Geoengineering & Climate Engineering
Geoengineering is the intentional modification of Earth’s climate, atmosphere and temperature by massive and artificial means. It is propagated by a well funded conservative nuclear weapons science lobby with ties and support from the world’s richest folks and very conservative regressive think tanks and climate denying governmental elements.
When Geo engineering attracted massively negative publicity, mainly because of it’s daft proposals and the revelation of it as a Fossil Fuel industry funded hoax, it was alternately called Climate Engineering or Solar Radiation management to obfuscate it’s colours, it’s aims and multitude of sins.
Basically Geoengineering has been proposed as a means of reducing manmade CO2 caused climate warming in an abrupt fashion. Like putting the earthen brakes in a speeding runaway train. The earth bumps that will definitely cause a swift derailment of the train is what geo engineering is all about.
Especially because greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise towards a certain existential challenge, since humanity is unable to reach agreements to stem the emissions.
Most Geo Engineering and Climate Engineering proposals sound simple. Even simplistic. Yet they involve such imponderables, as managing the incoming solar radiation so that future greenhouse gas forced planetary temperature rises are counteracted by reduced solar radiation heating of the atmosphere and the planet.
By scientific learning, climate observation, discussion and by participating in various Geo Engineering closed clubs, closed scientific meetings and symposia, over the last few years, was able to access the true nature of the Geoengineering community. They tend to coalesce towards a transient climate response under a business-as-usual and growing CO2 emissions footprint of our civilization, and they do all their calculus, by using a rather simplistic global climate model that includes an interactive carbon cycle.
It is held in the geo engineering community as an accepted fact that the climate system responds quickly to artificially reduced solar radiation via increased insulation. Hence, – the reasoning goes that – there may be little cost to delaying the deployment of geoengineering strategies until such a time as “dangerous” climate change is imminent. So the daft ones say, we might start right now. Again assuming that we will not deal with our CO2 emissions as humanity and an intelligent species. The Geo engineers reason faultily, that spatial temperature patterns in the geoengineered simulation are comparable with pre industrial temperatures, although this is clearly not true for precipitation modeling. For example if their model held true, the green and pleasant England would disappear under their ministrations. It would though be replaced by a Carbon sink. And as such carbon sinks increase massively in response to geoengineering. At least in their model and in faulty theory spawned from nuclear radiation addled brains.
Reality is somewhat different. Because geoengineering acts to mask climate warming, there is a direct CO2 driven increase in carbon uptake without an offsetting temperature-driven suppression of carbon sinks. However, this strengthening of carbon sinks, combined with the potential for rapid climate adjustment to changes in solar forcing, leads to serious consequences, climate forcings and failures. Especially since these geoengineering solutions have to be applied massively for hundreds of years. This isn’t cathedral building though. You cannot stop in the middle and wait for the state coffers to refill in order to resume building. Geo engineering has to be a continuous effort over the time of ten to twenty generations and countless changes of governments and economic fortunes and misfortunes.
For once it’s started it leads us inexorably to it’s continuation. Otherwise the negative consequences will destabilize the Climate far more than if we had never started. In some ways it is like Crack cocaine for the climate and humanity as a whole. Once you get hooked, you can’t stop. And if geoengineering has to be terminated due to economic reasons, or it fails to perform like premature ejaculation of nasty results or it has to be stopped abruptly – the negative consequences will be vast and terrible, because such a scenario will lead to runaway greenhouse effects. Once started geoengineering and then we stop for some reason – any reason – it could lead to very rapid climate change, with warming rates up to 20 times greater than present-day rates. This warming rebound would be larger and more sustained should climate sensitivity prove to be higher than expected. Thus, employing geoengineering schemes with continued carbon emissions could lead to severe risks for the global climate system.
Do you want us to light up that crack pipe?
Are you ready to smoke it along with the next twenty generations of fucked up humanity addicts?
Is this what our civilization amounts to?
