Thom's bells

Climate change is depressing.

Last week in Lit club we discussed a paper that pointed out that if we stopped using CO2 this instant, we would still experience 2 degrees C warming. If we can manage to just stop increasing the amount of CO2 we emit (so, keep our emissions to 2006 levels--oops! we're already past that, but close enough) we'll see something like 8 degrees of warming by 2500. That's another PETM, but probably even faster! I know, that's so far out in the future for us measly humans with our short-term attentions, and we may not even have enough fossil fuels available to sustain that level of emissions, but even so, that's depressing.

Today we talked about Geoengineering as an alternative strategy to dealing with global warming. The paper we discussed dealt specifically with the possibility of using sulfate aerosols to cool the planet in much the same way that volcanoes cool the planet naturally. So here's the idea--we take mass of sulfate equivalent to a volkswagon and shoot it up into the stratosphere 20,000 times every day! If we stop, all the warming we prevent with this particular brand of geoengineering comes into play almost immediately. According to their calculations, it would work, as long as we could shoot the sulfate into the stratosphere in a carbon neutral way, and as long as we never stopped. What a great plan, right?

Anyway, I think everyone left the room a bit down, wondering how exactly we can fix global warming, especially in such a way that people will actually be willing to do it. As Matt Huber so eloquently put it, we humans are like voracious locusts, whose every activity puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. We need a giant, non-emitting CO2 sucker and a huge pit in which to dump all the CO2. Any ideas out there?