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Controversial Spraying, Sun-Dimming Method Aims To Curb Global Warming (cbsnews.com)
Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere. From a report: A fleet of 100 planes making 4,000 worldwide missions per year could help save the world from climate change. Also, it may be relatively cheap. That's the conclusion of a new peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research Letters. It's the stuff of science fiction. Planes spraying tiny sulphate particulates into the lower stratosphere, around 60,000 feet up. The idea is to help shield the Earth from just enough sunlight to help keep temperatures low. The researchers examined how practical and costly a hypothetical solar geoengineering project would be beginning 15 years from now. The aim would be to half the temperature increase caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This method would mimic what large volcanoes do. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It was the second largest eruption of the 20th century, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In total, the eruption injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide aerosols into the stratosphere. USGS said the Earth's lower atmosphere temperature dropped by approximately 1-degree Fahrenheit. The effect only lasted a couple of years because the sulfates eventually fell to Earth.
Ever heard of ACID RAIN?
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
As if the mythical chemtrails rumor isn't hard enough to beat down, now they want thousands of planes spreading "mind control chemicals" world wide? The tinfoil hat crowd will go insane over this idea.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Ever heard of ACID RAIN?
That was Prince, not Bowie.
#DeleteChrome
I can't be the only person thinking this... but I think we humans have hit a point where we can safely say injecting -more- chemicals into the environment should, at best, be a very last resort. Preferably, not on the table at all, ever.
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."
While I don't think this idea is quite as extreme as the Matrix. I do wonder what the impact would be on solar power globally. Since the wind currents could also be affected, what issues could it cause for current wind power plant locations too?
Is "controversial" how the headline writer decided to say "unfathomably stupid"? https://science.nasa.gov/scien...
Did you look at this? They said 4000 flights per year in the first year, increasing to 60,000 flights per year in year 14.
Yow.
...and, yes, I'm not sure what other impacts of 1.5 million tons of sulfur burned into the upper atmosphere per year will be, but "acid rain" is the first thing that comes to mind.
The problem is there's a very vocal and politically active group which opposes the one power generation solution we already have which solves the problem - nuclear power.
Environmentalists suffer from what I call Just Right-itis. The insistence that there is just the right amount of global warming occurring. Enough that mankind is in mortal danger, so we have to take drastic action quickly. But not so much that we need to switch to a different power source ASAP. Instead there's just the right amount of global warming so that we can spend decades developing completely new power sources, meanwhile continuing to burn fossil fuels thus exacerbating the problem.
It's like finding out a asteroid will hit the Earth in a few decades and wipe out all life on it. But then staunchly opposing deflecting the asteroid using existing technology which is already capable of dealing with it, and instead insisting that completely new technology be developed to deal with the asteroid. This reasoning only makes sense if you value your pet technology over the survival of life on Earth. Their primary goal isn't stopping and arresting global warming. It's using it as a vehicle to drive the transition to renewable power, even if that means risking all life on Earth.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end game. The #1 priority should be getting off fossil fuels. We can do that with nuclear, buying ourselves decades if not centuries to develop renewables and batteries until they're in a state which can handle base load. Then we can switch from nuclear to renewables. If you oppose this most rational course of action, then you force us to start coming up with more and more desperate ideas to stave off disaster, like polluting the atmosphere in order to save it.
Author of the "study" is Gernot Wagner, an economist and a co-director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program - with David W. Keith.
Dave-boy also likes spraying sulfuric acid in the air as a solution for global warming, while arguing that more windmills will cause "significant warming" (which IS bullshit BTW).
Dave also runs a business where his main preoccupation is coming up with clever ideas how to keep those N. Murray Edwards tar sands oil dollars coming in.
Carbon Engineering is funded by several government and sustainability-focused agencies as well as by private investors, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and oil sands financier N. Murray Edwards.[5][6][7]
TLDR: It's a bullshit study, created for the benefit of dirtiest of oil industries, so they could have something to point at and claim that burning tar ain't really that bad, all things considering.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We have a hugely complex system that we don't really nderstand. Some people think that human activity may be influencing that system, although absolutely none of the predictive models we have actually work. So...the answer to a non-understood influence on a non-understood system is: muck with the system some more.
How about we first invest in climate monitoring, and try to understand the whole system? If global warming is such an important issue, why is the number of monitoring stations monotonically decreasing, especially in regions like the Arctic?
So, if you were in a car which was heading towards a concrete wall, and someone said "Hit the brakes!", you'd say "No, first we need to be sure which part of the wall we're going to hit"?
I mean, yes, we don't have 100% precise models for climate change. That doesn't mean we should immediately give up. We don't have 100% precise models of how a commercial airline will fly from LAX to EWR, and yet dozens of planes manage to complete that route each day. Crazy, isn't it? It's almost like we could just work on the biggest emitters up front, and assume that in the future someone will figure out how to deal with the more subtle sources.
This is the sunspot cycle, which involves a "dimming" in total solar irradiance (TSI) of 0.1%
Aha, I see you do not know much about solar science, and you don't seem to realize what is happening - so I will help you understand.
This is not just "the sunspot cycle". Perhaps you missed the part where it was two years earlier than the cycle would have had it dip normally?
At times the sun enters what is called a Deep, or Grand Solar Minimum, and the drop in solar irradiance is far more than the number you gave.
If you read that article the scientist involved has a 93% accuracy in predicting the solar cycle strengths.
The article lays it out clearly:
even if the IPCC's worst case scenarios are seen, that's only a 1.5 watts per square meter increase. Zharkova's analysis shows a 8 watts per square meter decrease in TSI to the planet.
Now of course this is a prediction and her model could be wrong - just like most of the IPCC models to date (which is why they revise them frequently). But the consequences of her being right are actually dire, unlike a warming of 2-3C which is not very dire at all in comparison. In that case the rise we were supposed to see from global warming might just be enough of an offset to the solar minimum to keep most of us from starving.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You know that famous painting, "The Scream"? Can you guess why the sky is orange? It's because of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption. Here are more paintings from that time". We might end up with an orange-tinted atmosphere, and the constant "sulfur" smell everywhere. Their idea is that injecting SO2 will chemically convert into SO4. It will also convert into H2SO4, more commonly known as "acid rain". It can also cause ozone depletion, which is one of the reasons it "can't stop" if we start.
It's an apocalyptic idea, and has an insane amount of unmitigated risks. It's an "end-game strategy" that will irreversibly alter our entire planet, and will be the ultimate Anthropocene Epoch event; this will be our Chicxulub.