If the world heats up too much climate engineering with aersols might be needed.
Internationally coordinated research and field-testing on 'geoengineering' the planet's atmosphere to limit risk of climate change should begin soon along with building international governance of the technology, say scientists from the University of Calgary and the United States.
Collaborative and government-supported studies on solar-radiation management, a form of geo-engineering, would reduce the risk of nations' unilateral experiments and help identify technologies with the least risk, says U of C scientist David Keith, in an article published in the Jan. 27 online edition of Nature. Co-authors of the opinion piece are Edward Parson at the University of Michigan and Granger Morgan at Carnegie Mellon University.
"Solar-radiation management may be the only human response that can fend off rapid and high-consequence climate change impacts. The risks of not doing research outweigh the risks of doing it," says Keith, director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy's energy and environmental systems group and a professor in the Schulich School of Engineering.
Solar-radiation management (SRM) would involve releasing megatonnes of light-scattering aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere to reduce Earth's absorption of solar energy, thereby cooling the planet. Another technique would be to release particles of sea salt to make low-altitude clouds reflect more solar energy back into space.
It is cheap to do.
Long-established estimates show that SRM could offset this century's predicted global average temperature rise more than 100 times more cheaply than achieving the same cooling by cutting emissions, Keith notes. "But this low price tag raises the risks of single groups acting alone, and of facile cheerleading that promotes exclusive reliance on SRM."
The effects are rapid when nature releases large quantities of sulfur aerosols from a volcano.
SRM would also cool the planet quickly, whereas even a massive program of carbon dioxide emission cuts will take many decades to slow global warming because the CO2 already accumulated in the atmosphere will take many years to naturally break down. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, for example, cooled the planet by about 0.5 degrees Celsius in less than a year by injecting sulphur into the stratosphere.
Pinatubo was small potatoes compared to Tambora in 1815 which caused crop failures for 2 years. But Tambora is small potates compared to Toba's eruption about 74,000 years ago. Another eruption like Toba would cause billions to die.
But if CO2 emissions keep rising and only aerosols are used to cool the planet then rains could decrease with resulting crop failures and other problems.
But a world cooled by managing sunlight will present risks, the scientists note. The planet would have less precipitation and less evaporation, and monsoon rains and winds might be weakened. Some areas would be more protected from temperature changes than others, creating local 'winners' and losers.'
The fact that climate engineering is possible and affordable is why I do not expect south Florida, most of Bangladesh, and other large low lying places won't be submerged by melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica. Push comes to shove we've got options. But we need to do the research in advance to learn about the scale and nature of side effects.
Update: Note that since climate engineering causes rapid changes in temperature we do not have to do it decades in advance of dangerous warming. Once it is obvious the Greenland or Antarctica ice is rapidly melting we can apply the brakes to the temperature rise at that point. Since people have such high discount rates with regard to future problems that seems the most likely scenario.
| Share | | Randall Parker, 2010 January 27 11:35 PM Climate Engineering |
building international governance
Fuck that noise! I don't want any government imposed on me by third world kleptocrats. First or second world kleptocrats either.
Geo engineering is not the way out of this mass hysteria. The path out of this paralyzing fear is through genuine science, a la Popper.
Climate fears aren't based on science. They're based on hoaxters in the British CRU, the IPCC, and GISS.
When you realize how badly you've been taken in . . . And then to compound delusion with high-risk global scale engineering insanity! Too much.
Yeah. But if things don't work out you can always sell the technology to the military.
"building international governance"
Yes, because it has proven so effective and trustworthy and controllable in the past.
Idiots.
Reading this, I'm reminded that about a century ago, there were proponents of diverting the Gulf Stream to provide for a much more temperate northern US coast. The proponents were ignorant of the effects on northern Europe. If it were feasible and undertaken, it would have been a definite casus belli. But fortunately, they were also ignorant of the immense momentum in the Gulf Stream.
Please make the case that the climate scientists are any less ignorant. The revelations and shenanigans of the past couple of years especially leave me highly doubtful.
