Scientists Propose Engineering The Atmosphere To Cool Planet

Mother Nature Network:

Love the blue skies that greet you on a sunny day? Don't get too used to it. Scientists have proposed a last-resort solution to climate change. It involves engineering the upper atmosphere to cool down, and this will result in a planetary haze.

Read the whole story: Mother Nature Network

Comments

[SonofLiberty1]

Making the upper atmosphere hazy is just nuts....

These people hate God, hate naturalists, hate astronomers and hate school children.

[Exusian]

Two words:

Ocean acidification

It's the other negative side effect of increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The scheme to inject SO2 into the atmosphere will do nothing about the decline in the pH of the ocean, and the consequent impact on the marine food chain.

[Gasparilla]

And what happens when the Greenland glaciers all melt and raise the ocean levels? This may be a last ditch effort that can be done quickly. No one says it's not a double edge sword.

[Chic Bowdrie]

Relax. There's plenty of time to move inland. In the mean time, let's keep debating to what degree CO2 has to do with global warming.

"Our results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland's outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future." http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n2/abs/ngeo394.html

Interesting history here: http://books.google.com/books?id=lWQdP4_7SycC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=greenland+glaciers+%22ice+mass%22+%22sea+level+rise%22+johannessen&source=bl&ots=1I0HdmOX7c&sig=cIBHe9kktrlRuXtQy3WM95l1FRo&hl=en&ei=Lov1So2vO4_Q8QaDz7jzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CAwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=greenland%20glaciers%20%22ice%20mass%22%20%22sea%20level%20rise%22%20johannessen&f=false

[Exusian]

What happens to the one quarter to one third of the human population that depends on the sea for it's protein when the marine food chain collapses?

The only course of action that makes any sense is to 1) stop injecting more fossil carbon into the atmosphere and ocean, and 2) develop methods and technologies to remove the excess fossil carbon that we have already injected into the atmosphere and ocean.

[Gasparilla]

Except the possibility of what you are describing will take decades.

[SneathLane]

I've looked at lots of these schemes - and none of them include a dependable removal phase. Like the hunters who imported rabbits into Australia, only to have the rabbits cause billions of dollars of damage over the next century and a half, these guys would blithely make changes without being able to reverse them if unanticipated consequences wreak havoc.

[Gasparilla]

None of the substances would be permanent and would quickly dissipate from the atmosphere. Just like the effects from very large volcanic eruptions disappear in a few months or so. This has no comparison to rabbits.

[SvrWx]

this is just another crazy scheme. What's the saying...Don't mess with mother nature? This would be the ultimate in messing.

Remember...hazy shades all day long. How would this affect food production or the growth of forests?

[jeanruss]

The evidence that chemtrails harms the health of life on the planet is building. Where do governments get off spraying all of us with toxic chemicals? Why is this legal? Where is the discussion about how clouding up the earth might prevent the absorption of Vitamin D? We cannot be healthy without sunlight. The research on how vital Vitamin D is to human health is staggering. Is this really a eugenics issue?

[RomeoMD25]

UN asks for $400bn blank cheque
UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon doesn't think $100bn per year is enough to stop global warming. Despite not giving any precise details, he insists that the amount needed is more to the tune of $400bn.

[future primitive]

Didn't these guys see Highlander II: The Quickening?

[thundermummy]

Damn! You beat me to it!

[freshmind]

CO2 is at a low level, historically the average for the past hundreds of millions of years was 1000 ppm. Taking CO2 out of the air is absurd. What ramifications would that have? If we had nothing that emitted CO2 the climate would still change regardless of what we do, how about looking at the past millions or hundreds of millions of years for a clue.

[jsarets]

Yet the emergence of land animals was preceded by a dramatic reduction of atmospheric CO2 by vast blooms of photosynthetic marine life that caused a mass extinction of marine animals. Earth's history of atmospheric CO2 variations involves dramatic changes to living systems.

Humans could not have survived in such conditions. At 600 ppm of CO2, we start experiencing respiratory discomfort that, even in the short-term, significantly affects mood and limits productivity. Long-term exposure to these CO2 levels causes chronic cardiovascular disorders.

Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is absurd. What ramifications would that have? How about looking at the fossil record for clues? We observe that periods of high CO2 concentrations coincide with the proliferation of primitive autotrophs and the extinction of complex animals.

[Chic Bowdrie]

Wikipedia says "1% (10,000 ppm) will make some people feel drowsy." We're in the 380s now. Extinction will take awhile.

[Publicola]

freshmind: "Taking CO2 out of the air is absurd"

Suggesting that addressing man-made greenhouse gas emissions involves "taking CO2 out of the air" is absurd.

freshmind: "If we had nothing that emitted CO2 the climate would still change regardless of what we do"

Suggesting that the goal of addressing man-made global warming is to stop climate change altogether is also absurd.

Got any more misleading straw men?

[Exusian]

Actually, CO2 is at the highest level of the last few million years, for sure higher than the last 2.6 to 3.2 million years of the current glacial-in­terglacial cycle, and perhaps as many as 20 million years.

That means CO2 is at higher levels than at any time during the evolution of modern humans, not to mention during the development of every single thing we know as civilization, including agriculture.

Buut yes, do let us look in Earth's geologic past for some devastating examples of greenhouse gas-driven climate change.

