Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
- 70,230
- 10,864
- 2,040
good grief, these people are more dangerous to us than a little warming and cooling something the earth has been doing for MILLIONS OF YEARS NOW
snip:
There’s a cheap, quick, dirty, and controversial way to combat global warming that isn’t on the agenda of the United Nations climate summit in Paris, which runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11. It involves replicating the planet-cooling effect of a volcanic eruption. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew in 1991, its emissions briefly reversed most of the global warming that had occurred since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The idea is to mimic Pinatubo by using a fleet of modified business jets to inject fine droplets of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, where they would combine with water vapor to form fine sulfate particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth.
Scientists estimate that a few grams of sulfate would be enough to counteract the warming effect of a ton of carbon dioxide. The cost of this planetary protection? Perhaps 0.01 percent of the annual world gross domestic product. In other words, almost nothing. The cost of stopping the entire planet from warming would be not much more per decade than the $6 billion the Italian government is spending to protect one city, Venice, from rising sea levels. That’s the calculation of a leading figure in the debate over so-called geoengineering, David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard and of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 30, 2015. Subscribe now.
Illustration: Justin Metz; Source: Getty Images (2)
Naturally, there’s a catch. Several, in fact. The sun shield would merely mask the rising concentration of greenhouse gases, like perfuming a skunk. It adds one pollutant to counteract another. It could reverse progress toward closing the hole in the ozone layer by ripping apart ozone molecules. Sulfate particles falling from the sky could cause air pollution deaths. It would leave fertile coral reefs exposed to deadly bleaching because it wouldn’t do anything about ocean acidification. It could even become a cause for war if one country decided it was harmed by another’s climate meddling. Even Keith allows that it’s a “brutally ugly technical fix.”
Critics’ biggest worry: It would be perceived as a get-out-of-jail-free card for the planet. If pausing global warming is as easy as sending a fleet of modified Gulfstream G650s into the stratosphere with payloads of sulfuric acid, the weak pressure to cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases might get even weaker. That’s why you won’t find it mentioned on the agenda of the Paris summit, a major event that’s expected to draw 45,000 people from more than 190 countries.
This leaves humanity in a strange place. An effective but flawed technique for stopping global warming is shunted aside while negotiators try to fix the problem the right way, through cutting emissions. In Paris, China and India will point fingers at the wealthier nations, which will point right back. Meanwhile, temperatures keep going up. As the Parisian philosopher Voltaire might have reminded the UN: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Every few years, geoengineering, the umbrella term for ideas such as volcano replication, gets rediscovered—and promptly beaten back down. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, was an early enthusiast of what backers ambitiously call solar radiation management. That pedigree hasn’t exactly won over environmentalists. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner were castigated for hyping it in their 2009 best-seller, SuperFreakonomics. Advocates have been accused of playing God, committing chemical terrorism, weaponizing weather, even risking the collapse of civilization. Climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago calls the acid-spraying idea “barking mad.”
all of the barking Mad article here:
How to Slow Climate Change With a Fake Volcano
snip:
There’s a cheap, quick, dirty, and controversial way to combat global warming that isn’t on the agenda of the United Nations climate summit in Paris, which runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11. It involves replicating the planet-cooling effect of a volcanic eruption. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew in 1991, its emissions briefly reversed most of the global warming that had occurred since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The idea is to mimic Pinatubo by using a fleet of modified business jets to inject fine droplets of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, where they would combine with water vapor to form fine sulfate particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth.
Scientists estimate that a few grams of sulfate would be enough to counteract the warming effect of a ton of carbon dioxide. The cost of this planetary protection? Perhaps 0.01 percent of the annual world gross domestic product. In other words, almost nothing. The cost of stopping the entire planet from warming would be not much more per decade than the $6 billion the Italian government is spending to protect one city, Venice, from rising sea levels. That’s the calculation of a leading figure in the debate over so-called geoengineering, David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard and of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 30, 2015. Subscribe now.
Illustration: Justin Metz; Source: Getty Images (2)
Naturally, there’s a catch. Several, in fact. The sun shield would merely mask the rising concentration of greenhouse gases, like perfuming a skunk. It adds one pollutant to counteract another. It could reverse progress toward closing the hole in the ozone layer by ripping apart ozone molecules. Sulfate particles falling from the sky could cause air pollution deaths. It would leave fertile coral reefs exposed to deadly bleaching because it wouldn’t do anything about ocean acidification. It could even become a cause for war if one country decided it was harmed by another’s climate meddling. Even Keith allows that it’s a “brutally ugly technical fix.”
Critics’ biggest worry: It would be perceived as a get-out-of-jail-free card for the planet. If pausing global warming is as easy as sending a fleet of modified Gulfstream G650s into the stratosphere with payloads of sulfuric acid, the weak pressure to cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases might get even weaker. That’s why you won’t find it mentioned on the agenda of the Paris summit, a major event that’s expected to draw 45,000 people from more than 190 countries.
This leaves humanity in a strange place. An effective but flawed technique for stopping global warming is shunted aside while negotiators try to fix the problem the right way, through cutting emissions. In Paris, China and India will point fingers at the wealthier nations, which will point right back. Meanwhile, temperatures keep going up. As the Parisian philosopher Voltaire might have reminded the UN: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Every few years, geoengineering, the umbrella term for ideas such as volcano replication, gets rediscovered—and promptly beaten back down. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, was an early enthusiast of what backers ambitiously call solar radiation management. That pedigree hasn’t exactly won over environmentalists. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner were castigated for hyping it in their 2009 best-seller, SuperFreakonomics. Advocates have been accused of playing God, committing chemical terrorism, weaponizing weather, even risking the collapse of civilization. Climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago calls the acid-spraying idea “barking mad.”
all of the barking Mad article here:
How to Slow Climate Change With a Fake Volcano
