Climate Engineering As US Policy? 355
EricTheGreen writes "The Associated Press has an article featuring Obama administration science advisor John Holdren discussing potential climate engineering responses to global warming. Among the possible approaches? His own version of Operation Dark Storm — shooting micro-particulate pollution high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. I'm sure the rest of the world would have no issue with that at all, of course. Yikes ..."
Re:negative spin much? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, but will anyone listen?
"One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the recent January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel on the east side of the peninsula, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound on the west side." Mercer, Nature 1978 v271.
The ice shelves in that quote are ~10Kyrs old and have all collapsed in recent years, except for the Wilkins shelf which is collapsing as we speak.
Re:Not reversal (Score:3, Informative)
I think we're doing all that right now (this one, we as a species, not just the US or the West), but it's a side effect rather than the goal. It is informally called "global dimming", where particulate pollution is reflecting sunlight. There was a NOVA episode on this where they managed to find data to help them track the amount of sunlight hitting the surface over the past hundred years or so, among other lines of evidence.
yes, it is. (Score:3, Informative)
It rains. That gets the dirt out of the air. So the problem with mitigation will be, what will happen when all of these things we launch into the air come back and hit the ground.
We had a ton of pollution that essentially accomplished this effect and to some degree masked global warming. Once we got smart and lowered the size of and then got rid of particulate emissions of many kinds, that's when temperatures started moving up.
Re:negative spin much? (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps that's because organised [wikipedia.org] astroturfers [icecap.us] have conviced [ff.org] many people [senate.gov] science doesn't apply to AGW [realclimate.org].
The fact that the first hit on a google search for 'icecap "global warming"' is the icecap.us site would indicate your pessimisim is warranted. I actually had someone reply to me the other day who said something like "you don't get to quote Nature and Science as evidence for AGW because they are not statisticians".....sigh.
Re:Let's fix the problem that doesn't exist (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not reversal (Score:5, Informative)
Contrary to all the 'sky-is-falling' BS that people who produce bad computer models to scare the public enough to make government give them more money to find scarier and scarier models, the global average temperature is in a pretty good place. Not as warm as the PAX Romana or the holocene optimum, but far better than the 'little ice age' of the 19th century and certainly better than a real glacial period.
Re:Let's fix the problem that doesn't exist (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you can cherry-pick two points on a noisy signal and pretend it's meaningful, but that doesn't make it so. The meaningful indicator is the overall trend, not the year-by-year variations.
Our climate has been both warmer and colder in the past and so called global warming has reversed itself since the 90's. That's good. I miss the "Man Made Global Cooling" of the 70's.
You're assuming that all pollutants have the same effect. Is it so far fetched to think that some materials might have different effects than others?
CO2 isn't that effective of an insulator. As the number of CO2 molecules increases, the insulating effect of each molecule starts to decline. Eventually increases stop mattering. Methane is like 80 times more insulating and Nitrous Oxides can be well over 200 times more insulating than CO2. Both are produced increasingly by farms.
Increasing spending can in fact cut the deficit -- if it causes the economy to grow sufficiently that the increased business activity generates more tax revenue than the amount spent took away. (whether or not that will happen is open to speculation, but it has worked in the past)
By and large it hasn't worked in the past. It did not work with Japan in the 1990's when they passed stimulus after stimulus. The 1930's so called "New Deal" in America failed miserably (which is why the Great Depression hit the USA much more than it hit other countries. It lasted a decade in the USA, and only a few years in Europe). Keynesian Economics has never really had a success story.
Oh wait you are trolling, aren't you. You just wanted an excuse to post the standard list of Republican talking points to another forum. Well done.
Illegals, being outside of the eye of the law are cheaper to hire. Granted there are not a "limited" number of jobs. Markets, unlike government spending are not zero-sum. Both parties must gain for any transaction to occour and if illegals come here to work, they will also spend the results of their work. That being said, they do heavily strain government services and the open borders have increasingly become a source of crime. It is a serious issue, but not as much from an economic point of view.
Re:Not reversal (Score:5, Informative)
Ever heard of the holocene maximum? Far from being an overn, the last two hundred years have been the coldest in the last TEN THOUSAND. A scant 30-40 years ago, climatologists were awake at night wondering if a glacial period was imminent and inevitable. Even if the last 20ish years have seen a warming trend, that's pissing into the sea considering that's still part of climbing out of one of the deepest low temperature holes (the mid-late 19th century) since the end of the last glacial roughly 11000 years ago. We're nowhere near the high temperatures of the holocene optimum of 4000 to 7000 years ago. One might well note that those higher temperatures didn't kill all the polar bears like global warming apologists rant about happening today. Contrary to all the 'sky-is-falling' BS that people who produce bad computer models to scare the public enough to make government give them more money to find scarier and scarier models, the global average temperature is in a pretty good place. Not as warm as the PAX Romana or the holocene optimum, but far better than the 'little ice age' of the 19th century and certainly better than a real glacial period.