But the geo engineers plod on unconcerned like the blighted street crack dealer…
And cocaine causes one to think big, be prefect and bulletproof before the inevitable crash. Same for Geo engineering types, and therefore they want massive big climate altering schemes. For their ”think big” moment, their option that is taken most seriously is altogether grander in perversity, conception and scale. Their grand scheme proposes nothing less than the transformation of the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere so that humans can regulate the temperature of the planet as desired. Like periodic volcanic eruptions, it involves injecting sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere to blanket the Earth with tiny particles that reflect solar radiation and absorb sunlight. This is their reincarnated bomb the atmosphere plan. The second version of the geo engineering dream plan, since their first one was to create an intentional nuclear winter by exploding nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere. As you can understand that had the world up in arms.
Yet the nuclear lobby of Geo engineers remained undettered and proceeded rebranding and renaming their scheme but still true to their origin and principles of bombing with live nukes, they still have that option on the table. Yes nuclear winter is still the wet dream of the massively funded geo engineering types. And they get funded from people like Bill Gates and others, too rich, too dyslexic, and too righteous in order to be patient with humanity’s imperfections…
So many and varied schemes have been proposed, by geo engineering nuclear cheese heads that our own mind is doodling with the most promising result being that they successfully hide their true intent. For their true intent is to immediately launch into a basic version 1 of their ”Grand Guignol” plan.
They want to engage in naturalistic horror. Their first dream is an adaptation of high-flying airplanes, fitted with extra tanks and nozzles, to spray the chemicals liberally all over. A fleet of 747s could do the job. To have the desired effect they of course would need the equivalent of one Mount Pinatubo eruption every three or four years. As a comparison mechanism, one must remember that the emissions from the eruption this April of Iceland’s Eazy…..lost volcano were less than a hundredth of those from the Pinatubo volcano. Therefore to geo engineer the climate we’d need the equivalent of one of those every week, every year for decades and for hundreds of years. Without political changes or a change of heart and mind in the humanity. We’ll be spraying our children like when DDT was in fashion and asbestos and both were sprayed on children as well as everywhere else. Hell – we’ll be eating and breathing the stuff. We’ll alter the human chemistry first before we alter the earth’s atmosphere…
But that’s another story.
More serious, thinking and cautious scientists recognise that attempting to regulate the Earth’s climate by enhancing global dimming is fraught with dangers. Most worryingly, the oceans are absorbing around a third of the extra carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans, which is raising their acidity, dissolving corals and inhibiting shell-formation by marine organisms. Turning down the dimmer switch may reduce incoming solar radiation but would do nothing to slow ocean acidification. The climate system is hugely complicated and tinkering with it might be akin to smoking crack cocaine to cure a common cold.
Moral hazards are overlooked as well as the law of unintended consequences
Although ideas for climate engineering have been around for at least twenty years, until recently public discussion has been discouraged by the scientific community. Environmentalists and governments have been reluctant to talk about it too. The reason is simple: apart from its unknown side-effects, geoengineering would weaken resolve to reduce carbon emissions.
Economically it is an extremely attractive substitute because its cost is estimated to be “trivial” compared to those of cutting carbon pollution. While the international community has found it difficult to agree on strong collective measures to reduce carbon emissions, climate engineering is cheap, immediately effective and, most importantly, available to a single nation.
Among the feasible contenders for unilateral intervention, one expert names China, the USA, the European Union, Russia, India, Japan and Australia. Could they agree? It’s like seven people living together in a centrally heated house, each with their own thermostat and each with a different ideal temperature. China will be severely affected by warming, but Russia might prefer the globe to be a couple of degrees warmer.
If there is no international agreement an impatient nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. It is not out of the question that in three decades the climate of the Earth could be determined by a handful of Communist Party officials in Beijing. Or the government of an Australia crippled by permanent drought, collapsing agriculture and ferocious bushfires could risk the wrath of the world by embarking on a climate control project alone and in usual POM fashion, without asking anyone else. We live in an island is ain’t so the ”reasonable” Aussies will ask the world as they get hit by the bus of runaway climate warming and while they mine coal frantically and use it up or export that coal faster than ever to be burned in a seemingly mad race to make their desert island unlivable. Sadly there is no England big enough to take them all back. They’ll have to make their colony work before ”Mad Max” ensues upon them..
