What if the Arctic melts, and we lose the great white shield? Interview with environmental policy expert Durwood Zaelke Dan Drollette Jr.

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Sep 3, 2019, 7:51:13 AM9/3/19

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654269

What if the Arctic melts, and we lose the great white shield? Interview with environmental policy expert Durwood Zaelke

Dan Drollette Jr.

Pages 239-246 | Published online: 30 Aug 2019

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https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654269

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ABSTRACT

In this interview, Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, outlines the climate change problem in the Arctic, tells of the increasing speed with which the ice is melting, and outlines some possible solutions, ranging from relatively benign approaches to methods that call for increasingly more intrusive tinkering with the planet.

KEYWORDS: Geoengineering, climate change, Arctic, sea ice, melting, permafrost, methane, greenhouse

Durwood ZaelkeAs the rate of melting of the Arctic sea ice goes up, other processes have sped up as well – including the pace of the thawing of the permafrost, the release of more methane, nitrous oxides, and other greenhouse gasses, and the possible changing of the jet stream. Some climate policy experts contend that the loss of this “great white shield” in the Arctic could set in motion a dire cascade of effects.

Among this group is Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, who tells the Bulletin’s Dan Drollette Jr how his ideas evolved regarding what should be done. Zaelke outlines the problem, tells of the increasing speed with which the ice is melting, and outlines some of the possible solutions, ranging from soft and relatively benign approaches to methods that call for increasingly more intrusive tinkering with the planet – all to solve what is a man-made problem in the first place. Zaelke says “I don’t like geoengineering. I’ve avoided it and thought it did indeed present a moral hazard. But when I look at the risk we’re now facing from the accelerating feedbacks in the Arctic in particular and the existential threat that presents, I have to say that geoengineering cannot be left off the table any longer.”

Dan Drollette Jr:

It seems that more climate scientists are accepting the idea that we might have to do something about climate …

Durwood Zaelke:

Well, I’d say that we humans have already been doing an experiment on the climate, but it’s not deliberate.

Drollette:

Okay, let me rephrase: They’re accepting the idea that we might have to do some sort of purposeful human intervention to counteract anthropogenic climate change.

Zaelke:

That’s more like it.

Drollette:

Though there’s an awful lot of people who still just don’t want to believe the evidence that climate change is even occurring, let alone that humans are the primary cause.

Zaelke:

Luckily, there are fewer and fewer of them – but there are still holdouts struggling to admit the problem. They just don’t want to rethink their own life, or the economic system. Which is what it will require.

It’s a pity, because we’re running out of time. And the whole challenge of climate change today is really one of timing.

Drollette:

How so?

Zaelke:

We have an accelerating problem: Climate change is happening faster, and bringing with it more changes and impacts today than there were yesterday. And it will be faster still tomorrow; climate change is not a steady-state phenomenon, but gets worse and worse day-by-day.

Meanwhile, our solutions are not on the same time scale. Yes, we’ll eventually convince everyone that climate change is real and requires drastic intervention. But by that time it’ll be too late.

Consequently, our challenge is not only to convince enough people that climate change is real – and do so far enough in advance to do something about it – but to show them that we have the solutions. And that if we move fast enough, we’ll have an opportunity to avoid the worst consequences.

And there are a lot of climate change impacts that are baked in already. We see it in the United States with our hurricanes and our floods and fires. And the rest of the world sees it too, with typhoons and rising seas and heat waves.

So, it’s not just about getting the message out; it’s a question of whether we can speed up our solutions. You can’t solve a fast-moving, accelerating problem with slow-moving solutions.

We’ve got to match our time scales, and we’ve got to do it fast.

Drollette:

Can you give me a big picture overview of some of these solutions?

Zaelke:

The IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C from last October, 2018, tells us very clearly that we need to start with three strategies for protecting the climate. (https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/) The first one we all know, which is moving away from fossil fuels and their emissions. Which we can do, by aggressive energy efficiency interventions and shifting to clean energy. You might think of this first part – the shifting to clean energy – as the management of carbon dioxide on the front end. Bottom line: just don’t emit CO2. (And some people would put nukes in that category of emission-free energy as well.)

The second thing that report tells us is that we have to reduce the short-lived climate pollutants – which is an absolutely essential piece of the solution, that the IPCC is addressing for the first time. These are short-lived climate pollutants. They include black carbon, particulate matter sometimes …

Drollette:

Black carbon would be soot, right? From burning wood, things like that?

