Mad Scientists; Yes, there are only a few . . . Just a handful.

I don't dare name them. And they are not named here. There are disguises; there are beautiful interlacings of words in an otherwise messy complex climate science genre. Climate Science -- A field that is almost as openly broad as Cosmology -- but down to Earth earthy, and anchored to the surface and the oceans and the air. . . No, No. I dare not name them.

But what if they get financial backing? Funding might swing dozens of Good Minds to the dangerous darkness. What if they go into hiding? What if they end up at Area 51 at Groom Lake? Or Worse, Area 11? (This "Area-11 statement" is only partly a work of humor and fiction. If it is hard to figure, yup; I wrote it in code. Many of you bright ones will easily decode the message, though. It is not about me. It might be about you.)

What if "they" quietly hide "them" in New Mexico, near Los Alamos with a supercomputer for a tool? Or over near White Sands at the missile test range, disguised as normal humans? Are there Mad Scientists living in Alamogordo?

For Mad Science, this article by Eli Kintisch in Science scratches the surface.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/222/1

Read this free access article in ScienceNOW Daily News, 22 February 2008.

When free access runs out, go to a library, read it there.

Images:Climate & Global Dynamics; NCAR - UCAR- edu

These modelers are some of the same people that the IPCC has seen referenced in many model analyses, all of whom seem to have failed to accurately predict the accelerated melting of the northern polar sea ice.

Some of The Names, some of Their Cautions.

Here are the names and their espoused ideological positions with respect to terraforming Terra, as I read it from Eli Kintisch's article online. I must emphasize: These "Are Not" the "Mad" Scientist's I refer to in the title above. These are, however, people who in many cases know the "Mad" scientists -- yet these want to stay within the circle of people, the cadre working for the planetary good, for life's survival -- out in the "open." (Within the "Circle of Light," for Science. How close is the Dark Side?)

A. Philip Rasch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, conducted the study, and intimated to Kintisch that the modeling and values used "pushed" the model toward a climate that looked like today's climate -- but notes that the scheme could go past what is wanted, and add too much sulfur which could further add ice to Antarctica, as an effective overcompensation of the warming. That could have effect on hemispheric and global ecosystems as well as the global-scale air-ocean connection -- numerous effects that scientists can't study or have not been realistically studied.

B. Christopher Bretherton, climate modeler at the University of Washington, Seattle, described the subject study as: good, solid, important work -- intimating that stratospheric aerosol injection is an approach to compensate greenhouse warming that is worthy of further study.

C. Michael MacCracken, at the Climate Institute, Washington D.C. warns that if nation's around the world independantly start to geoengineer with aerosols, these aerosols would likely be launched into the atmosphere in certain territorially associated spots scattered across the globe and not spread equally and evenly around the stratosphere, as in the models the scientists used. The possibilty of non-uniform distribution of these aerosols could produce more cooling in some areas than in others, and produce absolutely unknown environmental consequences.

D. Raymond Pierrehumbert, University of Chicago, Illinois, points out that "IF" we attempt this path, this "patch," it must be a dedicated continuous effort -- but that entering upon this course should not provide license for continued discharge of CO2 forever after.

(This is "raypierre" at www.RealClimate.org -- and RealClimate.org is one of the best sources of information on Climate that one can get.)

Image:Climate & Global Dynamics; NCAR - UCAR- edu

(Visit any Federal science website and see the damages that are a result of "anthropogenic global warming" --Denial! That is, all of the federal science sites have been severely edited, (dumbed, dumbed, dumbed--a process of active obfuscation) mostly through or because of John H Marburger, III, and the oversight of the "science-information" watchers in Office of Science and Technology Policy. It will take years and new responsible leadership outreach people to straighten this out, or perhaps the younger ones still aboard these numerous agencies will be able to fix things once the Bush is gone. I only hope that the code has been preserved as it should be, and can be recovered from the National Archives, if nowhere else, and can can be resurrected to the open format it had during the years of the prior administration. I digress, for example, I had seen the full Keeling Curve from Mauna Loa, and still want to review it. Used to be easy to Google "Keeling Curve Complete CO2 record" and come up with the thing from Scripps and Keeling's start to the present NOAA operation. Sure, it is probably still there and easy, but where? AARGHH! and I know who is responsible for this, don't you?)

