GEOENGINEERING WOULD BE MUCH CHEAPER AND BECOME EFFECTIVE MUCH SOONER

That the warmists insist on the quite impractical and unlikely route of CO2 reduction to achieve their proclaimed ends just shows that their real agenda is not what they make it out to be. It is a tool to make the hated Western society poorer, nothing else. Two articles below:

David Schnare, an environmental scientist and attorney associated with the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, told the U.S. Senate today that a solution to global warming is simple, cheap -- and no more than a few years away.

With geo-engineering, the doctor says, scientists are learning how to replicate natural phenomenon, like volcanic eruptions, to control global temperatures. Here are excerpts from prepared testimony the doctor submitted:

Geo-engineering is the deliberate modification of large scale geophysical processes ... The first of the two most common examples cited is placement of reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere in order to reflect incoming sunlight and thus reduce global temperature.

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 injected a significant amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, lowering the Earth's surface temperature by about (half a degree) the year following the eruption.

... Because these techniques mimic natural phenomena, we know more about how quickly and well they work than we do about the efficacy of attempting to reduce greenhouse gases. We have measured the effects of the natural processes and can state with considerable certainty, bordering of complete certainty, that they will produce the result sought. Although the effects of greenhouse gas reduction would occur over a period of no less than decades and more likely centuries, the effects of geo-engineering can (and will) be manifest in a matter of weeks after application. ... Geo-engineering is ... 200 to 2,000 times less expensive ... than exclusive reliance on carbon control.

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Two Greenies who really do believe:

Two of Britain's leading environmental thinkers say it is time to develop a quick technical fix for climate change. Writing in the journal Nature, Science Museum head Chris Rapley and Gaia theorist James Lovelock suggest looking at boosting ocean take-up of CO2. Their idea, already being investigated by a US firm, involves huge flotillas of vertical pipes in the tropical seas.

The two scientists say they doubt that existing plans for curbing carbon emissions can work quickly enough. "We are taking the very strong line that we are not going to save the planet by the regular approaches like the Kyoto Protocol or renewable energy," Professor Lovelock told BBC News. "What we have to do is to look at it in a systems sense, or a Gaian sense, and see if it's curable by direct action."

Professor Rapley, who has just moved to head up the Science Museum from a similar post at the British Antarctic survey, said the two men developed the ocean pipes concept during country walks in James Lovelock's beloved Devon.

Unbeknown to them, a US company, Atmocean, had already begun trials of a very similar technology. Floating pipes reaching down from the top of the ocean into colder water below move up and down with the swell. As the pipe moves down, cold water flows up and out onto the ocean surface. A simple valve blocks any downward flow when the pipe is moving upwards.

Colder water is more "productive" - it contains more life, and so in principle can absorb more carbon. One of the life-forms that might benefit, Atmocean believes, is the salp, a tiny tube which excretes carbon in its solid faecal pellets, which descend to the ocean floor, perhaps storing the carbon away for millennia.

Atmocean CEO Phil Kithil has calculated that deploying about 134 million pipes could potentially sequester about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities each year. But he acknowledges that research is in the early stages. "There is much yet to be learned," he told BBC News. "We need not only to move towards the final design and size (of the pipes), but also to characterise the ecological effects. "The problem we would be most concerned about would be acidification. We're bringing up higher levels of CO2 along with the nutrients, so it all has to be analysed as to the net carbon balance and the net carbon flux."

Atmocean deployed experimental tubes earlier this year and gathered engineering data. The pipes brought cold water to the surface from a depth of 200m, but no research has yet been done on whether this approach has any net impact on greenhouse gas levels. The company says a further advantage of cooling surface waters in regions such as the Gulf of Mexico could be a reduction in the number of hurricanes, which need warm water in order to form.

And Professors Lovelock and Rapley suggest that the ocean pipes could also stimulate growth of algae that produce dimethyl sulphide (DMS), a chemical which helps clouds form above the ocean, reflecting sunlight away from the Earth's surface and bringing a further cooling.

