Image: NASA, Goddard With a lot of work, we can go from here, where on this part of the globe we see, nearly 5 billion people live . . .

To here: where no one lives or EVER can live: A hellhot place.

Image: NASA, JPL : Approaching Venus, Earth's twin", and what Earth will look like in the far future.

Big Carbon’s Latest Chance:
Terraforming Terra. Some Dangerous Rumors.

If you are involved in “Big Carbon” this terraforming kind of talk could keep you in "business" much, much longer and raise more contrarian uncertainties along the line of that 1990 White house memo, than almost anything else you could do.

If you help influence funding for the research it could be a double edged sword, and it could be swung both ways. It could take ones head right off! It might mean the inter"nationalization" of OIL, COAL, NATURAL GAS -- all the mine-able, extractable fossil carbon sources brought together and to an abrupt end.

Or it could save your neck (temporarily) from a lot of hominids who can tear you limb from limb in a panic and no private black-water bunch of good old boys can long save you from a mob. (When they see their paycheck vanishing no matter what, just how much loyalty can Big Carbon Money buy? Or they could say: to preserve the Congress as the people's voice, we were able to remove those elected, and used a neurotoxin on the 3 million (3,202,324 we have counted them on camera) that were in the Big Carbon Truth March on Washington. A review panel has cleared us of any "wrong-doing.")

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEFD71131F93AA25757C0A966958260

Published April 19, 1990 --Article by Philip Shabecoff, special to the NY times

WHY would these scientists want to do "Geoengineering?"
Essentially, "Terra-forming" Terra?

So WHAT HAPPENED at Cambridge, Massachusetts?
It was a by "invitation only" meeting. It was about "geoengineering . . ."

And what should have been expected?
Surprisingly, just what you would expect.

Let’s suppose you have a “scientific gathering,” (of scientists, of course) who have been invited to discuss modifying the Earth, or the atmosphere of Earth, to cool it so that the effects of “anthropogenic global warming” are mitigated somewhat? So what would you expect from such a meeting?

Think about that, and read on, the answer is below.

I hope this link to Science "works" for you. Either through your library or institutional subscription.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/318/5853/1054

But on the chance it does not, below I will report "about" what Eli Kintisch reported. It is not quite like gossip, or hearsay, of even message corruption, but I do warn gentle readers that I "am" opinionated and biased.

Maybe it is message corruption? Generally, I try not to insert my definitive perspective into the "reporting" -- absolutely as long as I can help it! [I can't help it. I admit it. I am weak. Satire, satire.]

Eli Kintisch writing for Science 16 November 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5853, pp. 1054 - 1055, DOI: 10.1126/science.318.5853.1054 -- REPORTS in “News of the week” under the heading

CLIMATE CHANGE:

Eli Kintisch reports "Scientists Say Continued Warming Warrants Closer Look at Drastic Fixes"

Kintisch reports the meeting at Cambridge, MA , organized by the University of Calgary and by Harvard University, was attended by 50 invited elite notables in climate science research, energy and economics to explore and discuss "geoengineering."

Kintisch reports that climate modeler, David Battisti, University of Washington, said his objective, “was to stop people from doing something stupid.” Kintisch writes that Battisti was convinced by the “rising temperatures and carbon emissions, combined with little meaningful action by politicians, that it was time for mainstream climate science to look more closely at geoengineering.

Science fiction writers have been exploring this concept for many decades, but no one 'funds' them ----except for the funding and advances likely possible to a writer who would write what the Big Carbon crews and coalitions want you to hear. I'm wondering how this sits in the writer's mind? Can he live with the fiction he wrote? (It depends on how much he has socked away and what else he wants to write. . .

Funds have not yet been advanced through any research institutions or agencies for the "possibility" or purpose of modifying a major aspect of the Earth, the air, the sea, the climate -- for this to be given encouragement and be seriously studied.

The Sci-Fi stuff is not as really as far off the wall (any of it) as what some in the last few Republican administrations have been asking you to believe -- that billions of tons of CO2 from power plant to automobile to home heaters or stoves has no significant effect. And a President can fool a lot of people -- some of the time. . .

