Washington Post op ed

[Andy Parker]

Hey folks, the Washington Post just published an op ed on the messy politics of solar geoengineering, written by David Keith and me: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whats-the-right-temperature-for-the-earth/2015/01/29/b2dda53a-7c05-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html

[Andrew Lockley]

I disagree fundamentally with the premise of this article.

A decision on climate has to be made. Everyone knows it. Everyone has an incentive to avoid chaos. Therefore, people have a very large incentive to stick to a consensus process, because anyone who doesn't stick will instantly break that consensus and cause chaos - which is a guaranteed loser for all.

Same reason villagers don't burgle their neighbours when police are busy elsewhere dealing with a major incident.

A

On 30 Jan 2015 08:54, "Andy Parker" <apar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey folks, the Washington Post just published an op ed on the messy politics of solar geoengineering, written by David Keith and me: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whats-the-right-temperature-for-the-earth/2015/01/29/b2dda53a-7c05-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html

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[Stephen Salter]

Hi All

Andy Parker's concerns about international disputes over geoengineering might be reduced if only there was a technique which allowed a greater degree of local control and the chance of tactical adjustments based on day-to-day observations.  It is the prospect of being stuck with an unwanted outcome for the next two years which must be alarming.

Stephen

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

[Olaf Corry]

I agree with the basic idea that the politics of this will be likely to be very tricky (although - and partly for that reason - I remain unconvinced by the other premise of the article that SPI has been overwhelmingly shown to have net life-saving potential). 

Andrew, why the incredulity at a conflict scenario? The thing about international relations is that outcomes do not always reflect intentions or desired collective outcomes. History is full of consensus processes breaking down and collectively sub-optimal (to put it mildly) outcomes. Presumably everybody had an incentive to avoid the chaos of WW1 and stick to a consensus process...  

So the authors are right in my opinion to raise this problem regarding SRM. I would add that by complicating/souring the international diplomatic situation SRM could easily affect the ability to agree and cooperate internationally on mitigation and adaptation too, which we agree would still need to happen as fast as possible. 

If we are consistently outcome-ethical about it we probably shouldn't put the politics in one compartment and the evaluation of the technology in another one. 

Best regards

Olaf Corry

[Jim Fleming]

As argued in 1955:

"Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more

awful. After global climate control becomes possible, perhaps all our present

involvements will seem simple. We should not deceive ourselves:

once such possibilities become actual, they will be exploited."

-- John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?” Fortune, June 1955, 106–108.

James R. Fleming

Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Colby College

Research Associate, Columbia University

Series Editor, Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology, bit.ly/THQMcd

Profile: http://www.colby.edu/directory/profile/jfleming/

[Jim Fleming]

See my book Fixing the Sky (2010), chapter 7.

Jim

James R. Fleming

Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Colby College

Research Associate, Columbia University

Series Editor, Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology, bit.ly/THQMcd

Profile: http://www.colby.edu/directory/profile/jfleming/

[Fred Zimmerman]

Well, yes, but despite the Cold War era fears, nuclear war has not yet happened in 70 years, not just because of Andrew's "common interest" argument, but because politicians and military men apparently reached the conclusion that nuclear bombs were an ineffective way of coercing other nations to do things.  The same may be true for climate engineering.  I would not commit myself  to great optimism here, but I would propose that the history of nuclear weapons does not offer an evidentiary basis to say Von Neumann was right and "possibilities once actual .. will be exploited."

ᐧ

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 4:37 PM, Jim Fleming <jfle...@colby.edu> wrote:

[Motoko]

Great reference. I want to add the following sentence of von Neumann: "All experience shows that even smaller technological changes than those now in the cards profoundly transform political and social relationships."

Von Neumann could be right in assuming that climate control will change a lot. It will change also the relationship of science and policy.

[Nathan Currier]

Hi, I also disagreed with the premise of this op ed, but for quite different reasons: I have not been able to understand how someone like David Keith has been able to 

get fixated on such a notion as this bit about "Who will control the thermostat?" of geoengineering, which he has discussed for years now...... 

It should be obvious that even if geoengineering works effectively to counter warming, the very concept that it can therefore act as a functional "thermostat" is an entirely

different question, and dubious in every respect, it seems to me. The silliness is in the complete lack of assumed agency from the biosphere, and the obviously complex responses of abiological aspects of the Earth System as well. It's hardly just struggling humans who will "have their own ideas" about changes to solar input - every species, and every physical system, has its responses to all changes in the thermodynamic state of the planet, and the sum of all these responses gives you a net temperature. So it's one thing to temporarily be able to "push" the climate in a given direction - a kind of global aspirin, if you will - but quite another to imagine that you can through such means set the "global thermostat" at 58 or 59 or whatever, as though through aspirin Keith could set his internal temperature to 97.5  if he wished. I think that's just pure nonsense.  You might be able to do such a thing, at least in the sense of a little "more" or "less" for a little while, but you'd have to use entirely different means altogether than just the atmosphere or solar input to have some kind of planetary thermostat. Consider the Azolla event after the PETM, in which a major driver for the planet first getting its modern ice caps likely came from a single species without any underlying solar signal at. To maintain a global thermostat, you'd effectively have to police every "rogue species" on the planet, not just the "rogue states." Oh, and you'd have to run the tectonic plates, too.......

Cheers, Nathan 

[Cush Ngonzo Luwesi]

 I partly agree with Andy: Skepticism yes but realism is also needed. Alvin Toffler (1970) predicted the “future shock” that “change denial” will cause in the anthropocene. He used an analogy from the transmission of sound through electrical cables, which until 1875, was unconceivable by some while M. Bell was inventing the first telephone. Thence, he called for improved anticipation in governance to mitigate that future shock and ensure a smooth transition from hold practices to the new technological environment with the pace of social and technical change (Jasanoff, 2011; Stilgoe et al., 2013). Nonetheless, Toffler (1970) argued that not all technological and scientific discoveries would come out from the laboratories and take place nor would they see the light; some would just abort while others would vanish in the impasse, owing to their unfeasibility or fanciness or even disconnection to reality and disconcertion. This corroborate with the recent Royal Society’s Berlin Declaration 2014 on geoengineering.

