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Whether climate change is man made or not is up for debate. Whether climate change is happening or not is rather one sided towards it is happening.

What happens in a climate changed world cannot be modeled. Our computers are simply not powerful enough to model climate. If we could have a system that could cool the Earth down back to 2010 levels for as long as we wanted to, with no long term effects, then that would buy us time to reduce carbon emissions further.

I expect our carbon pollution to be reduced over the next 10 years. I expect a global scale effort that will be, in my opinion, too small, and too late.

The sulfur dioxide solution to global climate change is an uneasy one. It's not my goal to convince people in this thread it's the way to go. That would involve having available the data and models on me as well as me having some credibility. I don't have any of that.

I am reporting news. I will be replying to posts in this thread that I believe re-report this news incorrectly. But not at an attempt to convince anyone. It would be silly for people to join my facebook group for example on good faith.

I came across the sulfur dioxide solution about a week ago and had a look at it. I'm not a scientist and I think it would be better for people to have their own look into it as I did rather than me post links with probable bias.

It's pretty crazy. Pump about 0.1% of the sulfur dioxide currently being released into the atmosphere into the stratosphere. The amount is so small that if we stopped it would fall back to earth and the effect would be completely reversed within a few years. It has in fact happened before during volcano eruptions with no long term effects. It doesn't cause acid rain, that amount is too small. It won't freeze the Earth, we have already seen what happens when this amount is released.

I get a bit queezy myself with the idea of solving pollution with pollution. Solving a human created problem* with a human created solution. Some environmentalists are admittedly pretty zealous and abhor this idea, geoengineering our climate with toxic gas.

What it actually does is buy us time to develop ways to reduce carbon emissions. Climate will change, sea water will expand and rise, and the Atlantic current might even fail and freeze northern Europe (but not this decade).

All this tiny bit of sulfur dioxide does is cool the Earth as long as we need it to, stabilizing the climate. I do not support this so we can keep on polluting, just give us time.

It costs about 250 million to set up; compared to Nicholas Stern's 1 trillion cost to reduce carbon emissions it's pretty cheap. And people around the world just aren't motivated to reduce their emissions by guilt alone, maybe a lot of the developed world is but not the developing world, which accounts for 52% of emissions.

* Whether climate change is actually man made or not is still up for debate, but this solution doesn't need an answer.

Not sure but either way, I think this is probably a subject for the Off Topic forum...

It's bloody freezing at the moment, so let's cross the "it's bloody boiling" bridge when it warms up a bit eh?

onlainari wrote: Climate will change, sea water will expand and rise

Just to point out that the water will not physically expand very much; it is the ice melt water that will cause the sea levels to rise, as all the ice that is currently on the land will drain off into the rivers and from there be carried into the oceans, leading to a rise in sea levels.

Moving to OT Forum.

A much quicker way is for the US or Russia to Nuke China and India. Nuclear winter will help cool the planet and the distinct drop in population will help with resources.

Of course I watched 'The Road' last week and am already stocking up for the fall....

The higher temperatures are not necessarily caused by man made global warming, but by a cyclical pattern of heating and cooling that has been going on for millions of years. For example, at the time of the dinosaurs, the average global temperatures were 10 degrees higher than today. Then it cooled down due to the impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, warmed up again, then an ice age, etc. The idea that we can so adversely effect the ENTIRE GLOBAL CLIMATE is absurd. As the the climategate scandal showed, all of the climate change "scientists" are merely fudging the numbers to support their "theory" without looking at past geologic data regarding global climate change. The world is getting hotter, so we MUST BE THE CAUSE!

Global warming is bull . The scientific community has several theories but summed up the earth goes through several warm and cool periods in its history and no one theory holds down well. Hell, even the magnetic poles have switched sides several times. Based on ice records carbon levels are about level and really the only impact we have is pollution pollution. Y'know, acid rain and destroying water tables. The ozone hole also wasn't carbon emissions, it was CFCs so again chemical pollution.

Really, humans can't kill the earth. To paraphrase George Carlin "If we ever started hurting the earth it would just shake us off like a bad case of fleas."