Kintisch points out that Nobel prize winner, Paul Crutzen in a 2006 paper in Climatic Change, (see Science, 20 October 2006, p. 401) served as a catalyst to spur discussion among scientists openly. This was a "taboo" topic, Harvard environmental chemist Scot Martin intimated.

To remove the "taboo", and to get it out in the "public" required someone not behaving like the usual herd-driven “sheep” in the science community and a Nobel Prize winner seems to have the credentials and reputation to do this. This meeting, so stimulated by Crutzen’s paper, was then organized by Harvard’s geochemist Daniel Schrag and Calgary’s physicist, David Keith.

(Les Porter interjection: It will be interesting to see if the serious side of this subject carries more weight than the “testing” Nobelist James Watson referred to in the "politically incorrect climate” and the result of remarks which "sidelined" him at Cold Spring Harbor several weeks ago.)

One "fear" stated as "preventing serious research" into the subject is that the study of technical repairs to the atmosphere might be taken seriously by the real masses of sheep (the Public) and support to cut carbon emissions would be difficult (even more difficult) [impossible] to achieve.

[This writer [Les Porter] finds that above envisioned difficulty is a flimsy excuse. For a scientist to believe that the “public” would not examine the facts fully when they are clearly, objectively and understandably presented, is not a real reason but a science "community" problem. If the science community is having trouble communicating the facts to the public, to the politicians and businesses and multinationals that support these politicians -- we need a Carl Sagan-kind of guy to figure out how to communicate from the climate science towers to the plain honest level playing field -- just exactly how dangerous this CO2 thing is and what it is going to do to every life on Earth.

In fiction, even like "State of Fear," which really really is Crichton's "Real State of Real Confusion," the truly dastardly effects are not visible yet.

Oh, but they will be.

That will be the real state of fear. To say the public would want to continue on this carbon fueled economy is more frightening to me when said by some colleagues or climate scientists.

Eli Kintisch reports Crutzen writing last year, "The very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gasses could be reduced so much that the experiment would not have to take place, Currently, this looks like a pious wish."

Kintisch reports that Battisti suspects the participants share the hope of many of those who took part in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb -- that society would never have to use the knowledge they provided. Battisti outrightly declares the greater need is to cut carbon emissions instead of the geoengineering options the meeting would discuss. Battisti said, “It would be incomprehensible that we deploy this.”

=====================
Kintisch writes that the Terraforming field's roots lie in early and mid Cold War era Soviet-U.S.-weather-modification programs of the 1960s. A number of radical ideas drifted into the public consciousness then. And none of their potential consequences were effectively understood in the least.

From a purely technical level -- not a human or biological level -- the problem is engineering, but on a scale we could now only conceive as being within the power of a “super unified planet-based civilization." Forget North American Union. Forget the EU. Forget about Asia. Everybody seems to have already forgotten about Africa.

Would a real planetary civilization be able to make an equitable distribution of resources? Yes. But not us. We have republicans and democrats (lots of little political parties, and their philosophies soar) and we have a seemingly infinite number of tribes. We have a few with immense personal wealth. We have a culture driven insane and unreal by profit and the exploitation of everything as much as can be exploited, for immediate return. Since there is no future under the current circumstances, sounds like you should get yours while you can. It is a bad day for the good people of this species. Is there a chance the world can be unified? Not while the present kinds of malfeasant persona's are in positions of power.

No. Buckminster Fuller was way ahead of his time and the problems we have now would not be possible in Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion World. You would not be some kind of wage slave either, and you would actually work to contribute -- and be rewarded for learning a living. No. Instead we have a very very ill planet of squabbling tribal states. We have republican dictators and leaders who are or think they are beholden to neither Constitution or Law. There are those who think the laws of physics can be violated. Bucky Fuller would have made a good Director of Planetary Works. He may not have made a good Democrat -- and he would not have been any kind of current Republican. He might have asked they be banned from any participation in world government.

It is clear that Fuller would have had difficulty with the Republican tissue of government -- largely because Fuller thought in advanced scientific and engineering concepts, not in one-ups-manship or the inhuman use of humans.

