SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering
Leon Di Marco
Solar geoengineering: Risk of ‘termination shock’ overplayed, study says
The policy options put forward in the paper do not require decision-makers to “behave with perfect rationality”, the authors note, but that they “must just avoid wanton irrationality”.
Although this may seem reasonable, says Prof Alan Robock of Rutgers University, “unreasonable policy decisions are made all the time”. He asks: “Can we count on future political actors to be reasonable?”
It is also worth remembering that the potential for termination shock is just one of many other potential risks and concerns with SRM, he tells Carbon Brief:
“Even if termination shock were less likely, there are still many reasons why SRM would not be a robust policy option.”
That said, Robock “completely agrees” with the last paragraph of the paper, which argues that the solution to global warming is mitigation and adaptation so that SRM is not necessary in the first place:
“Our final conclusion is the most obvious and important. The best way to avoid termination would be to avoid a situation where a large amount of SRM would be needed to reduce committed climate risks. Strong action on mitigation would reduce the amount of SRM necessary to maintain a stable global temperature.
The development of safe and scalable CO2 removal techniques could reduce the cooling needed from SRM after deployment, and strong adaptation investment would reduce the suffering from the residual climate impacts to which Earth is already committed.”
Parker, A. and Irvine, P. J. (2018) The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering, Earth’s Future, doi:10.1002/2017EF000735
Wil Burns
- It should be emphasized at the outset that that the potentially catastrophic implications of the termination/rebound effect (which I think were actually underplayed in the EF article) places an extremely high burden of proof on anyone who supports deployment of SAI if the precautionary principle/approach is to mean anything in the context of international environmental law, and it should. I don’t think this piece comes near to meeting that burden;
- Parker, et al. argue that peak shaving, i.e. limited deployment of SRM technologies, might obviate the threats associated with the termination effect. Beyond the fact that this assertion is based on what remains extremely speculative modeling, it presumes two things: 1. The world community as a whole, without unilateral dissent, agrees as to what the “optimal” temperature should be over the course of the next 50-100 years, which is not likely to be true (Russia and Canada, for example, in less guarded moments, will admit that they believe that substantial increases in temperature may produce net benefits for them in terms of increases in agricultural productivity); and b. Given this reality, there’s a central authority with their hand on the thermostat (and this argument is also germane to the assertion that we could agree to a scheduled phase-out of SAI deployment). While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM largely because of the feckless response of the world community to climate change, they indulge the fiction that this same community will now come together to agree to binding limits on the deployment of SAI, and that individual countries will cede sovereignty. That does not reflect my 35 years of experience in international negotiations associated with climate change;
- Parker et al. also argue that a “belt and suspenders” approach to SAI deployment, i.e. having backup systems in place, would ensure that the termination effect did not occur. Again, this assumes a high level of coordination at the international level that is belied by climate politics to date. It also ignores a broader question, which is whether “termination” might occur as a consequence of the actual failure of SAI in the longer term. While we have some empirical evidence from volcanic events, e.g. Pinatubo, injection of sulfur into the stratosphere in the short term would exert a cooling effect, we do not know what happens with ongoing injections, and there’s some research that indicates that long-term bio-geochemical feedbacks might severely denude the effectiveness of said approach, creating a “natural” termination effect;
- And, finally, it needs to be emphasized that large-scale deployment of an SAI approach would require governance (including the Rube Goldberg approach advocated here by Parker, et al, i.e. peak shaving, back-up systems, etc.) for CENTURIES or perhaps a MILLENNIUM. As Marcia McNutt suggested a few years ago, such governance architecture would be unprecedented in the history of mankind.