Dr Cush Ngonzo Luwesi, PhD

Lecturer

Department of Geography

Kenyatta University

[Russell Seitz]

The answer to David and Andy's concern is to have as many thermostats as there are micrclimates.

The alternative to  top down approaches  to SRM is to develop local control of local albedo-- every community has two albedo footprints, one anthropogenic and the other dictated by geography , and the impact of their radiative forcing  on local microclimate can be locally addressed by local modulation o surface albedo on long time scales and short .

[Ken Caldeira]

Kate Ricke's model results are often trotted out to support the 'winners and losers' meme, but if you look at her results the conflict is between people who win less and people who win more.

We did a follow-up study on political dynamics, using her results (see below).

A key point to recognize is that, under typical climate damage metrics, the optimal amount of solar geoengineering for any given region differs from the global optimum typically by about 10%.  That is, people would be arguing about the second digit, not the first digit.  I doubt these second digit arguments will lead to any great conflict.

The much greater conflict would likely to be whether to deploy a sulfate aerosol layer at all. If a consensus can be found to deploy, I doubt whether there will be that much conflict over subtle adjustments to the knob.

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014021/article

Panel (a) shows on the vertical axis climate damage to different regions as a fraction of damages without solar geoengineering. The horizontal axis is th amount of solar geoengineering. Panels (b) and (c) show the optimum preferred by different regions. Note that they differ from the global optimum by only 10% or so.

_______________
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science 

Dept of Global Ecology

260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA

+1 650 704 7212 kcal...@carnegiescience.edu
http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab  

https://twitter.com/KenCaldeira

My assistant is Dawn Ross <dr...@carnegiescience.edu>, with access to incoming emails.

[Jim Fleming]

There was no approval for a "Berlin Declaration 2014 on geoengineering." 

I was at the meeting and the session. Correct me if I am wrong.

James R. Fleming

[olivermorton]

You are completely right, Jim - there was no such declaration. Anyone interested in revisiting the reasons for this absence can subject themselves to some of the debate here http://www.ce-conference.org/media/214

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[J.L. Reynolds]

I generally believe that the concerns over potential conflict over solar climate engineering are often overblown. There will surely be disagreements among countries as to their desired temperatures. Yet often implied and sometimes explicitly stated in the CE discourse is that these disagreements would likely lead to armed conflict, and/or that they would render CE ineffective. Countries, including the powerful ones, routinely disagree over numerous things. My sense is that definitions and rules in the WTO and its agreements, for example, are much more consequential for them than CE would be. These conflicts are resolved through various sorts of bargaining. Perhaps I am excessively optimistic, but it seems that the nature of international conflict and resolution is fundamentally different (and more peaceful) than 100 years ago (to use Olaf’s WW1 example), particularly among the powerful countries. Solar CE has the advantage, like much of international trade, that the advantages of countries’ collective agreement would likely outweigh their potential, individual advantages of getting the climate which they desire. Disagreement could lead to various CE programs interfering with one another, and they would all be left worse off. That is, it is a resolvable collective action problem.

 

From my vantage, the biggest concern would be if there were a systematic disagreement on the type and intensity of solar CE among powerful countries versus weak ones. The Ricke et al paper (which I recommend) cited by Ken begins to get at the that, but it also assumes that all countries would desire pre-industrial climates. That may not be the case.

 

-Jesse

 

-----------------------------------------

Jesse L. Reynolds, PhD

Postdoctoral researcher

Research funding coordinator, sustainability and climate

European and International Public Law

Tilburg Sustainability Center

Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Book review editor, Law, Innovation, and Technology

email: J.L.Re...@uvt.nl          

http://works.bepress.com/jessreyn/

[Andrew Lockley]

I think that the assumption of a return to pre industrial is outmoded as an intervention strategy. It's one I've heard much more from social scientists than physical scientists, who typically look to prevent or reduce future rises.

The only reason to return to pre industrial would be to reverse tipping point sea level rises, or others eg methane degassing from permafrost.

As to the issue of disagreement and conflict, I'm absolutely with Jesse in thinking this has been grossly overblown. I view this as a commonsense position, and one that's sadly lacking from the literature. I'd strongly encourage people to publish both discursive and modelling papers on the issue.

It's all too easy, apparently, for people to assume that consensus would be unusually hard to achieve - without offering any evidence for this position.

The world is not typically governed by force but by agreement.

A

[Ken Caldeira]

Just as with things like the abrupt4xCO2 scenarios, and solar dimming scenarios, metrics that measure differences from pre-industrial climates are intended to be useful tools to help understand both political and climate-system dynamics.

Often, work is done to illustrate some basic principals with the assumption that it will be extended later into more realistic scenarios, hopefully using better models.

In my group, we aim to illustrate important previously unrecognized principles in idealized contexts, in the hopes that others will follow later with more detailed exploration.

Illustration in idealized settings is an important first step.

If Galileo (who was by many orders of magnitude a better scientist than any of us) had considered rolling friction when thinking about rolling balls down an incline plane, he would not have predicted that it would take the ball 1/2 the time for the ball to roll 1/4 way down the plane.

http://galileo.rice.edu/lib/student_work/experiment95/inclined_plane.html

Science advances by tackling simple idealized cases first, and then adding complexity later.

_______________
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science 

Dept of Global Ecology

260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA

+1 650 704 7212 kcal...@carnegiescience.edu
http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab  

https://twitter.com/KenCaldeira

My assistant is Dawn Ross <dr...@carnegiescience.edu>, with access to incoming emails.

[Mike MacCracken]

A bit delayed in responding to this email, but Tom Wigley had a paper in Science (copy attached) basically indicating that one would have to go back to preindustrial CO2 to stop sea level rise. An interesting research question might be how long one would need to return to a much lower radiative forcing to get sea level rise stopped before conditions could return to something like the 350 ppm CO2 level, so about as warm as one can be without the ice sheets losing mass.

