Mad Scientist Alert! "If we could experiment with the atmosphere and literally play God, it's very tempting to a scientist,"

The Mad Scientist are out in the open again. Not that they ever went away, it is just that they don't usually get much attention in the mainstream media. Here from the Tennessean we have an AP story with pictures of some of the actual participants of this mad scientist moment leisurely discussing their plans to alter the Earth.

Does anyone else see the irony of scientist declaring that mankind has altered the climate due to their insatiable lust for, uh, progress, now  wanting to alter the climate to compensate for man altering the climate? As if the progress of man in order achieve a better and longer life is somehow unnatural which needs to be counter acted  by using technologies that would not have been possible without the progress that caused the supposed problem to begin with.

I really love the sub head to this article too a sort of subliminal double meaning.  Not that warming intensifies, but rather that warming intensifies talks, let us hope it stays there. because as we know everyone wants to save the planet. This of course includes our friends at the Novim Group, we'll see if there is any connection here.

Well here is the article

Scientists ponder risks of manipulating climate

Warming intensifies talk on saving planet

Written by
Charles J. Hanley
ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICHELEY, England — To the quiet green solitude of an English country estate they retreated, to think the unthinkable.

Scientists of earth, sea and sky; scholars of law, politics and philosophy in three intense days were cloistered behind Chicheley Hall's old brick walls: Four dozen thinkers pondered the planet's fate as it grows warmer, weighed the idea of reflecting the sun to cool the atmosphere and debated the question of who would make the decision to interfere with nature to try to save the planet.

Sorryyyyyy, I just could not let this go, the idea of thinkers pondering the unthinkable cloistered behind old brick walls. Maybe I've just read too many Robert Ludlum novels in my time but this sends chills up my spine.

The unknown risks of "geoengineering," in this case, tweaking Earth's climate by dimming the skies, left many uneasy.

"If we could experiment with the atmosphere and literally play God, it's very tempting to a scientist," said Kenyan earth scientist Richard Odingo, "but I worry."

Arrayed against that worry is the worry that global warming may abruptly upend the world we know, by melting much of Greenland into the sea, by shifting India's life-giving monsoon, by killing off marine life.

 This sounds very much like the hyperbole that our hero Dr Richard Muller spoke out against in his famous video "Greenland melting into the sea" ? If the previous paragraphs did not chill you how about this for a Mad Scientist motto:

"If we could experiment with the atmosphere and literally play God, it's very tempting to a scientist,"

Well aren't they special!

If climate engineering research isn't done now, climatologists say, the world will face grim choices in an emergency. "If we don't understand the implications, and we reach a crisis point and deploy geoengineering with only a modicum of information, we really will be playing Russian roulette," said Steven Hamburg, a U.S. Environmental Defense Fund scientist.

Oh boy, you can see it coming can't you! The God like scientist need to do research! They need some money to investigate what needs to be done to save the world from you sinful pathetic little human beings. You have gone and wrecked the Earth and now they will need to investigate ways to save us from our wasteful, sinful nature. Oh how the thinkers ponder cloistered behind their brick walls, protected from the disease of human kind.

The question's urgency has grown as nations have failed, in years of talks, to agree on a binding long-term deal to rein in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.-sponsored science network, foresees temperatures rising as much as 6.4 degrees Celsius (11.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, swelling the seas and disrupting the climate patterns that nurtured human civilization.

About the only thing swelling in regards to climate, is the swelling egos of the scientific community,

Science committees of the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress urged their governments last year to look at immediately undertaking climate engineering research, to have a "Plan B" ready, as the British panel put it, in case the diplomatic logjam persists.

Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, subsequently organized the Chicheley Hall conference with Hamburg's EDF and the association of developing-world science academies. From six continents, they invited a blue-ribbon cross section of atmospheric physicists, oceanographers, geochemists, environmentalists, international lawyers, psychologists, policy experts and others to discuss how the world should oversee such unprecedented research.

Yes Plan B ! Wow, this sounds vaguely familiar. I mean what could go wrong with all this "thinker" firepower cloistered together to save the world. I am reassured, how about you?