Zaelke:

It’s particulate matter from the incomplete burning of wood, but also from diesel and coal as well. (https://www3.epa.gov/airquality/blackcarbon/basic.html) These fuels create this material that is the second-largest contributor to climate change – just behind carbon dioxide and probably neck-and-neck with methane. As a short-lived climate pollutant, methane is 80 times more powerful in warming the planet, molecule-for-molecule, than CO2 is. If you’re working on a 20-year time horizon, that is.

Then there’s also tropospheric ozone, or ground level ozone associated with urban smog. Then finally you have the hydro-fluorocarbons, or HFCs, which we’ve been reducing aggressively under the Montreal Protocol through the Kigali Amendment. (https://thebulletin.org/2019/01/global-agreement-addressing-ozone-depletion-will-also-bring-large-climate-benefits/)

These make up the package of short-lived climate pollutants, which we’ve absolutely got to deal with.

Drollette:

So, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and short-lived climate pollutants makes for two strategies for protecting the climate. What’s the third?

Zaelke:

We have to figure out how to reduce the existing CO2 that we’ve already put into the atmosphere, on a much faster time scale than the natural carbon cycle does it. Consequently, carbon dioxide removal strategies are essential, if you want to stay within the carbon budget of 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That includes as a starting point the brilliant technology of photosynthesis. We’ve actually got a strategy that works. If we stopped cutting down our forests and destroying our grasslands and our wetlands, and started protecting our kelp forests, we could stop emitting a lot of pollution and enhance our carbon sinks – the things that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. We could go a step further and expand the possibilities of biomass (plant and vegetable matter) to put more and more CO2 back into the soil. And such “soft” geoengineering processes include enhancing soil carbon through photosynthesis.

Then we also have mechanical, or “hard” solutions for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. These include things like the artificial trees that Klaus Lackner has been working on at Arizona State University. (https://cnce.engineering.asu.edu/klaus-lackner/)

And Climeworks in Switzerland (https://www.climeworks.com) has been pioneering the field of CO2 direct reductions from the ambient atmosphere.

In the same category there are companies like Blue Planet Cement (http://www.blueplanet-ltd.com), which are capturing CO2 at the smokestack and turning it into a viable product – in their case, lightweight-cement building materials. They’ve even poured some at the San Francisco airport extension in the last few years. Again, there are ways of treating the existing CO2, to pull it out of the atmosphere.

Now, the things I’m taking about here, in this third category, they’re about managing CO2 on what I think of as the back end. The idea is that carbon dioxide is already out there in the atmosphere – or you’ve already committed to pumping it into the atmosphere – so let’s remove as much as we can, so it’s not harming the climate.

But it’s important to note that it may well be that even all these approaches added together may not be sufficient to keep us at the target of 1.5 degrees of global warming.

And of course we’re not doing all of them. When you look at reality, we’re a long way from keeping average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees, or even 2 degree Celsius. When you face up to that, you have to say: “We’d better look at other strategies.”

That’s especially evident when you look at the accelerating warming in the Arctic, which I think is the weakest link in the chain of climate protection. The Arctic has such a profound role on regulating global climate, in so many ways.

Let’s start with the expansive Arctic sea ice, which acts as a great white shield sending incoming solar radiation safely back to space.

Drollette:

“Great white shield” is a nice turn of phrase.

Zaelke:

It’s very apt; the Arctic sea ice has functioned that way for a long time, helping keep the Arctic cold by reflecting sunlight back out to space. If we lose that ice, then the incoming solar radiation will be encountering darker oceans, which more readily absorb it. This warms the oceans, which then warms the atmosphere above the oceans and accelerates the melt of even more Arctic sea ice. It becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

And because of things like that, we’re down today to only about one percent of the normal amount of multi-year strong ice – the thick ice that acts as a sort of glue that holds the Arctic together, and helps keep the region cold. When that’s gone, then we will only have the thin, honeycombed, first-year ice left – which is much more fragile and more susceptible to faster melting and to the breakup from cyclonic winds and waves that we anticipate increasing in the Arctic as well.

So, the endgame of Arctic sea ice is not going to be a slow, gradual melt; it’s going to be this chaotic surge of wind and waves that break up what’s left – the fragile first-year ice. Which then goes out to sea where it melts much more quickly. (https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/climate-report-understates-threat/)

And you lose that defensive shield.

To give you a sense of the numbers, let me just cite one Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper (https://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3322) by Veerabhadran Ramanathan and others that calculates that the loss of Arctic sea ice between 1979 and 2011 added 6.4 watts per square meter to Arctic warming. That’s about 25 percent more CO2 added when you average this globally. That’s a big hit for the climate system to take.

