Tipping Points, the need for an international NGO and David Keith’s take on tipping points.
H simmens
@herbsimmens
HerbSimmens.com
On Dec 6, 2023, at 9:16 AM, robert...@gmail.com wrote:
Wow! There is a detailed and well referenced section (3.2.3.4) that largely dismisses solar geoengineering. There's a lot in here that needs careful reading before reaching an informed conclusion. It may be that a carefully researched rebuttal is called for rather than knee jerk reactions. Their conclusion is:
We strongly caution against reliance on solar geoengineering as a major tool for preventing tipping points, or the expectation that this kind of approach will be available and politically acceptable in the future to contribute to prevention efforts. Nor should SRM ever be considered a possible replacement for mitigation.
What I have yet to see in the report (it's 494 pages!) is how reduced emissions and GGR will do the trick. Hopefully that's a surprise lurking somewhere yet to be found.
RegardsRobert
On 06/12/2023 11:08, 'Chris Vivian' via NOAC Meetings wrote:
----All,
See this report and associated article:
- Guardian article ‘Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn’ - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/06/earth-on-verge-of-five-catastrophic-tipping-points-scientists-warn?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other and the original report https://global-tipping-points.org/.
Chris.
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Hugh Hunt
Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2023 6:23 PM
To: robert...@gmail.com <robert...@gmail.com>
Cc: Chris Vivian <chris....@btinternet.com>; healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; 'Eelco Rohling' via NOAC Meetings <noac-m...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Tipping Points, the need for an international NGO and David Keith’s take on tipping points.
Ron Baiman
"Baked into some of the arguments that we must forge ahead now with more extreme solutions is the assumption that we’re on the brink of creating a barely habitable, hothouse planet. This idea, too, requires some scrutiny.
It does look increasingly certain that the world will warm by more than 1.5 ˚C, which—appropriately—has sparked greater concerns about climate change.
But a prescient 2017 paper, by researchers Jane Flegal and Aarti Gupta, warned that the global goal of preventing temperatures from exceeding that threshold could promote a “tyranny of urgency,” in which solar geoengineering is portrayed “as one of the only ‘realistic’ pathways to moving toward such aspirational goals.”
To be sure, climate change is
incredibly and increasingly dangerous, particularly for people in the hotter, poorer parts of the world. But a few points of context are worth bearing in mind: 1.5
˚C is a political target, not a scientific threshold for climate collapse.
The
growing likelihood that the planet will soar past it has fueled doomish views that largely aren’t backed up by climate science.
The shift to carbon-free ways of operating is accelerating, making worst-case emissions scenarios from a few years ago look increasingly implausible. Deaths from natural hazards are trending down, not up, as the world invests resources and technical know-how into protective measures. And the world likely still has several decades to drive down emissions enough to hold warming around 2 ˚C.
So yes, we absolutely need to
accelerate the buildout of the clean technologies we have, the development of
the tools we still need, the funding of adaptation measures in the most climate-vulnerable
regions, and the study of extreme measures that may help in a hotter
future."
Reminds me of Alfred E. Newman's "What me worry?"
Our HPAC colleague Oswald Peterson is in the article as saying (in relation
to and cooling credits that his company is also trying to raise for ISA
methane removal and cooling):
“They’re stopping one of the most promising climate technologies with this wariness,” he said, when I asked about the criticisms. (Meaning inaccurate criticisms that sending tiny amounts of sulfur to the stratosphere does not cool and is unsafe - RB). “Wariness right now is our biggest problem.”
Oswald criticized scientists who insist, in the face of grave climate risks, that “we have to do so many lab studies and write many books” before carrying out outdoor experiments."
And BTW per Hugh's comment - Oswald is one of the co-authors of the bunker fuel open letter here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vGEDuEn6uikvGZpR9oZplPPhN8mxB1__/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116465941111195452408&rtpof=true&sd=true
Best,
Ron
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robert...@gmail.com
It'll be interesting to see how this all
shakes down once the message from Hansen et al's Warming in
the Pipeline seeps into the academic consciousness, if it
ever does. In the meantime, this tome from Lenton and friends
is a serious obstacle.
I was discussing the policy significance of
SRM the other day and was recalling Gardiner's 2010 paper about
SRM being conceptually 'Arming the Future'. Notwithstanding his
views more than a decade ago when no more than a handful of
people worldwide had even heard of SRM, there is an argument
that that future has now arrived and the ethics of SRM needs
revisiting.
