Top climate scientists have cautiously endorsed the need to study schemes to reverse global warming that involve directly tinkering with Earth’s climate. Their position on geoengineering, which will likely be controversial, was staked out at an invitation-only meeting that ended here today. It’s based on a growing concern about the rapid pace of global change and continued anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.

“In this room, we’ve reached a remarkable consensus that there should be research on this,” said climate modeler Chris Bretherton of the University of Washington, Seattle, during a morning session today. Phil Rasch, a modeler with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, underscored the point. “We’re not saying that there should be geoengineering, we’re saying there should be research regarding geoengineering.” No formal statement was released at the meeting, which was organized by Harvard University and the University of Calgary, but few of the 50 scientists objected to the idea.

The field of geoengineering has long been big on ideas but short on respect. Some of the approaches that researchers have dreamed up include launching fleets of space-based shades to dim the sunlight hitting Earth or altering the albedo of the ocean with light-colored reflectors. Perhaps the best-known idea is to pump aerosols into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. But there’s been scant support from mainstream scientists, many of whom fear that even mentioning the g-word could derail discussion of carbon-emissions cuts. Others worry that technological tinkering might backfire…

April 2009.  From http://www.slate.com/id/2217230/

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“This is not at all hard to do,” Granger told the audience, declaring that “a single large nation”—especially a nuclear power, which might act with relative impunity—could easily exercise the option. A run of bad news from the climate scientists might convince a government that the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet was accelerating, and that Earth’s low-lying areas were facing an imminent rise of 3 feet or more in sea level. “If, say, a Huckabee administration suddenly woke up and started geoengineering the planet, what could anybody else do about it?” Morgan asked. (One could equally envision a left-leaning, low-lying European nation with the same inclination.) Geoengineering “turns the normal debate over climate change on its head,” he and some co-authors wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. Getting nations to agree to cut their greenhouse pollution has proved to be the ultimate free-rider problem, as the biggest nations must all cooperate or the planet will keep getting warmer. The Pinatubo option creates the opposite dilemma: As the discussions in Lisbon made clear, any of a dozen nations could change the global temperature all by itself.

The Pinatubo option could have some very unpleasant side effects, too. An Indian space scientist suggested that deploying the scheme might disrupt various monsoon cycles that provide water to hundreds of millions of people across the world. Granger’s graduate student got up afterward and warned the group that computer simulations suggest the technique might lead to a drop in global rainfall. (The aerosols would block solar energy, which drives precipitation systems. She did note that higher temperatures in a world without geoengineering might also yield drier areas.)

Whatever its specific effects, it’s easy to see how geoengineering would create confusion and sow international conflict. “If a country like the United States were to do this on their own and China [happened] to go into a decadelong drought, [the Chinese would] want to know what was the cause,” explained Ken Caldeira, a geochemist from the Carnegie Institution. “Climate science is not at the point of attributing the cause of weather events.” Not every expert at the meeting thought that the unilateral scenario was realistic, but no one downplayed the emerging strategic risk that geoengineering represents. Some mused that rich individuals or corporations—”climate pirates” perhaps?—might even issue their own “Pinatubo ultimatum.”

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November 2009.  From http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/with-geoengineering-outlawed-will-only-outlaws-have-geoengineering/

For the second time this month, the Chinese government has reportedly induced a snowstorm in Beijing by seeding clouds with silver iodide. This form of geoengineering has been around for quite a while. In SuperFreakonomics, we write about a cloud-seeding effort carried out in the 1940’s by General Electric scientists including Bernard Vonnegut; his younger brother Kurt was the project’s p.r. man

The second storm in Beijing was the heaviest snowfall the city had seen in 54 years. The government’s apparent motivation for forcing precipitation was to relieve a long-standing drought. Beyond creating the various kinds of havoc that such big storms create, there are unintended consequences as well: for instance, the chloride used to rid the streets of snow after the storm is thought to lead to environmental and perhaps even structural damage.

What is the appropriate response to this news?

It probably depends on your view of the world — of politics, the environment, and human nature. Should one ignore the snowstorms and chalk them up to the Chinese simply being Chinese? Or should one think about these small-scale geoengineering exercises as a potential threat to the world’s geopolitical balance? It isn’t hard to imagine the trouble that might result if governmental snow- and rain-making became commonplace: one drought-ridden country declares war on its neighbor after the neighbor “steals” its rainfall.

In SuperFreakonomics, we write about some geoengineering schemes that scientists are considering to cool the earth if global warming becomes dangerous. One involves increasing the reflectivity of oceanic clouds; another suggests mimicking the effect of large volcanoes by spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to diminish solar radiation. These ideas are extremely unpopular in environmentalist circles.

