TERRA FUTURA 2013: INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA ABOUT GEOENGINEERING | NoGeoingegneria

[Andrew Lockley]

http://www.nogeoingegneria.com/interviste/terra-futura-2013-interview-with-vandana-shiva-about-geoengineering/

TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW

NoGeoingegneria: So, first, thank you very much for your time because you’re an incredible woman and you always have so much time for everybody. and it’s great. We wanted to speak a little bit about geoengineering with you. It’s something that embraces everything: food and water and what is happening now in the world in a situation of climate change, and great change, and risk of collapse at every level. I saw the interview you had with Amy Goodman. So, first, what is, for you, at this moment, the role of geoengineering?

00:55 Vandana: the role of geo-engineering should, in a world of responsibility, in a world of scientifically enlightened decision making and ecological understanding, it should be zero. There is no role for geo-engeneering. Because what is geoengineering but extending the engineering paradigm? There have been engineered parts of the earth, and aspects of ecosystems and organisms through genetical engineering: the massive dam building, the re-routing of rivers. These were all elements of geoengineering at the level of particular places and we have recognized two things: one, that when you don’t take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage. Everyone knows that in effect climate change is a result of that engineering paradigm. We could replace people with fossil fuels, have higher and higher levels of industrialization, of agriculture, of production, without thinking of the green-house gases we were admitting, and climate change is really the pollution of the engineering paradigm, when fossil fuels drove industrialism. To now offer that same mindset as a solution is to not take seriously what Einstein said: that you can’t solve the problems by using the same mindset that caused them. So, the idea of engineering is an idea of mastery. And today the role that we are being asked to play is a role based on informed humanity.

2:45 NoGeoingegneria
In my eyes geoengineering started in the 50s with atomic tests, because in this period they started to make geoengineering of the atmosphere of earth in a global sense, in a bigger sense, and a lot of projects in the 50s started to organize the earth, the planet, in a new way, with a new idea of engineering really the whole planet. With the power of atomic bomb scientists made a shifting in their mind, in my eyes. So in this period, in the 50′s weather modification also started very energically. It is part of geo engineering, and you have here the map of the ETC group, in the whole world, they are doing it, and you cannot do local modifications without changing the whole system. I know in India, in Thailand, and Australia weather modification maybe is more discussed, more open than in Europe. For example in Italy they made weather modification in the 80′s and people don’t know it. What do you think about the role of weather modification in a sense of geoengineering for food, for water, for the whole system?

4:21 Vandana

Weather modification is a very small part of geo engineering. Geoengineering right now is the hubris of saying: “all this climate change, and we’re living in the anthropocene age and now human beings will be the shapers of our future, that totally control the overall functions of not just our planet, but our relationship with other planets, so many of the solutions offered have been putting reflectors in the sky to send the sun back as if the sun was a problem rather than the very basis of life, or to put pollutants into the atmosphere in order to create a layer of pollution that would stop the sun from shining. But the instability of the climate that is the result of the greenhouse effect will just be aggravated by these interventions. Now weather modifications done in a narrow-minded way, to say “we are not getting rain so let us precipitate rain artificially so that agriculture doesn’t fail” is something that for example the Chinese did for the olympics. They made sure there would be no rain during the Olympics. It is a lower level of hubris than the larger project of geoengineering.

5:47 you know this map…..?

5:49 Vandanayes of course i know Etcetera.

5:52 N: and you see that the ETC Group also published only a part, it’s only a part because everyday something else is coming out, in the whole world they are doing it, so if you make in a lot of points.

6:07 V: it’s not too much the points

6:08 N: what does it mean for weather extremes for example?

6:11 V: the first thing is it creates more instability, and we are dealing with instability, therefore we must deal more with actions that create insurance against instability, rather than aggravating the instability. It’s like I’m driving a car and I know there’s a precipice there, I should put the car in reverse and then turn into another direction. What geo engineering is doing is saying “let’s put our foot on the accelerator”. And the precipice is climate instability, climate unpredictability. And at the root of it is the false idea that these silly little actions will be able to control and regulate the weather and climate. But the second most important part of why geo engineering is so so wrong is that is ultimate expression of patriarchal irresponsibility. Patriarchy is based on appropriating rights and leaving responsibility to others. In this case the scientists who are playing these games, the who are investors financing it, are all doing it without having any consent for these experiments, any approval for these experiments, locally or globally, and worse, without thinking of the consequences or what it can lead to, and without ever ever being bound to responsibility. Therefore it is the ultimate expression of all the destructive tendencies of patriarchy.

