Hi All
In their chapter asking ‘what could possibly go wrong’, Michael Mann and
Tom Toles list problems about mirrors in space, stratospheric sulphur,
ocean fertilisation and direct air capture of CO2 but say almost
nothing, just six words, about John Latham’s idea for marine cloud
brightening.
Sea surface temperatures have a powerful effect on weather and climate.
The intention of the Latham technique would be to return sea surface
temperatures to what they ought to be. The method has a high frequency
response and we have control of place and season for the treatment so
anxieties about ‘whose hand on the thermostat’ are lower than for
long-lived, world-wide processes.If we screw up we can stop very rapidly
and learn from mistakes.
If Stephen Schwarz and Andrew Slingo (1996) are correct in their
interpretation of the Twomey effect, the amount of salt needed to offset
double pre-industrial CO2 is about 1% of the 6500 million tonnes of salt
which Grini (2002) says are being thrown up from the ocean every year,
much along beaches and close to human habitations. What we would be
doing is using wind energy to shift the size distribution of nuclei to
the best value to make cloud drops in mid ocean regions of our choosing.
This might involve changing nuclei concentration from 50 to 100 per
cubic centimetre in an air mass over the sea but this will have little
effect if that air mass reaches land where nuclei concentrations are
1000 or more. If some salt nuclei do reach land, breathing salt is good
for people with chest problems, especially asthmatic children.Ocean
salinity is kept stable by rivers washing salt back from land to sea.In
the few places where there is never any rain, salt levels will already
be very high so more will not make any change.
The change in cloud reflectivity is below the detection level the human
eye. It is far below the change from cloud to clear sky and even further
below the change from day to night. The sea is an excellent integrator
of short term fluctuations in heat inputs.We already know quite a lot
about marine currents so that we can choose where the cooling will
go.The most obvious place in the short term is the Arctic.
I enjoy Tom Toles cartoons which you can download from
http://www.climateactionreserve.org/blog/2013/06/13/our-favorite-climate-cartoons-from-tom-toles-washington-post/
I really would like leading climatologists like Michael Mann to help us
use marine cloud brightening in the best and safest way.Please Michael,
give us much more specific detail about what could possibly go wrong.
Please Tom, do more cartoons. Can you send them to this blog for the
benefit of people who cannot get the Washington post?
Stephen
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design. School of Engineering,
University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh EH9 3DW, Scotland
[email protected], Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704, Cell 07795 203 195,
WWW.homepages.ed.ac.uk/shs, YouTube Jamie Taylor Power for Change
On 24/09/2016 20:27, Greg Rau wrote:
"What could possibly go wrong" is that by continuing to not take CDR
and SRM seriously (Mann and Toles), we will increasingly commit
ourselves to drastic emissions reduction - "the simplest safest
solution...to address the problem at its root cause" - last line in
the chapter. Everyone is for simple and safe, yet how simple has
emissions reduction proven to be and how safe is it to assume that our
dismal emissions track record will magically change? Even the
ultimate keepers of climate truth, the IPCC, now tell us that simple
and safe alone isn't going to keep us below 2 deg C warming and that
BECCS and afforestation will also be required. While this too may
prove to be magical thinking, how wise is it to denigrate what needs
to be a serious effort to see if we have any additional options for
staving off global warming and ocean acidification?
Mann and Toles have each in their own way contributed significantly to
the climate change issue, but when it comes to solutions they do a
disservice to the cause by broadly painting alternatives to emissions
reduction as mad-cap science fiction (curiously, except for DAC?!?).
What are their better ideas in the now likely event that emission
reduction attempts fail to singlehandedly solve the problem, and do
these ideas themselves pass the laugh test?
Greg
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Andrew Lockley <[email protected]>
*To:* geoengineering <[email protected]>
*Sent:* Saturday, September 24, 2016 4:52 AM
*Subject:* [geo] Book chapter: Geoengineering, or “What Could
POSSIBLY Go Wrong?” Mann
Geoengineering, or “What Could POSSIBLY Go Wrong?”
Excerpt from "Madhouse effect", Mann and Toles.
Attached
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