Geo Engineering Combats Climate Change

COPENHAGEN—The controversy at this climate summit revolves around two simple issues: Who cuts? Who pays? Of course, climate change does not distinguish between a ton of carbon dioxide emitted from cutting down a peat forest in Indonesia versus a ton emitted as a result of burning coal in Germany. Therefore, a relatively new term is beginning to stir some controversy here in the Danish capital outside the direct negotations: geoengineering.


That's in part because the "Conference of Parties" negotiations have taken so long. After 17 years, the basic issues remain to be addressed, and overall emissions have grown since 2000—the year enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty as the peak year of greenhouse gas emissions for the developed world (the U.S. signed this agreement). With little hope of reducing emissions in the near term—some scientists, such as geochemist Wally Broecker of Columbia University think we'll be lucky to stop at concentrations of 550 parts per million in the atmosphere—more radical solutions are on offer: artificial, eternal volcanoes; using saltwater mist to increase cloud cover; even flotillas of mirrors in space.

"Geoengineering is plan B," says oceanographer John Shepherd of the U.K's Royal Society of plans to deliberately tinker with the planet's climate. "It's not to be adopted unless absolutely necessary."

After all, "geoengineering is technically possible," Shepherd adds. But "in most cases, it's still on the backs of envelopes and there are very many things to be concerned about, like environmental impacts."

It's not just environmental impacts from filling the skies with sulfur dioxide to mimic the cooling impact of a massive volcanic eruption, like Mount Pinatubo in 1991, among other plans on offer. "This will have vast human rights implications, on self-determination, on the right to food," says Diana Bronson, program manager at the ETC Group. "We're talking about technologies that would modify the entire planet."

And though building a sulfur dioxide smokestack to the stratosphere is an expensive proposition, there are simpler and cheaper ways to accomplish these ends, including dumping such particles from a helicopter. "It would take 10 Howitzers firing a shell a minute a year to get sulfates into the atmosphere," says Jason Blackstock, an analyst at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. "Fifty to eighty countries in the world are capable of this."

Already, Russian scientist Yuri Izrael has begun to experiment and the Chinese routinely seed clouds to produce rain or snow. The Indians and Germans have conducted scientific testing of dumping iron in the ocean to attempt to promote algae growth and thus carbon sequestration.

"We aren't going back to the climate we had before," says Jane Long, associate director for energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "We are going to be managing the environment, not just the climate but also hydrology, soils. We have to learn how to do that."

Of course, there are geoengineering options that are not as dangerous, such as mechanical devices to suck CO2 out of the air. Physicist Klaus Lackner of Columbia University and others are working on such devices and believe they could be accomplished for $300 per metric ton of CO2 removed. And others advocate restoring organic carbon to the soil in the form of so-called biochar (charcoal), which could sequester as much as 900 megatonnes of carbon over the next several decades.

But still questions of governance remain. For example, who will determine the appropriate level for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere? Freezing Russians or sweltering island states? Who will control the global thermostat?

"Reducing emissions should remain the top priority for the foreseeable future," Shepherd says, "but serious research is needed rather than enthusiasts working in their spare time." Perhaps control of the world's climate shouldn't be trusted to basement tinkerers or scientists.

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Antarctic Airborne

PUNTA ARENAS, Chile – With seven science flights over Antarctica completed in the first 13 days of Operation Ice Bridge's first southern campaign in NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory, the mission is on track to complete its planned flights by mid-November.

The mission has 17 planned flights over different parts of the continent, focusing on the ice sheet, glaciers, and sea ice in West Antarctica. Which flight target is flown on a given day is largely determined by difficult-to-forecast Antarctic weather conditions. Several of the instruments onboard cannot gather data through clouds. Twice so far, however, flights have been scrubbed at the last minute due to snow at the airport in southernmost Chile.


Mission planners use a mix of weather forecasting tools and satellite observations to make their daily decisions about when and where to fly. In addition, updates from meteorologists at the airport provide critical information. "The Antarctic weather is a terrible problem for us," says Ice Bridge project scientist Seelye Martin of the University of Washington, Seattle. "We could not operate without the support we receive from the Chilean meteorologists here."