In 1910, they told me that if we voted for diverting the Gulf Stream we'd be fighting wars in Europe ... and they were right!
When we have a scientific model for our climate that has been proven through both direct measurement as well as proxies (and all of which is open for general review and comment), then we might know enough to begin to discuss climate engineering. I have no doubt that someday science will progress to that point. Unfortunately, we are not there yet. And the scientific misconduct that has characterized too much of climate research has set that date back by more than a decade.
As someone trained in economics and it's scientific methodologies, I'd like to point out that the methodologies used to find the findings in the climate change stuff, are the nearly the same methodologies that economists use in econometrics. Let me just say that it's very easy to have your findings biased (it's a technical term, I'm not referring to politics or ideology) because you are missing variables or didn't account for various factors or anticipate various changes. Climate is horrendously complicated and I'm sure it has at least tens of thousands of variables to account for. That being said, I've learned to never completely trust most cutting edge science.
Also, I was talking to my uncle the other day, who's an ecologist. I asked him what his thoughts on global warming was. He said it was definitely happening, but it's been grossly misrepresented in the media. He said the world will warm a bit, but that's perfectly fine. Nature and man will easily adapt. He said that there are other things that will happen which will cause problems, not by the warming itself, but by the increase in greenhouse gases. Climate will radically shift in various area. For instance, some areas will become dryer, while other areas get "wetter." There are some other things, too. He also said he's against cap and trade and other environmental efforts to reduce emissions, which was surprising because he's a huge environmentalist. He said that those efforts will be futile. He explained that man-made carbon isn't the problem. He said that normally, nature would be able to handle a much higher volume of carbon than is even being produced right now. The reason it can't is because of over-development in the wetlands of the world. Normally, this are would sequester vast amounts of carbon every year and play a tremendous role in climate stability. Because it's been developed so much, it is no longer sequestering as much carbon every year as it used to. It's also been causing a change in the wetlands itself. The properties of wetlands that make it so important in climate stability and flood control are diminishing. He said that the best solution to climate change was to somehow decrease the amount of developed land in the wetlands (probably by getting some of the people to leave it) and to let the wetlands regenerate itself.
Regeneration of the wetlands - you mean like recovering the fertile crescent by defeating Sadam? Civilization probably began with the عرب الأهوا.
What would be the consequences if Yellowstone were to cut loose? All these efforts to cool the planet would seem mighty silly if there were a sudden need to warm it.
I was a Boy Scout, and I still believe that you should always leave the campsite in better shape than you found it. My conservationist tendencies do not blind me to the fickle forces of nature, however. Weather changes. Climate changes. You would think that the "Party of Change" would be a little more open to the fact that things change. Unfortunately, it appears that their best thinkers are sclerotic old codgers to whom the challenges of change foresage the fading of the flame.
Let's shift our efforts from one folly to another, in the name of science, saving us from ourselves? Oh, it's cheaper, too, so much the better. If we do it quickly, will anyone notice we've spent more energy in the appearance of change rather than truly achieving something?
The message that is lost is let's stop throwing resources away, wasting time and money, and turn instead to solving some more mundane problems.
It's a fundamental question of how to use our fundamental life energy in a way that both stirs more energy, while spinning off something that the planet and people can use prosperously.
Porkov, I don't think Yellowstone is a wetland. I think wetlands are primarily in swamps, river valleys etc. From what he was saying, we don't really need to create or expand reserves necessarily. I don't know the specifics, but he basically thought that it would be easiest to discourage both farming and residence there in general. As I understand it, it's mostly a problem in the developing world because the cost of living is usually lower there, although it's a big problem in the Mississippi River valley. In fact, it's the cause of a lot of the floods there, including the Great Flood of 1993.
I'd like to add that I don't know a lot about this personally and I'm kinda relying on my uncle's input because he's an expert in it and has personally studied the issue.