The problem isn't the temperature. That's a blip on the radar. The problem is that the rate of energy being trapped in the troposphere is increasing at an alarming rate. The rate of change is the issue. When temperatures change too quickly, species can't adapt to the change and they go away. We're seeing the collapse of entire branches of the animal and plant kingdom. Have you read about the imminent disappearance of amphibians on a global scale. Creatures that predate dinosaurs are being wiped out by a fungus, and its clearly environmental, but we don't understand what's going on yet.
The little ice age was a result of aerosols released into the atmosphere by volcanoes. With the dramatic rise of CO2 and the now growing amount of methane in the atmosphere, you may see the holocene optimum temperature again very soon, but you should make a point to enjoy it while you can, because by that point the graph line will be moving very quickly, and the temperatures that follow won't be anything like anybodies idea of an optimum anything. Stop looking at the thermometer (only), and look at the world. The changes are striking, accelerating, and clearly heading in a direction that is contrary to human success and survival. Worse, we're wiping out most of the higher lifeforms in the process. We depend on a lot of those animals for our well being.
Try this, rather the selectively hunting for facts to justify your opinion. Give up you opinion, and just look at as many facts as you can. Pick them from every possible source. Let the facts paint a picture. A slow temperature increase over 3000 years give plants and animals of all type plenty of time to adapt, migrate, react. Human beings have obliterated paths of migration for animals, and we've made the world considerably warmer in decades not millenia.
Mass extinctions are already upon us. Stop trying to justify a myopic view of the world. Humanity has demonstrated a profound capacity to be irresponsible particularly in the wanton desire to "Get Mine". Its time for us to stop being a civilization of selfish whining babies, and begin planning a future that sustains a quality of life worth living for. To that end, its a good time to begin looking at what quality of life really means and how we plan on addressing it as a species.
Re:negative spin much? (Score:3, Informative)
The NW passage was not suitable for cruise ships [hl-cruises.com] in 1906. Besides none of the crossings via a temporary route say anything much about climate.
"Al's famous hockey stick is dirty data taken from weather stations that have experienced heat islands being installed in the form of pavement. Go check out surface data.org. Sometimes one needs to "scrub" the data, and throw out obviously tainted data from a compromised station."
First of all it's Mann et al's hockey stick [realclimate.org] not Al Gore's, second there is no such "surface data.org" web site, third the source of your half truth is the national academies testimony to the senate [nationalacademies.org] which states...
"The basic conclusion of the 1999 paper by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years
"Remember all the data pointed to a new ice age in 1970, now the same data points to warming..."
No, but I am old enough to remember reading a whole lot of newspaper articles based on one national geographic article that by chance I also read when in HS. I do remember when the negative forcing [wikipedia.org] of soot was offsetting the positive forcing of CO2 more than in is now. Again looking at the national academies, they first warned of global warming in the 50's, nothing has changed in those warnings except the credibility and urgency have increased by orders of magnitute.
"Turns out that just about all dust in antarctic PENINSULA ice record comes from Patagonia."
Not sure what your point is here because more dust/soot sitting on the ice speeds up the rate of melting, your link correctly states that the dust levels are low right now because the glaciers are MELTING in patagonia?
I'm not sure where you get your information but if I were you I would start to question them since the sources you do give [google.com.au], are now publishing papers that make Al Gore's movie look optimistic.
Re:Not reversal (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what NOAA has to say about the holocene maximum [noaa.gov]:
In summary, the mid-Holocene, roughly 6,000 years ago, was generally warmer than today, but only in summer and only in the northern hemisphere. More over, we clearly know the cause of this natural warming, and know without doubt that this proven "astronomical" climate forcing mechanism cannot be responsible for the warming over the last 100 years.
Climatologists did not worry about an imminent ice age in the 70s [wmconnolley.org.uk]. It's a myth.
Re:negative spin much? (Score:2, Informative)
The hockey stick has been updated with better data, finding that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years [pnas.org].
Re:negative spin much? (Score:3, Informative)
Why would you link the IPCC report when it's common knowledge that 650 of the scientists [sacredscoop.com] whose work was used for the report have come out publicly and said that the entire report is pretty much a fabrication and false in nearly every aspect?
Because the content of your link is a crock of shit? (As is the rest of the site: "If Barack Obama Becomes the President Prepare for Marxism", "Bristol Palin Pregnant, but Makes Brave Choice", "Sarah Palin: A Conservatives Dream Come True"!)
Your link quotes TV weathermen, people who claim the sea levels are falling, that the global climate is *cooling* (despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
Classic myths (teh Sun is causing the warming!) sit side by side with quotes that claim the planet is cooling.
Why don't you link to the debunking [climateprogress.org] of your... erm... bunk?
Re:Sorry About the Ice Age... (Score:3, Informative)
Here is what was actually happening: Plastic bags are cheaper for the store than paper.