[dissident]

Injecting 10 million tons of SO2 at 30 km (it will not be effective at 20 km) every year is not technologically feasible.

1) Building towers this high is absurd.

2) No aircraft can cruise at 30 km (22 km is the ceiling and only U2 type aircraft can do it). I have actually seen seminars where aircraft were being proposed; these people clearly had no clue about stratospheric transport.

3) sending in rockets or firing shells from massive guns on the surface is just insane. The chemical impact from propellant release and any explosive dispersion in the stratosphere would be huge.

Geoengineering is technotopian magical thinking.

[onlooker]

So, I find this article detailing different possibilities for Geoengineering. I hope you guys can comment as this is looking like maybe the only way left to keep the climate system from becoming totally hostile to most life currently on Earth. In particular Tanada and Dissident what do you think of "Another approach is suggested by Nualgi.com who propose to add iron and other trace metals/micro nutrients to the water in order to stimulate growth of a specific type of phytoplankton called diatom algae, which through photosynthesis absorb carbon dioxide in the water and add oxygen. The oxygen is then used by methanotroph bacteria to oxidize methane. "
Here is link to full article http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/oxyge ... rctic.html

[JV153]

So, I find this article detailing different possibilities for Geoengineering. I hope you guys can comment as this is looking like maybe the only way left to keep the climate system from becoming totally hostile to most life currently on Earth. In particular Tanada and Dissident what do you think of "Another approach is suggested by Nualgi.com who propose to add iron and other trace metals/micro nutrients to the water in order to stimulate growth of a specific type of phytoplankton called diatom algae, which through photosynthesis absorb carbon dioxide in the water and add oxygen. The oxygen is then used by methanotroph bacteria to oxidize methane. "
Here is link to full article http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/oxyge ... rctic.html

Might work.. but how you prevent it from sucking up all the CO2, which might be a problem, for obvious reasons.

[onlooker]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... are_btn_fb
Could a £400bn plan to refreeze the Arctic before the ice melts really work?

[Tanada]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/12/plan-to-refreeze-arctic-before-ice-goes-for-good-climate-change?CMP=share_btn_fb
Could a £400bn plan to refreeze the Arctic before the ice melts really work?

That plan would be an unmitigated disaster. The water below the ice is above freezing, so pumping it out onto the existing ice means it would transfer about half of that energy to the existing ice and the other half to the atmosphere. Given the fact that ice accumulates energy faster than water releases it this plan would not thicken the ice, quite the opposite in fact. The only remotely possible way for this to work would be to desalinate the water into high purity fresh water and then chill it under high pressure. The last step would be spraying it out as a super cooled fluid a few meters above the ice so it will crystallize before reaching the ice floating on the surface. That is an enormously more complicated plan and needless to say it would also cost many times the proposed cost to actually build and operate such a system. We can't even get people to build desalination systems on the California coast when they have frequent droughts, what do you think the odds are of getting them to build such an insane number on the Siberian/Alaska/Canada/Greenland coast? No point in building them in Scandinavia, the gulf stream keeps ice away from that coast.

[onlooker]

Thanks T. on second thought maybe no thanks haha

[Rod_Cloutier]

I saw this interesting and alarming interview today about how chemtrail spraying has been intensified. The fellow being interviewed, Dane Washington, knows his stuff, clearly he is not a tinfoil hat nut, and it is worrisome about the quantities of poisons being dumped into the air right now in order to deflect sunlight and accomplish SRM.

"We are facing converging cataclysms. When people focus on jobs, economy and retirement, how much will any of that matter if we have a planet that doesn’t support life? If we lose our habitat and every breath we take is full of toxic heavy metal that is making us sicker and dumber by the day . . . . And my only goal is to bring this issue to light and to a halt. We know we have major collusion between all the major powers in the world on this issue. The single biggest leap we can take in the right direction is to expose and stop weather engineering which is weather warfare, and stop these programs (commonly known as chemtrails) in their tracks.” "

https://youtu.be/oKItH69Jj2M?t=41s

He also has a website devoted to stop the spraying which has numerous interesting videos, articles and commentary:

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/

[Zarquon]

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/

"The latest completely engineered winter weather assault to be launched on US populations is the theatrically named "Winter Storm Europa" How severe does the rapidly worsening weather whiplash have to get before populations face the fact that ongoing global climate engineering/weather warfare programs are decimating and derailing Earth's climate and life support systems?
...
The storm severity map below clearly shows the epicenter of the extreme weather from "WInter Storm Europa" is directly on top of the Dakota Water Protector protest zone."

