Time article

[Oliver Wingenter]

The Time article was quite honest about the problem of Global Warming.

"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't: we may not be
able to stop global warming. The Arctic Ocean, which experienced
record melting last year, could be ice-free in the summer as soon as
2013, decades ahead of what the earlier models told us. We need to
begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a
decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly
failed to do so."

This is a true and clear statement for the public to grasp.

"Geoengineering has long been the province of kooks, but as the
difficulty of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become harder to
ignore, it is slowly emerging as an option of last resort. The tipping
point came in 2006, when the Nobel Prize--winning atmospheric scientist
Paul Crutzen published an editorial examining the possibility of
releasing vast amounts of sulfurous debris into the atmosphere to
create a haze that would keep the planet cool. "Over the past couple
of years, it's gone from an outsider thing to something that is
increasingly discussed," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution
for Science at Stanford University."

What is untrue about this paragraph?

"Caldeira modeled the effects on climate that Crutzen's notion of
spreading sulfur particles into the air would have and found that
geoengineering might be able to compensate for a doubling of the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even more
impressive was the price tag: somewhere between a few hundred million
dollars and a couple of billion dollars a year, compared with the
unknowable cost of decarbonizing the entire world. But the drawbacks
are serious. Worsening air pollution is a risk. We'd have to keep
geoengineering indefinitely to balance out continued greenhouse-gas
emissions, and the motivation to decarbonize might disappear if we
believed we had an insurance policy. And those are just the
consequences we know about. But the truth is, we're already performing
an unauthorized experiment on our climate by adding billions of tons
of man-made carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Unless the geopolitics
of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering
might become our best shot. \\

This is a fair paragraph and a warning about some of the consequences.

Of course curb greenhouse gas emissions is the preferred cure. But
CO2 emissions continue to accelerate. We need to develop contigency
plans now and prove them viable or not. Bad news sooner (a
geoengineering scheme that does not work) is better known sooner than
later.

We should not discourage Climate Engineering proposals and give only
credible opinions on those we have a real understanding about.


Oliver W. Wingenter, Ph.D.
Assoc. Prof. of Atmospheric Chemistry
Chair, Department of Chemistry
Research Scientist, Geophysical Research Center
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Socorro, New Mexico 87801
505-835-5263 Telephone
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~oliver/opage.html

[Ken Caldeira]

Of course, the main problem with the Time magazine piece is that it gives me too much credit. I did not model sulfur particles as Phil Rasch and Alan Robock have been doing.

I thought the mention of air pollution was a bit of a red herring.

--
===============================
Ken Caldeira
Department of Global Ecology
Carnegie Institution
260 Panama Street
Stanford, CA 94305 USA
+1 650 704 7212; fax: +1 650 462 5968

kcal...@stanford.edu

http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/CIWDGE/home/main%20page/caldeira.php

[danb...@gmail.com]

Strange, CNN was discussing the TIME article today, with the anchor/
news reader asking a gentleman from TIME at the New York office about
the ten top IDEAS featured in the current issue, and not once, again,
not once, did the subject of GEO-ENGINEERING　ｃｏｍｅ　ｕｐ。
－－　ｄａｎｎｙ
On Mar 21, 1:03 pm, "Ken Caldeira"

<kcalde...@globalecology.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Of course, the main problem with the Time magazine piece is that it gives me
> too much credit. I did not model sulfur particles as Phil Rasch and Alan

> Robock have been doing.ＨＨ

> >http://infohost.nmt.edu/~oliver/opage.html<http://infohost.nmt.edu/%7Eoliver/opage.html>

>
> --
> ===============================
> Ken Caldeira
> Department of Global Ecology
> Carnegie Institution
> 260 Panama Street
> Stanford, CA 94305 USA
> +1 650 704 7212; fax: +1 650 462 5968
>

> kcalde...@stanford.edu
>
> http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/CIWDGE/home/main%20page/caldeir...- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Dan Whaley]

Climos has posted a brief response to the Becker and Pope papers.

http://www.climos.com/climosblog/?p=25

> >http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/CIWDGE/home/main%20page/caldeir...Hide quoted text -