Do you know what your jet stream is doing tonight?

                                           The jet stream actually doesn't look like that

Do you ever wonder what the jet stream is doing while you're not looking?  

Sure, you occasionally see maps that show the jet stream shooting across the United States, usually when the weather channel is trying to explain why the weather is so unusually hot or so unusually cold.  The jet stream is always portrayed as a thin, continuous and sinuous band of high speed winds snaking its way around the planet.   You can also see the same kinds of diagrams in many geography and science textbooks.

But thats all wrong.  The jet stream actually isn't like that at all.   Global Warming is changing the jet stream to something quite different. 

You don't believe me---then why not see the jet stream for yourself?   Real-time meteorologic data from around the world can now be accessed from data feeds provided by NOAA and other agencies around the world who collect meteorological data.   This is the same data that is used by the US Weather Service and various weather sites like Weather Underground when they make weather predictions.  

One of the best places to see the jet stream is at a site called Earth: An Animated Display of Global Wind, Weather and Ocean Conditions.   Click through on the link I've provided and it will take you to a real-time display of the jet stream.  Click around on this web site and you can access a lot of other interesting real-time meteorologic data as well.

Global Warming is changing the way the jet stream behaves and the way it operates.  The amplitude of the waveforms in the jet stream are becoming bigger and the wavelengths are becoming smaller so it is becoming more and more sinuous.  This allows warmer temperatures to penetrate far into the north, and is partly responsible for the melting of the Arctic Ocean sea ice.  Some climatologists also think the changes in the shape of the jet stream are causing more extreme weather events in temperate latitudes----such as more severe droughts and extreme heat events in the summer and more intense cold outbreaks of cold polar air in the winter.  The realization that global warming caused by CO2 building up in the atmosphere is changing the shape of the jet stream helps explain why we are seeing more of both extreme warm AND extreme cold weather events.

But you don't have to believe me that global warming is changing the shape of the jet stream.  Now you can see the jet stream for yourself.

 

Geoengineering with Artificial Clouds

                                              "Hey.....You......Get off my cloud"  --- Mick Jagger

Most proposals for Geoengineering the Earth to mitigate global climate change involve scaling up natural processes that already occur on the earth.  For instance, cloudy days tend to be cooler then sunny days because clouds block the sun.  One proposal to counteract global warming involves creating artificial clouds.  A NASA review of climate change states:

"Even small changes in the abundance or location of clouds could change the climate more than the anticipated changes caused by greenhouse gases..." 

Artificial clouds aren't very hard to make.  Thousands of huge artificial clouds, called contrails, are created by jet aircraft everyday.   As thousands of passenger jet flights pass occur over the United States, contrails made of steam appear behind each jet engine as a by-product of combustion of jet fuel in the jet engines.  Currently about 60 billion gallons of jet fuel are consumed each year by jet aircraft in the USA.  The stream exhaust is superheated when it leaves the jet engine and quickly expands to about 100 times its original volume in the low air pressure found in stratosphere where jet travel occurs and then freezes into ice crystals to form visible clouds.  Based on the volume of jet fuel consumed, about 10 trillion cubic feet of clouds are produced.  Surely these clouds are cooling the climate?  Perhaps the ideal Geoengineering program would involve subsidies to encourage frequent free jet travel to Rio and Paris and Vegas and other exotic places in order to make even more jet contrails and counteract Greenhouse Warming?

Unfortunately, no.

Yes, clouds block solar radiation and can produce some local cooling.  But water itself is a greenhouse gas, and clouds absorb long wave radiation emitted by the earth and keep the earth's surface warmer than it would be without clouds.  This effect is especially noticeable at night----the very coldest nights tend to be clear, while cloudy nights are warmer.

When the warming and cooling effects of cloud cover are compared, the warming effect is actually somewhat larger than the cooling effect.  Some scientists actually believe jet contrails and other artificial clouds are playing a significant role in INCREASING planetary global warming.  

So Mick Jagger had it right all along...

I was sick and tired, fed up with this
And decided to take a drive downtown
It was so very quiet and peaceful
There was nobody, not a soul around
I laid myself out, I was so tired and I started to dream
In the morning the parking tickets were just like
A flag stuck on my window screen
I said, Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Don't hang around 'cause two's a crowd
On my cloud

—NASA

Nuclear War and Geoengineering

                                        Enough with the planetary geoengineering already

One of the nasty side effects of a nuclear war, in addition to the mass destruction of cities and deaths of millions of innocent civilians, is something called nuclear winter.  Computer models of the effects of nuclear war suggest that the huge explosions and enormous heat generated by nuclear bombs create convective clouds that carry radioactive dust and aerosols up into the upper atmosphere from the detonation site at ground zero.  Set off enough nuclear bombs and create enough nuclear mushroom clouds, and the debris carried into the atmosphere will block a portion of the sunlight and produce a global cooling effect.