wil
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Wil Burns
- It should be emphasized at the outset that that the potentially catastrophic implications of the termination/rebound effect (which I think were actually underplayed in the EF article) places an extremely high burden of proof on anyone who supports deployment of SAI if the precautionary principle/approach is to mean anything in the context of international environmental law, and it should. I don’t think this piece comes near to meeting that burden;
- Parker, et al. argue that peak shaving, i.e. limited deployment of SRM technologies, might obviate the threats associated with the termination effect. Beyond the fact that this assertion is based on what remains extremely speculative modeling, it presumes two things: 1. The world community as a whole, without unilateral dissent, agrees as to what the “optimal” temperature should be over the course of the next 50-100 years, which is not likely to be true (Russia and Canada, for example, in less guarded moments, will admit that they believe that substantial increases in temperature may produce net benefits for them in terms of increases in agricultural productivity); and b. Given this reality, there’s a central authority with their hand on the thermostat (and this argument is also germane to the assertion that we could agree to a scheduled phase-out of SAI deployment). While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM largely because of the feckless response of the world community to climate change, they indulge the fiction that this same community will now come together to agree to binding limits on the deployment of SAI, and that individual countries will cede sovereignty. That does not reflect my 35 years of experience in international negotiations associated with climate change;
- Parker et al. also argue that a “belt and suspenders” approach to SAI deployment, i.e. having backup systems in place, would ensure that the termination effect did not occur. Again, this assumes a high level of coordination at the international level that is belied by climate politics to date. It also ignores a broader question, which is whether “termination” might occur as a consequence of the actual failure of SAI in the longer term. While we have some empirical evidence from volcanic events, e.g. Pinatubo, injection of sulfur into the stratosphere in the short term would exert a cooling effect, we do not know what happens with ongoing injections, and there’s some research that indicates that long-term bio-geochemical feedbacks might severely denude the effectiveness of said approach, creating a “natural” termination effect;
- And, finally, it needs to be emphasized that large-scale deployment of an SAI approach would require governance (including the Rube Goldberg approach advocated here by Parker, et al, i.e. peak shaving, back-up systems, etc.) for CENTURIES or perhaps a MILLENNIUM. As Marcia McNutt suggested a few years ago, such governance architecture would be unprecedented in the history of mankind.
wil
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From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com [mailto:carbondiox...@googlegroups.com]
On Behalf Of Leon Di Marco
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2018 6:10 PM
To: Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
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Douglas MacMartin
Wil,
No offense, but I’m more gobsmacked by your response than anything in this!
Two things:
1) Nowhere in the article, nor in any of my conversations, is there any suggestion consistent with “While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM” . You’ve been involved in this debate long enough, you know perfectly well that Andy doesn’t advocate SRM, and indeed I’ve never heard a single person advocate doing it (though I know a couple of people who have at least said something of the form “if X was true then we should” where we all know that X isn’t true, typically “X” being “ignoring the sociopolitical concerns”; that’s as close to “advocate” as I’ve ever heard anyone get to, other than the Dalai Lama and Gingrich who were both woefully uninformed). Lots of us advocate doing research and thinking carefully about it, including Andy. (Nor do I think he used language like “obviate”, which to me suggests that you think he thinks the risk is zero, rather than what he actually wrote that there are ways to reduce the risk. Agree that judging how effectively one can reduce the risk is a challenge about which reasonable people will disagree, though arguing that it is possible to reduce the risk seems rather obvious to me.)
2) Directly related; the reason many of us advocate research and thinking carefully about it is because the future is scary no matter what. If you think implementing some limited amount of SRM, and having multiple nations capable of deploying is a “Rube Goldberg”, do you really think that it will be trivial to adjust to a 3 or 4 degree world with associated millennial-scale commitments to sea level rise etc? Yes, governance of SRM would be unprecedented, but so would governance of a future world without SRM. I think humility on both sides would be warranted; yes there are serious risks to consider for doing SRM, yes there are serious risks to consider for not doing SRM, we certainly don’t know the balance of risks today to say what “should” be chosen in the future because we don’t know either risk well enough, but regardless we aren’t the ones choosing anyway (for which I’m certainly glad). I will object to anyone on either side who thinks we already know everything we need to know to make a decision, and that includes both physical risks and societal risks. So I could equally well accuse you of insouciance when it comes to the risks associated with climate change.
a. And specifically, I don’t agree that “risk of termination” is a show-stopper sufficient to argue that there are no circumstances under which we would ever deploy SRM, and I don’t agree that “risk of termination” is so trivially manageable that we can forget about it. Substitute any other risk, or “governance” or whatever you want, and my sentence would be roughly the same.
b. I don’t even know how to assign the sign of applying the precautionary principle to SRM. Nor do I think anyone knows enough to know that yet.