7:50 N: Yeah, and you see you can take one name Edward Teller. He comes from the atomic bomb. He had the idea of controlling the weather by atomic bomb. He proposed the shield for sun radiation management, so the same persons, the same power structure is organizing this type of management of the planet and of space. So, you know about the intention of control ….?

8:22 V: Well for some people the intention is really one of making others suffer. And therefore aspects of geo- engineering are about links with military warfare. How do you alter the climate so that you can just make rain fall or fail in a particular area and let agriculture suffer. But in other cases, even if there isn’t that military intention of harm to the other there is an ignorance…..

8:56 N: There is also economic interest ……

8:58 V: Not all, the reason that there is such a battalion of scientists behind it…..

9:00 N: You know oil and not soil, the food and water …….

9:05 V: The people are pushing it have a money interest. The people who are pushing it have a military interest. , people are pushing to have a military interest. The players merely have the arrogance that ” I have the solution”. And it’s the combination of stupidity combined with the arrogance of the little players, and the evil projects of the ones who control it, that combination is what makes it toxic. Because if the scientific community could only recognize its responsibility to society and the planet and say “I will not be part of your games”, which is how Scientists for Social Responsibility was created, which is how the group that started to monitor the whole nuclear issue, those were all scientists. This is a marriage of stupid scientists with evil minds, and we need scientists with responsibility to be the counterforce to say this is not science, just as we need in genetic engineering. And it is as the community of scientists who really know the science start to speak more and organize better, that the stupid scientists of the biotech industry will quieten down. And biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature

10:30 N: you spoke also of the dams. It’s big geoengineering also in India and in the whole world and there are now the big interests of water and here, the last time we had an interview with Pat Mooney he said that big dams, energy production, water control, and weather control, it’s one thing. So it’s not only a small intervention to have crops. It’s something more.

11:06 V: No as I said it’s the ultimate hubris, that’s what it is! Hubris on a planetary scale!

11:19 N: Uh….. what do you think about the fact they will spray nano particles? That’s the program!

11:29 V: Each of these issues has a particular aspect thats different but i think those particular aspects are very small compared to the overall damage and the overall irresponsibility. For me the first issue is, how dare you do this. How dare you. That has to be humanity’s response. Then the rest of the little thing of how nano particles can harm or have too much sulphur in the atmosphere can harm, those are specific details but this is a civilizational issue. And in civilizational issues you don’t look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!

Transcript by lukinski&trishy
Vandana Shiva –

Biography:Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker, activist, physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer and science policy advocate, is the Director of The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. She serves as an ecology advisor to several organizations including the Third World Network and the Asia Pacific People’s Environment Network. In 1993 she was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”. A contributing editor to People-Centered Development Forum, she has also written several works include, “Staying Alive,” “The Violence of the Green Revolution,” “Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge,” “Monoculutures of the Mind” and “Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit,” as well as over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals. Shiva participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement during the 1970s, whose main participants were women. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization, and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the anti-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her book “Vedic Ecology” that draws upon India’s Vedic heritage. Shiva has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics, genetic engineering are among the fields where Shiva has contributed intellectually and through activist campaigns. She has assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering. In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. Her book, “Staying Alive” helped redefine perceptions of third world women. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as non governmental organisations, including the International Forum on Globalisation, the Women’s Environment & Development Organization and the Third World Network

[Ronal W. Larson]

List   cc Andrew

    This interview is of course not good news;  Dr.  Shiva has a pretty strong following in environmental circles.

    I add a few comments here for three reasons

         First because she has said all of the same things about biochar (not mentioned in the transcript below) on several occasions.  She wrote a very confused forward (as though she hadn't read it) to a major biochar book by Albert Bates (at his invitation) - should anyone want to see more on her CDR/biochar views.  Albert, a leader in both fields, says that mostly the Permaculture movement is behind biochar, not listening to her.  Her views on biochar are the same as given below.