In recent years, scientists have developed a wide range of technical "geo-engineering" ideas for curbing global warming. Seeding the ocean with iron filings to stimulate plankton growth, putting sunshades in space, and firing sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere from a giant cannon have all been proposed; the iron filings idea has been extensively tested. But the whole idea of pursuing these "technical fixes" is controversial.

"One has to understand what the consequences of doing these things are," commented Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California, who has published a number of analyses of geo-engineering technologies. "There are scientific questions of safety and efficacy; then there are the broader ethical, social and political dimensions, and one of the most disturbing is that if people start getting the idea that technical fixes are available and cheaper than curbing carbon emissions, then people might start relying on them as an alternative to curbing emissions. "So I think it's worth investigating these kinds of ideas, but premature to start deploying them."

Chris Rapley does not believe ideas like the ocean pipes are complete answers to man-made global warming, but may buy time while society develops a more comprehensive response. "It's encouraging to see how much serious effort is going into technical attempts to reduce carbon emissions, and the renewed commitment to finding an international agreement," he said. "But in the meantime, there's evidence that the Earth's response to climate change might be going faster than people have predicted. The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic, for example, poses a serious concern for the northern hemisphere climate."

Professor Rapley said the letter to Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, was intended to get people thinking about the concept of technical fixes rather than just to advocate ocean pipes. "If you think of how the science community has organised itself," he said, "with the World Climate Research Programme, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, International Polar Year and so on - you've got all this intensive interdisciplinary collaboration figuring out what Earth systems are up to and figuring out how they work, but we don't have a similar network working across the entire piece as to what we can actually do to mitigate and adapt."

He said there was a need for some sort of global collaboration to explore potential climate-fixing technologies. "Geo-engineering is one of the types of thing that are worth investigating," opined Ken Caldeira, "and yes, the amount of effort going into thinking of innovative solutions is far too little. "If we can generate 100 ideas, and 97 are bad and we land up with 3 good ones, then the whole thing will have been worthwhile; so I applaud Lovelock and Rapley for thinking along these lines."

He observed that human emissions of greenhouse gases are bringing huge changes to natural ecosystems anyway, so there was nothing morally difficult in principle about deliberately altering the same natural ecosystems to curb climatic change. But changing patterns of ocean life could potentially have major consequences for marine species. Whales that feed on krill, for example, could find their favourite food displaced by salps.

These would all have to be investigated, James Lovelock acknowledged. But, he said, it is time to start. "There may be all sorts of ecological consequences, but the stakes are terribly high."

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Let's make the world storm-proof

The idea that hurricanes are blowback for man's polluting ways overlooks the fact that it is only man - through development and construction - who can offset the impacts of freak weather

Chris Mooney has followed up his attack on the Bush administration's scientific record with a more personal examination of hurricanes (1). Storm World was written in response to Katrina, the category 3 hurricane that hit New Orleans in 2005 leading to the breach of the levee and the subsequent flooding of the city with around 1,700 deaths and material costs generally expected to exceed $100billion (2). Amongst the homes that were eventually destroyed was that of Mooney's mother.

Mooney explains that the modern discussion of hurricanes and their relation to global warming mirrors that of the nineteenth century. On the one hand is William (Bill) Gray, a student of Riehl who shot to fame by unveiling the first Atlantic seasonal hurricane forecasting system in 1984, and prides himself on his ability to crunch data and observe patterns, rather like Redfield. On the other hand are scientists like Kerry Emanuel, who rely on theoretical insight and computer modelling to provide an understanding of the weather that can lead to better predictions of future storm activity. Interestingly, both camps appear to agree that warming has occurred and both agree that warming will increase the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. They disagree, profoundly, on what is causing the current warming and how long it will last. Gray believes the warming is somehow related to the thermohaline cycle (5), while almost everyone else believes the warming is due to CO2 emissions. Gray maintains that the warming will soon reverse, as the thermohaline cycle changes, while his opponents believe that what warming has occurred will be at least maintained and will continue to increase as CO2 continues to be released.

