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+--- Thread: More scientists now think geoengineering may be essential (/thread-7206.html)
More scientists now think geoengineering may be essential - C C - Jun 11, 2019
https://www.wired.com/story/more-scientists-now-think-geoengineering-may-be-essential/
EXCERPT: Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.
“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.” King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”
[...] Geoengineering the climate to halt global warming has been discussed almost as long as the threat of warming itself. American researchers back in the 1960s suggested floating billions of white objects such as golf balls on the oceans to reflect sunlight. In 1977, Cesare Marchetti of the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis discussed ways of catching all of Europe’s CO2 emissions and injecting them into sinking Atlantic Ocean currents. In 1982, Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko proposed filling the stratosphere with sulphate particles to reflect sunlight back into space. The first experiments to test the idea of fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of CO2-absorbing algae were carried out by British researchers in 1995. Two years later, Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, proposed putting giant mirrors into space.
[...] many climate scientists until recently regarded such proposals as fringe, if not heretical, arguing that they undermine the case for urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But the mood is shifting. There is broad, international scientific agreement that the window of opportunity to avoid breaching the Paris climate target of staying “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), is narrowing sharply. A pause in the rise in CO2 emissions that brought hope in 2015 and 2016 has ended; the increase has resumed at a time when we should be making progress toward a goal of halving emissions by 2030 [...] CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere—the planetary thermostat—are now at 415 parts per million (ppm) and rising by almost 3 ppm each year, reaching levels that have not been seen in 3 million years. “We have two years left to bend the curve” downward, says Johan Rockstrom.
Some experts contend we may be approaching a moment when nothing other than geoengineering can meet the international community’s promise—made when signing the UN Climate Change Convention at the Earth Summit in 1992—to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” (MORE - details)
RE: More scientists now think geoengineering may be essential - Syne - Jun 11, 2019
These are the morons who are going to end up accidentally scorching the sky, and depriving us of much needed sun, if we give these loons free reign. We don't even have a full tally of the planets natural and cyclic management capabilities yet.