On this issue of “setting the thermostat,”  global average temperature might well not be the most important metric to be using. Precipitation has been mentioned, but it might well be that the rate of sea level rise would in the end be seen as being of much more relevance—keeping a bit cooler only takes energy, relocating as a result of sea level rise is much more problematic (not just due to storm surge and inundation, but of salt water pressing into coastal aquifers, etc. And it might be much easier to get consensus on dealing with sea level rise than on a value for global average temperature.

Mike MacCracken

On 2/2/15, 6:59 AM, "Andrew Lockley" <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:

I think that the assumption of a return to pre industrial is outmoded as an intervention strategy. It's one I've heard much more from social scientists than physical scientists, who typically look to prevent or reduce future rises.

The only reason to return to pre industrial would be to reverse tipping point sea level rises, or others eg methane degassing from permafrost.

As to the issue of disagreement and conflict, I'm absolutely with Jesse in thinking this has been grossly overblown. I view this as a commonsense position, and one that's sadly lacking from the literature. I'd strongly encourage people to publish both discursive and modelling papers on the issue.

It's all too easy, apparently, for people to assume that consensus would be unusually hard to achieve - without offering any evidence for this position.

 The world is not typically governed by force but by agreement.

A

On 2 Feb 2015 11:24, "J.L. Reynolds" <J.L.Re...@uvt.nl> wrote:

I generally believe that the concerns over potential conflict over solar climate engineering are often overblown. There will surely be disagreements among countries as to their desired temperatures. Yet often implied and sometimes explicitly stated in the CE discourse is that these disagreements would likely lead to armed conflict, and/or that they would render CE ineffective. Countries, including the powerful ones, routinely disagree over numerous things. My sense is that definitions and rules in the WTO and its agreements, for example, are much more consequential for them than CE would be. These conflicts are resolved through various sorts of bargaining. Perhaps I am excessively optimistic, but it seems that the nature of international conflict and resolution is fundamentally different (and more peaceful) than 100 years ago (to use Olaf’s WW1 example), particularly among the powerful countries. Solar CE has the advantage, like much of international trade, that the advantages of countries’ collective agreement would likely outweigh their potential, individual advantages of getting the climate which they desire. Disagreement could lead to various CE programs interfering with one another, and they would all be left worse off. That is, it is a resolvable collective action problem.
 
From my vantage, the biggest concern would be if there were a systematic disagreement on the type and intensity of solar CE among powerful countries versus weak ones. The Ricke et al paper (which I recommend) cited by Ken begins to get at the that, but it also assumes that all countries would desire pre-industrial climates. That may not be the case.
 
-Jesse
 
-----------------------------------------
Jesse L. Reynolds, PhD
Postdoctoral researcher
Research funding coordinator, sustainability and climate
European and International Public Law
Tilburg Sustainability Center
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Book review editor, Law, Innovation, and Technology

email: J.L.Re...@uvt.nl <mailto:J.L.Re...@uvt.nl>           
http://works.bepress.com/jessreyn/ <http://works.bepress.com/jessreyn/>
 

From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengi...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ken Caldeira
Sent: 31 January 2015 18:32
To: cushn...@gmail.com
Cc: Motoko; geoengineering
Subject: Re: [geo] Washington Post op ed

 

Kate Ricke's model results are often trotted out to support the 'winners and losers' meme, but if you look at her results the conflict is between people who win less and people who win more.

 

We did a follow-up study on political dynamics, using her results (see below).

 

A key point to recognize is that, under typical climate damage metrics, the optimal amount of solar geoengineering for any given region differs from the global optimum typically by about 10%.  That is, people would be arguing about the second digit, not the first digit.  I doubt these second digit arguments will lead to any great conflict.

 

The much greater conflict would likely to be whether to deploy a sulfate aerosol layer at all. If a consensus can be found to deploy, I doubt whether there will be that much conflict over subtle adjustments to the knob.

 

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014021/article

 

Panel (a) shows on the vertical axis climate damage to different regions as a fraction of damages without solar geoengineering. The horizontal axis is th amount of solar geoengineering. Panels (b) and (c) show the optimum preferred by different regions. Note that they differ from the global optimum by only 10% or so.

 

 



 

 


_______________
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science 

Dept of Global Ecology

260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA

+1 650 704 7212 <tel:%2B1%20650%20704%207212>  kcal...@carnegiescience.edu

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

https://twitter.com/KenCaldeira

 

My assistant is Dawn Ross <dr...@carnegiescience.edu>, with access to incoming emails.

 

 
 

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 7:54 AM, Cush Ngonzo Luwesi <cushn...@gmail.com> wrote:

 I partly agree with Andy: Skepticism yes but realism is also needed. Alvin Toffler (1970) predicted the “future shock” that “change denial” will cause in the anthropocene. He used an analogy from the transmission of sound through electrical cables, which until 1875, was unconceivable by some while M. Bell was inventing the first telephone. Thence, he called for improved anticipation in governance to mitigate that future shock and ensure a smooth transition from hold practices to the new technological environment with the pace of social and technical change (Jasanoff, 2011; Stilgoe et al., 2013). Nonetheless, Toffler (1970) argued that not all technological and scientific discoveries would come out from the laboratories and take place nor would they see the light; some would just abort while others would vanish in the impasse, owing to their unfeasibility or fanciness or even disconnection to reality and disconcertion. This corroborate with the recent Royal Society’s Berlin Declaration 2014 on geoengineering.

 

Dr Cush Ngonzo Luwesi, PhD

Lecturer

Department of Geography

Kenyatta University

 

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 3:24 PM, Motoko <moto...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Great reference. I want to add the following sentence of von Neumann: "All experience shows that even smaller technological changes than those now in the cards profoundly transform political and social relationships."

Von Neumann could be right in assuming that climate control will change a lot. It will change also the relationship of science and policy.

Am 30.01.2015 um 22:37 schrieb Jim Fleming:

As argued in 1955:

"Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more

awful. After global climate control becomes possible, perhaps all our present

involvements will seem simple. We should not deceive ourselves:

once such possibilities become actual, they will be exploited."

-- John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?” Fortune, June 1955, 106–108.


