Geoenginering = A Dangerous Greenwashing Myth With Huge Hidden Costs and Faustian Bargains

Global MARCH Against Chemtrails and Geoengeneering
August 25th 2013

At an international symposium held in Ghent, Belgium May 28-30, 2010, scientists asserted that “manipulation of climate through modification of Cirrus clouds is neither a hoax nor a conspiracy theory.” It is “fully operational” with a solid sixty-year history. Though “hostile” environmental modification was banned by UN Convention in 1978, its “friendly” use today is being hailed as the new savior to climate change and to water and food shortages. As Rady Ananda says in his report 'A Review of the "Case Orange', "The military-industrial complex stands poised to capitalize on controlling the world’s weather."

Chemtrails, now known by the more acceptable moniker of Solar Radiation Management [SRM], is being publicly hailed as the globe's geoengineering saviour by many, including some climate scientists and many economists. But is it, or is just another dangerous bit of greenwashing that James Hanson refers to as 'Doubling Down on Our Faustian Bargain'?

Speaking of the devil, the US Air Force report 'Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025' outlines the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives, stating, "In 2025, US aerospace forces can "own the weather" by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications."

Then perhaps, in the course of their normal world-domination research, the military bumped into ol' Beelzebub who's proffered a deal including a 'solution' to global warming but in exchange...well, in addition to the reality that as more and more greenhouse gases were emitted more and more of the antidote would be needed to counteract it, was the fact that the antidote needed in increasing desperation was made of barium and aluminum particles which were already known to be toxic human health.

Knowing that in due course the military would frantically have launch more and more Stratocruisers, each burning huge amounts of fuel themselves, all the while having to keep the stupid scheme a secret because of the toxins they'd be spreading, Mephistopheles laughed again at how easily the dim-witted humans would abandon their moral principles in order to obtain whatever immediate benefits they desired.

Not only SRM geoengineering schemes, but all of them, have huge energy footprints never mentioned in the glossy brochures promoting their bromides. Looking closely at the energy embedded in every geoengineering scheme is like watching channel 666, Comedy Central, on Satan's satellite system.

For instance, as Carbon Engineering's president David Keith says of CO2 air capture, often viewed as benign or 'soft' geoengineering [after all what could possibly be wrong with removing carbon dioxide from the overloaded atmosphere], "For starters, air capture of CO2 requires vast amounts of water and, yes, more energy. According to one study, scrubbing all current annual fossil fuel emissions from the air would deprive 53 million people of water." Going on to say, " Even capturing CO2 from power station smokestacks, where it is already in a relatively concentrated stream, requires those power plants to burn nearly one third more fuel in order to generate the same amount of energy, plus the additional demand required to power carbon capture. Capturing CO2 from the air, where it is measured in parts per million, would require vastly more power stations to be built in the first place. More carbon-spewing power stations that is, to help scrub a bit of the emitted CO2 back out of the air."

Of course over time whistleblowers have come forward to warn us about SRM [chemtrails] including airport managers, airline industry executives and the US Air force itself, but the military and security establishments have remained silent until... the situation became so desperate that even an idea as dysfunctional as geoengineering became acceptable as a greenwashing euphemism for climate remediation...until now.

So here we are, stuck in steerage on board the Global Titanic as the elites take a shot a making another few trillion from geoengineering. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they make their deals and they secure access to the limited seats in the lifeboats on their south seas islands.

Geoengineering Keeps Consumers Consuming, Polluters Polluting and Markets Booming-Whoopee

According to The American Enterprise Institute think tank, geoengineering offers the ideal "marriage of capitalism and climate remediation". Going on to say, "Forget about cutting emissions: manipulating the atmosphere and biosphere, geoengineering is the only sensible option for business and thus policy makers." Ya gotta give the capitalists credit, first they make trillons of dollars in profits by poisoning the planet with their industrial pollution, then they lobby for a an even more potentially dangerous and deadly solution that will assure them even more profit. Whadda wonderful world eh.

Up until recently geoengineering was broadly understood to be just another dangerous set of schemes devised by the mad scientists. Five years ago articles like Scientific American's 'The Hidden Dangers of Geoengineering'  which focused on the uncertainty and unintended consequences of the schemes were commonplace. How times have changed. Now everywhere the in mass media, including Scientific American, articles are asking 'Has the Time Come to Consider Geoengineering?'. Apparently capitalism's spin doctors have succeeded in stalling and resisting opposition long enough that global warming has become an accepted reality and now the spinners can move on to the next phase - geoengineering the growth of investors' portfolios.

The geoengineering schemes being developed by the mad scientist's may be nonsensical from an environmental and scientific perspective, but they fit neatly into extractive capitalism's agenda. Fuck every living thing, only short term profits count in the 'market'. In reality, geoengineering MIGHT slow global warming a bit in the short term but it won't do a damned thing to stop all the other insults the biosphere is suffering from extractive capitalism.

This past week two stories about the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice have set the the climate science dervishes whirling. One is about the lake forming at top of the world as the North Pole melts, the other being the hyperbolic, and already broadly discredited, claims by the fear-mongering Arctic Emergency Methane Group that a catastrophic methane burp that would cost the world $60trillion was 'likely' to occur in the next decade and that the only solution is a geoengineering scheme called Solar Radiation Management [formerly chemtrails]. Unfortunately, despite what are almost certainly well motivated intentions by AEMG's scientists, sensationalized stories that try to use fear to fuel the fires of action only harm the cause of real communication and give ammunition to global warming's opponents.

Probably the most surprising website, chocked full of informative and in-depth links, that i found while researching geoengineering this last couple weeks is the one produced by the Tea Party Command Center. Strange eh.

IMO geoengineering is crap disguised as a solution. IMO, conservation, and only conservation, can solve the widespread environmental degradation being caused by consumer's demands and extractive capitalism's blind ambition to fulfill them. As Jorge Majfud says, "Trying to reduce environmental pollution without reducing consumerism is like combating drug trafficking without reducing the drug addiction." It's important to notice that Majfud refers to the broad issue of environmental pollution, not just to global warming.

Geoengineering Schemes are Designed to Bedazzle Investors With Visions of Sugarplums - BAU

Can Chemtrails save the polar bears?

Another study out today is spiraling toward the black hole of geoengineering. This one by David Keith, a Calgarian and professor of applied physics at Harvard University suggests we could refreeze Arctic using the same Solar Radiation Management technology that was until recently condemned as the mutterings of the 'tinfoil hat' gang. In fact the experimental technologies known in science as Solar Radiation Management [SRM], Stratospheric Aerosols, Geo-Engineering or Climate Engineering have long been known in popular culture as chemtrails.