"From climate engineering to forced vaccinations, the walls are closing in. All of us are needed in the critical effort to sound the alarm."

"It is imperative that we all work together toward the goal of making the population as a whole understand that virtually all their “weather” is being completely manipulated. That there is NO NATURAL WEATHER at this point. That we are all the victims of “weather warfare” and many of us will soon be climate refugees if we are not able to bring the climate engineering to light and to a halt. On top of all this we are all literally being poisoned by the toxic metal fallout from these programs, but that’s another story."

"The picture above is the HAARP ionosphere heating facility in Alaska. There are numerous ionosphere heating installations around the globe that are used to manipulate the jet stream into historically unprecedented patterns."

"Those that choose to believe these blatant lies simply do not yet want to wake up. Here is the fact of the matter, all commercial jet aircraft and all military tankers are fitted with a type of jet engine that is by design nearly incapable of producing any condensation trail except under the most extreme circumstances, the high bypass turbofan."

http://usawatchdog.com/chemtrails-are-g ... wigington/

Clearly not a tinfoil hat nut. Not at all. And he needs YOUR donation!

[onlooker]

Okay here are seven Geoengineering ideas that this article claims could "Save Humans from Climate Change" Critiques welcomed
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-scien ... hange.html
1. Spray Sulfate Aerosols Into The Atmosphere
Though cited by a number of reports as being rather risky due to potential unintended consequences, the idea behind spraying sulfur particles into the atmosphere goes something like this: By using large balloons or aircraft to put more sulfur particles into the stratosphere, you could reduce the Earth's absorption of of sunlight and prompt planetary cooling. Similar to what happens when volcanoes erupt and put ash and sulfur into the air.

The downside? According to an article in Science doing this could trigger chemical reactions which would lead to destruction of the ozone layer.
2. Trap CO2 in Carbon Scrubbers

Perhaps two years from being manufactured, researchers at Columbia University say that soon they may have a working carbon scrubber which could take one ton of CO2 out of the air per day. Small than a standard shipping container in size, and about $200,000 in price, these carbon scrubbers trap CO2 entering them on an ion exchange resin. The CO2 then can be either buried or used in other ways. Sounds like an interesting idea? It is, but as the device's developers point out, hundreds of millions of these would have to be deployed to suck up all the excess carbon emissions so this would only be part of any planetary medicine we'd be practicing.
3. Fertilizing Trees With Nitrogen
The idea here is said easily enough: Fertilize trees with nitrogen to stimulate their ability to absorb more carbon dioxide and, by increasing their albedo, reflect more solar radiation back into space. Voila! You've begun cooling the planet. Not so fast...

Fellow TreeHugger Jeremy Elton Jacquet :

For one thing, little is still known about the relationship between albedo and nitrogen; even if the nutrient does act as a switch that changes the leaves' structure to increase their albedo, only certain species would be able to take advantage of this property. As a result, if we wanted to apply this method on a sufficiently large scale to effect carbon emissions, we would have to plant entire forests made just out of those few species.
And then there are all the environmental downsides associated with high nitrogen concentrations: nitrous oxide emissions (a far more potent greenhouse gas), groundwater contamination and drying (trees that consume larger amounts of nitrogen need more water), just to name a few.

4.Aerial Reforestation
Planting new trees in areas deforested by natural disaster or human action could increase the carbon sink potential of a given area of land, but given how much previously forested land has been cleared of trees in recent years, to complete the job quickly enough some scientists have proposed using airplanes to drop tree seedlings over wide areas of land.

