Dear Stephen,
Of course ignorance of the potential consequences is a reason for not
messing with the climate system. If you mean laboratory or computer
research, that is not a problem. But you propose sailing ships around
injecting salt into clouds. This is before there is any international
agreement on the acceptable scale of such tinkering. And how can you do
informed consent for the entire planet? What will you do about
protesters who are sure this is the development of military technology
for the regional control of weather?
You were at Asilomar. Didn't you hear about all these issues? Didn't
you come away from there with a realization that we are very far from a
situation where such in situ experimentation would be acceptable?
And read Jim Fleming's book /Fixing the Sky/. Learn about all the
historical precedents filled with charlatans, a Nobel Prize winner who
thinks he is so smart he can step into my field and does not realize how
ignorant he is, and military men who want to use weather and climate
control as a weapon. How can you just ignore all this?
Alan
Alan Robock, Professor II (Distinguished Professor)
Editor, Reviews of Geophysics
Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program
Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-732-932-9800 x6222
Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644
14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected]
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
On 9/26/2010 10:59 AM, Stephen Salter wrote:
Hi All
It is good to have the correct attributions to wise statements but the
main point of my reply to James was the attempt to get comments and
help for small experiments which he had said could not be done. It is
odd to say that our ignorance of a subject is a justification for NOT
doing research on it.
Stephen
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design
Institute for Energy Systems
School of Engineering
Mayfield Road
University of Edinburgh EH9 3JL
Scotland
Tel +44 131 650 5704
Mobile 07795 203 195
www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs
On 25/09/2010 22:17, James R. Fleming wrote:
Colleagues:
Stephen Salter wrote: /Ken has pointed out that we are already
carrying out an dangerous planetary test which we do not understand.
Lowell says that we started it thousands of years ago./
I believe the proper attribution for these ideas are not Caldeira and
Wood but a combination of Glbert Plass and Roger Revelle and Hans
Suess for the first and William Ruddiman for the second.
"If at the end of this century, measurements show that the carbon
dioxide content of the atmosphere has risen appreciably and at
the same time the temperature has continued to rise throughout
the world, it will be firmly established that carbon dioxide is
an important factor in causing climatic change" -- Gilbert Plass
(1956).
"Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical
experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor
be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are
returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic
carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of
years. This experiment, if adequately documented, may yield a
far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and
climate" -- REvelle and Suess (1957).
"The hypothesis (Ruddiman, 2003
<http://courses.eas.ualberta.ca/eas457/Ruddiman2003.pdf>
<http://courses.eas.ualberta.ca/eas457/Ruddiman2003.pdf%3E>) that
early agriculture caused large enough emissions of greenhouse
gases millennia ago to offset a natural climatic cooling remains
controversial" -- Ruddiman.
Also, there is no doubt that clouds can be brightened (by ships
tracks, etc.), but is this a climate test? Do you know that in 1947
Kathleen Blodget at General Electric told Irving Langmiur that
intervening in a cloud was something much different than "controlling
the weather?" Seems to have fallen on Langmuir's deaf ears.
Jim Fleming --
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