        Second,  because I have today read the following in Oliver Morton’s excellent book (“Eating the Sun”) on photosynthesis.  He comments on views like hers in the last chapter where he reports (pages 389ff) on the views of (former “Geo" list member) Peter Read.    

      a.  Oliver wrote p 392:   “What’s more, we are rearranging the world……. in a decentralized, slapdash way.  The idea we might do it better should not be rejected for an unworkable if understandable desire that we not do it at all.”

       b.  A paragraph later:  “We can’t let a romantic idea that nature should be free to carry on regardless dominate our thinking; nature is everywhere under our influence already.

     c.  One more paragraph later.   We are on the flight deck, and we are alone.   We are at the controls and we have no option but to use them.  And we know where we want to go.  The fact that we have only a dim idea of how to fly means we must act carefully and thoughtfully, not that we must not act.

        All of Oliver’s book was written before the name “biochar” was selected (in 2007 at a biochar conference -  because of Peter).   Dr.  Shiva’s views were probably the same then and I feel are refuted nicely above in these three excerpts.  These apply as well to George Monbiot, whose similar views are on p 389.  They were also given recently even more strongly in an e-mail response to Albert Bates, saying:  

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[Ronal W. Larson]

List   cc Andrew

    This interview is of course not good news;  Dr.  Shiva has a pretty strong following in environmental circles.

    I add a few comments here for four reasons

         1.   Because she has said all of the same things about biochar (not mentioned in the transcript below) on several occasions.  She wrote a very confused forward (as though she hadn't read it) to a major biochar book by Albert Bates (at his invitation) - should anyone want to see more on her CDR/biochar views.  Albert, a leader in both fields, says that mostly the Permaculture movement is behind biochar, not listening to her.  Her views on biochar are the same as given below.

        2.   Because I have today read the following in Oliver Morton’s excellent book (“Eating the Sun”) on photosynthesis.  He comments on views like hers in the last chapter where he reports (pages 389ff) on the views of (former “Geo" list member) Peter Read.    

      a.  Oliver wrote p 392:   “What’s more, we are rearranging the world……. in a decentralized, slapdash way.  The idea we might do it better should not be rejected for an unworkable if understandable desire that we not do it at all.”

       b.  A paragraph later:  “We can’t let a romantic idea that nature should be free to carry on regardless dominate our thinking; nature is everywhere under our influence already.

     c.  One more paragraph later.   We are on the flight deck, and we are alone.   We are at the controls and we have no option but to use them.  And we know where we want to go.  The fact that we have only a dim idea of how to fly means we must act carefully and thoughtfully, not that we must not act.

        All of Oliver’s book was written before the name “biochar” was selected (in 2007 at a biochar conference -  because of Peter).   Dr.  Shiva’s views were probably the same then and I feel are refuted nicely above in these three excerpts.  

      3.  These sentences apply as well to George Monbiot, whose similar views are on p 389.  They were also given 4 days ago even more strongly in an e-mail response to Albert Bates, replying to a posting on the recent biochar conference by Albert at 

   http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-21/post-modern-moonshots

George wrote to Albert, saying 

     I find this utterly terrifying: one of the worst examples of mindless cornucopianism since the untimely demise of Peter Read.

 

Beware of what you want to believe!

 

George

     I include this because I think George is even more dangerous to most CDR (certainly biochar) than Dr.  Shiva

    

     4.  Lastly,  Dr.  Shiva’s interviewer below wanted her to talk about “the map” (produced by a third campaigner against geoengineeering:  ETC).  That map can be seen at 

On Oct 25, 2013, at 6:05 PM, Andrew Lockley <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:

[Hawkins, Dave]

Without making an argument that we should never pursue any form of geoengineering, let me note an obvious response to Oliver's arguments quoted below.
The fact that we are already manipulating "nature" in many ways does not support an argument that we should therefore manipulate it in all ways that human imagination can conceive. Our job is to exercise good judgement in deciding where to go and where to stop. So purely as an intellectual matter, the option of not doing some forms of geoengineering cannot be rejected. It is not a valid argument to respond to criticisms of specific forms of geoengineering by saying we already manipulate nature a lot.

