Danny Bradbury's List: eco-hacking

• Lowell Wood

  • Worked with Edward Teller, big propoent of geo-engineering
• John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter hawked their idea of making marine clouds thicker and more reflective by whipping ocean water into a froth with giant pumps and eggbeaters
• Gregory Benford’s announcement that he wanted to “cut through red tape and demonstrate what could be done” by finding private sponsors for his plan to inject diatomaceous earth – the chalk like substance used in filtration systems and cat litter – into the Arctic stratosphere
• Yuri Izrael, head of the Moscow-based Institute of Global Climate and Ecology Studies, wrote to Russian president Vladimir Putin to make the case for immediately burning massive amounts of sulfur in the stratosphere
• Paul J. Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate, proposed a scheme similar to Wood’s
• James Pollard Espy (1785–1860)

  • Artificial volcanoes
• 1842 to Washington, D.C., where he was funded by the Navy and employed as the “national meteorologist” by the Army Medical Department
• Vincent Schaefer

  • Cloud seeding
• Howard T. Orville

  • Proposed military uses of weather control
• the Air Weather Service flew more than 2,600 cloud seeding sorties and expended 47,000 silver iodide flares over a period of approximately five years at an annual cost of some $3.6 million

  • Weather control in Vietnam war
• UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) was eventually ratified by nearly 70 nations, including the United States. Ironically, it entered into force in 1978
• Vladimir Zworykin, an RCA engineer noted for his early work in television technology

  • Using computers to predict weather and co-ordinate eco-hacking actions
• “On the Possibilities of Weather Control,” Harry Wexler
• In 1965, the President’s Science Advisory Committee warned in a report called Restoring the Quality of Our Environment

  • First global warming report
• An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.
• Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research

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• Sulfates from volcanoes provide a surface on which chlorine gases in the cold polar lower stratosphere can become activated and cause chemical reactions that intensify the destruction of ozone molecules, although the sulfates themselves do not directly destroy ozone.

• The study found that injections of small particles, over the next 20 years, could reduce the ozone layer by 100 to 230 Dobson Units. This would represent a significant loss of ozone because the average thickness of the ozone layer in the Northern Hemisphere is 300 to 450 Dobson Units. (A Dobson Unit is equivalent to the number of ozone molecules that would create a layer 0.01 millimeters thick under conditions at Earth's surface).

   

• In the Antarctic, most of the ozone is already depleted and the sulfate injections would not significantly reduce the thickness of the ozone layer. Instead, they would significantly delay the recovery of the ozone hole.

   
• They also warn that a geoengineering project could lead to even more severe ozone loss if a major volcanic eruption took place at the same time.

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