect an ecosystem that stretches across more than 130,000 square miles, says Daniel Harrison, a postdoctoral research associate with the Ocean Technology Group at the University of Sydney. Cloud brightening is the only thing we've identified that's scalable, sensible, and relatively environmentally benign," he says... Next month, he plans to start computer climate modeling to explore whether cloud brightening could make a big enough temperature difference to help.
They're collaborating with Silicon Valley's Marine Cloud Brightening Project, which has spent the last seven years "developing a nozzle that they believe can spray salt particles of just the right size and quantity to alter the clouds. They're attempting to raise several million dollars to build full-scale sprayers." The article describes them as "one of several research groups that have started to explore whether cloud brightening, generally discussed as a potential tool to alter the climate as a whole, could be applied in more targeted ways."
So what happens if this intervention accidentally goes wrong and utterly destroys the entire reef? Wouldn't it be something if those who claim to be helping the reef end up killing it?
Seriously. Do you know why Australia has the largest invasive camel population in the world? Settlers brought camels to help build settlements, then just left them in the desert. Their populations grew to 800,000 at one point. The Saudi's often import camels from Australia to breed against because they have more desirable traits and better breeds.
Salting the could seems like a terrible idea. Geoengineering is not going to reverse pollution, it's just going to create more of it. We need to stop buying as much stuff. We need upgradeable electronics and more durable hardware. We need to have fewer factories and consume less. Climate change isn't even a real issue. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse that by focusing on carbon emissions we are only looking at a symptom and not the core problem that consumerism/consumption is depleting the planet of critical resources.
If you think you are going to mitigate the effects of the current anthogenic forced warming by consuming less, you are going to be a sad panda.
Governments might tolerate cost shifting, tax increases or other economic versions of rearranging the deck chairs, but slowing growth isn't going to fly. To the first approximation, the entire world economy is based on increase. Even stasis is bad.
Since a constant increase is an exponential function, we've got a bit of a problem as exponential functions tend not to be long lived natural phenomena. There is a reason that economics is called the 'dismal science'.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
While geoengineering absolutely calls for a high standard of knowing what we're doing, equating it with global warming is like saying swords kill people so surgery is stupid.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Do you really think environmental scientists trying to protect the reef won't bother to check that?
Yes, but only because the range of coral survivability is high enough that if they manage to spray enough to matter then I would question how much global warming we would be causing by burning kerosene to get the stuff in the air in the first place.