Posted on 01/24/2017 5:04:14 PM PST by Olog-hai
Instead of collectively spending $100 billion annually under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to combat global warming, developed nations should consider investing just $9 billion in a marine cloud whitening project that could prevent global warming for the rest of the 21st century, according to Bjorn Lomborg, director of a Danish think tank.
Marine cloud whitening mimics the effects of a volcanic eruption by inserting salt particles into the atmosphere to make clouds denser so they reflect more sunlight back into space.
Spending just $9 billion on 1,900 seawater-spraying boats could prevent all the global warming set to occur this century, Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, writes in a January 18 column for Project Syndicate, adding that the benefits the project would generate would be worth an estimated $20 trillion.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
What could possibly go wrong?
This idea frightens me (literally).
We don’t know what global climate will do over the next century without taking action, and past predictive performance demonstrates that our models are not good enough to give us more than a vague hint. We do, however, know exactly what would happen initially with this project. The engineering and the math are not difficult - global temperatures would drop 2-4 degrees. Initially. Climate is a chaotic system; the subsequent response to that drop could be almost anything, including (rough calculation - 15% to 30% chance) a global ice age. Because of the nonlinear nature of climate response, no one could possibly know what would happen after that cloud was generated, but putting that large a change into our climate is far more likely to be catastrophic than doing nothing would be. No, thank you!
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