Scientists: Trying to change earth's climate is tricky

[lovuian]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/03/18/climate.technology.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
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Scientists are exploring global warming solutions that sound wholly far-fetched, including giant artificial "trees" to filter carbon dioxide out of the air, a bizarre "solar shade" created by a trillion flying saucers that lower Earth's temperature, and a scheme that mimics a volcano by spewing light-reflecting sulfates high in the sky.

These are costly projects of last resort -- in case Earth's citizens don't cut back fast enough on greenhouse gas emissions and the worst of the climate predictions appear not too far away. Unfortunately, the solutions could cause problems of their own -- beyond their exorbitant costs -- including making the arid Middle East even drier and polluting the air enough to increase respiratory illnesses.

Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said mankind already has harmed Earth's climate inadvertently, so it's foolish to think people can now fix it with a few drastic measures.
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and they must be talking about
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has drawn up an emergency plan to save the world from global warming, by altering the chemical makeup of Earth's upper atmosphere. Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, believes that political attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases are so pitiful that a radical contingency plan is needed.

In a polemical scientific essay to be published in the August issue of the journal Climate Change, he says that an "escape route" is needed if global warming begins to run out of control.

Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research.

A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells, said Professor Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

The effect of scattering sulphate particles in the atmosphere would be to increase the reflectance, or "albedo", of the Earth, which should cause an overall cooling effect.

Such "geo-engineering" of the climate has been suggested before, but Professor Crutzen goes much further by drawing up a detailed model of how it can be done, the timescales involved, and the costs.
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Many ideas but are they only going to make things worse instead of better???

[Wayne_in_WA_State]

1. desperate measures

I would try to be extremely careful about thinking we can solve global warming with the wave of a magic wand whose unintended consequences we cannot foresee. We need to follow the lead of Al Gore and quickly phase out fossil fuels and move to clean energy.

But I still think we have to keep an open mind about drastic measures and not rush to implement them, but be scientifically open to exploring them and evaluating them in peer reviewed journals like Climate Change. More knowledge and research is a good thing.

The fact that people are coming up with some screwball ideas at least shows that they are taking the climate crisis seriously and are giving thought to what could possibly be done to solve it. That's a step forward from straight denial.

[OneBlueSky]

2. some people believe this is already being done and cite "chemtrails" as evidence . . .

one of the theories behind the so-called chemtrails is that they are dispersing reflective material in the atmosphere in an attempt to lessen global warming . . . personally, I don't know enough to have an opinion, but I have seen days when the sky in my area is literally filled with criss-crossing trails that turn clear days overcast within hours . . .

[Amonester]

3. In that particular case (and in probably all cases), the answer is: yes.

Sulphur causes more acid-rain, as far as I know, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I "heard" of another "artificial" solution that involved "growing" microorganisms in the middle of the oceans which feed themselves with CO2 gas out of the atmosphere...

Would that "be enough" AND would doing that NOT create NEW problems? I doubt it wouldn't.