Bottom line is, I think we’re all in total agreement (you, me, and Andy, though I can’t speak for either of you) – we really need to mitigate and develop/deploy CDR at scale, and then if we work hard enough and we’re also lucky then we won’t be faced with having to decide about this. Just that folks like Andy or me aren’t sufficiently confident, and think we need to think carefully about it.
doug
From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com [mailto:carbondiox...@googlegroups.com]
On Behalf Of Wil Burns
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2018 12:43 AM
To: Leon Di Marco <len...@gmail.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [CDR] SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering
1. It should be emphasized at the outset that that the potentially catastrophic implications of the termination/rebound effect (which I think were actually underplayed in the EF article) places an extremely high burden of proof on anyone who supports deployment of SAI if the precautionary principle/approach is to mean anything in the context of international environmental law, and it should. I don’t think this piece comes near to meeting that burden;
2. Parker, et al. argue that peak shaving, i.e. limited deployment of SRM technologies, might obviate the threats associated with the termination effect. Beyond the fact that this assertion is based on what remains extremely speculative modeling, it presumes two things: 1. The world community as a whole, without unilateral dissent, agrees as to what the “optimal” temperature should be over the course of the next 50-100 years, which is not likely to be true (Russia and Canada, for example, in less guarded moments, will admit that they believe that substantial increases in temperature may produce net benefits for them in terms of increases in agricultural productivity); and b. Given this reality, there’s a central authority with their hand on the thermostat (and this argument is also germane to the assertion that we could agree to a scheduled phase-out of SAI deployment). While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM largely because of the feckless response of the world community to climate change, they indulge the fiction that this same community will now come together to agree to binding limits on the deployment of SAI, and that individual countries will cede sovereignty. That does not reflect my 35 years of experience in international negotiations associated with climate change;
3. Parker et al. also argue that a “belt and suspenders” approach to SAI deployment, i.e. having backup systems in place, would ensure that the termination effect did not occur. Again, this assumes a high level of coordination at the international level that is belied by climate politics to date. It also ignores a broader question, which is whether “termination” might occur as a consequence of the actual failure of SAI in the longer term. While we have some empirical evidence from volcanic events, e.g. Pinatubo, injection of sulfur into the stratosphere in the short term would exert a cooling effect, we do not know what happens with ongoing injections, and there’s some research that indicates that long-term bio-geochemical feedbacks might severely denude the effectiveness of said approach, creating a “natural” termination effect;
4. And, finally, it needs to be emphasized that large-scale deployment of an SAI approach would require governance (including the Rube Goldberg approach advocated here by Parker, et al, i.e. peak shaving, back-up systems, etc.) for CENTURIES or perhaps a MILLENNIUM. As Marcia McNutt suggested a few years ago, such governance architecture would be unprecedented in the history of mankind.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/BLUPR04MB659F36171AC9887B4A4A8D1A4D30%40BLUPR04MB659.namprd04.prod.outlook.com.
honegger.matthias
And to add my personal observation: While I find them often a good source of inspiration, I don't think that exchanges generated in google group discussions are very helpful for cleanly unpacking arguments and thorough academic reasoning; in this case I believe this would require making key points of contention the subject of public commentaries, which I think would in fact be a great contribution to the field.
- advocacy of SRM vs. advocacy of research on SRM
- how to unpack the sometimes very different types of risk (I see this as a large and continuously evolving field)
- implications of the above on the precautionary principle
- governance implications (long-term, incentive structures etc.)
- ...
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Michael MacCracken
Wil--I'm with Doug on this--indeed, likely even more so. The equilibrium sea level sensitivity based on paleoclimatic analysis is something like 15-20 meters (!!!) of sea level rise per degree C of global average temperature. During the glacial maximum 20 ka, sea level was down 120 meters and global average temperature was 6 C lower; go back to distant warm periods and there Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (so 70 m of sea level equivalent) weren't there when global average temperature was 4 C or so higher.
As to the time to get to equilibrium, it took 12 ka to lose 120 m of ice when the global average temperature was (on average) rising at about 1 C per 2000 years. We are headed to be up 3 C in 200 years, so 30 times faster. There is a good bit of uncertainty, but paleo evidence indicates ice is lost much, much faster than it is rebuilt, so I'd suggest the key issue is going to be the peak temperature increase (and we are on track to overshoot 1.5 or 2 C by a good bit). The UKMO model some years ago suggested the thermal response time might be a couple thousand years, but given ice movement/flow is likely a key loss process, I'd suggest we might be lucky if the response time is 1000 years to equilibrium, which implies we'll get to sea level rates of rise of a couple of meters per century, and once started, hard to see how that is stopped.