Tested on an episode of Discovery Project Earth, tree seedlings were encased in a variety of biodegradable containers (to test which cradled the tree best for its journey back to Earth) and dropped from slow moving airplanes. As the episode shows, bringing an idea like this from concept to fruition is easier said than done. Without entirely giving away the show's ending, we all better grab the nearest spade and get planting trees. At least until better delivery methods are developed.

5. Dump Limestone into the Oceans
This one's a bit of a ringer in the group, in that rather than combatting global warming directly, plans for dumping powdered limestone in the ocean would mainly address anticipated increasing ocean acidity. Due to these changes in pH levels in the world's oceans brought about by climate change, most of the planet's coral reefs could be wiped out, with devastating consequences for marine life and the humans which depend on it. But, by adding large amounts of powdered limestone to the sea these changes in water acidity could be checked--with the added bonus of increasing carbon sequestration as well.

If you're wondering about side effects, you're not alone. At this point the whole procedure is very much theoretical, add even if everything went exactly as planned it could take decades and billions of tons of limestone for the plan to work.
6.Ocean Iron Fertilization
Essentially mimicking natural processes, ocean iron fertilization hopes to stimulate the rate of photosynthesis in phyto plankton, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide which is absorbed, and creating essentially an artificial algae bloom. The thing is that the CO2 absorbed has to sink to sufficient depth (a couple of miles) so that it won't simply be circulated back up into the atmosphere.

How effectively this works is a debate that swings both ways: A recent study published in Nature says that at least in one experiment in the Crozet Islands the results were less than stellar. The carbon sequestered was far less than theoretically predicted. That said, not everyone agrees with the conclusion drawn by both the researchers or journalists (predictions of ocean iron fertilization's death are greatly exaggerated...) on the effectiveness of this procedure.

However, new tests in the South Atlantic have recently begin given permission to proceed which will study the role of iron in the global climate system. The organizers of the study, the Alfred Wegener Institut, specifically say that they are not study ocean iron fertilization, but nevertheless, the results of their research will be of interest to both proponents and opponents of this geoengineering procedure.
7.Enrich Soils With Biochar
Sometimes called a modern version of the ancient Amazonian agricultural practice of Terra Preta, biochar promises to both enrich soils and soak up excess carbon dioxide. How it works is this:

Biochar is a fine-grained charcoal high in organic carbon and largely resistant to decomposition. It is produced from pyrolysis of plant and waste feedstocks. As a soil amendment, biochar creates a recalcitrant soil carbon pool that is carbon-negative, serving as a net withdrawal of atmospheric carbon dioxide stored in highly recalcitrant soil carbon stocks. The enhanced nutrient retention capacity of biochar-amended soil not only reduces the total fertilizer requirements but also the climate and environmental impact of croplands. Char-amended soils have shown 50 - 80 percent reductions in nitrous oxide emissions and reduced runoff of phosphorus into surface waters and leaching of nitrogen into groundwater. As a soil amendment, biochar significantly increases the efficiency of and reduces the need for traditional chemical fertilizers, while greatly enhancing crop yields. Renewable oils and gases co-produced in the pyrolysis process can be used as fuel or fuel feedstocks. Biochar thus offers promise for its soil productivity and climate benefits. (International Biochar Initiative)
Sounds easy, but will it actually do any good? A recent study on different geoengineering methods said that, combined with reforestation, biochar has greater short term cooling potential than ocean fertilization, and that it was a "win-win for soil fertility as well as the climate." What's more, James Lovelock calls biochar our one last chance to save ourselves from devastating temperature increases.

[onlooker]

Very good points P. Yes, undeniably all these grand schemes would require prodigious amounts of energy. That is one obstacle, the other is more like a risk in that these plans could have side effects and make things worse rather than better (the law of unintended consequences). Finally, as you rightly point out PO is going to take the first big bite out of Industrial Civilization not climate change. Myopic vision in this case is good.

[careinke]

Onlooker, I agree with P, with the exception of Biochar, that all of these schemes require vast amounts of energy making them impractical, uneconomical, and probably environmentally degrading.

Even Biochar is not economical on a large scale mass produced bases. Transportation of the feedstock's to the production facilities, processing, and then shipping back out to be buried would require a lot of ever dwindling energy. Good biochar has to be produced at certain temps and quickly cooled. This all adds to the price of biochar, making it a rather expensive soil amendment. Still, all hope is not gone.