Porkov, I don't think Yellowstone is a wetland. I think wetlands are primarily in swamps, river valleys etc. From what he was saying, we don't really need to create or expand reserves necessarily. I don't know the specifics, but he basically thought that it would be easiest to discourage both farming and residence there in general. As I understand it, it's mostly a problem in the developing world because the cost of living is usually lower there, although it's a big problem in the Mississippi River valley. In fact, it's the cause of a lot of the floods there, including the Great Flood of 1993.
I'd like to add that I don't know a lot about this personally and I'm kinda relying on my uncle's input because he's an expert in it and has personally studied the issue.
Hippocrates - First rule is to do no harm. Actually, the first rule is to make sure your data is A) real and B) not fabricated or manipulated. Beyond that, all this talk is just nonsense.
Michael B. -- His sentence refers to the one following. If Yellowstone became the seething caldera it once was, we'd be dealing with super massive gassing and ash clouds.
Dust in the wind, all we need is dust in wind.
I think that the doctrine of unintended consequences and a bit of chaos theory is all that is required to dispel climate engineering (on both sides of the hypothesis). The alarmists have been systematic spiking the data, cherry-picking temperature records, falsifying correlations between CO2 and temperature (the fact is that temperatures change first then CO2 levels), and using every misrepresentation possible of the data. I just attended a meeting in Salzburg where the head of the Swiss group for the IPPC repeated that "there is a correlation between ice core temperature data and CO2 levels" - but when questioned admitted that the relationship was the opposite of his representation. Real scientists don't do this: politicians do it all of the time.
We are facing a decade or more of cold weather due to reduced solar activity. See "Global Cooling:the Coming Crisis of Credibility," http://mottsblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/global-cooling-coming-crisis-of.html This makes more demands on energy than any of the realistic warming scenarios. We need more energy for transportation, heating residences and businesses, and will have shorter growing seasons, more crop damages, etc. As John McCain argued, we need "all of the above..." in energy development.
Energy diversification is crucial. The cost of a modest program to get the US to 20% renewable energy by 2020 is only 0.9% of consumer prices (Energy Information Agency 2007- Bush Administration). The US has the lowest level of government support for renewables in the industrial world. All of the relatively poor New Member States in Central and Eastern Europe provide more support than the United States. We risk being dependent on foreign technology in the coming decades just as we have been dependent on foreign energy sources for the last three decades.
Randy Mott
President
CEERES Sp. z o.o.
(American-owned biogas and geothermal energy developer)
Warsaw, Poland
www.ceeres.eu
Drill, baby, drill!
Because man has proven so adept at defining and implementing solutions to problems in the past (kudzu anyone)? If we don't know the drivers of climate and the proportion in which they operate how can we possibly know what "lever to pull" to control it? Let's hypothesize that accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a natural response to cooling temperatures caused by reduced solar activity and/or changes in the Pacific and Atlantic decadal oscillations. So now, without understanding how the system operates, man will artificially introduce aerosols to lower the temperature? How's that gonna work out for us?
Once there were environmentalists who cared about the environment.
Modern environmentalists are political activists and scamming opportunists. Power grabbers and rent seekers.
The easy cure according to these false environmentalists is to shut down the industries of the modern world and stop having babies.
Let the poor countries of the world have all the babies so that they can inherit the world. You will be forgotten. Voluntary extinction for you, that's the easy cure.
Oh, and be sure to send your tax free donations to Greenpeace, WWF, Sierra Club, and the rest of us who want you off this planet!
I agree with Easier Cure. The original environmentalists were actually hunters who wanted to protect the wild so that game would be preserved and to avoid what happened to the American buffalo. There's certainly a lot of rent seeking going on. Follow the money. Who's doing all of the lobbying and funding for support and advertising for green energy and climate policy? Big energy. Why? To get hefty subsidies for their development so that they can get a leg up on their competition. Who's pushing for all of the regulations? The same people who are being regulated. Why? To prevent potential competition and prevent new entrants.
Btw, Easier Cure, isn't WWF wrestling? ;)
Michael B.
At one time WWF was both wrestling and World Wildlife Fund. Now wrestling is WWE.
Both the WWE and WWF are fakes.
