Geo-Engineering Documents

[socrates]

Climate change debunkers are no longer the enemy. From a quick search, one can find many documents pertaining to our predicament. The other day Swampgas mentioned that Sickle had located a pdf a while back that clearly demonstrated aerosol mitigation is way beyond a sci-fi theoretical stage. I believe that we need to answer all the noise and disinformation with as many facts as documents as we can. Here is hoping that we chemmies can join together and present a strong case against the insidious marketing of pollution. The people united will never be defeated.

I will start by presenting a few links. A lot of it is tough reading I admit. However, the more we the people learn about their terminology and goals, the more likely we will graduate from the tinfoil status into being considered true patriots who anonymously by consensus exposed the man-made whitening out of our skies.
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This link will take you to many links in this website's internet library. E.G. One could find a link to the patent and abstract for "Stratospheric Welsbach Seeding for Reduction of Global Warming".

Air Apparent's Library
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Through my quick search today I came across a lot of wordy documents. The gist I am getting is that falutin scientists are marketing not only that global warming is real, but that we need to look at cost effective mitigation plans to cool the planet. Sound familiar?

Testimony of Stephen H. Schneider
Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
Stanford University
July 10, 1997
CLIMATE CHANGE: CAUSES, IMPACTS AND UNCERTAINTIES
Scientific Politics Schmolotics

In the footnotes you might notice a Mr. Wigley. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately I couldn't locate a good link to his article
GEOENGINEERING: COULD - OR SHOULD - WE DO IT?

Betcha he said it could be tough to find alternatives, we gotta do something. You didn't hear what Deep Shield said?

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Here is one scientist's testimony before a US Senate Committee back in 2001.

TESTIMONY OF V. RAMASWAMY, SENIOR SCIENTIST, GEOPHYSICAL FLUID DYNAMICS LABORATORY, OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH, NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
"climate science, impacts, and mitigation"

revealing excerpt: "...Some aerosol types act in a sense opposite to the greenhouse gases and cause a negative forcing or cooling of the climate system (e.g., sulfate aerosol), while others act in the same sense and warm the climate (e.g., soot). In contrast to the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide (centuries), aerosols are short-lived and removed from the lower atmosphere relatively quickly (within a few days). Therefore, aerosols exert a long-term forcing on climate only because their emissions
continue each year."

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U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science 
Climate Change Research Division

Office of Biological and Environmental Research 
October 31, 2005 

Atmospheric Science Program
Science Team Meeting
Context and Challenges for the Program

 We Talkin 'Bout Aerosols

Oh to have been a fly on the wall at this convention or whatever it was.
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One thing I keep seeing is the phrase "radiative forcing". This is my new theory on all this. You ever have someone come into your house without knocking, they are inside already and do the fake inside knock. This is much of what we are seeing in the skies. We are witnessing the fake inside door knock. "They" are careful with their words, not wanting to admit that aerosol mitigation has been worked on for almost ten years. "They" are trying to market their pollution and hopeful that by the time they can legalize it, they can admit by the way we knew you'd like this, we've been at it for a while now getting closer to the finished product.

They are marketing their "Radiative Forcing" to take the "heat" off of them having to make immediate, necessary, and draconian GHG emission cuts.
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MIT Joint Program on the
Science and Policy of Global Change

Informing Climate Policy Given Incommensurable Benefits Estimates
Henry D. Jacoby
Report No. 107
February 2004

Schneider and Wigley in the Footnotes
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This last link I will post here is from Edward Teller and a couple other Frankenstein scientists who it seems to me give up a bit more info than "they" probably would have liked. Anyway, I doubt "they" can be too happy with how the geo-engineering ideas of Crusty and Wiggles have gone over with the public the last couple months. It appears that the marketing of pollution is no easier than that of torture.

Edward Teller and Friends Document from 2002

[socrates]

You think people like me, Swampgas, Lou, Chem11, Big Bunny are disinformation agents when it comes to geo-engineering as chemtrails theories?

I posted this one a while back, but read it and weep if you don't think this is why the skies look so sick due to deliberate deployment of aircraft emissions.

This is from 1997. Wake up and smell the sulfur!!!!!!!!!! The following is not from a Twilight Zone episode.

Smoking Gun Right Here Chemmies!!!!!

Reason Magazine
November, 1997

Climate Controls:
If we treated global warming as a technical problem instead of a moral outrage, we could cool the world.
By Gregory Benford

Although we are getting better and better at it, forecasting the weather is still remarkably tricky. Far easier to predict the political climate, especially when it comes to the issue of global warming. To wit: In December, negotiators from around the world will meet in Kyoto to work out an international treaty to deal with what most (though not all) scientists believe is a 0.5-degree-centigrade increase in temperatures over the past century, and the promise of more to come.

All major participants, including the U.S. representatives, will argue that the only way to address global warming is to reduce significantly levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are plausibly (though not definitively) linked to the rise in temperatures. Although a group of small island nations will suggest a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, members of the European Union will most likely carry the day with a plan to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide by at least 15 percent over the next decade.

The Clinton administration may object to those specific targets, but it will enthusiastically support the consensus that the only way to counter global warming is by reducing emissions. Indeed, the president announced in August that "we owe it to our children" to sign a treaty reducing consumption of greenhouse gases, a position echoed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who has called dissenters "un-American," and chief economic adviser Janet Yellen, who has called cost-benefit analyses of cutting greenhouse gases "futile."

Such thinking is perfectly in keeping with the universal environmentalist position, which is best understood as a starkly Puritan ethic: "Abstain, sinner!" "The only way to slow climate change is to use less fuel," asserts Bill McKibben in The End of Nature, a book that roundly condemns such luxuries as privately owned washing machines and oranges shipped to cold climates. And if a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gases seems extreme, consider that many ecologists champion far more costly conservation measures as the only solution. Ross Gelbspan's The Heat Is On even urges a government takeover of the energy sector and a massive propaganda campaign. In the wake of the Kyoto conference, expect to see calls for a Greenhouse Czar as global warming is brought to broad, persistent public notice.

