Smoke and Mirrors

Gritting our lungs but we’ve got it made in the shade

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
1/28/07
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

 

There was an article in the Guardian that, had it appeared on April 1st, I would have passed along with a wide grin. The Guardian has been infamous in past years for slipping in news stories on that particular date that aren’t exactly reality-based. The trouble is that usually it’s a sly wink to a British audience and neither my readers, nor, often as not, I will get the joke. It might be something like “Footballer’s wife Chelsea Wurst announced that she was getting her husband, striker Pete Wurst, a kitten for his birthday”, and 99.9% of Brits and .01% of Americans would know that Wurst is violently allergic to cats, and that he would be playing in the FA cup on his birthday.

On the same day that ABC news here in the US leaked advance information on the vast Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change study will be coming out that pretty much nails down human complicity in global warming, and on the same day that a major US study revealed that there is a strong correlation between living near freeways and diminished lung capacity in children, the admin announced that it would plan to combat global warming with ... drumroll, please.

Smoke and mirrors.

Here was a joke even people who don’t know how many sides a triangle has will get, I thought. Except it wasn’t April 1st, and the Guardian wasn’t joking.

The idea was that global warming could be reduced and even eliminated by dumping large amounts of particulates (like smoke) into the atmosphere. This would reduce the amount of sunlight striking the earth’s surface. Also, giant space mirrors could be used to reflect away sunlight to the same effect.

Mind you, the administration is still pretending that global warming is all just part of a vast conspiracy by “Big Science” to raise money for, well, science. So the proposal wasn’t to fight a war on global warming, but just as insurance should, by some remarkably long set of odds, global warming actually occur. Better safe than sorry, you know. “Insurance” is the word they used.

First the mirrors. This idea has been actually bouncing around for some time. The idea is that you deploy these mirrors, which need only be tin foil, in orbit and they reduce the amount of sunlight striking the earth. You would get complaints from people living along the orbital path of these mirrors, of course, since it would change their climate and agriculture, perhaps more drastically than global warming would. (“Honey, the sun just went out!” “Did you pay the bill?” “Yea-assh!”)

There’s two types of orbits that could be used. You could have mirrors in geosynchronous orbits, 25,000 miles up, which would stay over the same part of the planet’s face. Since the sun isn’t in geosynchronous orbit, this means that each day the shadow would move from west to east along the section of earth passing directly under the mirror and the sun. The other is non-geosynchronous orbit, which means that the mirror would orbit the earth anywhere from every 90 minutes to (realistically) every 28 days. This would cause brief artificial nights at various odd times.

One problem is that of scale. The earth’ surface is nearly 200 million square miles in area, and they want to reduce the amount of sunlight by 1%. That would require, at a minimum, 3 million square miles of mirrors in orbit, because the shadow cast by the mirrors wouldn’t be as large in area, or as opaque at the edges. That’s a lot of tinfoil.

The Putsch junta, which can’t manage a couple of minor occupations of backward countries and which was totally flummoxed by the Katrina disaster (“Whoa! Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast in August! Wow – who could have seen THAT one?”) propose to do this. Just as insurance, you know.

The other idea – dumping more smoke and dust into the atmosphere – is even more brain dead. As bad ideas go, it’s well above “Let’s overthrow Saddam” and more along the lines of “Let’s kick this Bengal tiger in the ‘nads and see if he reacts”.

Dust and smoke do reduce the amount of light striking the earth’s surface, and this causes global cooling. What’s more, it’s easier than putting mirrors the size of the United States into orbit.

In fact, we’ve managed to do this quite nicely. Human activity has kicked billions of tons of particulates into the atmosphere, resulting in global dimming over the past 60 years of about 12%. In some regions, it’s as high as 30%. We have accurate measurements of this going back 150 years, since farmers measured sunlight in order to better gage how their crops were coming along.

But particulates have a bad habit of killing us with lung disease. In fact, a major US study came out the same day the admin proposed putting more shit in the air pointing out that there is a nearly straight-line correlation between proximity to roads with a lot of diesel traffic and diminished lung capacity in American children. The more particulates they are exposed to, the less efficient their lungs become. Kids living 500 yards from a freeway have up to 30% diminished lung capacity. And while the study didn’t directly study rates of asthma and other lung disease, it’s inferentially clear that increased particulates elevate those conditions directly.

Any Londoner can tell you of the dense fogs that the city used to get that formed around all the particulates from soft coal fires in the city. Sometimes “black fogs” would form would kill hundreds and even thousands over a few days. Doctors know of the incredible damage smoking does to the lungs. Particulates do not make human lungs happy.

A lot of this was already known, and so much of the world has been working to reduce the amount of crap. London banned soft coal, and the air cleared and the fogs went away. California led the way in reducing auto emissions with the result that Los Angeles has cleaner air than it had in the 70s.

So we’re reducing dust and smoke, which in turn is reducing global dimming. But the admin, rather than look for cleaner and more efficient energy sources, wants us to reverse the reduction in global dimming by deliberately dumping the same junk in the air that we’ve worked so hard to reduce.

At least that one would be easy. Just require automakers to conform to the sorts of efficiency standards they had in 1952. Not only would this greatly befoul our air, but it would eliminate many annoying cities around the world. People would die of emphysema at age 35, grateful that they had the chance to breathe the pure air of Republican freedom.

We’re used to the administration treating the public like they were total idiots, and in all honesty, the public has done much to deserve such treatment. But this one, coming as it does in the same week at the IPCC Report and the (Dr James) Gauderman Lancet study on particulates, strikes a new low from the admin that brought us WMDs and “freedom is on the march”.

We fight heat by blocking light, and we fight pollution by dumping crap into the air. Wow! Another great “mission accomplished” moment!

Need any more proof that this demented administration is completely out of touch with reality?