A quantitative evaluation of the public response to climate engineering : Nature Climate Change

[Andrew Lockley]

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2087.html

A quantitative evaluation of the public response to climate engineering

Published online 12 January 2014

Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, with CO2 passing 400 parts per million in May 2013. To avoid severe climate change and the attendant economic and social dislocation, existing energy efficiency and emissions control initiatives may need support from some form of climate engineering. As climate engineering will be controversial, there is a pressing need to inform the public and understand their concerns before policy decisions are taken. So far, engagement has been exploratory, small-scale or technique-specific. We depart from past research to draw on the associative methods used by corporations to evaluate brands. A systematic, quantitative and comparative approach for evaluating public reaction to climate engineering is developed. Its application reveals that the overall public evaluation of climate engineering is negative. Where there are positive associations they favour carbon dioxide removal (CDR) over solar radiation management (SRM) techniques. Therefore, as SRM techniques become more widely known they are more likely to elicit negative reactions. Two climate engineering techniques, enhanced weathering and cloud brightening, have indistinct concept images and so are less likely to draw public attention than other CDR or SRM techniques.

[Jim Lee]

The abstract mirrors my personal opinions, I think they nailed it.

I am firmly against any solution that involves creating more pollution.

The "chemtrail" community is up in arms over what they think is "geoengineering SRM" and will rightly "tar and feather" anyone who's willing to go on record as saying they want to spray the skies.  The outrage should SRM be deployed will be tremendous, and I'll be there to lead that march.

Thank you to this community for being so willing to openly discuss your research. 

I hope that we can focus on solutions like CDR and albedo enhancement (as long as it isn't used to steer hurricanes, nudge nudge)

~ Jim Lee

Climate Viewer News

http://climateviewer.com/

[Stephen Salter]

Jim

Once hurricanes and typhoons have got going, marine cloud brightening cannot do anything to stop or steer them.  However we might be able to prevent an increase of sea surface temperatures enough stop them very young or reduce their severity.   Moderate ones are needed to produce rain on land.  Attenuating Haiyann would not have met with strong disapproval from people in the Philippines.

Stephen

Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design School of Engineering University of Edinburgh Mayfield Road Edinburgh EH9 3JL Scotland S.Sa...@ed.ac.uk Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704 Cell 07795 203 195 WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineerin...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to geoengi...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--

[Ken Caldeira]

These sorts of studies are interesting, yet fundamentally anecdotal.

I would imagine answers would differ greatly depending on how the questions were framed.

It would be interesting to ask:

If gases released from burning coal, oil and gas make the Earth so hot that crops fail throughout the tropics leading to widespread famine, and the scientific evidence indicated that the only way to rapidly increase crop yields would be to purposefully simulate the climate-cooling effects of a large volcano, would you consider doing this to avoid widespread suffering and death?

Or of people in the desert southwest of the US:

If global warming causes the desert southwest to become even hotter and drier, and the best scientific evidence suggests that spraying seawater in the sky off the coast of Los Angeles would make the desert southwest both cooler and less parched, more like it was before humans altered our atmosphere, would you consider alleviating excessive heat and drought in this way?

My point is not that these are the right ways to frame this issue, but rather that these sorts of polls often reflect the inherent biases of the pollsters in how the issues are framed.

--

The cited study claims to minimize framing effects, as if bias were avoidable and the idea of a value-neutral framing were a coherent concept.  We need studies that explore the effects of framing.

_______________
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science 

Dept of Global Ecology

260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA

+1 650 704 7212 kcal...@carnegiescience.edu

http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab  

https://twitter.com/KenCaldeira

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

[Jim Lee]

Stephen

I appreciate what you are saying, and I understand the need/want to mitigate hurricanes, however:

• weather modification is already secretive enough and the "experts" claim ignorance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V32iTBNoFuE
• Dr James Lee from American University said it best, we need a registry of all weather modification efforts before anything like SRM could occur http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/221/10011310.htm
• Multiple scientists at the WMA conferences talk about controversial ways to modify hurricanes, and should any of these occur, the public would not notified prior to experimentation.

On Engineering Hurricanes - William Cotton - American Meteorological Society 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIIFvTdqcA4

Planned and Inadvertent Weather Modification/Weather Modification Association 

Monday, 21 April 2008

New Unconventional Concepts and Legal Ramifications

https://ams.confex.com/ams/17WModWMA/techprogram/session_21926.htm

On Engineering Hurricanes

William R. Cotton, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO; and S. M. Saleeby

https://ams.confex.com/ams/17WModWMA/techprogram/paper_139450.htm

In the last year there have been two papers that have proposed that seeding hurricanes with small hygroscopic particles, as opposed to conventional giant hygroscopic particle seeding, could lead to the reduction in their intensity (Cotton et al., 2007; Rosenfeld et al., 2007). The Cotton et al. (2007) paper was based preliminary results of simulations of the impact of African dust on hurricane intensity (Zhang et al., 2007), which showed that dust acting as CCN influenced the storm development by inducing changes in the hydrometeor properties, modifying the storm diabatic heating distribution and thermodynamic structure, and ultimately influencing the storm intensity through complex dynamical responses. Some simulated storm intensities showed a monotonic decrease in storm intensity with increasing concentrations of CCN under certain configurations of the model but this trend was easily modified just by introducing slight variations in the GCCN profile. Thus, Zhang et al. (2007) concluded that the physical processes responsible for the impact of dust as nucleating aerosols on hurricane development need to be examined in the future under a wide range of environmental conditions.

