Global Warming is real. But the way we have chosen to fight it is ineffective. Even if we could stop all production of greenhouse gases (and that’s not going to happen), the concentration of these pernicious gases that we have built up since the beginning of the Industrial Age would not decrease significantly for many hundreds of years. What we are doing is too little and too late. We need time to go green; otherwise we will bankrupt ourselves in a futile effort to do this in just a few decades.
The adverse effects of global warming are already happening. The ice sheets of the Arctic Ocean are disappearing. Glaciers are sliding into the sea. An ice sheet seven times the size of Manhattan Island has just broken off from Antarctica (the poles react to global warming first). Coral reefs are dying and bleaching white in all of our oceans. Lakes are warming up, failing to mix as often as necessary to keep them from becoming polluted, and many of them are beginning to lose their pristine blue color (they expect this to happen to Lake Tahoe in less than ten years). And our governments are warning coastal communities to prepare for increased flooding.
Many of our most accomplished climatologists and atmospheric scientists have encouraged our attempts to reduce our output of greenhouse gases, but they have also suggested methods of stopping and even reversing adverse climate change by other means to stop impending disasters. The sources for the following opinions and technical recommendations are listed in the final two paragraphs of this article. The methods suggested by these scientists are in the category of geo-engineering. Specifically, these methods are called “Solar-Shade Technology.” Solar-shade technology can stop and even reverse global warming in less than a year. These technologies are designed to block or reflect back less than two percent of the sun’s light/heat energy before it penetrates our atmosphere. But it will take years to investigate these technologies, to develop and implement them and to figure out how to shut them down rapidly if they manifest any unacceptable adverse effects. Some of these technologies will be expensive, but they will not interfere with the economic progress of the world.
Solar-shade technology is not being talked about or published to the public primarily because the world’s governments and scientists do not want to discourage the efforts we are making to reduce our output of greenhouse gases. The scientists are also concerned about the possibility of unintended, non-linear (unpredictable) adverse effects of some of these new technologies. The governments of the world are not presently funding the research that we must undertake to develop and to test various sun-shade technologies to determine which are the most promising. Government authorities are discouraging open discussions of solar-shade technology. We cannot afford to delay this research any longer, and public knowledge is now a necessity to get this process started.
The cheapest and easiest solar-shade technology is to inject sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. This is the way that volcanic eruptions have produced periods of global cooling. This sulfur dioxide forms sulfate particles of 0.1 micrometers in diameter. This would block just enough sunlight, but permit the infrared heat radiation from the Earth to escape back into space. There are many suggested methods of getting the sulfur dioxide into our upper atmosphere, but each injection would last only a little more than a year. A periodic replenishing of the sulfur dioxide would be necessary. A possible adverse side effect of this method would be an increase in the Earth’s acid rain because some of the sulfur could form weak solutions of sulfuric acid.
Another method of reflecting back sunlight would be to fabricate and place large sheets of highly- reflective materials in large sheets on the Earth’s surface, such as unpopulated land areas, and as floating islands on our oceans (away from shipping lanes, of course). This is the way that polar ice reflects back sunlight, but these polar ice fields are melting away, especially in the Arctic Ocean and this is accelerating global warming.
Other methods include placing extremely light-weight reflective shields in low Earth orbit, or putting hydrogen or helium-filled tiny reflective balloons into our upper atmosphere. Potential drawbacks could include interference with our space projects and our communications to and from space. Interference with our optical and radio telescopes is also possible.
Another reflective technique would be lacing our clouds with aerosols designed to make these clouds more reflective of sunlight. Evaporation stations could also be scattered on the high seas to vaporize water mixed with these aerosols to build up this reflective cloud cover. How this would affect atmospheric and surface conditions on the Earth is not yet known because we haven’t developed such aerosols at present.
Still another imaginative idea to block a small portion of incoming sunlight is to use lunar dust particles injected at two stable positions in the moon’s orbit to create two dust clouds that would each pass between the Earth and the sun once a month, blocking sunlight for approximately 20 hours each month. Some scientists have pointed out that these dust clouds might reflect extra sunlight onto the Earth when they are not in position to block sunlight. This would have to be studied further and evaluated to ascertain that the blocking effect would exceed any possible reflection of the sun towards the Earth.
The most expensive of these solar-shade technologies would also be the most stable. An astronomer has suggested the placing of silicon disks into gravitational-stable L-1 positions between the Earth and the sun to scatter sunlight before it can reach the Earth. These discs would have to be radio controlled to keep them in place for very long periods of time. And somebody would have to monitor and control the locations of these discs and send out radio signals to keep them in place in the L-1 zone for hundreds of years. It will take that long to get rid of the pernicious greenhouse gases which have accumulated and are still accumulating in our atmosphere.