The only constant is change.

I'm in favor of reducing our impact on the planet, but we can't eliminate that impact. The odds of SO2 working as proposed with no side effects are pretty slim. There are always side effects.

Makov wrote:As the the climategate scandal showed, all of the climate change "scientists" are merely fudging the numbers to support their "theory" without looking at past geologic data regarding global climate change.

So I take it you know nothing about the incident other than what the media headlines spouted on the subject?

I am not suggesting the Earth is doing anything one way or the other, I am just suggesting that you look beyond what the newspapers push in order to sell more copies and actually realise the truth of the events behind the sound bites.

According to the climate change experts, the parts of England that aren't flooded will have a climate similar to the Mediterranean so it's all good here!

If you wanna say that the models computing climate change are questionable, ok fine. However aren't these same models the ones that would be predicting no major problems with pumping SO2 into the stratosphere?

Besides. Even 0.1% of current SO2 emissions is a tremendous amount of that gas.

Guys, the point of the thread is not to discuss climate change, it is to discuss what could be done to manipulate climate temperatures.

Some ideas for cooling the world down are to put particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight -- nuclear war is a quick option for this -- and to encourage algal blooms in the oceans, which would absorb CO2.

mrwhoop wrote:

Really, humans can't kill the earth.

Our impressive nuclear weapon stockpiles would suggest otherwise.

SilverMK2 wrote:

onlainari wrote: Climate will change, sea water will expand and rise

Just to point out that the water will not physically expand very much; it is the ice melt water that will cause the sea levels to rise, as all the ice that is currently on the land will drain off into the rivers and from there be carried into the oceans, leading to a rise in sea levels.

I have to point out you are incorrect, the ice melting is not the cause of water rising it is the expansion of water. http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/causes-of-sea-level-rise-from-climate-change

The graph clearly shows, especially at 2050, the massive difference between the two.


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Tyyr wrote:If you wanna say that the models computing climate change are questionable, ok fine. However aren't these same models the ones that would be predicting no major problems with pumping SO2 into the stratosphere?

Besides. Even 0.1% of current SO2 emissions is a tremendous amount of that gas.

While there has been modeling of SO2 emissions the fact is we have put that much SO2 into the stratosphere before and have seen what happens. Side effects and everything. It leaves the stratosphere after a year and as SO2 is an extremely inefficient degrader of ozone, the ozone completely recovers after three years. Apart from cooling the earth and blocking a bit of UV (like ozone), that's all it does.

When it gets absorbed and precipitates out that increases the acidity of the rain. Technically, anyway. All rain everywhere has sulfur dioxide in it (well, sulfuric acid which is made in a chemical reaction with sulfur dioxide); the increase this project has is very small, nowhere near enough to make acid rain.

I can't read the whole paper here at work but I have had a look at the graph, however, the difference in volume between 1g of (admittedly pure) water at 17 celcius and 1g of water at 26 celcius is 0.0021ml (at 1atm).

When you compare that to an entire ocean, where the temperature and pressure both rapidly decrease and increase (respectively) as you go further down, the overall expansion due to increased temperature is lessened further. I have no idea if they factored this into the information you link to, as I say, I can't read it all here at work.

I am not saying that the ocean would not rise due to increased temperature, but that the rise would not be as great as that due to increased quantity of water being added.

And I am saying you got your education from someone less qualified than I did. The sea level rise has got more to do with expansion of water than ice melting. Ice melting does make a good picture in a climate change ad campaign or documentary though.

Please when you have time this weekend, you can find out. For now I will not pursue this any further.

onlainari wrote:And I am saying you got your education from someone less qualified than I did. The sea level rise has got more to do with expansion of water than ice melting. Ice melting does make a good picture in a climate change ad campaign or documentary though.

I am not going to dispute education, as I have no idea what you are educated in, or who you are educated by (and I am sure the reverse is also true). Given you claim to have only head of the SO2 seeding plans a short while ago and that you were not a scientist, I assumed you were relatively new to the area.