Scientists have been experimenting with injecting reflective particles of different kinds into the high atmosphere for decades. Their goal is to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface and compensate for the greenhouse effect. High greenhouse gas levels would continue to trap heat, but with less energy coming in to begin with, in theory at least [more on that in a minute] temperatures on the surface would go down. Call it SRM, call it whatever makes you less anxious, but by any name geoengineering is gaining a grip on the collective consciousness because it sounds like a viable route to keeping extractive capitalism meeting consumer's demands for needless crap thereby keeping all their mutual fund and pension plan portfolios growing, in short-BAU.

Yesterday the AEMG's hyperbolic headline about the catastrophic $60 trillion 'Arctic Methane Burp', widely condemned by peer reviewed science, was pushing the fear button with its warning about the vast costs of a huge Arctic methane pulse. Of course their solution was geoengineering. AMEG is a geoengineering lobby. Geoengineering solutions are predicated on the assumption that we can solve the problem of global warming by masking the effects of extractive capitalism rather than by eliminating it, which is bullshit - only conservation, only stopping the insanity of consumer capitalism can ever solve global warming.

Global warming is just one symptom not the disease itself. The disease of materialism causes many symptoms that may be convenient to see as unrelated to each other but are all caused by consumer capitalism and the ridiculous self-serving belief in a free lunch. All those other inconvenient issues like fresh water contamination and depletion, like species extinction rates, like soil degradation from chemical ag. killing the biomass, like...are all caused by the same extractive capitalism, by corporations destroying the globe to achieve maximum profit for their shareholders through fulfilling the demands of consumers.

Anyway, the point is that opponents will immediately discredit hyperbolic headlines allowing people not well informed on the subject to turn away from the real problems that Arctic ice melting and methane feedbacks cause.

Regarding the AMEG fear mongering, Dr Vincent Gauci, a researcher at the Open University and director of the MethaneNet research network and professor David Archer from the University of Chicago, who researches ocean sediments and methane agree that even if the ocean warms, most of the methane released by thawing permafrost could stay in the seabed or dissolve in seawater. Saying, "Even in the unlikely event that we were to stop all emissions in the near future, the permafrost feedback response to our historic emissions, even in the absence of future human emissions, is likely to be self-sustaining and will cancel out future natural carbon sinks in the oceans and biosphere over the next two centuries."

Methane feedbacks are deadly serious and, despite AMEG's geoengineering wet-dreams, won't be solved by geoengineering.  Geoengineering is another scheme meant to bedazzle potential investors, to generate windfall 'profits' for the corporations [until they go bankrupt from the liability lawsuits arising from the collateral damages caused by their hubris] and to keep the stock market and investment portfolios growing until the shit hits the fan.

Catastrophic $60 Trillion 'Arctic Methane Burp' is a Hyperbolic Geoengineering Lobby Scare Tactic

Bubbles of methane emerge from sediments below a frozen Alaskan lake.

The science journal 'Nature' has published an article 'Vast Costs of Arctic Change' that says methane released by melting permafrost will have global economic impacts. Of course, i'm always glad to see the IPCC's underestimates and dim-witted conventional modeling process being discredited, the more black swan scenarios being brought forth by the mass media the better. Plus, it's true that the Arctic methane release feedback loop, though not included in almost all climate science models, is one of the biggest longterm dangers our short term thinking consumer culture faces.

My first thought about this was: Here we are faced global environmental disaster and all that science and the media can think about is how it will impact their bank accounts. Then my reasoning turned into: This article is great. It frames the issue in a way that even the consumer assholes can understand.

Then i started looking into this report and found a whole lotta scientists who don't agree with the underlying assumptions at all and for a lotta good reasons. So, if the report published in Nature, and being republished widely, isn't 'science', what is it? Well it's promotional, it's lobbying as part of the geoengineering bullshit. Geoengineering lobbies are predicated on the assumption that we can solve the problem of global warming by masking the effects of fossil fuels rather than by eliminating their use.

Ever heard of the 'Arctic Methane Emergency Group'? It's the source of this hyperbolic economic report designed to scare the shit outta folks enough so they'll think that geoengineering is their only hope [conservation, consuming less, is the only real alternative]. AMEG says on their website they are "investigating all possible options for developing the capacity to safely cool the Arctic within a couple of years." They go on to say on a different page that, "Geoengineering techniques for cooling the Arctic have to be applied by spring 2013 to reduce that risk [of runaway global warming becoming inevitable - ed.] as far as it is possible to do so." Adding, "Emergency intervention is needed both to save the Arctic sea ice and to reduce the risk of catastrophic global warming from a sudden large emission of methane."

More and more recently i'm coming around to agreeing that we're past point of no return, that no amount of tinkering, no regulations, can turn the consumer capitalist train around. Maybe the only hope we humans have left is some sorta geoengineering crap. The trouble here is using science to disguise self-interest. AMEG, like almost all geoengineering groups, has suspicious links with fossil fuel interests, investment funds and military interests.

This faux-science argument framed in terms of the potential damage to economies overlooks the global ecological damage that poses a far more serious risk -  the survival of ALL species - than the capitulation of capitalism. Fuck every living thing only profits count. Some geoengineering scheme MIGHT slow global warming but it won't do shit to stop all the other insults the biosphere is suffering from extractive capitalism and it MIGHT cause far worse damage globally than even our dim-witted leaders could cause without it.

The 'Security' Apparatus and the Corporations That Own Them Live in Fear of YOU

"They fly in town, they get shot down"

As Edward Abbey said, "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government." Guess you don't have to tell it to the residents of Deer Trail, Colorado which on Monday will become the first town anywhere to issue a bounty for drones. Citing the movement slogan - 'They fly in town, they get shot down' - the population appears nearly unanimous in its support of the bylaw and bounty.

Deer Trail's patriots may or may not have heard the recent speech by the FBI director Robert Mueller admitting that drones [unarmed for the moment at least] are being used in skies over the US for surveillance and tracking by a long list of state, county and city law enforcement agencies as well as Homeland Security and the FBI themselves [Oh Goody]. And they may or may not have read the new CIP International Policy Report which reveals how the military-industrial complex, including homeland security, have put border drones at the beck and call of other 'authoroities' who don't yet have the means or regulatory approval to have their own.

Or maybe the tide turned in Deer Trail when US Attorney General Eric Holder responded to Sen. Rand Paul’s inquiry as to whether the president claimed the “power to authorize a lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil and without trial.” by saying that, speaking hypothetically, it is “possible to imagine” an extraordinary circumstance in which that power might become “necessary and appropriate.” YIKES. The Deer Trail folks don't have to look very far to see the gathering darkness of Drone World do they...

The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory?

