Panel Urges More Research on Geoengineering as a Tool Against Climate Change

With the planet facing potentially severe impacts from global warming in coming decades, a government-sponsored scientific panel on Tuesday called for more research on geoengineering — technologies to deliberately intervene in nature to counter climate change.

In two widely anticipated reports, the panel — which was supported by NASA and other federal agencies, including what the reports described as the “U.S. intelligence community” — noted that drastically reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases was by far the best way to mitigate the effects of a warming planet.

But the panel, in making the case for more research into geoengineering, said, “It may be prudent to examine additional options for limiting the risks from climate change.”

Geoengineering options generally fall into two categories: capturing and storing some of the carbon dioxide that has already been emitted so that the atmosphere traps less heat, or reflecting more sunlight away from the earth so there is less heat to start with. The panel issued separate reports on each.

The panel said that while the first option, called carbon dioxide removal, was relatively low risk, it was expensive, and even if it were pursued on a planetwide scale, it would take many decades to have a significant impact on the climate. But the group said research was needed to develop efficient and effective methods to both remove the gas and store it so it remains out of the atmosphere indefinitely.

The second option, called solar radiation management, is far more controversial. Most discussions of the concept focus on the idea of dispersing sulfates or other chemicals high in the atmosphere where they would reflect sunlight, in some ways mimicking the effect of a large volcanic eruption.

The NYT, which should know better, never tells its gentle reader that there are some scientifically established geophysical factors that drive Earth's Climate:

I. The Milankovitch Glaciation Cycle
Earth's Orbital Path is not circular, but elliptical, bringing Earth nearer and farther from the Sun in a predictable cycle.
Earth's Axial Tilt toward the Sun changes over a predictable cycle measured in thousands of years
As the Earth spins on its axis, the poles precess through an arc of 13 degrees over a 26,000 year cycle, like a wobbling top.
All of this means that the Sun's rays differ greatly in their impact upon different areas of the Earth at any given time in the interplay of the three simultaneously occurring cycles. Read the link. It's a lot easier to to see than to explain:
Pre-glacial, Glacial, Inter-glacial, Post- glacial periods.

II. Sunspot Activity (The Maunder Minimum Cycle)
The effect of susnspot activity on Earth's Climate has been intensively documented for several hundred years.
Sunspots and Earth's Weather

III. Changes in Earth's Gravitational Field
No Small Change!

How these physical cycles affect climate is extremely complex, but that they do is indisputable and accepted by real science. "Global Warming" on the other hand is un-scientific, often hysterical, and largely Left-Wing political in nature, and completely at odds with observable data.

But, real science is quite at a loss in dealing with emotional argument about imagined horrors. What we are living through is a re-play of Lysenkoism ... the nightmare of completely false science that Stalin forced the Soviets to accept upon pain of banishment to Siberia and death. Not so different today. Nowadays, those who do not toe the line on the official climate story will be banished from politics and academia.

“that spur the growth of algae”

I think some guy did that privately out in the Pacific to create a feeding zone. Then later he would go net the increased population of fish.

Sounds reasonable, but I would want a lot of studying on it. It might end up like so many ponds in residental areas that get chocked with algae due to all of the fertilizer run-off.

Heh. I wonder if anybody had gotten a government grant yet to study Kudzu growth rates vs. CO2 over time.

By the way, the huge increases in CO2 that we have seen do not correlate at all to the global temperatures. Which makes sense, seeing as CO2 provides very little “greenhouse gas” effect to the atmosphere. Something on the order of 0.5%. The majority of the “greenhouse gas effect” is due to water vapor. With 99+% of water vapor being natural.

The few field tests of ocean fertilization over the years have been promising enough to make one wonder why detailed and extensive testing has not yet been accomplished. After all, if global warming is the catastrophic menace that it is claimed to be, then why hasn't the scientific response been vigorously open-minded and included ocean fertilization and other forms of geoengineering?

Every now and then, a global warming alarmist admits that success with ocean fertilization would divert funding and political force from their preferred solutions of comprehensive and intrusive regulation and vast alternative energy projects. The green global warming agenda is thus revealed as being at heart a retooled form of Marxian scientific socialism and a way to put the green alliance of nerds, ideologues, and thuggish con men in charge of much of the world's people and resources.

The problem with the opposing per cent of metric is that it is more a factoid than a credible counter argument. After all, the per cent is cumulative, with atmospheric CO2 at historically high levels and continuing to escalate like a bad debt. On a systemic basis, marginal changes matter even if, as in this instance, how and how much they matter is fraught with uncertainties.

Consider, for example, the effects on a person of gradually adding or withdrawing a few percent every day of normal water intake. The result would soon be death from water excess or from dehydration, but the precise manifestations and schedule of decline cannot be predicted in advance.

In fairness to the global warming case, it urges that as high carbon dioxide levels persist and continue to rise, feedback loops and other reinforcing mechanisms take hold and climate equilibria are overwhelmed. And it is said that by the time such effects are fully manifest, they will be gravely damaging and irreversible except on multigenerational time scales.

This cannot be fully disproved any more than parents can easily convince a four year old fearful of monsters that it is safe to go to bed and get to sleep as they are told to. After all, there might be a monster or two lurking. A check under the bed and in the closet and leaving a night light on usually suffices for the fears of a four year old.

For global warming alarmists, whose fears are at least plausible in concept, ocean fertilization may have a similar reassuring effect. And, as you indicate, there is also some reason to think that it might improve ocean fisheries. But that is a discussion for another time.

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