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WHY GEOENGINEERING ISN'T WORKING

 

By William Thomas

 

PART 1.

 

UNFAIR FIGHT

 

Remember what Einstein said regarding the mental state of those who relentlessly repeat what doesn’t work expecting a different outcome?

 

Right.

 

With U.S scientists set to “publicly attempt” a teensy tiny geoengineering experiment, the managed news stage is set to officially “out” a sunscreen program in noticeably high gear since late 1998.

 

“The test allegedly consists of a high-altitude balloon that will fly several miles into the atmosphere and release less than a pound of calcium carbonate,” reports Mac Slavo for ZeroHedge. The “alleged" experimenters will then spend a day flitting through the resulting artificial cloud to measure effects well-known for decades. And with legions of planet hackers screaming for Solar Radiation Management (SRM) set to blow open the geoengineering floodgates, Washington’s impulse to double-down on an already dire experiment could prove irresistible. Given what’s coming. 

 

Given what’s happening now.

 

Meanwhile, the future costs of transferring 37 billion tons of carbon safely sequestered deep underground into Earth’s closed, recirculating atmosphere every 12 months are rising with each aerosol emission and mission. Every species on Earth – with the possible exception of tubeworms blindly suckling sulphur vents at the bottom of the sea – faces the ultimate insolvency: human-driven mass extinction.

 

“The full-scale winnowing of vast populations of the planet’s invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants” is the wavefront of “‘biological annihilation’,” writes professor of art and ecology, Subhankar Banerjee. We’re talking, he adds, “massive species die-offs and various kinds of massacres.” China is now hand-pollinating crops after Earth's flying insect population collapsed by a staggering 76% in less than three decades. Add the recent starfish, seabird and piñon die-offs and climate denial starts to struggle for breath.

  

NASTY NUMBERS

When it comes to climate, everybody’s got a number. But as might be imagined onboard a spacecraft with smoke in the corridors, crops wilting, and drinkable water running out, we’re way past numbers.

 

None of them look good, anyway. Some two decades into twinned atmospheric modification experiments involving heat-trapping gasses and sunlight-reflecting materials, we can say of both with 100% certainty:

 

THIS IS NOT WORKING!

 

HOW DO WE KNOW?

Despite persistent efforts by U.S. Air Force Weather Force Specialists to cool things off by spreading Teller’s “sunscreen” overhead, sweltering cities worldwide keep breaking “hottest ever” records with 13 of 14 hottest temperatures ever recorded occurring so far in this Last Chance Century to get it right.

 

Instead of forestalling calamity, as rising sea-levels, wild weather, water shortages and freakishly combusting wildfires continue to knock the stuffing out of wild and human communities around the globe, Solar Radiation Mayhem is further provoking nature under the fuelish fantasy of bringing a petrol-powered climate “under control” – without controlling ourselves. After nearly two-decades of mad tinkering, geoengineering is still not working and never will.

Whoa! Dec. 5, 2018 -Patrick Pleul/dpa/Press Association   

 

HERE’S WHY:

Although this uptake is starting to reverse as the globe-girdling ocean becomes saturated with CO2, currently, 93% of global atmospheric heating is going into this average 2-mile-deep heat reservoir.

 

Pop quiz: How much greenhouse heat is heating the ocean?

 

Answer: Four Hiroshima-size bombs worth of energy every second. (at right)

 

That’s the equivalent of the heat released by nearly 345,600 Hiroshima bombs absorbed by the world ocean "every day,” reports David Holmes, a Senior Lecturer at Monash University.

Because of this enormous heat sink – over 332,519,000 cubic miles of seatwater - a few squadrons of airborne tankers piddling particulates into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and “cool” the planet is an ever-receding chimera that is disrupting weather and rainfall; further increasing the speed, spread and combustion of climate-whipped wildfires; interfering with solar, hydro and wind farms; shredding our space colony’s solar radiation shielding and sickening plants and animals. (Though too many writers refer to “humans” and “animals”, the only separation is in the minds that have gotten us into this mess.)

And that’s not all.

 

As the carbon-saturated world ocean turns acidic – to the growing distress of the many lives there – this gigantic radiator is beginning to release that stored heat into the winds rubbing against its surface, overwhelming any present or future AG efforts.

 

In polar regions, the drastic flip from sunlight-reflecting icecap to rapidly growing heat sinks of proliferating algae, soot-blackened ice, and dark open Arctic waters – alone is overriding all attempts at Aerosol Geoengineering.

 

Weather weirding is just beginning. The gigatons of the CO2 and CO2e gasses we’re currently emitting will take another 10 years to reach their peak impact in the upper atmosphere. And AG isn’t working now.

 

KAMIKAZES

Water vapor, one of the strongest greenhouse gases, increases by 7% for every 1°C warming. So for all those years, USAF tankers have been spewing hugely heat-trapping water vapor from their engines into the stratosphere they’re attempting to cool!