The 1.5 to 2 C target was a politically chosen target--what they hope/wished could be achieved. The IPCC 1.5 C report drafts have been interpreting much warming as the long term sustained level of rise and basically not talking about the equilibrium sea level implications--basically just accepting this level of warming as somehow acceptable for society. As Hansen et al pointed out in a paper several years ago, the significant changes starting occurring at a global warming of about 0.5 C, and what we really need to be doing to be able to fulfill the three conditionals in the objective of the UNFCCC convention (try having a strong global economy when SL is rising 2 m/century and there are more very strong storms), in my view, is quickly get back to less than 0.5 C warming. Mitigation can't get us there, at least not at the slow rate nations are responding; very substantial CDR phase up (so much more than is talked about in the IPCC 1.5 C report) in addition to mitigation can address the problem, likely taking over a century the limited way that nations have been responding. Early peak shaving by SRM is the only way to quickly get down and hope to slow the loss process from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that has already started.
There are also other risks, well illustrated by the earlier Hansen et al. article with the shifting Gaussian distributions. As he has been noting, hot anomalies that were 0.1% likelihood in the mid-20th century are now occurring 10% of the time. That amplified, disproportionate type of increase in the likelihood of extreme events, whether coastal inundations as SL rises, occurrence of extremes, etc., is going to be occurring, and that this could include the increasing likelihood of severe food and water crises seems quite plausible.
Basically, in my view, the seriousness of the situation that we
face has been understated (quite a natural consequence of
scientists wanting high confidence in their/our results). The
intent of slowly increasing SRM, in my view based on the situation
that we face, should be to keep the global average temperature
from rising and gradually pull it back to roughly the temperature
it had in the mid 20th century or so (I really doubt Canada or
Russia or anyone want the prospective SL rise even if they might
want the warming--and the thawing of their permafrosted regions
would not be all that desirable). In my view, the uncertainties
relating to temperature rising to levels with which we do not have
any historical experience are a good bit larger than the
uncertainties that would be associated with how peak-shaving SRM
would work. In my view, starting now and learning as we go (so
refining the timing and pattern of SRM application as we go) would
quite likely be less risk than letting warming continue and
thinking about SRM as a possible emergency response when the
temperature has gone up a good bit more.
How we get the governance set up in time to really limit the severe consequences that lie ahead is the challenge--I think much faster consideration is needed, and this will only likely come if there is a much more forthright realization of the insufficiency of the path we are on and the impacts that we are committed to with our slow response to date. At the very least, research and exploration of optimal approaches needs to be greatly accelerated while governance discussions go on, aiming for early conclusion.
Best, Mike MacCracken
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Wil Burns
When I read pieces such as this, I see a clear strain of advocacy, i.e. extremely serious risks associated with SRM deployment are being given short shrift. I’ve also seen public presentations of this research that essentially mocks those who raise the concerns about termination. As one African minister at one of these presentations remarked to me, it’s essentially if they are telling us to shut up and trust them. For me, the threat of the termination effect is one that can’t be wished away, and this risk is so momentous that it leads me to argue that we should be concentrating our efforts on short-term measures to avoid passing critical thresholds, e.g. addressing black carbon and further accelerating the phase-out of HFCs, as well as a longer-term strategy of exploring the prospects for CDR options and far more aggressive measures for de-carbonizing the economy and picking the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency. I’ll stop there, and promise not to darken the doorway of the CDR list with any further discussion of SRM. wil
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From: Douglas MacMartin [mailto:dgm...@cornell.edu]
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2018 5:08 AM
To: Wil Burns <w...@feronia.org>; Leon Di Marco <len...@gmail.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [CDR] SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering
Wil,
No offense, but I’m more gobsmacked by your response than anything in this!
Two things:
- Nowhere in the article, nor in any of my conversations, is there any suggestion consistent with “While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM” . You’ve been involved in this debate long enough, you know perfectly well that Andy doesn’t advocate SRM, and indeed I’ve never heard a single person advocate doing it (though I know a couple of people who have at least said something of the form “if X was true then we should” where we all know that X isn’t true, typically “X” being “ignoring the sociopolitical concerns”; that’s as close to “advocate” as I’ve ever heard anyone get to, other than the Dalai Lama and Gingrich who were both woefully uninformed). Lots of us advocate doing research and thinking carefully about it, including Andy. (Nor do I think he used language like “obviate”, which to me suggests that you think he thinks the risk is zero, rather than what he actually wrote that there are ways to reduce the risk. Agree that judging how effectively one can reduce the risk is a challenge about which reasonable people will disagree, though arguing that it is possible to reduce the risk seems rather obvious to me.)
