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.

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.

Reinvent Climate Management

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

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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.
[ Related: more 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.

This Roundtable's Network Reinventors

Global warming caused by chlorofluorocarbons, not carbon dioxide, new study says

7 hours ago

Chlorofluorocarbons are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week. This graph shows the …more

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week.

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide(CO2) emissions.

"Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong," said Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in Waterloo's Faculty of Science. "In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming."

"Most conventional theories expect that global temperatures will continue to increase as CO2 levels continue to rise, as they have done since 1850. What's striking is that since 2002, global temperatures have actually declined – matching a decline in CFCs in the atmosphere," Professor Lu said. "My calculations of CFC greenhouse effect show that there was global warming by about 0.6 °C from 1950 to 2002, but the earth has actually cooled since 2002. The cooling trend is set to continue for the next 50-70 years as the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere continues to decline."

The findings are based on in-depth statistical analyses of observed data from 1850 up to the present time, Professor Lu's cosmic-ray-driven electron-reaction (CRE) theory ofozone depletion and his previous research into Antarctic ozone depletion and global surface temperatures.

"It was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth's ozone layer was depleted by the sun's ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere," he said. "But in contrast, CRE theory says cosmic rays – energy particles originating in space – play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone."

Chlorofluorocarbons are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week. The graph demonstrates …more

Lu's theory has been confirmed by ongoing observations of cosmic ray, CFC, ozone and stratospheric temperature data over several 11-year solar cycles. "CRE is the only theory that provides us with an excellent reproduction of 11-year cyclic variations of both polar ozone loss and stratospheric cooling," said Professor Lu. "After removing the natural cosmic-ray effect, my new paper shows a pronounced recovery by ~20% of the Antarctic ozone hole, consistent with the decline of CFCs in the polar stratosphere."

By proving the link between CFCs, ozone depletion and temperature changes in the Antarctic, Professor Lu was able to draw almost perfect correlation between risingglobal surface temperatures and CFCs in the atmosphere.

"The climate in the Antarctic stratosphere has been completely controlled by CFCs andcosmic rays, with no CO2 impact. The change in global surface temperature after the removal of the solar effect has shown zero correlation with CO2 but a nearly perfect linear correlation with CFCs - a correlation coefficient as high as 0.97."

Data recorded from 1850 to 1970, before any significant CFC emissions, show thatCO2 levels increased significantly as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but the global temperature, excluding the solar effect, kept nearly constant. The conventional warming model of CO2, suggests the temperatures should have risen by 0.6°C over the same period, similar to the period of 1970-2002.

The analyses indicate the dominance of Lu's CRE theory and the success of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

"We've known for some time that CFCs have a really damaging effect on our atmosphere and we've taken measures to reduce their emissions," Professor Lu said. "We now know that international efforts such as the Montreal Protocol have also had a profound effect on global warming but they must be placed on firmer scientific ground."

"This study underlines the importance of understanding the basic science underlying ozone depletion and global climate change," said Terry McMahon, dean of the faculty of science. "This research is of particular importance not only to the research community, but to policy makers and the public alike as we look to the future of our climate."

Professor Lu's paper, Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change, also predicts that the global sea level will continue to rise for some years as the hole in the ozone recovers increasing ice melting in the polar regions.

"Only when the effect of the global temperature recovery dominates over that of the polar ozone hole recovery, will both temperature and polar ice melting drop concurrently," says Lu.

The peer-reviewed paper published this week not only provides new fundamental understanding of the ozone hole and global climate change but has superior predictive capabilities, compared with the conventional sunlight-driven ozone-depleting and CO2-warming models.

 Explore further: Ozone thinning has changed ocean circulation, scientists report

More information: Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change, Qing-Bin Lu, University of Waterloo, Published on May 30 in InternationalJournal of Modern Physics B Vol. 27 (2013) 1350073 (38 pages). The paper is available online at: www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979213500732

Provided by University of Waterloo  

Jets’ contrails contribute to heat-trapping high-level clouds

By Anne Danahy

February 21, 2013

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Condensation trails that airplanes produce mean not only a white-streaked sky on some days, but an increase in the amount of high-level clouds and, by extension, warming temperatures, according to a Penn State researcher.

