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Unbeknownst to most people, scientists have begun to conduct a secret experiment that involves shooting aerosols into the sky in the hope of preventing global warming. Specifically, this is a solar geoengineering experiment in San Francisco that’s trying to create brighter clouds that would, in theory at least, reflect more sunlight away from the earth.

Cleaner air in United States and Europe is brewing more Atlantic hurricanes, a new U.S. government study found. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study links changes in regionalized air pollution across the globe to storm activity going both up and down. A 50% decrease in pollution particles and droplets in Europe and the U.S. is linked to a 33% increase in Atlantic storm formation in the past couple decades, while the opposite is happening in the Pacific with more pollution and fewer typhoons, according to the study published in Wednesday’s Science Advances. NOAA hurricane scientist Hiroyuki Murakami ran numerous...

Scientists have proposed a new method to fight global warming: sun-dimming aerosols released into earth’s atmosphere. Research from scientists at Harvard and Yale universities was recently published in a journal called Environmental Research Letters which proposes using a technique called stratospheric aerosol injection to fight against climate change. The proposed technique would see scientists launching sulfate particles into the Earth’s lower stratosphere at altitudes up 12 miles high. Currently, the technology exists but there are no aircraft suitable to carry the particles and “developing a new, purpose-built tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive,”...

BURNING fossil fuels and cutting down trees causes global COOLING, a shock new NASA study has found. Major theories about what causes temperatures to rise have been thrown into doubt after NASA found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialization where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place. Environmentalists have long argued the burning of fossil fuels in power stations and for other uses is responsible for global warming and predicted temperature increases because of the high levels of carbon dioxide produced - which causes the global greenhouse effect. While the findings did...

I've watched the weather here for 50 years; growing up we did not have haze at 30,000 ft for months on end. Every day, it's like being in a greehouse, an obvious light filter prevents the full sunlight from reaching the ground. The past few years they've turned up the haze a lot. Spring - so far only 2 or 3 days above 70. Summers have been very cool. Have not had a really clear day in a long time. Decades ago, had really clear days all the time. What's really annoying is that they think we're so stupid we...

When CDC Director Tim Frieden first announced, just a week ago and very erroneously, that he was "confident we will stop Ebola in its tracks here in the United States", he hardly anticipated facing the double humiliation of not only having the first person-to-person transmission of Ebola on US soil taking place within a week, but that said transmission would impact a supposedly protected healthcare worker. He certainly did not anticipate the violent public reaction that would result when, instead of taking blame for another epic CDC blunder, one which made many wonder if last night's Walking Dead season premier...

Attempts to reverse the impacts of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere could make matters worse, say researchers. A new study suggests the idea, seen as a last-ditch way to deal with runaway climate change, could cut rainfall in the tropics by 30%. This would have devastating impacts on rainforests in South America and Asia The research has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The concept of curbing rising temperatures by blocking sunlight has been discussed by scientists for many years now. Some of the ideas have been dismissed as crazy notions, but others have...

Pollution during the 20th century appears to have suppressed North Atlantic hurricanes The Clean Air Act, which has benefited breathing in many American cities over the last few decades, may have worsened the weather in some places. New climate simulations suggest that reducing the level of atmospheric aerosol particles produced by human activity might have been the main cause of a recent increase in tropical storm frequency in the North Atlantic. Aerosol levels have increased since the industrial revolution began, but there have been periods when emissions stalled or fell, such as the Great Depression, World War II and after...

GLOBAL warming is on a 20-year “plateau”, the UK’s top climate researchers have revealed. Sceptics celebrated this week when the Met Office acknowledged temperatures are only creeping slightly above highs the world hit in 1998 and will be much the same over the next five years. Even the forecasters’ harshest critics say this does not mean the world’s climate will stop heating up but it raises questions over what the scientists and their £30million super-computer think is really going on. THE Met Office have revealed that global warming appears to have STALLED. The upwardly surging arrow used on graphs warning...

Full TITLE: Shocker: The Hansen/GISS team paper that says: “we argue that rapid warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases” Note: This will be a top post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one – please scroll down. Also, If you have not already, vote in the WUWT Sea Ice Forecast Poll, which closes at noon today.============================================================No, this isn’t a joke, it isn’t a fake document, and it isn’t a misinterpretation. It is a paper published by Dr. James Hansen (and the GISS team) in PNAS (Proceedings of the National...