An Associated Press reporter was invited to sit in on their discussions, generally off the record, as they met in large and small groups in plush wood-paneled rooms, in conference halls, or outdoors among the manicured trees and formal gardens of this 300-year-old Royal Society property 40 miles northwest of London, a secluded spot where Britain's Special Operations Executive trained for secret missions in World War II.

 If it weren't so scary it would be hilarious, well I guess it can be both. Really equating the mission of "God like" scientist to Special Operations from World War II. I love the idea that the discussion were primarily off the record, sort of like a secret society or something.

Provoking and parrying one another over questions never before raised in human history, the conferees were sensitive to how the outside world might react.

"There's the 'slippery slope' view that as soon as you start to do this research, you say it's OK to think about things you shouldn't be thinking about," said Steve Rayner, co-director of Oxford University geoengineering program.

Many geoengineering techniques they have thought about look either impractical or ineffective.

Oh come on Steve, what a ridiculous statement, you are the co-director of Oxford University geo-engineering program, you are being paid to think about this nonsense!

One idea has promise

Painting rooftops white to reflect the sun's heat is a feeble gesture. Blanketing deserts with a reflective material is logistically challenging and a likely environmental threat. Launching giant mirrors into space orbit is too expensive.

It really is not necessary either, if Northern Hemisphere winters continue on their current trend, roofs will be painted white....naturally.

On the other hand, fertilizing the ocean with iron to grow CO2-eating plankton has shown some workability, and Massachusetts' prestigious Woods Hole research center is planning the biggest such experiment. Marine clouds are another route. Scientists at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado are designing a test of brightening ocean clouds with sea-salt particles to reflect the sun.

Those techniques are necessarily limited in scale, however, and unable to alter planetwide warming. Only one idea has emerged with that potential.

Oh I wait with baited breath for the pronouncement from on high, or rather from behind the brick wall, but I bet I know what it is!

"The leading contender is stratospheric aerosol particles," said climatologist John Shepherd of Britain's Southampton University.

The particles would be sun-reflecting sulfates spewed into the lower stratosphere from aircraft, balloons or other devices, much like the sulfur dioxide emitted by the eruption of the Philippines' Mount Pinatubo in 1991, estimated to have cooled the world by 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degrees F) for a year or so.

I knew it, the man made volcano solution. Let's spew aerosols into the atmosphere and  hope that we don't have another Pinatubo, or worse, eruption sending the world into a man made ice age. God these guys are brilliant! Hey I have an idea, why not just remove government regulations on sulfur dioxide emissions from factories. kind of like China, and save the money on all those "aircraft, balloons and other devices". By the way when our God like scientist start talking about "other devices" it is time to buy a gun and plant a garden.

Engineers from the University of Bristol, England, plan to test the feasibility of feeding sulfates into the atmosphere via a mileslong hose attached to a tethered balloon.

Shepherd and others stressed that any sun-blocking "SRM" technique, for solar radiation management, would have to be accompanied by sharp reductions in carbon dioxide emissions on the ground and some form of carbon dioxide removal, preferably via a chemical-mechanical process not yet perfected, to sck the gas out of the air and neutralize it.

Otherwise, they point out, the stratospheric sulfate layer would have to be built up indefinitely, to counter the growing greenhouse effect of accumulating carbon dioxide.

You know we are in serious trouble when they start handing out acronyms "SRM". Solar radiation management, now that sounds like a natural solution to a man made problem doesn't it.  I do like the idea that they are now addressing the idea of sucking the sulfur dioxide out of the atmosphere, just in case. And all this is supposed to be more economical than carbon sequestration or cleansing?

I doubt any of this has anything to do with our climate at all. It is about cloistered thinkers who have no concept of the real world having been self-deluded behind their walls into believing that they have a God like control over mankind and the Earth.

Be afraid, very afraid, these people have shown that they are not a joke, though they are a joke, they now wield real power in the world we mortals live in.

UPDATE:

Is that Jason J Blackstock of Novim Group and CIGI fame waving his hand in the picture at top of post? I'm sure he would be there I wonder if the list of participants to this meeting is secret.

