Some say we can ‘solar-engineer’ ourselves out of the climate crisis. Don’t buy it Ray Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann
Geoeng Info
Some say we can ‘solar-engineer’ ourselves out of the climate crisis. Don’t buy it
What could go wrong with this idea? Well, quite a lot
So there is promise. But there is also great peril looming in the foreground.
Just as the world, at long last, is getting its act together, an ominous sun-dimming cloud has appeared on the horizon, threatening to derail these nascent efforts. That cloud comes in the form of technologies whose proponents call – somewhat deceptively – “solar geoengineering”.
So-called “solar geoengineering” doesn’t actually modify the sun itself. Instead, it reduces incoming sunlight by other means, such as putting chemicals in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight to space. It addresses a symptom of global heating, rather than the root cause, which is human-caused increase in the atmosphere’s burden of carbon dioxide.
While it is certainly true that reducing sunlight can cause cooling (we know that from massive but episodic volcanic eruptions such as Pinatubo in 1991), it acts on a very different part of the climate system than carbon dioxide. And efforts to offset carbon dioxide-caused warming with sunlight reduction would yield a very different climate, perhaps one unlike any seen before in Earth’s history, with massive shifts in atmospheric circulation and rainfall patterns and possible worsening of droughts.
What could possibly go wrong? Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Under a White Sky documents case after case where supposedly benign environmental interventions have had unintended consequences requiring layer after layer of escalating further technological interventions to avert disaster. When the impacts are local, as in Australia’s struggle to deal with consequences of deliberate introduction of the cane toad, the spread of catastrophe can be contained (so far, at least). But what happens when the unintended consequences afflict the entire planet?
Then there is the mismatch of time scales. The heating effect of carbon dioxide persists for 10,000 years or more, absent unproven technologies for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In contrast, the sun-dimming particles in question drop out in a year or less, meaning that if you come to rely on geoengineering for survival, you need to keep it up essentially forever. Think of it as climate methadone.
And if we are ever forced to stop, we are hit with dangerous withdrawal symptoms – a catastrophic “termination shock” wherein a century of pent-up global heating emerges within a decade. Some proponents insist we can always stop if we don’t like the result. Well yes, we can stop. Just like if you’re being kept alive by a ventilator with no hope of a cure, you can turn it off – and suffer the consequences.
Geoengineering evangelists at Harvard have pushed for expanded consideration of such technology; as panic over the climate crisis has grown, so too has support for perilous geoengineering schemes spread well beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts. And the lines between basic theoretical research (which is worthwhile – climate model experiments, for example, have revealed the potential perils) on the one hand, and field testing and implementation on the other, have increasingly been blurred.
Solar geoengineering has been cited in the Democratic Climate Action Plan. MIT’s Maria Zuber, incoming co-chair of Biden’s president’s council of advisers on science and technology (PCAST) is on record as favoring an expanded federal geoengineering research program. And now the other shoe has dropped – the US National Research Council has recently released a report going well beyond the very cautious, tentative recommendations for continued research in the 2015 NRC report one of us (Pierrehumbert) co-authored.
The new report pushes for a massive $200m five-year funding program. The growing support is based on a fundamental misconception, captured in the NRC report’s justification statement: that we likely won’t achieve the necessary decarbonization of our economy in time to avoid massive climate damages, so this technology might be needed.
Such “Plan B” framing is the worst possible justification for developing solar geoengineering technology. It is laden in moral hazard – providing, as it does, an excuse for fossil fuel interests and their advocates to continue with business as usual. Why reduce carbon pollution if there is a cheap workaround? In The New Climate War, one of us (Mann) argues that geoengineering advocacy is indeed one of the key delay tactics used by polluters.
SALTER Stephen
Hi All
The root cause of the root cause of the CO2 problem is the excessive population of humans. The best solution would be genetic engineering of a virus with high mortality and transmission efficiency. Covid 19 is pathetically inadequate. We would need to crank up the rate of variant production, improve the width of age sensitivity and also make it selective for skin colour, eye shape and perhaps even political attitudes.
Stephen
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design
School of Engineering
Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3DW
0131 650 5704
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBB6WtH_Ni8
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Some say we can ‘solar-engineer’ ourselves out of the climate crisis. Don’t buy it
Ray Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann
What could go wrong with this idea? Well, quite a lot
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Daniele Visioni
On 23 Apr 2021, at 08:53, SALTER Stephen <S.Sa...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi All
The root cause of the root cause of the CO2 problem is the excessive population of humans. The best solution would be genetic engineering of a virus with high mortality and transmission efficiency. Covid 19 is pathetically inadequate. We would need to crank up the rate of variant production, improve the width of age sensitivity and also make it selective for skin colour, eye shape and perhaps even political attitudes.