James R. Fleming

Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Colby College

Research Associate, Columbia University

Series Editor, Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology, bit.ly/THQMcd <http://bit.ly/THQMcd>

Profile: http://www.colby.edu/directory/profile/jfleming/ <http://www.colby.edu/directory/profile/jfleming/>

 
 

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Olaf Corry <toc...@gmail.com> wrote:


I agree with the basic idea that the politics of this will be likely to be very tricky (although - and partly for that reason - I 

remain unconvinced by the other premise of the article that SPI has been overwhelmingly shown to have net life-saving potential). 

 

Andrew, why the incredulity at a conflict scenario? The thing about international relations is that outcomes do not always reflect intentions or desired collective outcomes. History is full of consensus processes breaking down and collectively sub-optimal (to put it mildly) outcomes. 

Presumably everybody had an incentive to avoid the chaos of WW1 and stick to a consensus process...  

[Michael Hayes]

Hi Folks,

This level of discussion on SAI seems to be premature. We have yet to see any...any...models concerning the highly predictable increase in Polar Stratospheric Cloud (PSC) production which will be caused by SAI. This is not a trivial precondition to further discussion. As, the triggering of an Arctic Methane Tipping Point, through increasing PSC production, would make SAI simply a dysfunctional option.

Please read the following paper concerning the vital need to....not...increase PSCs through SAI.

Polar Stratospheric Clouds: A high latitude warning mechanism in an ancient greenhouse world.  

Best,

Michael 

[Oliver Morton]

What's the proposed SAI mechanism enhancing PSC? 

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The Economist

 

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[Fred Zimmerman]

Do you even need a proposed mechanism? From what I recall, both models and observations struggle at the poles, and we know that we don't want to go forward with SAI without a strong understanding of behavior at the poles. Maybe we should be asking what will we need to do to improve models and observations so that we have the same confidence at the poles as we do in other latitudes. 

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[Michael Hayes]

Oliver and List,

The primary cloud condensate nuclei for type one polar stratospheric clouds is sulfuric acid. This is a well known and established fact found in atmospheric physics. 

Here I offer a few reference among the many available:

1) Theoretical and Modeling Studies of the Atmospheric Chemistry of Sulfur: Hazem S. El-Zanan 

The relevance of the above book, to this topic, is found within the introduction.  

2) A 2D microphysical model of the polar stratospheric CN layer

1. Michael J. Mills¹, 
2. Owen B. Toon¹and
3. Susan Solomon²

"Each spring a layer of small particles forms between 20 and 30 km altitude in the polar regions. We present the first self-consistent explanation of the observed “CN layer” from a 2D microphysical model of sulfate aerosol. Our theory relies on photolysis of H₂SO₄ and SO₃, consistent with recent laboratory measurements, to produce SO₂ in the upper stratosphere and mesosphere. An additional source of SO₂may be required. Nucleation throughout the polar winter extends the top of the aerosol layer to higher altitudes, despite strong downward transport of ambient air. This may affect heterogeneous chemistry at the top of the aerosol layer in polar winter and spring.".

Please pay close attention to the 'Particle Microphysics' section and the conclusion in the above paper.

Further, if we take a close look at the 'Pinatubo Effect', in relationship to ozone production with elevated SO2 levels, we find a significant downward trend in the "global mean column ozone". This scenario is explained in the following paper. Please see pg. 403, 2nd column, 4th-5th para.: 

3) Atmospheric effects of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption: MP McCormick, LW Thomason, CR Trepte - Nature, 1995

However, we can find reference to the apparent contradictions found in the premise that SAI offers no threat to polar stability while lowering the 'global average temperature' in a far more topical references...such as:

4) Polar stratospheric cloud (Wiki)
PSCs are classified into three types Ia, Ib and II according to their chemical composition which can be measured using LIDAR. The technique also determines the height and ambient temperature of the cloud.[4]

• Type I clouds contain water, nitric acid and/or sulfuric acid and they are a source of polar ozone depletion.[5]
  • Type Ia clouds consist of large, aspherical particles, consisting of nitric acid trihydrate (NAT).[4]
  • Type Ib clouds contain small, spherical particles (non-depolarising), of a liquid supercooled ternary solution (STS) of sulfuric acid, nitric acid and water.[4]
  • Type Ic clouds consist of metastable water-rich nitric acid in a solid phase.[6]
• Type II clouds, which are very rarely observed in the Arctic, consist of water ice only.[4]

(My highlights)

5) Also, the Harvard website "Equable Climate Dynamics-Polar Stratospheric Clouds" offers a well written oversight of PSC trapping polar heat and the reference section has a number of citations worth reading.

6) And again, we should pay close attention to the paper I originally sited for a view of the PSC dynamics within an ancient "greenhouse" world. Please pay close attention to the 'Discussion' section.

Polar Stratospheric Clouds: A high latitude warning mechanism in an ancient greenhouse world: Sloan and Pollard  

In brief summation, an intentional increase in stratospheric sulfuric acid, per SAI, will trigger a corresponding increase in the most common PSC type of formation (type 1) and thus this action would represent an intentional increase in polar temperatures. Thus, such intentional actions would constitute a knowable action resulting in the intentional acceleration of polar methane hydrate releases and the existential threat that such releases pose (i.e. Arctic Methane Tipping Point). Thus, the intentional injection of sulfuric acid into the atmosphere represents an real and significant threat to climate stability, as we know it, and will further accelerate the current trend towards an equitable (unstable) climate....intentionally.     

Oliver, thank you for your question and I hope my response offers a reasonable degree of information for you to decide for yourself if SAI is or is not a threat to polar (and global) climate stability as opposed to the current hyperbolicly positive rhetoric concerning the efficaciousness of the SAI concept.  

Best regards,

Michael

[nathan currier]

Hi, Michael & Adrian - 

Thanks so much for all of this, which I personally think is very important material. I found the Sloan-Pollard paper fascinating, in spite of, and maybe partly also because of, the fact that it isn't a new paper, yet seems to inject a fresh and tantalizingly relevant paleoclimate perspective into this discussion of the role of Arctic stratospheric clouds in Arctic climate -  and thus by inference how Arctic stratospheric sulfur injection could get entangled in all of that in a pretty nasty way.

