Cooling the Earth: Mitigating Global Warming While Avoiding the Next Ice Age

There is a lot of recent interest in methods of cooling earth's climate, by reducing CO2 in the air, and other more direct means. The image above pictures an array of high-tech CO2 sequestrators, made to suck CO2 directly out of the air.

This NY Times article presents even more outlandish ways of cooling the earth:

The plans and proposed studies are part of a controversial field known as geoengineering, which means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability. Dr. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist, will detail his arguments in favor of geoengineering studies in the August issue of the journal Climatic Change.

....Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding.

....The study of futuristic countermeasures began quietly in the 1960's, as scientists theorized that global warming caused by human-generated emissions might one day pose a serious threat. But little happened until the 1980's, when global temperatures started to rise.

Some scientists noted that the earth reflected about 30 percent of incoming sunlight back into space and absorbed the rest. Slight increases of reflectivity, they reasoned, could easily counteract heat-trapping gases, thereby cooling the planet.

Dr. Broecker of Columbia proposed doing so by lacing the stratosphere with tons of sulfur dioxide, as erupting volcanoes occasionally do. The injections, he calculated in the 80's, would require a fleet of hundreds of jumbo jets and, as a byproduct, would increase acid rain.

By 1997, such futuristic visions found a prominent advocate in Edward Teller, a main inventor of the hydrogen bomb. "Injecting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach," Dr. Teller wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "Why not do that?"

....Other plans called for reflective films to be laid over deserts or white plastic islands to be floated on the world's oceans, both as ways to reflect more sunlight into space.

Another idea was to fertilize the sea with iron, creating vast blooms of plants that would gulp down tons of carbon dioxide and, as the plants died, drag the carbon into the abyss.

The US Government has been making policies and plans for several years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to increase sequestration of greenhouse gases.

The reason the atmosphere of the climate is even more charged than usual, is the recent schizoid NAS Panel Report. Even Al Gore is rather steamed about the NAS report, among other things.

Although planting more trees would seem to be a more efficient and inexpensive way of reducing greenhouse gases than high-tech sequestrators, one must admit that sequestrators can be placed in areas where trees will not readily grow, such as arid deserts and above timberlines on mountains.

As for the futuristic orbiting lenses and mirrors, temperature control is not a bad thing to research. Clearly the earth has experienced times when it was both much warmer than at present, and much colder. Given human beings' love of comfort, it is only prudent to learn what methods of temperature control will work, and which methods will either not work, or be too dangerous to implement.

Anyone with an IQ above 50 should know that an ice age is a thousand times more lethal to human civilisations than the mild warming trends being experienced currently. Current warming has been mild and not without benefit. More concerning is the possibility of positive feedback warming or cooling. Humans need to be able to recognise early signs of feedback effects quickly, and be prepared to deal with them.

Too much current climate work is based on incompetent modeling and proxie work. The prediction of climate catastrophes based upon unprofessional and unethical quasi-science will only lead to the diverting of resources from projects that reduce poverty and disease, to projects that accomplish nothing productive. It is time for climate research to enter the big leagues, and begin to incorporate solar effects and the effects of water vapour and cloud formation.