- Directly related; the reason many of us advocate research and thinking carefully about it is because the future is scary no matter what. If you think implementing some limited amount of SRM, and having multiple nations capable of deploying is a “Rube Goldberg”, do you really think that it will be trivial to adjust to a 3 or 4 degree world with associated millennial-scale commitments to sea level rise etc? Yes, governance of SRM would be unprecedented, but so would governance of a future world without SRM. I think humility on both sides would be warranted; yes there are serious risks to consider for doing SRM, yes there are serious risks to consider for not doing SRM, we certainly don’t know the balance of risks today to say what “should” be chosen in the future because we don’t know either risk well enough, but regardless we aren’t the ones choosing anyway (for which I’m certainly glad). I will object to anyone on either side who thinks we already know everything we need to know to make a decision, and that includes both physical risks and societal risks. So I could equally well accuse you of insouciance when it comes to the risks associated with climate change.
- And specifically, I don’t agree that “risk of termination” is a show-stopper sufficient to argue that there are no circumstances under which we would ever deploy SRM, and I don’t agree that “risk of termination” is so trivially manageable that we can forget about it. Substitute any other risk, or “governance” or whatever you want, and my sentence would be roughly the same.
- I don’t even know how to assign the sign of applying the precautionary principle to SRM. Nor do I think anyone knows enough to know that yet.
Bottom line is, I think we’re all in total agreement (you, me, and Andy, though I can’t speak for either of you) – we really need to mitigate and develop/deploy CDR at scale, and then if we work hard enough and we’re also lucky then we won’t be faced with having to decide about this. Just that folks like Andy or me aren’t sufficiently confident, and think we need to think carefully about it.
doug
From:
carbondiox...@googlegroups.com [mailto:carbondiox...@googlegroups.com]
On Behalf Of Wil Burns
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2018 12:43 AM
To: Leon Di Marco <len...@gmail.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [CDR] SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering
I am not sure why I’m still gobsmacked by Andy Parker’s insouciance when it comes to the risks associated with SRM approaches such as SAI, but I still am. A couple of thoughts about this piece:
- It should be emphasized at the outset that that the potentially catastrophic implications of the termination/rebound effect (which I think were actually underplayed in the EF article) places an extremely high burden of proof on anyone who supports deployment of SAI if the precautionary principle/approach is to mean anything in the context of international environmental law, and it should. I don’t think this piece comes near to meeting that burden;
- Parker, et al. argue that peak shaving, i.e. limited deployment of SRM technologies, might obviate the threats associated with the termination effect. Beyond the fact that this assertion is based on what remains extremely speculative modeling, it presumes two things: 1. The world community as a whole, without unilateral dissent, agrees as to what the “optimal” temperature should be over the course of the next 50-100 years, which is not likely to be true (Russia and Canada, for example, in less guarded moments, will admit that they believe that substantial increases in temperature may produce net benefits for them in terms of increases in agricultural productivity); and b. Given this reality, there’s a central authority with their hand on the thermostat (and this argument is also germane to the assertion that we could agree to a scheduled phase-out of SAI deployment). While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM largely because of the feckless response of the world community to climate change, they indulge the fiction that this same community will now come together to agree to binding limits on the deployment of SAI, and that individual countries will cede sovereignty. That does not reflect my 35 years of experience in international negotiations associated with climate change;
- Parker et al. also argue that a “belt and suspenders” approach to SAI deployment, i.e. having backup systems in place, would ensure that the termination effect did not occur. Again, this assumes a high level of coordination at the international level that is belied by climate politics to date. It also ignores a broader question, which is whether “termination” might occur as a consequence of the actual failure of SAI in the longer term. While we have some empirical evidence from volcanic events, e.g. Pinatubo, injection of sulfur into the stratosphere in the short term would exert a cooling effect, we do not know what happens with ongoing injections, and there’s some research that indicates that long-term bio-geochemical feedbacks might severely denude the effectiveness of said approach, creating a “natural” termination effect;
Douglas MacMartin
Well said, and point taken. (I’ve talked to many people who are opposed to SRM simply because they’ve heard one particular individual – not one of these authors – talk about it while coming across, unintentionally, as sweeping all challenges under the rug.) Sorry to sound critical; just felt like you were committing the opposite sin of a priori dismissing SRM as unworkable. Which will depend at least as much (probably more so) on what non-SRM looks like as it does on what SRM looks like.
