Climate 'science' gone wild: UK researchers to pump toxic sulfates into sky to promote global coolin

[redrumloa]

In the 70's scientists wanted to cover glacier with black coal dust to induce melting due to fears of a coming ice age and global cooling. Most would now shake their head or look back with fright at such an idea. In 40 years people will look back at this proposal with equal fright. That is assuming these morons do not actually proceed.

 

[the_leander]

In the 70's scientists wanted to cover glacier with black coal dust to induce melting due to fears of a coming ice age and global cooling. Most would now shake their head or look back with fright at such an idea.

Oh you're right they would shake their heads, but more because it doesn't work - as the ice melts the pigment gets diffused and as it does so it's effectiveness decreases.

IIRC the idea was trialled not as a means to halt global cooling, but to help speed up the melting of icebergs to reduce the number of ships and gas/oil rigs getting hit by them. Previously they had tried to use high explosives, but found that large blocks of ice is quite tolerant of things going bang on or near its surface.

 

[faethor]

Oceans contain Marine Phytoplankton,Coralline algae, & Coral which all absorb CO2,
and absorbed quite a lot in the geological past when the CO2 level was much higher

Again the ocean exchanges CO2 not only does it absorb it also off-gasses. The ocean is one option thought to be useful to store CO2, as you write. When something has more CO2 it becomes more basic. As the ocean moves more basic animals that don't like that will die off. Plants, generally, that do like that would increase. -- Though this is 'only a theory'...

 

[Karlos]

Trying to simulate the effect of Volcanism on the atmosphere for $30k .... hmmm,

If an actual volcano were to erupt, say on Iceland, it might send a plume as high as 18000 ft into the atmosphere. Then climate scientists could study if there were any effects of albedo changes, but alas, all recent volcanic eruptions have been too small to have any measurable effects .

Recent ones, perhaps. However, there have been enough in recorded history that happened to be followed by years of unusually cool weather out-of-place enough to be noted by people at the time. However, I must say that I find the idea of stratospheric sulfuric acid aerosol an impractical one. The quantities of material required to simulate the effects of a large volcanic eruption, say on the scale of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption (which resulted in an estimated global drop of around 1.2C for several years) is not something we can feasibly reproduce.

 

[Karlos]

Which is nothing compared to what a category VEI-8 "supervolcano" eruption would do. Part of the lake district in the UK is the remnant of one of those (the Scarfell peaks) that went of 400M years ago. There hasn't been anything like that in recorded history. However, there is a modern-day potential example over in Yellowstone...

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

The quantities of material required to simulate the effects of a large volcanic eruption, say on the scale of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption (which resulted in an estimated global drop of around 1.2C for several years) is not something we can feasibly reproduce.

Though before we cleaned up our emissions humans were pumping a lot of SO2 into the air while burning high sulphur coal, oil and gas. That seems to have held temperatures at bay a little. Currently China is looking at cleaning up their energy sector too, and for the same reason. Acid rain fallout.

 

[Karlos]

Though before we cleaned up our emissions humans were pumping a lot of SO2 into the air while burning high sulphur coal, oil and gas. That seems to have held temperatures at bay a little. Currently China is looking at cleaning up their energy sector too, and for the same reason. Acid rain fallout.

There's a difference there though, that's tropospheric SO2, which soon gets rained out and causes the problems associated with acid rain (most notably that it causes aluminium in clays to dissolve and get taken up by plants, where it competes with magnesium in chlorophyll and basically starves them to death, assuming the pH doesn't get so low as to cause other morbidities first). Stratospheric aerosols remain up there for many years however.

 

[metalman]

Recent ones, perhaps. However, there have been enough in recorded history that happened to be followed by years of unusually cool weather out-of-place enough to be noted by people at the time. However, I must say that I find the idea of stratospheric sulfuric acid aerosol an impractical one. The quantities of material required to simulate the effects of a large volcanic eruption, say on the scale of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption (which resulted in an estimated global drop of around 1.2C for several years) is not something we can feasibly reproduce.

aah, Krakatoa gets all the press! but if your simulating climate change, use Tambora as the model

The 1815 Eruption of Tambora, "the year with no Summer" the largest known ash-producing eruption in the last 10,000 years, reducing the volcano to half its former size.

It is speculated it was the volcanic eruption of Rabaul Caldera, New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea around 540 AD that caused the collapse of the ancient world.