The origins of this kind of proposal go back, in part, through what was learned following the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991 when this second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century released a plume of sulfates and other aerosols well into the stratosphere. This resulted in significant global cooling that lingered for more than a year as 1992 was a significantly cooler year compared to the surrounding years. This served as a living laboratory for atmospheric scientists who learned just how sensitive global temperatures are to the concentration of stratospheric aerosols.
This also occurred at a time when the 'global warming' narrative was in its infancy and this new knowledge opened up the theoretical possibility of potentially geoengineering the atmosphere in the future if the Earth was ever in danger of 'catastrophic global warming'. It took until the early part of the 21st century for the 'global warming' narrative to become a media staple for marketing FEAR of the future along with GUILT to millions. If we have allowed ourselves to believe what we hear in the media...i.e. that we are currently on the verge of a climate catastrophe due to increased CO2 emissions from human activity without researching it or questioning it ourselves, we may even be tempted to perceive the idea of purposefully POLLUTING the atmosphere in 2019 as a well-timed and magnanimous gesture for 'saving' the planet.
And this is exactly what repetitive suggestion can create...that is, a situation whereby the 'absurd' can actually appear to be logical...
Fortunately for me, I was exposed to authentic climate science before it was infiltrated, manipulated and redirected for political purposes as a student studying Meteorology and Atmospheric Science in the late 1990's. This makes it easier for me to recognize when propaganda is being promulgated as 'science' though I admit that it also makes it more frustrating for me when I witness people that care about the Earth being sucked into the faith-based 'religion' that the idea of man-made climate change has become.
On paper, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is supposed to operate as an objective organization that reports on the status of the climate with periodic reports that provide policy makers with information upon which to make their decisions. The reality of the IPCC is that ever since the 2001 climate report (which included the infamous 'hockey stick' graph from Michael Mann, et al), this organization has operated in a very biased fashion toward climate alarm-ism.
If you are not familiar with the Michael Mann graph, it is the top graph in the image below showing what is supposed to represent global average temperatures over the past 1,000 years or so. As you can see, the pattern of the graph resembles a 'hockey stick' and while the IPCC adopted this graph for its 2001 report without hesitation, there is a significant amount of disagreement and dissension among authentic climate scientists as to the manner in which it was derived.
The Tim Ball graph on the bottom is a plot of global temperature changes over the past 1,000 years based on authentic data. It includes the well documented 'Medieval Warm Period' and the 'Little Ice Age'. This is the graph that I was first introduced to as a student.
The graph on the top is based on manipulation of data (eliminating both warmer data from the past and cooler data from the present) which was intended to 'flatten' the graph and create the appearance of dire circumstances in our modern era. The 2009 'Climate-Gate' scandal revealed this accusation of alteration of data to be valid.
There was once an argument by the 'global warming' alarmists that these extreme temperature fluctuations shown in the bottom graph were only present in Europe (government shills like Bill Nye will make these kinds of 'recited' statements when confronted with the authentic data). However, many recent studies have revealed that the warmer times existed throughout the globe during the Medieval Warm Period while colder times existed throughout the globe during the Little Ice Age.
It is also interesting to note that there are records from the period between 950-1250 AD (Medieval Warm Period) where wine producing vineyards in England are documented in addition to generations of Scandinavians thriving on Greenland at that time. There are also records from the period between 1450-1850 (Little Ice Age) where annual festivals existed on the regularly frozen Thames River in England and it was during the transition between these extreme times that the Greenland settlements had to be abandoned largely in part due to shorter growing seasons and less viable farmlands (i.e. natural climate change).
If we assume that the manipulated Mann graph on top is accurate (a science that is considered to be 'settled'), these documented records from the past would not make any sense considering that it appears that temperatures were steady throughout almost the entirety of the last 1,000 years according to his 'data'. However, given the authentic graph on the bottom, these documents records would make perfect sense. Currently, the Thames River does not freeze at all in the winter and vineyards are not supported by a currently cooler climate in England. That is, current global temperatures lie in between these extreme periods in our relatively recent history as shown in the authentic graph.
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,"
- George Orwell (1984)
The point here is that authentic climate science has been corrupted and yet we are still bombarded by media repetition of the idea that CO2 emissions from human activities are DRIVING climate change and that we are currently experiencing extreme temperatures that need immediate action (even if its drastic) less we perish like the dinosaurs.
