Either we’re fucked, or Tim Flannery has gone crazy-ape bonkers
Posted by clubwah on May 20, 2008
Outspoken climate change campaigner Tim Flannery says we should pump sulphur into the atmosphere to stave off environmental collapse in the next FIVE years.
Flannery says sulphur could be inserted into the earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.
He said the process, which can be achieved by adding sulphur to jet fuel would create global dimming through contrails would even change the colour of the sky. Me thinks it would lead to acid rain too.
Aviation, which many people blame for greenhouse gas already contributes to global dimming - when all flights were banned in the US in the days after the September 11 attacks, the mean temperature around the United States shot up by a very significant one degree.
While global dimming may be seen as the opposite of global warming and thus a good thing, it is has it’s own negative effect on the environment in that it reduces the sun’s capacity to evaporate water by around 10 per cent, leading to less rainfall - some scientists believe it is global dimming which led to disastrous droughts in Ethiopia during the 1980s.
Flannery, admits the consequences of pumping sulphur into the atmosphere to increase global dimming are unknown - this to me sounds like a cane toad solution on a Biblical scale.
I don’t seek to denigrate Dr Flannery or be a climate change believer or sceptic - though I reckon he has certainly given some ammunition to the latter here. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Earth has frozen over before, and it has been warmer than it is now - Antarctica had rain forests.
Whether or not the global warming trend is man-made or paert of a natural cycler is an argument I won’t get into here. But I do believe the planet will sort itself out and mankind has to be more flexible to nature’s evolution.
We built farms and towns to suit climatic conditions at a particular time, maybe we need to accept that this was always going to be a moveable feast,
May 20, 2008 at 2:15 pm
It is like Tim just came up with this suggestion to amuse Blair/Bolt
and all the other RWDB on the interwebs.
Bolt wil be bringing this up for years
May 20, 2008 at 2:48 pm
2015 AD - Man looks up from fiddling with his car aircon just long enough to realise that civilsation is collapsing. “Bugger”, he says.
May 20, 2008 at 2:51 pm
The sulphur theory has been around for 30+ years. One drawback is that we would lose the blue color of the skies and as they would become permanently overcast. I know this because I listened to a podcast about it last year some time.
May 21, 2008 at 12:00 am
If it’s on a podcast it must be true.
Listen to the GrodsThink everyone. It……rocks!