Devil’s Bargain: Why Aerosols Pose a Deadly Climate Change Threat
"Geoengineering may be used to combat global warming, experts say "World leaders 'have moral obligation to act' after UN climate report" IPCC authors suggest there is high agreement that injection of chemicals into stratosphere could help limit rises "
We already have planet-cooling technology – the problem is, it’s killing us
By Eric Holthaus
We already have planet-cooling technology in aerosols – the problem is, they're killing us; inside the enormous threat to climate change K.M. Chaudary/AP
A trope of sci-fi movies these days, from Snowpiercer .. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/ to Geostorm .. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981128/ , is that our failure to tackle climate change .. https://www.rollingstone.com/t/climate-change/ .. will eventually force us to deploy an arsenal of unproven technologies to save the planet. Think sun-deflecting space mirrors or chemically altered clouds. And because these are sci-fi movies, it’s assumed that these grand experiments in geoengineering will go horribly wrong.
The fiction, new evidence suggests, may be much closer to reality than we thought.
When most people hear “climate change,” they think of greenhouse gases overheating the planet. But there’s another product of industry changing the climate that has received scant public attention: aerosols. They’re microscopic particles of pollution that, on balance, reflect sunlight back to space and help cool the planet down, providing a crucial counterweight to greenhouse-powered global warming .. https://www.rollingstone.com/t/global-warming/ .
An effort to co-opt this natural cooling ability of aerosols has long been considered a potential last-ditch, desperate shot at slowing down global warming. The promise of planet-cooling technology has also been touted by techno-optimists, Silicon Valley types and politicians who aren’t keen on the government doing anything to curb emissions. “Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year,” wrote Newt Gingrich in an attack on proposed .. http://humanevents.com/2008/06/03/stop-the-green-pig-defeat-the-boxerwarnerlieberman-green-pork-bill-capping-american-jobs-and-trading-americas-future/ .. cap-and-trade legislation back in 2008.
But there’s a catch. Our surplus of aerosols is a huge problem .. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Aerosols/ .. for those of us who like to breathe air. At high concentrations, these tiny particles are one of the deadliest substances in existence, burrowing deep into our bodies where they can damage hearts and lungs.
And yet we can’t live without aerosols, at least some of them. Natural aerosols – bits of dust, salt, smoke, and organic compounds emitted from plants – are an integral part of our planet’s atmosphere. Clouds probably wouldn’t be able to make rain .. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/meteo300/node/671 .. without them. But as with greenhouse gases, human activity has resulted in too many aerosols (the excess is air pollution), with the bulk of the human-emitted aerosols lingering in the lower atmosphere, worsening their impact on our health. The result is a devil’s bargain: Aerosols are necessary for normal weather and help moderate rising temperatures, but they’re also killing us.
- Turns out have been unwittingly geoengineering for decades, and just like in the movies, it’s gone off the rails. -
According to a new study, we might be locked in this deadly embrace. Research by an international team of scientists .. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL076079/full .. recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters says that the cooling effect of aerosols is so large that it has masked as much as half of the warming effect from greenhouse gases. So aerosols can’t be wiped out. Take them away and temperatures would soar overnight.
Turns out we have been unwittingly geoengineering for decades, and just like in the movies, it’s gone off the rails.
In 1990, the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a select group of the world’s top experts on climate science, said that “there is no doubt that aerosol particles influence the Earth’s climate.”
What’s clear is that they’re cooling us off. If we magically transformed the global economy overnight, and air pollution fell to near zero, we’d get an immediate rise in global temperatures of between 0.5 and 1.1 degrees Celsius, according to the new study. (For reference: The climate has warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.) The warming would be concentrated over the major cities of the northern hemisphere, close to where most aerosols are emitted. In the hardest hit parts of highly-urbanized East Asia, for example, the complete removal of aerosols would likely have a bigger effect than all other sources of climate change combined. Temperatures in the Arctic could jump as much as 4 degrees Celsius – a catastrophe that would shove the region further toward a permanently ice-free state .. https://grist.org/article/let-it-go-the-arctic-will-never-be-frozen-again/ .
“It is well understood that [aerosols’] presence is masking a substantial amount of greenhouse gas warming,” says Cat Scott, a research fellow at the University of Leeds whose own work .. shorturl.at/nHNO7 .. has helped scientists understand the cooling effect of aerosols.
This puts our increasingly interdependent global civilization in a tough bind. Get rid of carbon emissions to fight global warming and you get rid of aerosols, pushing temperatures back up.
So what do we do?
