THE TWILIGHT'S COLD GLARE

This piece is reposted  because an Op ed in today's NYTimes repeats its theme. It first appeared here in December of last year

Geo-Engineering  happens. By  1751, Ben Franklin had noted how the Founding Fathers had changed  our as yet unfounded nation's balance of solar energy.  "By clearing America of woods and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light" Franklin noted , they had  literally altered the Earth's albedo.

Ten generations later , the first Earth Day led to America's Clean Air Act and a ten million ton a year drop  US sulfur dioxide emissions. This, as  inadvertently  as in 1751,  unexpectedly  contributed to global warming by letting more light penetrate the atmosphere. The two satellite photos shown here demonstrate an important corollary --bouncing more sunlight back into space can cool the Earth.

Today , this phenomenon is the subject of a review of atmospheric albedo  engineering in  Nature.[subscription required]

Though alteration of the Earth's radiative equilibrium can happen  by accident or design, those most viscerally  opposed to  geo-engineering often have  designs of their own.The thoughtful Nature piece does much to correct naysaying by carbon traders and others with political agendas. It notes  how radically the deposition of solar warmth can be altered by  very small masses of aerosols. The equivalent of a few pound per capita of fine mist from the 1992 eruption of Mount Pinatubo scattered enough  sunlight back into space to cool the planet more than CO2  build-up had warmed it in the previous decade  . The cooling glare startled sunset watchers for a year. And fired the tempers of self-appointed ethicists who prefer societal intervention  to dealing with climate change directly.

Experience  teaches that a little mass can cast a lot of shade. A few tons of jet fuel can  lay  a sun-reflecting contrail from coast to coast. A chilling corollary  dawned on Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen  a decade ago, and now he has floated the notion of

aircraft  delibeerately generate stratospheric sulfur aerosols to stop global warming cold. "It was meant to startle the policymakers," says Crutzen. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."

Dr. Crutzen's attempt to find a place at the table for unorthodox ideas comes not a moment too soon. Intellectual daring doesn't figure in Olympia Snowe or Al Gore's attacks on those who insist the debate is not over, but  Crutzen is hardly alone. In the  Washington Post, Robert Samuelson has pointed to the folly of mistaking  global warming for "a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless."

The truth that sets the IPCC free may not be the one its political managers want to hear - but that has not prevented the horde of authors from leaving it out in plain sight .The new report's section on climate sensitivity  notes that "Clouds, which cover about 60% of the Earth’s surface, are responsible for up to two-thirds of the planetary albedo, which is about 30%. An albedo decrease of only 1%, bringing Earth’s albedo from 30% to 29%, would cause an increase in the black-body radiative equilibrium temperature of about 1°C, a highly significant value, roughly equivalent to the direct radiative effect of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration."

And a 1% increase in albedo , say the same atmospheric computer models the global warming worriers invoke , would lower the Earth's average temperature  by about as much as the IPCC predicts it will rise in the century to come . Turning a few pounds of sulfur per capita per year  globally into cloud cover enhancing aerosols or condensation nuclei could , quite conceivably accomplish that.  In some decades, major volcanic eruptions naturally inject far more sulfur , so it is hardly a concept outside the bounds of the natural history of climate . It be enough to arrest the melting of the polar ice caps. Such an aerosol arctic sunbonnet might cost roughly as much as the power bill for running the Internet. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Gore and his communitarian cohort are aghast. Such modest post-modern proposals threaten to cut their fantasies of Deep Green societal control -- and moral superiority -- down to economic size."

Crutzen's proposed solution has little to do with pollution. Smokestack emissions in the lower atomosphere are too short lived to provide economic leverage on fighting global warming. Engineered aersols put far higher in the sky- in the lower stratosphere in fact , ar the focus of his interest. He also notes that they can do a lot more good at high latitudes , because  slanting rays of sunlight interact with more particles than  the  vertical rays of the tropical sun.  The story of this policy paradox  began a decade before I first met Crutzen at a  'nuclear winter' conference in Sicliy in 1984.

Responding to the ’Energy Crisis.’ of the ’70’s the National Academy of Science identified coal and conservation as bulwarks against OPEC oil blackmail, but proposals to conserve fuel collided with a democratic Congress anxious to reduce acid rain. In terms of energy efficiency, draconian reductions in sulfur emissions- a legislative move spearheaded by hearings held by freshman congressman Gore, backfired  badly . Rather than investing in more efficient combustion technology; industry bought SO2  scrubbers instead. They literally put a damper on combustion, and instead of climbing,  average US  power plant efficiency fell for a decade despite advances in  high temperature materials that made for more efficient jet and car engines. Regulation also forced a massive shift from burning electrical coal close to eastern mines to stripping and shipping low-sulfur fuel from the prairies of Wyoming.  Nonetheless, by 1990 the Greens got they asked for - a solution to the problem of acid rain purchased at a high cost in carbon dioxide.