Mooney does well to treat Gray's opposition to the consensus on global warming with proper respect, despite Gray's clearly eccentric views and often gross dismissal of his fellow scientists. It would be easy to dismiss Gray out of hand, forgetting that he pioneered the science of hurricane forecasting and has trained a vast number of younger leading hurricane specialists, many of whom now disagree with him. Science depends upon conviction and scepticism much more than consensus; it is grossly unfortunate to dismiss Gray's contribution as heretical. There are plenty of unknowns that Gray rightly draws attention to: the effects of clouds and ocean spray, stabilisation from warming at upper levels, the influence of the thermohaline circulation, and the effect of hurricanes themselves pulling up masses of cooler water. Unfortunately, however, Gray's basic objection to the global warming consensus - that we can't possibly understand the weather, it's too complicated and difficult - is simply unconvincing.

The bottom line question out of all this is: Are hurricanes getting worse because of global warming or not? Mooney is not trying to be catastrophic and self-consciously avoids hyperbole. `Certainly', he says early in his book, `[this work] is no polemic, no work of alarmism. our scientific understanding of the hurricane-climate relationship remains too incomplete to justify such an approach.' Towards the end of his book, the picture that Mooney paints is fairly mundane. In the Atlantic, at least, global warming is likely increasing the intensity, and probably frequency, of hurricanes. More hurricanes and hurricanes of increased intensity is a problem for those who live in the paths of hurricanes, but these problems are hardly new and need not be apocalyptic. The category 4 Galveston Hurricane of 1900 killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people, but modern construction and evacuation options should prevent that scale of death in modern Galveston. In fact, a seawall was built in the aftermath of 1900 and dredged sand was used to elevate the city. A category 3 hurricane that hit Galveston in 1915 killed 275 people, a massive reduction from the 1900 hurricane.

In contrast, a 1970 six-metre storm surge caused by a tropical cyclone equivalent to a category 3 hurricane killed some 300,000 to 500,000 people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). A cyclone preparedness programme was put in place to warn people of future cyclones but, unlike Galveston, no major sea defences or cyclone-proof homes and bridges were built. In 1991, another intense cyclone with a six-metre storm surge hit Bangladesh and killed around 138,000 people.

Regions that can be hit by hurricanes and cyclones will inevitably be hit by hurricanes and cyclones regardless of the influence of global warming. Whether global warming really is increasing the intensity and incidence of such dramatic weather events, and it seems a fair bet that it is, these weather events fluctuate widely due to many factors that remain to be understood and are a long way from being controlled. Until we can control the weather, defences and evacuation plans can be engineered for the people who choose to live in vulnerable areas and, if necessary, people can permanently relocate.

It is important to recognise that what to do about hurricanes is a social rather than scientific question. It is one thing for scientists to draw attention towards a growing problem such as the potential for more intense and frequent hurricanes due to global warming. It is quite another to tell democratically elected governments how to manage energy policy and city defences in the light of that evidence. Mooney considers the role of science in political decision-making far too uncritically as a choice between `sound science', which emphasises a very high burden of proof before scientific information serves as the basis for significant political action, and the `precautionary principle', which asserts that we cannot wait for all the evidence to come in before we respond.

Both sound science and the precautionary principle fail to provide any resolution to the question of political action. An insistence on a very high burden of proof will mean waiting until something happens and then it is too late. On the other hand, taking action before it is necessary wastes resources. Wisdom lies in knowing when action is necessary, and that is a political decision not a scientific one.

Mooney laments that scientists are too enamoured to the peer-reviewed literature and too reluctant to make general political observations and recommendations. He wants scientists to `stop being only scientists, and realise that they must be communicators - and leaders, and examples - as well'. Following these recommendations will be disastrous for both science and politics.

Good scientists know that their data and observations can be misleading. A single line of investigation is rarely correct absolutely, which is why peer review is so important. It acts as a system of checks and balances to maintain an even keel towards the truth. Scientists respect this process because it generally works and affirms the legitimate nature of science by holding it up to proper scrutiny. Scientists who try to run around this process by appealing directly to the media or politicians undermine the credibility of scientific pursuit. Does Mooney really want scientists delivering their data direct to the media to support their plans for social reorganisation?

