Come on! Go attain your knowledge and speak your opinion….
But it boils down to nothing more than an argument.

What I meant by “dealing directly” with the methane problem is to act to forestall the proximate cause — human emissions of GHG. If and (probably when) that does not work, we may turn to geoengineering, but even then, we CANNOT try techniques which simply shade the earth or increase albedo effect.

There’s three reasons I oppose geoengineering until and unless we’ve done everything we can on mitigation.

First, adaptive responses absent mitigation efforts amounts to little more than trying to run up the down escalator. It’s possible, but stupid.

Second, GHG emissions are not simply a warming problem, they pose a serious geochemical problem that is fully as hazardous as warming. For example, if we shade the earth, but continue to emit carbon, we will acidify the oceans, shut down calcification, and turn them into sterile wastelands covering 70% of our planet’s surface. Humanity will suffer from this in ways too horrible to contemplate.

Finally, there are those who will hold forth the promise of geoengineering as yet another reason to do nothing.

If, ultimately, we do need to do some form of geoengineering, it must deal with the problem of too much GHG in the atmosphere by removing it — any attempts to simply reduce the radiative forcing by blocking the sun amounts to a one-dimensional solution to a multi-dimensional problem. The only thing I’ve seen which is both remotely possible and which deals with the root problem — that is the excess carbon — is using weatherization of certain common minerals (olivine is one) to directly remove carbon from the atmosphere.

But again, this is a last resort and cutting GHG is necessary in any case.

But

Interesting thing from Science Daily today….

“In recent years, there has been growing evidence for the hypothesis that the effect of the pandemics in the Americas wasn’t confined to killing indigenous peoples. Global climate appears to have been altered as well.

Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions.

They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands—abandoned as the population collapsed—pulled so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it helped trigger a period of global cooling, at its most intense from approximately 1500 to 1750, known as the Little Ice Age.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/ 2008/ 12/ 081218094551.htm

The ice-age cycle, at least, appears to go like that: orbital forcing initiates a change, GHG release or uptake amplifies it. But what are the sinks and sources? Hansen et al 2007 (”Climate change and trace gases”) just says “the ocean, soils, and biosphere”. I don’t think there is a more detailed understanding, at least not a consensual one. So it’s also unclear to me whether Arctic methane release is normally part of that cycle, or whether it presages a return to a hotter regime, such as no ice-caps at all. Under ordinary circumstances, at this point in the cycle, we should have more than 50000 years of slow cooling ahead of us, with the associated GHG drawdown. But we used the opportunity provided by the Holocene Optimum to grow numerous and dig up all the fossil carbon. It would be apt if we also headed back into the climatic regime which last existed when that much carbon was in the air.

Here’s an idea. But first I want to make a point.

Notice I did not put an adjective before “idea”. I didn’t call it “great”, “stupid”, or put any other sort of spin on it. I think at this point we should put ideas into only two categories, those not yet well-considered and those well thought out.

Once give ideas some quality time the bad ones will die a natural death.

Dismissing an idea too quickly, well think of all the things like a spinning planet and moving continents that sounded really weird when first suggested….

—

This guy suggests spraying large amounts of sea water into the lower atmosphere, from 20 to 200 feet into the air.

“First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation.”

http://www.physorg.com/news148887530.html

Now I can see a problem with the idea. It would likely cause a period of “global dimming” during which food production (as it is normally done) would decline. We saw that in the dimming period post WW II and around here in NoCA we saw it last summer as we spent months with a high smoke cover from the 2,000+ plus fires we suffered.

So, what to do if the basic physics works?

Well, we could put on a global push to grow extra food for a year or two and warehouse it for a ‘year of cooling’.

And we could prepare our farmers with crops that would grow in their fields under conditions of milder sunlight.

Last summer my cukes and zukes produced almost nothing. No jars of pickles in my pantry.

Same was true in my neighbor’s gardens. But we got lots and lots of “spring” tomatoes and green leafy stuff. I grew lettuce all through the summer.

We ate. We just ate differently.

We may need to build solar powered “giant vacuum cleaners” in the World’s desert belt to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Klaus Lackner is now building a prototype in Tucson (he calls it a “scrubber), but there is no public funding as far as I know. This process is referred to in “Fixing Climate,” by Wallace Broeker and Robert Kunzig. Also, the Guardian published a story on this on Sept 15 referring to Lackner, “Rollback Time for Safeguard Climate, Expert Warns” – http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2008/ sep/ 15/ climatechange.carbonemissions

Does anyone have more information on CO2 Scrubbers? We at West Coast Climate Equity would certainly like to hear from you.

Geoengineering is not the answer; at least not geoengineering that amounts to a giant SPF 12000 blanket of some kind –for starters an acidified ocean may be worse than a warmer world.

If the methane clathrates and the methane from perma-frost has begun to enter the atmosphere, then we need to deal directly with that, not treat symptoms.

We also need to keep moving toward a clean energy infrastructure, because it is our only hope of being able to deal with the run-away warming methane releases would create.

In 2001 I tried to get modelers at NOAA and at Scripps to take a look at the implications of methane from arctic warming — but they were either not interested, or fearful of reprisals from the Bush administration. When I placed and op-ed on the issue in the Baltimore Sun in 2004, I got a lot of criticism from scientists about being alarmist.

My point in raising it then was not to encourage despair but rather to stimulate action.

We have no choice but to act as if we can avoid this, whether that’s true or not. At the very least, we will buy ourselves some time.

Are Gwynne Dyer and these military guys ready for world-wide martial law. Shutting down all but agricultural, food processing and emergency GHG emisions? Putting everyone on rations? Everyone living in dormitories? Protecting endangered speicies from becoming “bush meat”?Artificial aerosols? Adding pulverized CaCO3 to the oceans? They’re going to be busy even without war.