“This is a great white shark that ate some of my traps [picture]. We pull up the trap, up it comes. Here’s a thought experiment. I’m swimming along and it takes off my leg. I’m 80 miles from shore. Well what’s gonna happens to me – now I die. Five years from now this is what I hope happens. I’m taken back to the boat, i’m given a gas mask, 80 ppm hydrogen sulphide, i’m then thrown in an ice bath and cooled 15 degrees lower, and I can be taken to a critical care hospital, and the reason I can do that is because we mammals have gone through a series of these hydrogen sulphide events and our bodies have adapted.” …“now, you’re all thinking, yeah what about the brain tissue. Well, this is one of the great challenges that is gonna happen. You’re in an accident - you got two choices, you’re gonna die or take the hydrogen sulphide and say 75% of you is saved mentally…what are you gonna do?” – Peter Ward
“Gaia has a critical case of anthroponemia and is undergoing runaway heating. We’ve got two choices, die, or give the atmosphere a sulphur dioxide injection. The biosphere may only operate at say 75%, but it’s better than being dead” - me
“Gaia's Junk Shot” - Mitigating an Extinction Level Methane Catastrophe
Conventional Solar Radiation Management could possibly decrease forcing by 2-6 Watts/m-2. Not good enough for a catastrophic and sustained methane ebullition. Worse so for a runaway Venus Syndrome. Let's try blocking 30 Watts-m-2 and more. For reference, sunlight is about 270 Watts-m-2, the hottest its been in its 4.6 billion year life. Our pollution parasol already blocks about half of the warming. And we've only experienced about 55% of our CO2s heat. We're locked in for more.
Materials:
1: Alberta tar sands sulfur pile – 2 tonne /m-3
2: Mojave Desert airplane airframes – 3 t/m-3
World Al production > 20Mt/yr
3: 10 to 30 Mt nuclear warhead (Options for 100 Mt if the Russians help)
4: Tar sands high-sulphur crude oil
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~keith/Misc/A ... Report.pdf <-- Geoengineering Cost Analysis for the nerds.
Aurora Flight Sciences geoengineering report uses between 1 Mt and 5 Mt of sulfur compound per year at altitudes of 40 to 100 kft. I’m going to use 5 Mt of sulphur and 1 Mt of scrap aluminum. 5 Mt sulphur volume = 2 500 000 m-3 , 1 Mt aluminum volume = 333 000 m-3, Cylinder volume 2.8 million m-3, r = 75 m, h = 160 m, approximately deep as its diameter.
Construction: Excavate a vertical cylinder in the earth 160 metres deep, 75 metres radius. Construct a concave housing for a nuclear weapon at the bottom and an access tunnel. Place a cap of flattened aircraft 0.5 metres (arbitrary number) thick over the nuclear housing, and fill in the cylinder with a mixture of sulphur dust and pulverized airframe (aluminum dust). Cover the top loosely with dirt, enough to insulate the sulphur/aluminum from a pool of sulfur boosted crude oil 100 metre radius and 1 metre deep. Multiple (a few hundred) “Gaia's Junk Shot” can be constructed and positioned where circulation patterns will carry the dust to the Arctic. The cylinders are a permanent storehouse for sulphur and aluminum until catastrophic methane eruption occurs, and geoengineering capacity is required.
Action: On a calm wind day with circulation patterns favoring movement of particles to the Arctic, set the crude oil on fire. Let it burn until violent convective currents develop and carry particles into the high atmosphere. Detonate the warhead.The explosion should ignite the aluminum and sulfur, generating even more heat to propel the particles upwards.
I have seen ideas of moving the moon or putting a giant mirror at L1 – this scenario is far more realistic. I wonder if the shockwaves would unleash more methane though? No, current sea floor drilling unleashes more, and we would only do something so awesome if the world really needed saving. For example, temperatures begin to increase by 1 degree C per year. At 2 degrees, society collapses. At 4, the soldiers survive. At 6 C few will be around to hear methane explosions or see Cat 7 storms circle the earth unabated. And at + 15 degrees C anomoly, not even the microbes will complain of radiation. We're at 0.8 now, locked in for 2-4, which would further unlock the Arctic carbon as methane.
Storax Sedan - 104 kiloton warhead exploded in a mine shaft 194 metres deep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)
Arctic Ice in Death Spiral
http://stephenleahy.net/2010/09/23/arct ... tastrophe/
Time Lapse of Extreme Ice Loss
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_ti ... _loss.html
NSF Methane Statement March 2010.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/03/04/s ... f-venting/
http://symposium.serdp-estcp.org/Technical-Sessions/1A
Shakhova and Semiletov presentation to the US DoD December 2010. Check out page 34.
Ooops...are we ready for abrupt climate change? Modern humans put out 9 Gt carbon as mostly CO2. In one year, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf has decided to kick it up a notch. Don't worry, the methane hasn't mixed yet and the global average isn't rocketing up - but who knows when it will start moving? It's time to build 200 of my babies. Gaia's Junk Shot The heating will affect the Arctic the most. We'll block out the god damn sun the entire year if we have to."Bad news: directly observed fluxes exceed estimated by up 3 orders of
magnitude. (that's 1000x)
Interpretation of acoustical data recorded with deployed multibeam
sonar allowed moderate quantification of bottom fluxes as high as 44 g/
m2/d (Leifer et al., in preparation). Prorating these numbers to the
areas of hot spots (210×103 km2) adds 3.5Gt to annual methane release
from the ESAS. This is enough to trigger abrupt climate change
(Archer, 2005)."
Methane, Propaganda, and the Architects of Genocide
http://theartofannihilation.com/
Post-Docs and grads wanted for summer geoengineering school, Canada, 2011.
University of Calgary, Heidelberg University, and Carnegie Mellon University
http://groups.google.com/group/geoengin ... 3c3243cd65
It's free, hosted in Banff. All you smart engineers get out there and solve our problems.
One more nuke. Tsar Bomba. Hell yes!
If we wanted the cloud to go higher, we could even fire a nuclear missile into the mushroom cloud.