That means we could lose all the Arctic sea ice within 15 years, plus or minus 10. And keep in mind that plus or minus part; when you have a 15-year horizon, it could well be minus 10. Which works out to five years.

Drollette:

Five years before all the Arctic sea ice is gone?

Zaelke:

Five years.

Everything suggests that the system is moving faster and faster. To think that we’re going to be lucky and get that plus 10 – for a total of 25 years from now – is probably not realistic. The scientists say the best guess is 15 years, but it really could be a lot less.

And when we lose all that ice, we’re going to get multiples of the warming that we saw through 2011. That’s going to accelerate the positive feedbacks that melt permafrost. When you melt permafrost, you’re releasing carbon dioxide, super pollutants like methane, or short-lived climate pollutants and nitrous oxide emissions. A recent paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics just a couple weeks ago using low-level aerial flights calculated that nitrous oxide emissions from melting permafrost were much, much higher than previously thought. (https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/19/4257/2019/)

This is not good.

The start of the loss of permafrost is another indication of the wicked cascade that we’re facing as we lose the Arctic Sea ice. Permafrost has much more stored climate emissions in it than we already had put up in the atmosphere.

It’s game over if that happens.

Drollette:

Taken together, what does it all mean?

Zaelke:

When we look at these trends, we realize that everything we’ve learned over half a century of studies shows that the climate problem is getting worse faster than we thought before. Everything shows that the positive feedbacks are kicking in, and we’ve had no luck yet in finding something in the natural system that’s going to slow them down.

We thought for a while that maybe the increased amount of carbon dioxide would enhance plant growth, and that would accelerate the photosynthetic reduction in the atmosphere.

But that didn’t happen.

In fact, we now think that the warming that’s caused by the extra CO2 may actually damage the crops.

And once again, the problem is accelerating while our solutions are not – and our political will is still fractured. That is in large part today because the United States lacks leadership on this point, but it’s also because other countries have challenges replacing their coal-based economies too …

When you look at the critical role of the Arctic and you look at how fast we’re losing the sea ice, and how fast we’re accelerating the melting of the permafrost, and changing the jet stream – these are all very difficult impacts to slow down after we’ve lost all the Arctic sea ice. I am at this point in my evolution of climate solutions beginning to focus on what’s called geoengineering. Now this is not a well-defined term. It’s a loose collection of ideas about intervening in the climate system. Some we call soft geoengineering.

Drollette:

I was going to ask you to explain the concept a bit more.

Zaelke:

Soft geoengineering consists of efforts that are scalable and reversible. You try something, and if it works, you do more. If it has impacts that are not tolerable you do less and you shut it down, or reverse it. In other words, we have control over soft geoengineering. We may not even want to use that term, but for the moment, let’s continue with that.

A good example that people typically put in this category is biochar, which is a technology I like. It’s technically biochar pyrolysis, or the heating of animal or vegetable matter under conditions of low oxygen, so that you turn it into a fine-grain charcoal that can go in the ground as a soil amendment to enhance the growth of plants. That puts more carbon immediately into the soil and locks it in the ground. Then the enhanced growth of plants puts even more CO2 into the soil. It’s a very good strategy, definitely scalable, that had been in use for centuries in Brazil before the arrival of the first Portuguese explorers – who called it terra preta de Indio, or the “dark earth of the Indians.”

Drollette:

And just to keep things clear, this is an example of soft geoengineering, an area which itself is about managing CO2 on the back end – removing as much carbon as we can and locking it in the soil, so it’s not harming the climate?

Zaelke:

Right. And it has so far – over a period of hundreds of years of testing – been benign and incredibly helpful. So, my advice is that we accelerate the use of biochar as fast as we possibly can.

Looking more directly at the Arctic, there are two strategies for restoring polar ice that are scalable and reversible if they should have unintended consequences.

One is by Leslie Fields and her group, called Ice911. (https://www.ice911.org/) The idea is to put a silica coating on the fragile, first-year ice to enhance the regrowth of multi-year ice – the strong ice that can keep the white shield in place. You start with a small area. If it works, you do more, and you monitor the impacts to see if there’s a problem. But because silica is a naturally occurring substance, we would not expect it to have any adverse impacts. But nevertheless, you want to monitor it – this is the way we do these kinds of experiments.