As of the landing of the Oct. 27 flight, completed targets included: three flights over glaciers, two over sea ice, one over the Getz ice shelf, and one to study the topography of the ice sheet on the mission's closest approach to the South Pole.

The Getz Ice Shelf was the target of the first flight on Oct. 16. Thwaites Glacier was the focus of the flight on Oct. 18, with Pine Island Glacier the target of a high-altitude flight on Oct. 20 and a low-altitude flight on Oct. 27.

"Pine Island Glacier is a major focus for our mission," says Martin. "We have four flights planned for this glacier. One of our hopes with these flights is to understand the detailed topography under the floating ice tongue. That topography controls the rate of melting there."

The mission's first sea ice flight on Oct. 21 over the Bellingshausen and Amundsen seas was a "pioneering flight," according to Martin. "We don't know what the thickness of the sea ice is here. These will be the first direct measurements of sea ice in this area. This area is important because it is the only Antarctic sector where the sea ice is actually retreating."

Martin was excited about the prospect that the combined data from two different instruments would give scientists a new way to make more accurate measurements of sea ice thickness. Thickness of sea ice is estimated from measurements of the depth of the snow and ice visible above the sea surface. But scientists have not been able to distinguish accurately how much of this material above the sea is snow and how much is ice. An accurate measurement of the two is needed to improve their calculation of overall ice thickness.

"With this flight we did something that has not been done successfully before," says Martin. "We flew a snow radar from the University of Kansas that is designed to measure the snow depth on sea ice and the laser Airborne Topographic Mapper from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility to measure the sea surface and the height of the combined snow/ice layer above the sea. If everything worked as planned, this will give us the first combined measurement of the 'layer cake' and the snow layer to an accuracy of about 2 inches."

The second sea ice flight on Oct. 24 flew over the Weddell Sea for low-altitude flights some 1500 feet above the sea under sporadically cloudy conditions.

The farthest flight of the mission took place on Oct. 25. The target was a portion of the circle of latitude at 86 degrees south. This area has been intensely mapped by NASA's ICESat satellite because the spacecraft's orbit only goes as far south as this latitude. By remapping the ICESat data points with another laser-based topographic instrument -- the Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) -- scientists hope to improve the accuracy of the ICESat data record and prepare to extend these critical ice surface change observations into the future.

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The Tibetan Glaciers is Melting at Stunning Rate

Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply.

Throughout India, China, and Nepal, some 15,000 glaciers speckle the Tibetan Plateau, some of the highest land in the world. There, perched in thin, frigid air up to 7,200 meters (23,622 feet) above sea level, the ice might seem secluded from the effects of global warming.

But just the opposite is proving true, according to new research published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of researchers traveled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the Naimona'nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting. Mountain glaciers have been receding all over the world since the 1990's and there was no reason this one, which provides water to the mighty Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra Rivers, should be any different.

But when the team analyzed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them. Glaciers around the planet are usually dated by looking for two pulses pulse of radioactivity buried in the ice. These are the leftovers from American and Russian atomic bomb testing in the 1950's and 1960's.


In the Naimona'nyi samples, there was no sign of the tests. In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944.

"We were very surprised not to find the 1962-1963 horizon, and even more surprised not to find the 1951-1952 signal," Thompson said. In more than twenty years of sampling glaciers all over the world, this was the first time both markers were missing.

He suspects the reason for this is that high-altitude glaciers, despite residing in colder temperatures, are more sensitive to climate change. As more heat is trapped in the atmosphere, he said, it holds more water vapor. And when the water vapor rises to high altitudes it condenses, releasing the heat into the upper atmosphere, where high mountain landscapes feel the brunt of warming.

"At the highest elevations, we're seeing something like an average of 0.3 degrees Centigrade warming per decade," Thompson said. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects 3 degrees of warming by 2100. But that's at the surface; up at the elevations where these glaciers are there could be almost twice as much, almost 6 degrees."

"I have not seen much as compelling as this to demonstrate how some glaciers are just being decapitated," Shawn Marshall of the University of Calgary said.

