Global Warming Solutions: Avoiding the Obvious

My wife, as I have often mentioned, is a climate scientist. And sometimes she hears some great stuff at seminars, hearing the facts straight from the horse's mouth. A couple of times she passed on stuff I REALLY wanted to blog but was a little confidential. You should have heard what the NASA administrators were trying to tell the scientists during the whole censorship scandal. Pretty scary stuff. But not something I can pass on.

Something she passed on to me recently, though, really got me thinking and doesn't involve any inside secrets as far as I know.

Some scientists have been advocating some pretty radical ideas to deal with Global Warming. One such idea is to lace our atmosphere with sulphate particles to increase the albedo of the atmosphere. This idea seems pretty crazy: possibly acidifying our atmosphere at who knows what cost to take a chance that it will reflect back enough solar energy to reduce warming. Apparently another such idea is even more crazy: increase the albedo of the ocean by covering large areas with white styrofoam. Hmmmm...

But back to sulfate particles. Apparently, one problem here is that no one actually, until recently, actually did the calculations to see if it would work or if it would cause massive acid rain. Well, according to data submitted for publication, calculations show that it COULD work and that the amount necessary to make a difference shouldn't have a large effect on acid rain. So, that actually is kind of promising. But...and here is where things get sticky when dealing with such ideas: the cost would be in the trillions (on a ROUGH calculation) AND no one knows what the dynamics would be. In other words, how long the sulfate particles would stay in place and how they would be distributed globally are completely unknown. I suspect that lack of understanding of the dynamics would include not being sure that LOCALIZED acid rain problems might not happen if concentrations became unusually high in spcific locations. A similar situation arose with the chemicals that caused the ozone holes: they reached exceptionally high concentrations at the polar regions and the specific dynamics of those locations made them particularly potent. We don't know what would happen with the sulfates in terms of the dynamics of the situation.

This kind of solution is viewed as a last ditch attempt to deal with a rapidly deteriorating situation. The scientist who first proposed it called it an "Escape Route." But here is what I don't get: why are we jumping to those solutions but neglecting the more obvious solutions?

Don't get me wrong. I would like to think there was a kind of Hollywood movie style "Escape Route" to solve global warming if it ever got really bad. But when we are talking in the trillions of dollars and with only an uncertain long-term efficacy, we are talking about a pretty narrow escape route. My question is this: how expensive are the far more obvious, less dramatic, more immediate solutions: alternative energy and reforestation? If we started spending that "Escape Route" level funds (or, I might add, Iraq-war level funds) more slowly and carefully, funding large scale alternative energy projects and reforestation efforts, wouldn't that make more sense? I strongly suspect the solutions would be more reliable and less expensive than a dramatic, let's get Bruce Willis to star in it kind of "Escape Route."

And if we can't afford the more mundane solutions of alternative energy and reforestation, which are sure to have lasting impacts, then we sure as hell can't afford an "Escape Route" where the costs will be incurred all at once and the end result still kind of iffy.

Let's keep focused. I strongly suspect that spending just one trillion dollars over ten years to deal with Global Warming would greatly reduce the chances of having to spend multi-trillions of dollars spent on an "Escape Route." Or, for that matter, multi-trillions in illegal wars for Halliburton profits. Maybe some scientists can do the calculations for the efficacy and cost of the mundane, alternative energy and reforestation solution. Add in, of course, the added benefits such an approach would bring. Alternative energy would create local jobs, giving benefits beyond simple alleviation of global warming. And reforestation has multiple benefits for the ecology and economy of deforested regions: alleviation of flood/drought cycles, preservation of top soil, preservation of fisheries downstream, etc.

Wish we could focus on THAT kind of solution. What do you think?

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