By comparing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite images showing contrail occurrence with data from eastern U.S. stations that record sky-coverage for different levels in the atmosphere, Penn State Professor of Geography Andrew Carleton was able to confirm that contrails contribute to the occurrence of high-level clouds.

The results of the analysis that Carleton and several of his students completed will be published this spring in the international journal Climate Research.

To address the question of whether there is any relation between jet contrails and trends in sky coverage, the researchers plotted the spatial occurrence of contrails identified on the satellite images for two time periods: 1977-79 and 2000-02. Sky cover data on clouds occurring at different levels has been collected continuously at National Weather Service stations. The satellite contrail and surface-observed sky-cover data was overlaid and separated according to high versus low frequencies of contrails.

The researchers found that high frequencies of contrails didn’t equate to an increase in total cloud amount or an increase in low-lying clouds, but they did mean a significant increase in high-level cloudiness observed from the surface since about the mid-1960s.

“It suggests that contrails do influence the upward trend in the amount of high-level clouds over the last 50 years for the eastern one-third of the United States,” said Carleton, a faculty member in Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.

While Carleton wasn’t surprised by the results, he said establishing them is an important step in looking at what might be done to address the issue. It could be particularly important in upcoming decades as the potential for contrails to go from being regionally significant to more widespread becomes likely as air traffic continues to increase.

Contrails form when jet engines emit sooty particles and moisture into cold air high in the troposphere. Water vapor already present in the atmosphere collects and freezes around those particles, which are essentially the nuclei, and form linear ice crystal clouds. Contrails are prevalent in the Midwest, Northeast and Southeast of the United States, along with Western Europe and the North Atlantic. East and Southeast Asia could see growing impacts of contrails in the upcoming 20 to 30 years, as economies and air travel there continue to grow.

Carleton’s previous research found that contrails affect the climate near Earth’s surface by reducing the daily range of temperatures (the warmest point during the day minus the coolest temperature at night). He and David Travis, from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, undertook a base study on contrails and surface temperature conditions after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when there were no commercial jets in the air for three days. They found that the lack of flights led to an increase in the range of temperatures for the United States in general, and sub-regions typically seeing the highest frequencies of contrails (the Midwest and Northeast). The researchers concluded that jet contrails contribute to reducing the near-surface air temperature range.

Persisting contrails present the greatest impact on climate because instead of dissipating relatively quickly they linger, trapping heat beneath them. While contrails do block the sun to some extent, when they persist they also spread and become thinner, which means they don’t reflect as much solar energy away while still trapping heat.

“The net effect tends to be to warm the earth’s surface, rather than to cool it,” Carleton said.

The new research finds that in addition to shrinking the temperature range, contrails contribute to high-level cloudiness, which can contribute to warming the atmosphere.

A next step is trying to predict where and when contrails will occur so, when needed, planes could be rerouted around those areas to head off further aggravating the contrail impact on climate. Carleton noted that this is similar to the short-term rerouting of planes that already happens with severe storms.

“These contrail outbreaks are, broadly speaking, similar in size to big summer storm events,” he said.

The work is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

Betelgeuse Blows Out a Monstrous Arc of Gas Nearly As Big As Our Solar System

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China’s geoengineering plans dismissed as “fantasy”

Beth Walker

Olivia Boyd

11.04.2013

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The authorities are increasing their cloud-seeding ambitions in response to drought, but many experts are sceptical about the benefits

China has a long history of "rainmaking", but experts are sharply divided on the merits. (Image by baike.baidu.com)

 

Airplanes loaded with cloud-seeding chemicals swept across southwest China early last month in a bid to bring rain to the drought-parched region. Tens of thousands of rockets and battalions of cannons stood poised to ambush stray clouds that might pass unwittingly into view.

