But Greenies won't like it because it won't hurt anybody or send us back to the caves
In the summer blockbuster of 1998, Armageddon, Bruce Willis led a crew of courageous malcontents on a space expedition to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. The movie is science fiction, of course, but the concept that man could employ technology to avert such a natural disaster is anything but fantasy. Research is underway on several fronts to prepare to deflect our inevitable appointment with an asteroid.
This summer's catastrophe movie, An Inconvenient Truth, casts man as villain rather than problem solver. However, if one accepts the premise Al Gore promotes in the film--that disasters are just around the corner as a consequence of industrialization--one must wonder: Where are the technological knights in shining armor?
Enter Dr. Gregory Benford, a science fiction author and physicist on the faculty of the University of California at Irvine Department of Physics and Astronomy. Benford has been an advisor for NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the White House Council on Space Policy. At the June 2006 Skeptics Society conference at the California Institute of Technology, Benford, with this reporter in attendance, proposed a plan to shield the Earth from the sun's radiation--controlling the climate on purpose instead of by accident.
Benford's proposal involves suspending thousands of one-micron particles high in the stratosphere (approximately 82,000 feet above the Earth) to reflect solar radiation. Benford formulated the plan with colleagues from Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Benford's widely publicized January 21, 2005 San Diego Union-Tribune article with Martin Hoffert, "Fear of Reason," criticized Michael Crichton's climate contrarian novel State of Fear on several fronts. That led to expectations Benford might use the Skeptics address to promote plans for limiting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Instead, he came out swinging in the other direction, suggesting drastic limits on fossil fuel combustion intended to stabilize atmospheric CO2 were not likely to be adhered to and were undesirable.
Benford dismissed as unrealistic the possibility that alternative forms of energy could supplement nuclear power to meet the world's foreseeable energy needs for the next 50 years. He acknowledged the possibility that people may be able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester or store it underground in porous rock formations, but said he sees more promise in the unexplored frontier of directly managing solar radiation.
First, Benford revisited a plan he had suggested earlier to control solar radiation by placing a 1000-kilometer-wide mylar lens between the Earth and sun. But Benford's newest idea is even simpler: Creating a particulate shield that takes advantage of the same kind of modeled climate responses to relatively minor changes in atmospheric composition that are driving belief in manmade climate change in the first place.
The cooling effect of atmospheric sulphate aerosols has led many climate modelers to suggest these particles have been counteracting global warming. Despite much research supporting this cooling effect, global warming alarmists have downplayed the suggestion that this knowledge could be employed usefully. Stephen Schwartz, an atmospheric chemist at Brookhaven National Labs, said, "This is an attractive thought, but it cannot work in the long run because aerosols are so short-lived in the atmosphere, whereas greenhouse gases accumulate over time."
But Benford and his scientific team, expanding on research suggesting a significant albedo, or reflection, effect of one-micron sulphates, suggest lofting a shield of designer particles--one possibility being diatomaceous earth, commonly mined for filtration and pest control--crushed uniformly to the requisite particle size. Benford suggests the shield could be deliberately fashioned to increase solar reflection in the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum, thus limiting warming and the potentially harmful effects of UV radiation on plants and animals while maintaining the wavelengths beneficial to photosynthesis. By choosing the right particles and height in the atmosphere, the principal downside of sulphate aerosols--acid rain--can be avoided, Benford maintains. Dispersing the shield in the stratosphere would place it largely above the water vapor cycle.
Benford thinks the shield could be established and maintained for the relatively paltry sum of a billion dollars a year. If so, direct management of solar radiation could accomplish an order of magnitude more than the Kyoto treaty while costing several hundred times less.
Benford proposes testing the idea with a relatively small-scale experiment over the Arctic, where he believes stratospheric circulation patterns would confine a first deposition of particles, allowing their effect to be carefully studied. Some financially capable sources were sufficiently impressed by the presentation in Pasadena to approach Benford to discuss funding the research, according to Dr. Michael Shermer, the conference host and publisher of Skeptic magazine.
A great deal of research must be conducted before Benford's idea could be implemented if it should prove to be feasible. Nevertheless, his supporters assert, if there truly is an impending climate change problem, why not investigate means to fix it directly and in a manner that does not severely punish world economies?
Benford does not foreswear some Earth-based strategies--such as making roads and buildings in lighter colors to reflect more solar radiation--or discount the value of energy efficiency and improved alternatives to fossil fuels. But he is convinced by energy demographics that, rather than limit fossil fuel consumption, we should have near-term technologies on the shelf to shield the world from severe warming should any of the worst-case scenarios actually appear likely.