In this instance, Hollywood gets it right. Our reluctance to reduce carbon emissions fast enough makes the two goals of eliminating air pollution and limiting global warming mutually exclusive. On our current path, disaster is inevitable. The only choice might be to engage in a delicate and risky gamble. It would involve gradually eliminating pollution from factories and tailpipes; replacing them with artificial aerosols in the upper atmosphere where they’re much less likely to damage human health; and then hope nothing (else) goes seriously awry.
Instead of geoengineering being a last-ditch effort to avert the worst ravages of climate change, it’s going to have to be part of our toolkit to solve the problem.
The good news here is that previous attempts at removing harmful aerosols have proven largely successful, especially in the United States and Europe. The U.S. Clean Air Act, one of the most important fruits of the 1970s environmental movement, led to a sharp and nearly immediate fall in air pollution, likely saving millions of lives .. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/christina-angelides/1990-clean-air-act-will-save-42-million-lives-2020 .
“This is known territory, at least compared to massively reducing CO2 emissions,” says Bjorn Samset, research director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research and lead author of the study in Geophysical Research Letters.
Samset thinks the immediate health benefits of curbing air pollution mean that China will likely stick to these efforts, in spite of the potential warming effects. “It’s very plausible that Asian aerosol cleanup – which saves lives directly by reducing air pollution – can get prioritized over strong greenhouse gas cuts,” he explains.
If that happens, prepare for another surge in warming.
The second part of the film-inspired formula – pumping artificial aerosols into the upper atmosphere – should also work, in theory. Balloons and airplanes could spray benign aerosols like calcium carbonate (essentially crushed limestone), that would be carried by the wind throughout the upper atmosphere. One recent study estimated it would take 6,700 business jet flights per day – outfitted with spraying equipment – to keep enough aerosols in the stratosphere to cool the climate by one degree Celsius. The cost: $20 billion per year, more or less in-line with Gingrich’s estimate from a decade ago. It’s just that there’s plenty of uncertainty over what would happen next.
What was once the realm of scary science fiction and conspiracy theory is now entering the mainstream of atmospheric study – only those now conducting the experiments are clear about the risks.
“We really don’t know the effects of geoengineering,” he said. “That is why we’re doing this research.”
And if geoengineering with aerosols works to offset warming? That, too, could have disastrous side effects, according to another recent study .. shorturl.at/dizMS .. published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Embarking on a planetary-scale aerosol geoengineering project would produce “a wide range of unintended regional consequences,” Samset says. One of the biggest risks is that the cooling would work too well, producing shifts in ecosystems at “unprecedented speeds,” according to the Nature Ecology and Evolution study. That could be a fatal shock to animals and plants already stressed by decades of warming.
“I could imagine global conflicts breaking out over these type of actions,” says Susanne Bauer of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of Samset’s co-authors. “On the other hand, I do believe geoengineering must be studied, just to be aware and educated about the possibilities.”
Time is running short, but that doesn’t mean we should be reckless. We are fast entering a world in which there are no good options remaining to tackle climate change. Geoengineering is dangerous, but so are aerosols, and so is accelerating climate change. Absent a real-life Hollywood miracle, we’ll likely need to try some interventions that would have been better left to the movies.
It was a question reasonably based upon your climate change denial post. Are you 'science averse' too? Global warming is apparently inverse to the temperature of the sun, so by default human causes are the major influence on climate change. The sun's energy has decreased since the 1980s but the Earth keeps warming faster than before. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148155077 .. reproduced in part here .. Tearex, UQx DENIAL101x 4.2.1.1 Message from the past "You do know we can measure how much energy is emitted from the sun so your statement is laughable." .. with video ..
5-year period ending 2019 on pace to be hottest on record: UN
"Geoengineering may be used to combat global warming, experts say [...] But the authors warn there are major uncertainties about the social, environmental and ecological impacts, which mean the world would be far better off if policymakers strengthened natural cooling systems such as forest cover and accelerated efforts to reduce carbon emissions"
Date 22.09.2019
The world will need to increase efforts against climate change three-to-fivefold to prevent a 1.5-2 degree Celsius rise in temperature, a UN report found. The 2015-2019 period will be the hottest on record.
The world needs to dramatically ramp up action to prevent a climate disaster, with the five-year period ending 2019 set to be the hottest on record, a UN report said Sunday.
A World Meteorological Organization report released a day before world leaders gather in New York for a special UN climate summit said that the world has warmed already by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels and warming is accelerating.
In the five-year period from 2015-2019, the temperature "is currently estimated to be 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (1850-1900) times and 0.2 degrees Celsius warmer than 2011-2015," it said.
The four-year period from 2015-2018 was already the hottest since record keeping started in 1850.
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