Posted on 08/07/2017 10:25:46 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Late last month, about 100 researchers from around the world gathered at Logan International Airport in Boston. A fleet of buses appeared to whisk them to a remote and luxurious ski resort in northeastern Maine. They met to talk, drink, and cogitate off the record for five days about a messy solution to one of the world’s most challenging problems. They had gathered to discuss how to provide humanity one last line of defense against catastrophic global warming: solar geoengineering.
The idea behind solar geoengineering is simple. For the last four decades, humanity has struggled to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere. We have decommissioned nuclear plants, introduced millions of new gasoline-burning cars to the roadway, and dawdled through treaty after treaty. Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has only risen.
An administration hostile to climate mitigation has taken power in the United States, and some countries risk falling short of the promises they made under the Paris Agreement. It seems suddenly plausible that the industrialized world will not succeed in staving off two degrees of temperature rise.
“With the physics [of stratospheric injection], you can have huge multipliers. You put one particle in the stratosphere and it can deflect trillions of photons,” said Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Yet this makes the most feasible form of geoengineering (dimming the sun) only a stopgap. “Most of the climate models project that solar geoengineering could offset most climate change for most people most of the time. But in climate models, if something goes wrong, you can run the model again. In the real world you don’t have that option,” Caldeira said.
So much of the meeting was devoted to the natural follow-up question: What could go wrong?
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Ya mean spraying all them chemicals in the atmosphere is a bust?
Is that why they haven’t been flying over the area lately streaking the bejeesus out of the sky on perfectly fine sunny days *-?
I guess once they get all the VW diesels and trucks off the road, that’ll do it. Yup.
Big Squaw appears to be the only ski resort even remotely “east” in Maine, but I wouldn’t call it that.
Keep your day job.
Celestial Mechanics is not your forte...
To cut globull warming all idiot warmist anti-science people should be sent to another galaxy.
Thats a lot of ice.
Think of all the margaritas...
I found the douche!
That big sucker could cause global cooling to the land masses and ocean around it as well provide ice for margaritas... for the free world.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.