Robert
Ye Tao
I am at COP28 and spoke to a room of 30 youth climate leaders
aged 17 to 30 yesterday, briefly mentioning Hansen et al's paper
and implications. One person came up afterwards to ask for more
details.
Ye
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Ron Baiman
Good job Ye. At least one in the audience spoke with you after ~ ~ ~
I want to say about 1,200 words bout consensus reporting that is responsible for the way our climate culture functions: Lenton and McKay are pillars in the tipping world -- they are on our team. Their lead in tipping science is crucial to advancement of a restoration target. The great challenge is the industry of science that has created the significant understatements in IPCC's consensus science reviews. The reason for the understatements is the scenario bias. Any large consensus work is going to be affected by not only the scenario bias, but by consensus reticence. I have not read the Potsdam Report yet but I can guarantee that the reason(s) direct cooling is so poorly represented is because of the base science that tells the consensus that more research is needed. This does not mean that "more research is needed." It means that in the publishing scientists opinion, the climate change impact risks described in scientific findings do not warrant the also described risks of geoengineering, where the science is affected by reticence and the scenario bias and almost completely does not address low frequency/high risk outcomes.
The scenario bias is also huge in other consensus reporting because almost all consensus reporting organization rely upon IPCC scenarios where, of the 1,202 scenarios evaluated in IPCC Assessment Report 6 (AR6), none have a warming target less than 1.5 C. None of IPCC's chosen scenarios have gross target dates before 2100, or assume tipping activation sooner than late century, or assume that once activated, tipping becomes irreversible via self-fulfilling systems collapse science. None have continued emissions scenarios or scenarios that implement carbon dioxide removal as a primary mitigation. None have scenarios that implement geoengineering in any form. All IPCC scenarios assume that emissions reductions or elimination are the major mitigation strategies to a 2 C future, or as the 1.5 C Report says, preferably less than 2 C. Because of the lack of critical futures in these "accepted" scenarios, consensus reviews cannot speak meaningfully to anything that is not included in the biased scenarios.
The fundamental impact of the scenario bias is that the vast majority of consensus reporting must adhere to the IPCC's scenarios that do not include evaluation of virtually any geoengineering solutions, tipping responses or meaningful climate restoration actions, that happen before late century. The scientists involved in the consensus reports cannot do anything about this other than caveat and I also guarantee that these caveat(s) are in the Potsdam Report. These caveats are specifically about direct cooling, and the inaccurate reporting of the excessive cost and slowness of implementation of carbon dioxide removal.
The same scenario bias/consensus reporting reticence thing has been ongoing with atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR), only with CDR for much longer than with direct cooling, therefore CDR has gained greater acceptance: i.e. IPCC's suggestion that up to 1,250 Gt CO2 removal is required to achieve 1.5 C by 2100... and, the California Low Carbon Fuels Sequestration Incentive, and IRA's IRS 45Q Carbon Oxide Removal Incentive enhancements, where Obama started 45Q, Trump tripled its pay and added air capture, and the IRA tripled it again and added a cash pay instead of just a tax incentive.
The same dance has been going on with restoration scenarios and we have made progress there too with publishing by the tipping science crowd that is lead by Lenton and McKay. Only... Lenton and McKay still maintain (mostly) the consensus viewpoint that is biased because of the minimum warming target of 1.5 C -- where further warming is not restoration and restoration is required to halt tipping.
We are on our way. The solutions are being implemented but, direct cooling is behind CDR. The science is just too new for a consensus to agree. Literally, climate tipping is faster than climate science where findings take a bare minimum of years to go from data collection to final publishing and IPCC only publishes every 6 to 7 years. This can create a 10 year lag from data collection to public knowledge/policy implications and data collection lags the climate change impacts by at least years too.
We need to hold to our guns and not disrespect the consensus or its restoration leaders like Lenton and McKay. They are performing their jobs according to standards in the industry of science. Specifically, climate science does not yet have the response to brand new evidence that has low frequency/high risk outcomes. Like Mike says, the science reports the average outcome, but the average outcome is far less meaningful than less frequent more extreme events. Further, the scenario bias of the IPCC, who is responsible for the vast majority of public knowledge and policy on climate change; the scenario bias has significantly colored the discussion because none of the scenarios of IPCC's Assessment Report 6 have a target of less than 1.5 C.