Some months ago now, when Ken was asking about "bad memes of geoengineering", and I mentioned what I saw as the "Pinatubo meme" and the vague thoughts I had been having about stratospheric H2O, its role in warming, and various potential interconnections with both methane and sulfur, and thus more "hidden" positive forcings from it that went along with the often discussed and more obvious negative ones, I didn't imagine that what I was thinking of as the worst possible kinds of direct connections would be so likely as it seems from what you have just sent.

Right off the bat, one thing it suggests to me is that Arctic-only sulfur SRM in the stratosphere, which I too had thought was a good idea when I first had heard of it, might turn out to have been one of the worst geoengineering ideas proposed, potentially causing more harm than good. Add to that that Adrian had written then about how the lofting will work quite poorly in the Arctic, as discussed in his paper.  

To be fair, it is still the net effect that matters, and when I first wrote about this to the group, I did my own little entirely unprofessional back-of-the- envelope calculation, in terms of global sulfur SRM issues and Pinatubo, using the Solomon et al  paper on the contribution of stratospheric H2O to warming in the 90s, and hypothesized, based on some other papers describing how volcanic injection of H2O can play out in the stratosphere for ~5-10 years, a "what if" in which a large % of that 90s H2O perturbation had come directly from Pinatubo itself, how bad would that be for its overall forcing profile, and yet I found that even then (not so likely) it would it reduce the cooling efficacy by something like 50% I think it was, at most....and the amount of that positive forcing tied directly to the sulfur would be far smaller, too, since H2O is directly injected in the process.............

But in the Arctic-only stratospheric sulfur SRM case, on the other hand, it sounds as though there might be the potential for the whole idea to actually be close to being outright pernicious and entirely useless!.....very interesting......thanks again.....

Cheers, 

Nathan

[nathan currier]

By the way, as a follow up to that, has anyone proposed using this very same material as the source of an Arctic geoengineering idea - that is, has anyone proposed something like "cirrus stripping" but for polar stratospheric clouds instead, as a way of helping to cool the Arctic? Might there be a feasible way of doing this? 

Cheers, 

Nathan

[David Mitchell]

Michael and Nathan – Many thanks for your thoughts on this!

 

To answer your question Nathan; yes, we need to explore this further.  We have a new satellite remote sensing tool that appears to show the right conditions for “cirrus stripping” during polar winter, but these results are preliminary.  Conditions for this technique could be better in the polar winter stratosphere; stay tuned…

 

David Mitchell

 

From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengi...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of nathan currier
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2015 5:38 PM
To: Michael Hayes
Cc: Geoengineering FIPC; Oliver Morton; Andrew Revkin; John Latham; David Keith; arctic...@googlegroups.com; Dr. Adrian Tuck; Ken Caldeira; Andrew Lockley; Michael MacCracken
Subject: Re: [geo] Re: Washington Post op ed

 

By the way, as a follow up to that, has anyone proposed using this very same material as the source of an Arctic geoengineering idea - that is, has anyone proposed something like "cirrus stripping" but for polar stratospheric clouds instead, as a way of helping to cool the Arctic? Might there be a feasible way of doing this? 

 

Cheers, 

 

Nathan

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 8:25 PM, nathan currier <natcu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, Michael & Adrian - 

 

Thanks so much for all of this, which I personally think is very important material. I found the Sloan-Pollard paper fascinating, in spite of, and maybe partly also because of, the fact that it isn't a new paper, yet seems to inject a fresh and tantalizingly relevant paleoclimate perspective into this discussion of the role of Arctic stratospheric clouds in Arctic climate -  and thus by inference how Arctic stratospheric sulfur injection could get entangled in all of that in a pretty nasty way.

 

Some months ago now, when Ken was asking about "bad memes of geoengineering", and I mentioned what I saw as the "Pinatubo meme" and the vague thoughts I had been having about stratospheric H2O, its role in warming, and various potential interconnections with both methane and sulfur, and thus more "hidden" positive forcings from it that went along with the often discussed and more obvious negative ones, I didn't imagine that what I was thinking of as the worst possible kinds of direct connections would be so likely as it seems from what you have just sent.

 

Right off the bat, one thing it suggests to me is that Arctic-only sulfur SRM in the stratosphere, which I too had thought was a good idea when I first had heard of it, might turn out to have been one of the worst geoengineering ideas proposed, potentially causing more harm than good. Add to that that Adrian had written then about how the lofting will work quite poorly in the Arctic, as discussed in his paper.  

 

To be fair, it is still the net effect that matters, and when I first wrote about this to the group, I did my own little entirely unprofessional back-of-the- envelope calculation, in terms of global sulfur SRM issues and Pinatubo, using the Solomon et al  paper on the contribution of stratospheric H2O to warming in the 90s, and hypothesized, based on some other papers describing how volcanic injection of H2O can play out in the stratosphere for ~5-10 years, a "what if" in which a large % of that 90s H2O perturbation had come directly from Pinatubo itself, how bad would that be for its overall forcing profile, and yet I found that even then (not so likely) it would it reduce the cooling efficacy by something like 50% I think it was, at most....and the amount of that positive forcing tied directly to the sulfur would be far smaller, too, since H2O is directly injected in the process.............

 

But in the Arctic-only stratospheric sulfur SRM case, on the other hand, it sounds as though there might be the potential for the whole idea to actually be close to being outright pernicious and entirely useless!.....very interesting......thanks again.....

 

Cheers, 

 

Nathan

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 5:52 PM, Michael Hayes <vogle...@gmail.com> wrote:

Oliver and List,

 

The primary cloud condensate nuclei for type one polar stratospheric clouds is sulfuric acid. This is a well known and established fact found in atmospheric physics. 

 

Here I offer a few reference among the many available:

 

1) Theoretical and Modeling Studies of the Atmospheric Chemistry of Sulfur: Hazem S. El-Zanan 

 

The relevance of the above book, to this topic, is found within the introduction.  