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GEO-ENGINEERING USING SEA-CREATURES: ANOTHER POTENTIAL FIX FOR ANY GLOBAL WARMING
A simple sea creature could help to address the problem of global warming, a scientist claims. Tiny tube-like salps mop up greenhouse gases by feasting on carbon-dioxide-soaked algae from the oceans. The US researcher told an American Geophysical Union meeting of his plans to adjust nutrient levels in the ocean to boost the sea animal's populations. But other scientists warned of the unknown consequences of meddling with the ocean's complex ecosystem.
The salp is a transparent hollow tube, no bigger than an unshelled peanut, that swims around vacuuming up microscopic plants. Because it is efficient in sucking up marine algae that have absorbed dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2), the salp is seen by one scientist as the key to sequestering excess atmospheric gas to the ocean bottom. "It's just a feeding tube," said Phil Kithil, CEO of Atmocean Inc, a private research firm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. "It eats at one end and excretes at the other." The solid carbon pellet that emerges from the salp sinks and dissolves deep enough in the ocean to be effectively taken out of the carbon cycle.
Mr Kithil wants to increase the algae-eating salp population in the world's oceans by boosting its food supply. He proposes to bring deep-water nutrients to the surface with arrays of wave-activated pumps. With an infusion of nutrients, the algae bloom would mushroom, according to the untested proposal, and absorb mass quantities of dissolved CO2, before being eaten and excreted by salps.
The speculative idea includes releasing thousands of coiled pumps that un-spool when they hit water, extending like organ pipes. Each pump consists of a flexible tube, up to 1,000m in length, which would draw cold, nutrient-rich water to the ocean surface. Mr Kithil estimates 1,340 pump arrays, each consisting of 100,000 tethered pumps over 100,000 sq km, could sequester nearly a third of manmade CO2 annually.
So far, the pumps have only been tested for proof of concept. Next summer, in an experiment with 25 pumps off the coast of Bermuda, Mr Kithil will see whether he can actually increase algal blooms and lure salps to feed. Mr Kithil's idea falls under the umbrella of geoengineering - a diverse and growing collection of proposals, mostly untested, to employ large-scale engineering solutions to the planet in an attempt to restore its energy balance.
But some climate scientists warn the possible side-effects of tinkering with the Earth's climate do not justify the risk. [Yet tinkering with the earth's climate is exactly what THEY want to do!] "The ocean is such an alien system for us to be tinkering with based on the current level of science," said Jim Bishop, a bio-geochemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "We don't understand the ecosystem dynamics well enough to predict what will happen.
Biologist Larry Madin at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has previously highlighted salps' CO2 mopping abilities. But as a cure for global warming, "it's just not that simple," he told the BBC. "You can't count on the fact that these organisms will show up." Salps grow in some places and not in others, Dr Madin explained. "It's easy enough to add nutrients and make things grow faster," he said, "but the next step is harder - to try controlling what happens to larger more complex animals with more complicated life cycles."
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DEEP-SIXING CROP WASTE TO REMOVE CO2: ANOTHER IDEA RUNS FOUL OF THE GREENIE PURITANS
I called my idea crop residue sequestering, or CRS, and I admit it sounded crazy, almost too easy - even to me. But as I learned when I surveyed the landscape of ideas, CRS is tame compared to many of the schemes to reduce global warming that have been proposed by scientists and amateurs alike.
The folks making these proposals fall into two broad categories. Some, the ecoengineers, want to tweak a naturally occurring process to remove carbon; and some seek ways to alter the heat balance of the planet - I call them geoengineers.
The classic tweaking approach involves fertilizing the ocean to increase phytoplankton growth, which in turn pulls more CO2 out of the atmosphere to feed the floral bloom. Other approaches can be as simple as growing more trees or as complicated as using chemical and biological scrubbers to cut down the CO2 before it escapes from chimneys. All these schemes have a common element: sequestration. A few plans call for dumping the carbon beneath depleted gas and oil fields or inside salt domes, but the most popular dumping site is the bottom of the ocean...
This raised a question: Generally speaking, is it more efficient to sequester CO2 before it enters the atmosphere, or is better to release it, let the global carbon cycle remove half of it, and then use a process like CRS to remove a portion of the CO2 that remains? The answer seemed obvious: Forget about all those methods that collect CO2 as it flies up the world's smokestacks, and concentrate instead on amplifying the global carbon cycle's effect, which is automatic and free of charge. We folded this larger argument into the CRS paper and sent it to the two most widely read and respected journals around, Science and Nature. Our Plan B was the journal Climatic Change.