Fear trumps freedom in many parts of 'the home of the brave' these days. The recent revelations by Edward Snowden of a massive and illegal surveillance program in the name of security that makes George Orwell’s book 1984 look tame are just another example of the descent into tyranny that even the US Constitution warns of by requiring all federal politicians and bureaucrats, all military personnel, to swear an oath to uphold and defend the US Constitution from enemies "both foreign and domestic". That is, the authors of the US Constitution understood that government personnel may be the very people who would destroy its Constitutional government.

To quote John Atcheson's article 'The New Social Contract — and Why You're Not Part of It', Perhaps the constant drumbeat about the terrorist threat is merely cover for the fact that the social contract has been rewritten since Reagan. No longer is the compact between the governed and the government – it is between the corporations and the government. We are now one nation, under corporations, for corporations, by corporations."

What are the authorities so afraid of? Certainly the globe's most powerful military and covert security establishment aren't really so afraid of medieval terrorist mullahs spouting "Death to Amerika". No the authorities only use the evil enemy as a tool to keep the only real threat to their extractive empire divided. The authorities are the security apparatus of the corporations and elites that own them and they all live in fear of YOU. The powerful know that one day their empire of consumption will collapse...and they're scared shit less that, when that day comes, we - the many - will open our eyes and form a newer social contract that doesn't include them - the few.

Pick a Controversial Issue, Research it, Be Skeptical, and Careful, You May Turn On a Light that Doesn't Turn Off

The ‘Honolulu Advertiser’ front page headline on November 30, 1941

It's little wonder that so many conspiracy theories find fertile minds to germinate in considering that a recent poll by the Pew Research Center found 80% of Americans don't trust the government [IMO they'd get the same type of numbers in almost any country]. The situation didn't start with the recent acceleration of tyranny. For instance almost everybody my age - 65 - remembers the Gulf of Tonkin false flag operation that dragged my generation into the disastrous and genocidal War in Vietnam.

It's not an Amerikan story, it's his-story from Nero to now. Time after time the world keeps falling for the same lies. In what is most commonly called a false flag operation, a government agency stages a terror attack and blames some innocent, though adversarial, group for the carnage. Almost immediately the sheepish citizens cringe in fear and, after a few quick doses of propaganda, march behind their precious leaders into war. As at least two millennia have proven, false flag operations have provided the perfect recipe for war.

None of these great deceptions surpassed Pearl Harbor, it changed the world forever, it was the seminal event in both my parents lives and mine too in a couple of ways. First, they met in Philippines during the war so...Second, a seemingly simple assignment in history class during my senior year of High School in '66 turned on a light for me. i'll warn you, be careful about that light, once it's turned on, it never turns off.
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The assignment was to write a paper on some aspect of on WWII. There was lottsa of information on WWII everywhere including the local library. i chose the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it should have been an easy ride to a good mark [my goal in school back then]. For some reason this time instead of just reading a few essays, then 'paraphrasing' them i actually read some stuff that drove me read more.

The day after my initial research at the local Adams Mass. library i drove my old beater Plymouth up to Williamstown and sat down in the Williams College library with a stack of books in front of me. About 8 hours later, tired and bleary eyed, i walked out a different person. Turned out Pearl Harbor was a setup, the US needed an excuse to get into the war, the US leadership sacrificed thousands of innocent lives to achieve their political goals. The paper got written, the teacher hated it, my family hated it, everyone hated it, i got a D - but the jig was up for me from then on - i never again just routinely bought anything the authorities were selling.

Now nearly 5 decades later and well into the Google era it's far easier for folks to look into what is really happening in the world around us. Of course it's absolutely impossible to look into anywhere near everything going on around us. So i suggest you pick a controversial topic that interests you, it doesn't seem to matter which one. You'll probably find...well who knows what you'll find.. but it could be a light.

All this is a preamble to anther light that has been slowly coming on for me in this last year or two since i met a couple of very bright folks living up here near my new hideout. Like me they distrust the mainstream media's constant genuflecting to corporate authority. One of their pet peeves that weaves well into both the extreme weather events issue The Mud Report has been trained on recently and the widespread distrust of government being fertile ground for all sorts of conspiracy theories is 'chemtrails'. At first i rolled my eyes while quietly saying to myseld that i'd easily find the real 'truth' and convince them of it. Well, as yesterday's report shows, it didn't turn out that way.

In fact while researching the Solar Radiation Management [SRM], Stratospheric Aerosols, Geo-Engineering and Climate Engineering issues i ran headlong into another conundrum that i thought i understood but didn't - HAARP which is located in Alaska and is the largest ionospheric heater in the world. Much is known about HAARP, much is unknown at least publicly and it's the focus of many theories in part because the government is so secretive about it. Canada's nightly news show The National on CBC ran a two part story on HAARP back in 2007 that was then and still is eye-opening. i know CBC's The National very well, i watch it almost every night, and they aren't tinfoil hat types. Check it out here - Part 1 and Part 2, but again be careful of the light.

HAARP is capable of heating a 1000 square kilometer area of the ionosphere to over 50,000 degrees. It’s also a phased array. Which means it’s steer-able and those waves can be directed to a selected target area. What the scientists and engineers have found is that by sending radio frequency energy up and focusing it, as they do with these kinds of instruments, it causes a heating effect. And that heating literally lifts the ionosphere within a 30 mile diameter area therein changing localized pressure systems or perhaps the route of jet streams. Moving a jet stream is a phenomenal event in terms of man being able to do this. One problem is we can't model the system adequately. Another is the long term consequences of atmospheric heating are unknown. Changing weather in one place can have a devastating downstream effect.  And H.A.A.R.P. has already been accused of modifying the weather.

Calling it SRM or Geo-Engineering Instead of Chemtrails Doesn't Make it Any Less Dangerous

The reality is that climate change is seen as threat to security by the US military and every other security agency on the globe. Gen. Anthony C. Zinni,  former head of the US Central Command wrote recently, “We will pay for this [climate change] one way or another. We will pay today and have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms,” he warned. “And that will involve human lives.” Is the US Military is concerned about the consequences of climate change? You Betcha!

Another reality is that the US, NATO, China, Russia and others including the corporations who see huge profits from various geo-engineering schemes on this desperate planet and have been experimenting for decades with ways to engineer a way around the consequences of our abusive consumption. For instance between 1962 and 1983 would-be weather engineers tried to change the behavior of hurricanes using silver iodide. That effort, dubbed Project Stormfury, was spearheaded by the Navy and the Commerce Department.

