What’s need in Science is a hot topic. A band wagon on which one can jump with gusto, grabbing its great Grips of Grants, guides which ensure success and promotion.
When I was a graduate student, for one sizzling summer, the furious fad was wavelets. Everybody, me included, wanted in on it, and got in on it. You couldn’t find a journal or conference without them.
They have since faded into the noise, an apt metaphor, there to join the sea of results, more or less useful, but having nothing to really move one’s soul.
A good name can do that. I’ve often written that computer scientists win any marketing contest. The results are not close. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural nets, quantum computers. On and on. Terrific names that capture one’s imagination. All completely misleading, of course, penned by the mattress salesmen of Science.
Coming in second, and the subject for today, is “climate change”. Global cooling, global warming, population bomb, sustainability, tipping points, global boiling, climate crisis, and many more. Slogans one can stand behind. And submit grants for.
I learned a new one. From that woman who can see the flaws in her own science field, but believes all others must be right and true with an ardency that would put any activist to shame. Termination shock. As in, “Oh No! Not a termination shock!” (Not to be confused by the same name for the point at which the solar wind slams into the earth’s magnetic field.)
Only this new name is not so new. I found a reference from 2015, a breathless abstract from from “climate engineering” conference.
You may recall a group of mad scientists—mad as in lunatic, certifiable, Bedlam bound, nuts—want to block the sun’s rays from reaching the earth. They call it not “How To Kill Everything With Science”, but use the euphemism SRM, for “Solar Radiation Modification.”
The idea is to launch into space the tangled web of argument NPR hosts use to justify transing your kids. This mass of obfuscation is so dense it is expected it can block at least 40% of all incoming solar radiation. If we add the mass of peer-reviewed papers on the same subject, we can get to nearly 90%.
Kidding! They want to put any number of chemicals up there, in space or high in the air, hoping these chemicals never fall back to earth. Never mind how we’ll get these chemicals lofted, what matters is we can write grants to fund our discussions of it.
Which brings us to “termination shock”. Quoting from the aforementioned abstract:
If deployment of SRM were stopped suddenly it could lead to a rapid rise in global temperatures, which would probably be even more damaging than the slower warming from unchecked climate change. This effect – known as the ‘termination shock’ – is an influential idea in SRM discussions, and for some commentators it is one of the greatest potential threats from the development of geoengineering. This presentation will outline the science behind the termination shock, but its main focus will be the socio-political dimensions, and the drivers that might cause sudden termination, such as terrorism, economic collapse, natural disasters, or the discovery of damaging side effects.
“Stop us before we pollute the atmosphere because if we start then stop (because of terrorism) all will die!” Now that is a winning grant submission.
Then there are peer-reviewed papers like this one in Nature: “Abrupt reduction in shipping emission as an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock produces substantial radiative warming“. My first, and deeply scholarly, reaction upon seeing that was, “What.”
My next question, before reading the abstract, was, “Who paid for this?” Can you guess, dear reader?
T.Y. discloses support for the research of this work from NASA TerraAquaNPP program [grant number 80NSSC24K0458], NASA MEaSUReS program [grant number 80NSSC24M0045], NOAA ERB program [grant number NA23OAR4310299] and DOE ASR program [grant number DE-SC0024078].
You did.
The abstract opens “Human activities affect the Earth’s climate through modifying the composition of the atmosphere, which then creates radiative forcing that drives climate change.” Which since this is in a journal specializing in “climate change”, which only those interested in “climate change” peruse, and thus all involved already profess this, reads more like a litany from a holy text than science. An obligatory prayer before the main business begins.
The paper’s idea is that, in 2020, reducing sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping “created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact.” They prove this via “simulation”.
Ah.
Perhaps you felt this shock? I didn’t, but they did. They think this momentous change in SO2 emissions “could lead to a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020?s compared with the rate since 1980 with strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity.”
More than doubling! That “strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity” means that if you can’t find the extra warming, it’s because it is in hiding, and only Experts can discover where.
Others fret that China reducing air pollution will finally release the beast of “climate change”, which thus far had been trapped under a layer of noxious car exhaust. They call this, too, a “termination shock.”
Which only proves you can never make some people happy.
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