I was reading a Breitbart headline:
Climate Change is Not Our Fault, So Let’s Just Deal With It, says California Professor
And took the meaning to be “it’s not our fault – but even so we must tackle it”, not the intended “just live with it”, when I realised it raised an intriguing question.
Imagine the following scenario.
- CO2 has been shown to have direct effect on climate of about 0.6C (Ref: Hermann Harde) and let’s assume strong negative feedback reduces that to 0.2-0.3.
- That incredibly, we found a way to change the environment. The obvious one is the one that we were all threatened by in the 1970s which is a “nuclear winter”. In other words, causing a massive explosion that caused lots of dust to go into the atmosphere (aka pollution).
Now let’s suppose we start to understand natural variation and we realise that we are heading toward a massive warming phase. And then we work out, that we can explode a suitable bomb without causing much if any nuclear contamination (or whatever the mechanism is) and so we effectively have a way to altar the world’s temperature to stop natural change.
Should we try to control it?
Logically, if warming (or cooling) is “bad” then it is bad irrespective of what causes it. Because dying from cold is just as bad if that cold is caused naturally or by e.g. the policy of government making it impossible for elderly people to heat their homes.
But if we wouldn’t control the climate as the greenblob has been urging us to do for years, why would we e.g. try to stop Ebola – because it’s ebola also part of the natural world and isn’t it also an endangered “species” that should be protected along with all other endangered lifeforms?
Hi, just your visiting engineer dropping by again. From a purely philosophical point of view, if we could find a global thermostat I’m sure it would be very beneficial to be able to keep the Earth global temperature constant.
Although could you imagine the arguments between northern latitude countries who demand cranking it up a degree and tropical countries saying we should throttle it back a degree?
Anyways, this thermostat would be a geo-engineering miracle. And the assumptions made about knowing all about natural variability are huge. We’d need to know all the natural cycles including future solar variability to a high degree of accuracy. And assuming that the global thermostat is not an instant response system, the precision to hold global temperatures to say within +/-0.1C are almost incomprehensible. And then there’s global versus regional climate.
I could go on and on but I’d have trouble focusing my thoughts. I’m interested in other points of view though so I’ll sign off here.
We know — from a diminished outbound radiation signature with satellite monitoring and by atmosphere sampling — that CO2 has increased in the atmosphere to equal just over 3 watts per meter squared over the entire surface of the globe. This has been mitigated somewhat by the aerosol particulates of pollution which has blocked some sunlight reaching the earth but that is now being overwhelmed by the build up of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases.
First, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to satellite data as it all depends on the orbital stability.
Second, the effect of CO2 is patchy if I remember right and 3watts sounds far too high – but I’m just about off to bed.
And how have particulates affected cloud cover? YOU DON’T KNOW. So, all your categorical unequivocal assertions that we are supposed to accept as gospel truth – are really just wild speculation.