The early weather modification techniques were all based on silver iodide cloud seeding. These efforts focused on seeding the lower altitude clouds so as to control precipitation. They were only marginally successful because these low levels clouds had to contain enough moisture in the first place. Over time different tactics evolved including trying different chemicals at different altitudes. It's a long story, but here's a link to an online timeline if you're into the details. One important milestone mentioned yesterday was the idea of spraying aluminum oxide from jet aircraft patented by Hughes Aircraft back in 1990.

Sometime before 1990 the engineers at Hughes [and others] had figured out that the highest clouds, those up in the stratosphere, reflected solar energy back into space thereby having a cooling effect on the planet, whereas lower levels clouds acted as a blanket holding in both the Earth's heat and the reflected energy incoming from the sun. The technologies that have evolved are known in science as Solar Radiation Management [SRM], Stratospheric Aerosols, Geo-Engineering or Climate Engineering. Unfortunately in popular culture they've become known as chemtrails. By not calling them chemtrails The Mud Report is trying to get beyond the knee jerk conspiracy theory name calling and let the issue move back onto weather manipulation and environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) where it belongs.

SRM through aerosol injection is the most plausible SRM geo-engineering strategy, since at least some sort of analog to it - large volcanic eruptions - has been observed to reduce tempratures, at least on a relatively small area or short time scale. But a major analysis in Science this year by leading experts titled 'A Test for Geoengineering?' concluded: "Stratospheric geo-engineering cannot be tested in the atmosphere without full-scale implementation." Going on to say, "Weather and climate variability preclude observation of the climate response without a large, decade-long forcing. Such full-scale implementation could disrupt food production for billions of people". In addition recent sampling is showing huge amounts, some over 4,000 times the legal limits, of toxic aluminum build up in water samples from pristine areas where planes spraying Stratospheric Aerosols have been documented and are of huge public health concern.

The military, the corporations and the spooks know full well that any admission of global geo-engineering experimentation would bring trillion dollar lawsuits from the lawyers of every water district, every agricultural group and countless others. Consequently, what at first glance appears to be a project designed to save the planet is kept secret allowing the conspiracy theories to explode [more on that tomorrow].

Calling it Solar Radiation Management, geo-engineering or chemtrails doesn't change the fact that its real and very dangerous. Despite what the genuflecting mainstream media says there are whistleblowers like William Thomas the manager for planning and environment at the Victoria Airport Authority who has confirmed that 'chemtrails' spread by US Air Force tanker jets over the BC capital are a joint US-Canadian military operation. Also, recently the United Nations (UN) and various Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed groups have  been forced to admit that such sprayings are taking place, and that the emitted particles are not normal contrails. As spokesman for the groups said, " The chemtrail sprayings are being done to save the planet from the devastating effects of global warming".

Below are some of the known negative consequences of  SRM global geo-engineering programs [YIKES!]

Greatly reduced overall global rainfall.
Completely disrupted global hydrological cycle
Loss of blue skies and direct sunlight, thus effecting photosynthesis
Greatly increased global drought
Greatly diminished crop yields
Decimated ozone layer. Northern and Southern hemispheres
Contaminated soils
Contaminated waters
Contaminated atmosphere and breathable air column
Unquantifiable negative impacts to all life forms
Increased dry lightning strikes creating record forest fires
Possible triggering of climate feed back loops like methane hydrate and clathrate releases

The Evolution From Cloud Seeding to Weather Modification to Solar Radiation Management

Solar Radiation Management[?] in the skies above Rachel Nev.

As Earth continues to warm and growing human populations continue to expand demands upon the Earth's limited resources increasing extractive and industrial pollutants throughout the biosphere more and more life forms, including humans, will be driven toward extinction. It follows that someday relatively soon natural resource wars will dominate the planet. Certainly the Military Industrial Complex [MIC] knows that in the context of global warfare military use of environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) constitute the ultimate weapon.

This isn't news or speculation, the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report said back in 1996, "Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence  purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog, and storms on earth or to modify space weather, … and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of technologies which can provide substantial increase in US, or degraded capability in an adversary, to achieve global awareness, reach, and power."

While there is no firm evidence that the US Air Force is using environmental modification techniques deliberately to modify weather patterns, one would expect that if these capabilities are being developed for military use, they would at least be the object of routine testing, much in the same way as the testing of new conventional and strategic weapons systems.

What started nearly 100 years ago with the earliest cloud seeding experiments has developed into a wide range of technologies as different eras have presented different challenges. The last few Mud Reports have concentrated on global warming, regardless of its causes, as the main driver of our current era's extreme weather events. Understanding this full well, research by the military and corporations has concentrated on 'getting ahead of  curve'. Consequently Solar Radiation Management [SRM], Stratospheric Aerosols, Geo-Engineering, Climate Engineering have all evolved as offshoots of cloud seeding research and development throughout the decades.

In 1990 the idea of spraying aluminum oxide from jet aircraft was patented by Hughes Aircraft. The plan proposed to seed the metallic particles was to add the tiny particles to the fuel of jet airliners, so that the particles would be emitted from the jet engine exhaust while the airliner was at its cruising altitude.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION: Patent #5003186
A method is disclosed for reducing atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect resulting from a greenhouse gases layer. The method comprises the step of seeding the greenhouse gas layer with a quantity of tiny particles of materials characterized by wavelength-dependent emissivity or reflectivity, in that said materials have high emissivities in the visible and far infrared wavelength regions and low emissivity in the near infrared wavelength region. Such materials can include the class of materials known as Welsbach materials. The oxides of metal, e.g., aluminum oxide, are also suitable for the purpose. The greenhouse gases layer typically extends between about seven and thirteen kilometers above the earth's surface. The seeding of the stratosphere occurs within this layer. The particles suspended in the stratosphere as a result of the seeding provide a mechanism for converting the blackbody radiation emitted by the earth at near infrared wavelengths into radiation in the visible and far infrared wavelength so that this heat energy may be reradiated out into space, thereby reducing the global warming due to the greenhouse effect."

This seems to be the first published geo-engineering project and it was only a short time later in the 1990s that talk radio host Art Bell started talking about the curiously long lasting lines in the sky above his hideout in Rachel Nev. [see photo above]. and the whole chemtrails controversy exploded into the pejorative name calling fiasco it is now. Calling the now widely documented phenomenon Solar Radiation Management [SRM], Stratospheric Aerosols, Geo-Engineering or Climate Engineering instead of chemtrails allows the debate about it to get beyond the knee jerk conspiracy theory name calling and lets it move back onto weather manipulation and environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) issue where it belongs.

It seems obvious [IMO] that the US military and its NATO allies are worried about global warming's strategic danger and are researching if not already taking action to mitigate the risks. All of these topics are highly controversial, most folks knowing how the long list of disaster caused by the hubris of scientists rightly fear all types of the potentially destructive global geo-engineering schemes. Writing about these covert schemes usually leads to ridicule, but that's what The Mud Report will do tomorrow.