Since then Henian Zhang has carried out more simulations that illustrate that the response is by no means simple. In some cases increasing CCN leads to a strengthening of hurricane intensity. Moreover, the results of introducing dust acting at CCN further in the lifecycle of the storm reveals that the response to CCN varies greatly depending on the stage of introduction of the aerosol. Thus this work illustrates that even using simple, rather idealized simulations the response of a hurricane to aerosol can be quite nonlinear. This makes the potential modification of hurricanes to small-particle hygroscopic seeding even more challenging than envisioned by Cotton et al. (2007) and Rosenfeld et al. (2007). Nonetheless we urge that this topic should be investigated much more extensively and in further detail.

American Meteorological Society:

New Unconventional Concepts and Legal Ramifications

https://ams.confex.com/ams/17WModWMA/techprogram/session_21926.htm

Chair: Joe Golden, Univ. of Colorado/CIRES/NOAA/GSD, Boulder, CO

2.1 Atmospheric heating as a research tool   

Lyle M. Jenkins, Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation, Houston, TX; and B. J. Eastlund

https://ams.confex.com/ams/17WModWMA/techprogram/paper_139228.htm

https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/139228.pdf

2.2 Reducing hurricane intensity by cooling the upper mixed layer using arrays of Atmocean, Inc.'s wave-driven upwelling pumps   

Philip W. Kithil, Atmocean, Inc., Santa Fe, NM; and I. Ginis

https://ams.confex.com/ams/17WModWMA/techprogram/paper_139127.htm

2.3 On Engineering Hurricanes   

William R. Cotton, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO; and S. M. Saleeby

https://ams.confex.com/ams/17WModWMA/techprogram/paper_139450.htm

https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/139450.pdf

2.4 A machine to get rid of hurricanes   

Brian Sandler, none, West Bloomfield, MI

https://ams.confex.com/ams/17WModWMA/techprogram/paper_137069.htm

https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/137069.pdf

I understand that people will continue to experiment in the skies, all we ask is that all the secrecy end so that the effects of these experiments can be peer reviewed, and the public can be fore-warned.  I'm still working on this:

1. Create a “multilateral registry of cloud seeding, geoengineering, and atmospheric experimentation events with information and data collection on key characteristics” [1].
2. Create a publicly available multilateral registry website, with hourly updates on atmospheric activities.
3. Require nations/states/persons to notify the multilateral registry (at least) 24 hours prior to initiation of atmospheric experimentation/modification to ensure public notice, and liability should said experimentation/modification cause monetary, environmental, or physical losses.

Transparency and discussion are key.

~ Jim Lee

Climate Viewer News http://climateviewer.com/ (803) 450-4305

[Andrew Lockley]

There are a few responses to this online. Please see Gardner:

http://dcgeoconsortium.org/2014/07/24/quantitative-evaluation-of-the-public-response-to-climate-engineering-a-reply-critique-guest-post-meryl-p-gardner-university-of-delaware/

which is again replied to by Wright et al

http://dcgeoconsortium.org/2014/08/13/a-quantitative-evaluation-of-the-public-response-to-climate-engineering-reply-to-gardner-guest-post-malcolm-j-wright-damon-a-h-teagle-and-pamela-m-feetham/

A possibly comparable study (Kniebes et al) is below, which I believe
also suffers from the problem identified by Ken - in that it's all
down to how you tell the story.

https://www.ifw-members.ifw-kiel.de/publications/informed-and-uninformed-opinions-on-new-measures-to-address-climate-change/KWP%201936.pdf

Personally, I don't much care for public opinion about technologies
that are half developed. I'd rather find out if they actually work.

A

[Greg Rau]

See article linked below, begging these questions: Is it time yet to:

1) admit that CCS (as currently formulated) is not and cannot be deployed in time and at sufficient scale to solve the problem?

2) support R&D on alternative, retrofittable, point source mitigation technologies?

3) challenge the myths that CDR is too expensive, risky, ineffectual, ethically challenged and socially unjust?

4) all of the above?

5) none of the above. Let's just build seawalls and adapt? Or do SRM?

I'd say the ball is in the politicians' and policymakers' court on these questions, apparently with the blinds shut and the sound canceling devices on (comment attached).

Greg 

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/8/084018

Abstract
The world not only continues to build new coal-fired power plants, but built more new coal plants in the past decade than in any previous decade. Worldwide, an average of 89 gigawatts per year (GW yr–1) of new coal generating capacity was added between 2010 and 2012, 23 GW yr–1 more than in the 2000–2009 time period and 56 GW yr–1 more than in the 1990–1999 time period. Natural gas plants show a similar pattern. Assuming these plants operate for 40 years, the fossil-fuel burning plants built in 2012 will emit approximately 19 billion tons of CO2 (Gt CO2) over their lifetimes, versus 14 Gt CO2 actually emitted by all operating fossil fuel power plants in 2012. We find that total committed emissions related to the power sector are growing at a rate of about 4% per year, and reached 307 (with an estimated uncertainty of 192–439) Gt CO2 in 2012. These facts are not well known in the energy policy community, where annual emissions receive far more attention than future emissions related to new capital investments. This paper demonstrates the potential for 'commitment accounting' to inform public policy by quantifying future emissions implied by current investments.