The reality about global climate is that it is ALWAYS fluxing from one state to another and even over the past 1,000 years there is ample evidence to suggest that the current climate is relatively stable when compared to shifts such as when conditions transitioned from the Medieval Warm Period into the Little Ice Age between the 13th and 15th centuries.
So, without any significant CO2 emissions from human activities during the Medieval Warm Period or subsequent aerosol emissions to counter the 'dangerous' warming and bring on The Little Ice Age (because we all know that man is the biggest driver of climate change...haha), what could have possibly led to the transition from one extreme climate to another?
While the Earth's climate is very complex, there are some major factors that actually DRIVE it rather than just modulate it. While greenhouse gases like CO2 (when quantities are adequate) CAN modulate the climate by trapping some heat, the most significant driver of climate on Earth is the most obvious one...its the Sun.
Both the ANGLE and the INTENSITY of the Sun vary over time and the cycles for these variations tend to be very predictable with cycles for the angle of the Sun (Milankovitch cycles) ranging between 23k and 100k years and cycles for the intensity of the Sun (i.e. sunspots and solar magnetic field) ranging between 11 years and up to 400 years.
Variance in the angle of the Sun relative to the Earth (Milankovitch cycles) is the PRIMARY driver of climate over the long term. The graph below compares temperatures to CO2 concentrations over the past 450,000 years based on the Antarctic ice cores. Its easy to see that temperature fluctuations have followed a fairly predictable pattern which has been driven by both increasing and decreasing solar irradiance due to varying solar angles relative to the Earth.
Over the past 2.5 million years, the Earth has technically been experiencing an 'Ice Age', in that, permanent ice exists at the poles. However, some periods during this current 'Ice Age' have involved glaciers reaching into mid-latitudes (glacial periods) while other periods have included glaciation only near the poles (inter-glacial periods). Including the modern inter-glacial period, the warmer times as indicated by the graph above have involved retreating glaciers while the colder times have involved advancing glaciers. Its easy to understand why the sun's angle would be so important since we witness anywhere from a 30-50° swing between summer (high solar angle) temperatures and winter (low solar angle) temperatures in mid-latitudes.
But wait...if temperature and CO2 are rising and falling together over the last 450,000 years, doesn't this PROVE that man-made CO2 emissions will increase temperatures to 'dangerous' levels if we don't create policies to tax these emissions and/or spray the atmosphere with aerosols to block the Sun?
Not exactly. While Al Gore uses this graph in his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" to scare people as he uses a lift to reach the top of the graph, it is greatly recognized among climate scientists that CO2 responds to temperature changes over this period and not the other way around. There is actually a 600-800 year lag whereby CO2 will rise and/or fall several hundred years AFTER temperature changes lead the way. The reason for this is pretty simple. The Earth's surface is about 70% ocean covered and oceans serve as a sink/source of CO2. When air temperatures increase due to stronger Sun angles, eventually the water temperatures in the oceans respond by warming as well. Warmer ocean water holds less CO2 than colder ocean water so when the water temperatures increase, CO2 is released from the oceans and into the atmosphere. The opposite is true when air temperatures cool due to weaker Sun angles and when the oceans therefore absorb more CO2.
And while these Milankovitch cycles drive climate change on Earth over the long-term, other natural cycles either drive climate change or modulate it on smaller scales. These include variance in solar activity (sun spots and solar magnetic field) as well as ocean circulation cycles (i.e. El Nino, La Nina, AMO and PDO) which modulate the climate by transferring heat within the oceans with varying intensity. The graph below shows the data from the Greenland ice cores going back approximately 10,000 years.
On this smaller time scale, the general drift toward colder temperatures over the past 10,000 years has been driven by the Milankovitch cycles while the spikes and valleys in this graph are the results of varying solar activity modulated by ocean circulation fluctuations. You can see here that the shift from the Medieval Warm Period into the Little Ice Age in relatively recent years was driven and modulated in the same way.
Atmospheric gases DO play a role in modulating the climate on smaller time scales. Water vapor is by far the most abundant and important greenhouse gas and is the reason that life on Earth as we know it can exist. Other greenhouse gases tend to be relatively insignificant (i.e. CO2). Short-term fluctuations in natural aerosols from volcanic activity and other natural sources can also make a significant impact to the climate. However, these affects are short lived and temporary. As I mentioned previously, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 provided scientists with a living laboratory for how volcanic activity can temporarily reduce global temperatures.