Everyone thinks they are saving the planet

The absurdity of the entire AGW theory and the unintended consequences are sometimes both staggering and amusing. Consider this article from Popular Science -"New Clean-Fuel Rules For Ships Could Actually Hurt the Environment". It discusses the seemingly very worthwhile new regulations to cut air pollution from the overseas shipping industry.

The regulations call for reducing the sulfur in shipping fuel—which is basically unrefined petroleum sludge—from 4.5 to 0.5 percent by 2020. Scientists project that this switch will cut sulfur-pollution-related premature deaths from 87,000 worldwide per year to 46,000.

Of course we want to reduce these known pollutants from the atmosphere...right? I mean it is all about man not leaving a mark on the ecosystem ...right? But not so fast there Eco Warriors:

But the sulfate aerosols spewing from supertanker smokestacks also produce planet-cooling clouds called ship tracks, which form when water droplets coalesce around sulfate particles. These clouds, which are big enough to be seen from orbit, reflect sunlight back into space, preventing the equivalent of up to 40 percent of the warming caused by human-produced carbon dioxide. “The IMO has done a good job addressing air-quality issues,” says Daniel Lack, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA. “But there’s a climate impact that wasn’t necessarily considered.”

So by cutting real pollution we in fact will be eliminating the mitigation of (imaginary) pollution -CO2. But that's not all !:

Worse, the fuel switch won’t improve ships’ carbon emissions—if the industry were a country, it would be the sixth-largest CO2 emitter. The IMO plans to regulate CO2, but until then, it might be best to leave well enough alone.

Got all that? Now consider that our Eco Warriors and their mad scientist allies have been so concerned that we are going to fry the planet by spewing evil CO2 into the atmosphere that they are regularly spending countless (tax payer) dollars investigating the possibility of spewing these same real pollutants into the skies to save us from the imaginary one.

So at the same time part of the Eco-scientific community is studying the negative affects of sulfate aerosols on the Earth:

Reductions of SO2 emissions in the 70-90% range should be required for both new and existing ships as soon as possible, but no later than 2015—

Another group of Eco-scientist is trying to figure out the best way to pump it back in.

We used a general circulation model of Earth's climate to conduct geoengineering experiments involving stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide and analyzed the resulting deposition of sulfate. When sulfur dioxide is injected into the tropical or Arctic stratosphere, the main additional surface deposition of sulfate occurs in midlatitude bands, because of strong cross-tropopause flux in the jet stream regions. We used critical load studies to determine the effects of this increase in sulfate deposition on terrestrial ecosystems by assuming the upper limit of hydration of all sulfate aerosols into sulfuric acid. For annual injection of 5 Tg of SO2 into the tropical stratosphere or 3 Tg of SO2 into the Arctic stratosphere, neither the maximum point value of sulfate deposition of approximately 1.5 mEq m−2 a−1 nor the largest additional deposition that would result from geoengineering of approximately 0.05 mEq m−2 a−1 is enough to negatively impact most ecosystems.

And everyone thinks they are saving the planet and making a good buck in the process. Of course this is nothing new to us.
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Immelt melt solution ?

FROM- Business and Media Institute

'Nightly News' Proposes 'Geo-Engineering' Atmosphere as Solution to Climate Change

Segment suggests tinkering with the clouds and posting other elements in space to prevent so-called manmade climate change.

read article here

More...

Chu's White Paint Brush

This past week the Obama administration’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, suggested that one solution the nations of the world should take to reduce global warming is to paint roofs and roadways white. The premise being that white colored roof would reflect insolation whereas a darker colored roof would absorb it. Chu elaborates further

If you look at all the buildings and make all the roofs white, and if you make the pavement a more concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour, and you do this uniformly, it's the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years.

Sounds like a sweet deal. A little white paint here, a little more over there and before you know it, all the cars in the world suddenly have no effect on global warming because their emissions will be offset. Does this mean someone that paints their roof white will get a carbon tax exempt card for being a good soldier in the fight against global warming? Does it even matter that painting one’s roof white will only reduce cooling costs when it’s hot outside? What about when it’s not hot and sunny? What good is your white roof doing when it’s snowing or when it’s cloudy, cool and damp?