Physics and even simple science seems to befuddle every Republican political functionary; a good example would be the following from the USGS.

http://quake.usgs.gov/research/history/wallace-XI.html

USGS Director and scientist Dallas Peck was in a meeting with Reagan Republican appointee Interior Secretary, James G. Watt, and USGS scientist Peck was enthusiastically reporting about how USGS water scientists had used new microwave imaging techniques to map previously unknown underground water channels in rocks a million or more years old. Secretary Watt shook his head and retorted, "That can't be so, Dr. Peck, the world is only 6,000 years old!" When Dallas Peck colleague and friend, Robert E Wallace asked Dallas about the story, Dallas Peck said it was absolutely true, and added, "What could I say or do, other than just stop right there?"

That illustrates perhaps, better than anything else possibly could, the sorry state of federal science leadership under Republican political appointees. No the Secretary doesn't have to be a scientist, but he should not interject his beliefs into science. That is irresponsible, typically Republican and true today as it was twenty years ago. No Republican scientists (or so identified) were invited to the geoengineering meeting. Scientists do science; politicians should stay out of it. But surely the attendees will be approached.

Some of the schemes Kintisch mentions the meeting participants discussed to fight the warming include:

-- Blocking sunlight with giant shades in space. [Yeah. This is almost doable, but right now it would probably be much cheaper to shut down any CO2 emissions, and take the lucrative profits made in the past and plow them into huge sucking devices to capture what is already in the air, and sequester it. (The NASA-ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, is located at the Earth-Sun Lagrangian point (L1) in a Halo Orbit. L1 is the place for a sun shade. Several missions are using L1 at present, others have in the past. This is major major engineering. This is something an intelligent species may want to try about 1100 million years from now or earlier to keep Earth's oceans from boiling away to space in the Venus Greenhouse promise for our planet. If maintained, such as device could last right up until the Sun ratchets into the red giant stage.

Another far future option might be moving the Earth further from the Sun. [Science Fiction writer Larry Niven has an approach for that in "Time out of Mind."]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

-- Clouds generated at sea by devices placed afloat to loft, water vapor, into the air and make clouds to increase the albedo (reflectance) over the oceans to keep the oceans from absorbing as much energy and warming as much. [Uh. . . Yeah. Water Vapor is a potent GHG and it’s flux, along with the relatively stable pre-anthropogenic CO2 have dynamically helped stabilize and warm and cool the Earth. Life forms in the ocean and ashore, have gotten used to this stability. It seems a little unlikely, and would need Yeah, yeah. It is just an idea.]

Kintisch writes that Lowell Wood and Star Wars Colleagues mostly with (Lawrence) Livermore-Berkeley National Laboratory had suggested aerosols like what Mt. Pinatubo lofted into the stratosphere to produce the cooling effect of volcanoes. One of Wood's central points was that aerosol methods are cheap. Some modeling papers recently have simulated that effect.

[Volcanoes are “cool”, huh? The particulates and sulfates from Pinatubo reportedly caused an additional half million deaths subsequent to the eruption, via respiratory stress in the region and around the world. Cheap might be a relative term].

Harvard physicist Robert Frosch, reported that a National Academies' panel on climate denied his suggestion to include the “cost of geoengineering options” in a figure on possible solutions to global warming. One relatively simple option: Inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of solar energy reaching Earth's surface. "Nobody wanted to put the geoengineering line on the figure because it looked too [economically] easy," Frosch told participants.

-- Cost was a major player in the discussions at the meeting, with some preliminary studies indicating that the SO2 option could be deployed for just a few billion dollars a year. That amount could make aerosol engineering attractive to "politicians" looking for radical fixes in a warming world. [

Side effects?

--- Atmospheric dynamicists pointed out that the few modeling studies that have simulated Terraforming efforts down-play important details such as ocean and complex feedbacks.

(Modelers agreed, but insisted the simplified models, are "preliminary.")

Kintisch reports:

-- Ecologists pointed out that the artificial cooling attempts could lead to serious dehydration in the tropics and that no matter which fix could be used to lower the Earth's temperature it would not address the steadily acidifying ocean.

--Kintisch reports one modeler, Raymond Pierrehumbert, University of Chicago, describing one unpublished experiment, simulating a future scenario in which the amount of atmospheric CO2 had quadrupled [1536 ppmv] but Earth was kept cool by a yearly dose of geoengineering. He said his model showed that a halt in the geoengineering effort--"by, say, a war or revolution"--would result in a 7° C temperature jump in the tropics in 30 years. That rise, he says, would trigger unimaginable ecological effects.