All of these technologies may seem a bit radical, but our current efforts to stop or even reduce our production of greenhouse gases are as one scientist has stated, “a pious dream.” Our efforts are not working and they will not and cannot be made to work in anything approaching the time frame that global-warming conferences have demanded. We are currently employing the Titanic School of Management to address the problem of adverse climate change. We didn’t keep a sharp lookout on what was ahead of us. We have already hit the terrible obstacle of global warming, and some of us are denying the reality of what is happening to us. If global warming continues, and we are certainly not using adequate means to stop it, it is likely that the methane locked under the sea beds and under the arctic tundra will be released in giant methane burps. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and such burps will very likely initiate a global warming run-away. The probable result will be a 15 to 20 foot rise in sea level in the foreseeable future. The world’s coastal areas would be flooded, our low-elevation cities and regions would have to be abandoned, and it is possible that almost one billion people would have to be relocated. Or they would relocate themselves and invade higher ground inland. This would not be a peaceful or orderly process.
The democracies of the world are under a special obligation to trust their citizens. Stopping the emission of greenhouse gases is a necessary goal, but this is not possible in the time frame that we have available before we are hit by global disasters. There are other factors to consider, also. The idea that the developed nations of the world should stop the production, transportation and other greenhouse gas producing activities to let the developing nations such as China, India and Russia have a free pass to continue their economic development is a bad plan. We simply won’t do this. Our economies would collapse under the additional competitive disadvantages this impossible idea would impose upon us. And even if we did this, and we persuaded the developing nations to give up their economic progress and stop their rising productivity, and take away their new cars from their citizens and put them back on bicycles, it still wouldn’t work. Global warming has too big of a head start. We are going to have to implement one or more of the better options we have to do the necessary research and put solar-shield technologies in place to buy time to go green. It will take us hundreds of years to get rid of the greenhouse gases already in our atmosphere. Meanwhile, we will go green gradually, and we will have the time that we need to rid ourselves of the pernicious pollution that threatens our entire world.
The sources accessed to list the above ideas include many of the world’s most distinguished climatologists, atmospheric scientists and astronomers. They are leaders in these fields and have extremely important positions all over the world. They have published their ideas and research in various scientific journals, but have been cautious about releasing their opinions in general publications. Al Gore is not a scientist, but he has done a fine job of calling our attention to “An Inconvenient Truth,” and won himself a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, he does not seem to realize that we cannot stop global warming by stopping our production of greenhouse gases. Paul J. Crutzen has a Nobel Prize for the work he did in identifying the causes and coming up with the solution to our disappearing protective ozone shields at the Earth’s poles. It was he who published a Scientific Essay on “Albedo Enhancement By Stratospheric Sulfur Injections.” In this same paper he called our current efforts to stop adverse climate change by stopping our release of greenhouse gases, “a pious dream.”
Stephen Schneider, a climate researcher at Stanford University, made early contributions to the concept of geo-engineering projects that could be used to counteract global warming. Several of the ideas listed above are also his. NASA Physicist, James Hansen, has published papers which show that a sea level rise of several meters is almost inevitable if we don’t or can’t stop the increasing greenhouse gas accumulations. He has objected to government attempts to muzzle scientists who have tried to speak out on the inconvenient truths that we are facing and the inadequate means we are employing to stop global warming. Stanford Physicist , Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, has organized workshops to study solar-shade technology and is another pioneer in the methods of injecting sulfur dioxide into our upper atmosphere. Roger Angel at the university of Arizona, who is the Astronomer who designed and produced many of the world’s largest telescope mirrors, came up with the ideas of placing silicon discs in L-1 zones to scatter sunlight. He worked with Pete Worden of NASA’s Ames research Center to develop methods of injecting these discs in L-1 zones and keeping them there as long as they are needed (probably for centuries). Curtis Struck at Iowa State university came up with ideas of using lunar dust clouds placed In orbit around the moon to block some incoming sunlight. Ken Schneider and Damon Matthews (both at Carnegie), and Wally Broecker, Geologist and Paleoclimatologist, Columbia University, have pointed out that all of these geo-engineering projects must be researched, but used only with extreme caution and only if conditions worsen to such an extent that we have to use them. Almost none of these scientists is wildly enthusiastic about having to employ any of these geo-engineering, solar-shade technologies, but all of them have expressed opinions to the effect that we must do the necessary research to develop these technologies in case we need to deploy them. But none of this research is going to receive adequate funding until the governments of the world get realistic about the inadequate means we are currently using to stop global warming before the aforementioned disasters are upon us. Greenhouse gas reduction is a noble and necessary goal, but it will not stop or even slow down global warming for many centuries. Solar-shade technology is the only hope we have of stopping and reversing the adverse climate changes we are already experiencing .
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