 

While simultaneously injecting megatons of CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere at altitudes where they will do the most immediate harm. Which makes about as much sense as 93,000 airline flights every day spewing those same heat-trapping compounds directly into the stratosphere, where there warming and ozone-eating impacts are immediate.

 

 

IT’S A GAS

Record levels of CO2 and CO2e are eating aerosols for snacks. The “e” stands for carbon dioxide-equivalent, such as all the nitrogen (NOx) being emitted by 513 million industrial farms, 1,250,000 vehicles and 500,000 aircraft worldwide.

 

An even bigger monster stirring in the closet is the daily methane (CH4) outpouring from 1,100,000,000 cows, well over 1.7 million fracking wells in the USA alone – plus all that thawing tundra, and the seafloor clathrates already belching half-mile-wide methane plumes from a thawing CH4 cache of some 10,000,000,000 tons.

While the world focuses on carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide is heating the air 300-times more than CO2. During the first 20 years of release – over the rapidly-thawing Arctic, for example – methane heats the atmosphere 86-times CO2; 34-times out to a hundred years.

 

Methane is not a game changer. Prehistoric ice cores from the last big blowout 635 million years ago show it’s a game ender.

 

This means that the momentum already baked into planetwide warming by the last few decades of as yet mostly unfelt emissions means future AG cannot work. (See “Einstein” above.)

 

 

HERE’S HOW THE OPPOSING TEAMS STACK UP

Near as I can determine, a squadron of “Weather Force” tankers comprises around 12 aircraft (about half the strength of an operational fighter squadron). Pitting 83,166 pounds of aerosolized reflectants from a squadron of KC-135s – or just over twice that payload from a dozen KC-10s – against hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases is a burp in a growing hurricane of climate change. How is an air force hard-pressed to bomb all the countries Washington decides needs bombing (seven at latest count) going to deal with another 38 billion tons of CO2 added to this opposing “forcing” every year?

 

In the words of James Kunstler: fuggitaboutit.

Sea ice break-up means wild weather near you -Christopher Michel/Fickr

 

“FIXING” THE ARTIC DOES NOT COMPUTE

Assessing The Controllability Of Arctic Sea Ice Extent By Sulfate Aerosol Geoengineering appeared in Geophysical Research Letters in January 2015.

 

The aim of this investigation was to determine if enough sunlight-scattering particles could be spread above the fast-melting Arctic Ice Sheet (AIS) to cool air warming five-times faster than across the USA, stop the meltdown, and allow the ice to recover.

 

Andy Coghlan presented the verdict in New Scientist: “Researchers using computer simulations have found that attempts to reduce solar radiation in the Arctic to stop sea ice from retreating are infeasible.”

 

According to those increasingly clever algorithms, “saving" the Arctic Ice Sheet would require flying more than 1,000 KC-135 tanker aircraft over the thawing Arctic every day for 25 years. (Each tanker measures its hourly pollution in tons.)

 

This scientific assessment of manufacturing a daily Arctic-wide overcast for 25 years also discovered:

 

1. When the climate-fighting Stratotankers stop flying out of Svalbard, Norway, the ice immediately melts again, as the rest of the planet has continued to heat.

 

2. After the planes stop flying, the climate heating trend “accelerates”.

About half of the global temperature rise is suppressed by aerosols from burning carbon – as well as spreading contrails and “chemtrails” across the world’s skies. Stopping aerosols release overnight could make temperatures rise abruptly by 1.20°C in a matter of weeks.

 

And over Europe by up to 2–4°C.

West Antarctic melting down -Natalie Tapson/Flickr 

 

DON’T FORGET THE OTHER 'ARCTICA…

Note to planet hackers: Better put aside another thousand non-existent tankers to cover distant Antarctica with daily overflights for at least the next quarter-century. Or is it already too late there, as well?

 

After losing about 3 trillion tons of ice since 1992, Antarctica appears to have tripped over a tipping point.

 

“In the past five years – as the atmospheric and ocean temperatures have continued to climb amid ongoing reliance on fossil fuels – ice losses have tripled,” writes Jessica Corbett for Common Dreams

 

"There has been a sharp increase, with almost half the loss coming in the last five years alone,” chimes in University of Leeds professor Andrew Shepherd, a lead author of the "utterly terrifying" new report from NASA and the European Space Agency. "A threefold increase now puts Antarctica in the frame as one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise. The last time we looked at the polar ice sheets, Greenland was the dominant contributor. That's no longer the case."

 

Speaking of faulty glaciers and melting assumptions, about a decade ago, noted New Scientist, "the official view was that there would be no net ice loss from Antarctica over the next century."

 

Instead, the global warming Dr. James Hansen warned about in 1988 has apparently reached a level “such that ice sheets begin to disintegrate in a rapid, non-linear fashion on West Antarctica, Greenland or both."

 

Everywhere you look, the continuously “nuked” ocean and the atmosphere rubbing against it are just too damn hot.

