I'm not trying to give you heartburn, Shared Humanity, but the way I look at it, we are presently geoengineering the Earth by adding greenhouse gases and that should give everybody heartburn, because all our wellbeing depends on this Earth.
I have evaluated the concepts behind geoengineering and technological energy advances and have tried to do so in the most unbiased manner. ccwebmaster mentioned several points about stratospheric aerosols that run contrary to my research. First off, if the poles are becoming too warm and creating problems with the jet stream, because of the temperature difference between the equator and poles, cooling the poles and not the whole Earth is the smart thing to do. Secondly, a volcano is hell of a better model than a computer when it comes to cooling the Earth with stratospheric aerosols. Is there evidence of polar consequences from past volcanic eruptions? The troposhere is thinner at the poles (9 km) instead of 17 km at the equator. An Antonov An-225 Mriya has a service ceiling of 11,000 meters and a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy has 10,600 meters. These are the largest military cargo transports and smaller ones have even a higher service ceilings. With added oxygen tanks, cargo airplanes can go as high as their design gives them lift, so it is quite possible to delivery large amounts of material to the stratosphere and doing so is low tech. The idea of putting sulfur in jet fuel and just flying around doesn't solve the problem of particle size and distribution, but I'm not totally ruling out the concept as a boost. Sulfur is a fuel and from what I recall of studying sulphate aerosols, the best results require making small particules of sulfuric acid, which means water needs to be added to SO3. I'm not aware of research to obtain the best results from a delivery system, but my guess would be to use military cargo transport and satellites to monitor distribution. I also don't know if we have a satellite system that can properly detect stratospheric sulphates and monitor levels, but initially levels could be monitored by the aircraft deliverying the sulphates. The price tag I've seen on this geoengineering is several billions of dollars per year and it may give the world time to change it's direction. I don't support rushing in there and doing it, but I do support researching the best way to quickly and properly get it done.
If you believe in global warming and I think the people on this site do, claiming warmer means drier is crappy science. The Earth has been going through glaciation changes for a couple of million years, so the idea that the Earth has a stable climate is bogus. Only major changes in climate patterns can explain the Sahara becoming green during interglacial thermal maximums, because monsoons have to change direction and travel north. Whether the Earth does it by changing solar irradiance over time or man does so by adding radiative forcing with greenhouse gases doesn't change the outcome by much. Milankovitch changes during the Eemian meant the Northern Hemisphere was getting more direct sunlight and the Sahara was green for 30,000 years. That means the Earth can get hot enough to melt GIS with mankind living in caves. Adding greenhouse gases is a more general warming of the Earth than direct sunlight from Milankovitch changes, even if the poles are warming faster as explected. The fact is that's what the poles always do that and it's logical for them to do so. This is not new territory on planet Earth and there are plenty of scientific studies showing consistent outcomes of warming the Earth more than it presently is.
A question for fishmahboi! What would be the cost of mining and applying enough limestone dust to counteract man's acidification of the oceans and major waters? It's been done in lakes with acid rain destroying the habitat. With ships plying the oceans all the time, there certainly should be an easy mechanism to return the pH to proper levels for surface water and there are plenty of references from Earth's past more carbon times, though a distinction of purely using CO2 levels is warranted. I also have a question about the missing CO2 during glacial maximums, so if 100 ppm of CO2 left the atmosphere during glacial maximums, where did it go? I certainly believe the biosphere had less carbon during glacial maximums, but I don't think that much carbon can get trapped in land masses covered with ice. The carbon shutdown for the atmosphere would have to happen both at seas and land masses, but where did that carbon in CO2 go during glaciation when an ocean has less volume of water, so it's pH has to be high? What was the pH of that ocean, because the ancestors of all the ocean creatures had to live through that and not that long ago?
I don't see anything wrong with warning about ocean acidification or any of the changes man has made to planet Earth, but I do see something wrong with making disaster predictions totally contrary to known science. The truth is we don't know enough to monkey around with the Earth, but we do know it's been warmer and colder than it presently is. We presently live in a world that rapidly changes from warm interglacials to cold glaciation and Archaeological evidence proves that world is not at climate stasis during interglacial warm periods. The last time the Earth was warmer, mankind started forming cities because of the abundance of food, but now the Doomsayers claim it's the end of the world if the Earth returns to those times. The time before that, the Earth had hippos and water buffalo in the Thames and Rhine. That means the winters can't be too cold for too long or those species couldn't exist there. There are plenty of northern places on Earth where species have existed before and you can't get them to live there now, because the climate is too cold.
The only way we will ever get human beings to care about global warming is either intellectually or if they feel global warming is biting them in the ass. It's only human nature to dismiss warnings of doom. I've seen claims that a warmer Earth is drier and that is nonsense. These claims about famine associated with a warmer Earth are nonsense. Overall the world will become more productive in agriculture with it warming, but people don't live in the whole world, so even if it's totally better, there will be some big time losers in certain locations.
I've looked at maps for food production and the common theme is it's too cold north to make more food than we presently do. I can post the maps for you, but they are easy to get in wiki just by researching the staples. I've looked at corn, rice, wheat, millet, soybean and potato and they have world production maps showing the area producing the products. It's only logical and common sense that northern areas are more cold stressed to reduce yields than southern areas have been warmed and since trees existed next to the Arctic Ocean in the past, there is plenty of room to expand agricultural production northward. The logic behind this massive famine caused by global warming rests on the assumption that mankind is at it's food production limit and that is a bogus claim. The majority of food production is done to accommodate established markets, because a farmer will go broke mindlessly producing without a means to sell their product. It doesn't take much land to produce more food than people want, so try it sometime and see if you can even give away the food! It's not that hard to produce food and I don't see people giving up mowing their lawns to create food.
Now I grant that climate change will cause a period of instablility as climate patterns change, but that is instability on top of a prior unstable world. I expect food prices to increase in the developed areas, because the market will allow an increase. The notion that mankind has lived on a planet with a stable climate is bogus. Whole civilizations weren't flushed down the toilet in our recent past and agriculture is and has been a gamble against the elements, since it's creation. North and South America are rich in Archaeological evidence of past civilizations being done in by climate change, long before industrialized mankind became it's present factor to change the climate. What we need is a system that values human life and our environment. No civilization on Earth should have to suffer the consequences of modern man using fossil fuels and somebody wil lose out, even if the Earth changes to a better overall state for food production. Society needs to advance enough and value people more than the price of how it once enslaved them. My days on Earth will be much more satisfying when someone somewhere on Earth isn't suffering, but I'm sure the people involved in the suffering are more concerned about it than I am.