My limited interest in the subject and hence limited reading in the field would suggest that expansion would not contribute as much as increased mass of water. Granted I have not read extensively, so I may be wrong.

Since I have nothing else I really need to do tonight, I will look into the matter.

Ice floating on water displaces the same volume of water as it contains in weight. Thus, when the ice melts, there is no increase of water level.

This means the melting of the Arctic ice will have no effect on sea levels in itself, however the melting of glaciers and the Antarctic ice will.

The thing about a tiny increase of volume as water heats up is that there is an awful lot of water in the oceans. About 1.37x10^9 Km^3, apparently.

I am aware of how floating ice works, don't worry

However, as I pointed out, a large quantity of that water is very cold and under a lot of pressure, meaning that it would take a great deal of heat to cause it to expand in any meaningful way.

Historical data and computer models do show that the ocean is a giant heatsink, but I will really have to go and read up more before I continue to push the idea that expansion is a less significant factor on sea levels.

reds8n wrote:

mrwhoop wrote:

Really, humans can't kill the earth.

Our impressive nuclear weapon stockpiles would suggest otherwise.

Historical astroid impacts dwarf the power of the worlds nuclear arsenals. The Chicxulub impact is estimated to have released 100,000,000 megatons of TNT. 2 million times more powerful than the worlds most powerful nuclear bomb. The Chicxulub impact was powerful and in no way destroyed the earth. I don't think our nuclear weapons would either. I'm not equating the death of life with the end of the earth. Even after the Chicxulub impact, life endured.

DarthDiggler wrote:Historical astroid impacts dwarf the power of the worlds nuclear arsenals. The Chicxulub impact is estimated to have released 100,000,000 megatons of TNT. 2 million times more powerful than the worlds most powerful nuclear bomb. The Chicxulub impact was powerful and in no way destroyed the earth. I don't think our nuclear weapons would either. I'm not equating the death of life with the end of the earth. Even after the Chicxulub impact, life endured.

I think the problem with that analogy is that asteriods do not produce vast quantities of radiation when they impact. They also can impact over the entire earths surface at once.

DarthDiggler this topic is less about if we could survive climate change (we can), and more about would we rather not change our climate, which before now was pie in the sky.

As the op. I'm not sure we would want the earth's climate to remain at 2010 levels indefinitly. The earth is a dynamic place. Ever changing and evolving. No one can be sure what would happen if we froze the earth's conditions in time over a long (millions of years) time. The earth's cycles of making rock, storing chemicals and molecules and then releasing them within a changing climate cold have unintended consequences.

It is also presumptous to assume that this time in earth's climate history is the best. Who's to say at a different time in the past the earth's climate wasn't better for a more wider range of biological life. In the end the attempt to freeze the earth's climate will most likely prove futile. The movement of the earth's crust, a process with no known way to stop, will see to an ever changing climate no matter what we do to CO2 levels.


Now here's the real insidious problem with earth's CO2 levels. Biotic respiration accounts for over 10 times more CO2 into the atnosphere than all the automobile tailpipes on the planet combined. We release it as we breath and there are more and more of us on the planet everyday. The only true way to curb CO2 emmisions is to eliminate the source, respiration, and that means you and me.

No one is planning of eliminating CO2 emissions, CO2 is very good for the planet. You're coming from an angle that is hard to attack. You've chosen your football team and I can't convince you to change teams no matter how many seasons it goes without the trophy.

Doug Stanhope's section from the excellent Screenwipe.

adult language

Personally, I don't think we are overpopulated. We were overpopulated when the world was at 2 billion people. Then ammonium nitrate was invented. Now people think we'll be overpopulated at 7 billion people. That's only with 2010 technology.

Who cares about the climate?

The party is over in 23 months anyway? Did you really think the Mayans were only joking?

Can I have all your money please? I don't need it right now, you can wire it to me the day before the apocalypse.

Kilkrazy wrote:Can I have all your money please? I don't need it right now, you can wire it to me the day before the apocalypse.

But KK, if he gives it to you, his bank account will be empty and that nice "lawyer" from the Ivory Coast won't get anything.