(I put "nature" in quotes to start because humans are of course part of nature. We don't act on nature; we act in nature. But our capacity to change the functioning of many ecosystems previously largely uninfluenced by humans, is enormous. The fact that we are a part of nature does mean we can argue that we should be comfortable with any actions we take because they are "natural." That stance conveniently would discard any responsibility we have for considering the impacts of our actions.)

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 27, 2013, at 3:34 PM, "Ronal W. Larson" <rongre...@comcast.net<mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>> wrote:

List cc Andrew

This interview is of course not good news; Dr. Shiva has a pretty strong following in environmental circles.

I add a few comments here for three reasons

First because she has said all of the same things about biochar (not mentioned in the transcript below) on several occasions. She wrote a very confused forward (as though she hadn't read it) to a major biochar book by Albert Bates (at his invitation) - should anyone want to see more on her CDR/biochar views. Albert, a leader in both fields, says that mostly the Permaculture movement is behind biochar, not listening to her. Her views on biochar are the same as given below.

Second, because I have today read the following in Oliver Morton’s excellent book (“Eating the Sun”) on photosynthesis. He comments on views like hers in the last chapter where he reports (pages 389ff) on the views of (former “Geo" list member) Peter Read.
a. Oliver wrote p 392: “What’s more, we are rearranging the world……. in a decentralized, slapdash way. The idea we might do it better should not be rejected for an unworkable if understandable desire that we not do it at all.”
b. A paragraph later: “We can’t let a romantic idea that nature should be free to carry on regardless dominate our thinking; nature is everywhere under our influence already.
c. One more paragraph later. We are on the flight deck, and we are alone. We are at the controls and we have no option but to use them. And we know where we want to go. The fact that we have only a dim idea of how to fly means we must act carefully and thoughtfully, not that we must not act.
All of Oliver’s book was written before the name “biochar” was selected (in 2007 at a biochar conference - because of Peter). Dr. Shiva’s views were probably the same then and I feel are refuted nicely above in these three excerpts. These apply as well to George Monbiot, whose similar views are on p 389. They were also given recently even more strongly in an e-mail response to Albert Bates, saying:

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[Hawkins, Dave]

Whoops. In my penultimate sentence I left out an important "not."
The sentence should read--
> The fact that we are a part of nature does NOT mean we can argue that we should be comfortable with any actions we take because they are "natural."
Sent from my iPad

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[Ronal W. Larson]

List  and David

   1.   David Hawkins responded today with a longer piece and then this correction:

"Whoops. In my penultimate sentence I left out an important "not."  
The sentence should read--

The fact that we are a part of nature does NOT mean we can argue that we should be comfortable with any actions we take because they are "natural." 

    This is partly to make sure that everyone understands that Oliver is not guilty of the charge which David is rightly saying must not occur.  I think my three short excerpts from a very long book make clear that Oliver is well aware of this.  

     Conversely,  Dr.  Shiva seems to believe it impossible to do ANYTHING right.   Unfortunately the same seems true of George Monbiot and his BiofuelWatch sources.  

     I hope we can have some additional dialog on the ethics of doing nothing in the CDR arena.

   2.   I have excerpted all but a few lines of what I wrote earlier, as I inadvertently sent two versions - neither complete (still learning my new Mac).  Below I finish my thoughts about a map mentioned in the interview.

On Oct 27, 2013, at 1:48 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net> wrote:

List   cc Andrew

    This interview is of course not good news;  Dr.  Shiva has a pretty strong following in environmental circles.

    I add a few comments here for four reasons

           <snip the first three>

    

     4.  Lastly,  Dr.  Shiva’s interviewer below wanted her to talk about “the map” (produced by a third campaigner against geoengineeering:  ETC).  That map can be seen at 

     [RWL:  What I meant to add was the website for that map that I consider as uninformed about CDR as I do the comments of Dr. Shiva and George Monbiot:

          

                http://www.etcgroup.org/content/world-geoengineering

    

       This map is at least 16 months our of date, claiming only 300 “Geoengineering” projects.  Roughly half of them seem to be biochar - and I am sure the number was much higher 16 months ago, but would probably be in excess of 1000 by now.  One example of their being badly out of date is the fact  they show zero biochar activity in China, whereas that Country has at least 3 regional groups (shown at the the IBI site, along with conferences in China).  My guess is that China either is or will be the premier biochar country shortly - exactly as they have done for wind, photovoltaics, solar thermal heating (something like 2/3 of the world totals), and afforestation.