How about 55 million years ago when a sudden spike in CO2 and CH4 (methane) resulted in a dramatiuc spike in temperature? Look up the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).
Both CO2 and average surface temperature have been declining ever since as that extra carbon was slowly sequestered.

Or how about 251 million years ago when a truly massive flood basalt volcanic event initiated a surge in CO2 large enough to render 95% of all life on earth extinct. Loook up the End-Permian Extinction Event.

Be careful when you go looking in the geologic past, you might not like what you find.

[Chic Bowdrie]

"How about 55 million years ago when a sudden spike in CO2 and CH4 (methane) resulted in a dramatiuc spike in temperature?" How do we know that the temperature rise didn't come first?

[whatbox]

Both of these ideas have been around for many years. They are proposed by people who have no concept of the scale, and cost, of these types of engineering projects.

It is far more plausible, and cost effective, to harness natural processes such as photosynthesis to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. In the meantime, we need to significantly reduce our CO2 emissions in order to mitigate the change that is already underway.

[MagicalPossibilities]

They've been doing this for years. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I've seen chemtrails - they are NOT the same as regular jet emissions.

[sloppybear16]

I think we have all seen the "criss-cro­ss-clouds" in the sky from chemtrailing. It is admitted that we have been cloud-seeding for decades.

Doing it on a much larger scale sounds way more dangerous that the potential harm caused by anthropogenic global warming/global cooling/climate change.

Why isn't there ever more discussion about Sun-cycles and there affect on our planets temperature?

[SonofLiberty1]

Chemtrails is in your mind, Contrails are what you see when a jet goes by.

[SonofLiberty1]

Yes you are, chemtrails are in your head not in the sky.

[deepintheheartoftejas]

Silly. It's not just warming of the atmosphere that's the problem: it's the sharp rise in CO2, and the resultant acidification of the ocean, the growth of anaerobic bacteria. Fixing the temperature is not going to fix the fundamental atmospheric changes of our industrial world... and what will the side-effects be on plants that recycle CO2, or crops that produce our food? There are ALWAYS side-effects.

[MagicalPossibilities]

So true - and creating a cloud cover will not only NOT cool the planet - clouds keep the heat in. Here in the desert a clear hot day means much cooler nights, whereas cloudy conditions keep the nighttime temperatures up.

[Imago]

Sorry, and I'm not advocating geo-engineering, but you aren't understanding the science here at all.

Yes, you're right, after a day of baking in the (cloudless) desert sun, nights stay warmer when they're cloudy then they do when they're cool.

But that's after the heat has already hit during clear, hot days.

Creating a haze that cuts down on the amount of heat that makes it through the atmosphere will, in fact, drop temperatures. As evidenced by atmospheric shifts after volcanoes, etc.

Read an article linked to the article above: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33495560/ns/us_news-environment/

It's a much better piece than the Mother Nature article.

[Publicola]

Some types of atmospheric agents - including water vapor clouds - act as greenhouse agents and keep heat in.

Other types of atmospheric agents however - such as sulfate aerosols that originate from volcanoes - act as dimming agents and instead keep the heat out.

[RTIII]

Imago is right. A simple and reasonably accurate way to think of it is that the tops of clouds reflect heat back into space while the bottoms reflect it back toward the Earth.
.

[Chic Bowdrie]

Anaerobic bacteria? I'd like to read up on that. Link, please? Otherwise, good point!

[SonofLiberty1]

Bacteria that live in an oxygen free environment

[Angie Cordeiro - Huffpost Blogger]

"SPONTANEOUS REMISSION FOR A TERMINALLY ILL PLANET" with BRUCE LIPTON, Ph.D. & STEVE BHAERMAN

Check it out...ahhhh H-O-P-E ;-)

[Itsmyland2]

Swami Beyondananda is very wise

[SFTor]

Exactly who are we kidding here?

We are looking at a planet that is at 0.42 degrees Celsius above the baseline. Everything we see of climate change, both in rate and scale, is well within normal for climate history.

Yes, there is climate change. Some of it may even be man-made. The warming has increased agricultural harvests by about 15%. Pretty cool. Let's keep those scientists on a short leash, before someone goes and really effs this up.

I am a liberal Democrat and an atheist by the way, in case someone feels the urge to call me a Bible-thumping Conservative.

[RTIII]

"Everything we see of climate change, both in rate and scale, is well within normal for climate history."

Nope. Get yourself educated. Use real scientific sites for information, not the popular press or industry shills. Try the American Geophysical Union or the members of the Earth Science Information Partner Federation ("ESIP Fed") - I am a member of both groups and I can tell you the quality level is quit high, and most of us welcome communication from the lay public - we can often direct you to resources that can help illuminate your queries.

.

[fumes]

we must stop the climate from changing..

we must.. it's been going on long enough!

[Gasparilla]

Same old same old. No one says that climate hasn't or doesn't change. It is odd that a lot of the same people who insist on a literal interpretation of the bible, which is that the earth is 8 to 10 thousand years old, are the same people who then talk about climate changes going back millions of years. It's like, pick an argument. It's reject science on one hand and then quote it on the other.

As for the "haze", it's indisputable that an extremely large volcanic eruption will fill the atmosphere with enough suspended particulate matter to lower temperatures for a year or so. That particulate matter deflects sunlight. It may be the only thing we can do.

[Chic Bowdrie]

I'd rather sit out on my deck and enjoy the view.