Although it might seem entirely sensible for scientists to inform public policy, there is a line between information and policy and between scientists and politicians. Scientists are not democratically elected; they have no popular mandate for deciding what Florida should do about hurricanes or how Bangladesh should organise building policy. However well-intentioned, shifting expertise into a position of authority without electoral support is a form of tyranny. Clearly Mooney does not see it that way, and probably neither do many people. The introduction of science into policy is generally regarded as benign, a well-intentioned and useful process. The aim is to protect life and liberty and not to undermine it. This is disarmingly unlike the tyrannies of the past and so it escapes popular opposition.

The problem, however, is that public and social policy is not something that can be decided by an empirical process that avoids public debate. People can, if they wish, decide to live on the coast in the face of increasing hurricanes. Society can, if it chooses, offset the cost of people being in harm's way. It is not the job of science to decide what is best for humanity; that is the job of the people. If science, even well intentioned and technically correct science, takes that decision away, then we have tyranny.

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SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON MAN-MADE OZONE HOLE MAY BE COMING APART

Reality aces the knowalls again. And the antarctic "ozone hole" has reached record sizes in recent years, DESPITE the abolition of CFCs. The latest reading is not as big as the record 28 million sq km holes that developed during 2000, 2003 and 2006 but is close to it. When will they admit that the whole CFC scare showed only how little they knew?

As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.

Long-lived chloride compounds from anthropogenic emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are the main cause of worrying seasonal ozone losses in both hemispheres. In 1985, researchers discovered a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, after atmospheric chloride levels built up. The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules' ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength of light a molecule can absorb), as the energy for the process comes from sunlight. Molecules break down and react at different speeds according to the wavelength available and the temperature, both of which are factored into the protocol.

So Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate. "This must have far-reaching consequences," Rex says. "If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being." What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

The rapid photolysis of Cl2O2 is a key reaction in the chemical model of ozone destruction developed 20 years ago2 (see graphic). If the rate is substantially lower than previously thought, then it would not be possible to create enough aggressive chlorine radicals to explain the observed ozone losses at high latitudes, says Rex. The extent of the discrepancy became apparent only when he incorporated the new photolysis rate into a chemical model of ozone depletion. The result was a shock: at least 60% of ozone destruction at the poles seems to be due to an unknown mechanism, Rex told a meeting of stratosphere researchers in Bremen, Germany, last week.

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. "Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart," says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. "Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely," agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. "Now suddenly it's like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge." ......

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Unhealthy to use wood-burning fireplaces in winter

How did we ever survive in the past without California politicians to protect us?

Anyone who breathed the acrid smoke that hung across the Sacramento Valley when forest fires raged this summer must understand why the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District has proposed a common-sense rule to restrict wood burning this winter. From the beginning of November to the end of February, those cozy wood fires are the single largest source of lung-piercing fine particulate pollution.

The mixture of soot, smoke, metals, nitrates, sulfates and dust that residential fireplaces emit from burning wood penetrates deep into lungs. Exposure decreases lung function and aggravates asthma and bronchitis. In people with serious heart or lung disease, exposure to wood smoke can cause premature death.

In response to studies that documented serious health impacts, the federal government adopted stringent new standards that require local air districts to reduce the public's exposure to soot. To meet that standard, Sacramento air district officials have proposed Rule 421. It would prohibit residents in Sacramento County from burning wood or pressed logs and pellets in their fireplaces during the 25 to 30 bad air days of the year when particulate pollution is greatest, on those winter days when the air is still and smoke hovers close to the ground. Those who violate the rule would face fines of up to $50 for the first offense.

For local elected officials who sit on the air district board, the most controversial provision of the new rule bans the burning of pressed logs and pellets along with wood. Though less harmful than burning wood, pressed logs and pellets are still 100 times more polluting than natural gas. They contribute to the toxic stew that causes an estimated 90 premature deaths in the Sacramento metropolitan area every year. Rule 421 would cut soot pollution by one third in Sacramento County this coming winter, protect public health and save lives.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

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