Marshall, who studies glaciers in North America, said it's striking how much worse glaciers near the equator are than those in the Canadian Rocky and Cascade mountain ranges.

The finding has ominous implications for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters of the Naimona'nyi and other glaciers for their livelihoods. Across the region, no one know just how much water the Himalayas have left, but Thompson said it's dwindling fast.

"You can think of glaciers kind of like water towers, " he said. "They collect water from the monsoon in the wet season, and release it in the dry season. But how effective they are depends on how much water is in the towers."

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Warming The Planet Plan B

Earth needs a "Plan B" in the fight against global warming, in case efforts to curb greenhouse emissions fail or are inadequate, said an American scientist in testimony Monday to the British government.

Such a backup plan would probably need to involve climate engineering projects to deliberately counteract the effects of global warming. The engineering ideas that have been floated in recent years include injecting sunlight-blocking compounds into the upper atmosphere or building a gigantic structure in space to filter sunlight reaching Earth.

"Everybody keeps talking about tipping points and climate catastrophes," Stanford University climate researcher Ken Caldeira told Discovery News. "If you take the risk seriously, then you want to do two things: Reduce the chances of it happening, and if it does happen, then know what to do."


Caldeira addressed the U.K. Parliament's Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee.

"Only fools find joy in the prospect of climate engineering," Caldeira said in his prepared testimony. "It's also foolish to think that risk of significant climate damage can be denied or wished away. Perhaps we can depend on the transcendent human capacity for self-sacrifice when faced with unprecedented, shared, long-term risk, and therefore can depend on future reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But just in case, we'd better have a plan."

For years the idea of engineering the climate has been approached with great caution, since it involves a gigantic expense with unknown benefits and risks.

"Climate engineering is a very risky thing," Caldeira told Discovery News. "But increasing greenhouse gas emissions is also very risky."

There are cases in which the effects of our accidental climate engineering, via greenhouse gases, can only be reversed by some kind of engineering.

The plight of polar bears is one example. Thick perennial Arctic sea ice is disappearing fast, taking with it polar bear habitat. No amount of carbon emission reductions today will change that trend for decades or even centuries to come. Engineering may be the polar bear's only hope, Caldeira explained.

That said, engineering is not really a solution, said climate scientist David Victor, also at Stanford University.

"It's a tourniquet," Victor told Discovery News. "It's not a substitute for fixing the original wound. It might be part of a suite of actions."

In the end, said Caldeira, humanity faces three options with regards to global warming: 1) Reduce greenhouse gases drastically and immediately, 2) Adapt to a warmer planet, and 3) engineer the climate.

"I think there is a good chance we're going to end up doing a bit of all three of them," Caldeira said.

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Melting of Glacier Under Alaskan Volcano

Geologists monitoring Mount Redoubt for signs of a possible eruption noticed that a hole in the glacier clinging to the north side of the volcano had doubled in size overnight -- and now spans the length of two football fields.

Scientists with the Alaska Volcano Observatory on Friday flew close to Drift Glacier and spotted vigorous steam emitted from a hole on the mountain. By Saturday, they had confirmed the area was a fumarole, an opening in the earth that emits gases and steam, that was increasing in size at an alarming rate.

They also saw water streaming down the glacier, indicating heat from magma is reaching higher elevations of the mountain.

"The glacier is sort of falling apart in the upper part," research geologist Kristi Wallace said.


The signs of heat add to concerns that an eruption is near, which could send an ash cloud about 100 miles northeast toward Anchorage, the state's largest city, or onto communities on the Kenai Peninsula, which is even closer to the mountain on the west side of Cook Inlet. It would be the first eruption since 1990.

Particulate released during an eruption has jagged edges and can injure skin, eyes and breathing passages, especially in young children, the elderly and people with respiratory problems.

It can also foul engines. An eruption in December 1989 sent out an ash cloud 150 miles that flamed out the jet engines of a KLM flight carrying 231 passengers on its way to Anchorage. The jet dropped more than two miles before pilots were able to restart the engines and land safely

A week ago, the observatory detected a sharp increase in earthquake activity below the volcano and upgraded its alert level to orange, the stage just before full eruption. The warning that an eruption was imminent caused a rush on dust masks and car air filters in Anchorage.

