Global Warming? Pleeeze ….it’s been admitted several times there is no such thing as Global Warming, even by the IPPC people at the UN in a big uproar at the end of 2009.
As you read this article see if you remember this from the article referred to above:
Global warming alarmists are scrambling to save face after hackers stole hundreds of incriminating e-mails from a British university and published them on the Internet.
The messages were pirated from the Climatic Research Unit
(CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and reveal correspondence
between British and American researchers engaged in fraudulent reporting
of data to favor their own climate change agenda. UEA officials
confirmed one of their servers was hacked, and several of the scientists
involved admitted the authenticity of the messages, according to the New York Times.
The article opined, “The evidence pointing to a growing human
contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked
material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.”
Climatologist
Patrick J. Michaels challenged that position. “This is not a smoking
gun, this is a mushroom cloud.” The e-mails implicate scores of
researchers, most of whom are associated with the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization many skeptics believe
was created exclusively to provide evidence of anthropogenic global
warming (AGW).
Can geoengineering put the freeze on global warming?
Scientists call it “geoengineering,” but in plain speak, it means things
like this: blasting tons of sulfate particles into the sky to reflect
sunlight away from Earth; filling the ocean with iron filings to grow plankton that will suck up carbon; even dimming sunlight with space shades.
Each brings its own set of risks, but in a world
fretting about the consequences of global warming, are these ideas whose
time has come?
With 2010 tying as the world’s warmest year on
record and efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions looking stymied,
calls are rising for research into engineering our way out of global
warming — everything from launching solar shade spacecraft to
genetically engineering green deserts. An international consortium of 12
universities and research institutes on Tuesday, for example, announced
plans to pioneer large-scale “ocean fertilization” experiments aimed at
using the sea to pull more greenhouse gases out of the sky.
Once the domain of scientists’ off-hours schemes
scrawled on cocktail napkins, such geoengineering is getting a serious
look in the political realm.
“We’re moving into a different kind of world,” says environmental economist Scott Barrett of Columbia University. “Better we turn to asking if ‘geoengineering’ could work, than waiting until it becomes a necessity.”
A National Academy of Sciences‘
best estimate has global warming bumping up average temperatures by 3
to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Meanwhile, greenhouse
gas emissions that are largely responsible, most from burning the
modern economy’s main fuels, coal and oil, look set to continue to rise
for the next quarter-century, according to Energy Information Agency
estimates.
“That’s where geoengineering comes in,” says
international relations expert David Victor of the University of
California-San Diego. “Research into geoengineering creates another
option for the public.”
No longer eyed askance
“Geoengineering is no longer a taboo topic at
scientific meetings. They are looking at it as one more policy
prescription,” says Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch, author of Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope — Or Worst Nightmare — For Averting Climate Catastrophe. “But it is yet to become a household word.”
That may be changing, as the terms of debate
about geoengineering become clear. On the pro-research side, this
October the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology called for
more research into geoengineering, “to better understand which
technologies or methods, if any, represent viable stopgap strategies for
managing our changing climate and which pose unacceptable risks.” On
the more cautious side, a United Nations Environment Programme species
conservation meeting in Nagoya, Japan, ended that same month with a call
for, “no climate-related geoengineering activities,” without
environmental and scientific review.
What are the actual geoengineering proposals?
•Ocean fertilization. Dumping iron filings
into the ocean to spur phytoplankton blooms is the saltwater version of
forestation. The increased mass of the plankton’s cells would swell
with carbon pulled from the air. On the downside, it may kill fish,
belch out other greenhouse gases such as methane, and hasn’t worked very
well in small trials.
•Forestation. Intense planting of trees
and reclaiming deserts with hardier plants is one of the ideas endorsed
at the recent Cancun, Mexico, climate meeting, where representatives of
192 nations made some progress on an international climate agreement.
More fantastic versions, endorsed by Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson,
would rely on genetic engineering to produce trees that act as natural
carbon scrubbers, their trunks swollen with carbon pulled from the air.
•Cloud engineering. Painting rooftops
white, genetically engineering crops to have shinier surfaces, and
floating blocks of white Styrofoam in the oceans are all proposals to
mimic the effects of clouds, whose white surfaces reflect sunlight.
Pumping sea salt into the sky from thousands of “spray ships” could
increase clouds themselves. Cost-effectiveness aside, such cloud-seeding
might end up dumping rain on the ocean or already soggy regions,
instead of where it’s needed.
•Pinatubo a-go-go. As mentioned above, sulfur aerosols could be fired into the sky by cannons, released by balloons or dropped from planes.
•Space mirrors. Hundreds of thousands of
thin reflective yard-long disks fired into a gravitational balance point
between the sun and Earth could dim sunlight. Cost aside, rocket
failures or collisions might lead to a tremendous orbital debris cloud
circling the Earth. And a recent Geophysical Research Letters space
tourism report suggests the rocket fuel burned to launch the needed
number of shades would dump enough black soot — which absorbs sunlight
and heats the atmosphere — to increase average global temperatures about
1.4 degrees.
“Most of the technologies are not yet proven and
are at the theoretical or research phase,” an August Congressional
Research Service report noted.
Entire article at USA Today
global warming, al gore, geoengineering, climate research unit,
babybttrfly
Steve Hilton
Mike
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