Group items tagged

fail safe is is probably a bit exaggerated ...

A wide scale 8 year experiment in China on combating desertification seems to have been successful. Instead of using cyanobacteria blooms in the sea, the tested method proposes to spray them on the boundaries of desert/farmland every few days, so that the carbon they capture stays on the ground. It is useful in fixing the organic material against wind erosion only complementary to planting hardy grasses. Very fast result, nevertheless. Could be classified as a geoengineering activity.

130 km2 as next step will be quite an area

Atmospheric rivers, short-lived wind tunnels are created in the upper troposphere and carry vast amounts of water. They 'fuel' from the tropical Pacific reservoir and cause heavy precipitation events and even floods to mid-latitude land, as soon as they encounter the Sierra mountains. The new finding is that two inter-hemispheric climatic oscillation modes allow for their creation, as soon as they are found in a certain phase combination.

Could we conceivably control these like we're thinking to do with taifuns? :)) Would be geoengineering at its finest

The location of the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the waters off Greece's Santorini are the site of newly discovered opalescent pools forming at 250 meters depth. The interconnected series of meandering, iridescent white pools contain high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2) and may hold answers to questions related to deepsea carbon storage as well as provide a means of monitoring the volcano for future eruptions.

We were there last year, swimming in one of those 'healthy' mud pits..

250m and we did not know about them ??

ocean fertilization might induce increased marine aerosol (DMS) emissions leading to further cooling effect but also changes in precipitation

This seems to be the Swiss company's website: http://www.meteo-systems.com

error in CO2 models? Cynthia have a look at it please - effect on our paper?

May be of interest for Friederike and Nina... Link to the full report at the bottom of the page.

thanks Marek! hope that you are doing fine!!!

Destroy a forest at one side of the world (amazon), and create one ate the other side... the world is crazy!

Any better ideas...?

Did you know about this Weather Modification Office? Promising or dodgy?

Yes. In China it happens apparently quite often that weather is regionally modified, e.g. in order to have good weather conditions during certain events (like olympics in Beijing). But also in other countries weather modification is applied, for reasons of agriculture, pollution, skiing, etc. Obviously, one wonders on the environmental impact of such an artificial cloud feeding process with silver iodide. I just googled, stumbling upon this report http://www.weathermodification.org/AGI_toxicity.pdf which published the result: no environmentally harmful effects...

and w.r.t. ur question: I mean different weather conditions which we experience locally (like droughts or other extreme weather events) are (often) due to large-scale/global climatic changes. Hence, cloud seeding just describes a local, short-term mitigation of these events. However, there is a geoengineering proposal (so climate modification) which also suggests to seed clouds above the sea (i.e. increase cloud coverage, e.g. by using seaspray as cloud condesation nuclei), thereby increasing the planetary albedo (Earth reflectance) and reducing the energy reaching the Earth surface. If this idea is promising or not, I couldn't judge upon, but for sure it is worthwhile to take a closer look at.