Flannery : Use Chemtrails To Fight Global Warming
Carbon bad, but sulphur is good?
Flannery should come clean. Trials of dumping sulphur and other chemicals into the atmosphere from planes to create a 'sun shield', to encourage global dimming, has been going on for years. Distributing a substance like sulphur from planes is the very definition of a 'chem trail', and these test runs have been on show over Sydney in recent months, for anyone who bothers to look up occasionally.But he says it may be necessary, as the "last barrier to climate collapse."
Professor Flannery says climate change is happening so quickly that mankind may need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive.
The gas sulphur could be inserted into the earth's stratosphere to keep out the sun's rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.
"It would change the colour of the sky," Prof Flannery told AAP.
"It's the last resort that we have, it's the last barrier to a climate collapse.
"We need to be ready to start doing it in perhaps five years time if we fail to achieve what we're trying to achieve."
Prof Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, said the sulphur could be dispersed above the earth's surface by adding it to jet fuel.
He conceded there were risks to global dimming via sulphur.
"The consequences of doing that are unknown."
The 'dimming' that Flannery talks of will be similar to the skies we've come to know well over some Australian cities in recent years. The cloud cover spreads early in the morning, and fills the sky, thin cloud but from horizon to horizon, blocking out much of the direct sunlight, and the cloud cover stays around for days. It's not the miserable grey of London skies, it's just...dim.
You will hear much, much more talk of using chemtrails to fight climate change very soon, if Flannery is speaking of such plans on behalf of international interests, and presumably he is.
ABC's Four Corners current affairs program ran a story on the dangers of global dimming in mid-2005. Despite what Flannery claims, scientists have a pretty good idea of what global dimming will do to the planet :
So more pollution will counter global warming, as long as it's sulphur pollution, but we need to cut carbon pollution and then increase the amount of sulphur in the atmosphere to encourage global dimming, which masks the full effects of global warming, which will destroy much of the world if it's not stopped, but global dimming is also destructive, but not as destructive as global warming, which is being held in check by current global dimming so we need to increase global dimming with sulphur while cutting down on carbon to stop global warming...or something.Noticed less sunshine lately? Scientists have discovered that the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface has been falling over recent decades.
If the climatologists are right, their discovery holds the potential for powerful disruption to life on our planet. Already it may have contributed to many thousands of deaths through drought and famine.
Global dimming is a product of the fossil fuels that cause global warming. It is the result of tiny airborne pieces of soot, ash and sulphur compounds reflecting back the heat of the sun.
Scientists have also linked global dimming to the failure of rains in sub-Saharan Africa – and the catastrophic droughts that hit Ethiopia in the 1980s. They worry that the same thing will happen again in areas like Asia, home to billions of people.
The overriding concern expressed by climate scientists in this program is that our climate will be radically altered, rendering many parts of the planet uninhabitable - unless concerted action is taken to combat both global dimming and global warming.
I'm sure it makes perfect sense, if you're a professor.
12 comments:
Sorry Flannery, but geo-engineering our planet's atmosphere like this is plain nuts and very dangerous.
Chemtrails are real then? I've seen clouds form from exhaust plumes of aircraft but only some planes. It's wild to watch but few seem to notice it is going on.
Keep Watching The Skies!
Seriously this idea is utter batshit crazy.
This paper was presented at the Third Rally for International Disarmement at Saintes in France, May 9 to 11, 2008.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND GEOENGINEERING
AN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION IS NEEDED
Wayne Hall
http://www.enouranois.gr
It is now over ten years since the first reports began to appear on the Internet of what appears to be a world-wide programme, for unannounced purposes, of spraying from aircraft. This activity, if it exists, has been given the name “chemtrails” (chemical trails). The qualifier “if it exists” is inserted because, for all the years that the phenomenon has been observed and reported, the official position, from government and scientific sources, has been that what citizens are witnessing is nothing other than conventional aircraft emissions, and that no deliberate “spraying” activity is underway. (Whether legitimate distinctions can still be drawn between “aircraft emissions” and “spraying” is another, by no means straightforward, question.)
In Greece the “chemtrails” subject has been raised around five times in the national parliament. It has also been raised in the European parliament. In all cases the official response has been such as to discourage the questioner from pursuing the matter further. Attempts, both by elected bodies such as the municipal council of Aigina in Greece, or by private individuals, to take legal action against what has been reported by some sections of the media to be “spraying”, have been rebuffed by arguments from lawyers 1) that no proof can be offered that what is involved is deliberate spraying and 2) that no legal framework exists for the handling of such complaints.
