Sunday, June 23, 2013

More propaganda to push geoengineering ,Man-made particles lowered hurricane frequency: study

Man-made particles lowered hurricane frequency: study
A television reporter watches waves hit a pier before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy October 29, 2012 just off the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Higher levels of air pollution reduced the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes and other tropical storms for most of the 20th century, a study said Sunday.
A television reporter watches waves hit a pier before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy October 29, 2012 just off the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Higher levels of air pollution reduced the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes and other tropical storms for most of the 20th century, a study said Sunday.
AFP - Higher levels of air pollution reduced the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes and other tropical storms for most of the 20th century, a study said Sunday.
Adding to evidence for mankind's impact on the weather system, the probe found a link between these powerful storms and aerosols, the scientific term for specks of matter suspended in a gas.
Aerosols can occur in natural form -- as dusty volcanic plumes, clouds or fog -- but are also man-made, such as sooty particles from burning coal or oil.
The study focused on particles from North America and Europe that were generated mainly from burning fossil fuels.
Researchers from the UK Met Office created weather simulations covering the period 1860 to 2050.
They found that tropical storms were much less frequent during periods when emissions of man-made aerosols increased over the North Atlantic.
"Increases in anthropogenic emissions (particularly of aerosols) through most of the last century is found to have reduced hurricane activity," co-author Ben Booth told AFP.
"The cooling impact of man-emitted aerosols may have had a more important regional impact on climate than we previous appreciated."
Aerosols reflect solar rays and change the brightness of clouds, which affects how much of the Sun's heat is projected onto the surface of the sea, the authors suggest.
Ocean warmth provides the raw energy for tropical storms, which in extreme conditions can brew into destructive hurricanes.
Conversely, the study found that measures since the 1980s to tackle pollution and improve air quality reduced levels of aerosols -- and in turn ramped up hurricane activity.
"The clean-up of industrial aerosols in the last 20 years, while being beneficial for human health and linked to a recovery of African Sahel rains since the 1980s droughts, may have contributed to increases in Atlantic hurricane activity," Booth said by email.
The authors said their study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first to demonstrate a link between aerosols and Atlantic tropical storms.
The research team postulates that in the future, it will be Earth-warming greenhouse gases, much longer-lasting than aerosols, that will exert the most influence on tropical storm frequency.
Previous work published in Nature Climate Change had said that while the number of tropical storms was not projected to increase in future, their intensity was.
The hurricane season runs from June to November. For 2013, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has predicted 13 to 20 "named" storms, seven to 11 hurricanes and three to six major hurricanes.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Reinvent Climate Management

Reinvent Climate Management
1 day ago via reinventors.net

Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management
Reinvent Climate Management


Watch here for LIVE broadcast on June 18, 2013 11:00 am PT

Managing the climate in the face of global warming is a wicked problem with almost no precedent. Given the global nature of the problem, no one nation can solve it without getting virtually all other nations involved. Even if Americans stopped driving cars and eating meat en masse tomorrow, it would not make much of a dent if the Chinese kept burning coal at their mad pace. India, Japan, even Canada all play outsized roles.
The problem demands engaging almost every independent nation in a highly coordinated manner. Therein lies one aspect of the climate management problem: coming up with global governing systems that could monitor and coordinate in ways that are far beyond the capabilities of our current international institutions.
Relatedmore news tagged with "Global warming" ]
Another aspect of climate management is geoengineering. Some studying the changes in our climate think that we already may have gone too far in dumping global warming pollution into the atmosphere — that even with drastic cuts to carbon, we will still be unable to avoid huge climate changes. They and others are contemplating ideas such as “solar radiation management”– blocking out something like 3 percent of the sun’s light by, for example, spreading and maintaining particles of sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere, similar to what happens when volcanos erupt.
It gets potentially more complicated because such a geoengineering project in the upper atmosphere could lead to unintended changes to regional climate conditions, and potentially be seen as a threatening action. And it wouldn’t take a superpower to make geoengineering happen — a wealthy private sector actor who wants to “save the Earth” (Nathan Myhrvold and other tech titans have talked about similar projects) could do it. So could any country with a small air force, such as India, Saudi Arabia, even Belgium.
During this roundtable we will face up to this extremely difficult problem and talk about how to Reinvent Climate Management. What would a system of global governance look like that’s up to the true challenges ahead? What kind of authority would it need? If actors like rogue nations or geoengineering tech titans broke the rules, what could be done? We’ll look at a range of possibilities, including those that don’t involve big government. Is there a bottom-up way forward? One led by corporations?
This roundtable will be driven by Jamais Cascio, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, who is author of Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering, and who is now at work on his second book.
 We’ll be filling up the roundtable with other systems thinkers in the weeks ahead.

Remarkable Reinventor




    Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers, Jamais Cascio specializes in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future, focusing on the intersection of emerging technologies, environmental dilemmas, and cultural transformation. Cascio’s work appears in publications as diverse as the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and Foreign Policy, and he has been featured in a variety of television programs on future issues. Cascio speaks about future possibilities around the world, at venues including the Aspen Environment Forum, Guardian Activate Summit in London, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, and TED.
    In 2009, Cascio published his first non-fiction book, Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering, and is at work on his second. Cascio is presently a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, and also serves as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In 2003, he co-founded WorldChanging.com, the award-winning website dedicated to finding and calling attention to models, tools and ideas for building a “bright green” future. In March, 2006, he started Open the Future as his online home, writing about subjects as diverse as robot ethics and the carbon footprint of cheeseburgers.

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