Biochar is easier to implement at the local level, using local feedstock's, local construction materials, and local use of the biochar. By applying some permaculture principles the process can be profitable and regenerative. Lots of experimentation is going on with biochar on the small scale (village on down to the individual).

The smallest application is the use of cook stoves in poor countries that make biochar while producing heat for cooking. once the meal is cooked the biochar is cooled and put out in the garden. The stoves use less wood than the traditional cook fires while at the same time producing a soil amendment, (among other uses), that will also reduce the amount of water and nutrients needed for the soil to produce food. Local businesses have already been set up in several countries to produce and sell these stoves.

On a little larger scale, you can build a "TLUD" Biochar maker fairly inexpensively to make your own biochar pretty easily. You can check this out on You Tube.

Scale up a little and you can use the heat produced to dry your feedstock or heat your greenhouse. Throw your biochar into your active air compost tea mixture and you have a super inoculant that restores life to your soil requiring less and less inputs as the years go by.

Bottom line, I don't think you can do biochar in a centralized massive way, but you can do it with a massive number of little projects. Plus it would be good for the earth, good for people, and good for the future. Basically following the three Permaculture ethics.

[Tanada]

Good biochar has to be produced at certain temps and quickly cooled. This all adds to the price of biochar, making it a rather expensive soil amendment. Still, all hope is not gone.

Biochar is easier to implement at the local level, using local feedstock's, local construction materials, and local use of the biochar. By applying some permaculture principles the process can be profitable and regenerative. Lots of experimentation is going on with biochar on the small scale (village on down to the individual).

Who gets to determine what is 'good biochar' and why do you trust their opinion? The Amazonian amerinds manufactured the stuff for centuries under all sorts of variable conditions and here we are 500 to 1,000 years later finding that their biochar has persisted in the hot wet jungle environment and is still both sequestering carbon and acting as a very valuable soil amendment.

Somehow the 'academics' got ahold of the idea of biochar and immediately wrote that it had to be produced under certain conditions to have the best possible qualities. Then this ultimate best quality was defined as 'good' and all other qualities were automatically downgraded to useless in the media and then that spread through the permie community.

The perfect is not only difficult to achieve on any kind of consistent basis, the perfect is the enemy of good. Not to mention that the 'perfect' as defined by the academics has only been tested on very short cycles.

We do know certain facts, primitively produced biochar lasts for hundreds to thousands of years in tropical soils where other forms of organic carbon rapidly decay into CO2. Primatively produced biochar used as a soil amendment has massively improved the tropical soils where it was added. Primatively produced biochar has kept the carbonaceous material (mostly wood) used in its manufacture from decaying into CO2 effectively sequestering it for many lifetimes.

Knowing just those three facts I think it is a massive mistake to get hung up on whether the biochar manufactured is the best quality possible as determined from what are actually very short term life cycle studies. Every bit of biochar used as a soil amendment is sequestered carbon, which is a good thing. Every bit of biochar used as a soil amendment adds to the organic carbon level of the soil and has a medium and long term effect of improving the soil in terms of workability and retention of minerals that act as fertilizers for plants. The only question at all is the short term effect of biochar which has given a broad range of results. Some research plots with first season biochar have done great, others have been no better or slightly worse than unamended soil. From all the data I have looked over it appears that treating the new biochar with compost tea or even urine solves the first season raw biochar tendency to absorb nutrients from the existing soil.

[yellowcanoe]

That plan would be an unmitigated disaster. The water below the ice is above freezing, so pumping it out onto the existing ice means it would transfer about half of that energy to the existing ice and the other half to the atmosphere. Given the fact that ice accumulates energy faster than water releases it this plan would not thicken the ice, quite the opposite in fact. The only remotely possible way for this to work would be to desalinate the water into high purity fresh water and then chill it under high pressure. The last step would be spraying it out as a super cooled fluid a few meters above the ice so it will crystallize before reaching the ice floating on the surface. That is an enormously more complicated plan and needless to say it would also cost many times the proposed cost to actually build and operate such a system.