By mid March a light, sporadic drizzle over Yunnan province brought welcome relief to farmers and residents struggling into a fourth consecutive year of severe drought. Local newspapers heralded the rains as the province’s first successful large scale cloud-seeding operations of the year.

This was the latest episode in China’s attempts to control the weather.

The water-starved country already has the world’s largest weather engineering programmes, and these look set to grow. In February, China’s top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, announced plans to step up cloud-seeding and other weather modification techniques to tackle drought and boost agriculture.

Cloud-seeding is the oldest and most common weather modification technology, and often a resort during drought. It involves injecting clouds with frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) or silver iodide, using military aircraft, cannons or rockets, to speed up the production of rain.

China’s bid to use cloud-seeding to guarantee blue skies during the 2008 Beijing Olympics caught global attention. But the country’s history of “rainmaking” stretches back into the distant past. Marco Polo reportedly returned to Europe from Cathay with an “explosive yellow powder” – and tales of how the Chinese used it to trigger rain, historian James R Fleming points out in his book Fixing The Sky.

Today, China spends US$100 million a year on operations to make rain, prevent hailstorms, contribute to fire fighting and counteract dust storms in almost every province.

It’s a figure expected to grow. "Weather modification technology is crucial to China," Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, told China Daily in 2012. During China's 12th Five-Year plan period "our goal is to reduce losses caused by weather disasters from 3% of GDP last year to 1% by the end of the period."

Doubts about effectiveness
China is not the only country looking for technological fixes to water scarcity. The popularity of cloud-seeding has rocketed over the past decade, as governments, companies and scientists turn to large-scale interventions in our climate systems – known as geoengineering – as a potential fix for water shortages and global warming.

In the US, cloud-seeding is used to boost rainfall during spring planting, suppress hail, increase snowpack in the Rocky Mountains and divert and weaken hurricanes. Scientists working for the Abu Dhabi government claimed to have created more than 50 rainstorms in Al Ain in July and August of 2010, the peak of summer. Indonesia recently said it had used cloud-seeding to prevent further flooding in its inundated capital Jakarta.Iraq, Yemen, India and Mexico all have their own programmes.

“Worldwide more than 40 or 50 countries are doing cloud-seeding,” says Roelof Bruintjes one of the world's leading experts on weather modification at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research who has helped many countries design and improve weather modification programmes, including China.

“With so many countries doing this, getting the science right is important.”

China’s false hopes on geoengineering
Though a prominent advocate of weather modification, Bruintjes is critical of China’s methods. Despite the wishful thinking of policymakers, cloud-seeding is “not a drought busting tool”, he says, pointing out that drought tends to mean less cloud – and without cloud, you can’t cloud-seed. Such techniques should be used as a long-term water management tool rather than a quick fix, he says.

Paul Sayers, a water expert at the University of Oxford who is advising the Chinese government on drought planning, also dismisses cloud-seeding as a solution to drought, arguing the authorities need to get a better balance between supply and demand management. “Drought plans can’t just be about infrastructure – desalination, cloud-seeding – China needs to think about drought in a more strategic way.” A start would be to find a way of prioritising water allocations during drought to avoid irreversible environmental damage, he says.

Experts are in fact sharply divided on the efficacy of cloud-seeding. TheChina Meteorological Administration claims its weather manipulations helped to release 490 billion tonnes of rain – about 12 times the water storage of the Three Gorges Project – between 2002 and 2012. But many are sceptical about such lofty claims, as well as China’s recent noises about more ambitious programmes.

“My first impression is that it’s very much more of a public relations effort than it might be a technically sound proposition,” says Fleming, who is professor of science, technology and society at Colby University in Maine. Being seen to do something about China’s worsening drought at least demonstrates an attempt to fix the problem, even if it achieves little.

As the world invests more in geoengineering, China is also likely to want to stay at the front of the pack, he says: “If China is becoming a world leader economically and in some ways militarily, they’re going to have to position themselves as a player in this field, even if from my point of view it’s a slight fantasy.”

