consensus

Renegade geoengineering

October 30, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

As the dangers of climate change continue to grow, so has interest in geoengineering – deliberate tinkering with the earth’s climate system. In particular, stratospheric solar geoengineering – releasing aerosols into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of heat from the sun reaching the Earth – is attracting increasing interest. Scientists at Harvard, Cornell, Colorado State, Princeton, and the University of Chicago are all researching the topic.

Actually doing it on a scale that matters is fraught with peril from unintended consequences of disrupting the delicate interactions between the Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea ice.

Meanwhile, a tiny start-up company in Silicon Valley has raised more than a million dollars in venture capital and is busy releasing balloons full of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in the name of combatting global warming. Furthermore, they are selling so-called “cooling credits” to customers who want to offset their personal carbon emissions.

The aerosol being released is on such a small scale that it can’t possibly have a meaningful effect on temperatures. There really isn’t scientific analysis guiding or accompanying the work.

There are no laws prohibiting the dispersal of small amounts of sulfur dioxide in California. Even if there were, these people could go offshore or elsewhere to do their work. But this renegade geoengineering highlights a serious issue; namely, that there doesn’t have to be scientific, political, or any other kind of consensus for someone to undertake a potentially catastrophic attempt to alter the climate. It’s a real worry.

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Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet

Photo, posted September 24, 2006, courtesy of Doc Searls via Flickr.

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It Really Is Greenhouse Gases | Earth Wise

December 26, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The scientific consensus that human-generated carbon dioxide is changing the climate began to form in the 1980s.

For a long time, the changes to the climate were simply denied. After a while, as those changes became increasingly hard to ignore, the argument shifted to the changes being real but not caused by anything people are doing. The multi-trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry was strongly motivated to focus attention away from the association between carbon dioxide and climate change.

The greenhouse gas effect has been known since the 19th century. It isn’t just real; it is essential to life on earth. Without sufficient levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to trap some of the sun’s heat, the earth would be an ice planet incapable of supporting much in the way of life. But there can be too much of a good thing.

Naysayers continue to grasp at alternative explanations for the warming planet rather than the inconvenient truth. Some people try to claim that it is the release of heat from all our energy-generating activities -power plants, heaters and air conditioners, vehicles, and so on – that is warming the planet.

That issue has been studied in detail. Human activity does generate a lot of heat and, technically speaking, that heat does help warm the planet. However, the sun dumps 10,000 times more heat on the earth than all of human energy production added together. Just the normal fluctuations in solar energy are 10 times larger than everything we do put together.

What is increasingly warming the planet is not the continuing energy striking the earth; it is primarily the fact that growing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are trapping more and more of that heat and preventing it from escaping into space.

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