So what happens if the trend toward higher global temperatures continues, and we find ourselves in a world being changed by rising sea levels, droughts, extinction of species - the whole pantheon of catastrophe that one could imagine? Not to worry! University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel has come up with a plan which would effectively block a large enough percentage of the sun's energy to counterbalance the warming.

Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD has suggested purposely shooting sulfur into the atmosphere to curb global warming.

Doing so would mimic a volcanic eruption, such as Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, which cooled the Earth by 1 degree Fahrenheit in the year following the eruption. Crutzen's plan calls for releasing the sulfur in the stratosphere, where it would remain for 1-2 years, at a cost of $25-$50 billion.

I'm confident Professor Crutzen knows far more than I do, but I don't know if more tinkering, especially by chemically altering the atmosphere, is something I feel very comfortable about.

Many U.S. cities are taking a fresh, green approach to their rooftop spaces. These roof systems have many benefits, according to the EPA, including mitigating rainwater runoff, prolonging the life of the underlying roof material, reducing noise transfer, insulating a building from extreme temperatures, particularly during the summer months, and by absorbing air pollution and storing carbon. The City of Chicago currently has 43 green roof projects, while Portland has 42 such projects.

Another article on this subject appeared two years ago in National Geographic News.

A thought-provoking piece from a think tank called Foreign Policy in Focus caught my eye today. Cap and trade, to summarize again, is the policy in which a GHG emitter is "capped" at a set value of emissions and that if they exceed that value, they must trade with an emitter who is under their set value. This value can be gradually decreased in order to ease back on overall emissions. This method worked effectively in reducing sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution from existing power plants in the United States, which helped to curb acid rain. However, trying to manage a cap-and-trade system on a global scale would be nightmarish in it's complexity.

This article argues that a better solution is to set performance standards, not on existing emitters but on new sources. Save the expensive retrofits on coal-fired power plants, but any new coal burners (and there will be a LOT of them!) would have to meet stringent CO2 emission requirements. I'll be writing more later on how coal plants can almost eliminate emissions. The same idea would work for automobiles, appliances, etc. Performance standards set in the 1970s vastly improved air quality, both by reducing emissions from power plants and from autos. The Montreal Protocol set global standards for phasing out the production of CFCs and is solving the global ozone-layer problem.

I believe there are opportunities for vast improvements on our CO2 emissions, and that some people are going to get very, very wealthy due to their innovations.

A Vermont advocacy organization called the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) has released a report titled Building Solutions: Energy Efficient Homes Save Money and Reduce Global Warming. While the group's home page makes their political leanings clear, and I don't advocate any political party or affiliation, I do appreciate some of what the report has to say about making homes more energy efficient. The report is too bold, in my opinion, in many of it's statements on global warming.

Vermont has many older (pre-1940) homes with poor insulation and older home heating equipment. New furnaces are as much as 40% more efficient than models which are over 15 years old. In addition, improving weatherization and insulation of a home - which can cost a couple of thousand dollars but will generally pay for itself within 4 years, according to the report - can also reduce the burden on the state, as lower-income families may require less assistance to pay their heating bills. Since the cost of heating oil - one of the most common sources of heat in the Northeast - has skyrocketed in the last 7 years, more families than ever before are requiring assistance to pay their heating bills.

I know from personal experience that upgrading a furnace in an older home can have a dramatic effect on fuel oil consumption. Our previous home was built in 1945, and when we moved in, it had the original furnace. The thing ran like a champ, but it was tremendously inefficient. When we upgraded, we found we used at least one third less fuel oil than we had used before. Some weatherization is expensive, such as replacement windows, and some, such as blocking drafts through electrical outlets on outside walls, is not. Lots of information on weatherizing your home can be found here.

Here's a headline you don't see every day - from Australia's Daily Telegraph - "Nukes 'would stop global warming.'" And to think I didn't even know Australia had the bomb! Oh wait, it's NOT the bomb they're talking about! It's nuclear energy!

"The only way you can justify adding nuclear into the mix is if you are determined to reduce greenhouse gases," Dr Switkowski told ABC TV tonight.

The Greentech Innovation Network - created by venture capital group Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers - met late this week to discuss which strategies - both policies and technologies - could most effectively fight global warming.

The group has already exercised considerable political clout, playing an important role in persuading California's law makers to pass some of the nation's toughest legislation on greenhouse gas emissions. Now they're debating whether to push for national limits.

