You gotta love this -- reducing CO2 emissions speeds up global warming...
Hey...what do you know??? No matter what we do..it's bad...
A rapid cutback in greenhouse gas emissions could speed up global warming, the veteran environmental maverick James Lovelock will warn in a lecture today.Prof Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory that the planet behaves like a single organism, says this is because current global warming is offset by global dimming - the 2-3ºC of cooling cause by industrial pollution, known to scientists as aerosol particles, in the atmosphere.
His lecture will be delivered as Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, launches the results of a public consultation on the Government's proposed Climate Change Bill which is intended to cut Britain's greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.Prof Lovelock will say in a lecture to the Royal Society: "Any economic downturn or planned cutback in fossil fuel use, which lessened aerosol density, would intensify the heating.
"If there were a 100 per cent cut in fossil fuel combustion it might get hotter not cooler. We live in a fool's climate. We are damned if we continue to burn fuel and damned if we stop too suddenly."
posted by GayandRight @ 7:11 PM
4 Comments:
Yup, science is complicated and here comes another complication:
http://theflatearthsociety.org/forum//
While conservatives may snicker that they they were correct all along, our pollution has benefits too, one of which is the emission of dimming particles that cool us down.
Rather than prescribing the very unlikely fast and drastic emission cuts to avoid abrupt climate change or runaway global warming, I suggest the low cost method of "biosequestration" to remove vast quantities of carbon from the air and put it back into the ground where it came from.
I suggest seeding an extensively tested GMO into the ocean.
Read my blog for more information: http://myspace.com/dobermanmacleod
"...I suggest the low cost method of "biosequestration" to remove vast quantities of carbon from the air and put it back into the ground where it came from."
It is already happening. Google salps.
Global dimming was noticably reduced starting in the early 1990s. That was part of the reason for the warming in the 1990s. Now with the global dimming problem largely out of the way, we are no longer warming. A large global dimming event was the 1991 volcanic eruption that lasted a few years.
Of course, I wonder why dark/brown aerosols were not mentioned by anyone in this post yet. That was discovered earlier this year and has warmed vast areas of the globe. That must be the anti-dimming effect.
Yeah, salps are a form of oceanic life that removes carbon from the air and puts it the ground, but they don't appear to be aggressive enough to remove enough.
I was thinking about some kind of invasive species that would spread more rapidly and fill the niche more completely.
The main thing most people miss is that our mild Holocene climate is going to rapidly turn into the hothouse state of 55 million years ago. We simply don't have time to gradually cut emisions and wait for a damaged earth to remove the excess CO2.
Wish I had more space and time: read my blog at http://www.myspace.com/dobermanmacleod (or send me an email).
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home