Les Porter: As a matter of fact, Karen Bice, WHOI has data indicating the surface of the Atlantic was 107o F.
http://www.whoi.edu/science/GG/people/kbice/Bice_etal_2006.pdf and CO2 was from 1300 to 2300 ppm. in the 84mya - 100 Mya time-frame.[/]]

-- Kintisch reports that Sallie Chisholm, an MIT biological oceanographer said her colleagues were down-playing the difficulty of determining how "inherently unpredictable" biosphere feedbacks will react to "turning the temperature knob." She said, "We cannot predict the biosphere's response to an intentional reduction in global temperature through geoengineering."

-- Kintisch reported that other scientists warned about a likely public backlash. Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Toronto in Canada talked about street protests. "Some people may consider geoengineering to be an act of ultimate hubris," he says. "It's going to provoke fear, anger, guilt, and despair."

-- According to Kintisch, Harvard climate dynamicist, Peter Huybers suggested public alarm about geoengineering maybe a potentially positive effect, saying, "If they see us talking about this as a last-ditch effort, it might increase their alarm" and drive them to cut emissions.

Kintisch reports that by the end of the 2-day event, participants were "stunned" that they had come so far. "In this room, we've reached a remarkable consensus that there should be research on this," announced climate modeler Chris Bretherton of the University of Washington, Seattle. Nobody dissented.

The decision on whether to do this will not be made by this group," Schrag said. But what scientists can do, he said, is offset the input of groups driven by profit or ideology with solid research on the possible side effects of various geoengineering techniques.

Kintisch noted that some attendees had changed from the beginning of the meeting. Mixed in with his new sense of "responsibility," Battisti says, is dismay that the climate problem has grown so serious as to drive scientists to contemplate steps that, in theory, might lead to more serious problems than continued warming. After speaking on the phone with his wife from his hotel room, Battisti confessed, "I told her this meeting is terrifying me."

==============
Big Carbon had its Global Climate Coalition-- and it looks like Bush II is trying to cover for what were his earlier asscociations with those that decried anthropogenic global warming.

Supposedly, Big Carbon abandoned their Coalition, and we have all seen BP's "It ain't much, but its a start..." Commercials on the tube. -- and we are seeing artificially inflated prices for fuel on the street. The last three Republican administrations have done little to research or protect the environment, keeping the agencies from investigating what needs to be investigated for this nation and the world. The Terraforming meeting participants all knew the real situation might need the kinds of actions they were called to think about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Climate_Coalition
(see wikipedia’s pages on it and its decommissioning and (?supposed?) abandonment --and lobbyist global and international reach)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jan/27/lastword.environment

http://65.17.225.133/assets/webPages/departmental/news/SpecialReports/details.aspx?newsID=20413&section=science

Charleston’s “The Post and Courier” publish a timeline through 2005 using the bottom of the Keeling-Chin Mauna Loa “saw tooth” curve of at least 375 ppmv , a then conservative value now in the 384ppmv range

---------------------------------------------
K. C. Armitage concisely accounts for the recent difficulties, mostly attributed to “political” sidings and the industry of Big Carbon wanting to continue being unaccountable for their part.

http://pfaff.sts.virginia.edu/sts401p/images/1/16/Armitage2005.pdf

Upcoming and with links to many countries of the world:

http://www.globalclimatecampaign.org/

http://www.globalclimatecampaign.org/index.php?cmd=Main.ShowCountry&id=53&lang=en&PHPSESSID=23bfc9179f59e62d7da6077f9fccf47b#country53

From a purely technical level -- not a human or biological level -- the problem is engineering, but on a scale we could now only conceive as being within the power of a “super” unified planet-based civilization.

Some of the schemes Kintisch mentions the meeting participants discussed to fight the warming include:

To keep Big Carbon in business, you can bet the scientists who "participated" by invitation to the Massachusetts meeting -- will be contacted by the Carbon Industry -- with money. Please realize that it is likely to be a "lot" of money.

Hey BIG CARBON, Listen up. Throw big money into science, while you can. It might save your lives and companies or names for a history. Otherwise corporations will be a thing of the past and as structured, should be relegated to the past...