21st Century Wars Maybe Fought Over Water Using Weather Modification. Is It Already Happening?

The devilish parts of the predictions that the 21st centuries wars will be fought over water are swirling in the details. As the oceans warm they’re giving off more water vapor and embedded thermal energy into the atmosphere resulting in a Goldilocks scenario whereby some regions are suffering from devastating floods and landslides at the same time others are experiencing killer droughts.

For the moment the area where i live in Southwest British Columbia is Goldilocks country but just over the mountains Southwest Alberta has seen billions of dollars and a number of lives lost in floods. South of there the Southwestern US's drought is so severe the lakes have dried up, the wildlife is dying as the temps soar to record heights. Southwest China is being washed into the sea while Australia bakes in its 5th year of record drought and its native and domestic animals starve to death. As John Prine said, "First you haven't any water, the you're gonna drown. That's the way the world goes round." And it always has but now that the heat has been turned up the world's lumpy weather patterns are swirling faster.

Where, when and how much it rains is the difference between life and death and it will become increasingly important as the world's weather weirdness increases. As Matthew Watson, at Bristol University says, "Whatever we do is a compromise, and that compromise means there will be winners and losers. That opens massive ethical questions: who gets to decide how we even determine what is a good outcome for different people? How do you get a consensus with seven billion-plus stakeholders?" Answer: you don't get a consensus, you get conflict, you get war.

This isn't news to the military and corporate stakeholders who've been using weather modification techniques like cloud seeding for nearly 100 years with increasing success to determine who those winners and losers will be. Cloud seeding is happening right now on every continent. For example, the largest cloud seeding system in the world is that of China to increase rainfall over several increasingly arid regions, including its capital city, Beijing.  Indonesia uses cloud seeding to even out the rainfall in an attempt to prevent future flooding. In India, cloud seeding operations have gone on for decades to battle severe drought. The United Arab Emirates uses cloud seeding to create artificial rain in the Dubai and Abu Dhabi desert.

In the United States and Canada, cloud seeding is used to increase precipitation in areas experiencing drought, to reduce the amount of fog around airports.and by major ski resorts to induce snowfall. Cloud seeding began in France during the 1950s. Soviet military pilots seeded clouds over the Belorussian SSR after the Chernobyl disaster to remove radioactive particles from clouds heading toward Moscow. In Germany civic engagement societies organize cloud seeding on a region level.to protect agricultural areas, for example wine growing areas.

Australia seeds clouds over the Hydro-Electricity Commission catchment area on the Central Plateau to increase electricity capacity. In Africa,  Mali and Niger use cloud seeding on a national scale to enhance agricultural output. There hundreds more example of how weather modification can and does serve the positive goals of preventing damaging weather, or increasing rainfall in drought stricken areas but it can also be used to provoke damaging weather against an enemy or rival, as a tactic of military or economic warfare.

During the Vietnam War the US military's Operation Popeye used cloud seeding over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, increasing rainfall by an estimated thirty percent during 1967 and 1968.in the hope that the increased rainfall would reduce the rate of infiltration down the trail. The operation seeded clouds with silver iodide [still commonly used globally]. The motto of the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron who carried out the operation was: "make mud, not war."

In reaction to operation Popeye weather modification techniques such as cloud seeding for military purposes were banned in 1978 by the United Nations. The treaty was signed by almost every UN member country including the US after the words prohibiting "widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury".were added. Of course the Pentagon now argues that this permits "local, non-permanent changes". Weather modification technologies are now described by military analysts as "a force multiplier with tremendous power that could be exploited across the full spectrum of war-fighting environments."

The wars of the 21st century will be fought not only over who gets water and when but will also be fought by using weather modification as a weapon to starve the people and destroy the ecosystem of the 'enemy'. The Pentagon and undoubtedly other military establishments around the globe are already to looking into this at the very least. Out with Star Wars, in with Climate Wars. Is China giving us trouble? Send them a drought. Is Russia being difficult? How about a massive heat wave accompanied by flooding?

Environmental warfare fought with weather modification techniques is the ultimate occult type of warfare. Think about it. Our best scientists can't state with any certainty that our recent and obvious extreme weather events are caused by global warming how could they possibly prove that a drought in China, or a flood in Iran, or any other extreme weather event was the result of weather modification. Maybe the wars have already started?  How would we know.

Watching the Documentary 'Last Call at the Oasis' took Another Little Piece of My Heart Last Night

Last night the documentary series The Passionate Eye on Canada's CBC network aired the 'Last Call at the Oasis', a frightening look at the global water crisis. It touched me deeply as it will touch you too because, like the climate, the weather and the air we breath, water connects us all.

'Last Call at the Oasis' starts out somewhat as an extension of another great book and movie, Cadillac Desert, that nearly 20 years ago focused on our culture's abusive and unconscious waste of this most precious and irreplaceable resource. Unfortunately in those intervening years our culture's actual abuse has been far greater than even the depressing projections of that earlier movie foretold, far worse.

'Last Call' predicts that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water then goes on to teach us how and why through excellent cinematography, interviews and examples from the lives of everyday folks in every corner of the world. To comment on it in depth would take a library full of Mud Reports, but here's a few of the points i wrote down after it ended:

1. Only 1% of the world's vast water supplies are freshwater.

2. There are already 140,000 desalinization plants operating globally, each of them consumes vast amounts of energy and in total they barely put a dent in our usage.

3. Between 80% and 90% of our water usage is agricultural, most of which is wasted.

4. Aquifers, the source of almost all of our agricultural water take thousands of years to replenish. We are depleting them in a few decades. The water that does seep through down into our ground water has been so polluted by agricultural chemicals that it's now considered toxic.

5. Not only do agricultural chemicals and other wastes contaminate our groundwater but recently we've started blasting in an even more toxic brew of chemicals through fracking, a brew that because of the Halliburtom Loophole, we're not even allowed to know the contents of.

6. There is no new water, we drink the same water the dinosaurs did.

'Last Call at the Oasis' covered many other interconnected dystopian topics too. The Earth is one biosphere, we're all in this together. The air, water, weather, climate touch us all equally. Our combined demands for MORE than we need have been and are still being supplied by an extractive capitalist system that is destroying the very world that sustains us faster and faster everyday. It's a cop-out to simply blame the rich, or the corporations or the banks owned by the rich who finance this ecocide without looking in the mirror and realizing that everything we WANT, everything we consume has the destruction of clean water, air and polluting energy in it. Human greed, laziness and our culture's endless quest for another free lunch took, to paraphrase Janis Joplin, 'another little piece of my heart' last night watching Last Call at the Oasis, it will yours too.

Extreme Weather Events Effect Us All, Making Them an Ideal Window Into Our Interconnected World

As John and Yoko said, "We all want to Save The World", but, unfortunately, there's no easy answers. Hell we can't even agree on the questions. About the only thing we all agree on is that when Mother Nature thunders we all quake. Experiencing an extreme weather event tends to focus one's attention on the here and now. Rich or poor, big or small, blue eyes or brown when the the floods or the wildfires rage our common emotional response sometimes allows us a moment of clarity, a window through which we catch a glimpse of our interconnected world.

Though the cause of any one extreme weather event is uncertain [natural variation - global warming - angry gods] it also doesn't really matter much when a person is digging in or running for their life does it? Shit happens and we can debate its causes as much as we want but, as the Sufi saying says, "The sea will be the sea, no matter the drops philosophy" We are the sea and environmental protection and preservation of the planet is the responsibility of every individual and community on Earth. On that too, hopefully, we can all agree, but how?

1. Let's suppose human induced global warming and angry gods both play an insignificant role in or current run of extreme weather events and that natural variability is the driving force in which case about all we can do is buy a six-pack and move to higher ground.
2. Let's suppose the culprit behind it is angry gods, if so, perhaps the rattling of bones and feathers or pleading, praying and sacrifices might change our luck [as well as see a surge in bone and feather sales].
3. Let's suppose human induced global warming is the steroid like cause of the plethora of extreme weather home runs lately. After all, as Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says, “Picture a baseball player on steroids. This baseball player steps up to the plate and hits a home run. It’s impossible to say if he hit that home run because of the steroids, or whether he would have hit it anyway. The drugs just made it more likely.” In which case there are real environmental protection and preservation steps we can take to change our, and our descendants, future likelihood of increased extreme weather events.

Agree or not with supposition #1 and #2, the solutions to them do almost nothing to effect all the other pollution problems our consumer culture are causing in lockstep with the extreme weather events. #3 does. The solutions required by supposition #3 are the same solutions required by the long list of the environmental degradation issues the Earth is currently facing. #3 may dry up the bone and feather market, it may mean a few less six-packs are bought, but, if somehow humans could stop over consuming the world's resources, stop wanting more than they need, stop shitting in their own nest the by-product of a livable world in the future seems worth it.

Finally, how to approach the #1 and #2 gang and communicate the bold vision of our #3-ness.  Preston Manning, founder of Canada's ultra-conservative Reform Party gave us #'3ers some great advice recently. Manning recommended we to start with environmental and global warming effects that local people understand to encourage bottom up democracy. Manning said, "In the nineties, loggers in Alberta started to observe that the winters were no longer cool enough to kill of the pine beetles. Driller rough necks that used to get into the muskeg by November 15 weren’t able to get in until Christmas. Pile drivers in Tuktoyaktuk had to drive piles ten feet instead of six, because the permafrost had subsided. The ice roads north of Winnipeg started to melt in April instead of May. Start with the local impacts,” Manning said, “because people are really noticing those. Then bring up the fact that scientists have been working on the problem and reached similar conclusions.” Manning thinks this thinking is a way into the minds of the #1 and #2 gang he calls conservatives.

We all want to Save The World but because we see the world through different perspectives, different assumptions, our solutions often only create more problems. Taking Manning's advice to focus on the real feet in the mud local effects of the Earth's broader environmental problems leads us back to the extreme weather events and our common emotional responses to them as an ideal window into our interconnected world and maybe the wisdom of our #3-ness' solution

How the Loss of Arctic Sea Ice Increases the Rate and Severity of Extreme Weather Events

The very informative article titled 'Are slowing Rossby Waves leading to extreme weather?' summarizes the longer more technical article, 'Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes', that shows why/how the unanticipated rapid loss of Arctic sea ice is a major contributor to the extreme weather events we're seeing all around us. The next 3 paragraphs from the Early Warning article explain the picture above which is a stylized cross-section of the lower portion of earth's atmosphere.

"At the equator, it's hot and so the air rises, and as it does so it cools, which lowers the amount of water it can hold below the amount that is actually in it, causing rain, thunderstorms, etc. The resulting drier air eventually returns to the earth's surface around 30o north and south of the equator - this is the Hadley cell and the dry descending air is the cause of deserts at around those latitudes."

"Similarly at the poles it is very cold, causing sinking air, and driving a similar polar cell which requires air to be lifted up at around 60o north and south of the equator.  In between there is a Ferrell cell which moves air northward at the surface and southward high up.  All three of these cells essentially serve to move heat from the equator (where the sun shines the most} to the poles (where it shines the least)."

"High up at the boundaries of the cells, air of quite different origins with large pressure and temperature differences meets.  These differences drive strong winds, which you'd think would flow in a north south direction, but instead the rotation of the earth (Coriolis force) bends them around so that you end up with very rapid zonal (latitudinal) winds - the jet streams - occurring at high altitude."

The video above is an easy to understand show and tell about the jet stream and its big chaotic-looking meanders named Rossby Waves (also known as planetary waves). Rossby Waves have a massive effect on the weather. If the jet stream gets stuck - the Rossby waves stop or slow down - it can lead to weather extremes - one place may have flooding as rain continues for weeks or months, while another place may have drought as it stays sunny and dry there for an extended period.

The paper explains how the loss of Arctic sea ice means that the Arctic ocean absorbs a lot more sunlight in the late summer and fall, which it then gives back to the atmosphere in the winter. Because the atmosphere is then warmer than it used to be as a result, it is thicker and this in turn will cause the Rossby waves to move more slowly and become bigger and loopier.

This group of atmospheric interactions is another in a series of climate developments which were not projected by climate science or climate models. For example in the relevant section of the IPCC AR4 there is no discussion of the possibility that Rossby Waves might slow down and cause more extreme weather events. As The Mud Report has been trying to show recently that the climate system is far more complex than climate science is currently able to model. It seems, therefore, to be only common sense that we be cautious. But humans seem to have selectively bred out a 'common sense gene', in it's place we've selected for a 'gimme more gene'.

Climate Scientists All Know that "Climate Trains the Boxer but Weather Throws the Punches"

This photo by Sean R. Heavey shows the dangerous beauty of a 'Montana Thunderstorm'.

As the oceans warm, they’re giving off more water vapor. “Everybody knows that if you turn up the fire on your stove, you evaporate the water in a pot more rapidly,” says Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. "During the past 25 years satellites have measured a 4 percent average rise in water vapor in the air column. The more water vapor, the greater the potential for intense rainfalls."