 

2) A 2D microphysical model of the polar stratospheric CN layer

 

1.     Michael J. Mills¹, 

2.     Owen B. Toon¹and

3.     Susan Solomon²

 

 

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[Daniel Kirk-Davidoff]

Hi all, 

I have a couple of papers on the PSC idea from a few years back.  I still think it's interesting and could use continued studies in models with more up-to-date cirrus physics, but it depends on some pretty speculative dynamics within the PSCs to maintain those high water levels in the stratosphere.  Simply put, it's hard to get much of a flux of water to the vortex via the stratospheric overturning circulation, so you need to count on cloud self-heating to produce cycles of evaporation and condensation in the vortex that, in the mean, keep things pretty opaque in the IR, and allow for several watts of extra cooling to the surface.  

Cheers, 
Dan Kirk-Davidoff

Kirk-Davidoff, D.B., J.-F. Lamarque, 2008: Maintenance of polar stratospheric clouds in a moist stratosphere. Climate of the Past,4:69-78. 

Kirk-Davidoff, D.B., D.P. Schrag, and J.G. Anderson, 2002: On the Feedback of Stratospheric Clouds on Polar Climate. Geophys. Res. Let.. 29(11), 10.1029/2002GL014659

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Kirk-Davidoff
9501 Good Lion Rd.
Columbia, MD 21045
410-730-2780

[Adrian Tuck]

Try these two, they have the merit of being more recent.

Adrian Tuck

 

'ATMOSPHERIC TURBULENCE: A Molecular Dynamics Perspective'.

Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-923653-4.

http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199236534

 

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[Nathan Currier]

Hi Mike, 

I wonder if you could explain a little more here on SLR as being a better metric to set than temperature, because it seems to me like there's a fundamental optimism behind saying this, and perhaps you can correct my overly pessimistic assumptions......

The way that I have begun to imagine it is that the recent Rignot et al study and other advances have started to make a picture where you have on-the-ground observations of the bottom-up ice sheet mechanics in real time -  the grounding lines, retrograde beds, etc -  and that this can be fit back in with all the more general global paleoclimatic evidence to create a pretty coherent view from which total 'sea level commitment' should be able to be estimated, even if the future rate still could not without reverting to ice sheet models, etc.  Given that the Eemian level became 20-30 ft higher than current with CO2 never going much higher than the pre-industrial 280ppm, and that we have already reached a CO2 level and likely a net forcing that, if sustained, will lead to ~75-120ft higher than now, is there any real grounds for hoping that the total irreversible 'sea level commitment' is not already somewhere within 30-120 ft? Given that the signals making the +30ft of the Eemian (not even getting into the Holsteinian) were so mild, and now we've come along and put such a whopper of a signal into the system, even if we dial it back very quickly, let's say all the way back to 280, wouldn't it be hard to explain a scenario where at least that same +30 ft is not still going to come due now? If not, how could that be explained, since even the preindustrial level is nothing like that at which new ice sheets get formed? And after all, in the Rignot study, since Pine Island is so structurally vital to the WAIS, the now irreversible 4ft of rise that was mentioned everywhere when the study was published is clearly NOT the full commitment just from that area which we can see in a very granular and detailed way - and that's pretty much irrespective of global engineering of the surface temperature, too, it would seem. So, as thermostats go, it might be like telling people they can set their house between 40-55F - that is, just way far from any kind of comfort zone, even if, of course, 30 ft is still a lot better than 120..... 

Now, I remember that you were once talking about some interesting measures, far less controversial than "real geoengineering", that might be helpful for SLR, like preventing icebergs from floating off from near outlets around Greenland.....I wonder whether any more work has been done on this, and whether such a technique might work well around the parts of WAIS recently recognized as being hopeless, where it is the salinity gradient driving the pumping of warmer waters down to the grounding line of the ice sheets, which you might be able to interrupt in this manner?

Cheers, 

Nathan 

On Tuesday, February 3, 2015 at 7:34:01 PM UTC-5, Mike MacCracken wrote:

A bit delayed in responding to this email, but Tom Wigley had a paper in Science (copy attached) basically indicating that one would have to go back to preindustrial CO2 to stop sea level rise. An interesting research question might be how long one would need to return to a much lower radiative forcing to get sea level rise stopped before conditions could return to something like the 350 ppm CO2 level, so about as warm as one can be without the ice sheets losing mass.

On this issue of “setting the thermostat,”  global average temperature might well not be the most important metric to be using. Precipitation has been mentioned, but it might well be that the rate of sea level rise would in the end be seen as being of much more relevance—keeping a bit cooler only takes energy, relocating as a result of sea level rise is much more problematic (not just due to storm surge and inundation, but of salt water pressing into coastal aquifers, etc. And it might be much easier to get consensus on dealing with sea level rise than on a value for global average temperature.

Mike MacCracken


On 2/2/15, 6:59 AM, "Andrew Lockley" <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:

I think that the assumption of a return to pre industrial is outmoded as an intervention strategy. It's one I've heard much more from social scientists than physical scientists, who typically look to prevent or reduce future rises.

The only reason to return to pre industrial would be to reverse tipping point sea level rises, or others eg methane degassing from permafrost.

As to the issue of disagreement and conflict, I'm absolutely with Jesse in thinking this has been grossly overblown. I view this as a commonsense position, and one that's sadly lacking from the literature. I'd strongly encourage people to publish both discursive and modelling papers on the issue.

It's all too easy, apparently, for people to assume that consensus would be unusually hard to achieve - without offering any evidence for this position.

 The world is not typically governed by force but by agreement.

A

On 2 Feb 2015 11:24, "J.L. Reynolds" <J.L.Re...@uvt.nl> wrote:

I generally believe that the concerns over potential conflict over solar climate engineering are often overblown. There will surely be disagreements among countries as to their desired temperatures. Yet often implied and sometimes explicitly stated in the CE discourse is that these disagreements would likely lead to armed conflict, and/or that they would render CE ineffective. Countries, including the powerful ones, routinely disagree over numerous things. My sense is that definitions and rules in the WTO and its agreements, for example, are much more consequential for them than CE would be. These conflicts are resolved through various sorts of bargaining. Perhaps I am excessively optimistic, but it seems that the nature of international conflict and resolution is fundamentally different (and more peaceful) than 100 years ago (to use Olaf’s WW1 example), particularly among the powerful countries. Solar CE has the advantage, like much of international trade, that the advantages of countries’ collective agreement would likely outweigh their potential, individual advantages of getting the climate which they desire. Disagreement could lead to various CE programs interfering with one another, and they would all be left worse off. That is, it is a resolvable collective action problem.
 