Michael B.,
Think about what you are saying here:
There's certainly a lot of rent seeking going on. Follow the money. Who's doing all of the lobbying and funding for support and advertising for green energy and climate policy? Big energy. Why? To get hefty subsidies for their development so that they can get a leg up on their competition. Who's pushing for all of the regulations? The same people who are being regulated. Why? To prevent potential competition and prevent new entrants.
ExxonMobil could buy the whole solar power industry with their chump change. Big Energy? That's ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, and other oil, coal, and natural gas producers. The bright light of PV, First Solar, has a market cap of less than 3% of ExxonMobil. Go to Google Finance and compare XOM with FSLR.
Lobbying: Who has the big lobbying money? The companies with the most cash. That'd be oil companies followed by coal and natural gas companies.
Some of the people who are huffing and puffing against the theory of global warming are a bunch of chumps who are tools of the big money interests who spend to create fake scientific journals and fake opposition to mainstream climate science. If you want to be a tool then keep blathering about how CO2 isn't a green house gas. Ignore its absorption spectrum for light. Never mind what Svente Arrhenius figured out in 1896 about CO2's effect upon atmospheric temperature.
The idea that Big Energy is for renewables is a joke. Look at the large market cap companies. Look at where they spend their lobbying money. They are spending money to get you to believe exactly what you believe so that you'll fight for their interests.
Bruce,
The WWF is a fake? I'm scandalized.
Not all big energy is lobbying for it. If all of them were lobbying for it, then it wouldn't be very helpful in getting them a leg up on the competition. Power companies are a huge source of the lobbying, especially on the state level. On the federal level, General Electric is a pretty bad offender. There was at least a couple oil firm that lobbied for ethanol subsidies and a few for wind power. I wish I remember their names, but it's been a while. I'm guessing they are trying to diversify their capital portfolio to more energy besides just oil. For the most part, most oil companies are fighting it though, at least when I last checked.
I'm not naive or a tool. I never actually stated a firm position in the global warming debate. To be honest, I think both sides of the debate in the media (I don't know about academia itself) are entirely controlled by politics and rent seekers. When I was in school, I remember looking at a firm's annual report for one of my classes. They were a power company in the Midwest and they were heavily investing in wind power and lobbying for government subsidies and what not.
You can be sure that there are companies, and individuals, whose political activity on this issue has a lot to do with self-aggrandizement.
Getting back to climate engineering, I don't see how it can be a complete fix. One of the changes wrought by an increased greenhouse effect is a decrease in the ΔT between the poles and equator. Unless the distribution of aerosols is mostly over the poles, it will take a net global cooling to get e.g. the arctic permafrost areas back to their early-20th century temperatures. This would be bad too.
Getting back to climate engineering, I don't see how it can be a complete fix. One of the changes wrought by an increased greenhouse effect is a decrease in the ΔT between the poles and equator. Unless the distribution of aerosols is mostly over the poles, it will take a net global cooling to get e.g. the arctic permafrost areas back to their early-20th century temperatures. This would be bad too.
got any real evidence other than wwf garbage that the tundra is melting, or didn't you get the e-mails?
It's amazing, with all the coal or nuclear plants built in the last 30 years and how much drilling has exxon done in anwr and how much the energy problem grows every year and the real problem is they don't fund global warming, sixties idiots in their seventies.
Yep. These dimwits locked their brains on autopilot and never looked back. Danger Will Robinson, Danger!
Will they ever take the time to learn where they went wrong? No. It would break their brittle minds in two.
E-P,
I agree that cap-and-trade is a big scam. So are offsets. Europe serves as a cautionary tale of types of responses to CO2 build-up for what not to do.
Climate engineering: Still could beat losing south Florida, assorted islands, and coastal cities. We need ways to do climate engineering that would concentrate the effects on the poles.
Michael B.,
Sure, there are plenty of green lobbyists just chasing big bucks. Look at corn ethanol. Farmers pretend to help the environment for profit. Ditto the political market for offsets. My point is that the bigger guns are on the fossil fuels side.