Nobelist Absurdity of the Day

Scientist: Inject Sulfur into Air to Battle Global Warming
By Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer

Injecting sulfur into the second atmospheric layer closest to Earth would reflect more sunlight back to space and offset greenhouse gas warming, according to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego.

Crutzen suggests carrying sulfur into the atmosphere via balloons and using artillery guns to release it, where the particles would stay for up to two years. The results could be seen in six months.

Great plan, Paul. On the plus side, at least one member of the NAS thinks there is still a reason for not melting down all artillery on the planet quite yet.

In a prior thread, d-day comments:

Your last two posts kind of contradict one another.

Volcanos and earthquakes and fires and anything that spews ash into the atmosphere absolutely have global cooling effects on the climate.

They can reasonably account for all the vast historical changes of the last million years, in fact. High volcanic activity and global Ice Ages correlate. The difference is that, all things being equal, industrial production has coincided with a warming trend that has a far greater probability of being manmade. Indeed, Pinatubo erupted in 1991 and dropped climate a tad, but failed to stall the warming trend.

Au contraire, mon frere. Read your own post back. Yes, volcanos and anything else spewing ash into the atmosphere can cause global cooling. But that does not account for all of the 'vast historical changes' in global climate. You've covered the cooling side, but then, what makes it warm back up?

There is of course no simple answer to that question, though, as I've pointed out before, cyclically -variable solar output is the most logical prime factor (and would also go some way toward explaining why the polar caps are also melting on Mars), which m12edit summarized so succinctly in his response:

m12edit said...

so why is it that we're approaching the high temperature in both the 110k year cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.png) and in the 700 yr cycle (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7149/2767/1600/Spotlight_281_Page_2.jpg), not forgetting the 22k year cycle between ice ages. I think the point is that Gore is a hysteria monger, there's more going on than we have a clue about, all signs point to the Earth warming on all short and long term time scales, and that the sky isn't falling. BTW, note that 110k years ago it was 1.5 degrees C (almost 3 degrees F) warmer, and 330k years ago it was about 1.25 degrees C warmer. Also check out this link http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/geos462/21climastro.html regarding orbital varience and climate change. Now, with all this, and though I agree we should limit pollution (everybody's pollution including developing nations--which is why Kyoto is terrible), can you say with certainty, even probability that global warming is happening primarily because of us? What really scares me are the scientists who are devising plan to deliberately cool the atmosphere. I feel like a plan to influence global warming/cooling directly and specifically could really screw things up--road to Hell being paved with good intentions and all.

I am with m12 on this: I consider myself an environmentalist and think MUCH more pressure should be brought to bear on Russia and China (and Mexico, and...) to stop treating the planet like their personal garbage disposal, but I also think that Kyoto was a farce as it held 'developing nations' to almost no standards, while espousing draconian limits on 1st world nations that would effectively cripple our economies.

And therein lies my annoyance with the global-warming crowd. Their war is not so much against the potential 1 degree F increase over the next 100 years so much as it is channeled hostility against modernization, industrialization, and mankind itself, and more specifically against what they perceive to be 1st world exploitative capitalism (whose benefits they so obliviously enjoy while simultaneously railing against -- all the gratitude and realism of a spoiled, Ché-t-shirt-wearing rich kid screaming quotations from Chairman Mao's little red book at bourgeois Daddy while in the safety and air-conditioning of their Calabasas cul-de-sac home with kidney-shaped pool).

The other thing that annoys me is that, for a crowd who sneers at Bush as a simpleton who doesn't understand "nuance," they are themselves guilty of incredibly simplistic thinking when blaming seemingly all the world's ills on SUVs -- while ignoring the (literally) blindingly obvious other explanation up in the sky.

I would argue that their obsession with SUVs again is a mask - that the real object of their hatred is families and power and masculinity and all the other things we learned were Evil in PoMo indoctrination camp college, but I'm late on deadline and that's a discussion for another day.