Saturday, February 16, 2008

Why many IPCC scientists desperately need adult supervision

Ok, so in many Northern Hemisphere locations, we're suffering the worst winter in 50-100 years. What should we do?

From this post:
Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford, the lead author on one chapter of the latest IPCC report, spoke today at the Marschak Colloquium.
...
[Major points from the talk:]
...
11. We may need albedo-increasing options, at least to cut the top off the carbon peak for a couple of decades. Simplest approach seems to be to put huge hoses on smokestacks and support them with balloons, in order to release sulphates into the upper troposphere to produce Mount-Pinatubo-like cooling. Cost is manageable; dwell time is about a year, making the process tunable. The big problem would be acid rain. But it's certainly time to put some substantial effort into figuring out whether increasing the albedo is workable, and if so how to do it.

No comments: