Wallace Smith Broecker FINAL WARNING FOR EARTH: The ‘grandfather’ of climate science urges scientists to USE GEOENGINEERING!
Days before his death, Wallace Broecker urged scientists to consider deploying a last-ditch solar shield to stop global warming. As if they weren’t using geoengineering and spraying the skies already!
After struggling with heart disease for decades, the renowned climate scientist Wallace Smith Broecker had made it clear he was acutely aware of his own mortality. So when he sat down in front of a video camera to record a final message to his fellow scientists in mid-February, the 87-year-old researcher knew his days were few.
The man who popularized the term “global warming” and first described the critical role oceans play on climate had an urgent message for 40 of the world’s top climate scientists. Humanity is not moving quickly enough to slow the production of carbon dioxide that is warming the Earth, Broecker said Feb. 11, his livestreaming image projected onto a big screen at Arizona State University, where researchers had met to discuss untested solutions to global warming.
It was time for humankind and the world’s scientific community to begin to seriously study more extreme solutions to the climate crisis, Broecker said. That included creating a massive solar shield in the Earth’s atmosphere, a tactic known variously as “geoengineering,” “the sulfur solution,” “solar radiation management” and the “Pinatubo Strategy.”
“If we are going to prevent the planet from warming up another couple of degrees, we are going to have to go to geoengineering,” he said. The price of continued inaction, he added somewhat ominously, could be “many more surprises in the greenhouse” known as Earth.
Broecker regretted he could not be at Arizona State’s first Planetary Management Symposium on Climate Engineering but said he was glad he could address his longtime colleagues remotely. Though he was using a wheelchair and breathing through an oxygen tube, he assured his colleagues that “my mind is running pretty smoothly.”
A week after his dramatic appeal, Broecker died of congestive heart failure, inspiring praise for his work as the “grandfather” of modern climate science. His death, and his final message to scientists, re-energized the debate over the sort of re-engineering of the Earth’s climate systems that Broecker and other academics had broached as early as the 1970s.
Like cataclysmic Pinatubo eruption
The theory is that the planet might be cooled, in a worst-case scenario, by releasing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere some 70,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. The idea would be for jets to release so much SO2 that they would mimic a massive volcanic eruption, like the one at Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which shrouded much of the planet in a sulfurous cloud, cooling the Earth by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a full year.
Many scientists have been hesitant about pursuing such an extreme measure, citing scientific, ethical, legal and political dilemmas. Tampering with Earth’s atmosphere was not a preferred alternative, Broecker had acknowledged, but he insisted that his fellow academics needed to be ready, should last-ditch measures be needed to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Broecker told the symposium that he had worked with another prominent climatologist on mechanical units that might remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But 100 million of the devices would be needed to get the job done, he said, and there was no sign that the world’s leaders had the political will to get the job done.
More radical solution
http://strangesounds.org/2019/03/broecker-final-warning-earth-geoengineering-video.html
“全球變暖”概念提出者Wallace S. Broecker教授辭世享年87歲
讓“全球變暖”（Global Warming）變得家喻戶曉的地質學教授華萊士·史密斯·布勒克（Wallace Smith Broecker），已於近日安然辭世，享年87歲。1931年生於芝加哥的Broecker，在奧克帕克的郊區長大。1975年的時候，他在一篇文章中正確地預測了大氣中中的二氧化碳含量上升，會導致明顯的全球變暖。
Broecker 可能是首個意識到“海洋輸送帶”（Ocean Conveyor Belt / 深層大循環）的人，這是一個影響從氣溫、到雨水模式的全球潮流網絡。
普林斯頓大學教授邁克爾·奧本海默稱—— Broecker 鬥志昂揚、才華橫溢、且獨一無二！
他並沒有因為20 世紀70 年代的寒冷氛圍所愚弄，清楚地看到了前所未有的變暖現象。即便很少有人願意傾聽，他也能清楚地表達自己的觀點。
在全球海洋的大循環中，北大西洋的冷鹹水會下沉，像柱塞一樣驅動從北美洲到歐洲的洋流。這一潮流帶來的溫暖地表水，有助於保持歐洲氣候的溫和。
如果沒有這個大循環，那歐洲將是一個深度凍結的地方，氣溫下降20℉（6.7 ℃）以上，倫敦會變得像距離北極圈600 英里的挪威斯匹次卑爾根那樣。
Broecker 的研究表明，大循環也是氣候系統的一個致命弱點。這種現象相當脆弱，我們不清楚確切的成因，但它可以被迅速地改變。
他指出，只要溫度略微升高，北大西洋的“水泵”就會停止運轉。溫室氣體積聚所造成的變暖，足以對海流產生巨大的影響。
賓夕法尼亞州立大學教授邁克爾曼說到：Broecker 幾乎憑一己之力推廣了這個概念，努力向公眾和政策制定者傳達潛在的後果，即便大家並一定願意傾聽。
1984 年，Broecker 向眾議院小組委員會說到—— 想要管好溫室氣體，需要舉國的魄力，去了解大氣、海洋、冰川和陸地生物圈的運作方式。
1997 年的時候，Broecker 在接受美聯社採訪時稱：“我們生活在一個可以突然從一個州、跳到另一個州的氣候系統中”。
氣候系統已被證明是非常敏感的，而我們正在挑逗一頭憤怒的野獸。通過向大氣中傾倒大量的溫室氣體，如燃燒化石燃料產生的二氧化碳，我們正在進行一項可能產生毀滅性影響的實驗。
1996 年的時候，Broecker 獲得了國家科學獎章，並且是國家科學院的成員。此外，他還擔任生物圈2 的研究協調員。
他於1959 年加入哥倫比亞大學，大部分時間都在紐約Palisades 的實驗室工作，被科學界稱為’氣候科學的祖父’和’氣候科學院長’。
奧本海默稱：“他的發現是解釋地球氣候歷史的基礎，沒有科學家不想參與其中。與他對話從不沉悶且受益匪淺，我會很想念他的”。
https://blog.wongcw.com/2019/02/19/%E5%85%A8%E7%90%83%E8%AE%8A%E6%9A%96%E6%A6%82%E5%BF%B5%E6%8F%90%E5%87%BA%E8%80%85wallace-s-broecker%E6%95%99%E6%8E%88%E8%BE%AD%E4%B8%96%E4%BA%AB%E5%B9%B487%E6%AD%B2/
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