Many environmentalists who argue that intensive carbon mitigation is the sole route to address global warming seem to feel that too many of the world’s citizens (including some political leaders) have their heads stuck in the sand, denying the reality of global warming.

But the point we make in SuperFreakonomics is that those who argue for carbon mitigation as the sole route to address global warming may have their heads stuck in a different pile of sand, and these Chinese snowstorms show why. Here’s what we write in the book:

As of this writing, there is no regulatory framework to prohibit anyone — a government, a private institution, even an individual — from putting sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere. … But of course this depends on the individual. If it were Al Gore, he might snag a second Nobel Peace Prize. If it were Hugo Chávez, he’d probably get a prompt visit from some U.S. fighter jets.

So while environmentalists may find the very notion of geoengineering repugnant, the fact is that geoengineering is already with us, and will likely be put to use whether we like it or not.

This leads to the very important matter of governance. While some environmental activists might like to hope that geoengineering is just science fiction that neither will nor should ever come into play (much as one might have liked to hope the same of atomic weapons), the facts on the ground (and in the Chinese clouds) do not support this view. Government leaders are getting together in Copenhagen next month to discuss collective carbon mitigation. It is becoming increasingly clear that they should be discussing the rules going forward for collective geoengineering as well, whether it is small-scale schemes like the Beijing snowstorms or large-scale ideas that address global warming…

January 2010.  From http://www.slate.com/id/2242931/

The Copenhagen climate meeting was a big disappointment. Sen. Lindsey Graham now says the cap-and-trade bills “are going nowhere.” So despite continued work toward cutting greenhouse emissions, we may see in the coming months a renewed interest in geoengineering—the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the atmosphere—in an attempt to ward off the dangers of climate change.

The once-rogue concept of planet-hacking has come a long way in just three years: from key private meetings among scientists, to sophisticated computer modeling papers (PDF), to serious investigations of the idea by the British Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. This week the discussion moves into a new phase: a debate over how actual field tests for geoengineering should be implemented, regulated and, in fact, whether their results would even help us to understand the most severe risks of deployment at all. In three opinion pieces published in the premiere science journals—one in Nature yesterday, and two in Science today—scientists from across the world offered differing takes on the future of internationally coordinated testing. But their back-and-forth over which experiments might be best and what sort of political treaties would be necessary raises a distressing possibility: It’s not just that geoengineering tests will be difficult. It’s that the problems they invite would be so diverse—and their results so inconclusive—that we’re likely to skip the testing altogether. If countries are going to hack the stratosphere, they may just do it full-bore in the face of disaster.

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… Mr. Browne’s fall from grace really began on March 23, 2005, when 15 people died and more than 170 were injured in America’s worst industrial accident in a generation: a huge fire and explosion at Texas City.

… the Texas City plant was America’s second-largest refinery, turning 460,000 barrels of crude oil a day into gasoline. But the facility, built in 1934, was poorly maintained and long starved of capital investment by its owners.

“We have never seen a site where the notion ‘I could die today’ was so real,” the Telos Group, a consulting firm hired to examine conditions at the plant, said in a report two months before the accident.

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The government ultimately found more than 300 safety violations , and BP agreed to pay a then record $21 million in fines.

A year later, there was a new calamity: 267,000 gallons of oil leaked from BP’s network of pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

It was the worst spill ever on the North Slope, and once again, the cause was preventable. Investigators found widespread corrosion in several miles of under-maintained and poorly inspected pipes. BP eventually paid more than $20 million in fines and restitution.

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The near sinking of Thunder Horse in 2005 was caused by a shockingly simple mistake: a check valve had been installed backward, and that caused water to flood into, rather than out of, the rig when it heated up during the hurricane.

After costly repairs to fix that damage, BP discovered a more significant problem: rudimentary mistakes in the welding of pipes in the underwater manifold, which connects dozens of wells and helps carry the oil back to the platform, had caused dangerous cracks and breaks.

Had the well been active, the damaged pipes would have caused a major oil spill. As it was, the company had to remotely rip out, retrieve and fix dozens of complex and heavy pieces of equipment lying on the sea floor, some weighing more than 400 tons.

Altogether, the blunders cost BP and its minority partner, Exxon Mobil, hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and set back production, today at 300,000 barrels a day, by three years.

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Revisiting Texas City in 2009, inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 safety violations and proposed a record fine of $87.4 million — topping the earlier record set by BP in the 2005 accident. Most of the penalties, the agency said, were because BP had failed to fully live up to the previous settlement.

In March of this year, OSHA found 62 violations at BP’s Ohio refinery, proposing another $3 million in penalties.