Such hand wringing is as unimaginative as it is unequivocal. Instead of draconian cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions, there may very well be fairly simple ways--even easy ones--to fix our dilemma. But the discussion of global warming never makes this clear; it seems designed to preclude any hint that we might remedy the situation except through great sacrifice, discomfort, and cost. Indeed, it seemingly assumes a direct relationship between the level of sacrifice, discomfort, and cost demanded by any proposed solution and its scientific efficacy. Solutions based on suppressing fuel use will cost us dearly, in terms of both dollars spent and standard of living. Economists differ over the price tag, with a rough analysis yielding an estimate of about $250 billion a year to reduce carbon dioxide emissions alone by 15 percent worldwide. (This number is easily debatable within a factor of two.) To this price we must add the cost of reducing other greenhouse gases, a cost felt not merely in our pocketbooks but also in the goods, services, and innovations whose production would be halted or forgone.

But for a number of reasons that I will discuss below, now is precisely the time to take seriously the concept of "geoengineering," of consciously altering atmospheric chemistry and conditions, of mitigating the effects of greenhouse gases rather than simply calling for their reduction or outright prohibition. While such a notion may seem outlandish at first blush, it merely acknowledges explicitly what everyone already understands: that human activity has an impact on the planet.

Forty years ago, the noted atmospheric scientist Roger Revelle declared that "human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment" by pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The question before us should not simply be how best to stop the experiment--and, by extension, the prosperity and progress allowed by cheap, abundant energy.

Rather, the question should be how best to design that experiment, so that we maximize benefits and minimize costs. As the citizens of the advanced nations become convinced that global warming is an immediate threat worthy of response, they will legitimately ask for solutions that demand the least sacrifice.


Politics and Parasols


A little-noticed 1992 National Academy of Sciences panel report spoke directly to this issue. The report clarified the science behind global warming and then ventured far from the ruling environmental orthodoxy: Could we accept that greenhouse gases will rise and find ways to compensate for them? Instead of cutting gases, could we intervene to mitigate or offset the warming they may cause?

Climate modification is time-honored, though not clearly a winner. Cloud seeding in the United States during the 1940s and '50s met some success but ended in a blizzard of lawsuits from those who claimed their local rainfall had been diverted by neighboring areas. (Though such assertions had little scientific proof, courts felt otherwise.) During the Cold War, both sides studied a menu of climatic dirty tricks, including schemes to kill the opponent's crops.

These programs foundered on a fundamental fact: Before modifying a climate, one must first grasp it. At the level of understanding available in the 1960s, only spectacular interventions would have left discernible signatures. Climate variability was so little fathomed that weather prediction was pointless beyond roughly a week.

But in progress little noticed by the public, systematic weather prediction has advanced more than tenfold in its assured time range. By watching the sun, atmosphere, ocean, land, and clouds using satellites, advanced aircraft, ships, and a tight grid of land-based observations, we have diminished the uncertainties about long-range weather. We are still just talking about the weather, but the talk is of higher quality. Earlier this year, for instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency predicted a coming wet winter six months in advance, based on temperature measurements of tropical waters, presaging a new El Niño ocean current. Whether that prediction is right or wrong--the coming months will decide--we are entering a new era in forecasting. With the latest systems, backed by heavy computer modeling, we will shrink uncertainties, identify subtle feedback loops, sniff out regional pollution patterns, discern the spread of deserts and the withering of forests.

Sensitive global measures of disturbance will shed further light on polar and glacial contractions, ozone levels, volcanic dust, levels of the oceans. There is even a technique available for cheaply gauging global reflectivity by measuring "earthshine"--the faint glow of our reflected light, seen on the dark portion of a crescent moon. Using a small telescope and makeshift gear, astronomers easily showed that we reflect 30 percent of incoming sunlight back into space--a number that our satellite system got earlier, at a price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars. Such innovation will lessen the costs and confusions of global understanding, a help we will need dearly if and when the greenhouse predicament worsens.


Geoengineering


Some geoengineering systems appear possible to deploy now, and at reasonable cost. They could be turned on and off quickly if we got unintended effects. It would be relatively easy to run small-scale experiments to answer questions about how our current atmosphere behaves when one alters the kind of dust, or aerosols, in it. Nuanced knowledge is crucial; the biosphere is a highly nonlinear system, one that has experienced climatic lurches before (glaciation, droughts) and can go into unstable modes, too.

Indeed, some critics argue that this simple fact precludes our tinkering with the "only Earth we have." Earth's climate might be chaotically unstable, so that a state with only slightly different beginning conditions would evolve to end up markedly different: An engineered early frost this year might mean an ice age the next. But we also know that Earth suffers natural injections of dust and aerosols from volcanoes, driving weather changes. Experiments that affect the planet within this range of natural variability could be allowed with little to no risk.

The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is to grow plants--preferably trees, since they tie up more of the gas in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a season or two. Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil. Forests, which cover about a third of the land, have shrunk by a third in the last 10,000 years (though they have grown over the last half-century in the United States, mostly due to market forces).

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years. As tropical societies clear the rain forest, the temperate nations have actually been growing more trees, slightly offsetting this effect. In the United States, we have lost about a quarter of our forest cover since Columbus, and replanting occurs mostly in the South, where pine trees are a big cash crop for the paper industry. But globally we destroy a forested acre every second. Just staying even with this loss demands a considerable planting program.

Trees soak up carbon fastest when young. Planting fast-growing species will give a big early effect, but what happens when they mature? Eventually they either die and rot on the ground, returning nutrients to the soil, or we burn them. If this burning replaces oil or coal burning, fine and good. Even felling all the trees still leaves some carbon stored longer as roots and lumber. Buildings can hold lumber out of this cycle for a century or so.

About half the U.S. carbon dioxide emissions could be captured if we grew tree crops on economically marginal croplands and pasture. More forests could enhance biodiversity, wildlife, and water quality (forests are natural filters); make for better recreation; and give us more natural wood products. Even better, one can do the cheapest part first, with land nobody uses now. This would cost about $5 billion a year, and a feel-good campaign would sell easily, with merchants able to proclaim their eco-virtue ("Buy a car, plant a grove of trees").

This would work reasonably well in the short run. But trees take water, and one must be careful not to exhaust the soil, so this is a solution with a clear horizon of about 40 years. Soaking up the world's present carbon dioxide increase solely through trees would take up an Australia-sized land area--that is, a continent. Most such land is in private hands, so the job cannot be done by government fiat. Still, a regional effort could make a perceptible dent in overall carbon dioxide levels.


