{"id":5523,"date":"2013-01-11T03:23:19","date_gmt":"2013-01-11T08:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/?p=5523"},"modified":"2013-01-11T08:12:57","modified_gmt":"2013-01-11T13:12:57","slug":"year-4-month-1-day-11-who-put-the-benzedrine-in-mrs-murphys-ovaltine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/year-4-month-1-day-11-who-put-the-benzedrine-in-mrs-murphys-ovaltine\/","title":{"rendered":"Year 4, Month 1, Day 11: Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on one of our technological back-up plans:<\/a><\/p>\n

One afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.<\/p>\n

It didn’t look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope – and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans’ team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.<\/p>\n

The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.<\/p>\n

The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.<\/p>\n

“Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky,” Neukermans said. “But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When, not if. Sent January 6:<\/p>\n

While the prospect of geoengineering technologies for mitigating climate change’s effects is terrifying, the crisis allows for no non-terrifying outcomes. We’re midway through a mass extinction of a magnitude unprecedented in human history; our greenhouse emissions have achieved a critical mass sufficient to forestall an ice age 50,000 years from now (even if we completely stopped burning fossil fuels today); melting methane in the Arctic has transformed the “Venus effect” from a never-in-a-million-years nightmare to a statistically significant probability. <\/p>\n

There’s no single cause of the climate disaster, and no single solution. But the business-as-usual approach which has brought us to this point must be rejected; we humans must transform ourselves, our communities, and our nations \u2014 putting the survival of our species above our short-term gratification. Armand Neukermans’ work on increasing cloud reflectivity could never as dangerously uncontrolled an experiment on Earth’s atmosphere as the multi-century endeavor known as industrial civilization.<\/p>\n

Warren Senders<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Published.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on one of our technological back-up plans: One afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,6,44],"tags":[1220,160,668,688],"class_list":["post-5523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-environment","category-politics","tag-clouds","tag-economics","tag-geo-engineering","tag-scientific-consensus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5523"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5534,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5523\/revisions\/5534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}