From my vantage, the biggest concern would be if there were a systematic disagreement on the type and intensity of solar CE among powerful countries versus weak ones. The Ricke et al paper (which I recommend) cited by Ken begins to get at the that, but it also assumes that all countries would desire pre-industrial climates. That may not be the case.
 
-Jesse
 
-----------------------------------------
Jesse L. Reynolds, PhD
Postdoctoral researcher
Research funding coordinator, sustainability and climate
European and International Public Law
Tilburg Sustainability Center
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Book review editor, Law, Innovation, and Technology

email: J.L.Re...@uvt.nl <mailto:J....@uvt.nl>           
http://works.bepress.com/jessreyn/ <http://works.bepress.com/jessreyn/>
 

[Mike MacCracken]

Hi Nathan—It is because of the potential (growing probability) of sea level rise that you mention that at least some of the effort on SLR should be devoted to exploring the potential for limiting sea level rise rather than using global average temperature as a metric. So, what might one do—well, given that the accelerating ice sheet loss is due to energy from warming ocean waters, might not it make sense to be exploring the potential for cooling the Southern Ocean, the Labrador Sea/Davis Strait, etc. (and might some of the more local effects of the warmer waters reaching the glacial faces be moderated by wave-induced vertical mixing of surface and near-bottom waters)?  Might it make sense as well to see if there is a way of promoting added snowfall over the ice sheets? As far back as the Caldeira-Wood paper it was evident that high-latitude global cooling via polar SRM does not reduce the extra flow of water vapor into polar regions because the water vapor increase is a result of additional moisture being evaporated at lower latitudes where solar radiation is not being reduced—and that resulting cooling in high latitudes would lead to more of the precipitation in high latitudes being snow, hopefully tending to rebuild the glaciers and add mass to the ice sheets. Even ideas of pumping water onto ice sheets (or particular ice streams, etc.) needs to be explored—and whatever else creative minds might come up with.

It just seems to me that, given the grave, seemingly inevitable, threat being faced (as mentioned by Rignot et al., etc.), efforts by the scientific community should be made to see if there is anything that might be done, and that doing so, even though the sea level rise will take longer to occur than a several degree C global warming, needs to be receiving some significant attention. Giving in to pessimism rather than exploring every possibility does not seem acceptable to me—that the scientific community is not even getting the support needed to explore all the options is what is so particularly discouraging to me, and needs, in my view, to change.

Best, Mike

On 2/8/15, 12:33 PM, "Nathan Currier" <natcu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Mike,

I wonder if you could explain a little more here on SLR as being a better metric to set than temperature, because it seems to me like there's a fundamental optimism behind saying this, and perhaps you can correct my overly pessimistic assumptions......

The way that I have begun to imagine it is that the recent Rignot et al study and other advances have started to make a picture where you have on-the-ground observations of the bottom-up ice sheet mechanics in real time -  the grounding lines, retrograde beds, etc -  and that this can be fit back in with all the more general global paleoclimatic evidence to create a pretty coherent view from which total 'sea level commitment' should be able to be estimated, even if the future rate still could not without reverting to ice sheet models, etc.  Given that the Eemian level became 20-30 ft higher than current with CO2 never going much higher than the pre-industrial 280ppm, and that we have already reached a CO2 level and likely a net forcing that, if sustained, will lead to ~75-120ft higher than now, is there any real grounds for hoping that the total irreversible 'sea level commitment' is not already somewhere within 30-120 ft? Given that the signals making the +30ft of the Eemian (not even getting into the Holsteinian) were so mild, and now we've come along and put such a whopper of a signal into the system, even if we dial it back very quickly, let's say all the way back to 280, wouldn't it be hard to explain a scenario where at least that same +30 ft is not still going to come due now? If not, how could that be explained, since even the preindustrial level is nothing like that at which new ice sheets get formed? And after all, in the Rignot study, since Pine Island is so structurally vital to the WAIS, the now irreversible 4ft of rise that was mentioned everywhere when the study was published is clearly NOT the full commitment just from that area which we can see in a very granular and detailed way - and that's pretty much irrespective of global engineering of the surface temperature, too, it would seem. So, as thermostats go, it might be like telling people they can set their house between 40-55F - that is, just way far from any kind of comfort zone, even if, of course, 30 ft is still a lot better than 120.....

Now, I remember that you were once talking about some interesting measures, far less controversial than "real geoengineering", that might be helpful for SLR, like preventing icebergs from floating off from near outlets around Greenland.....I wonder whether any more work has been done on this, and whether such a technique might work well around the parts of WAIS recently recognized as being hopeless, where it is the salinity gradient driving the pumping of warmer waters down to the grounding line of the ice sheets, which you might be able to interrupt in this manner?

Cheers,

Nathan







On Tuesday, February 3, 2015 at 7:34:01 PM UTC-5, Mike MacCracken wrote:

A bit delayed in responding to this email, but Tom Wigley had a paper in Science (copy attached) basically indicating that one would have to go back to preindustrial CO2 to stop sea level rise. An interesting research question might be how long one would need to return to a much lower radiative forcing to get sea level rise stopped before conditions could return to something like the 350 ppm CO2 level, so about as warm as one can be without the ice sheets losing mass.

On this issue of “setting the thermostat,”  global average temperature might well not be the most important metric to be using. Precipitation has been mentioned, but it might well be that the rate of sea level rise would in the end be seen as being of much more relevance—keeping a bit cooler only takes energy, relocating as a result of sea level rise is much more problematic (not just due to storm surge and inundation, but of salt water pressing into coastal aquifers, etc. And it might be much easier to get consensus on dealing with sea level rise than on a value for global average temperature.

Mike MacCracken


On 2/2/15, 6:59 AM, "Andrew Lockley" <andrew....@gmail.com <http://andrew....@gmail.com> > wrote:

I think that the assumption of a return to pre industrial is outmoded as an intervention strategy. It's one I've heard much more from social scientists than physical scientists, who typically look to prevent or reduce future rises.