Does it work?
The danger, Fleming argues, is that a focus on weather manipulation distracts from the lifestyle changes that can really make a difference to our environment. The biggest impact on the Beijing Olympics came not from the much-hyped “cocktail of artillery shell ordinance” used to bust up clouds, he says, but lower-key measures to slow down traffic into the city, which reduced hydrocarbons and helped clear the air, compounded by a “fortuitous weather pattern”.

This gets to the heart of the problem with evaluating cloud-seeding, namely the difficulty proving cause and effect. Weather is complex, shifting and difficult to understand – crediting shell fire for subsequent rain is easy enough in political rhetoric, but harder to stand up scientifically.

Some of the research that has been done strikes a sceptical tone. In 2003, the US National Research Council published a study that questioned the effectiveness of cloud-seeding and the extent of impacts outside of local areas. The report called for greater research into practices for understanding and improving cloud-seeding impacts.

To complicate things further, rising levels of pollution in the atmosphere could reduce the effectiveness of cloud-seeding, says Bruintjes. His research on inadvertent weather modification, including the effects of smoke and pollution on clouds and rainfall, suggests that what works in an unpolluted region may not in a highly polluted one.

He says more research is urgently needed in China, where the approach has been chaotic and unscientific:“They have made some claims but there is no evaluation available that can substantiate their claims," he says. China has started to invest more in upgrading technology and evaluation methods, adds Bruintjes, but results will be slow to show.

Research is costly, admits Bruintjes, but if you can get 10-15% of water out of cloud, it’s cost-effective – “five to 15 times cheaper” than any water-saving alternative, such as building reservoirs, desalination plants or water-transfer programmes.

Fears of local and regional conflict
Concerns stretch beyond efficacy and cost, however. Fleming points out that commerce is playing a driving role in weather modification. His studies of dry areas of the US show funding for rainfall enhancement is coming not from the government, but from water companies, irrigation companies and hydropower companies.

Officials in China have also talked about providing cloud-seeding as a service to the private sector. The prospect of companies paying for rain to fall in one area – potentially meaning it won’t fall somewhere else – will inevitably raise knotty questions about water rights and public access to resources.

Some commentators are also fearful that growing use of weather modification could lead to conflict both within and between states.

Its development is already closely linked with military espionage. During the Cold War, US scientists debated weather modification as one way to destroy Soviet agricultural harvests and incite internal dissent. The US military used cloud-seeding in the Vietnam War to disrupt transport of military supplies along the Ho Chi Minh, a move it's claimed triggered catastrophic flooding and widespread starvation.

James Lee, professor at the American University, Washington and author ofClimate Change and Armed Conflict, has even suggested the US military is investing in cloud-seeding as an excuse for developing drones. Almost inevitably, Lee fears the widespread use of weather modification could trigger resource conflicts: “There are so many countries involved in this that I think at some time, one country is going to say to the other ‘hey, you’re stealing our rain’.”

The History of Weather Control

I would like to extend an invitation to everyone in this community to please browse, share, and fact check an interactive javascript timeline based on weather modification andgeoengineering.
As we all know there is not a definitive history of weather control, therefore I have put much effort into creating one.  This page will grow over time, with many additions/corrections.
Each slide has an image, with reference links beneath the image.  
Please send me any links to other timelines and reference material that can help me flesh this story out.  

The History of Weather Control
http://www.terraforminginc.com/weather-control/

Thank you for your time.

Jim Lee
http://www.terraforminginc.com/
http://www.climateviewer.com/

Geoengineering Research Needs Better Guidelines, Climate Change Experts Say

Posted: 03/17/2013 2:14 pm EDT

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From Climate Central's Lauren Morello:

With no clear rules to guide new research, scientists are shying away from examining whether geoengineering technologies can effectively cool the planet, and at what cost.

That’s the warning put forth by a pair of climate change experts in an essay published Thursday in the journal Science.

