Weather
modification/geoengineering
…..
I.e., playing God with the
Earth and skies
Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom
Department of Anthropology and Geography
CSUS
Geoengineering:
“the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary
environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.”
Basic methods:
1) sun-blocking or “solar radiation management” (STM)
aimed at reducing incoming solar energy
2) remove carbon dioxide from atmosphere
Physicist Lowell Wood (aka “Dr. Evil”), a protégé of
Dr. Edward Teller (aka “Dr. Strangelove”), who spent
four decades at Lawrence Livermore Lab and now
with Hoover Institution:
“(Bureaucratic) mitigation is not happening and is not going to happen. (We can achieve)
“instant climatic gratification” by “an intelligent elimination of undesired heat from the
biosphere by technical ways and means.” He proposes to “fix” the earth’s climate by:
1) Building up Arctic sea ice to increase earth’s albedo and “suck heat from the midlatitude heat
bath.” How?
A) Use large artillery pieces to shoot as much as a million tons of highly reflective sulfate
aerosols or specially engineered nanno-particles into the Arctic stratosphere to deflect the
sun’s rays. This would require a constant military bombardment of the stratosphere
B) Use a fleet of B-747 “crop-dusters” to deliver particles by flying continuously around the
Arctic Circle, or
C) Use a 25-km-long sky hose tethered to a military blimp to pump reflective material into the
upper atmosphere.
More “cool” ideas
Astronomer J. Roger Angel: Place a huge fleet of mirrors in orbit
to divert incoming solar radiation at cost of “only” several trillion
dollars.
Meteorologist John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter: make
marine clouds thicker and more reflective by whipping ocean
water into a froth with giant pumps and eggbeaters.
Astrophysicist Gregory Benford: let’s “cut through the red tape
and demonstrate what could be done” by finding private
sponsors to inject diatomaceous earth- chalklike substance in
filtration and cat litter- into the Arctic stratosphere.
Unintended consequences? Unknowable, but
what the hay….. Some more “cool” ideas:
Yuri Izrael, Moscow’s Institute for Global Climate and Ecological
Studies, wrote to Russian president Putin and advocated burning
massive amounts of sulfur in the stratosphere to lower earth’s
temperature “a degree or two.”
Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Cruzten wants to cool the earth by
injecting reflective aerosols or other substances into the tropical
stratosphere using balloons or artillery. He estimates we’d need 5
million metric tons/year and the annual cost would be over $125 billion.
(This would be an attempt to create an artificial Mt. Pinatubo eruption
of 1991.)
Crutzen’s “interesting alternative?” Release soot particles to create
minor nuclear winter conditions.
Engineering climate has
attracted attention of:
Scientists
Scientific Societies
Venture capitalists (Bill Gates has funded projects to increase
whiteness of clouds and increase earth’s albedo).
Conservative think tanks
American Enterprise Institute
George C. Marshall Institute
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Hoover Institute
Heartland Institute
Paradoxically, while these conservative think tans (rightly)
debunk the theory of man-caused global warming, they
still support geoengineering.
Why?
Ongoing weather modification
projects
About 80 unregulated weather modification projects
now in western U.S.
Rainmaking in the desert
Figure 1 A schematic of the processes that influence the life cycle of
stratospheric aerosols (adapted with permission from SPARC 2006).
Figure 2 A very rough budget (approx. 1 digit of accuracy) for most of the
major atmospheric sulphur species during volcanically quiescent
situations, following Rasch et al. (2000), SPARC (2006) and Montzka et
al. (2007). Numbers inside boxes indicate species burden in units of Tg S,
and approximate lifetime against the strongest source or sink. Numbers
beside arrows indicate net source or sinks (transformation, transport,
emissions, and deposition processes) in Tg Syr−1.
Figure 4 (a–c) Examples of distribution of the geoengineering aerosol for
June, July and August from a 20-year simulation for a 2Tg Syr−1 emission.
The white contour in (a) shows the region where temperatures fall below
194.5K, and indicates approximately where ozone depletion may be
important (see §2d(i)).
Figure 5 (a,b) The surface temperature difference from present
day during June, July and August with the 2×CO2 simulation and
the geoengineering simulation using 2Tg Syr−1 emission (which is
not sufficient to entirely balance the greenhouse warming).
Figure 8 Column ozone for (a,c) baseline run and (b,d)
geoengineering run for two meteorologically similar Antarctic
winters in mid-October 2025 (a,b) and the coldest simulated
Arctic winters (c,d) in the beginning of April (DU, Dobson
units).