The Geritol Solution


The oceans comprise the other great sink of greenhouse gases; some researchers estimate that they absorb 40 percent of fossil- fuel emissions. In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a million in a drop of water. They color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain. Far offshore, the sea returns to its plankton-starved blue.

The oceans are huge drivers in the environmental equations, because within them the plankton process vast stores of gases. Though cause and effect are not quite clear, we do know that in ice ages, carbon dioxide levels dropped 30 percent.

Could we do this today? Driving carbon dioxide down should lower temperatures, certainly. But how?

The answer may lie not in the tropics but in the polar oceans, where huge reserves of key ingredients for plant growth--nitrates and phosphates--drift unused. The problem is not weak sunlight or bitter cold, but lack of iron. Electrons move readily in its presence, playing a leading role in trapping sunlight.

A radical fix would be to seed these oceans with dissolved iron dust. This may have been the trigger that caused the big carbon dioxide drop in the ice ages: The continents dried, so more dust blew into the oceans, carrying iron and stimulating plankton to absorb carbon dioxide. Mother Nature can be subtle.

Such an idea crosses the momentous boundary between quasi-natural mitigation such as tree planting and self-evidently artificial means. Here is the nub of it, the conceptual chasm. With a boast that may cost his cause dearly, the inventor of the idea, John Martin of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, said, "Give me half a tanker full of iron, and I'll give you another ice age."

The captured carbon gets tied up in a "standing crop" of plankton. These tiny creatures dwell within a few meters of the surface. To truly bury the gas, they must somehow carry it into the vast bulk of the whole ocean. Some biologists believe that from the plankton the carbon dioxide should slowly dissolve into the lower waters, though we are uncertain of this. Perhaps the carbon dioxide eventually is deposited on the seabed. This last process no one has checked. Somehow, though, a good deal
of carbon does end up in the deep ocean sinks.

First proposed by Martin in 1988, the "Geritol solution" of adding iron to the ocean had a rocky history. Many derided it automatically as foolish, arrogant, and politically risky. But in 1996 the idea finally got tested by the U.S. government, and it performed well. Near the Galapagos Islands lies a fairly biologically barren area. Over 28 square miles of blue sea, scientists poured 990 pounds of iron during a week of testing. Immediately the waters bloomed with tiny phytoplankton, which finally covered 200 square miles, suddenly green. Plankton production peaked nine days after the experiment started. One thousand pounds of iron dust stimulated over 2,000 times its own weight in plant growth, far greater than the performance of any fertilizer on land. The plankton soaked up carbon dioxide, reducing its concentration in nearby sea water by 15 percent. It quickly made up this deficiency by drawing carbon dioxide from the air.

Projections show that since this process would affect only about 16 percent of the ocean area, a full-bore campaign to dump megatons of iron into the polar oceans probably would suck somewhere between 6 percent and 21 percent of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with most recent estimates settling around 10 percent. Such scary, big-time tinkering is the extreme; the method would have to be tested at far lower levels. Still, this mitigation could dent the greenhouse problem, though not solve it entirely.

(to be continued)

[socrates]

Gregory Benford (continued)

Even such partial solutions attract firm opponents. Geoengineering carries the strong scent of hubris. What is best described as eco-virtue reared its head immediately after the 1988 proposal, even before any experiments took place. Following the Puritan model that any deviation from abstinence is itself a further indulgence, many scientists and ecologists saw in Martin's plan an incentive for polluters. "A lot of us have an automatic horror at the thought," commented atmospheric authority Ralph Cicerone of the University of California at Irvine.

Other specialists retaliated. Russell Seitz of Harvard said the Galapagos experimenters were afraid to seem politically incorrect. "If this approach proves to be environmentally benign," Seitz said, "it would appear to be highly economic relative to a Luddite program of declaring war against fire globally."

Large uncertainties remain: How would the iron affect the deeper ecosystems, of which we know little? Will the carbon truly end up on the seabed? Can the polar oceans carry the absorbed carbon away fast enough to not block the process? Would the added plankton stimulate fish and whale numbers in the great Antarctic Ocean? Or would some side effect damage the entire food pyramid? Even if the idea worked, who should run such a program? Additionally, there is some evidence that little of the newly fixed carbon in the Galapagos experiment actually sank.
It seems to have come back into chemical equilibrium with the air. Controversy surrounds this essential point; clearly, here is where more research could tell us much.

This much seems certain (and should allay many fears): If we decide to stop the Geritol solution because of unforeseen side effects, control is easy. The standing crop will die off within a week, providing a quick correction.

Costs, too, are easy to figure. There is nothing very high-tech about dumping iron. Martin estimated that the job would take about half a million tons per year. Depending on what sort of iron proves best at prodding plankton, and implementation methods, the iron costs range between $10 million and $1 billion a year. Throwing in 15 ships steaming across the polar oceans all year long, dumping iron dust in lanes, brings the total to around $10 billion. This would soak up about a third of our global fossil-fuel-generated carbon dioxide emissions each year.


Reflecting on Reflectivity


Not all mitigation efforts need take place on land or sea. In fact, the most intuitive approach may be simply to reflect more sunlight back into space, before it can be emitted in heat radiation and then absorbed by carbon dioxide. People understand the basic concept readily enough: Black T-shirts are warmer in summer than white ones. We already know that simply painting buildings white makes them cooler. We could compensate for the effect of all greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution by reflecting less than 1 percent more of the sunlight.

A mere 0.5 percent change in Earth's net reflectivity, or albedo, would solve the greenhouse problem completely. The big problem is the oceans, which comprise about 70 percent of our surface area and absorb more light because they are darker than land.

When it comes to increasing albedo, it would be wise to begin the discussion by introducing positive measures that can be easily understood and are close at hand. Reflecting sunlight is not a deep technical idea, after all. Simply adding sand or glass to ordinary asphalt ("glassphalt") doubles its albedo. This is one mitigation measure everyone could see--a clean, passive way to Do Something.

A 1997 UCLA study showed that Los Angeles is 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding areas, mostly due to dark roofs and asphalt. Cars and power plants contribute, but only a bit; at high noon, the sun delivers to each square mile the power equivalent of a billion-watt electrical plant.

This urban "heat island" effect is common. But white roofs, concrete-colored pavements, and about $10 billion in new shade trees could cool the city below the countryside, cutting air conditioning costs by 18 percent. Cooler roads lessen tire erosion, too. About 1 percent of the United States is covered by human constructions, mostly paving, suggesting that we may already control enough of the land to get at the job.