To date, national and global government bodies, have shunned geoengineering for fear of being accused of wanting to avoid their responsibilities with science fiction solutions. The topic is not mentioned in the Stern report and receives only one mention in the Garnaut report. But it received a whole two dozen pages at the Environmental Parliament report. As a sign of its continuing political sensitivity, when in April 2009 it was reported that President Obama’s new science adviser John Holdren had said that geoengineering is being vigorously discussed as an emergency option in the White House, he immediately felt the need to issue a “clarification” claiming that he was only expressing his personal views. Additionally the Energy chief of DoE Dr Chu also favours some form of geoengineering and a lot of nuclear energy plants for the Power and Utility industry. Naturally because he also comes from the Lawrence Livermore laboratory weapons research group and his intellectual kinship runs easily to nuclear weapons grade solutions.
Holdren and Chu who are some of the sharpest minds in the business and would not be entertaining what is known as ‘Plan B’ – that is, re-engineering and tweaking the planet’s climate and atmosphere in order to head off catastrophic warming – unless they were fairly sure Plan A would fail. Obviously plan A is failing because the Obama White House [their employer] and the present Democrat administration haven’t made a serious effort at Climate and Energy legislation for the US. They play a chicken little game of waiting and hiding behind their fingers, fully hoping if not expecting other nations to carry the CO2 burden of reductions for them. Ahhh and they also blame the Chinese for their growing economy and emissions.
Although this doesn’t pass muster for national policy – the blaming the Chinese bit and inaction – the good, smart & nuclear scientific ”thinkers” persevere in inaction till we reach the cliff. Must remind the willy Coyotes out there though that allthough the road runner flies, coyote has no functioning parachute….
INACTION WILL LEAD TO A CRASH
It’s a very Faustian technique. After all, a self fulfilling prophesy, is just that.
Fiddling with the dimmer switch may prove an almost irresistible political fix for governments. It gets powerful lobbies off their backs, gives the green light to burn more coal, and oil, it avoids the need to raise petrol taxes, allows unrestrained growth and is no threat to consumer lifestyles. And of course it allows for inaction in establishing a pollution price for the carbon emissions going up to the atmosphere.
In short, compared to the hard work of getting our economies on the sustainability path and cutting our own greenhouse gas emissions, geoengineering gets everyone off the hook easy. Although officially, no government is yet willing to lend official support to geoengineering, the Russians and Chinese and Americans have been practicing the game wholesale for decades now, in secret. However, the pressure is building up from a warming planet and the day when the government of a major nation like the United States, Russia or China publicly backs Plan B cannot be far off. Or even a smaller player with their blessing to act as an official test tube baby of Geo engineering nation. Look for a dictatorship the likes of Muyanmar or a flexible commonwealth coal drunk like Australia to start. Then the floodgates will open.
Even now, beneath the radar, Russia has already begun testing geo engineering on a much more massive scale than reported. Yuri Israel, a Russian scientist who is both a global-warming sceptic and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Putin, has tested the effects of aerosol spraying from a helicopter on solar radiation reaching the ground. He then was granted the resources by the government to run a full-scale trial with a fleet of government airplanes, after the disastrous summer drought and fires of Moscow and the destruction of their agricultural grain belt harvest of 2010.
Strangelove and his freaked out son rule the roost of Climate Engineering morons
Two of the earliest and most aggressive advocates of planetary engineering are Edward Teller and Lowell Wood. Teller, who died in 2003, was the co-founder and director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of Nuclear weapons, in Berkeley hills near San Francisco, California in the USA.
Edward Teller when thought of kindly; is described as having a near-mythological status as the dark heart of weapons research. The Darth Vader of massively killing machines and father of survival techniques in a Nuclear Winter of his own causing. Teller is often described as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” and was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound mad scientist prone to Nazi salutes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film of that name.
Lowell Wood was recruited by Teller to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and became his protégé. For decades Wood was one of the Pentagon’s foremost “weaponeers”, leading him to be christened “Dr. Evil” by critics. He led the group tasked with developing Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Star Wars missile shield that included plans for an array of orbiting X-ray lasers powered by nuclear reactors. And he was the one that infused the Hollywood cowboy US President with the ideas of a limited nuclear war and the backyard MX missiles and the interesting factoid, that a nuclear winter would be a survivable garden holiday.