Science and Nature weren't interested (compared with the detection of extrasolar planets and quantum teleportation, dumping crop residue off the sides of boats isn't very sexy, I guess). Climatic Change bit.
But first there was the peer review that every scientific article must undergo before publication. Here we ran into some problems. We were not told that our idea was crackpot fantasy - the peer review process is far too genteel for that. Instead we were informed that "this is a creative concept that might eventually yield an interesting paper - the current paper is not yet there. It needs much more thought." And as for our epiphany that, in general, hijacking the global carbon cycle was the best way to rid the world of its excess CO2, we were told that "the authors do not appear to understand the global carbon cycle."
The editor of Climatic Change told us that if we could address the reviewers' concerns, we could resubmit the paper. Fair enough. There were some genuine problems - in particular, we didn't distinguish between organic and inorganic carbon in our discussion of carbon's circuit through the biosphere. The reviewers spent several pages showing why our numbers couldn't possibly be correct, without realizing that we had grouped inorganic and organic carbon together. (This is one of the dangers of being an outsider - we didn't realize that atmospheric scientists generally consider the biosphere to contain only organic carbon.)
We rewrote from scratch. And as we did so, we began to receive not-so-subtle feedback from readers to whom we'd given the paper. One confessed that his first thought was that CRS was fundamentally a bad thing: Because it takes advantage of the global carbon cycle to sequester CO2, it could actually encourage polluters to emit more pollutants, rather than cut down on emissions. Then it slowly dawned on us. We were not fighting a technical battle so much as a moral one.
It was a battle I ultimately lost. To satisfy the reviewers, who held the keys to the atmospheric science kingdom, I cut out the larger implication that ecohacking is inherently more efficient than trying to sequester carbon at its source - though the CRS concept itself made it through the peer review process. My paper, titled "Sequestering of Atmospheric Carbon Through Permanent Disposal of Crop Residue,"will be published in Climatic Change within the next 12 months. After three long years, I'm part of the club - but I doubt I'll ever really feel like I belong, because even if CRS proves to be a bad idea and not a single bale of crop residue ever gets tossed off a boat, I will always believe that hacking the carbon cycle is our only real chance of fixing this global-warming mess.
More here
My first reaction was that crop waste would float to the surface, but if it is tightly baled, I guess it would not
Yet another wrong guess in the conventional climate models
Climatologists believe the Southern Ocean may slow the rate of global warming by absorbing significantly more heat and carbon dioxide than previously thought. The new study, appearing in the Journal of Climate, notes that westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere have moved southward over the last 30 years. As the winds shift south, they can do a better job of transferring heat and carbon dioxide from the surface waters surrounding Antarctica into the deeper, colder waters, say the researchers.
Lead researcher, Joellen L. Russell, stressed that the effect won't reverse or stop global warming, but will slow it. She noted that previous models of the Southern Hemisphere westerlies and Southern Ocean circulation did not have the winds properly located. In simulations of present-day climate, those models distorted the ocean's response to future increases in greenhouse gases.
The new model does a better job of depicting the location and observed southward shift of the Southern Hemisphere atmospheric winds than do the previous models. Developed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, it shows that the poleward shift of the westerlies intensifies the strength of the winds as they whip past the tip of South America and circumnavigate Antarctica. "It's like a huge blender," Russell explained. "Those winds propel the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The current drives the upwelling of cold water from more than two miles deep. The heavy, cold water comes to the surface and then sinks back down, carrying the carbon dioxide and heat with it."
The poleward intensification of the westerlies will allow the ocean to remove additional heat and anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "Because these winds have moved poleward, the Southern Ocean around Antarctica is likely to take up 20 percent more carbon dioxide than in a model where the winds are poorly located," said Russell, an assistant professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson. "More heat stored in the ocean means less heat stored in the atmosphere. That's also true for carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas."
While a slowing of the planet's warming is welcome news, there is widespread concern at what effect raised CO2 levels will have on marine ecosystems. Adding more CO2 to the oceans will change their chemistry, making the water more acidic and less habitable for some marine organisms. As a next step, the team hopes to contribute to figuring out how warming, ice-melt and ongoing shifts in the Southern Hemisphere westerlies will affect the complex biogeochemistry of the Southern Ocean.
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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