From such homegrown solutions, we could make the leap to space. The most environmentally benign proposal for increasing the planet's albedo is very high-tech (and expensive): a massive orbiting white screen, about 2,000 kilometers on a side. Even if such parasols were broken into small pieces, putting them up would cost about $120 billion, a bit steep. We would also have to pay a lot to take them down if they caused some undesirable side effects. (One is certain: a night sky permanently light-polluted, irritating astronomers and moonstruck lovers.)

Using more-innocuous dust to reflect sunlight does not work; it drifts away, driven off by the sun's light pressure. But the upper atmosphere is still a good place to intervene, because much sunlight gets absorbed in the atmosphere on its way to us. Also, measures far above our heads trouble us less.

Other sorts of reflectors at high altitudes are promising. Spreading dust in the stratosphere appears workable because at those heights tiny particles stay aloft for several years. This is why volcanoes spewing dust affect weather strongly. The tiny motes that redden our sundowns reflect more sunlight than they trap infrared.

Even better than dust are microscopic droplets of sulfuric acid, which reflects light more effectively. Sulfate aerosols can also raise the number of droplets that make clouds condense, further increasing overall reflectivity. This could then be a local cooling, easier to monitor than carbon dioxide's global warming. We could perform such small, controllable experiments now. The amount of droplets or dust needed is a hundredth of the amount already blown into the atmosphere by natural processes, so we would not be venturing big dislocations. And we would get some spectacular sunsets in the bargain.

As usual, there are human-centered concerns. The Environmental Protection Agency hammers away at particulate levels, blaming them for lung disorders. Luckily, high-
altitude dust would come down mostly in raindrops, not making us cough. The cheapest way of delivering dust to the stratosphere is to shoot it up, not fly it. Big naval guns fired straight up can put a one-ton shell 20 kilometers high, where it would explode and spread the dust. This costs only a hundredth as much as the space-parasol idea. But booming naval guns that rattle windows for miles around are likely to provoke more than a few Not in My Backyard reactions.

Fortunately, there is a ready alternative to dust in any form: jet fuel. Changing the fuel mixture in a jet engine to burn rich can leave a ribbon of fog behind for up to three months, though as it spreads it becomes invisible to the eye. These motes would also come down mostly in rain, not troubling the brow of the EPA. Fuel costs about 15 percent of airlines' cash operating expenses, and running rich increases costs by only a few percent. For about $10 million, this method would offset the 1990 U.S. greenhouse emissions. Adding this to the cost of an airline ticket would boost prices perhaps 1 percent. An added asset is that quietly running rich on airline fuel will attract little notice, doesn't even change sunsets, and is hard to muster a media-saturated demonstration against.

But there are, as always, side effects. Dust or sulfuric acid would heat the stratosphere, too, with unknown impact. Some scientists suspect the ozone layer could be affected. If a widespread experiment showed this, we could turn off the effect within roughly a year as the dust settled down and got rained out. (Smaller experiments should show this first, of course.)

These ideas envision doing what natural clouds do already as the major players in the total albedo picture. A 4 percent increase in stratocumulus over the oceans would offset global carbon dioxide emission. Land reflects sunlight much better than the wine-dark seas, so putting clouds far out from land, and preferably in the tropics, gets the greatest leverage.

Clouds condense around microscopic nuclei, often the kind of sulfuric acid droplets the geoengineers want to spread in the stratosphere. The oceans make such droplets as sea algae decays, and the natural production rate sets the limit on how many clouds form over the seas. Clouds cover about 31 percent of our globe already, so a 4 percent increase is not going to noticeably ruin anybody's day.

Tinkering with such a mammoth natural process is daunting, but in fact about 400 medium-sized coal-fired power plants give off enough sulfur in a year to do the job for the whole Earth. (This in itself suggests just how much we are already perturbing the planet.) There are problems with using coal: Arguing that more air pollution is good for Mother Earth sounds intuitively wrong. Coal plants sit on land, and the clouds would be most effective over the oceans. A savvy international strategy leaps to mind: Subsidize electricity-dependent industry on isolated Pacific islands, and ship them the messiest, sulfur-rich coal. The plants' plumes would stretch far downwind, and the manufactured goods could revitalize the tropical ocean states, paying them for being global good neighbors. The wealthy states would then get their mitigation carried out far from home and far from vexatious neighborhood committees, using labor purchased at low rates. And nobody has to take the plants; prices will mediate the demand.

A more boring approach, worked out by the National Academy of Sciences panel, envisions a fleet of coal-burning ships which heap sulfur directly into their furnaces. (Maybe some collaboration would work here. Freighters burning sulfur could also spread iron dust, combining the approaches, with some economies.) The ships spew great ribbons of sulfur vapor far out at sea, where nobody can complain, and cloud corridors form obediently behind. It would be best to use these sulfur clouds to augment the edges of existing overcast regions, swelling them and increasing the lifetime of natural clouds. The continuously burning sulfur freighters would follow weather patterns, guided by weather satellite data.

At first these could operate as regional experiments, to work out a good model of how the ocean's cloud system responds. This low-tech method would cost about $2 billion per year, including amortizing the ships.

The biggest political risk here lies with shifts in the weather. The entire campaign would increase the sulfur droplet content in our air by about 25 percent. Probably this would cause no significant trouble, with most of the sulfur raining out into the oceans, which have enormous buffering capacity. Keeping the freighters a week's sailing distance from land would probably save us from scare headlines about sudden acid rains on farmers' heads, since about 30 percent of the sulfur should rain out each day.


Albedo Chic


The NAS panel found that "one of the surprises of this analysis is the relatively low cost" of implementing some significant geoengineering. It might take only a few billion dollars to mitigate the U.S. emission of carbon dioxide. Compared with stopping people in China from burning coal, this is nothing.

We should not take the 1992 panel report, thick with footnotes and layers of qualifiers, to be a road map to a blissful future. The NAS estimates are simple, linear, and made with poorly known parameters. They also ignore many secondary effects. For example, forests promote clouds above them, since the water vapor they exhale condenses quickly. Those lovely cumulus puffs reflect sunlight. So growing trees to sop up carbon dioxide also increases albedo, a positive feedback bonus. But is that the end of the chain? No, because water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas. Thick clouds absorb infrared as well. If forests respire a lot, they can partially trap their own heat. Understanding this, and calculating it in detail, will take a generation of research.