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Accidents have also continued to plague BP’s pipelines in Alaska. Most recently, on May 25, a power failure led to a leak that overwhelmed a storage tank and spilled about 200,000 gallons of oil — the third-largest spill on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

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TOMATO prices could double or triple in coming months after a millions of seedlings were poisoned in an act of mass sabotage in north Queensland.

About seven million plants, including about four million tomato seedlings, have been lost after they were poisoned with a herbicide at a Bowen nursery in June.

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Whitsunday Mayor Mike Brunker said it was the fourth time crops had been sabotaged in the region in the past decade.

He called on police to offer a major reward for information about the crime.

“We just need someone to come forward who knows the grub who has done this,” he said.

The price spike will bring back memories of Cyclone Larry, which devastated most of Australia’s banana crops and saw the price of that fruit spiral beyond $10 a kilogram.

Ms Kreymborg said the poisoning was on a much larger scale than previous incidents.

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Ford has countered with a 305 horsepower V6 that gets an EPA rated 31 mpg. To demonstrate the excellent gas mileage of this new Mustang, they went around the half-mile Bristol Motor Speedway 1,457 times…. on a single tank of gas. This means the Mustang got 48.5 miles per gallon…

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The single biggest uncertainty identified by the 14 experts — and it was a unanimous judgment — was the role of clouds in the earth’s future climate. This may come as no surprise to anyone who has been following climate science closely; the cloud problem has been vexing researchers for decades.

The tops of clouds bounce some sunlight back into space and so have a cooling effect. But as anyone who has stepped outside on a cloudy winter night knows, clouds can also serve as a kind of insulating layer, reflecting heat back toward the ground.

Some forecasts of climate suggest that as greenhouse gases cause the earth to heat up, more water will evaporate, forming more clouds. But other research suggests that low-level clouds may tend to dissipate in a warmer world, letting more sunlight in. Scientists simply are not sure whether the net effect of the changes in cloud cover will be to moderate the level of global warming or to worsen it.

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Wish it weren’t so, but I fear my lasting memory of many trips to Prince William Sound will be of hunched-over workers with toothbrushes, trying to scrub black tar from shivering birds and sea-worn rocks in the Alaska spring of 1989.All the images were staggering: The birds looked lost and stunned, their coats of warmth matted black, their wings greased by hydrocarbons that would eventually kill most of them. The inlets of that most Edenic of sheltered seas had a sickening sheen, with a smell that made you nauseated and stayed with you through sleepless nights. Harder still was the sight of fishermen — tough, independent, weather-callused men — weeping for their loss.

But what stayed with me were those hundreds of workers with toothbrushes. They would labor all day, and maybe clean a rock or two — Sisyphus on the sound. After a while it was all public relations theater paid for by Exxon, whose tanker went aground and spilled at least 11 millions gallons into one of the richest marine cornucopias in the world.

Here now is the sad replay in the Gulf of Mexico, with that life-killing choreography. Then, as today, an oil company deployed booms and dispersants, tried to buy off fishermen with quicky legal settlements, and made resolute promises about restoration and doing the right thing.

In Alaska, we saw how that turned out: after nearly two decades of legal foot-dragging, Exxon got exactly what it wanted: a Supreme Court that consistently backs the powerful and well-connected reduced punitive damages from $2.5 billion to $500 million — in a good year, just a single week’s profit for the company.

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From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/science/20tier.html?hpw

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You can never not do just one thing. Environmentalists of the 1970s liked to justify their resistance to new technologies by warning that you could never do just one thing. It was a nice mantra and also quite accurate. New technologies do indeed come with unexpected side effects.But resisting new technology produces its own unpleasant surprises. The “No Nukes” movement effectively led to more reliance on electricity generated by coal plants spewing carbon. The opposition to “industrial agriculture” led to the lower-yield farms that require more acreage, leaving less woodland to protect wildlife and absorb carbon.

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“Total reliance on organic farming would force African countries to devote twice as much land per crop as we do in the United States,” he writes. “An organic universe sounds delightful, but it could consign millions of people in Africa and throughout much of Asia to malnutrition and death.”

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Last week, the National Academy of Sciences reported that genetically engineered foods had helped consumers, farmers and the environment by lowering costs, reducing the use of pesticide and herbicide, and encouraging tillage techniques that reduce soil erosion and water pollution.

“I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about,” Mr. Brand writes in “Whole Earth Discipline.” “We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”

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Mr. Brand has also renounced his opposition to nuclear power and now promotes it as green energy because of its low-carbon emissions and its small footprint on the landscape. He wants to see the development of small modular reactors, and he quotes a warning from the climate scientist James Hansen, “One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of antinuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions.”

