PSH please... You throw up a study and can't even point out points in the study that reflect your argument. Sure it can be claimed that methods may work, but the effects of attempting these GEOengineering, cloud manipulation, and strom creation is so far out of our grasp. The effects of todays' efforts to geoengineer a massive cloud blockage is simply outlandish considering the size of the atmosphere and the energy/money it would take. Not to mention sending the suns rays back into the stratosphere won't be a good idea nor will stop warming.
Furthermore, you bash my statement about C02 with cloud blockage causing warming, when in fact this is the key issue that brings us to excess C02 in the atmosphere. Cloud coverage would block all of the C02 and greenhouse gases from escaping. This was even mentioned in the article Mr. Ripley posted.
While C02 levels have increased, humans may have caused a minor shift embalance in the scale considering we only emit about 8GT into the atmosphere compared to the amount the oceans emit roughly about 700GT. If there was a shift in the oceans and plants CO2 emissions it would be a dastardly effect.
The only thing we can do to hopefully solve the human CO2 increase is to cut down our emissions, again stated in my Ripley's article. This will at least slow our imprent down. But cloud seeding and Geoingeneering weather structures is a waste of energy. The earth and bioaphere is simply too big. Plus it would be terrible for the atmopshere in general.
So you can say " I don't understand what you wrote" or that my sentence is "incorrect" when obviously it is partially true, and then don't provide any counter claim except for claiming I need more education.. Sigh. I'm not an expert but I understand the fundamentals and dynamics of how weather and wind patterns work. I'd recommend both of you to spruce up your debate and arguement skills.
Earth surface temperatures are, at their most basic, a combination of the effects of insolation, albedo and greenhouse gases. Each of these are effected by an insane myriad of factors from orbital Milankovitch cycles, land surface area vs. sea surface area vs. ice surface area, sea floor spreading rates, etc.
A lot of the mechanisms are still mysterious to modern science (which is why it's such an exciting field of study).
Your first and most fundamental mistake comes from the idea that any energy reflected from the earth's surface is just collected in greenhouse gases. Which, certainly, some of it is, but nowhere near all of it. This is an important effect called 'albedo' which you must have learned about in your class if you talked about snowball earth: at colder temperatures there is more sea ice, which reflects more solar energy back into space than land or especially ocean (which is particularly absorptive). This feedback mechanism getting out of control is heavily responsible for both the occurrence and persistence of the snowball/slushball episodes. If any reflected energy was simply collected by greenhouse gases, albedo wouldn't make any difference.
I'm just not sure where your whole 'cloud cover increases global warming' idea comes from in general. There's a long, long history, completely empirical and before humans had any wider understanding of climate systems, of particulate matter significantly increasing Earth's albedo leading to drastically colder temperatures. See Mt Tambora's 1815 eruption and the subsequent world wide 'Year Without a Summer' in 1816.
The paper I linked earlier (the Caldeira paper) finds that an overall increase in albedo by 1.8% would maintain/cool the earth's temperature and sea ice levels given a doubling of atmospheric CO
2, with some other effects (unrelated to the mechanism that is used) that you can read about. It's not a very dense read.
Another one of your fundamental misunderstandings of climate cycles is that there is no appreciable loss of CO
2 to space (CO
2 is after all significantly denser than N
2, this is only really big with H
2 and He for obvious reasons). I'm honestly not sure where you got this from. Carbon, once released into the atmosphere, is removed by being sequestered in either the ocean or in sediments -> rocks. The ocean is in fact a carbon sink (and since dissolved CO
2 exists in equilibrium with carbonic acid causes a lowering of pH of the ocean).
I mean I'm not going to go into more detail about the carbon cycle, you should really just look that up.
The issue with this type of geoengineering isn't that the atmosphere is 'too big', it's that the effects would be much wider ranging than just lowering surface temperatures, thus it's not done. The idea that it's not possible is completely unfounded.