Generally speaking, the Earth IS heading toward its next glacial period when glaciers will advance toward mid-latitudes, though we are still likely at least several centuries away from this becoming a problem. However, some climate scientists believe that glacial periods can appear suddenly as there is some evidence to suggest this as well. Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, this knowledge combined with decreasing temperatures and advancing glaciation had many scientists convinced that we were already heading in that direction.
Notice the 180° turn that Time Magazine made between the late 1970's and the early 21st century in terms of the direction of global climate. Pretty compelling! |
But then global temperatures warmed up again throughout the 1980's and 1990's before becoming more flat since around 2000. Unfortunately, some opportunistic politicians colluded with willing scientists and took advantage of the temporary warming to manufacture FEAR and incentivize taxation while blaming CO2 emissions as the reason for what could easily be explained as natural warming. In fact, between WWI and WWII global temperatures rose in a similar magnitude and duration to the warming that occurred most recently. In fact, in the United States, the 1930's is still by far the hottest decade on record. Just look at this graph of average maximum summer temperatures in the US. As is easy to see, summers are certainly getting cooler, NOT hotter in the US. Also, note that the lowest point in this graph was in 1992 which was a direct result of the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo half way around the world.
A combination between fluctuations in sun spot activity and ocean circulations can explain the warming earlier in the 20th century, the cooling in the mid-20th century and the warming to end the century. Notice the relative absence of sun spots during the Little Ice Age as well as the slight dip during the brief cooling in the 1960'/1970's. Sunspots were also on the rise during the very warm 1930's.
In addition, the Pacific Ocean is enormous and has an influence on short term global climate but especially in the US since it is 'upwind' of the US. Below is a graph of the warm and cool phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
This graph is perhaps even more compelling than the sunspot graph as the warm and cool phases of the PDO essentially line up exactly with patterns of warming and cooling during the 20th century as well as with the relatively 'flat' temperatures during the first 20 years of the current century.
The THEORY that CO2 COULD trap enough heat to make a significant impact is reasonable since CO2 is a greenhouse gas (though there are limits to its ability to affect global air temperatures...see graph below). However, given that CO2 comprises a minuscule portion of the atmosphere relative to water vapor and that fluctuations in CO2 have NEVER driven temperature changes on Earth and that there is NO correlation between CO2 and temperatures since the burning of fossil fuels began (unless we alter the temperature data over the last 1,000 years to make it appear so), the CO2-driven climate change narrative appears to be nothing more than a fear-driven political weapon. Just look at the relationship (see below) between CO2 concentration and the sensitivity of the atmosphere in terms of incremental temperature changes.
What it shows is that even at pre-industrial levels of CO2, the atmosphere was already essentially 'saturated' with CO2 and any further CO2 has very little impact on changing global temperatures. For more, also have a look at this recent study which concludes that the majority of observed global temperature changes are due to changes in cloud cover and relative humidity (water vapor) which are driven by fluctuations in solar irradiance.
So, that takes us to the questions posed in the title of this article:
1) Is Spraying the Atmosphere With Aerosols Going To 'Save' Us From Climate Change?
As we've discussed, the climate is ALWAYS in the process of change and these changes are driven primarily by changes in the Sun's angle relative to the Earth on large time scales and both driven and modulated by solar output (sunspots and magnetic fields) and ocean circulation fluctuations. On very small time scales (~1-3 years), aerosols from volcanic activity and other natural sources can significantly reduce global temperatures for a temporary time period.
This last point is the principal behind the idea of artificially spraying aerosol POLLUTION in order to block the Sun and reduce the warming that is supposedly being caused by man-made CO2 emissions. So, spraying the atmosphere will not SAVE us from climate change but it will certainly CHANGE the climate! Its absurd to think that climate change is simultaneously perceived as something to FEAR as well as something being proposed as a SOLUTION to that fear!
Further, even IF CO2 was increasing global temperatures and creating an 'unstable' climate, how do we know that purposefully cooling the planet wouldn't create even more instability? Also, the heat that greenhouse gases trap near the Earth's surface is VERY different from the incoming solar radiation that would be blocked in terms of how it is utilized. That is, prevention of sunlight with POLLUTION will reduce photosynthetic uptake of CO2 which will leave even MORE CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore create MORE warming (theoretically) while poisoning Earth in the process. If CO2 was actually steadily warming the planet then policies that reduce its emissions at least make sense, but policies that involve reducing photosynthetic uptake of CO2 to achieve cooling are absurd IF CO2 actually causes warming in the manner in which we are told!