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Greenhouse gases will keep accumulating unless engineers build economical sources of low-carbon energy or develop techniques for sequestering carbon. And if those advances aren’t enough to stop global warming, we’ll want new tools for directly engineering the climate. Given the seriousness of the danger, Mr. Brand supports climate-engineering research, and he has updated his famous line from four decades ago. The update makes a good concluding lesson for Turqs:

7. We are as gods and have to get good at it.

http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/car/4078/Italdesign-Namir-Concept.html

187 mph, zero to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds & 90 mpg.

Fuel efficient and powerful.  Enough said.

The human-driven buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere appears to have ended a slide, many millenniums in the making, toward cooler summer temperatures in the Arctic, the authors of a new study report.

Scientists familiar with the work, to be published Friday in the journal Science, said it provided fresh evidence that human activity is not only warming the globe, particularly the Arctic, but could also even fend off what had been presumed to be an inevitable descent into a new ice age over the next few dozen millenniums.

The reversal of the slow cooling trend in the Arctic, recorded in samples of layered lakebed mud, glacial ice and tree rings from Alaska to Siberia, has been swift and pronounced, the team writes.

Earlier studies have also shown that the Arctic, more than the planet as a whole, has seen unusual warming in recent decades. But the new analysis provides decade-by-decade detail on temperature trends going back 2,000 years — five times further than previous work at that detailed a scale…

One relatively cheap solution, however, is gaining favour among many different groups and is endorsed today by an independent study that compares the costs and benefits of all the main ideas. A wind-powered fleet of 1,900 ships would criss-cross the oceans, sucking up sea water and spraying it from the top of tall funnels to create vast white clouds.

These clouds would reflect a tiny proportion, between 1 and 2 per cent, of the sunlight that would otherwise warm the ocean. This would be enough to cancel out the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions. The ships would be unmanned and directed by satellite to locations with the best conditions for increasing cloud cover. They would mainly operate in the Pacific, far enough from land to avoid interfering with rainfall.

The idea has been circulating for a decade but until now has merely been one of many climate engineering pipedreams. A study commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, a think-tank that advises governments on how to spend aid money, found that the fleet would cost $9 billion (£5.3 billion) to test and launch within 25 years. This is a fraction of the $250 billion that the world’s leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions.

The Royal Society is expected to announce next month that cloud-forming ships are one of the most promising ideas.

The Copenhagen study also looked at a scheme to mimic the effect of major volcanic eruptions, which have a global cooling effect lasting a year or more. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 sent billions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide and other particles into the atmosphere. These formed a haze that shielded the sun’s rays and reduced global average temperature by about 0.5C.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 had an even more dramatic effect: 1816 became known as the year without summer.

Many scientists have proposed different methods of injecting particles, or aerosols, into the atmosphere, including using squadrons of air tankers, possibly based in the Arctic to focus on protecting the ice cap.

The study concluded that the scheme would cost $230 billion and would be much harder to control than cloud-producing ships, which could be switched off if shown to have adverse effects. The study dismissed the space sunshade idea after calculating that the costs of launching the mirrors would be $395 trillion.

“The space sunshade is really just science fiction but cloud whitening ships deserve serious scrutiny,” said Bjorn Lomborg, director of the think-tank. He argues that, although global warming is a huge problem, there might be better ways of addressing it then simply cutting CO2 emissions. “We need to have a debate about all of the options, not just the politically correct one of reducing CO2,” he said.

He is hosting a conference in Washington DC next month at which a panel of Nobel laureates will vote on the most cost-effective solution.

Rival teams of British and American scientists are seeking funding for sea trials of prototype cloud-forming ships. The Carnegie Institute has donated several hundred thousand dollars to the US team. The British team, led by John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Manchester, and Stephen Salter, an engineer at the University of Edinburgh, is working with a Finnish shipping company, Meriaura.

I think the idea is absolutely brillant and the cost is a fraction of other schemes and easily bareable by the world’s largest economies.  Of course, not everyone agrees.  From http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/crank-week-september-1-2008-john-latham

The 300-ton unmanned ships would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 100 ft high, 8 ft in diameter cylinders known as Flettner rotors. The continuous rotation of these cylinders would generate a force perpendicular to the wind direction, propelling the ship forward if it is oriented at right angles to the wind.

Illustration by John MacNeill

The scheme relies on the “Twomey effect”, which says that increasing the concentration of water droplets within a cloud raises the overall surface area of the droplets and thereby enhances the cloud’s albedo. Albedo is the measurement of how reflective an object, like a planet, is. The more reflective Earth is the more solar radiation is reflected back into space, reducing the Sun’s heating effect. By spraying fine droplets of sea water into the air, the small particles of salt within each droplet act as new centers of condensation: the more condensation the more low cloud cover, the more low cloud cover the higher Earth’s albedo, the higher Earth’s albedo the lower Earth’s surface temperature—global warming solved.