NOAA Research in the Stratosphere is Taking Off
(Article updated April 2024: The year 2023 experienced a remarkably unprecedented jump in global temperature that has now exceeded the dangerous 1.5 Degrees C threshold. (See here) Enduring this amount of warming for long, likely no more than a couple to several decades, results in irreversible Earth systems collapse with natural feedback emissions that dwarf humankind’s. (See here))
In March 2020, national Sierra Club adopted a new geoengineering policy that replaced their old position of “anything geoengineering including research, over our dead body.” The new policy is that Sierra Club “supports geoengineering research in case emergency cooling is needed.”
Our director literally sponsored this new policy where he was a member of the new climate change policy team. Thanks to the team and all the review committees and the board for listening and approving. The justification was that our Earth systems have seen their collapses activated and once begun, a collapse does not stop unless the thing that caused the collapse to begin (warming in the case of most Earth systems) is removed before the point of no return.
Literally then, unless we cool our climate to a temperature cooler than about 1 degree C warming above normal where we are at 1.1 degrees C now, these tipping collapses and their natural feedback emissions become irreversible. An example of the point of no return is the Amazon rain machine. The trees in the Amazon create the moisture that then creates the rain in a natural loop. Remove enough trees and not enough moisture is generated to maintain the rain machine and the forest fails. This is happening in the Amazon now as it has flipped from carbon sequestration to emissions and importantly, human-created deforestation and subsistence burning only account for about 20 percent of the reason why the Amazon is failing. Warming effects, like forest mortality from drought and drought-caused fires, and increased evaporation from warmer temperatures, is responsible for the rest of the forest mortality. Because forest sequestration per unit is only very modest, and the very large extent of our forests are why they are (were) such large sequestration machines, the Amazon is now emitting greenhouse gases instead of absorbing them. The point of no return has likely not been reached yet, but under the current trend, this time is far ahead of the standard 2100 climate change time frame, and is more likely only decades. (see here)
The following is the lead to this NASA article on their ongoing research of the stratosphere, that has multiple purposes: to help us better understand the stratosphere’s role in climate change, and most importantly, to help us understand the ways that geoengineering will work in the stratosphere, which is the place where we already understand that solar radiation management will work best.
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NASA – March 2, 2023
A major airborne research mission of the stratosphere is underway in Alaska
A converted Cold War bomber packed with sensitive instruments is investigating atmospheric chemistry and aerosols over the Arctic this month in the most ambitious NOAA airborne stratospheric research mission yet.
The project, dubbed SABRE, is one element of NOAA’s growing Earth’s Radiation Budget research program, an effort to provide baseline observations of the stratosphere and other elements of Earth’s climate system to inform evaluations of potential future efforts to slow global warming by modifying the amount of heat captured by the atmosphere.
“Processes in the stratosphere can change climate at the Earth’s surface,” said Karen Rosenlof, the Chemical Science Laboratory’s senior scientist for climate and climate change. “Satellites give us important information, but not everything we need to know. SABRE measurements will help to assess the increasing impacts to the stratosphere through space flight or deliberate climate intervention.”