Seems like he believes in GH gases and warming...
But now, in a major reversal, some of the world's most prominent scientists say the proposals deserve a serious look because of growing concerns about global warming.
Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.
Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding.
"A lot of us have been saying we don't like the idea" of geoengineering, he said. But he added, "We need to think about it" and learn, among other things, how to distinguish sound proposals from ones that are ineffectual or dangerous.
I'll stop, no need to quote the whole thing since you can read it yourself. Consider:
"People used to say, 'Shut up, the world isn't ready for this,' " said Wallace S. Broecker, a geoengineering pioneer at Columbia. "Maybe the world has changed."
garyjones.org
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But I’m not here to scare you into seeing it. There are plenty of other reasons to see the film this Thursday or Friday night after your favorite happy hour. However indirectly, New York City is the star of several scenes. Experts such as Columbia University’s Wallace S. Broecker explain the science behind global warming, in a way that even Keanu can understand. Union Square’s farmer’s market is the backdrop for discussions with a local organic farmer about how global warming and agriculture affect each other. And who could forget the image of 200+ foot carbon dioxide vacuums in Central Park presented as a technological fix to our climate change problem?
eco-logic.com
PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent: Global warming. Almost all climatologists agree it's a clear and future danger. Wallace Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia University, has been blaming his fellow humans for over 30 years.
WALLACE BROECKER, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: The way we're going now, we're not being responsible. We're saying, "We want energy as cheap as we can get it, damn the future."
PAUL SOLMAN: Meanwhile, says Broecker, the world's population is heading toward nine billion. If current trends continue, carbon in the atmosphere may triple by the end of the century.
WALLACE BROECKER: And triple is something like a six-degree centigrade warming. We would certainly melt the Greenland icecap and probably release the West Antarctic ice sheet, which together would raise sea level about thirty-six feet.
PAUL SOLMAN: Thirty-six feet?
WALLACE BROECKER: Yes. So that would mean all coastal property throughout the whole world would be destroyed, unless you diked it off.
pbs.org
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Glaciers That Speak in Tongues
and other tales of global warming
By Wallace S. Broecker
...My prediction was correct, but was it soundly based? Ten new ice-core records—from Greenland, from Antarctica, and from high-mountain sites elsewhere on the planet—are now available. None show Dansgaard’s combined 80-year and 180-year cycles. I thus have been inclined to write off the success of my prediction as just a happy accident. Still, the changes we are attempting to document have a magnitude of only a few tenths of a degree, and perhaps in most records they are masked by regional climate change....
....Unfortunately, we cannot even say whether natural changes are at this point retarding or reinforcing human-induced greenhouse warming. The situation will be much clearer two decades from now, however, as computer simulations predict an additional 1.5° F warming by the year 2020. If such an increase in global temperatures occurs, there will not be any doubt: natural causes alone would not have been sufficient to account for it.
We may have to remove CO2 from power-plant exhausts and even from the atmosphere itself.
Does this mean we can all sit back, do nothing, and wait for the results to roll in? Certainly not. In twenty years, we may well conclude that we must stem the rise of CO2, and if so, we’ve got a lot of preparation to do. Very likely, fossil fuels will remain our primary source of energy. With more people and a higher standard of living in the less developed countries—and with even a sustained per capita level of demand in the United States—energy use will at least double by the year 2050. We must learn how to remove CO2 from power-plant exhausts and probably from the atmosphere itself. (Estimates of the cost of CO2 removal suggest that it would add a few cents per kilowatt-hour to the cost of electricity or about forty cents per gallon to the cost of gasoline.) Plus, of course, the CO2 we remove must be put somewhere: stored in the deep ocean or in deep saline aquifers or, if we want to be sure it never comes back to haunt us, converted into magnesite (MgCO3), a geologically inert mineral. More difficult than the technical aspects are the political ones. Ready or not, we will have to face them all.
To strengthen their case, corporate spokespersons, avid consumers, and plenty of other people and institutions inclined to dismiss the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2 as inconsequential may be happy to latch on to the paleoclimatic reconstruction presented here. This would be unfortunate. Unless all the work done on climate simulations and fossil-fuel-use projections is seriously flawed, one thing is certain: our planet will indeed experience a major human-induced warming during this century.
naturalhistorymag.com
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Lamont's Broecker Warns Gases Could Alter Climate
Oceans' Circulation Could Collapse
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BY LAURENCE LIPPSETT
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Thermohaline circulation links the Earth's oceans. Cold, dense, salty water from the North Atlantic sinks into the deep and drives the circulation like a giant plunger.
n the eve of the international meeting on global warming that opened Dec. 1 in Kyoto, Japan, one of the world's leading climate experts warned of an underestimated threat posed by the buildup of greenhouse gases—an abrupt collapse of the oceans' prevailing circulation system that could send temperatures across Europe plummeting in a span of 10 years.
If that system shut down today, winter temperatures in the North Atlantic region would fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit within 10 years. Dublin would acquire the climate of Spitsbergen, 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
"The consequences could be devastating," said Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and author of the new research, which appeared in the Nov. 28 issue of the magazine Science.
columbia.edu |