“This deadlock poses real threats to sound management of climate risk,” writeHarvard University climate scientist David Keith and UCLA environmental law expert Edward Parson. “Geoengineering may be needed to limit severe future risks, so informed policy judgments require research on its efficacy and risks."

Without that research, the world could face “unrefined, untested and excessively risky approaches” if climate change intensifies to the point that governments consider fighting it with geoengineering approaches, Parson and Keith said.

The researchers, who say the global debate over geoengineering is increasingly polarized, recommend that governments begin coordinating small-scale geoengineering research and block, at least for now, large-scale experiments.

They are not the first experts to recommend more geoengineering research. Over the past several years, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the U.K. Royal Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, the American Geophysical Union and the Government Accountability Office have all called for more study to determine the efficacy and drawbacks of various proposed geoengineering techniques.

Parson and Keith zero in on one category of techniques to engineer a cooler planet — those that aim to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight that reaches Earth, which have drawn significant attention and controversy.

And unlike many earlier reports calling for geoengineering research, theirs attempts to define the size and scope of “large” and “small” experiments and lay out concrete steps governments and scientists should take to regulate the field.

“There is an increasing crystallization of opposing views and in the specific groups that have looked at this,” Parson said, “which kind of makes sense because of the natural tension that you feel when you look at these technologies: ‘Oh my goodness, we could really need something like this because we’re doing such a poor job at managing the primary problem, which is climate change. But oh my goodness, (geoengineering techniques) hold so many perils themselves.’”

But that has not stopped what Parson and Keith deem “rogue” experimentation, including an episode last year in British Columbia, Canada. An American businessman arranged to dump about 100 tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean in July in the hope of kickstarting a massive plankton bloom that would draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Researchers who study the ocean have warned that such experiments could have unknown, potentially harmful effects on marine ecosystems. Those concerns helped drive the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity and the London Convention, which regulates dumping of wastes into the ocean, to prohibit for-profit plans to fertilize plankton blooms with iron.

But despite those bans, when the American businessman Russ George undertook his experiment last summer near the islands of Haida Gwaii, the Canadian government was caught unaware.

And Parson and Keith argue the experiment, though ill-conceived, did not actually violate international law.

“The Haida case is a very good example of what you might fairly characterize as an experiment without controls, run without scientific organization,” Keith said. “We need the ability to regulate these things.”

He and Parson argue that governments should begin informal coordination to oversee small-scale field experiments that could help scientists understand how the atmosphere would respond to geoengineering — without having any significant effects on local climate conditions.

The category might include a small experiment to examine whether injecting sulfur compounds into the stratosphere destroys ozone molecules, or how spraying tiny particles of sea salt into the atmosphere affects cloud formation.

At the other end of the scale, Parson and Keith call for a government moratorium on experiments large enough to have a noticeable effect on regional or global climate conditions.

And there is little advantage to experiments that fall between those two extremes, they say.

“What I hope we are contributing is pointing out some quite effective things that cold be accomplished very simply and very quickly,” Keith said. “The experiments that could teach you a lot are very small, small compared to (the atmospheric effect of) things like trans-Atlantic airport flights.”

And a moratorium on large-scale experimentation could help allay the fears of people who worry that any research could make the actual use of geoengineering techniques a foregone conclusion.

Most importantly, both researchers said, studying geoengineering does not reduce the need for the world to cuts its greenhouse gas emissions, because geoengineering is not a long-term solution to climate change.

Their overall approach is sound, said Katharine Ricke, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science who has published several studies evaluating different aspects of geoengineering. Her recent research suggests that economic incentives created by deploying geoengineering would drive governments to form small, exclusive coalitions, because the physical impact of geoengineering will vary widely around the globe.

"Every additional partner you bring in requires you to compromise on the setting of the global thermostat," Ricke said.

With that in mind, she said, "it's reasonable to assume that fostering international cooperation and inclusiveness and transparency in geoengineering research can probably only make it more likely that any implementation (of geoengineering) would be cooperative and inclusive and transparent."