Would-be litigants are asked to “wait” for the missing legislation to be passed. The reality is, however, that no identifiable group of politicians or scientists appear to be willing to take the requisite political or scientific responsibility for what eyewitnesses claim to be convinced is happening. It may well be that those who are opposed, both practically and theoretically, to what they believe is occurring, are the ones who will be forced, by default, to take political responsibility for it.
A legislative framework does exist for spraying for military purposes. That is the Environmental Modification Convention of October 1978, which prohibits the use of environmental modification as a weapon. The existence of this treaty has inspired a group of scientists in Germany, along with the Green Party politician Johannes Remmel and the meteorologist Karsten Brandt, to file a suit against the German government for climate manipulation, “using chemical trails (chemtrails) comprised of fine dust containing polymers and metals, used to disrupt radar signals.”
What this amounts to is prosecution on the basis of what law is available rather than what is likely actually to be occurring, given that most of the theoretical debate on climate modification covers non-military objectives such as mitigation of the effects of climate change.
The non-military aspect of “chemtrails” goes by the name of geoengineering. In recent years it has been the subject of much promotional journalism recommending it as a “politically realistic” alternative to attempting to limit greenhouse gas emissions as required by the Kyoto guidelines.
One of the latest such articles canvasses the benefits of injecting the upper atmosphere with particles of glass to dampen the effects of “global warming”. Reporting on research being carried out at the US Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, South Carolina, this recent article of the Cybercast News Service contains certain new features such as positive comments from professional “climate change sceptics” on the virtues of geoengineering. Until recently the expressed attitude of most “climate change sceptics” towards geoengineering proposals was extremely negative.
The “sceptic” Timothy Ball, for example, last year said that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Crutzen should have his Nobel Prize taken away from him as punishment for his geoengineering proposals of spraying sulphur in the stratosphere.
http://www.enouranois.gr/english/political/Dialogue_with_a_Climate_Change_Contrarian.doc
Now the prominent climate change “sceptic” and free market ideologue Patrick Michaels is saying that “the real debate over climate should centre on geoengineering”, an argument presented in the past - to little effect – to climate change activists and scientists, who have been mostly very reluctant to broach the subject, and in some cases (for example the Greek climate scientist Dimitris Lalas) have explicitly refused.
Of course Michaels has his own reasons for making his point. He says: “Global warming theorists are finally starting to get the message - which is that you really can't do much about global warming with carbon restrictions. They are starting to realize that we can't impact global climate change by imposing huge global taxes on carbon, or trying to ban all fossil fuels.”
The basic stance of the climate change sceptics was laid down in the late Edward Teller’s 1998 Wall Street Journal article “Sunscreen for Planet Earth”. It is this: we question whether there is really a climate change or global warming problem, but in any case, if there were a problem, this would be the solution to it: The solutions the climate change sceptics accept to problems whose existence they are aggressively opposed to recognizing are 1) geoengineering, above all the planetary spraying of light-reflective particles to reduce levels of incoming sunlight and 2) nuclear power, as the allegedly carbon-free energy source of the future.
The geoengineering proponent David Keith is on record as saying the following: “What we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this (i.e. about geoengineering) .We need a broader debate, a debate that involves: musicians, scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are.” This is the same David Keith that is also on record a saying, following a September 2001 meeting in the White House on ‘Response Options to Rapid or Severe Climate Change’, that “if they had broadcast that meeting live to people in Europe, there would have been riots.”
Keith’s challenge to public dialogue, and specifically his declaration of willingness to be personally involved in it, should be accepted, because of the valid point recently made by Athenian citizen activist John Lewis: “An International Convention on Geoengineering is needed. It is a science that needs both to be developed and to be controlled.”
It should be understood that the condition for public dialogue with people such as David Keith is going to be conformity with the official assertion, in government and in the scientific community, that geoengineering proposals of the type Keith himself makes have not yet begun to be implemented, and will be implemented at some point in the future only as a last resort.
The reasons for the adoption of this position are probably as follows: as outlined by the lawyer Bodansky in the 1990s, the political difficulties of legalizing geoengineering are enormous. Decisions, however, to proceed with implementation without prior establishment of a legal framework leave the agencies engaged in geoengineering activity open to the threat of litigation, including politically-motivated litigation, from climate change sceptics and their corporate backers.
Collaboration will therefore have to focus on the question of how the threat of this kind of litigation can be averted while at the same time the legitimate demands of the public for protection are respected.