But perhaps the greatest unknown is social: How will the politically aware public react--those who vote, anyway? If geoengineers are painted early and often as Dr. Strangeloves of the air, they will fail. Properly portrayed as allies of science--and true environmentalism--they could become heroes. Not letting the radical greens set the terms of discussion will matter crucially.

A major factor here will be whether mitigation looks like yet another top-down contrivance, another set of orders from the elite. Draconian policing of fuel burning will certainly look that way, a frowning Aunt Bessie elbowing into daily details, calculating your costs of commuting to work and setting your thermostat level. In contrast, mitigation does not have to push a new camel's nose into our tents. Technical solutions can play out far from people's lives, on the sea or high in the air.

Better, widespread acceptance of mitigation strategies could lead to an albedo chic--ostentatious flaunting of white roofs, the Mediterranean look, silvered cars, the return of the ice-cream suit in fashion circles. White could be appropriate after Labor Day again.

More seriously, every little bit would indeed help. This is crucial: Mitigation wears the white hat. It asks simple, clear measures of everyone, before going to larger-scale interventions. Grassroots involvement should be integral from the very beginning. Local efforts should go apace with those at the nation-state level, especially since mitigation intertwines deeply with diplomacy. Here appearances are even more critical, given the levels of animosity between the big burners (especially the United States) and the tropical world.

Plausible solutions should stay within the NAS panel's sober guidelines. Learning more is the crucial first step, of course. This is not just the usual academic call for more funded research; nobody wants to try global experiments on a wing and a prayer.

Beyond more studies and reports, we must soon begin thinking of controlled experiments. Climate scientists so far have studied passively, much like astronomers. They have a bias toward this mode, especially since the discernible changes we have made in our climate generally have been pernicious. Such mental sets ebb slowly. The reek of hubris also restrains many. But a time for many limited experiments like the iron-dumping one will come. This will be the second great step as we ponder whether to become geoengineers. Constraints must be severe to ensure clear results.

Most important, perturbations in climate must be local and reversible--and not merely to quiet environmentalist fears. Only controlled experiments, well designed and well analyzed, will be convincing to all sides in this debate. Indeed, the green plume near the Galapagos Islands showed this. Its larger features were best studied by satellite, which picked up the green splotch strongly against the dark blue sea. But the crucial issue of whether the carbon stayed tied up in ocean waters was poorly addressed. Satellites were of no help. Slightly better funding and more scientists in dispersed, small craft could have told us a lot more.

Careful climate modeling must closely parallel every experiment. Few doubt that our climate stands in a class by itself in terms of complexity. Though much is made of how wondrous our minds are, perhaps the most complex entity known is our biosphere, in which we are mere mayflies. Absent a remotely useful theory of complexity in systems, we must proceed cautiously.

While computer studies are notorious for revealing mostly what was sought, confirming the prejudices of their programmers, methods are improving quickly. They can explore the many side avenues of small-scale geoengineering experiments. Invoking computer models as crucial watchdogs in every experiment will calm fears, at least among those who read beyond the headlines.

Who pays, in the end? Political pressure may well compel nations to comply with some target goals. A crucial factor will be what ratio to use in assessing a nation's (or region's) rectitude: net fossil-fuel consumption divided by what? Population? This favors the poor and populous nations. Economic value created with the fuels? The United States would fare reasonably well. Some weighted mean between the two?

To avoid descending into pure power politics and making policy sausage in public, a World Warming Authority could copy our fledgling pollution-voucher methods, bringing some market forces into play. But instead of simply trading the right to burn more--a negative unit--one could use a positive Mitigation Unit as well. Industries amassing them by, say, paying for rich-burning jet fuel could then burn more oil themselves. A market-driven dynamic equilibrium could then minimize costs for a given anti-warming target.

(one more page to follow)

[socrates]

By Gregory Benford continued:

Such approaches might drive the emergence of suites of methods, which regions could choose among to their best advantage. Deserts reflect light well (though their roads are usually dark), so added cloud cover is less effective there overall; the whitewashing of cities could be measured by their average decrease in the heat-island effect; lands with high rainfall may favor forestation. Any such policy calculus should hover over the
intricacies of markets, which will move faster and with more ingenuity than any committee. Rigid mandates will inevitably fail.

Still, going from the local to the global is fraught with uncertainty--and sure to inspire much anxiety. We will always be ambivalent stewards of the Earth. And greenhouse gas emissions certainly will not be our last problem, either. We are doing many things to our environment, with our numbers expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. What new threats will emerge? Catastrophes may come at a quickening pace, springing from the many synergistic effects that we must trace through the geophysical labyrinth.

As we begin correcting for our inadvertent insults to Mother Earth, we should realize that it's forever. Once we become caretakers, we cannot stop. The large tasks confronting humanity, especially the uplifting of the majority to some semblance of prosperity, must be carried forward in the shadow of our stewardship.

And yet, even among the able nations, those who have the foresight to grasp solutions, an odd reluctance pervades the policy classes. As the atmospheric physicist Ralph Cicerone has noted, "Many who envision environmental problems foresee doom and have little faith in technology, and therefore propose strong limits on industrialization, while most optimists refuse to believe that there is an environmental problem at all."

Having sinned against Mother Nature inadvertently, many are keenly reluctant to intervene knowingly. Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California at Irvine who predicted, with Mario Molina, the depletion of the ozone layer, declared, "I am unalterably opposed to global mitigation." This added considerable weight to the abstention cause. At root, such people see mankind as the problem; only by behaving humbly, living lightly upon our Earth, can we atone. Here most scientists and theologians agree, at least for now.

The next century will see a protracted battle between the prophets who would intervene and the moralists who see all grand-scale human measures as tainted. Even now, many argue that even to speak of geoengineering encourages the unwashed to more excess, since the masses will think that once again science has a remedy at hand.

Some, though, will say quietly, persistently, Well, maybe science does....



Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine and the author of Timescape.

[socrates]

It is very easy to fall into rabbit holes when trying to figure out "chemtrails". Swampgas mentioned the other day that Sickle a while back had found a very important document. I am finding it very difficult to find some documents that look good. There will be no google cache, and I'm stuck wondering where the thing is.