Despite significant pyrotechnics and air travel disruption last year, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull simply didn't put that many aerosols into the stratosphere. In contrast, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, put 10 cubic kilometers of ash, gas and other materials into the sky, and cooled the planet for a year. Now, research suggests that for the past decade, such stratospheric aerosols—injected into the atmosphere by either recent volcanic eruptions or human activities such as coal burning—are slowing down global warming. "Aerosols acted to keep warming from being as big as it would have been," says atmospheric scientist John Daniel...

Glory is a low Earth orbit scientific research satellite designed to collect data on the properties of aerosols, including black carbon, in the Earth's atmosphere and climate system, and to collect data on solar irradiance for the long-term effects on the Earth climate record. The new robotic probe is headed to the launch pad, aiming for a spot aboard what is called the A-train -- a fleet of Earth-orbiting spacecraft keeping tabs on the planet's changing climate. Coming to a topline conclusion about the treality of global warming will be a snap: Glory will measure the total amount of energy...

Colette Hume on board her flight to the US Security measures for flights inbound to America stepped up a gear following the attempted attack on a plane heading for the US on Christmas Day. How then was I was able to unwittingly carry a 200ml hairspray can - twice the liquid limit - onto a Qantas flight to the US, after two separate supposedly rigorous security checks? Let me make it clear, there was no intention to flout the rules. It wasn't an attempt to test the rigour of the new security. It was a mistake on my part to...

Forget Copenhagen CO2 cuts, tune your diesel properly Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, also the home of famous carbopocalypse doom-prophet James Hansen, have repeated earlier assertions that atmospheric soot may be as important as greenhouse gases in driving global warming. This could be good news for humanity, as atmospheric soot levels would be much easier to reduce. Filtering soot out of exhausts from diesel engines and coal burners is simple compared to removing and sequestering CO2, and as an added benefit the effects would be rapid: soot doesn't persist in the atmosphere for long periods the way greenhouse...

Aerosols' complicated influence on our climate just got more threatening: they could make methane a more potent greenhouse gas than previously realized, say climate modellers.Drew Shindell, at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues ran a range of computerized models to show that methane's global warming potential is greater when combined with aerosols — atmospheric particles such as dust, sea salt, sulphates and black carbon. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol assume methane to be, tonne-for-tonne, 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. But the...

Scientists have used a new approach to sharpen the understanding of one of the most uncertain of mankind's influences on climate - the effects of atmospheric "haze," the tiny airborne particles from pollution, biomass burning, and other sources. High resolution (Credit: NOAA) The new observations-based study led by NOAA confirms that the particles ("aerosols") have the net effect of cooling the planet - in agreement with previous understanding - but arrives at the answer in a completely new way that is more straightforward, and has narrowed the uncertainties of the estimate. The findings appear in this week's Journal of Geophysical...

Aerosols bumped up world’s plant productivity by 25 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, new research suggests The world’s vegetation soaked up carbon dioxide more efficiently under the polluted skies of recent decades than it would have under a pristine atmosphere, a new analysis in the April 23 Nature suggests. The trend hints that relying on forests and other vegetation to sequester carbon may not be effective if skies continue to clear, researchers say. Major volcanic eruptions throw large quantities of aerosols, such as small bits of fractured rock and droplets of sulfuric acid, high into the atmosphere. Those particles...

1st paragraph (with link to abstract): "Our recent paper “Climate response to regional radiative forcing during the twentieth century”, has generated some interesting discussion (some of it very 'interesting' indeed). So this post is an attempt to give a better context to the methods and implications of the study." Yet more aerosols: Comment on Shindell and Faluvegi Most intriguing paragraph: "In the absence of increasing greenhouse gases, our large historical emissions of sulfate precursors would have led to substantial cooling from sulfate, and the subsequent reduction in emissions would have brought temperatures back towards their previous level. So reduced sulfate...

Feature Aerosols May Drive a Significant Portion of Arctic Warming 04.08.09     Aerosols can influence climate directly by either reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation as it moves through the atmosphere. The tiny airborne particles enter the atmosphere from sources such as industrial pollution, volcanoes and residential cooking stoves. Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio> Larger image Though greenhouse gases are invariably at the center of discussions about global climate change, new NASA research suggests that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols....

Curbing a notorious form of industrial pollution may ironically harm Amazonia, one of the world's natural treasures and a key buffer against global warming, a study released Wednesday has found. Its authors see a strong link between a decrease in sulphur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and a rise in sea temperature in the northern Atlantic that was blamed for wreaking a devastating drought in western Amazonia in 2005. University of Exeter professor Peter Cox and colleagues created a computer model to simulate the impact of aerosols -- airborne particles that, like sulphur dioxide, are also spewed out by...