Of course, I am not the only one who sees the scientific fraud and the political motivation behind this fear-based climate change narrative that has been driven into us since the late 1980's. Click on the link below for a better understanding of the breadth of this disagreement with the narrative that we never hear about through mainstream media.
"31,487 Scientists Say Global Warming is a Hoax - They're Speaking Out Against Junk Science"
2) Why Now?
I mentioned previously that changes in the Sun's magnetic field can drive climate on Earth on medium time scales. This is because variation in sunspot activity (which varies the Sun's intensity) is modulated by changes in the Sun's magnetic fields. In my opinion, the reason that we are hearing about the aerosol spraying 'solution' now is because the 'powers that be' know that the 'jig is up' in terms of being able to continue with the narrative that the planet is warming due to CO2 emissions.
I say this because recent studies suggest that not only are we generally heading toward the next glacial period (as mentioned previously) but that the next three decades may produce global temperatures that are lower than have been experienced since the Little Ice Age. This is just speculation, however, it is also very reasonable speculation as it appears that sunspot activity may be heading into a very low output period over the next few decades as described by the research of Professor Valentina Zharkova. Click on the video and/or read the description of the video below for more details.
Professor Valentina Zharkova gave a presentation of her Climate and the Solar Magnetic Field hypothesis at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in October, 2018.
The PC waves produced by a magnetic dipole and their summary curve were described analytically and shown to be closely related to the average sunspot number index used for description of solar activity. Based on this correlation, the summary curve was used for the prediction of long-term solar activity on a millennial timescale.
This prediction revealed the presence of a grand cycle of 350-400 years, with a remarkable resemblance to the sunspot and terrestrial activity features reported in the past millennia: Maunder (grand) Minimum (1645-1715), Wolf (grand) minimum (1200), Oort (grand) minimum (1010-1050), Homer (grand) minimum (800-900 BC); the medieval (900-1200) warm period, Roman (400-10BC) and other warm periods.
This approach also predicts the modern grand minimum upcoming in 2020-2055.
By utilising the two principal components of solar magnetic field oscillations and their summary curve, we extrapolate the solar activity backwards one hundred millennia and derive weaker oscillations with a period of 2000-2100years (a super-grand cycle) reflecting variations of magnetic field magnitude. The last super-grand minimum occurred during Maunder Minimum with magnetic field growing for 500 years (until ~2150) and decreasing for another 500 years. The most likely nature of this interaction will be discussed and used to explain long-term variations of solar magnetic field and irradiance observed from the Earth."
In my opinion, the urgency to attempt the spraying campaigns in 2019 is due to the knowledge that the expected solar minimum from 2020 through 2055 will not produce the temperatures that would be required in order to continue with the warming narrative and therefore to elicit taxation for CO2 emissions. If they can get the spraying campaign up and running in 2019 they can also potentially attribute the natural cooling that is likely to occur over the next few years to that of being a 'successful' result of that very spraying...essentially 'proving' that these methods 'saved the planet' from global warming when it will actually be a result of natural cooling!
It sounds absurd to suggest that there would be such a large scale manipulation of the masses without regard for consequences. However, the very nature of this proposal to spray aerosols reveals a certain level of potentially nefarious intentions since as a solution to an apparent environmental problem it appears to instead potentially CONTRIBUTE to the issue (man-made climate change) that it is supposedly attempting to solve...to me, somethings just not right!
And finally, a recent ongoing eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia is currently spewing aerosols into the stratosphere much in the same way that Mt. Pinatubo did in 1991. Because of this, even without the potential solar minimum on the horizon, 2020 may very well be a much cooler year much in the same way as what happened in 1992.
Given this development, IF common sense and the well-being of humanity were to be prioritized in this situation, the idea of spraying the atmosphere would be postponed until the effects of the fallout from this latest eruption are properly assessed. If this proposal is NOT postponed, then the nefariousness of their intentions reveals itself, in my opinion...
I guess we will have to see what happens...thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Christopher Taylor
BS - Meteorology
MS - Atmospheric Science
MS - Environmental Science & Management