Global Warming Update

...and yet another potential solution is offered by LiveScience. Let's define the problem first:

All scientists agree that Earth gets warmer and colder across the eons. A delicate and ever-changing balance between solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases controls long-term swings from ice ages to warmer conditions like today.

Those who are often called experts admit to glaring gaps in their knowledge of how all this works. A study last month revealed that scientists can't pin down one of the most critical keys: how much sunlight our planet absorbs versus how much is reflected back into space.

Nonetheless, most scientists think our climate has warmed significantly over the past century and will grow warmer over the next hundred years. Various studies claim the planet is destined to warm by anywhere from 1 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the next few centuries. Seas will rise dramatically, the scenario goes, inundating coastal cities. But another group of scientists argue that the temperature data supporting a warming planet is not firm and that projections, based on computer modeling, might be wildly off the mark.

So...all scientists agree that this phenomemnon is cyclical...score one for us. (I just searched the archives, but was unable to find the discussion in which we talked about this...it might have been in the Haloscan comments section which has long since gone down the memory hole. You should upgrade to their premium service. Uh-huh.) I'm still of the opinion that there really isn't a whole lot to this and that we should leave well enough alone...but that won't stop me from showing you what their potential solution is...

"Reducing solar insolation by 1.6 percent should overcome a 1.75 K [3 degrees Fahrenheit] temperature rise," contends a group led by Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc. "This might be accomplished by a variety of terrestrial or space systems."

The power of scattering sunlight has been illustrated naturally, the scientists note. Volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, pumped aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the global climate by about a degree. Other researchers have suggested such schemes as adding metallic dust to smoke stacks, to flood the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight back into space.

In the newly outlined approach, reflective particles might come from the mining of Earth, the Moon or asteroids. They'd be put into orbit around the equator. Alternately, tiny micro-spacecraft could be deployed with reflective umbrellas.

A ring created by a batch of either "shades the tropics primarily, providing maximum effectiveness in cooling the warmest parts of our planet," the scientists write. An early version of their idea was presented but not widely noticed in 2002.

Allow me to translate: by turning Earth in to Saturn by pumping aerosols (isn't this BAD!) like a volcano (nature is BAD!), we can cool the global climate. If we add metallic debris to all those evil, corporate smoke stacks, we can flood the admosphere and send more sunlight back where it came from, thus reducing global warming.

That's the theory. And it's a helluva solution if you ask me.