“NOAA Calls For Urgent Geoengineering Investigation”
#CDR #mCDR #SRM
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/26/noaa-calls-for-urgent-geoengineering-investigation
Someone is going to dim the sun, and it will be soon, https://climate.benjames.io/someone-is-going-to-dim-the-sun/.
The fact:
- “100 planes injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere would dim the sun by about 1%, and cool the earth by about 1°C”
The reality:
- We don’t know if a cascade reaction can happen, and if it will, it can be absolutely dramatic.
- It is most costly than the article suggests.
- We need to regulate/forbid this.
FIGHT THE SUN
(already in progress)
Passwords and Peanut Butter
Wanna buy some *really* expensive peanut butter?
For a modest investment of $1,069.00, you too can acquire a tasty 3-pak of NIST Standard Reference Peanut Butter.
Coming in at approximately $59/ounce, that’s a bit pricier than the $.20/ounce you’d spend at the grocery store. But in this case, you’re buying more than the product in the jar. You’re buying “truth.”
NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is well-known as the government agency which sets password policies. NIST is the reason most websites began asking users to create passwords which contain: Upper-case letters
Lower-case letters
Numbers and
Special characters
NIST is also the reason most websites now ask for passwords longer than 8 characters, and why websites *don’t* ask us to choose from a list of goofy questions like “Where did you attend high school?” or “What’s your favorite food?”
In the world of cybersecurity, NIST is almost always thought of as the good guys.
In addition to defining best practices and providing advice related to technology, NIST also produces 1,300 Standard Reference Materials, or SRMs. Thirty of these are food-related.
These highly-analyzed samples are used by manufacturers all over the world to calibrate their testing equipment. Lab techs know if their results agree with the NIST standard sample, their tests are reliable.
The high cost of these reference materials — including peanut butter — is really all about the extensive process NIST used to accurately measure the ingredients, and all the scientific expertise that went into verifying the sample’s chemical and physical properties.
NIST refers to their Standard Reference Materials as “Truth In A Jar.”
Other fun facts about these reference samples: NIST sells $20MM per year
From a 20,000 square foot warehouse
The most popular SRM is a break-away product called “Charpies”
NIST even sells standard cigarettes for flammability testing
The newest Standard Reference Samples are: Typical Human Diet
Human Sludge (ugh!)
Live Hamster Ovary Cells for production of human monoclonal antibodies
So NIST isn’t only all about passwords. They also help lab techs find nasty impurities in peanut butter, like aflatoxins, that would do us a world of hurt if not for the vigilant folks at NIST.
Here's a recent behind-the-scenes video from Veritasium as they tour the NIST SRM warehouse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c
And Tom Scott did an excellent, 4-minute video interviewing NIST staff in their lab. Check out the freeze-dried urine and whale blubber:
Despite it's title "It's Time to Engineer the Sky" this piece in SciAm does a decent job of laying out the risks of geoengineering using stratospheric aerosols as well as the arguments people use to promote research into it.
Original title "A Stratospheric Gamble" was a better one though.
Bottom line: SRM has major risks but also quite possibly deployed in future. I'd rather not leave research up to carbon offsetters
#GeoEngineering #ClimateChange #SRM
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-engineer-the-sky/
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a controversial technique that aims to reflect sunlight back into space to cool the Earth. SRM could potentially reduce some of the impacts of climate change, such as heat waves and sea level rise, but it also poses significant risks and uncertainties. Policymakers must understand the trade-offs and ethical issues and engage with diverse stakeholders and experts to ensure responsible governance.
Passwords and Peanut Butter
Wanna buy some *really* expensive peanut butter?
For a modest investment of $1,069.00, you too can acquire a tasty 3-pak of NIST Standard Reference Peanut Butter.
Coming in at approximately $59/ounce, that’s a bit pricier than the $.20/ounce you’d spend at the grocery store. But in this case, you’re buying more than the product in the jar. You’re buying “truth.”
NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is well-known as the government agency which sets password policies. NIST is the reason most websites began asking users to create passwords which contain: Upper-case letters
Lower-case letters
Numbers and
Special characters
NIST is also the reason most websites now ask for passwords longer than 8 characters, and why websites *don’t* ask us to choose from a list of goofy questions like “Where did you attend high school?” or “What’s your favorite food?”
In the world of cybersecurity, NIST is almost always thought of as the good guys.
In addition to defining best practices and providing advice related to technology, NIST also produces 1,300 Standard Reference Materials, or SRMs. Thirty of these are food-related.
These highly-analyzed samples are used by manufacturers all over the world to calibrate their testing equipment. Lab techs know if their results agree with the NIST standard sample, their tests are reliable.
The high cost of these reference materials — including peanut butter — is really all about the extensive process NIST used to accurately measure the ingredients, and all the scientific expertise that went into verifying the sample’s chemical and physical properties.
NIST refers to their Standard Reference Materials as “Truth In A Jar.”
Other fun facts about these reference samples: NIST sells $20MM per year
From a 20,000 square foot warehouse
The most popular SRM is a break-away product called “Charpies”
NIST even sells standard cigarettes for flammability testing
The newest Standard Reference Samples are: Typical Human Diet
Human Sludge (ugh!)