I found one Arcadia link from DBS, but when I try to go there, it is gone. I'm a lot better at finding books than internet links. The point is ithe more we do find legitimate documents, the more we can get a grassroots movement cooking here. I do not want these arses to get away with chemtrailing us. If we have to stay indoors more, fine, but please stop with all this pig pollution.

[halva]

Benford's "Reason" article is a very old and very well-known (in our movement) item in our basic bibliography, Socrates.

[socrates]

Benford's article didn't say copywrite restricted, so I copied and pasted it. When "chemtrails" are exposed to the masses, this article will be seen as one of the smoking guns. This is the problem with the marketers of pollution. They are Frankenstein scientists who are illegally screwing with the skies. They crave to legalise that which preceding and other documents have shown are what's behind the mucktrocities above us. The disinformationalist will try to diminish the importance of such a document in awkward attempts to funnel as many sheep as possible into the many rabbit holes. History books of the future will explain the Bush Admin's war crimes and attempts at legalising torture and the violation of Americans' civil rights. They will also reveal to youth that Benford was a prominent pioneer wingnut like Teller from the Science Department's fascism bureau.

[socrates]

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Mitigation(2001)


Excerpt:
The term “geo-engineering” has been used to characterize large-scale, deliberate manipulations of earth environments (NAS, 1992; Marland, 1996; Flannery et al., 1997). Keith (2001) emphasizes that it is the deliberateness that distinguishes geo-engineering from other large-scale, human impacts on the global environment; impacts such as those that result from large-scale agriculture, global forestry activities, or fossil fuel combustion. Management of the biosphere, as discussed in this chapter, has sometimes been included under the heading of geo-engineering (e.g., NAS, 1992) although the original usage of the term geo-engineering was in reference to a proposal to collect CO2 at power plants and inject it into deep ocean waters (Marchetti, 1976). The concept of geo-engineering also includes the possibility of engineering the earth’s climate system by large-scale manipulation of the global energy balance. It has been estimated, for example, that the mean effect on the earth surface energy balance from a doubling of CO2 could be offset by an increase of 1.5% to 2% in the earth’s albedo, i.e. by reflecting additional incoming solar radiation back into space. Because these later concepts offer a potential approach for mitigating changes in the global climate, and because they are treated nowhere else in this volume, these additional geo-engineering concepts are introduced briefly here.

Summaries by Early (1989), NAS (1992), and Flannery et al. (1997) consider a variety of ways by which the albedo of the earth might be increased to try to compensate for an increase in the concentration of infrared absorbing gases in the atmosphere (see also Dickinson, 1996). The possibilities include atmospheric aerosols, reflective balloons, and space mirrors. Most recently, work by Teller et al. (1997) has re-examined the possibility of optical scattering, either in space or in the stratosphere, to alter the earth’s albedo and thus to modulate climate. The latter work captures the essence of the concept and is summarized briefly here to provide an example of what is envisioned. In agreement with the 1992 NAS study, Teller et al. (1997) found that ~10(to the 7th power)t of dielectric aerosols of ~100 nm diameter would be sufficient to increase the albedo of the earth by ~1%. They showed that the required mass of a system based on alumina particles would be similar to that of a system based on sulphuric acid aerosol, but the alumina particles offer different environmental impact. In addition, Teller et al. (1997) demonstrate that use of metallic or optically resonant scatterers can, in principle, greatly reduce the required total mass of scattering particles required. Two configurations of metal scatterers that were analyzed in detail are mesh microstructures and micro-balloons. Conductive metal mesh is the most mass-efficient configuration. The thickness of the mesh wires is determined by the skin-depth of optical radiation in the metal, about 20 nm, and the spacing of wires is determined by the wavelength of scattered light, about 300nm. In principle, only ~10(to the fifth power)t of such mesh structures are required to achieve the benchmark 1% increase in albedo. The proposed metal balloons have diameters of ~4 mm and a skin thickness of ~20nm. They are hydrogen filled and are designed to float at altitudes of ~25km. The total mass of the balloon system would be ~10(to the sixth power)t. Because of the much longer stratospheric residence time of the balloon system, the required mass flux (e.g., tonnes replaced per year) to sustain the two systems would be comparable. Finally, Teller et al. (1997) show that either system, if fabricated in aluminium, can be designed to have long stratospheric lifetimes yet oxidize rapidly in the troposphere, ensuring that few particles are deposited on the surface.

One of the perennial concerns about possibilities for modifying the earth’s radiation balance has been that even if these methods could compensate for increased GHGs in the global and annual mean, they might have very different spatial and temporal effects and impact the regional and seasonal climates in a very different way than GHGs. Recent analyses using the CCM3 climate model (Govindasamy and Caldeira, 2000) suggest, however, that a 1.7% decrease in solar luminosity would closely counterbalance a doubling of CO2 at the regional and seasonal scale (in addition to that at the global and annual scale) despite differences in radiative forcing patterns.

It is unclear whether the cost of these novel scattering systems would be less than that of the older proposals, as is claimed by Teller et al. (1997), because although the system mass would be less, the scatterers may be much more costly to fabricate. However, it is unlikely that cost would play an important role in the decision to deploy such a system. Even if we accept the higher cost estimates of the NAS (1992) study, the cost may be very small compared to the cost of other mitigation options (Schelling, 1996). It is likely that issues of risk, politics (Bodansky, 1996), and environmental ethics (Jamieson, 1996) will prove to be the decisive factors in real choices about implementation. The importance of the novel scattering systems is not in minimizing cost, but in their potential to minimize risk. Two of the key problems with earlier proposals were the potential impact on atmospheric chemistry, and the change in the ratio of direct to diffuse solar radiation, and the associated whitening of the visual appearance of the sky. The proposals of Teller el al. (1997) suggest that the location, scattering properties, and chemical reactivity of the scatterers could, in principle, be tuned to minimize both of these impacts. Nonetheless, most papers on geo-engineering contain expressions of concern about unexpected environmental impacts, our lack of complete understanding of the systems involved, and concerns with the legal and ethical implications (NAS, 1992; Flannery et al., 1997; Keith, 2000). Unlike other strategies, geo-engineering addresses the symptoms rather than the causes of climate change.

