Real Global Temperature Trend, p20 – Combining thermal inertia & carbon cycle inertia: 1 decade extra warming after emissions stop

Apart of course from the amount of greenhouse gases we keep pumping into the atmosphere, there are mainly three factors that determine the amount of warming we will experience in the near future: CO2 climate sensitivity, ocean thermal inertia, and … Continue reading

Real Global Temperature Trend, p18 – Now how high is climate sensitivity? Here’s the answer of the world’s 16 leading climate experts!

If you have any affinity with climate science, this should interest you – probably a lot: Piers Forster, James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Alan Robock, Michael Mann, Ken Caldeira, Stefan Rahmstorf, Chris Forest, Gabriele Hegerl, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Jonathan Gregory, Drew … Continue reading

Arctic solar geoengineering options modeled – feasibility investigated, including seasonal approach

solar geoengineering ArcticScientists are slowly starting to get practical on geoengineering. Cooling the entire planet with stratospheric solar geoengineering could cost only 5 billion dollars per year. And opting for artificial clouds saving the Arctic with geoengineering could be as cheap as 24 million euros.

Now a group including renowned climatologists and leading geoengineering thinkers Ken Caldeira and David Keith tries to investigate ways to alleviate some of the (likely) unwanted side effects of Arctic solar geoengineering.

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Painting the skies a bright white with geoengineering

Clouds in the skyOne idea for fighting global warming is to increase the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, scattering incoming solar energy away from the Earth’s surface. But scientists theorize that this solar geoengineering could have a side effect of whitening the sky during the day. New research from Carnegie’s Ben Kravitz and Ken Caldeira indicates that blocking 2% of the sun’s light would make the sky three-to-five times brighter, as well as whiter. Their work is published June 1st in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

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SRM geoengineering more likely to increase global food production

If we would pump aerosols in the stratosphere to artificially cool the Earth and thereby compensate (part of) the current climate warming, we would be permanently living under a slight sunshade. That would mean in a futuristic world it may … Continue reading