(And I trust that if I word something at some point that sounds like what you describe below, then you shouldn’t refrain from bluntly pointing that out; I’d rather know.)
I was going to take this off the CDR list, but it is relevant… we’re all depending on it! Future choices look like some combination of
1. Way more aggressive mitigation
2. Rapid ramp up to serious (tens, at least Gt/yr) CDR
3. Some level of SRM
4. Accept higher temperatures and pray we can adapt to whatever surprises the climate system throws at us
Pick any two, and without some serious and rapid change in direction, pick at least 3…
From: Wil Burns [mailto:w...@feronia.org]
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2018 10:52 AM
To: Douglas MacMartin <dgm...@cornell.edu>; Leon Di Marco <len...@gmail.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [CDR] SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering
When I read pieces such as this, I see a clear strain of advocacy, i.e. extremely serious risks associated with SRM deployment are being given short shrift. I’ve also seen public presentations of this research that essentially mocks those who raise the concerns about termination. As one African minister at one of these presentations remarked to me, it’s essentially if they are telling us to shut up and trust them. For me, the threat of the termination effect is one that can’t be wished away, and this risk is so momentous that it leads me to argue that we should be concentrating our efforts on short-term measures to avoid passing critical thresholds, e.g. addressing black carbon and further accelerating the phase-out of HFCs, as well as a longer-term strategy of exploring the prospects for CDR options and far more aggressive measures for de-carbonizing the economy and picking the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency. I’ll stop there, and promise not to darken the doorway of the CDR list with any further discussion of SRM. wil
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From: Douglas MacMartin [mailto:dgm...@cornell.edu]
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2018 5:08 AM
To: Wil Burns <w...@feronia.org>; Leon Di Marco <len...@gmail.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [CDR] SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering
Wil,
No offense, but I’m more gobsmacked by your response than anything in this!
Two things:
1) Nowhere in the article, nor in any of my conversations, is there any suggestion consistent with “While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM” . You’ve been involved in this debate long enough, you know perfectly well that Andy doesn’t advocate SRM, and indeed I’ve never heard a single person advocate doing it (though I know a couple of people who have at least said something of the form “if X was true then we should” where we all know that X isn’t true, typically “X” being “ignoring the sociopolitical concerns”; that’s as close to “advocate” as I’ve ever heard anyone get to, other than the Dalai Lama and Gingrich who were both woefully uninformed). Lots of us advocate doing research and thinking carefully about it, including Andy. (Nor do I think he used language like “obviate”, which to me suggests that you think he thinks the risk is zero, rather than what he actually wrote that there are ways to reduce the risk. Agree that judging how effectively one can reduce the risk is a challenge about which reasonable people will disagree, though arguing that it is possible to reduce the risk seems rather obvious to me.)
2) Directly related; the reason many of us advocate research and thinking carefully about it is because the future is scary no matter what. If you think implementing some limited amount of SRM, and having multiple nations capable of deploying is a “Rube Goldberg”, do you really think that it will be trivial to adjust to a 3 or 4 degree world with associated millennial-scale commitments to sea level rise etc? Yes, governance of SRM would be unprecedented, but so would governance of a future world without SRM. I think humility on both sides would be warranted; yes there are serious risks to consider for doing SRM, yes there are serious risks to consider for not doing SRM, we certainly don’t know the balance of risks today to say what “should” be chosen in the future because we don’t know either risk well enough, but regardless we aren’t the ones choosing anyway (for which I’m certainly glad). I will object to anyone on either side who thinks we already know everything we need to know to make a decision, and that includes both physical risks and societal risks. So I could equally well accuse you of insouciance when it comes to the risks associated with climate change.
a. And specifically, I don’t agree that “risk of termination” is a show-stopper sufficient to argue that there are no circumstances under which we would ever deploy SRM, and I don’t agree that “risk of termination” is so trivially manageable that we can forget about it. Substitute any other risk, or “governance” or whatever you want, and my sentence would be roughly the same.
b. I don’t even know how to assign the sign of applying the precautionary principle to SRM. Nor do I think anyone knows enough to know that yet.