[socrates]

T. M. L. Wigley

A Combined Mitigation/Geoengineering Approach to Climate Stabilization

excerpt: ...We consider here the deliberate injection of sulfate aerosol precursors into the stratosphere. This can significantly offset future warming and provide additional time to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and so stabilize CO2 concentrations cost-effectively at an acceptable level.

[socrates]

Climate Policy Center

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
“CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH: DO WE
NEED A ‘MANHATTAN PROJECT’ FOR THE
ENVIRONMENT?”
Thursday, 21 September, 2006
Testimony By
Lee Lane
Executive Director
Climate Policy Center


excerpt:

As insurance against runaway climate change, research on geoengineering may be the only available option. Because emission reductions require so much time, a GHG control policy must be initiated many decades before it achieves its full effects – and long before the full extent of the problem is entirely visible. Our political systems are not always far sighted enough to respond to such long-term threats.

Geoengineering, in contrast to GHG controls, could be implemented swiftly. For one thing, reaching international agreement for geoengineering would probably be largely about the sharing of monetary costs, a type of negotiation for which we have much experience. (Schelling 2005 592) Meantime, the costs would be confined to the R&D needed to prove-up the technology’s feasibility. The future costs of actually deploying geoengineering solutions are highly uncertain; however, in the early 1990s, the U.S. National Academies of Science, after studying geoengineering, concluded, “Perhaps one of the surprises of this analysis is the relatively low cost at which some of the geoengineering options might be implemented.” (NAS 1992 460) The logic behind an exploration of geoengineering is so strong that it is beginning to erode the taboos that have hitherto blocked its consideration. The newly-elected president of the National Academy of Science has become an advocate for exploring various geoengineering concepts. A growing number of other scientists, including Nobel Laureate Dr. Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck
Institute have begun proposing possible approaches. Yet these scientists note the continuing absence of governmental support for the exploration of the various technologies. (Broad 1-4)

At this point, however, the pros and cons of the various approaches to geoengineering remain poorly understood. The cost, effectiveness, limits, side effects, and ancillary benefits are matters of growing speculation, but little empirical research. The social and political dynamics of geoengineering solutions have also not been systematically explored.

[socrates]

Climate Engineering proposals

This link has a good overview also about geo-engineering options other than the chemtrails (e.g. plant trees, sink/store Co2, iron fertilization, even weed, er seaweed, etc.)

From ChooseClimate.org
excerpt: "2.2.2 Sulphate aerosols or Dust in the stratosphere.

Aerosols or dust in the stratosphere survive much longer than in the troposphere, and are already known to cool the planet, as observed following large volcanic eruptions. In the early 1990s, dust from mount Pinatubo checked global warming, and the observed cooling effect matched well with the most recent model predictions.

It has been suggested that we could deliberately inject either sulphate aerosols or dust into the stratosphere. For a recent review refer to Dickinson (1996).The idea is first credited to the Soviet scientist Budyko (1974) and developed by many others since, mainly in the US, even reaching a US government report (National Academy of Sciences 1992). Originally rockets or rifle shells would have carried the dust, but Penner (1984) suggested that it could be done more easily by a slight modification of commercial jet fuel, and this would be very cheap. In a policy statement to an International Energy Workshop in San Diego in 1992, he presented the dust idea as a "Low-cost no regrets" option for mitigating greenhouse warming, showing that it would cost just 0.1 cents (using coal dust) to cool the planet to compensate for one tonne of Carbon as CO2 in the atmosphere, or 1 cent if SiH4 was used to make inert SiO2 dust (Penner 1993). However, he first attempts to rubbish the whole global warming scenario, and clearly doesn't intend that we carry this out unless, by some strange chance, all those scientists in IPCC happen to be right and we really do find we have a problem. Then, "for intolerable warming, low-cost planetary albedo augmentation may become the method of choice some decades in the future".

Besides being cheap, the aerosol fix is also promoted as "reversible", i.e. you can easily stop if it doesn't work, and within a few years the dust would fall out. On the other hand, most greenhouse gases have a much longer lifetime so if they are to be offset with stratospheric aerosols, we would have to rely on the ability of future generations to keep flying those planes, to keep repairing the shield or be faced with sudden warming.

Even if we are content to pass on that burden, we would also be cutting the amount of sunlight reaching plants on the surface, and presumably also changing its spectral composition. Perhaps the plants would take up less CO2? And do we really want to live under a constant haze in the sky to keep us cool? Do a few scientists and policymakers have the right to impose this on all other life on the planet?

Another obvious objection is that the injected particles might provide a very efficient surface for ozone destruction, as polar stratospheric clouds already do every spring. It seems the engineers have not yet looked at this in any detail...

...2.5 Soaking up ozone-destroying chemicals, by adding more.

This proposal is not directly concerned with global warming, more with damage from the increased UV flux passing through holes in the ozone layer. On the other hand, stratospheric ozone destruction is intimately linked to climate change, both because ozone is a greenhouse gas, and because surface warming results in stratospheric cooling and therefore more polar stratospheric clouds which provide the surface for ozone-destroying chemistry.

The destruction of ozone is catalysed by free radicals of chlorine or nitrogen oxides, derived mainly from CFCs or aircraft exhaust respectively The suggestion was (see Baum 1994), to add ethane or propane to the stratosphere to soak up the chlorine radicals, forming hydrochloric acid. About 50,000 tonnes would be needed in the Antarctic stratosphere each spring. However, to predict exactly what will happen, you have to solve simultaneously about 150 equations describing chemical reactions. Some simplifications have to be made, yet it isn't intuitive, which reactions will matter. Ralph Cicerone, who came up with this idea, found later that introducing a couple of new reactions, previously thought unimportant, changed the balance substantially. Now he is not so enthusiastic about the proposal. Perhaps we should be relieved! ...

Part 3: Who sponsors climate engineering proposals?

3.1. Industrial sponsors and consultants

The funders of research are usually indicated either at the beginning or end of a paper. Before reading such small print I had the impression that climate engineering was primarily the domain of a few eccentric academics. It is no longer so. Such professors may receive most publicity, but I was concerned to find most climate engineering research is now funded by industry, particularly those with a vested interest in continued high consumption of fossil fuels. In addition to direct sponsorship, there are many projects funded by government supported institutes set up for industrial research and development.

The table below is given only for purposes of illustration: there are many more sponsors involved and each is likely to back a range of proposals.

