Poster's note : important paper, shows we may need much more aerosol than predicted. However, this isn't directly compared to other estimates in the paper.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL053797/full Keywords aerosol effects;cirrus clouds;geo-engineeringJump to… Abstract [1] Cooling the Earth through the injection of sulphate into the stratosphere is one of the most discussed geo-engineering (GE) schemes. Stratospheric aerosols can sediment into the troposphere, modify the aerosol composition and thus might impact cirrus clouds. We use a global climate model with a physically based parametrization for cirrus clouds in order to investigate possible microphysical and dynamical effects. We find that enhanced stratospheric aerosol loadings as proposed by several GE approaches will likely lead to a reduced ice crystal nucleation rate and thus optically thinner cirrus clouds. These optically thinner cirrus clouds exert a strong negative cloud forcing in the long-wave which contributes by 60% to the overall net GE forcing. This shows that indirect effects of stratospheric aerosols on cirrus clouds may be important and need to be considered in order to estimate the maximum cooling derived from stratospheric GE. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