I agree the idea is completely impractical, however the concept has been used on a much smaller scale and for an entirely different reason. Panarctic Oils in the early 70's drilled a number of wells on artificially thickened sections of ice. Once the ice had thickened enough in the fall to support a Twin Otter a crew equipped with pumps would be flown in. Sea water was pumped onto the surface to create an ice slab large enough and thick enough to support a drilling rig. They may also have pumped water to help construct a runway capable of handling larger aircraft. Once the ice slab was thick enough to support a drilling rig, the rig, drilling crew and everything else they would need was flown in on C-130 Hercules aircraft.

[onlooker]

Thanks,everyone for those erudite and informative responses, each one of you contributes valuable info.That why this site is great, many smart people. So, we seem to be zeroing in on Biochar as a present and future great asset for society. I think this site is painstakingly arriving at future options to maintain a viable modern society. So by being overly critical of any "solutions" we are applying the scientific method rigorously, to arrive at truly promising ideas. By the way what about how to make the ocean less acidic ?

[Cid_Yama]

Shows just how disingenuous Trump Administration climate change denial is. If it's a hoax, why do we need geoengineering?

Under the Trump administration, enthusiasm appears to be growing for the controversial technology of solar geo-engineering, which aims to spray sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space and decrease the temperature of Earth.

While geoengineering received little favour under Obama, high-level officials within the Trump administration have been long-time advocates for planetary-scale manipulation of Earth systems.

David Schnare, an architect of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition, has lobbied the US government and testified to Senate in favour of federal support for geoengineering.

He has called for a multi-phase plan to fund research and conduct real-world testing within 18 months, deploy massive stratospheric spraying three years after, and continue spraying for a century, a duration geoengineers believe would be necessary to dial back the planet’s temperature.

Geoengineers argue that such methods would be an inexpensive way to reduce global warming, but scientists have warned it could have catastrophic consequences for the Earth’s weather systems.

Scientific modelling has shown that stratospheric spraying could drastically curtail rainfall throughout Asia, Africa and South America, causing severe droughts and threatening food supply for billions of people.

“Clearly parts of the Trump administration are very willing to open the door to reckless schemes like David Keith’s, and may well have quietly given the nod to open-air experiments,” said Silvia Riberio, with technology watchdog ETC Group. “Worryingly, geoengineering may emerge as this administration’s preferred approach to global warming. In their view, building a big beautiful wall of sulphate in the sky could be a perfect excuse to allow uncontrolled fossil fuel extraction. We need to be focussing on radical emissions cuts, not dangerous and unjust technofixes.”

A White House report on climate change research submitted to Congress in January called for the first time ever for research into geoengineering.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has also appeared to support geoengineering, describing climate change as an “engineering problem.” ExxonMobil’s funding of the climate denial industry is under investigation by attorney generals in the United States, but it’s less well known that ExxonMobil scientists under Tillerson’s reign as CEO were leading developers of geo-engineering technologies like carbon dioxide removal.

Asked about solutions to climate change at an ExxonMobil shareholder meeting in 2015, Tillerson said that a “plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions.”

link

This is just downright criminal. And insane.

[Plantagenet]

Under the Trump administration, enthusiasm appears to be growing for the controversial technology of solar geo-engineering, which aims to spray sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space and decrease the temperature of Earth.

While geoengineering received little favour under Obama, high-level officials within the Trump administration have been long-time advocates for planetary-scale manipulation of Earth systems.

David Schnare, an architect of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition, has lobbied the US government and testified to Senate in favour of federal support for geoengineering.

He has called for a multi-phase plan to fund research and conduct real-world testing within 18 months, deploy massive stratospheric spraying three years after, and continue spraying for a century, a duration geoengineers believe would be necessary to dial back the planet’s temperature.

[/url]

This is just downright criminal. And insane.

Maybe. Maybe not.

We already know that sulphate aerosols can cool the atmosphere from observations of the climatic effects of volcanic eruptions. Given the dangers of global warming, it might smart to test this method to cool the planet.

Cheers!


One method for injecting sulphates into the upper atmosphere to artificially cool the climate

[dohboi]