No quiz Nov1

But here are some questions from ch14-16-

1. What simple urban adaptation could "more than offset" current warming?

2. What particles will SPICE deliver, rather than sulphur?

3. What fundamental problem do most sunlight-reducing proposals fail to deal with?

4. What did the IAGP researchers admit about geoengineering?

5. What did the February 2015 major review "point out up front"?

6. What has Flannery watched over the years in astonishment?

7. What's another name for congealed atmospheric CO2?

8. What may provide "spectacular solutions to the climate crisis"?

DQ

• Are you as generally impressed by "our seemingly endless ingenuity" as Flannery is?
• Do most people think of emitting less pollution as an adaptation for survival, or just a form of what an ex-veep once called "personal virtue"? 
• Do you agree with the IAGP researchers? 147
• Was Klein too hard on Richard Branson? Is Flannery too easy on him?
• Are you ready to invest in seaweed?
• Have you heard of a conspiracy-minded organization called Geoengineering Watch? What do you think of it?
• Your discussion suggestions please

More on electric & hybrid vehicles... Climate Change from Philosopher's Eye


Can Humans Go From Unintended Global Warming to Climate By Design?
By ANDREW C. REVKIN OCTOBER 18, 2016



Geoengineering is in the wind more and more these days,particularly the use of sun-blocking aerosols as a cheap, temporary counterweight to greenhouse-gas-driven global warming.

In pondering the plausibility or desirability of such a tool, it might be useful to start with a thought experiment:

1) Suppose humans are not heating the climate and oceans through the buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. (This is only a thought experiment.)

2) Presume our capacity to understand Earth systems and devise sophisticated technologies continues to build. (Keep in mind this isn’t a given if budget priorities don’t shift.)

3) Consider the cost, in lives and money, exacted by today’s climatic extremes, let alone those worsened by warming. Many such costs can be reduced by developing suitable crops and water systems or building resilient communities. But not all. Then, on a very long time scale, consider the prospect of an inevitable new ice age.

Sifting these notions, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there will almost certainly come a moment when humans will startdesigning our climate and not simply perpetually adapt to its vagaries... (continues)
==
The Nuclear Winter by Carl Sagan (1983)

Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe.

A more or less typical strategic warhead has a yield of 2 megatons, the explosive equivalent of 2 million tons of TNT. But 2 million tons of TNT is about the same as all the bombs exploded in World War II - a single bomb with the explosive power of the entire Second World War but compressed into a few seconds of time and an area 30 or 40 miles across...

In a 2-megaton explosion over a fairly large city, buildings would be vaporized, people reduced to atoms and shadows, outlying structures blown down like matchsticks and raging fires ignited. And if the bomb were exploded on the ground, an enormous crater, like those that can be seen through a telescope on the surface of the Moon, would be all that remained where midtown once had been.

There are now more than 50,000 nuclear weapons, more than 13,000 megatons of yield, deployed in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union - enough to obliterate a million Hiroshimas.

But there are fewer than 3000 cities on the Earth with populations of 100,000 or more. You cannot find anything like a million Hiroshimas to obliterate. Prime military and industrial targets that are far from cities are comparatively rare. Thus, there are vastly more nuclear weapons than are needed for any plausible deterrence of a potential adversary.

Nobody knows, of course, how many megatons would be exploded in a real nuclear war.

There are some who think that a nuclear war can be "contained," bottled up before it runs away to involve much of the world's arsenals. But a number of detailed analyses, war games run by the U.S. Department of Defense, and official Soviet pronouncements all indicate that this containment may be too much to hope for: Once the bombs begin exploding, communications failures, disorganization, fear, the necessity of making in minutes decisions affecting the fates of millions, and the immense psychological burden of knowing that your own loved ones may already have been destroyed are likely to result in a nuclear paroxysm.

Many investigations, including a number of studies for the U.S. government, envision the explosion of 5,000 to 10,000 megatons - the detonation of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that now sit quietly, inconspicuously, in missile silos, submarines and long-range bombers, faithful servants awaiting orders.

The World Health Organization, in a recent detailed study chaired by Sune K. Bergstrom (the 1982 Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine), concludes that 1.1 billion people would be killed outright in such a nuclear war, mainly in the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, China and Japan.

An additional 1.1 billion people would suffer serious injuries and radiation sickness, for which medical help would be unavailable.

It thus seems possible that more than 2 billion people - almost half of all the humans on Earth - would be destroyed in the immediate aftermath of a global thermonuclear war. This would represent by far the greatest disaster in the history of the human species and, with no other adverse effects, would probably be enough to reduce at least the Northern Hemisphere to a state of prolonged agony and barbarism.

Unfortunately, the real situation would be much worse. In technical studies of the consequences of nuclear weapons explosions, there has been a dangerous tendency to underestimate the results. This is partly due to a tradition of conservatism which generally works well in science but which is of more dubious applicability when the lives of billions of people are at stake.

In the Bravo test of March 1, 1954, a 15-megaton thermonuclear bomb was exploded on Bikini Atoll. (below image)

(continues)
==
On the 8th Day (BBC documentary, explores the possible ecological and atmospheric consequences of nuclear war, particularly as they would be expressed in a ''nuclear winter.'' Darkness would shroud the Northern Hemisphere; temperatures would fall. The planet would survive, but not as a hospitable place)... The Day After ('83-the highest-rated television movie in history, postulates a fictional war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, the action itself focuses on the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, as well as several family farms situated next to nuclear missile silos.)