Our challenge is to break the back of this scenario biased and reticent perception of reality that 1.5 C is safe, that emissions reductions are mandatory, and that carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering are not suitable mitigation strategies. Emissions reduction or elimination do help a small amount, but there are two realities of the biased 1.5 C scenarios that must be considered when understanding the critical path of climate restoration: required carbon removal infrastructure, and time to the point of no return.
Once we implement a CDR infrastructure, it is little money to scale that infrastructure an additional 25 to 50 percent to address future emissions. The great challenge is scaling it from today to the gigaton level. If we assume that the 200, 1 million ton per year CDR units now committed under IRS 45Q are the beginning of our scaling efforts, we still have to scale this infrastructure 6,000 times to achieve 50 gigatons per year. If we do not scale the removal infrastructure by this 600,000 percent we lose because emissions elimination alone cannot change our future once tipping is activated. Once scaled 600,000 percent to the 50 Gt level to achieve restoration, further scaling of 25 to 50 percent to address future emissions is relatively inconsequential.
But time is crucial. We can easily scale CDR 600,000 percent in less than 10 years if we are motivated with wartime passion. It will still take a decade to drawdown to restoration levels so emergency cooling is mandated or again, we lose because of the great risk of those low frequency high risk outcomes that are a product of irreversible tipping completion.
So remember, if it's not in IPCC's scenarios, it's not in other consensus works. Geoengineering is feasible and proven relatively safe, because we have been emitting cooling aerosols for 100 years and we know exactly how many people respiratory illnesses kill every year. It is not nascent as is described in the scenarios approved for evaluation in IPCC's work. Carbon dioxide removal is not expensive, because 200, 1 million ton per year units are committed under IRS 45Q, not because scenario biased and reticent findings say it is too expensive in IPCC's scenarios. Scaling CDR too; there are no scenarios in IPCC's work that evaluate much more rapid implementation of CDR to address what are now abbreviated tipping timelines.
This challenge of breaking through to the consensus is not new. Peter F and all have been working on getting a restoration scenario included in IPCC scenarios for a decade now. We need to be diligent and understand why it is that our climate culture is so understated, so that we can effectively advance mitigation relative to climate change that is faster than climate science.
Steep trails,
Bruce
Bruce Melton PE
Director, Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3
President, Melton Engineering Services Austin
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rob...@rtulip.net
I hope people have read Albert Bates’ excellent blog, quoting the great philosopher-poet Paul Simon on Mrs Robinson’s affair with Sultan Al-Jaber, with numerous astute references to the #1 1968 hit. The ideological disarray surrounding the Sultan’s true observation that cutting emissions is not enough is quite astounding as we hide this little secret from the kids. I hope it doesn’t mean that every way you look at this, you lose. But the problem is entirely true that people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest (The Boxer).
Jim Hansen has expanded on his groundbreaking call in his Pipeline paper for intervention with Earth’s radiation imbalance with this new comment, where he says even the 2°C goal is dead if policy is limited to emission reductions and plausible CO2 removal. 1.5 is already totally gone with conventional policy. That means we need sunlight reflection methods to remove heat from the Earth System to address tipping elements.
The problem is that climate science leaders such as Tim Lenton et al are adamantly opposed to any physical removal of system heat to slow down the existential risk of crossing tipping points. This situation opens up some very confusing and difficult social and political and scientific questions.
It just seems obvious that if heat threatens systemic collapse, then getting rid of the heat as fast as possible would be a good idea. But apparently not for IPCC and the sympathetic eyes of the whole popular climate action movement, with some notable courageous exceptions such as the leaders of Extinction Rebellion and of course Dr Hansen. Simple climate arithmetic indicates net zero heat is a far more important goal than net zero emissions. And yet this entire conversation is largely hidden from public view.
My view is that this policy conundrum can find some explanation in analysis of social psychology. Human beings are instinctively tribal. We crave the support of friends in order to unify against enemies. We sacrifice our personal independence for the sake of group identity and cohesion and trust. This tribal attitude was an adaptive response early in human evolution, but tribal thinking is now maladaptive. The problem with putting identity before truth has long been recognised. As far back as the gospel injunction to love your enemies (Matthew 5:44), ethicists have seen that clan psychology leads to worsening cycles of polarisation, distortion, hatred, war and collapse.