Then there’s the strategy that has been taken up by Sir David King in his new initiative at Cambridge University. (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cambridge-scientists-radical-ways-to-stop-climate-change-a8907766.html) This idea has been around for a while in various forms, but what he’s promoting is a situation where you have wind-powered pumps in the Arctic that pump sea water up onto the fragile first-year ice to regrow multi-year ice. Now you would need a lot of those small windmills pumping water up – but again, it’s scalable, reversible, and if it works you should do more.

Drollette:

Now is this the “brightening the clouds above the poles” idea that the BBC News was talking about recently – about pumping sea water up and out into fine nozzles to get particles of salt into the clouds? (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48069663)

Zaelke:

No, no, that’s something else, where you have these wind-powered autonomous ships sailing the oceans that pump sea water up into the sky. That nucleates the type of clouds that can help with climate change. Clouds are hugely important in regulating climate; they’re about negative 25 watts per square meter. Compared to the warming that we’re experiencing just from preindustrial times, which was about three watts per square meter.

But if we mess with the clouds in the wrong way, some computer models have predicted it could have very devastating impacts on climate. Which could be happening already, as we see the poleward migration of the extra tropical clouds.

But spraying sea water is another good example of the idea that if it works, you do more.

Drollette:

What are some of the other types of geoengineering out there?

Zaelke:

Then you get to what we could think of as “hard” geoengineering. At that point, you’re looking at continental-scale projects, and things that are harder to reverse in a time frame that would prevent the adverse impacts. In that category, generally, the focus is on solar radiation management from aerosols: Can you shoot reflective particles into space and have that reflective force cool the climate?

We know it works; we had a natural experiment in the form of the emission of sulfate particles by Mount Pinatubo in the early 1990s, which when it erupted spewed reflective particles of sulfate into the atmosphere and subsequently cooled the planet by a couple of degrees Celsius for a fair number of years.

So, we know that this approach has the potential to work. But what we don’t know is how it will affect weather systems locally. Would it reduce the Asian monsoons? If you mess with the monsoons, you’re messing with agriculture for tens or hundreds of millions of people. It’s a risk you have to be incredibly careful about.

It’s getting to the edge of weather modification, which is considered an illegal means of war in one of our treaties. You have to be careful that you know what you’re doing from the scientific side, but also from the political side …

But let me change this back to the science for a second. We’re at the point where I think it’s essential that we start experimenting with all types of geoengineering, because if we can’t save the Arctic, then arguably, we can’t save the climate system.

If the Arctic is the weakest link in the chain of climate protection – and I have very strong evidence indicating that’s the case – then we have to find a way to save the Arctic sea ice. And “save” at this point means saving and regrowing strong multi-year ice so we build that shield back up, and we slow the melting of the permafrost and that self-reinforcing feedback loop that that caused. We really have to think of the special emergency in the Arctic and the special strategies we need. My recommendation would be to deploy the soft geoengineering immediately along with the other strategies that we mentioned, such as bringing down at the front end the amount of CO2 and short-lived pollutants that are emitted.

And then, when political leaders fully appreciate the scale and the immediacy of the climate emergency, they’re likely going to want to deploy the faster strategies – the geoengineering strategies that have the advantage, we believe, of speed. We can move them faster to save the Arctic.

Now again, this is not yet the dominant position of the field, but I think it’s a malpractice by scientists and policy makers not to focus on the Arctic, not to start studying the geoengineering solutions. The National Academy of Sciences has a new effort on this. Sir David King has his new effort just a few weeks ago at Cambridge. Leslie Field and others are working on it.

Drollette:

Just so it is clear when you talk about the three different steps to reduce the problem. You’re saying that we should be reducing CO2 emissions, cutting back on the emission of short-lived climate pollutants – and when it comes to geoengineering, we should be getting into the soft geoengineering first, because it is scalable and reversible?

Zaelke:

Yes.

Drollette:

And then save the hard engineering for later?

Zaelke:

Well, what I’m saying is that the three strategies in the IPCC 1.5 Report are all underway, and they’re all ready to be accelerated. Go flat out with those. That’s the Green New Deal, that’s where we need to focus so much of our attention. But then we also need to do soft geoengineering: It’s scalable, it’s reversible, and we need to start it soon, so we can accelerate. A lot of that will be in the category of carbon dioxide removal anyway, which is the third lever for the 1.5 report.

Then I’m also saying that we have to accelerate our experiments with the hard geoengineering. We have to know exactly what hard geoengineering can and cannot do, and what its consequences are. Because when the climate emergency manifests itself even further, there will be the possibility of rogue nations saying: “We can’t tolerate this. We’re going to shoot up sulfates rockets or have eye-level atmospheric flights that disperse sulfates, and too bad for the rest of you. We’re going to try it because we can’t feed our population, we can’t save our shoreline.” There are the possibilities of having this spin out of control in the governance side.