More...

There’s a long list of problems that white roofs have and there’s good reasons why most roofing surfaces across much of the country are darker colours. For example, a white roof would be a detriment to comfortable indoor air temperatures on a cold, cloudy windy day in the winter. Did the energy secretary figure increased energy costs to heat one’s home in the winter due to their new white roof? Here in the Northeast, where winters are famously cold, windy and snowy, the preferred way of heating one’s home is oil. Each hour longer that one would have to run their oil burners to make up for the loss in heat from the sun is the equivalent of leaving a diesel truck idling on the road for that same time. Hardly seems we’re making any dents in the equivalent numbers of cars being taken off the road.

The problems doesn’t only extend to extra oil consumption in the winter, there’s other risks as well. For example, a lighter colored roof allows more snow to build upon its surface as a darker roof would absorb more heat, melting some of the snow off throughout the winter. This extra added weight of snow might leave some roofs vulnerable to collapse! We’ve seen problems with collapsed roofs during the winter of 2007-08 in New England when continuous snowstorms left a 2-4 foot snow cover on top of many roofs leading to failure, especially as spring approached when the full season of accumulated snow of roofs would absorb much of the water from spring rains. If less snow is allowed to melt off during sunny winter days the percentage of roofs vulnerable to collapse would rise, even in winters that don’t deliver crippling amounts of snow. In addition to potential roof collapse, the slower melting of the snow could also lead to moisture/water problems from leaks that may present from something as simple as sagging paint or a slow drip from the ceiling or, much worse, mold and mildew problems, which can be toxic!

Generations of home builders in the Northeast have recognized these problems very early and made adjustments to how homes were built to account for these climatic caveats. Deciduous trees were planted on the southwest and southeast corners of homes to shade them in the summer and allow sunlight through in the winter. As these trees grew older they would shade the roof, a much better solution to having one that’s white, nipping sunlight in the bud before reaching the roof of the house. Windows weren’t installed along the north facing side of the house and conifers were plants to act as a wind block. Unfortunately, these building practices become a lost art as more and more pre-designed homes, made to all look the same as part of housing associations, became the preferred way of housing development.

As with homes, roadways are also expected to be a light shade of colour under Chu’s plan and this also presents its own set of problems. The winter season is just as harsh on roads as it is on roofs. Darker coloured roadways absorb just enough insolation during the winter to keep road surfaces a few degrees warmer than the ambient ground temperatures, helping to prevent them from freezing over when working in tandem with salt during winter storms. This same logic also applies on nights when the temperature is close to freezing and black ice formation could arise. The extra heat absorbed by dark coloured roadways may be the difference between a wet road and an icy one. The colour of a road also plays a role in problems with sun glare when the sun is low in the sky. The extra light reflecting off these new lighter roadways when the sun is low in the sky in mornings and evenings would play havoc on east-west routes.

All rationality appears to be lost by those that are scrambling to ‘stop global warming’ and ‘save the planet’. Our safety must be put at risk by paving glaring roads and driving around in glorified golf carts that crumple like tin cans. We’ve seen individuals nearly drive themselves to death from hypothermia trying to reach the North Pole to bring attention to global warming. The media continues to regurgitate green movement talking points without any questioning of the data that continues to show irregularities and anecdotal evidence pointing towards opposing conclusions. Any loon with a claim of climate disaster or wacky geo-engineering project is given open forum to the world. The hundreds of climate conferences that take place each and every year in which thousands of delegates are flown in from all over the world and given world-class cuisine surely emit more greenhouse gas than many of the developing nations they’re claiming to aid combined.

Chu’s advice isn’t all bad, however. In tropical areas where it’s warm year-round with the sun nearly overhead having a white roof would be advantageous. Conversely, as explained above, having a white roof in northern climes would work to one’s disadvantage so broadbrushing the issue simply won’t cut it. A more intelligent approach must be made with weight given to the climatic regime of each region of the country if one wants to implement a global warming building code for the exterior of one’s home.