The Shield for Planet Earth.

These images are examples of what an "Enhanced Sulfate Shield" could do for Earth!

Image Credits: NASA, Messenger flyby (left) and Galileo flyby (right) of our 'Sister' World.

Yes, again! As Venus is, Earth will become. (These images are simply the writer's illustration of what the Earth's Sulfate Aerosol Shield for a 5x to 10x CO2 relative loading would look like from space. In these example images, showing Venus, it is unknown whether Earth life can or could still exist beneath these clouds.)1

It will require desperation to do the protective aerosol shield. Even talking or studying or modeling it suggests desperation. But in the foreseen climate ahead, these are desperate times.

The shield concept, and the actions necessary, must be something sustained; something that will be maintained for generations. Likely, for centuries. Many Centuries. In any current based foreseeable future, an effort to remove the CO2 goes on for most of a thousand years -- unless bright Scientists figure out a way to suck 1/4th of the atmosphere into a device and yank the C out and let the O2 go. But a sunscreen is a global commitment, a species commitment. It has to be that way. Does anyone think we humans have any chance to recover the future that the last 14 years have cost America, and Mankind?

The scientists mentioned here all would like to see improved climate models and the studies supported to get information to improve the models. But this scale experiment is dangerous since to be effective it would would have to be global.

Most of the tools to accomplish the Mad Science -- Global Aerosol Shield, could be gotten from those weapons and craft we have built for purposes of war.

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Mad Science! Note: "Mad" could mean a tinge of anger and angry, right?

Eli Kintisch phone-interviewed those above, probably, but the paper I refer to is the AGU publication:

--- "Exploring the geoengineering of climate using stratospheric sulfate aerosols: The role of particle size" -- (28 January 2008) Rasch, Crutzen, Colemann

Yes. Size Matters. Size Matters A Lot.

The desperate approach I will clumsily outline here Does Not Solve the Fundamental Problem We Must Solve!

So how about some real funding for the Solution Scientists? Or even the Mad Ones, the Few, the Prou . . . the . . . uh . . . the Handful?

Well, YOU paid for the salaries and supplied the computers for the two NCAR authors; lead author, Philip J. Rasch and tertiary author, Danielle B. Colemann.

Paul J Crutzen (secondary author) is with Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany and
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007GL032179.shtml

The paper's abstract states that ~ 1.5 Tg Sulfur per year lofted into the low stratosphere is found to balance a "doubling of CO2" if the particles are small, while perhaps twice the amount ( up to 3 Tg Sulphur) may be needed if the particles reach the size seen following volcanic eruptions.

I do not know how finely sulfur can be made, and still be made to come "apart" and spread as some kind of dust to infiltrate the stratosphere and scatter solar energy in the stratosphere, and reflect like Venus. It is not clear to me where the S comes to be SO2 and then, perhaps with H2O, become the tiny white aerosol H2S0 particle, helping cool Venus. This sulfate "dust" descends and is functional for most of its descending time, where it reflects and scatters to space the energy that would warm the Earth, but now to cool it.

Is this insane? Or Mad? Or Angry? Can Big Money for the "Studies" of how to make Earth's upper atmosphere reflective, like Venus' atmosphere is, be elicited from the same "climate change Denier's Association" where scientists are offered $10,000 to profer a paper that shows everything is rosy? I mean, look, all we gotta do is put one and a half to three billion tons of sulfates into the stratosphere and we can cool Earth Just Like those 70% Reflective Clouds Cool Venus!

Nothing to worry about! Pour another 200 -- 300 ppmv CO2 with 400 to 650 billion tons of pure C into the air -- and we will have to counteract the warming -- just like what happened by accident on Venus!