But if we do it right, it can be hugely beneficial.

Again, my proposal is to study this now in a much more aggressive way. Right now, we are not experimenting the way we should with something that might be the most important medicine that the world has to cure us of climate impacts.

Yes, I’m saying start with the soft geoengineering, because it’s benign in most cases and it’s reversible in all cases – that’s its categorical definition.

But also pay attention now to the potential to use the harder geoengineering, because if that’s the only way to save the Arctic, we’d better have it in our arsenal ready to go when that decision is made.

Drollette:

Okay. Here’s a question that I’ve asked climate scientist David Keith of Harvard University. Do you consider hard geoengineering a last-ditch emergency operation? Or is it something fundamentally different?

Zaelke:

Well, I think we’re so close to that last-ditch moment that we better be ready; you need your Manhattan Project to be ready. You hope you don’t have to deploy it, but you’d better be ready to do it in the safest possible way.

And if it turns out in the initial experiments to be less risky than we think, then we should be deploying it right now, because the impacts we’re suffering now are very long-lasting. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle from the warming of the oceans, except on a multi-century time scale. You can’t put the glaciers back, or the Greenland ice sheets. These things are underway, and it’s going to take more heroic efforts.

It’s somewhat like pain medication – if you don’t stay ahead of your pain, what happens is you need a really big hit to bring you back into relative comfort.

We have to be ready, to have something ready to blast out.

If you look at the forecasts that Exxon-Mobil has for the use of its products for the next 25 years, they show their investors that more fossil fuels are going to be sold, because more people are coming into the world. And they’re going to be richer and they’re going to buy more oil and gas. If those projections prove true, then the transition to the climate-neutral moment is going to take longer. We’re still fighting that incredible legacy with the fossil fuel companies, despite the weakness that they’re showing because of their earlier deceptions regarding the science.

Drollette:

How cost-effective is hard geoengineering when compared to things like reducing emissions?

Zaelke:

I don’t know. We all have different estimates of what things will cost; you have a learning curve with any technology. We always try to project what the costs will be initially, but then as you learn and develop at scale, the price goes way down. So I can’t answer this precisely, but I think that the cost is minor compared to the damage that can be avoided. The cost to the world of losing the Arctic, and then having the permafrost melt, moves us into climate chaos where you have water shortages, food shortages, mass migration, political instability, and further movement to despotic governance – where the strong man will come in under the guise of restoring order and start suspending civil liberties, squeezing out democracy, and civilization starts to unravel. (https://thebulletin.org/2016/11/brian-schmidt-climate-change-is-a-real-existential-threat-that-should-be-dealt-with-immediately/) This is one all-too-possible scenario, if we’re not successful.

You can see through history how this has happened. You can see the darkening shadows that show how it’s beginning to happen now. If this scenario is to be avoided, we’d better get all of our tools ready and study them. If geoengineering in the hard form of injection of particulates that can reflect heat proves to be too dangerous, let’s find that out right now and move on to something else.

Drollette:

One thing I wasn’t entirely clear on – if you’re talking about hard geoengineering reflecting heat, that’s considered to be tinkering with the planet’s albedo, right? Is that correct?

Zaelke:

Yeah.

Drollette:

Does that do anything to deal with ocean acidification, or is it completely unrelated?

Zaelke:

No, it doesn’t. So you’re right, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It’s a way of dealing with the symptoms. Again, heat is one of the important things we want to manage, but dealing with CO2-caused ocean acidification is something else that we need. To do that, we need very aggressive carbon dioxide removal because under Boyle’s Law, we’re going to end up with out-gassing from carbon dioxide from the oceans – and that’s what you want to remove the acidification. But then you’re going to have more and more work to do pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. It can be done and the strategies are getting better and better and are more cost effective on the CO2 removal side. That’s probably one of the brightest spots right now in climate protection – carbon dioxide removal.

Drollette:

At least one climate scientist I have spoken with has said that one of the problems with hard geoengineering is that once you start, you can’t stop. He compared it to being in an emergency room living on life support solely with the help of a machine. You can’t ever unplug the thing. Is that a good way of describing the situation?