They're all putting considerable economic backing into companies developing alternative fuels, renewable sources of energy and "green" products. In addition, they sponsor the $100,000 "KPCB Prize for Green Innovation" to reward entrepreneurs in green technology.

I liked this quote from Iceland's president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson:

"If we put all our efforts on the parliaments, this will take decades. We need to build constructive alliances between the scientific community and the business community."

Grimsson wants his country to develop a hydrogen-based economy.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson has written a piece on airline efficiency (among other things) for My Turn Online, Newsweek Enterprise, hosted by MSNBC.com. While the first paragraph kind of left me scratching my head - Lovelock's Gaia theory forms the basis of our current understanding of global warming???? I know Lovelock has become interested in global warming in recent years, and in fact has said we're past "the point of no return," but the Gaia theory isn't really about global warming...I need to get back on point - the rest of the Branson article contains some pretty interesting stuff.

I've said before that some people are going to get rich offering "solutions" to global warming. Branson's already rich, which gives him the capital to invest to get even richer. Some of his airline efficiency ideas are so simple it seems almost unbelievable they aren't already in use. If it uses less fuel to have a plane sit on the ground waiting for a gate than it does to have it circle in the air, why would that not be the first choice? Airlines are so cash-strapped, you would think that saving fuel would be highly interesting to them.

An article today in the New York Times (registration required, but free) discusses many of the economic issues raised by addressing global warming. The article covers a lot of the familiar ground of cap-and-trade controls versus a carbon tax, including references to legislative proposals before Congress, including one from these two:

which envisions a cap-and-trade system. In nosing around looking for more information on the various legislative proposals, I found site with a couple of very interesting graphs comparing the different global warming bills before the 109th Congress. That site also includes a brief description of each of the proposals. It amazes me how much emissions have increased since 1990.

Back to the article in the Times - I had a quibble with this paragraph...

Yet it is increasingly clear that there is a considerable cost to carbon dioxide emissions, especially to future generations, as climate specialists warn of declines in farm output in poor tropical countries, fiercer hurricanes and coastal floods that could make many people refugees.

It seems to me that better examples of potential future threats could have been used. We've already discussed the "fiercer hurricanes" controversy - will they, won't they? No one really knows. As for farm output in poor tropical countries - why not hit Times readers where they live, or rather where they eat, by talking about America's breadbasket moving to Canada, as the NY Times Blog did just last week? I had to laugh at that blog entry, too...for the same reason one of the commenters over there did....it contains this quote from a news release:

In a world where 75 percent of poor people depend on agriculture, climate change will have a profound impact on their food security.

Do you know ANYONE who doesn't rely on agriculture? Unless some people have a Star Trek-style replicator, or on the opposite side of the spectrum, are completely reliant on hunting and gathering - I would guess EVERYONE depends on agriculture.

Ahhhhh....I've drifted a little off topic. That's what happens when I get up too early!

I got an e-mail plugging this engine as a hope for abating global warming through much improved efficiency. It's a snazzy website with cool graphics and a sweet video presentation, but - well, let's just say I didn't take auto shop in high school. And when I say that, I mean my understanding of even the basic function of the internal cumbustion engine is limited. So any engineers out there want to take a look and see if this actually looks like the great breakthrough it claims to be?

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember reading about Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who has a plan to use sulfate aerosols to mitigate global warming, or Arizona astronomer Roger Angel, who has a plan to launch an array of sunlight refracting shades which would reduce the amount of solar energy which reaches the Earth. Both of these are examples of something called geoengineering.

The Fall 2006 issue of UCAR Quarterly from the National Center for Atmospheric Research has an interesting article on geoengineering which includes more information both of the above plans and also touches on NCAR's own John Latham's ideas on increasing the number of droplets in marine stratocumulus clouds. Latham's research indicates that a 10 % increase in the number of droplets could increase the reflectivity of the clouds enough to counteract as much as a doubling of carbon dioxide.

None of these solutions would be used unless the climate was truly teetering on the edge of catastrophe - many scientists have concerns about Crutzen's work, although it underwent peer review, and Angel's plan is massive in scale and expensive. The fact that these ideas are even being considered shows that level of concern the scientific community has over global warming.

"If sizeable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not happen and temperatures rise rapidly, then climatic engineering . . . is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects," writes Crutzen. He stresses that the technique would be a last-ditch option that "should not be used to justify inadequate climate policies."</