Sponsor Example proposal
Statoil CO2 storage in aquifers
Norsk Hydro Ocean Fertilisation, CO2 disposal
Exxon Liming the Ocean
British Coal CO2 capture and disposal
Mitsubishi Ocean Fertilisation to grow fish
Hitachi CO2 fixation (through RITE)
Japan Gas Association Greening Deserts
Japan Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry CO2 capture, ocean fertilisation
American Gas Association Seaweed
RWE and DMT (Germany) Sponsors of IEA
International Energy Agency Overviews of many projects, see below
US Electric Power Research Institute Many projects, see below
Research Institute for Innovative Technology for the Earth Many projects, see below

I have not included here the many private engineering consultancies which have been hired to investigate proposals. Sometimes it is clear that they have little experience in global biogeochemistry, and make blatant errors or just discover what is already textbook knowledge to academics. However, it seems that certain governments trust such consultancies more than their own universities or research labs...

I also observed that most of the independent academics who submit papers describing direct climate engineering applications come from departments or institutes specialising not in environmental or earth sciences, ecology, meteorology or oceanography, but rather in chemical engineering, biotechnology, or industrial technology.


3.2 The IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme

In 1991 the International Energy Agency set up a Greenhouse Gas Research and Development Programme, for the purpose of collating and directing research into technical responses to climate change. The programme has its headquarters in Cheltenham, UK, on a site provided by British Coal which also has research labs there dedicated to CO2 disposal. The IEA programme is funded mostly by governments, although these are encouraged to invite participation from industries within their country, and there are three direct industrial sponsors: RWT and DMT of Germany, and EPRI (below). The programme's income in 1995 was £721,000. This funds little detailed research directly, acting more to bring people together and summarise their results, most notably by setting up a series of conferences on CO2 capture and disposal (the proceedings are in published in various issues of Energy Conversion and Management). There is also a series of workshops underway on ocean storage of CO2, expected to lead soon to the design of a small scale experiment.

Recently, it was decided to broaden the remit to include other greenhouse gases, for instance reducing methane emissions from natural gas flaring and leakage: generally this is a cheaper way to prevent the same greenhouse warming. Many publications are availiable from the programme, whose address and web page are given with the references..."


Socrates here again: I found this part most revealing from above,

"I also observed that most of the independent academics who submit papers describing direct climate engineering applications come from departments or institutes specialising not in environmental or earth sciences, ecology, meteorology or oceanography, but rather in chemical engineering, biotechnology, or industrial technology."

As the Chili pepper song says, "give it away, give it away now."

[socrates]

I tracked down the original link to the above. It looks like a very informative website worth exploring.
The above excerpts were taken from:

Climate Engineering
A critical review of proposals, their scientific and political context, and possible impacts.
compiled for Scientists For Global Responsibility, November 1996

by Ben Matthews

[halva]

January 27, 2007

Here is part of the U.S. Geoengineering Policy 2007:

What will be the impact on human health, agriculture (photosynthesis), and climate?

Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2007 6:44 PM
Subject: Guardian Unlimited Newspaper: U.S. answer to global warming: smoke and giant space mirrors.

www.tiny.cc/1LRdT
January 27, 2007
United States Answer to Global Warming by David Adam (Guardian Unlimited Newspaper)

US answer to global warming: smoke and giant space mirrors
Washington urges scientists to develop ways to reflect sunlight as 'insurance'

David Adam, environment correspondent
Saturday January 27, 2007

Guardian

The US government wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.
The US has also attempted to steer the UN report, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), away from conclusions that would support a new worldwide climate treaty based on binding targets to reduce emissions - as sought by Tony Blair. It has demanded a draft of the report be changed to emphasise the benefits of voluntary agreements and to include criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, the existing treaty which the US administration opposes.

The final IPCC report, written by experts from across the world, will underpin international negotiations to devise a new emissions treaty to succeed Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft of the report last year and invited to comment.

The US response, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, says the idea of interfering with sunlight should be included in the summary for policymakers, the prominent chapter at the front of each IPCC report. It says: "Modifying solar radiance may be an important strategy if mitigation of emissions fails. Doing the R&D to estimate the consequences of applying such a strategy is important insurance that should be taken out. This is a very important possibility that should be considered."

Scientists have previously estimated that reflecting less than 1% of sunlight back into space could compensate for the warming generated by all greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution. Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The IPCC draft said such ideas were "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects".

The US submission is based on the views of dozens of government officials and is accompanied by a letter signed by Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator at the US state department. It complains the IPCC draft report is "Kyoto-centric" and it wants to include the work of economists who have reported "the degree to which the Kyoto framework is found wanting". It takes issue with a statement that "one weakness of the [Kyoto] protocol, however, is its non-ratificiation by some significant greenhouse gas emitters" and asks: "Is this the only weakness worth mentioning? Are there others?"

It also insists the wording on the ineffectiveness of voluntary agreements be altered to include "a number of them have had significant impacts" and complains that overall "the report tends to overstate or focus on the negative effects of climate change." It also wants more emphasis on responsibilities of the developing world.

The IPCC report is made up of three sections. The first, on the science of climate change, will be launched on Friday. Sections on the impact and mitigation of climate change - in which the US wants to include references to the sun-blocking technology - will follow later this year.

The likely contents of the report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. Next week's science report will say there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise another 1.5C to 5.8C this century depending on emissions. The US response shows it accepts these statements, but it disagrees with a more tentative conclusion that rising temperatures have made hurricanes more powerful.

· See the US document here

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/01/26/USGReview_pp6_7.pdf
U.S. Review of the Second Draft of GWIII Contribution
Climate Change 2007 "Mitigation of Climate Change" (September 14, 2006 - Pages 6-7)

[thinkagain]

Hmm, can you imagine a world where a private corporation owns control over how much sunlight localities receive? The US could impose a Sunlight Tax, and then outsource servicing the distribution of sunlight to that company. It would be even more influential then controlling oil. People wouldn't be able to grow food without a proper tithing. It could also be used to depress emotional states in areas that where getting too uppity (relative to US interests). Makes me wonder if Mount Olympus was the name of an ancient corporate park, and all the gods where actually megacorporations controlling various aspects of nature and mind. It must be an incredibly intoxicating sense of power to make decisions concerning who gets the energy of the sun and who does not.

Further, if they successfully develop the technology - could they apply it to the planet Venus and possibly change the temperature and atmosphere there, to make it hospitable?