Saturday, August 9, 2008

green sulphate umbrella

there is a problem with the climate change sector of energy policy with which i'm particularly irritated... which is that people are either concerned with greenhouse gas emissions, or chemical pollutants, and no one seems to be considering the implications of both. namely... that they complement one another, they are both causing severe problems and they need to be decreased together, not separately. and this segregation of focus is all well and good except for that it completely destroys the ability of policy makers to address the current climate crises in a comprehensive manner. in the particular instance of these two issues, if one is given more weight than the other, or one is addressed without the other, we could all die anyway via the acceleration of the geophysical phenomena that greenhouse and pollutant gases are currently holding at bay.

namely... "global warming" versus "global dimming." very brief summary before i rant: in the 60's, particle pollution began to noticeably reflect a great deal of the sun's rays which had a cooling effect on the globe. this effect continued as pollution continued, the phenomenon being explained by the increased particles polluting clouds giving water a greater surface area on which to collect, and water molecules take much longer to collect enough to outweigh the particle and cause it to fall in a raindrop. while the water takes longer to collect, it stays in the clouds, reflecting a substantial amount of sunlight and preventing it from reaching the earth's surface. so from the 60's to the 80's, global dimming has protected us against the full assault of global warming, which would have otherwise been roughly two-fold. so yes, while pollution has been the cause of something like 135,000 premature deaths a year, it has warded off the 1,000,000 that would have been caused by the effects of accelerated global warming. but then, in the 80's when Congress adopted the EPA's Clean Air Act, pollutants decreased in the clouds and global warming revealed itself more drastically. and voila, in the 00's, if we want to live, we have to address both, and here is my rant...

this whole business of chemtrailing a sulfur umbrella into the stratosphere, if i'm being honest, doesn't seem like such a bad idea. because the world is having so much trouble - fuck it, because the United States is having so much trouble - deciding whether or not we want to assume this problem is real much less address it, it's going to take a few years to get policy implemented effectively. in the meantime, sulfate has a half life of roughly ten years, so it is in actuality one of the more innocuous short-term plans. shoot up the sky with more crap that doesn't belong in it while we, down on the ground, figure out how to decrease both ghg and particle pollutants from the atmosphere in concert.

reducing ghg requires technological implementation. reducing soot requires tighter regulation. the latter is easily done, while the former seems to be... the cause of increased rate of aneurysm and heart attack in our political leaders... for whatever reason... likely because (like so many socioeconomic crises that are incorporated into its implications) ghg emission is an exceedingy comprehensive nexus.

my point being this: if you deal with ghg emissions alone, we'll experience global cooling complete with drought, famine, disease, loss of populations, loss of species and loss of existence. if you deal with particle pollutants alone, we'll experience accelerated global heating complete with drought, famine, disease, loss of populations, loss of species and loss of existence. ergo... work simultaneously on decreasing them both [and if you're one of those people who thinks increased snowfall in certain areas of the globe this year is a clear sign that global warming doesn't exist, i have some words for your denial]. yes yes, i understand it's going to be oh so very difficult an endeavor... after all, particle pollutants have a shorter half life than do ghg's, and there's math involved, and oh for fuck's sake get over it and alter your nation's productive and consumptive behaviour so that ghg production are decreased more exponentially and particle pollutants more linearly. and then, oh no!, how do we know how much of atmospheric ghg and particle pollutants are from us and how many are natural? what if we accidentally take too much out of the sky and as a result lose oxygen and gravitational pull? [i'm exercising restraint not to comment on the rapture at this point...] after all, there's no way to tell if any of this is actually our fault! so let's continue to mutate our livestock and crops and make sure we adequately feed our greedily unbalanced economic and consumptive habits [i also think that it should be the govt's responsibility to pay farmers for feeding their nation so that we can ween off of this terrible seething monster of supply and demand]... but as per norm, i digress...

if we are indeed going to continue to restrict funding for and forebearance of green technology, then put a sulphate umbrella over our shallow little heads for a few decades while we figure out how to get over ourselves. and no more of this carbon scrubbing shit that cleans primarily sulfur out of industrial burners - if we're going to scrub, scrub both carbon and sulfur; why trap the more benign gas and give the more-difficult-and-expensive-to-remove-from-the-atmosphere gas VIP entrance? clean coal is actually not a bad baby step... since it seems we are going to need some dirt in our clouds for a while longer before the environmental consequences of Bushee's regime wear off and green technology begins to be taken seriously.

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