Stephen
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design
School of Engineering
Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3DW
0131 650 5704
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBB6WtH_Ni8
From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com <geoengi...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Geoeng Info
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2021 9:20 PM
To: Geoengi...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [geo] Some say we can ‘solar-engineer’ ourselves out of the climate crisis. Don’t buy it Ray Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann
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You should only click on links or attachments if you are certain that the email is genuine and the content is safe.
Some say we can ‘solar-engineer’ ourselves out of the climate crisis. Don’t buy it
Ray Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann
What could go wrong with this idea? Well, quite a lot
<~WRD0000.jpg>
‘The heating effect of carbon dioxide persists for ten thousand years or more, absent unproven technologies for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.’ Photograph: Phil Noble/ReutersAs we arrive at Earth Day, there is renewed hope in the battle to avert catastrophic climate change. Under newly elected president Joe Biden, the US has reasserted global leadership in this defining challenge of our time, bringing world leaders together in Washington this week to galvanize the global effort to ramp down carbon emissions in the decade ahead.
So there is promise. But there is also great peril looming in the foreground.
Just as the world, at long last, is getting its act together, an ominous sun-dimming cloud has appeared on the horizon, threatening to derail these nascent efforts. That cloud comes in the form of technologies whose proponents call – somewhat deceptively – “solar geoengineering”.
So-called “solar geoengineering” doesn’t actually modify the sun itself. Instead, it reduces incoming sunlight by other means, such as putting chemicals in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight to space. It addresses a symptom of global heating, rather than the root cause, which is human-caused increase in the atmosphere’s burden of carbon dioxide.
While it is certainly true that reducing sunlight can cause cooling (we know that from massive but episodic volcanic eruptions such as Pinatubo in 1991), it acts on a very different part of the climate system than carbon dioxide. And efforts to offset carbon dioxide-caused warming with sunlight reduction would yield a very different climate, perhaps one unlike any seen before in Earth’s history, with massive shifts in atmospheric circulation and rainfall patterns and possible worsening of droughts.
What could possibly go wrong? Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Under a White Sky documents case after case where supposedly benign environmental interventions have had unintended consequences requiring layer after layer of escalating further technological interventions to avert disaster. When the impacts are local, as in Australia’s struggle to deal with consequences of deliberate introduction of the cane toad, the spread of catastrophe can be contained (so far, at least). But what happens when the unintended consequences afflict the entire planet?
Then there is the mismatch of time scales. The heating effect of carbon dioxide persists for 10,000 years or more, absent unproven technologies for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In contrast, the sun-dimming particles in question drop out in a year or less, meaning that if you come to rely on geoengineering for survival, you need to keep it up essentially forever. Think of it as climate methadone.
And if we are ever forced to stop, we are hit with dangerous withdrawal symptoms – a catastrophic “termination shock” wherein a century of pent-up global heating emerges within a decade. Some proponents insist we can always stop if we don’t like the result. Well yes, we can stop. Just like if you’re being kept alive by a ventilator with no hope of a cure, you can turn it off – and suffer the consequences.
Geoengineering evangelists at Harvard have pushed for expanded consideration of such technology; as panic over the climate crisis has grown, so too has support for perilous geoengineering schemes spread well beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts. And the lines between basic theoretical research (which is worthwhile – climate model experiments, for example, have revealed the potential perils) on the one hand, and field testing and implementation on the other, have increasingly been blurred.
Solar geoengineering has been cited in the Democratic Climate Action Plan. MIT’s Maria Zuber, incoming co-chair of Biden’s president’s council of advisers on science and technology (PCAST) is on record as favoring an expanded federal geoengineering research program. And now the other shoe has dropped – the US National Research Council has recently released a report going well beyond the very cautious, tentative recommendations for continued research in the 2015 NRC report one of us (Pierrehumbert) co-authored.
The new report pushes for a massive $200m five-year funding program. The growing support is based on a fundamental misconception, captured in the NRC report’s justification statement: that we likely won’t achieve the necessary decarbonization of our economy in time to avoid massive climate damages, so this technology might be needed.
Such “Plan B” framing is the worst possible justification for developing solar geoengineering technology. It is laden in moral hazard – providing, as it does, an excuse for fossil fuel interests and their advocates to continue with business as usual. Why reduce carbon pollution if there is a cheap workaround? In The New Climate War, one of us (Mann) argues that geoengineering advocacy is indeed one of the key delay tactics used by polluters.
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Andrew Lockley
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SALTER Stephen
Daniele
I have had Covid myself and so I agree that it is not all funny. My intention was to shock.
The problem with having only emission reduction by 2050 is means that typhoons, floods, droughts, bushfires, sea-level rise, Arctic ice loss and damage to coral will all be worse, perhaps much worse than at present. If you think that present conditions are not acceptable you have to conclude that zero emission is not low enough. As well as reducing emissions we will have to remove greenhouse gases, probably with help from phytoplankton, and also do direct cooling a soon as we can and then ramp it down when emissions are under control.