The only reason to return to pre industrial would be to reverse tipping point sea level rises, or others eg methane degassing from permafrost.

As to the issue of disagreement and conflict, I'm absolutely with Jesse in thinking this has been grossly overblown. I view this as a commonsense position, and one that's sadly lacking from the literature. I'd strongly encourage people to publish both discursive and modelling papers on the issue.

It's all too easy, apparently, for people to assume that consensus would be unusually hard to achieve - without offering any evidence for this position.

 The world is not typically governed by force but by agreement.

A

On 2 Feb 2015 11:24, "J.L. Reynolds" <J.L.Re...@uvt.nl <http://J.L.Re...@uvt.nl> > wrote:

I generally believe that the concerns over potential conflict over solar climate engineering are often overblown. There will surely be disagreements among countries as to their desired temperatures. Yet often implied and sometimes explicitly stated in the CE discourse is that these disagreements would likely lead to armed conflict, and/or that they would render CE ineffective. Countries, including the powerful ones, routinely disagree over numerous things. My sense is that definitions and rules in the WTO and its agreements, for example, are much more consequential for them than CE would be. These conflicts are resolved through various sorts of bargaining. Perhaps I am excessively optimistic, but it seems that the nature of international conflict and resolution is fundamentally different (and more peaceful) than 100 years ago (to use Olaf’s WW1 example), particularly among the powerful countries. Solar CE has the advantage, like much of international trade, that the advantages of countries’ collective agreement would likely outweigh their potential, individual advantages of getting the climate which they desire. Disagreement could lead to various CE programs interfering with one another, and they would all be left worse off. That is, it is a resolvable collective action problem.
 
From my vantage, the biggest concern would be if there were a systematic disagreement on the type and intensity of solar CE among powerful countries versus weak ones. The Ricke et al paper (which I recommend) cited by Ken begins to get at the that, but it also assumes that all countries would desire pre-industrial climates. That may not be the case.
 
-Jesse
 
-----------------------------------------
Jesse L. Reynolds, PhD
Postdoctoral researcher
Research funding coordinator, sustainability and climate
European and International Public Law
Tilburg Sustainability Center
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Book review editor, Law, Innovation, and Technology

email: J.L.Re...@uvt.nl <http://J.L.Re...@uvt.nl>  <mailto:J....@uvt.nl <javascript:> >           
http://works.bepress.com/jessreyn/ <http://works.bepress.com/jessreyn/>
 

From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com <http://geoengi...@googlegroups.com>  [mailto:geo...@googlegroups.com <javascript:> ] On Behalf Of Ken Caldeira
Sent: 31 January 2015 18:32
To: cushn...@gmail.com <http://cushn...@gmail.com>
Cc: Motoko; geoengineering
Subject: Re: [geo] Washington Post op ed

Kate Ricke's model results are often trotted out to support the 'winners and losers' meme, but if you look at her results the conflict is between people who win less and people who win more.

 

We did a follow-up study on political dynamics, using her results (see below).

 

A key point to recognize is that, under typical climate damage metrics, the optimal amount of solar geoengineering for any given region differs from the global optimum typically by about 10%.  That is, people would be arguing about the second digit, not the first digit.  I doubt these second digit arguments will lead to any great conflict.

 

The much greater conflict would likely to be whether to deploy a sulfate aerosol layer at all. If a consensus can be found to deploy, I doubt whether there will be that much conflict over subtle adjustments to the knob.

 

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014021/article

 

Panel (a) shows on the vertical axis climate damage to different regions as a fraction of damages without solar geoengineering. The horizontal axis is th amount of solar geoengineering. Panels (b) and (c) show the optimum preferred by different regions. Note that they differ from the global optimum by only 10% or so.

 

 



 

 

_______________
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science

Dept of Global Ecology

260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA

+1 650 704 7212 <tel:%2B1%20650%20704%207212>  kcal...@carnegiescience.edu <http://kcal...@carnegiescience.edu>
http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab  

https://twitter.com/KenCaldeira

 

My assistant is Dawn Ross <dr...@carnegiescience.edu <http://dr...@carnegiescience.edu> >, with access to incoming emails.

 

 
 

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 7:54 AM, Cush Ngonzo Luwesi <cushn...@gmail.com <http://cushn...@gmail.com> > wrote:

 I partly agree with Andy: Skepticism yes but realism is also needed. Alvin Toffler (1970) predicted the “future shock” that “change denial” will cause in the anthropocene. He used an analogy from the transmission of sound through electrical cables, which until 1875, was unconceivable by some while M. Bell was inventing the first telephone. Thence, he called for improved anticipation in governance to mitigate that future shock and ensure a smooth transition from hold practices to the new technological environment with the pace of social and technical change (Jasanoff, 2011; Stilgoe et al., 2013). Nonetheless, Toffler (1970) argued that not all technological and scientific discoveries would come out from the laboratories and take place nor would they see the light; some would just abort while others would vanish in the impasse, owing to their unfeasibility or fanciness or even disconnection to reality and disconcertion. This corroborate with the recent Royal Society’s Berlin Declaration 2014 on geoengineering.

 

Dr Cush Ngonzo Luwesi, PhD

Lecturer

Department of Geography

Kenyatta University

 

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 3:24 PM, Motoko <moto...@googlemail.com <http://moto...@googlemail.com> > wrote:

Great reference. I want to add the following sentence of von Neumann: "All experience shows that even smaller technological changes than those now in the cards profoundly transform political and social relationships."

Von Neumann could be right in assuming that climate control will change a lot. It will change also the relationship of science and policy.

Am 30.01.2015 um 22:37 schrieb Jim Fleming:

As argued in 1955:

"Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more

awful. After global climate control becomes possible, perhaps all our present

involvements will seem simple. We should not deceive ourselves:

once such possibilities become actual, they will be exploited."

-- John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?” Fortune, June 1955, 106–108.


James R. Fleming

Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Colby College

Research Associate, Columbia University

Series Editor, Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology, bit.ly/THQMcd <http://bit.ly/THQMcd>  <http://bit.ly/THQMcd>