 

 

CLOUDY SCIENCE

Solar Aerosol Geoengineering (SAG) is all about clouds: how they form and what effects they have on temperatures and climate. Everyone can see that.

 

So it’s disconcerting when top atmospheric scientists armed with room-size computers remain baffled by… clouds. Does a natural or artificial overcast warm the Earth like a wool blanket? Or cool the planet like a reflective space blanket?

 

If both, what’s the net difference?

 

If not… ?

 

One reason we still don’t know what’s going on with atmospheric aerosols is that, it suddenly turns out, clouds hold more water vapor – and fewer more-reflective ice-crystals – then previously assumed. 

 

Who knew?

 

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, cites “major errors in climate simulations associated with clouds.”

 

“We aren’t fully appreciating the feedback,” explains Ivy Tan, a graduate student working with scientists from Yale and the Lawrence Livermore National Atom Bomb Laboratory. “This is one of the largest uncertainties left in climate change.”

 

And geoengineering.

“The impact that aerosolised particles have on the global climate is one of the biggest unknowns in climate science,” echoes Dr. Ruhi Humphries.

 

 

GEOMANIACS RUSH TO MAKE CLOUDS AND REDUCE CLOUDS

Hubris-challenged solar radiation “managers” now say they need to reduce cirrus clouds by spraying ice particle-eating chemicals – while increasing cirrus cloud coverage using geoengineering aerosols!

 

Yep, you read that right. Laydown more sunlight-screening murky overcasts, while trying to make less.

 

This fun planetwide experiment “would explore the potential for making cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere more porous to radiation bouncing back into space from Earth. By seeding them with substances like bismuth tri-iodide, which cause water to form into ice particles, the hope is to reduce the water vapour and allow more radiation to escape,” Coghlan continued.

 

Perhaps this reference to artificial ice nucleation aerosols was meant to explain “flash” snowfalls in above-freezing temperatures, shown by weather radar plots at Dane Wigington’s geoengineeringwatch.org.

 

But probably not.

  

Califoria burning -Stephen Lam/Reuters

“EXPLOSIVE” WILDFIRES

The past three California fire seasons have seen unprecedented combustion and fire-front speeds. “Our firefighters have been facing some extreme, tough fire conditions that they said that they’ve never seen in their lives,” L.A. County Fire Chief Daryl Osby told reporters in early November 2018.

 

Global warming “is absolutely contributing to what we’re seeing in California this year, and more broadly, to the increases in fire activity that we’ve seen over the past several decades throughout the western United States,” stated Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

 

“The relationship between fuel dryness and fire activity is exponential. This means that as drying occurs, the effects on fire are increasingly extreme.”

 

A persistent ridge of high pressure clamped over the region continues to spike local temperatures, driving powerful Santa Ana winds through the region, wrote David Whiting for Orange County Register during breakout wildfires the last year. 

This “high” forms when melting sea ice exposes Arctic seas. All that open water radiates “more heat into the local atmosphere – providing a slot of warmer air that assisted this drought, heat, and wind-promoting high-pressure ridge in forming,” observe atmospheric experts posting under the name, Robert Scribbler.  

“Every year seems to bring bigger, more calamitous fires,” worries the LA Times. (Nov. 10, 2018) One resident described "an inferno like you've never seen before. Trees were on fire like torches.” 

The fires are "unprecedented," agreed Cal Fire fire captain, Amy Head.

  

Geoengineering chemicals are a desiccant that wrings residual moisture out of already warming-withered air. Whiting, Osby, Scribbler and others neglected to mention years of aerosol missions that have further displaced the climate-derailed jetstream and helped maintain that stubborn high-pressure ridge. Together, atmospheric warming and combustible aerosols are fueling fires of frightening speed and violence.

 

 

Tanker #911 drops on Arizona’s Poco Fire, June 15, 2012. -Ian James

FIREBUGS

Here’s a photo of a DC-10 air tanker dumping 373,600 gallons of retardant in a thick red slurry on the Poco Fire in 2012.

 

Meanwhile higher-flying, climate-fighting versions of that same airplane were (each) dusting “explosively-combusting” aluminum particles  over tinder-dry brush and forests for many years all along the California coast. Though widely-dispersed by high-altitude winds, as Chernobyl demonstrated, paticulate fallout tends to come down in clumps, saturating ground cover and lungs in some places, while randomly skipping others. Perhaps the firefighters now suing PG&E ought to go after the Oil Majors and the U.S. Air Force, as well.

Chemtrail Holidays over BC's northern Gulf Islands -Will Thomas photo

FOUR STAGES OF TERMINAL DENIAL

 

·      There is no problem

 

·      There may be a problem, but we should do nothing about it

 

·      Maybe we should do something, but there is nothing we can do

 

·      Maybe we could have done something, but it's too late now.

 

(paraphrased from Yes Prime Minister)

Jump to Part 2. Geoengineers Vs. The World

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