Air Pollution To Solve Global Warming!? WTF!?

[Jcrowley]

Scientists: Pollution could combat global warming

POSTED: 8:22 a.m. EST, November 16, 2006

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Air pollution may be just the thing to fight global warming, some scientists say.
Prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate, said a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere could act as a "shade" from the sun's rays and help cool the planet.

Reaction to the proposal here at the annual U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such "massive and drastic" operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself "not enthusiastic about it."

"It was meant to startle the policymakers," said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."

Serious people are taking Crutzen's idea seriously. This weekend at Moffett Field, California, NASA's Ames Research Center hosts a closed-door, high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other "geoengineering" ideas for fending off climate change.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/11/16/smog.warming.ap/index.html

Batshit crazy. What's really nuts is that people are taking this seriously and no doubt wantin' to make a buck off of some new technology. Who would've thought the solution WAS pollution.

[Hand]

1. It actually would probably work.

Crutzen is one of the world's most distinguished and credible atmospheric scientists--and, like, his colleagues, is aware that increased aerosols do have a tempering effect on global temperature. I think that what he's really saying here is, as he observes, "...meant to startle the policy makers," i.e., this would be one way to mitigate what's now a truly critical situation--and if, as seems to be the case, they're unwilling to curb carbon emissions, becomes less a "desperation measure" and more the lesser of several really terrible options. Doing nothing is, of course, the worst possible option, and is pretty much the current policy among certain benighted administrations--including, to my utter embarrassment, Canada's current ghastly excuse for a government (I'm Canadian).

It is, as you suggest, batshit crazy, and I think Crutzen knows it. It's just slightly less so than what's being done now--nothing.

[ItNerd4life]

2. Batshit crazy! Voted for phrase of the day!

[intaglio]

3. Unfortunately not crazy

just a way of surviving. It's like the idea of using nuclear or making a huge sunscreen in space not good ideas but perhaps the only way to survive :-(

[originalpckelly]

4. In fact I watched a whole special about the positive effects of pollution...

(I think the special was called Global Dimming.)

It actually prevented Global Climate Change from being twice as bad. GCC is caused by the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, not by the tiny particles of ash which are spewed into the atmosphere when coal and other crap is burned.



The tiny particles make clouds more reflective, and hence reflect more energy back into space.

The downside is that it makes the clouds less likely to precipitate rain, because the drops of water stay fine and do not condense into larger droplets capable of falling to the ground. This is suspected to have caused a drought in the early 1980s in Africa.

However, if this technique could be used successfully, we might be able to control the average temperature of Earth, and eliminate the negative effects of GCC.

Here is a Wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

[originalpckelly]

5. Here is the PBS NOVA special:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/

[wiggs]

7. Right. And remember that one of the scary conclusions was

that, because we weren't previously aware of the cooling effects of global dimming, the actual strength of the global WARMING factors has been underestimated. That we are seeing temperatures rise even in the face of global dimming is more cause for concern.

[originalpckelly]

9. I know, after 9/11 when planes were grounded...

they observed massive increases in temperature differentials, the difference between the high of the day and the low.

It was actually pretty amazing to see the math right there on the screen, it kind of proved this fella who'd been saying this for years was right.

[Jcrowley]

8. Whoops

unforeseen consequences. Damn now we gotta quick come up with another "fix" for the problems caused by the previous fix. Oh well as least we didn't have to inconvenience ourselves with any meaningful changes.

Now outta my way I gotta get in line for that Holiday Hellion Playstation Fantasy Gameboard Revisited Part 3 The Sequel.

[flyingfysh]

6. the idea is real

I've seen reports that spending several billion dollars to put sulfur compounds in the upper atmosphere could actually save the planet from the bad effects of global warming. This was announced by a scientist who studied the effects of the Pinatubo volcano on climate. He is also not optmistic that governments will do the right thing anytime soon.

[CabalPowered]

10. Acid rain is real too.

But if it comes to it, we may not have a choice.