Extreme anti-global warming

With Brisbane having a terribly warm spring this past week, and its main water dam being down to 30 something percent, it might seem a little unwise to be expressing any skepticism about global warming. Truth is, I'm a bit of a fence sitter on the issue anyway.

But on the skeptic's side, some scientists noted recently that the sun may account for up to 30% of recent temperature increases. That's a big figure. I didn't notice this reported much in the main stream Australian press, but maybe I missed it.

If the sun is going to play that big a role, then mega engineering may be the answer. Popular Science ran an article about this a couple of months ago, and it is still on line. As I am keen on space travel generally, I like the idea of building giant space umbrellas, although I guess so many launches to put them into orbit might not do the atmosphere much good in the process. Maybe a better idea would be to make it from moon dirt and use a "mass driver" (an electro magnetic sled) to launch the bits into orbit. Or how about an asteroid being nudged into earth orbit and making it from that? I like the idea of putting an asteroid in earth orbit anyway, and then just working out what to do with it later. As I recall, some may be a good source of ore. Could it be done with a solar sail to "de-orbit" one? Just imagine the greenies reacting to a proposal to do that!

Another article with a similar space-based solution is here. The idea is not for one big umbrella, but a swarm of really little ones. Or even just a ring of particles in orbit to dissipate a couple of percent of sunlight from hitting the tropics. (How you successfully launch other desirable things through such a ring is not explained. Unless it can cope with that problem, it is a very silly idea.)

The other idea this article mentions is to make the atmosphere dirtier:

"Volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, pumped aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the global climate by about a degree. Other researchers have suggested such schemes as adding metallic dust to smoke stacks, to flood the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight back into space."

So pollution may save the planet after all.

How about using nukes to cause a few volcanic eruptions? Must be some volcanic islands somewhere that no one really needs. Just move the lizards to somewhere else. Eruptions make for pretty sunsets too.

And you can get too much of a good thing with a volcano:

"Global cooling often has been linked with major volcanic eruptions. The year 1816 often has been referred to as "the year without a summer". It was a time of significant weather-related disruptions in New England and in Western Europe with killing summer frosts in the United States and Canada. These strange phenomena were attributed to a major eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 in Indonesia. The volcano threw sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, and the aerosol layer that formed led to brilliant sunsets seen around the world for several years."


See link here. Wikipedia has a bit more about 1816's climate too.

This fiddling with climate is going to be tricky!