The AP's Wired published an article today about the Big Four suggestions for reducing global warming. It's utterly flabbergasting that people are taking them seriously.
There's the man-made "volcano" that shoots gigatons of sulfur high into the air. The space "sun shade" made of trillions of little reflectors between Earth and sun, slightly lowering the planet's temperature. The forest of ugly artificial "trees" that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. And the "Geritol solution" in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.
"Of course it's desperation," said Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider. "It's planetary methadone for our planetary heroin addiction. It does come out of the pessimism of any realist that says this planet can't be trusted to do the right thing."
That's the crux of the matter. Even though the earth's temperature has been fluctuating for millenia, quite without our help, these scientists trust only themselves and their like-minded compatriots to make sure the earth behaves properly. The fact that during the Medieval Warming period, people prospered (eg, Erik the Red established two colonies on Greenland that lasted until the next global cooling), doesn't improve the alarmists' ability to trust the earth.
Here are the Big Four ideas for saving the planet from itself:
The Geritol solution
A private company is already carrying out this plan. Some scientists call it promising while others worry about the ecological fallout.
Planktos Inc. of Foster City, Calif., last week launched its ship, the Weatherbird II, on a trip to the Pacific Ocean to dump 50 tons of iron dust. The iron should grow plankton, part of an algae bloom that will drink up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said large-scale ocean seeding could change the crucial temperature difference between the sea surface and deeper waters and have a dramatic effect on marine life.
As I recall from grade school Science class, too much algae kills the other life in ponds. That's why we banned phosphates from laundry detergent. Why would we do this to our oceans?
Man-made volcano
When Mount Pinatubo erupted 16 years ago in the Philippines it cooled the Earth for about a year because the sulfate particles in the upper atmosphere reflected some sunlight.
Several leading scientists, from Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen to the late nuclear cold warrior Edward Teller, have proposed doing the same artificially to offset global warming.
"It's an issue of the lesser of two evils," [Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research] said.
Scientists at the Center for Atmospheric Research put the idea into a computer climate model. The results aren't particularly cheap or promising, said NCAR scientist Caspar Ammann. It would take tens of thousands of tons of sulfate to be injected into the air each month, he said.
Scientists also complained about all the pollutants Pinatubo spewed into the air, not to mention the acid rain... But that's different. It's not a problem to pollute, when it's for the right reasons.
And if Mt. Pinatubo only reduced the temperature for a year, how long do the advocates of this approach plan to keep up the sulfer pollutants in our atmosphere? And what will be the long-term consequences?
Solar umbrella
For far-out concepts, it's hard to beat Roger Angel's. Last fall, the University of Arizona astronomer proposed what he called a "sun shade." It would be a cloud of small Frisbee-like spaceships that go between Earth and the sun and act as an umbrella, reducing heat from the sun.
About 800,000 of these would be stacked into each rocket launch. It would take 16 trillion of them - that's million million - so there would be 20 million launches of rockets. All told, Angel figures 20 million tons of material to make the discs that together form the solar umbrella.
I tried finding out the byproducts of rocket launches, and it's unclear whether carbon dioxide is one of them. Solid propellants may be able to produce CO2. But even if it's just the "immense volume of steam" put out by the space shuttle rockets, twenty million immense volumes of steam over the course of 30 years may have other side effects on the planet that we're not expecting.
Artificial trees
What's wrong with real trees?
Scientifically, it's known as "air capture." But the instruments being used have been dubbed "artificial trees" - even though these devices are about as treelike as a radiator on a stick. They are designed to mimic the role of trees in using carbon dioxide, but early renderings show them looking more like the creation of a tinkering engineer with lots of steel.
Nearly a decade ago, Columbia University professor Klaus Lackner, hit on an idea for his then-middle school daughter's science fair project: Create air filters that grab carbon dioxide from the air using chemical absorbers and then compress the carbon dioxide into a liquid or compressed gas that can be shipped elsewhere. When his daughter was able to do it on a tiny scale, Lackner decided to look at doing it globally.
It would take wind and a lot of energy to power the air capture devices. They would stand tall like cell phone towers on steroids, reaching about 200 feet high with various-sized square filters at the top. Lackner envisions perhaps placing 100,000 of them near wind energy turbines.
Even if each filter was only the size of a television, it could remove about 25 tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is about how much one American produces annually, Lackner said. The captured carbon dioxide would be changed into a liquid or gas that can be piped away from the air capture devices.
This is a great idea. We can put all the "radiator on a stick" devices with all the windmills in front of Ted Kennedy and Walter Cronkite's houses in Martha's Vineyard. All their hot air will keep the windmills spinning.
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The fact that some in the scientific community are seriously considering any of these options is evidence of how far off the deep end the global warming alarmists have gone.
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