Strongly agree with every word of this. SRM is the easy way to give overall cooling and whether Mythrvold is right, in saying that the right place to inject is the arctic, turns out to be correct only time and good models will tell. His argument for injecting in the arctic is slightly different from those of us who have suggested this previously. I, Greg Benford etc suggested saving the arctic without affecting the rest of the world too much. He seems to suggest that it is the right place to inject for general cooling.
Either way it seems likely that general cooling will probably leave some undesirable regional effects where the regional nature of cloud whitening would give us real control of the local effects. A whole new science -and not easy -but almost certainly necessary. John Gorman ----- Original Message ----- From: John Latham To: j...@cloudworld.co.uk Cc: Geoengineering ; Oliver Tickell Sent: Monday, December 28, 2009 2:33 AM Subject: [geo] Nathan Myhrvold argues for geoengineering: two schemes better than one? Hello John et al, Thank you, John, for drawing attention to the fascinating Nathan Myhrvold interview. In my view the stratospheric seeding SRM scheme developed by Nathan, Lowell Wood (both colossally brilliant and creative scientists) and others is very likely to work effectively if it were to be deployed: and funding for an examination of the idea and its ramifications should be made available as a matter of urgency. I?d argue also that two eggs in the basket are better than one, and that the cloud whitening (cloud albedo enhancement) scheme also holds significant promise of being able to stabilize the Earth?s temperature and polar sea-ice cover at about current values for some decades into the future ? at least until the 2xCO2 point. To examine this statement please read the just-published paper on this idea, by Rasch, Latham & Chen, in the special geo-engineering issue of Env. Res. Lett., edited by Ken Caldeira & David Keith, link http://stacks.iop.org/1748-9326/4/045112 Figure 2 of this paper, emanating from fully-coupled atmosphere/ocean GCM computations, illustrates how the proposed maritime cloud seeding, conducted in a 2xCO2 situation, can restore sea-ice cover to values existing at 1xCO2. I?d also point out that the cloud seeding produces its maximum cooling in the polar regions. Pursuing a little further the eggs-in-basket metaphor, it seems possible that although both the stratospheric sulphur and maritime cloud seeding schemes ? if technological and other problems were satisfactorily resolved ? could both prove to be independently able to ?buy significant time?, they might, acting in concert prove to be more powerful and flexible than either acting alone. One possible scenario is that the bulk of the cooling would result from stratospheric scheme while cloud whitening ? which is in principle capable of making localized (as well as global) changes ? could provide fine tuning in important selected areas. All Best, John (lat...@ucar.edu) 12/27/09 *************************************************************** Quoting John Nissen <j...@cloudworld.co.uk>: > > Hi all, > > Have you seen this? Best case for SRM in Arctic I've seen! > > Inventor Nathan Myhrvold describes "space hose" for getting aerosols > into stratosphere - and he's done the modelling to show it could be used > at the Arctic, to cool whole hemisphere, without disrupting weather (see > about 9 minutes in). "Cooling the Arctic shuts of a whole lot of > tipping points." It shows incredible promise, but governments aren't > running to him - so far. > > http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/podcasts/fareedzakaria/site/2009/12/20/gps.podcast.12.20.cnn > > > "Suppressing the only technology that could get us out of this > pickle..." would be plain silly. > > He argues (as nobody I've seen to argue before), that even emissions > reduction to zero overnight, would not solve the problem of global > warming, because about 20% CO2 stays in atmosphere for thousands of years. > > "Geoengineering has to be part of the debate". "We have to examine the > options". "You can't rule these things out." > > Cheers, > > John > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "geoengineering" group. > To post to this group, send email to geoengineer...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. > > > -- John Latham lat...@ucar.edu & john.latha...@manchester.ac.uk Tel. 303-444-2429 (H) & 303-497-8182 (W) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineer...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineer...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