Bottom line is, I think we’re all in total agreement (you, me, and Andy, though I can’t speak for either of you) – we really need to mitigate and develop/deploy CDR at scale, and then if we work hard enough and we’re also lucky then we won’t be faced with having to decide about this. Just that folks like Andy or me aren’t sufficiently confident, and think we need to think carefully about it.
doug
From:
carbondiox...@googlegroups.com [mailto:carbondiox...@googlegroups.com]
On Behalf Of Wil Burns
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2018 12:43 AM
To: Leon Di Marco <len...@gmail.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [CDR] SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering
I am not sure why I’m still gobsmacked by Andy Parker’s insouciance when it comes to the risks associated with SRM approaches such as SAI, but I still am. A couple of thoughts about this piece:
1. It should be emphasized at the outset that that the potentially catastrophic implications of the termination/rebound effect (which I think were actually underplayed in the EF article) places an extremely high burden of proof on anyone who supports deployment of SAI if the precautionary principle/approach is to mean anything in the context of international environmental law, and it should. I don’t think this piece comes near to meeting that burden;
2. Parker, et al. argue that peak shaving, i.e. limited deployment of SRM technologies, might obviate the threats associated with the termination effect. Beyond the fact that this assertion is based on what remains extremely speculative modeling, it presumes two things: 1. The world community as a whole, without unilateral dissent, agrees as to what the “optimal” temperature should be over the course of the next 50-100 years, which is not likely to be true (Russia and Canada, for example, in less guarded moments, will admit that they believe that substantial increases in temperature may produce net benefits for them in terms of increases in agricultural productivity); and b. Given this reality, there’s a central authority with their hand on the thermostat (and this argument is also germane to the assertion that we could agree to a scheduled phase-out of SAI deployment). While folks e.g. Parker advocate SRM largely because of the feckless response of the world community to climate change, they indulge the fiction that this same community will now come together to agree to binding limits on the deployment of SAI, and that individual countries will cede sovereignty. That does not reflect my 35 years of experience in international negotiations associated with climate change;
3. Parker et al. also argue that a “belt and suspenders” approach to SAI deployment, i.e. having backup systems in place, would ensure that the termination effect did not occur. Again, this assumes a high level of coordination at the international level that is belied by climate politics to date. It also ignores a broader question, which is whether “termination” might occur as a consequence of the actual failure of SAI in the longer term. While we have some empirical evidence from volcanic events, e.g. Pinatubo, injection of sulfur into the stratosphere in the short term would exert a cooling effect, we do not know what happens with ongoing injections, and there’s some research that indicates that long-term bio-geochemical feedbacks might severely denude the effectiveness of said approach, creating a “natural” termination effect;
4. And, finally, it needs to be emphasized that large-scale deployment of an SAI approach would require governance (including the Rube Goldberg approach advocated here by Parker, et al, i.e. peak shaving, back-up systems, etc.) for CENTURIES or perhaps a MILLENNIUM. As Marcia McNutt suggested a few years ago, such governance architecture would be unprecedented in the history of mankind.
Oliver Morton
this might well sit better there.
At which point, Wil, I'm afraid my agreement sort of runs out. The
paper by Andy and Pete just doesn't have the flaws you claim.
You say it presumes that "The world community as a whole, without
be over the course of the next 50-100 years"
decision to implement were taken in such a way as to win the widest
possible support, it says nothing about an optimising decision by the
world community as whole. It devotes significant time to what the
options open to political opponents of SRM -- unilateral, or indeed
multilateral, dissenters -- might be, and what other conditions need
to be in place for that dissent to lead to a termination shock.
Specifically, that a unanimity of actors capable of SRM has to be
convinced -- or have the belief imposed on them by force majeure --
that a termination shock is preferable to either continuing SRM or
phasing SRM out over a relatively small number of decades.
You also say it presumes that "there’s a central authority with their
hand on the thermostat".