Not just the potential for intense rainfalls is increased by the energy being added to our atmosphere but all types of extreme weather events once described as a once-in-a-century or a millennium occurrence are happening more far frequently than they used to. "What’s going on?" As National Geographic's great article 'Weather Gone Wild' on the recent deluge of extreme weather events asks, "Are these extreme events signals of a dangerous, human-made shift in Earth’s climate? Or are we just going through a natural stretch of bad luck? The short answer is: probably both." adding that, "But natural cycles can’t by themselves explain the recent streak of record-breaking disasters. Something else is happening too: The Earth is steadily getting warmer, with significantly more moisture in the atmosphere."

While the engineers, geologists and climatologists are busy studying the weather events and their causes those whose self-interest is most markedly in the cross hairs, folks like the insurance industry and the military, aren't quibbling about the causes.

A recent insurance industry report titled 'Warming of the Oceans and Implications for the (Re)insurance Industry' explains that "The rise in extreme weather events driven by warming of the oceans has led analysts in the global insurance industry to issue a warning that the sector risks being hit by waves of costly claims. Understanding the changes in ocean dynamics and the complex interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere is the key to understanding current changes in the distribution, frequency and intensity of global extreme events relevant to the insurance industry such as tropical cyclones, flash floods or extra-tropical storms,” the report says.

Another report issued a few days ago on a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies.concluded, "Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe." going on to say, "The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics.".

They all understand that as Deke Arndt of NOAA says, "Climate kind of trains the boxer, but weather throws the punches. And what climate will do is help train weather to throw certain punches more often. We’ll see these as extreme precipitation events, extreme droughts."

We're not necessarily having worse events than those of the past, we're having them more frequently as Dr James Hansen explained when addressing critics who evidence extreme weather events from the past, like the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, "Significant weather events such as the Dust Bowl are now occurring at an increased rate."

Meanwhile, the public watches the climate deteriorate before their eyes.  They watch as forest fires increase in number and severity; as killer heat waves, droughts and desertification, as shrinking ice caps, storms and tornadoes run rampant across their TVs - or their front yards. More on The Mud Report tomorrow about the science behind how global warming is amplifying the occurrence of extreme weather events by changing the jet stream's patterns.

Climate Models Neglect Methane Feedbacks-the Most Serious Scenario for Runaway Climate Change

Runaway climate change describes a scenario in which the climate system passes a threshold after which positive feedback loops cause the climate to continue changing, even absent further external forcings. The runaway climate change continues until it is overpowered by negative feedback effects which cause the climate system to restabilise at a new state. This has happened before many times in Earth's long history but, as in the case of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum [PETM] - often referred to as the great dying) - the runaway climate change happened over 1-2 thousand year time period.

Unfortunately, the warming that is occurring in our era is at least ten times faster than it was in the PETM. For this reason, it's impossible to rule out any catastrophic global warming scenario. Currently, climate models do not incorporate the effects of methane released from melting permafrost, which means even the most extreme warming scenarios the models have projected from the limited parameters they now utilize aren't extreme enough. Studies focusing on the PETM time period estimate that several thousand gton C of methane were released into the atmosphere. Recent land and sea base observations in the Siberian arctic show increased rates significantly above previous estimates.

The methane feedback loops are very serious but a spike in atmospheric methane concentration could set off abrupt catastrophic global warming. The most dangerous cause for such a spike is rapid clathrate breakdown. Clathrates [another name for methane hydrates] form when plankton and other tiny organisms in the ocean die and slowly drift to the seabed. Microorganisms feeding on the dead material emit methane. "This undersea methane bubbles up," Michael Mann writes, "but it quickly encounters the extremely cold water in the pores of the sediment. Under the high pressure of these cold depths, water and methane react to each other: water lattices link into crystalline lattices that trap methane molecules."

Sea ice, and the cold conditions it sustains, serves to stabilise methane deposits on and near the shoreline  preventing the clathrate breaking down and outgassing methane into the atmosphere and causing further warming. Melting of this ice will release large quantities of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, causing further warming in a strong positive feedback loop.
According to the US Geological Survey, the seabed methane hydrate fossil fuel resource is stupefyingly vast. By a conservative estimate, it's more than two times greater than all other known fossil fuels on earth. The United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one the most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change.

Arctic methane release is only one of the serious positive feedback loops climate models ignore. They also ignore the release of methane from permafrost regions around the Arctic where stores are released by bacteria [methanogenesis] consuming the now rotting biomass. Other serious runaway climate change feedback loops ignored by climate models include the ice-albedo feedback - where the advance or retreat of ice cover alters the 'whiteness' of the earth, and its ability to absorb the sun's energy - and the dying and burning of forests.

Of all the known problems and uncertainties The Mud Report has tried to talk about recently none are more serious than the continued underestimation by the climate 'consensus' of abrupt and catastrophic climate change caused by the feedback loops that are purposefully being ignored because their effects are not easily quantifiable by the scientific mindset and their dangerous implications are uncomfortable for the corporations and the politicians they own . More serious yet though are the unknown-unknowns - black swan events caused nature's dramatic non-linear phenomena - lurking and laughing at our hubris.

Proponents and Opponents of the CC 'Consensus' Agree That the IPCC is Political to its Core.

Finally, opponents and proponents of the CC 'consensus' agree.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a UN mandated intergovernmental body set up at the request of member governments. They produce assessment reports which have the consensus of every one of the participating governments. The IPCC Panel is composed of representatives appointed by governments and stakeholder organizations including climate scientists, NGOs and corporations. One example of the effectiveness of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that led to the IPCC is the Kyoto Protocol which, after years of negotiations, was a broadly flawed compromise that had no enforcement, didn't include many major emitters like China, India and Indonesia and since its adoption has seen almost every country in the world participate in massive increases atmospheric carbon pollution.

One thing proponents and opponents of the climate science's 'consensus' agree on is that the IPCC is, like every UN body, political to its core. Sergio Abranches of Ecopolity says, "Scientists are voicing concerns about the political screening of their texts by climate negotiators." Going on to say, "I’ve seen how they manage to bracket almost all substantive clauses, only to strike them out, leaving no more than general statements at the end. Most negotiators are masters of text rephrasing. They do it to reduce the degree of commitment or dilute substance, aiming at a comfortably bland final text."

Scientists and diplomats have very different mindsets  The language of science is objective and evidence-oriented. The language of politics is symbolic and interest-oriented. Whereas many scientists are foreseeing imminent disaster diplomats fear writing down the scientists’ warnings about climate change risks as they are formulated, whereas scientists want policy to follow science, not politics. This vetting of the IPCC's reports by politicians and their corporate masters helps explain why many countries are moving so slowly to develop precautionary policies.

