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GLOBAL WARMING

How to Fix a Climate Emergency

As forecasts for global temperatures grow increasingly dire, scientists are taking a serious look at an idea once considered crazy: reengineering the atmosphere.

 

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The sudden explosion of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991, sent a vast column of ash into the sky, blotting out the sun, killing hundreds and demonstrating one way to save humanity from a potential climate disaster.

The mountain's 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide rose from the Philippines into the stratosphere, blanketing the planet in a haze that reflected part of the sun's heat back out into space. Over the next several years, meteorologists watched in amazement as the haze lowered the earth's temperature by a cumulative total of half a degree Celsius—setting the clock back on global warming. In the century before Pinatubo, greenhouse gases released by human industry had helped raise the earth's temperature by 1 degree.

The effect was temporary—temperatures started rising again after a year or so. But scientists began to wonder if the volcano hadn't revealed a possible weapon against climate change. It takes only a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see that it would be possible to do artificially what the mountain did naturally. A judicious application of sulfur dioxide to the upper atmosphere, which could be accomplished by launching the gas from rockets, spraying it from high-altitude planes or releasing it from a big chimney, would have an almost immediate impact on temperature. And it would cost a thousand times less than even the most optimistic scenarios for cutting emissions. A small group of scientists began looking into how this kind of geo-engineering could be done most efficiently and with the fewest side effects.

Over the past two decades geo-engineering began to include other ways of fixing climate, including new spins on the Pinatubo effect. Using sulfur dioxide or other materials, they aim to reflect sunlight back into outer space. One would boost a series of mirrors into orbit, shading Earth from sunlight, but at a cost that would likely bankrupt the planet. In the 1990s, the controversial inventor of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, proposed floating reflective particles of metal in the atmosphere, adding a Dr. Strangelove air to the geo-engineering field.

The other, more publicly acceptable form of geo-engineering would focus on removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it underground. Known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), this idea is behind today's experimental clean-power plants, which are attracting lots of research and funding. But clean-coal plants will only reduce future emissions, which does not address the root of the problem. Among all the uncertainties that still surround climate change, one thing has become clear: the scary durability of carbon, which will hang in the air for a thousand years, continuing to warm the planet no matter how drastically future emissions are cut. So there is a growing urgency behind the geo-engineer's dream: to change the climate by artificial means, either sucking the existing carbon out of the air or cooling the air with solar reflectors.

Geo-engineering labored on the lunatic fringe of climate policy until recently. Experts shunned its ideas as mad science, and for fear that it would undermine the campaign to cut carbon emissions. People are not going to make hard sacrifices to combat global warming if they get the impression that a quick engineering trick can erase the threat. Besides, the very idea of engineering climate change spooks people. If science can't reliably predict the weather, how can it reliably engineer the global climate? The 20th century saw many less-ambitious efforts to reshape the earth—by diverting rivers, for example—end in disaster.

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Member Comments

  • Posted By: Lee Holmes @ 07/09/2009 4:10:14 PM

    Rustfree: And Basic Math 101 needs you as a student.

    There never was any ''2000''scientists on the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]

    There were precisely 212 who authored the original report that launched the phony career of the huckstering [and quite environmentally hypocritical, algore].

    On the heels of the recently released ''Climate Change Reconsidered'' penned by a consortium of 37 scientists,comes a letter signed by over 700 world climateologists and scientists including Nobel winners and Lauretes [three times the number of the IPCC] that are reexamining the faulty conclusions raised by the IPCC and detailed in the 880 page study. Disgusted with the way they were treated by the media and algore being branded ''deniers'' in the new Red Scare, several of the worlds top climate scientists are angrily turning their guns on the fundementalist greenies and the Goreians to attack their own shoddy and slipshod findings. Europe,Asia, the Americas,Australia, and Japan are all offering up their scientists to combat what these see as ''junk science''. Thus there is debate, and it is being performed within a peer-reviewed, scientific, environment.

    The Wall St. Journal June 26,2009:''Climate Change Climate Change''.

  • Posted By: Lee Holmes @ 07/09/2009 3:45:23 PM


    Heres one.

    Slap some duct tape on Bidens big mouth. That should equate to at least the amount of hot air India expends in a year.

  • Posted By: Apolitical @ 04/26/2009 5:26:00 PM

    Bryan - How it is being married to Michelle Bachmann, the mad congresswoman on her new groundbreaking theory that C02 is harmless. You, of course, already know idiocy is contagious as your and hers symptoms are all over here in the other media in grand display.

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