Allthough Wood and Teller would be better off as a mad Circus act, they aren’t comedians. As a matter of fact they are Grand Guignol blood suckers. Blind and horrible unfettered wild beasts of our common nuclear burden seeking a naturalistic horror to be visited upon us all. Creating this horror is what Wood and Teller and their successive nuclear sperm boy proteges like Ken Caldeira of Stanford University and David Keith of the University of Calgary are all about.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting lack of need for ”Detente,” their nuclear fortunes have eroded. Therefore they repurposed themselves to first promoting a self induced Nuclear Winter. Auto goal that is in soccer. And when this backfired, at around the end of the Naughties; Wood and Teller have been promoting aerosol spraying into the stratosphere as a simple and cheap counter to global warming. Reflecting the dominant opinion of the 1950s, they believe it is humankind’s duty to exert supremacy over nature. It is perhaps for this reason that they have long been associated with conservative think tanks that deny the existence of human-induced global warming. Both men have been associated with the Hoover Institution, a centre of climate scepticism partly funded by Exxon Mobil, and Wood is listed as an expert with the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington think tank that became one of the main centres of climate denial in the 1990s.
It is strange that geoengineering is being promoted enthusiastically by a number of right-wing think tanks that are active in climate denials. The American Enterprise Institute, an influential think tank also part-funded by Exxon Mobil that offered US$10,000 to academics for papers debunking the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has launched a high-profile project to promote geoengineering.
Of course, geoengineering protects their supporters and financiers in the fossil industries because it can be a substitute for carbon reductions and justify delay. But a deeper explanation lies in their beliefs about the relationship of humans to the natural world.
Pursuing abatement is an admission that industrial society has harmed nature, while engineering the Earth’s climate would be confirmation of our mastery over it — final proof that, whatever minor errors made on the way, human ingenuity and faith in our own abilities will always triumph. Geoengineering promises to turn failure into triumph.
Lowell Wood believes that climate engineering is inevitable; it’s a matter of time before the ‘political elites’ wake up to its cheapness and effectiveness. In a statement that could serve as Earth’s epitaph, he declared: “We’ve engineered every other environment we live in—why not the planet?”
Wood is contemptuous of the ability of world leaders to reduce emissions (which he dubs “the bureaucratic suppression of CO2″) and of their ability to reach a consensus on trialling geoengineering. He predicts that necessity will overrun popular resistance to the idea of fiddling with the atmosphere.
Faced with this resistance, Wood speculates about getting private funding from a billionaire for an experiment. “As far as I can determine, there is no law that prohibits doing something like this”. Wood is right: there is no law against a private individual attempting to take control of the Earth’s climate.
The most minor yet most visible of the consequences of using sulphate aerosols in order to engineer the climate carry the more disturbing effect of enhanced dimming of the light and the resultant opalescence would be the permanent whitening of day time skies. A washed-out sky would become the norm.
Gone forever would be the Blue Skies of our lives…
Yours,
Pano
PS:
If the nations of the world or some privateers and/or dictators manage to resort to climate engineering, and in doing so relieve pressure to cut carbon emissions, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would continued to rise and so would the latent warming that would need suppressing. It would then become impossible to call a halt to sulphur injections into the stratosphere, even for a year or two, without an immediate jump in temperature.
It’s estimated that, if whoever controls the scheme decided to stop, the back-up of greenhouse gases could see warming rebound at a rate 10-20 times faster than in the recent past, a phenomenon referred to, apparently without irony, as the “termination problem”.
Once we start manipulating the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever dependent on a program of sulphur injections into the stratosphere.
In that case, human beings would never see a blue sky again.
PS2:
The Environmental Court has a way of addressing these issues by establishing a reasonable standard of legal threshold for the scientific pursuit of a hypothesis and the common barriers to climate geo engineering.
To that end we invite You to our humble gathering at the 10th International Human Rights Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, this October the 10th.
The Environmental Court will convene on this issue at the European Court of Edinburgh City Chambers on the Royal Mile for the whole day, starting at 8am till 5pm.
To participate please email us directly.
PS3:
The funding and the people behind Geo engineering are to be also discussed in a follow on blog.
Please go out and in peace declare your love of Life and the Blue Skies.
But act. ACT ferociously by engaging in the fight for a reasonable global Climate deal in Mexico this November.
Hope to see you all in Cancun at the COP16.
But tomorrow go out in Berlin and rock Ms Merkel’s world against the nuclear life support of Germany’s Chernobyl era plants.