Mechanisms? SR-71's or Archangel 12's (A-12's) up-scaled to squirt both water and sulfur dust; or huge helium or hydrogen balloons with high explosives to detonate and spread dust at 120,000 feet or rockets to detonate a sulfur load, where needed. . . or even long-guns like Saddam's.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/babongun.htm

It brings to mind, Io, the Volcanic Galilean moon nearest Jupiter, whose volcanoes continually spew sulfur of every imaginable conformation hundreds of miles into near vacuum as Jupiter's gravitational tidal forces squeeze and release Io's body and frictionally serve to heat the hottest furnaces of volcanism in the system, and build molten hot sulfur pots and volcanic peaks. Were there an atmosphere of real substance on Io, imagine the dust!

But it might serve as a thought to loft a fiery molten sulfur container and spray through fine nozzles under extremely high pressure sulfur to become the properly "fine" dust at altitude, or mix enough water to quickly make the sulfuric acid so it could be spread and shield Earth from Big Carbon's efforts to eke a profit at all costs.

---1.5Tg S to 3.0 Tg S ---

That is 1.5 to 3.0 million metric tons of Sulfur. Earth has enough nearly pure sulfur to easily provide a maintenance level of sulfur dust to be lifted way way high. But how do you distribute it in the stratosphere?

http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm

The site above gives pulverized sulfur a weight of 961 kg/m3 That is a little less dense than water, and I have no idea on the particle size range that comes from pulverization of solid sulfur.

We are going to put all the sulfur in a box. The real box would be larger if all the particles are one micron diameter, but I'll use the 961 kg/m3 just to get a very rough idea of the scale at both ends of this model for 1.5 to 3.0 million metric tons of sulfur.

1.5/0.961 = 1.56x106 cu.meters and would fill a cubic sufur box 116 meters (380.6 feet) on a side.

3.0/0.961 = 3.12x106 cu.and fills a cubic sulfur box 146 meters (479.5 feet) on a side.

Now this is the rub. The bright white clouds of Venus are sulfuric acid clouds, and cloud chemistry and dynamics of Earth's clouds also involve S02 but on an uncertain scale. Ten years ago it was like this.

http://www.ucar.edu/communications/quarterly/summer98/sulfate.html

Now, some Mad Scientists want to turn Earth into Venus, a lot earlier?

Select an Atmospheric Model here: Click on the "I" with each model to read the general characteristics, couplings, mechanisms. . . and things necessary to the predictive ability of the model.

http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/tools/models/

Many mechanisms -- filtering and size grading operations -- might be required to produce the optimal size. One Micron, one millionth-meter, is the size that matches the peak scattering of sunlight. It is also well known that in the atmosphere, sulfur particles serve as seed particles for water vapor that become water droplets and reflect sunlight to space very well. The paper deals with a range of sizes.

Image from: NCAR

Tom Wigley, Mary Barth, and Jeffrey Kiehl collaborate on sulfate-related modeling at NCAR.

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[Study and funding? How about experiments. And what about the 500,000 people who died directly from the sulfates Pinatubo placed in the air? Some may even recall the cynical, unethical, and criminal treatment of human subjects our friendly pharmaceutical companies engaged in exploiting poverty populations around the globe, but especially Africa. Is this sulfate solution worth the risk? Is that an "acceptable" risk? If you are big oil like Shell in Nigeria and the mess oil has made of environment -- heck! what is your moral problem? Money solves all these woes. . .? Right? If you can't make a profit what good is it? Right? So oil spills kill a bunch of Nigerian fish. . .

How do you pay people when you take their lives in an "experiment?" Of course, you pay-it-"forward." Don't you?]

1 (for the scenario with a mostly white-cloud-covered aerosol shielded Earth): To insure "maintenance" and power sustainability, Big Carbon Inc. funded the systems. With the financial input the systems to launch sulfates into the Stratosphere were automated and placed over sulfur domes, and run autonomously, as was needed to insure maintenance. When rare instances of holes are found in the Sulfate Aerosol Shield, the Ocean's are often visible. Automated high powered specifically tuned orbital laser returns indicate both carbon and sulfur acidity in surface layers is substantially elevated over 20th and 21st century levels.