Clouds: how Mother Nature taught us to make them.

Erupting Volcano

What do persistent contrails, chemtrails, and volcanic eruption plumes have in common? Sulfur dioxide. Sulfur is the key to cloud-making.

Volcanoes are Mother Nature’s answer to global warming and may be humanity’s as well. Sulfur dioxide is the active ingredient in atmospheric global cooling via volcanic eruption.

Volcanic Clouds caused Mt. Pinatubo Erupting 1991
Mt. Pinatubo, Philippines 1991

 

 

So, Mother Nature did it first (and best). In researching this post, I discovered an excellent article on Motherboard by Brian Merchant in 2014. Merchant stated that “The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo blasted out 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide, leaving a slew of tiny particle clouds hovering in the sky. All those aerosols lingered in the atmosphere, where they bounced more sunlight back into space than usual, spurring global temperatures to fall by nearly an entire degree Fahrenheit in subsequent years.”

Planet-hacker, Dr. Ken Caldeira tried to disprove climate engineering but failed. It worked.

In Merchant’s article, he interviewed Dr. Ken Caldeira a respected atmospheric scientist who works for the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University where Caldeira studies climate hacking to counteract global warming.  Caldeira was quoted as saying:

“We know volcanoes cool the planet, we know it basically works.  The studies show that not that much stuff can produce a dramatic cooling, that it just seems to be the most obvious thing with enough leverage. And also the masses of material involved are thought to be reasonable.”

What Caldeira means by that statement is that it wouldn’t be too difficult, or expensive to implement planet cooling via geoengineering with materials similar to those found in a volcanic eruption, minus the really toxic stuff like mercury.  During Merchant’s 2014 interview, Caldeira speculates:

“My impression has been that if there was a demand to start putting something up in the next couple of years, that it wouldn’t be too much to build a fleet of airplanes and just start doing it.”

Thus would begin the cycle and responsibility of man-made weather. To Caldeira, like many atmospheric scientists, the notion of controlling the climate by man-made means is something that we should clearly avoid, but he reluctantly acknowledges that these measures may be necessary to sustain life on earth.

Making fake clouds, the solution to global warming?

In his 2007 TED Talk A Critical Look at GeoEngineering Against Climate Change, David Keith, Professor of Applied Physics in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences agrees with Caldeira’s assertion. Keith agrees that this geoengineering idea could solve the problem of rising global temperatures. Keith states “The solution in it’s simplest form would work like this: you could put sulfuric acid particles, sulfates, into the upper atmosphere where they would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet. He states that he’s certain that this would work because it’s been done before. Not by us, but by nature…volcanoes.”

Both Caldeira and Keith, like many atmospheric scientists, agree that the action of controlling the climate by man-made means is something that we should avoid. But they reluctantly acknowledge that these measures may become necessary to sustain human life on earth.

Making fake clouds.
Have they already started?

From the looks of our strange, cloudy skies, these measures might have already begun.  If your car made an emission trail like that, you’d be fined, or arrested. Why can’t we clean up our skies? Read on