One well written critique from the opponents perspective comes from the conservative Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (IAC) in a report titled 'IPCC must avoid playing politics', where they argue that the scientific community generally, and the IPCC specifically, must distinguish analysis from advocacy. Another by a very bright though, IMO, mistaken Roger A. Pielke Jr at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado titled 'Policy, politics and perspective' comes to almost exactly the same conclusions as the Mud Report from almost exactly the opposite original assumptions.

An example of corporate influence on the IPCC by politicians was documented by a whistleblower's release of a memo from ExxonMobil to the Bush administration. The memo led to strong Bush administration lobbying, evidently at the behest of ExxonMobil, to oust Robert Watson, a climate scientist, from the IPCC chairmanship, and to have him replaced by Pachauri, who was seen at the time as more mild-mannered and industry-friendly. Environmentalists argued that the anti-Watson campaign by the US, oil producers like Saudi Arabia, and oil corporations like Exxon-Mobil, intended to cow the IPCC with the bald display of their fossil fuel backed politics.

It seems obvious that arguing about the precise causes of climate changes – angry gods, CO2, water vapour, sun spots, terrorist plots, etc is a meaningless a waste of time when it should be apparent to every human that the climate is changing fast and dangerously. Killer heat waves, droughts, desertification, ocean acidification, reduced clean water sources and crop reduction, polar melting, sea level rise, global habitat creep away from the poles by flora and fauna alike, retreating glaciers, dying coral reefs, etc. are already resulting in wars over dwindling resources, out of control species extinction disasters, extreme weather deaths, etc. Meanwhile our politicians enable the talk-endlessly-to-buy-time business objections dedicated to maximizing profits today regardless of increasing threats to future generations. YUCK

The IPCC's Underestimated Projections Crucial in Understanding the Need to Take Precautions

Yikes! Underestimation of risk can be dangerous eh.

Numerous peer-reviewed studies comparing the projections made by the IPCC's 4th Assessment, like the Copenhagen Diagnosis, have examined the latest research and found that the IPCC, and the climate science community's consensus in general, has under-predicted many of it's climate change projections.

One study the Copenhagen Diagnosis sited was by Rahmstorf et al. which found that the IPCC's projections of sea level rise were underestimated concluding, "It's well-known that the IPCC almost certainly underestimates future sea level rise, because their models do not include the effects of dynamic ice processes.  Most sea level rise from ice melt comes from chunks of ice breaking off into the ocean, then melting.  This calving process is accelerated by warming, but the dynamic processes are not well understood, and are thus not represented in climate models...the IPCC's central sea level rise predictions were too low by about 60%."

In addition to confirming the Rahmstorf finding that the IPCC has underestimated sea level rise, the Copenhagen Diagnosis also found that the IPCC has dramatically underestimated the decline in Arctic sea ice extent and that the northern hemisphere's snow cover may also be declining at a faster-than-expected rate also saying that "rainfall has become more intense in already rainy areas, and recent changes have occurred faster than predicted".

The Copenhagen Diagnosis similarly found that the IPCC had also underestimated recent CO2 emissions from developing countries and added, "The global warming amplification (feedback) from carbon released as a result of permafrost melting has not been accounted for in any of the IPCC projections.  A recent UN Environment Programme report warned that failing to account for this feedback will result in an underestimate of future warming."

Another broadly cited study titled 'The Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge' concluded, "If the consensus estimates such as those from the IPCC are wrong, it is because the physical reality is significantly more ominous than has been widely recognized to date". In agreement is environmentalist Dr. William Rees, Professor emeritus UBC School of Community and Regional Planning who says "Climate change is occurring much more rapidly than the best climate change models suggest".

Then there's the comments made by Dr. James Hansen who concluded from his comprehensive study of past climate change (paleoclimate), that, in the long term, climate is twice as sensitive in the real world as it is in the models used by the IPCC. Hansen says, "The models include 'fast feedbacks' like water vapor, clouds, and sea ice, but exclude longer-term 'slow feedbacks' like ice sheets (ice is a feedback because an icy surface reflects more heat than a dark surface). There is a broad consensus that the fast-feedback climate sensitivity is 3°C." But, Hansen goes on to say, "Slow-feedback sensitivity has received far less attention. To cut a long paleoclimate story short, it turns out the total climate sensitivity is as high as 6°C when there are ice sheets on the planet, as there are today. That is, the slow ice sheet feedback doubles the warming predicted by climate models."

These underestimated projections are very important especially when considering the fact that none of the consensus' projections dares to take into consideration nature's dramatic phenomena sometimes referred to as Black Swan Events. It's crucial that all the risks be understood fully thereby alllowing precaution to prevail.

Are Global Warming Projections Underestimated by Climate Science and the IPCC? You Betcha!

Scientific American recently published an article, 'Climate Science Predictions Prove Too Conservative' saying that the IPCC’s consensus projections aren’t correct. But, contrary to what conservative opponents of the 'consensus' think, the direction the IPCC’s projections were wrong are opposite of what they claim. After checking 20 years worth of projections the article shows that the IPCC has consistently underestimated the pace and impacts of global warming.

Every IPCC report first passes through a vetting process where every country in the world as well as every corporate stakeholder must agree with the report's conclusions. The Scientific American article makes a valid complaint that the IPCC process is too conservative saying that, "When there is conflicting evidence of something, the IPCC has tended to say nothing in an effort not to upset anybody." And there's a wide range of anybodies not to upset.

As Sarah van Gelder says in a recent Guardian article, "There's controversy among environmentalists regarding 'whether to downplay the dangers' of global warming for fear of frightening people or being accused of being 'alarmist' by opponents." IMO most folks, when hearing that scientists are spinning their results, will instinctively distrust them, or anyone else, for using a strategy to slant information one way or another.

The article titled 'Climate Scientists Erring on the Side of Least Drama' at Skeptical Science explains why so many climate scientists are biased toward overly cautious estimates, erring on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions, which they call "erring on the side of least drama" (ESLD). It has many cool and easy to understand graphs and graphics along with a very readable text that refers often to a paper recently published in Global Environmental Change titled 'Why Climate Scientists Have Consistently UNDERestimated Key Global Warming Impacts'. In this paper the authors, Brysse et al., examined research evaluating past climate projections, and considered the pressures which might cause climate scientists to ESLD.

As Martin Luther King once said, "It's always the right time to do the right thing". Sounds like good advice for climate science and those producing the upcoming IPCC 5th Assessment. Tomorrow's Mud Report will outline some of the scientific reasons why noted environmentalists like Dr. James Hansen have concluded that, in the long term, climate is twice as sensitive in the real world as it is in the models used by the IPCC.