Meanwhile science was learning a lot about what it did not know. One fact of natural history is that a relatively small mass can cast a great deal of shade. Combusting just tons of jet fuel can transiently cast a mile wide sun reflecting contrail from coast to coast.  The absence of such clouds in the days after 9-11 changed ground temperatures measurably, and the fallout from that observation includes the idea that long lived clouds generated far aloft might offset the warming effect of CO2 in the air. Contrail water clouds dissipate in minutes, but sulfate motes can last for months- hence the cooling from stratospheric volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo in 1993, or as Ben Franklin also notes Iceland’s Mount Hekla in the 18th century .can lessen global temperatures for a year or more. And just as a long lived mist of sulfur rich volcanic droplets can palpably intercept the heat of the sun, so can one from burning fossil fuel.

One reason the Kyoto treaty crashed and burned was that economists who did the math discovered it could pare scarcely a tenth of a degree off 21st century temperatures.  That’s where the Law of Unintended Consequences comes in. The last thing Earth Day’s  instigators had in mind in 1970  was warming the planet, but being clueless to  how much cooling  ten million tons of sulfate aerosol could cause ,  Clean Air Act advocates  literally could not conceive that inventing the EPA could have a  negative  environmental impact, let alone that sulfur burned to no good effect could instead furnish  shade sufficient  to slow the melting of  polar ice .  Yet they are hoist on their own petard - it is now clear that curbing sulfur emissions exacerbated the rise due to CO2.

Perhaps PBS should produce a NOVA episoe on the subject, cataloging the ways  that  unbridled legislative zeal may lead to a frozen planet, with New York Harbor left high and dry as sea levels  recede. It would make a great vehicle for the narrative skills of one of my Harvard classmates, an unemployed politician from Tennessee. If agents in the audience  want to discuss my new script proposal, its  working title, copyright 2006, is The Day Before Yesterday.

Further reading :

1. Crutzen, P. J. Climatic Change 77, 211–220 (2006).
2. Wigley, T. M. L. Science 314, 452–454 (2006).
3. Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Royal Society policy document 12/05 (2005).
4. Govindasamy, B. & Caldeira, K. Geophys. Res. Lett. 27, 2141–2144 (2000).
5. Oman, L. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, L18711 (2006

Comments

[profligatewaste]

Alternatively, they could turn off all those acid-mist precipitators that we installed at copper smelters back in the '70s. Start burning high sulfer again (to Wyoming's chagrin).

[profligatewaste]

I mean high sulfer coal.

[profligatewaste]

I mean 'sulfur'.

[Charlie H.]

I've been wanting to be outside checking on global warming but lately it has been too darn cold.

[JPBlickenstaff]

Thank you for the comment that Engineering is the answer to global warming. The predictive models should also predict/suggest practical solutions or they are not very sound science.

[Jesse]

Russell

You responded to a blog post I did about this subject. To quote you:

"Natural history is evidently not your sport, but geochemical cycles are a part of it . and you would do well you ought to aquaint yourself at least with the orders of magnitude involved. in terms of time and space and mass, before venturing to dismiss Crutzen’s proposal as folly.Common wisdom is seldom predicated on pure ignorance."

I have no doubt that the solution provided by Dr. Crutzen is a plausible one. And I will be the first to admit I know only a small part of natural history.

But just because our best solution is to "polute" our atmosphere doesn't mean it's the right one. I was simply making commentary of the fact, that it seems that we are correcting problems with another problem. You can correct me on that and I invite you to. I am not trying to call anyone a fool, but short term fixes to a long term problem seem foolish. And maybe it's too late to fix the long term problem and short term fixes is all we have left.

I would love to have you guest post on the subject of global warming, as I cover sustainability on my blog frequently. Though many of my readers are most likely not scientists and so it would need to be in fairly easy to understand terms.

[GGillan]

A couple of questions along with a comment.

This line of reasoning presumes that CO2 is the cause of the recent warming. If it is not, or if it is only a small component of the warming, then something else is at work. How would this plan affect or be affected by that 'other' cause or causes? Any meaningful degree of uncertainty would make a lack of reversibility of these actions quite dangerous.

It seems from what you wrote that this action is self-terminating in that the effect is temporary (which is good). How certain is that, specifically with the materials in mind for use?

Lastly, although they are applied higher in the atmosphere, presumably the sulfur aerosols do sink eventually (hence the temporary nature of the effect). Do they then reach the ground as acid rain? If not, what becomes of them?

RESPONSE
You may wish to avail yourself of the further readings noted at the end of the article. The visit to your nearest science library will also enable you to locate and review an undergraduate text on the atmospheric sciences - which should take care of the rest of your query as well . Many find the infrared absorption spectrum of CO2 alone so interesting as to compel them to rethink matters.

[Daniel]

My concern with geo-engineering away global warming is that, in our exuberance for the doom and gloom hyped by enviromental harbingers like Al Gore, that we might overdo it a bit. What if global warming turns out to be "not so bad," but we turn around and signficantly cool the atmosphere by iron-seeding the ocean for planktom blooms and carefully saran-wrapping our atmosphere in sulfur?

Accidentally too cold might be worse than accidentally too warm.

[Charles Weber]

Increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is undoubtedly increasing climate warmth. However I suspect that an even greater affect on warmth is the baring of soil by increase in annual crop acreage, roads, buildings, grazing, and desertification. You may see an article that discusses this in more detail in http://charles_w.tripod.com/climate.html .
Sincerely, Charles Weber

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