In an article entitled "you want crazy we got crazy" Michael D. Lemonick suggested that a nuclear war just might make his day.  Mr. Lemonick didn't call for an all-out nuclear exchange between the US and Russia and China as he felt that was too extreme, but he proposed instead that limited nuclear exchanges between second tier nuclear powers like India and Pakistan, Israel and soon-to-go-nuclear Iran or even Britain and France might put just enough dust into the air to successfully counteract the effects of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere.  Mr. Lemonick suggested the ideal scenario would be a series of limited nuclear exchanges between different pairs of countries, with a new nuclear war beginning between two new countries just as the cooling effect of the previous nuclear war was just diminishing in effectiveness. 

It definitely seems crazy to suggest limited nuclear war as a way to slow Greenhouse Warming, so perhaps Mr. Lemonick had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he made his suggestion.  Or perhaps Mr. Lemonick is one of those crazy cock-eyed optimists who can always put a positive spin on things, no matter how disastrous the situation.   

So if in the future, god forbid, a nuclear war starts, please remember Mr. Lemonick's idea.   The world may be ending, but there is a silver lining in those mushroom-shaped radioactive clouds----at least you won't have to worry about Greenhouse Warming for awhile.

"We can't save the planet"

                                               


James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, was one of the initial advocates of using Planetary Geoengineering to counteract the effects of Greenhouse Warming.  Lovelock himself proposed converting plant material into biochar and dumping the charcoal in the ocean as a way to pump down CO2.  But as he became older Lovelock abandoned hope that Planetary Geoengineering could successfully counteract human-caused Greenhouse Warming.  In a recent interview at age 90 Lovelock said it is too late for Planetary Geoengineering to stop Greenhouse Warming, and humanity now has no alternative but to accept whatever happens.  

James Lovelock's message to humanity is one of resignation and surrender to whatever is coming with global climate change.  There is no way around the fact, according to Lovelock, that "we can't save the planet!"  

In addition to abandoning his own geoengineering ideas, Lovelock now also dismisses all other geoengineering ideas as impractical and impossible, saying "trying to save the planet is a lot of nonsense."  Lovelock dismisses the efforts of both politicians to craft CO2 reduction treaties, and scientists to find ways to mitigate CO2 emissions and counteract global warming.

Its hard to know if Lovelock was just having a particularly bad day when he abandoned his earlier advocacy for biochar and planetary geoengineering, or if there is some scientific reason why he has changed his opinion.  Lovelock hasn't abandoned all hope, however, as he holds out some hope that the Earth (or Gaia?) might somehow mitigate Global Warming in ways that we presently can't foresee.

However, if Gaia fails to stop global warming, Lovelock recommends that people retain a good attitude about it all.  After all, Lovelock says, while people may've caused global warming by overindulging in fossil fuels, "We're not really guilty.  We didn't deliberately set out to heat the world."    

Saving Gaia with Biochar Geoengineering

                                    James Locklock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis

James Lovelock is a genius.  He is best know for the Gaia hypothesis proposing that biologic organisms interact with non-biologic processes on earth in ways that help maintain the conditions for life on our planet.   It was inevitable that Lovelock would become interested in Planetary Geoengineering.   Curiously, given his authorship of the Gaia hypothesis, Lovelock rejects the idea that growing plants or other natural processes (i.e. so-called Green Geoengineering) by itself can cope with the greenhouse warming that is projected to occur as result of human fossil fuel consumption, because any attempt to increase global biomass by growing more plants will ultimately just result in more decomposing plant debris that returns CO2 to the atmosphere.    Lovelock proposes instead that agricultural waste be converted to charcoal to remove CO2 from atmosphere.   He calls this process biochar.

James Lovelock:

What we have to do is turn a portion of all the waste of agriculture into charcoal and bury it. Consider grain like wheat or rice; most of the plant mass is in the stems, stalks and roots and we only eat the seeds. So instead of just ploughing in the stalks or turning them into cardboard, make it into charcoal and bury it or sink it in the ocean. We don't need plantations or crops planted for biochar, what we need is a charcoal maker on every farm so the farmer can turn his waste into carbon.

Biochar seems like a simple and effective way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. But there is a complication. You can't make biochar by burning waste material in a bonfire ---combustion causes the CO2 to go right back up into the atmosphere. To create biochar you have to heat treat the waste in a specially controlled environment that keeps the carbon in the biochar----you need a device that Lovelock calls a "charcoal maker." The idea is to wind up with a charred simulacra of the original material---something like what happens to volcanologists if they get too close to a volcano when a pyroclastic flow is coming down the slope.