Collaboration will also have to focus on how distinctions can be instituted between military-motivated applications of aerosol spraying technology, such as that allegedly needed for facilitating the operations of geophysical weapons such as HAARP, and the use of aerosols in geoengineering. The former is covered by the Environmental Modification Convention of 1978. The latter is not. As well as working towards securing enforcement of existing environmental modification legislation (as was attempted with the 1999 Europarliament report A4-0005/99 “On the Environment, Security and Foreign Policy”) collaboration would have to focus on more effective political countering of “climate change sceptic” strategies and specifically on what appears to be the beginnings of a strategy for replacement of the present official climate change debate (a debate between the “sceptics” on one hand and mainstream climate science on the other) by a new debate over geoengineering in which the erstwhile “sceptics”, would continue to have a role as representatives of “political realism”.
The outrageousness of the “sceptics” strategy of preventing humanly and environmentally acceptable solutions to problems by denying the existence of such problems, only to come in thirty years later as representatives of so-called “realistic” but in fact entirely unacceptable “solutions” to the problems whose existence they denied, must be fully exposed and the “sceptics” consigned to the same marginal and disreputable position as that to which “chemtrails” activists and “conspiracy theorists” are nowadays confined.
Thanks Wayne, very interesting story.
Hello Darryl. Do you think it will be possible to engage Tim Flannery in dialogue, or is he inaccessible? David Keith has been or was relatively accessible a few months ago, though I have not recently tested whether he still is.
I kinda like having a blue sky, the risks to the ozone layer of pumping sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere are pretty serious, and there may be risks that we don't know about. But what happens if climate sensitivity (the amount of warming that you would expect if carbon dioxide levels double) turns out to be 10 degrees insead of 3 degrees centigrade, most global climate models predict a nonzero probability of this occurring. Or what if the IPCC is wrong and Greenland or the West Antarctic ice shelf decide to melt displacing hundres of millions of people.
In Hansen's latest paper he suggests that in order to maintain the planet in anything like its present state we will have to keep CO2 levels below 450 ppm and eventually bring them down to 350 ppm or less. Unfortunately most politicians are making it very unlikely for this to happen. If we don't stabilise carbon dioxide levels soon then we may have to engage in geoengineering to prevent something even worse from happening.
What if these programmes are already massively under implementation. Does your attitude to them change?
No answer.
One of the (many) resaons it took so long to convince Euroids & amerikans of global warming was the thickness of their pollution blankets reflected significant amounts of solar radiation until relatively recently, say 10 years ago whereas we in the comparitively pristine (less indigenous pollution plus the Coriollis effect) southern hemisphere were able to measure more acurately.
Here is something else I say about Tim Flannery in an older article. It also explains why I think the global warming debate is a false debate. (This does not mean that I am a contrarian. Quite the opposite!!)
Beginning of quotation:
In a characteristic article by the Australian contrarian journalist Andrew Bolt, Monbiot is bracketed together with the Australian academic Tim Flannery as examples of “hairshirt warming cultists” who should, because of their views on climate change, be banned from travelling by air. But what does Tim Flannery say about aviation? “Transport accounts for around a third of global carbon dioxide emissions. Transport by land and sea can easily be powered in ways that emit less carbon dioxide and the technologies to achieve this either already exist or are on the horizon. Air transport, however, is fast growing and not likely to be fuelled by anything but fossil fuels. Thankfully, jet contrails contribute to global dimming, so it may be just as well that the jets keep flying long after wind-powered and solar-powered ships and compressed-air cars monopolize surface transport” (Tim Flannery: The Weather Makers, pp. 282-283)
Flannery, in other words, implicitly if not openly, a supporter of “chemtrails” and of geoengineering. It is not necessary to enter into a discussion of which of the two – Flannery or Monbiot - is more or less of a hypocrite or has more or less inadequate or one-sided views. Both of them present a powerful analysis of climate change and then subvert it by choosing to tell less than the whole story. By doing this they leave open a loophole for the debunkers and the “sceptics” to present them both as “Chicken Littles”. Flannery is bold or deluded enough to support geoengineering and/or “chemtrails” as a hypothetical future prospect. But he will not embrace it as a present reality to which he gives his informed consent.. Monbiot is in even deeper denial about the evident present reality of “chemtrails”. Both engage in sterile arguments with contrarians and debunkers instead of initiating the dialogue that SHOULD be being heard by the public: their dialogue with each other about the acceptability or unacceptability of geoengineering, and even more specifically about whether aircraft emissions have a warming (Monbiot) or a cooling (Flannery) effect.
End of quotation.
This is from the article
"Chemtrails and the Europarliament"
http://www.spectrezine.org/environment/Hall6.htm
More discussion here:
http://www.911oz.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=1722
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