Again, it doesn't. Indeed it lays welcome weight -- welcome in the
sense that I think it has been underplayed in previous discussions --
on the high likelihood that a world with SRM would be highly likely to
have various independent or quasi-independent players capable of
shouldering the SRM burden. In such a world there will be a number of
different parties that can choose to increase levels of SRM, or to
slow down any decrease. No one party can unilaterally choose to lower
them. This clearly has its problems, as Gernot and Marty's "free
driver" analysis shows. But they are not the problem of a single hand
on the thermostat, nor do they stem from the unlikelihood of "binding
limits" and all countries "ceding sovereignty". And they are not
problems that lead to a termination shock.
Is a world with multiple SRM capabilities likely? Consider another
thing which might be considered a global good: satellite positioning
services. For such systems to work they needs must be global, and so
in some narrow economic sense there needs to be only one. But in terms
of geopolitical strategy that's a non starter -- no major power is
going to rely on another for something so strategically important. So
China and Russia have satellite navigation systems which China, at
least, is in a position to develop further, and Europe is starting to
deploy another. This sort of redundancy is not, as your post suggests,
a "belt and braces" approach that requires "a high level of
strategic uncertainty and the perceived need for an ability to keep
acting in a self-interested and un-coordinated way. Climate politics
suggest that that which is self-interested and un-coordinated is not
unlikely.
This leads to another point where I think your logic lets you down.
You say that large scale SRM would "require...governance for CENTURIES
or perhaps a MILLENNIUM." There are quite plausible scenarios where
this is not true -- you allude to one yourself, when you talk of "peak
shaving", but there are others. You seem to think such scenarios
unlikely and their discussion dangerous (indeed your critique seems
founded on the idea that this article is in some way an argument in
favour peak shaving scenarios, which I think is a stretch, since the
term is never used). But they are an example of relatively short-term
SRM. However, continuing on the point about a commitment of centuries
or even a millennium, you say that that would require "a governance
architecture unprecedented in the history of mankind." That is an
unwarranted leap. Continuous governance does not imply a preserved
governance architecture; it just implies that, at a given time,
something is governed.
There is also a reference I don't understand. You say that there is
might severely denude the effectiveness of said approach, creating a
here? Such feedbacks would have to not just impose diminishing returns
on SRM, but also to have a threshold beyond which the effects of SRM
vanish completely and rapidly. I am at a loss as to what such
feedbacks might be.
I also agree with Doug McMartin on the precautionary principle; it is
not remotely obvious which way it should point in this discussion.
Best wishes
Oliver
> Co-Executive Director, Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment, School of
> International Service, American University
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> 650.281.9126 | w...@feronia.org | http://www.ceassessment.org | Skype:
> wil.burns |
> 2650 Haste St., Towle Hall #G07, Berkeley, CA 94720| View my research on my
> SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=240348
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>
> Co-Executive Director, Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment, School of
> International Service, American University
>
> 650.281.9126 | w...@feronia.org | http://www.ceassessment.org | Skype:
> wil.burns |
> 2650 Haste St., Towle Hall #G07, Berkeley, CA 94720| View my research on my
> SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=240348
>
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Oliver Morton
Senior Editor, Essays and Briefings
The Economist
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My book "The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change The World"
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"Ambitious, enthralling and slightly strange" -- Bryan Appleyard, The
Sunday Times
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Michael MacCracken
Hi Wil--What I do advocate is a comparative analysis of, basically, global warming (with all the efficiency, mitigation, carbon removal, etc. that can realistically be projected) with SRM seeking to keep global average temperature in range experienced during 20th century versus going forward without SRM (with all the efficiency, mitigation, carbon removal, etc. that can realistically be projected). What I sense has been done far too much is evaluating SRM on its own, which I think would be fine were global warming not going on (so back in the 1960s when geoengineering was proposed to open the Arctic, etc. as opposed to today, where it is being proposed to keep our climate from changing.
On the urgency issue--if one wants to stay below 1.5 C, the world at near current emissions will use up the suggested allowed amount in a decade or two (do recall that cutting sulfate cooling also contributes to the warming influence). And right now, roughly 80% of the world's energy is coming from fossil fuels. The chances of keeping below 1.5 C is pretty low, and similarly for below 2 C--there is virtually no indication that emissions can be phased down this fast (and when not working on geoengineering I am engaged in trying to promote approaches to cutting emissions as fast as possible--my view is we have to do everything, I do not just push the need for climate intervention.
And I don't accept that the SRM has to be as finely tuned as you suggest--natural variability assures we will have a band and we are moving a band of conditions back to a lower average--more into the range that the world has experienced in the past.
Best, Mike
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