Alaska's volcanoes typically start with an explosion that can shoot ash 50,000 feet high and into the jet stream, but there are warning signs because magma causes small earthquakes as it moves.

Geologist Jennifer Adleman said the observatory has been recording quakes up to magnitude 2.1 but not at the frequency that preceded the last two eruptions in 1989 and 1990.

"We're looking for an increase of seismicity to match the precursor activity," Wallace said. "We haven't seen that yet."

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Arctic Ice Melt

Record summer sea ice losses in the Arctic Ocean are now leading to bursts of ocean life in the newly open waters, say researchers watching the north polar sea from space.

Blooms of phytoplankton have been increasing as the summer sea ice shrinks further back every year, according to observations made using the space-borne ocean color monitoring instrument called Seawifs.

"It's going up," said Stanford University researcher Kevin Arrigo, referring to the surge in phytoplankton in Arctic waters. "That was a surprise to us."


Arrigo coauthored a paper reporting on phytoplankton productivity for 2007, which adds to previous observations made from 1998 to 2006. The paper appears in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

What makes the phytoplankton trend surprising is that the microscopic plant-life continues to boom each summer without any signs of slowing -- at least in the nine years that Seawifs has been up there watching. That sort of growth runs against a generally accepted idea about Arctic Ocean waters.

"People typically think of the Arctic as a nutrient-limited system," said Arrigo.

In other words, there isn't a lot of fertilizer in the Arctic waters to support these tiny photosynthetic organisms. So either the phytoplankton blooms will soon start to reflect the scarcity of food by tapering or leveling off, or there's got to be another source of nutrients somewhere up there, Arrigo told Discovery News.

One alternative phytoplankton grocery store could be upwelling caused by wind blowing on the newly exposed waters. The wind can cause nutrient-rich deeper waters to mix with surface waters, making a nourishing soup for plankton.

Another possibility is that run-off from thawing lands around the Arctic Ocean is adding nutrients. The latter idea is less likely to cause the productivity that's been seen far out at sea, however, Arrigo said.

The same changes in the Arctic Ocean are quite plain to researchers who venture there by ship. One of them is Jean-Éric Tremblay of Université Laval in Québec, who studies the phytoplankton in the Beaufort Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories.

"In the Beaufort Sea the wind acts directly on the surface of the ocean so it's being mixed," Tremblay confirmed. "It looks more like the North Atlantic in the autumn."

As for the details about which species of phytoplankton is doing what -- which is critical to see how it affects the food web or carbon cycle of the Arctic -- that's not at all clear yet, Tremblay said. The problem is some phytoplankton species are great for the food web and others are not. Moreover, everything is happening fast, and it's pretty new.

"In some places the ice has been away for just one year," Tremblay noted. The water temperature is still too low for some plankton species. But that is likely to change and the perennial sea ice continues to shrink and the Arctic waters are exposed earlier and earlier to sunlight every summer. "We think that in the near future the situation will change."

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Fuel Came From Styrofoam

You know polystyrene foam - that thing we more commonly refer to as Styrofoam, otherwise known as the bane of recycling? Yes, THAT Styrofoam has recently been proven as an effective ingredient to up the efficiency and performance of biodiesel. And no, it's not April Fools all over again.


A study funded by the Department of Defense on finding ways to generate energy and recycle waste in the battlefield stumbled upon this gem of an information. The methodology used was quite elementary - the scientists merely dissolved Styrofoam with biodiesel in varying percentages (from 2 to 20 percent) and tested the fuel's performance. "A polystyrene cup will dissolve almost instantly in biodiesel, like a snowflake in water," says Song-Charng Kong, one of the researchers. The polystyrene material doesn't do quite well with other liquid fuels though.

Results are varying but one thing is clear - create a mixture of biodiesel with five percent of Styrofoam and you get an increase an output of the same rate. Unfortunately, any concentration beyond five percent and the fuel becomes too viscous, thereby negatively affecting performance. This limitation might be overcome in the future, or it might not, but fact remains that this discovery presents a possible and very agreeable option when it comes to recycling polystyrene foam in the garbage.

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