If I could make a suggestion, I would scale up Lovelock's plan beyond just agricultural waste. Why not also have "charcoal makers" in every restaurant so all the food trimmings and waste food could be shoveled into them. Why not replace garbage disposals in every home with "charcoal makers" so home leftovers could also be converted into biochar. Why not put charcoal makers at every garbage dump and every landfill so people could chuck their grass cuttings and shrub trimmings into them? Why not install a charcoal maker on every yacht, oil tanker, fishing boat and US navy vessel?

Imagine the mountains of biochar we could produce. We could make piles of black charcoal biochar as far as the could see.
Now here's the hard part---- please try to think of somewhere to put it all.

The "INTERSTELLAR" movie, Haboobs, and Planetary Geoengineering

                                                 Haboob sweeping across Phoenix, Az.

The movie "Interstellar" begins with the premise that something has gone terribly wrong with the Earth.  Humanity is no longer able to feed itself, so even a former NASA astronaut has been forced into farming to help grow enough food to avert mass starvation. Giant dust storms (called haboobs, from the Arabic word for such things) sweep periodically across the farms and bury small towns.  The future Earth in the movie Intersteller is something that looks like the Oklahoma dustbowl of the 1930s.   The only thing that still seems to work right is the hero's indestructible Dodge Ramcharger Truck, in an inspired bit of product placement by Chrysler-Fiat.

While the movie never explains whats gone wrong with the Earth, there clearly has been some kind of environmental degradation.  Lets see if we can figure out just what has gone wrong.  Haboobs are occurring more frequency  in places like Phoenix Az now as a consequence of higher temperatures and increasing aridification brought on by Greenhouse Warming.  California is in a massive drought due to Greenhouse Warming.  And crop blights and famines are predicted to occur as the planet warms.   The future Earth of Interstellar is our Earth, with CO2 emissions, Greenhouse Warming, and other current trends extrapolated into the future.   

Fortunately, in the movie NASA has secretly relocated to a new location just a short drive away from the former astronaut in his redoubtable Dodge truck.  At NASA an elderly scientist played by a charming Michael Caine has been laboring fruitlessly for 40 years to solve an equation describing gravity while the earth's environment has been progressively destroyed.  

And that raises fundamental questions.  The Interstellar film is to be applauded for championing the merits of science and science education.  Thanks to NASA science and technology and a huge dose of movie magic a small fragment of humanity is saved in Interstellar.  But why the heck doesn't lovable scientist Michael Caine devote maybe an hour a day trying to figure out how to save the earth?   Why does no one in the movie ever question the assumption that saving the earth is impossible?  Why hasn't NASA or some other agency or somebody somewhere done anything to counteract the changes in Earth's climate?  Why does the film want us to cheer because a few hundred select people successfully flee the dying earth, leaving billions behind in an ecological death trap?  Why does everyone assume the earth is headed for climate disaster and nothing can be done?   

Why is the idea of Planetary Geoengineering completely missing from Interstellar?

Snowpocalypse in Buffalo ---surprising side effect of Global Warming

                              Global temperatures on Nov. 21, 2014 from climate reanalyzer


The media is running out of superlatives to describe the unprecedented snowstorms in Buffalo, New York.  Up to 9 feet of snow haven fallen in the last two days.   Its being called a THUNDERSNOW!  MONSTER BLIZZARD!  INSANE!  WINTER STORM KNIFE!  EPIC!  SNOWPOCALPSE!   

But they should be calling it GLOBAL WARMING!

Lets put the SNOWPOCALYPSE into perspective by looking at a map of northern hemisphere temperatures on Nov. 21, the final day of the SNOWPOCALYPSE.   The cold temperatures that produced the massive lake effect snowfalls in the Buffalo area show up as a big blue blob over the northeastern part of North America.  But this area of blue on the map is surrounded by larger areas of red and black indicating unusually warm temperatures were present at the same time over Greenland, Alaska and nearby areas of the Arctic Ocean, north Africa and the Mediterranean Sea.  Even larger areas over the Atlantic Ocean and Northeast Pacific Ocean were also somewhat above normal temperatures.  

So northern hemisphere temperatures during the Buffalo storm are, for most part, above average.  Even the displacement of cold Arctic air southward to the middle west and the Buffalo area is a product of warm air blasting northward across Alaska, and pushing cold Arctic air southwards toward Buffalo.

So smile, Buffalo.  Thats not just the SNOWPOCALYPSE you're shoveling off your driveway---try to think of it as frozen GLOBAL WARMING.