The tribal assumption in climate policy is that the only solution is a war against fossil fuels. This has generated the opposing conservative tribal view of climate denial. The dominant advocacy of emission reduction alone generates what Bruce Melton calls its scenario bias, with the fallacious analogy that when you are in a hole the first thing to do is to stop digging. Against this popular fallacy, it is often the case that other immediate responses are better than attacking the direct cause of a problem. Health analogies of emergency treatment come to mind.
With climate change, we are certainly in a big hole, but brightening the planet is more urgent than cutting emissions. This is because warming is caused by the whole two trillion tonnes of CO2 that humanity has transferred from the crust to the biosphere. Cutting emissions can at best slow the growth of CO2 by a few gigatonnes each year, addressing less than 1% of the radiative forcing increase and doing nothing to actually cool the planet or mitigate extreme weather.
By contrast, intensive sunlight reflection could restore Holocene temperature within a century, even with ongoing business as usual. However, if you have drunk the Kool-Aid that says the war on fossil fuels is the only hope, you will find that facts have to be ignored to avoid cognitive dissonance. Like Michael Mann you will block unwelcome information from visibility. Much as all rational people would like GHGs to go away, the social and economic inertia of the fossil fuel economy is so vast that any slowdown is extremely difficult to engineer. So we have to plan on the assumption that business as usual is a probable scenario, with renewables growing only where they are economically justified.
Accepting the high likelihood that emissions will continue regardless of warming brings in the moral hazard debate. A key issue here is that decisions on solar geoengineering will make little difference to incentives for decarbonisation, but it is extremely dangerous to hold the world to ransom by insisting we must not cool the planet, as though that would change things, as moral hazard proponents argue. “Decarbonise or else” is not a practical climate slogan, since it leaves no available option when the bluff is called and nations fail to decarbonise.
The most important practical action at this time in my view is to promote investment in marine cloud rebrightening, as the probable hinge technology that can start to break down the vast irrational opposition to any action capable of mitigating dangerous climate change. Our team at rebrighten.org promote the observation that the darkening of the world must be reversed with rebrightening, with albedo now falling at an accelerating rate, faster than 1% per decade. The great benefits of MCRB, as we prefer to call it rather than MCB, include that it can be tested and deployed in national jurisdictions, such as Australia, that sea salt is innocuous as a cooling method, and that it can be targeted to mitigate extreme weather. These practical steps can help break open the sclerotic social inertia, creating discussion on the ethical and economic benefits of a shift to a regenerative cooling focus in climate policy.
I was pleased to see Albert’s superb diagram showing the massive anomaly between the IPCC echo chamber and climate reality. As he says, “the science arbiter, the IPCC, got it wrong. The poles shifted. The North Star is somewhere else in the sky.” Students of Milankovitch might know the North Star does constantly shift, if slowly. So for Sultan Al-Jeber to experience such massive pushback to his claim that 1.5 is his North Star indicates that hopefully we are on the brink of a paradigm shift to enable sunlight reflection.
Regards
Robert Tulip
Hi Robert,
Yet here is what the summary graphic says about SRM:
The above language is a frontal assault on cooling. There’s not even the pretense of evenhandedness that the Overshoot Commission demonstrated in calling for both a moratorium and for more research.
To the degree to which this report represents the views not just of Tim Lenton, his colleagues at Exeter, and sponsors like Jeff Bezos and interestingly Systemiq but also of the referenced 200 tipping point researchers from 90 organizations in 26 countries it is a devastating blow to Direct Climate Cooling.
While a persuasive rebuttal may be in order the larger challenge remains quite evident.
In the absence of the creation of an extremely well resourced international NGO whose sole mission is the advocacy of urgent cooling as part of a Triad based strategy to bring temperatures back down to well below 1° C the work that we’re all doing at PRAG, NOAC, HPAC and elsewhere will continue to have little or no discernible effect on the climate scientific, advocacy and decision-making communities.
I’m not aware of any effort to bring into being such an international NGO besides the efforts that you and I undertook sometime ago.
Which I believe is a monumentally shortsighted strategic error.
Let’s hope that somebody somewhere is working to bring such an NGO into being as an effective counterweight to the overwhelming hostility to cooling demonstrated by this and other reports and pronouncements.
Take a look at the stark contrast between SRM London researcher Pete Irvine’s take on the report compared to David Keith’s comments below - which I can’t say that I even understand.
(David was similarly utterly dismissive of tipping points at his appearance at an HPAC meeting earlier this year)
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