To help inform opinions, the graph below shows estimates of the amount of salt of all sizes thrown up by sea waves plotted against the date of the estimate.
The small blue circle is the mean at 5.4 gigatonne per year.
The thickening of the black line on the X axis between 1959 and 2020 shows the mass of sea salt with the mass of 10 ^ -14 grams chosen for a high Kohler nucleation efficiency which we would need for John Latham’s proposal for marine cloud brightening. This gives what we hope is enough to cancel thermal effects since preindustrial times. The size of spray is actually where there is a gap between the masses of Aitken and accumulation modes of natural aerosol.
Spraying can be stopped at the click of a mouse and salt will be washed back into the sea at the next rainfall. If we can forecast wind speed and direction a few days ahead we can target hot blobs, El Nino events and the Indian Ocean dipole which sets the balance between floods and bush fires between Australia and Africa. Over 20 years we could restore sea level.
The results below from Stjern et al. show the mean of nine climate models for temperature and precipitation if we increase the concentration of the right size of nuclei in cloudy ocean regions by 50%. Note the blue-green increased precipitation in drought-stricken regions.
Perhaps the people who have blocked research into this possibility will have uncomfortable thoughts in future.
I am too old to understand ‘skin in the game’. Please advise.
Daniele Visioni
On 23 Apr 2021, at 10:14, SALTER Stephen <S.Sa...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
DanieleI have had Covid myself and so I agree that it is not all funny. My intention was to shock.The problem with having only emission reduction by 2050 is means that typhoons, floods, droughts, bushfires, sea-level rise, Arctic ice loss and damage to coral will all be worse, perhaps much worse than at present. If you think that present conditions are not acceptable you have to conclude that zero emission is not low enough. As well as reducing emissions we will have to remove greenhouse gases, probably with help from phytoplankton, and also do direct cooling a soon as we can and then ramp it down when emissions are under control.To help inform opinions, the graph below shows estimates of the amount of salt of all sizes thrown up by sea waves plotted against the date of the estimate.
<image001.png>
The small blue circle is the mean at 5.4 gigatonne per year.The thickening of the black line on the X axis between 1959 and 2020 shows the mass of sea salt with the mass of 10 ^ -14 grams chosen for a high Kohler nucleation efficiency which we would need for John Latham’s proposal for marine cloud brightening. This gives what we hope is enough to cancel thermal effects since preindustrial times. The size of spray is actually where there is a gap between the masses of Aitken and accumulation modes of natural aerosol.Spraying can be stopped at the click of a mouse and salt will be washed back into the sea at the next rainfall. If we can forecast wind speed and direction a few days ahead we can target hot blobs, El Nino events and the Indian Ocean dipole which sets the balance between floods and bush fires between Australia and Africa. Over 20 years we could restore sea level.The results below from Stjern et al. show the mean of nine climate models for temperature and precipitation if we increase the concentration of the right size of nuclei in cloudy ocean regions by 50%. Note the blue-green increased precipitation in drought-stricken regions.
<image002.png>
Hawkins, David
A provocative, in the good sense, exchange.
A couple of comments on the pieces by Pierrehumbert and Mann.
Personally, I feel the arguments against planning for SRM deployment are numerous and very strong. The arguments against research on the subject are much weaker. The SRM topic is being discussed in policy circles. Not doing research will not halt the discussion in policy circles. Rather, it will tend to leave the field open for those who want to hold out SRM as an easy, effective alternative to cutting emissions. They can paint a rosy picture without having to be concerned about contradictory research findings.
I find no fault with the Pierrehumbert and Mann points about why SRM is not a substitute for emission cuts (nor with similar points made by Mann in his more nuanced blog on the NRC report https://michaelmann.net/content/my-comments-new-national-academy-report-geoengineering).
But taking the recent NRC report to task for proposing an SRM research program seems off-base to me. The NRC report takes pains to state that SRM can never be a substitute for emission cuts. It goes further and says the research it recommends should “focus on developing policy-relevant knowledge, rather than advancing a path for deployment.” The report recommends SRM be only a minor part of the climate research budget, suggesting $100-200 million total over five years. The report recommends off-ramps, providing for an end to research if show-stopper factors emerge.
I would be interested in knowing what specifically in the NRDC report Pierrehumbert and Mann disagree with. I understand the concern that spending public money on researching SRM has the potential to “legitimize” the concept of SRM. There is merit to that concern but barring research seems to me to be too blunt an instrument to address the concern. The cost of ignorance is too high.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/627C50AB-A374-48FF-8829-1881A31BCA8D%40gmail.com.