Live Hamster Ovary Cells for production of human monoclonal antibodies
So NIST isn’t only all about passwords. They also help lab techs find nasty impurities in peanut butter, like aflatoxins, that would do us a world of hurt if not for the vigilant folks at NIST.
Here's a recent behind-the-scenes video from Veritasium as they tour the NIST SRM warehouse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c
And Tom Scott did an excellent, 4-minute video interviewing NIST staff in their lab. Check out the freeze-dried urine and whale blubber:
The calls for #GeoEngineering are getting louder, but how effective is it? How safe? And who decides when and what to deploy?
"Some scientists worry that studying how to shade the Earth from some of the sun’s heat is a slippery slope toward deployment of ‘solar radiation management’ without fully understanding the risks."
#SRM #SolarRadiationManagement #MoralHazard
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21072023/new-federal-report-on-research-into-sun-dimming-technologies-delivers-more-questions-than-answers/
Oh yeah. And some people think that injecting more #Aluminum into the atmosphere will solve #GlobalWarming -- by dimming the Sun. Ummmm...
Solar #geoengineering by injecting aluminum oxide aerosol into the lower stratosphere is a serious threat to global mental health
by Dr. Giovanni Ghirga, May, 2022
"A possible geoengineering method to mitigate the global warming aspect of climate change is the injection of aerosols into the lower stratosphere, closely mimicking the way large volcanic eruptions cool the climate. This method is called solar-radiation management (#SRM) scheme or simply Solar Geoengineering. SRM has been suggested to be affordable and have high effectiveness compared with other geoengineering schemes that have been suggested to mitigate global warming. While sulphate aerosols are the most studied, it has been recently shown that aerosols with other compositions, aluminium oxide (alumina) and diamond, could be used to dramatically increase the amount of light scatter achieved on a per mass basis. Alumina particles formed after the alumina aerosol injection are more efficient scatterers and may have less severe technology-specific risks than sulfates. Thus, they are expected to be more efficient per unit mass for geoengineering applications.
"Nevertheless, it has also been suggested that SRM has a low associated safety compared with other geoengineering schemes because of its possible effects on regional climate, stratospheric ozone, high-altitude tropospheric clouds, biological productivity, and global biodiversity. We want to add a possible severe effect on Global Mental Health that could be caused by using alumina as light scattering.
"The average residence time of a particle in the lower stratosphere is approximately 1-2 years. After eventual transport into the troposphere, alumina particles undergo relatively rapid mixing processes by weather events, turbulence, and cloudscale overturning. They are mostly removed from the atmosphere by dry deposition, sedimentation, or scavenging by clouds, finally polluting the environment.
"Aluminium has often been regarded as not posing a significant health hazard if the human body burden of aluminium has increased. Nevertheless, epidemiological studies suggest that aluminium may not be as innocuous as was previously thought and that aluminium may actively promote the onset and progression of Alzheimer's disease. This condition is the most common form of dementia and may contribute to 60 –70 % of cases. In 2015, dementia affected 47 million people worldwide (or roughly 5% of the world's elderly population), a figure predicted to increase to 75 million in 2030 and 132 million by 2050. Recent reviews estimate that each year nearly 9.9 million people develop dementia globally; this figure translates into one new case every three seconds. Even prolonged exposure to low levels of aluminium leads to changes associated with brain ageing and neurodegeneration."
As always, @jtemple is nailing the #SRM debate. I'd missed @parson_ted's @LegalPlanet post aptly blaming solar #geoengineering research "prohibitionists" for the emergence of field-toxifying sulfur-balloon-for-profit folk like @MakeSunsets https://legal-planet.org/2023/03/15/solar-geoengineering-in-the-news-again-and-again/#.ZFMlRMsnGp4.twitter
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RT @jtemple
The private sector is suddenly interested in solar geoengineering — to the disma…
https://twitter.com/jtemple/status/1652328482448494593
Only in San Francisco would Climate Week #earthday activities include @MakeSunsets opportunists lofting sulfur balloons for carbon cash. #sfcw @SFClimateWeek @jtemple @AlexSteffen @Eaterofsun #SRM #GeoEngineering
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RT @revkin
Wondering if anti-#geoengineering activists are secretly behind @MakeSunsets, given how this non-science-based, for-profit venture lofting sulfur balloons and selling supposed quotients of avoided warming is toxifyin…
https://twitter.com/Revkin/status/1640503184241094656
Wondering if anti-#geoengineering activists are secretly behind @MakeSunsets, given how this non-science-based, for-profit venture lofting sulfur balloons and selling supposed quotients of avoided warming is toxifying discourse around actual #SRM research?
We have written up a popular science take on our research into the decade of #volcano (es) in Ptolemaic Egypt (160BCE), a near #srm #geoengineering analog:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/2023_singh_01/
#climate #climatechange #egypt #history #SolarResourceManagement
Nature News Research Highlight is paywalled, but above popsci was written by authors in name of #OpenScience:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00262-3
Original thread:
https://fediscience.org/@atthenius/109405566099331169
Publication:
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/si06400u.html
Thx @roadskater