Zaelke:

It is a good way, and that’s one of the things we have to study very carefully. Can we do a regional version of sulfates in the Arctic, that has less of the risk that he described? I think that is a very serious risk, and we would not like to be in a position where we’re held hostage to indefinite injection of these reflective particles. We simply don’t know. Nor do we know if we can we do a little of it. Maybe a piece of it? But the point is well-taken that if you think that’s the solution, and you don’t do the other parts, then the warming keeps going up even as you mask it further. Then you unmask it and you’re going to get a big burst.

But if you’re doing some well-managed particulate that’s reflecting heat while you’re reducing your temperature through these other strategies – such as coordinating the injection of sulfates into the Arctic air with the Ice911 effort and with Sir David King’s effort on windmills that pump the water up – than maybe that can succeed. We simply don’t know the answer to that question yet.

That’s why further experimentation, and further study, has got to look at that exact scenario … It’s a pretty frightening possibility that the methane bomb from the Arctic along with CO2 and nitrous oxide is going to be disastrous. And it’s going to happen sooner than people think.

Believe me, I don’t like geoengineering. I’ve avoided it and thought it did indeed present a moral hazard. But when I look at the risk we’re now facing from the accelerating feedbacks in the Arctic in particular and the existential threat that presents, I have to say that geoengineering cannot be left off the table any longer.

It is wrong not to study it. It is malpractice not to be ready. If it has the potential to help us, we better be ready to deploy it as soon as the yogurt hits the fan … Then when they [political leaders] see the urgency, they’re going to ask the scientists and the policy-makers: “What is the fastest lever I can pull that will keep my country and the world from climate chaos?”

We better know what that answer is.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

1. Old vs young sea ice over 33 years.

Sea ice age coverage map for (a) March 1985 and (b) March 2018. (c) Sea ice age coverage by year, 1985–2018. (Perovich D., et al. (2018) Sea Ice, in ARCTIC REPORT CARD 2018, 28.) Image courtesy of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development’s “Prime on Polar Warming,” under Creative Commons license.

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2. Melting permafrost.

Thawing permafrost as seen in the Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska. A recent study found that melting permafrost in the Arctic may be releasing 12 times as much nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere as previously thought. (According to the EPA, nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.) Public domain image, courtesy of US National Park Service. More information on thawing permafrost in the Arctic at https://e360.yale.edu/digest/melting-permafrost-releasing-high-levels-of-nitrous-oxide-a-potent-greenhouse-gas

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Michele, Jürgen

unread,

Sep 4, 2019, 11:52:40 AM9/4/19

to andrew....@gmail.com, geoengi...@googlegroups.com

Hi Andrew!

Please pass on to Geoengineering Group ...

New Links for Geoengineering Group Sept 2019

Hi all!

Geoengineering group has grown …

Long time ago I had added a method to reduce the strength of hurricanes.

See:

Hi all,
in October 2004 the idea came up to me.
Here I present it to "Geoengineering Group".

Greetings from Germany

Juergen Michele

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/geoengineering/juergen$20michele%7Csort:date/geoengineering/1Q2RvEUN4yU/VmwAeb_Jy0AJ

Google Groups

groups.google.com

Mit Google Groups können Sie Online-Foren und E-Mail-basierte Gruppen erstellen, sich daran beteiligen und interessante Diskussionen mit anderen Mitgliedern führen.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. J. Michele July 1st,2008
Institut für Energie-, Verfahrens- und Umwelttechnik
E-Mail: new E-Mail: juergen...@jade-hs.de

„Another nutty idea“ or “Modeller wanted”

But nutty ideas change the world …

If the expert in the field terms a proposal “a nutty idea” nobody else
will even touch it ...

So it may take another decade before the idea is picked up again.

Before 2005 I came up with the idea to use a high momentum free jet to
interfere with a hurricane, to reduce its intensity ...

See attachment:

Now on Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326812636_Another_nutty_idea_or_Modeler_wanted_Hurricane_mitigation_Original_proposal_to_the_Google-_Group_Geoengineering - download

And a “Provisional Patent Application.pdf” filed in 2013.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334697563_APPLICATION_FOR_PATENT_Inventor_Title_SYSTEM_FOR_HURRICANE_MITIGATION_BY_INDUCING_5_CONTROLLED_TROPICAL_STORMS_AND_HURRICANES_AND_METHODS_OF_USE_THEREOF - download

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Juergen Michele
Jade Hochschule
Wilhelmshaven

Tel.: 0049 4461 83043
E-Mail: juergen...@jade-hs.de

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Juergen_Michele/contributions

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329557261_Fighting_Blue_Green_Algal_Blooms_Help_Nature_to_Do_the_Job