Posted on 08/22/2011 12:17:22 PM PDT by Red Badger
Scientists believe that our warming world may face catastrophic changes to its natural environment, including droughts, rising oceans and fiercer, more frequent hurricanes.
Theoretically, it may be necessary to act globally to mitigate the damage. Initially, those efforts will probably take the form of limits on greenhouse gas emissions or forest preservation. But some scientists and policy makers believe it might be necessary for scientists to take an active hand in engineering a solution to our climate problems.
Those potential solutions, collectively called "geoengineering," would use scientists' knowledge of the Earth's cycles to curb the rise in temperature, the melting of the ice caps and increasing weather volatility. Yet, very few studies have tackled the practical implications of such extreme measures, in part because of the controversy surrounding the prospect of "messing with" the environment.
"It's ground zero right now for understanding the climate response to geoengineering," said Cecilia Bitz, of the University of Washington. Bitz is one of a handful of researchers in the U.S. exploring the impact of geoengineering ideas. "There have only been a couple dozen papers in the literature, and you'll be surprised to know that it's a rarity to have an ocean GCM [general circulation model] in the model."
A volcanic idea
Bitz, working with University of Washington researchers Kelly McCusker and David Battisti, analyzed the impact of the leading geoengineering solution, the release of volcanic aerosols into the upper atmosphere.
"The equivalent of Mount Pinatubo going off every year," Bitz said, referring to the eruption in the Philippines in 1991, the largest in recent memory.
Time series of globally-averaged surface temperatures for various simulations. The green line shows that as a sulfate layer is ramped along with carbon dioxide, global mean temperature can be held close to 1990 values. Additionally, the orange line illustrates the rapid rise in temperature that occurs if geoengineering with a sulfate layer is terminated, but carbon dioxide levels are still high. Credit: Courtesy of Cecilia Bitz, University of Washington Using the NSF-supported Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the researchers' simulations explored a range of aerosol implementations, from steady to slowly increasing releases of the aerosols to a sudden cessation of activity, which could lead to dangerously rapid warming.
Regional implications
Though it may be possible to reduce the atmospheric temperature, they found that other aspects of climate change, specifically the melting of the ice caps, may be much more difficult to reverse.
"There are regional issues--there's still warming in the poles and subsurface ocean warming near ice sheets, and there are plenty of unknowns that we can't answer," McCusker said.
Theirs is one of a handful of computational geoengineering studies, and it helps to determine how a drastic human-induced change might interrupt the Earth's environmental systems. The work follows up on other atmospheric studies by Bitz, including a recent publication in Nature that suggests that greenhouse gas mitigation can reduce sea ice loss and increase polar bear survival.
The only planet we have
"We don't know what society would consider an unacceptable level of climate change, but it may happen, and at that point, there may be a demand to geoengineer," Bitz said.
A big challenge to studying geoengineering is the lack of a suitable physical environment for experimentation.
"We only have one planet," said Alan Robock, a leading geoengineering researcher at Rutgers University. "Meteorologists and climate scientists do not have laboratories with test tubes or accelerators. And we cannot 'mess with' the only planet we have to test its responses to making stratospheric clouds or brighter oceanic clouds, so we use models of the climate system--computer simulations of how the climate would respond to these forcings."
Bitz hopes the solutions that she's exploring will never need to be tested. But, like an evacuation plan or a bomb shelter, it is comforting to know that if solutions are required, scientists have done the initial research and have a sense of the potential outcomes.
Robock said, "We may discover dangerous consequences we never thought of before. Or, we may find that particular geoengineering scenarios reduce the risk of global warming more than the additional risks they present. This will allow us to make an informed decision some time in the future when we are faced with dangerous climate change."
These people are Marxists, and they know exactly what they are doing.
I know.
That's why I said it.
I have a son who has a meteorology degree (which he notes is not the same as climatology). He described these global engineering schemes to fool Mother Nature as “a very, very bad idea.”
It’s one thing to affect global aborption and reflectivity. But, one of the biggest side effects is that you have to guess on how long something of this scale will stay aloft. If you’re wrong on its decay characteristics, you could overdo it and be talking ice age.
So Obama DOES have a plan - “Plan 9 From Outer Space.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
By the way, Irene is the first Atlantic hurricane of the season. In all of the years of record-keeping, we've never had a year where the first eight named storms never made it to hurricane status.
The mystifying thing is
the officials admit that the critters are chronic liars.
Yet they still believe them and do horrendous traitorous things at the critters’ behest. Sheesh.
Idiots on parade.
Not really. Having the understanding of atmospheric dynamics necessary will be a good thing when the next Ice Age commences, and we need to "geoengineer" the atmosphere to make it warmer. Best choice is apparently nitrogen trifluoride. VERY strong greenhouse gas, and its half-life in the atmosphere is in the centuries range.
Wouldn’t this qualify as “secondhand smoke?”
I think they mean more fiercely and frequently hyped hurricanes.
Didn’t he save Lois? ;-)
Exactly right. Unfortunately, these so called scientists will not get any grant money.
This idea brought to you by the same experts who thought planting kudzu in the South would be the ideal way to prevent soil erosion.
It is just nuts to contemplate using volcanic activity to offset global warming for so many reasons. They can't even predict with any certainty which volcanoes are going to erupt and when over the next 5 years. What happens if we get several big eruptions right after they stimulate one?
Are they then going to burn up a bunch of oil to offset it?
I still want to know why they aren't planting a bunch of trees to take care of the CO2? That seems to me more logical, and certainly less dangerous.
Can we find them another planet to experiment on — and send them all there?
Theoretically, it may be necessary to act globally to mitigate the damage. Initially, those efforts will probably take the form of limits on greenhouse gas emissions or forest preservation. But some scientists and policy makers believe it might be necessary for scientists to take an active hand in engineering a solution to our climate problems."
------
See? They know nothing. They even say so.
The global temperature is always in flux, just like the stock market and the value of commodities and currencies. And just because global temperatures are going up, doesn’t mean the ice caps will melt, anymore than if the temperature is going down it means a second ice age. Unless something really extreme, like a second ice age, is definitely in the offing, who says that it’s even a bad thing.
Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi jokingly hypothesized that since the length of the Mississippi had consistently been getting shorter, in a few hundred years it would be only a few yards long.
“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower
Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.
That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic,
can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,’ just a million
years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards
of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out
over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token
any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now
the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long,
and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together,
and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual
board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling
investment of fact.”
Meaning they will do something without clear knowledge of what they are doing or why.
Insanity begot my insanity.
.....Insanity begot BY insanity.
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