       The interviewer and Dr. Shiva seemed to think it reprehensible that a map exists with 300 “Geo” entries.  I view the number 300 differently.   I hope that ETC will quickly update, so as to show that there are huge and growing numbers of researchers who take the opposite ethical view of Dr. Shiva, George Monbiot, ETC,  and the interviewer.   

     On the other hand - maybe that is the ETC reason for not keeping this map current.

Ron

     <for expediency,  I snip the full interview with Dr.  Shiva, sent in a few days ago by Andrew>

[O Morton]

Dear David

When you're responding to my arguments, how do you get from "carefully and thoughtfully", in the quotation Ron offers, to "in all ways the human imagination can conceive"? To me, and I suspect most readers, "carefully and thoughtfully" means precisely what you say is required: that people should asses specific climate geoengineering proposals on their merits -- as they should assess other responses to the carbon/climate crisis -- and pass over some that they find unsupportable  

On "humans are of course part of nature"; I don't think there's any of course about it. How much and in what ways humans are part of nature seems to me to be the question which anthropocene politics attempt to answer, not an agreed ground from which people start.

Best as ever

Oliver

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[Tom Wigley]

Folks,

I'd never heard of Vandana Shiva before this. I was intrigued by the
statement in her biosketch that she had published "300 papers in

leading scientific and technical journals".

No matter what else she has done, she certainly does not have much of
a record as a bona fide scientist, at least as far as publications
goes. From Web of Science I find ...

... under Shiva, Vandana: 4 papers, the most cited of which has been
cited a grand total of 2 times

... under Shiva, V: 41 papers, the most cited of which has been cited
a grand total of 14 times and 21 of which have zero citations.

Whoever wrote the biosketch must be close to the record for inflation
of the facts.

Tom.

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[Hawkins, Dave]

Oliver,
I was reacting principally to the sentences that preceded the "carefully and thoughtfully" modifiers: "We are on the flight deck, and we are alone. We are at the controls and we have no option but to use them. And we know where we want to go."
For me, this comes too close to saying if we have buttons in front of us we must push them; "no option but to use them" seems in conflict with "carefully and thoughtfully." For some buttons, the only careful and thoughtful posture may be not to push them. Again, I am not making this argument for all types of geo-engineering concepts; only disagreeing with the idea that if we can conceive of a button we must push it.

I am interested in hearing more about how humans may not be a part of nature. If we are talking biologically, I can't see any answer but "of course." Perhaps you are talking about anthropological concepts and the perceptions humans have about their relationships with the rest of nature. There I would agree there is no "of course" about any aspect of that terrain.
best,
David

________________________________
From: O Morton [omeco...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2013 6:26 AM
To: geoengi...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Hawkins, Dave
Subject: Re: [geo] TERRA FUTURA 2013: INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA ABOUT GEOENGINEERING | NoGeoingegneria

Dear David

When you're responding to my arguments, how do you get from "carefully and thoughtfully", in the quotation Ron offers, to "in all ways the human imagination can conceive"? To me, and I suspect most readers, "carefully and thoughtfully" means precisely what you say is required: that people should asses specific climate geoengineering proposals on their merits -- as they should assess other responses to the carbon/climate crisis -- and pass over some that they find unsupportable

On "humans are of course part of nature"; I don't think there's any of course about it. How much and in what ways humans are part of nature seems to me to be the question which anthropocene politics attempt to answer, not an agreed ground from which people start.

Best as ever

Oliver

On Sunday, 27 October 2013 21:01:22 UTC, David Hawkins wrote:
Without making an argument that we should never pursue any form of geoengineering, let me note an obvious response to Oliver's arguments quoted below.
The fact that we are already manipulating "nature" in many ways does not support an argument that we should therefore manipulate it in all ways that human imagination can conceive. Our job is to exercise good judgement in deciding where to go and where to stop. So purely as an intellectual matter, the option of not doing some forms of geoengineering cannot be rejected. It is not a valid argument to respond to criticisms of specific forms of geoengineering by saying we already manipulate nature a lot.

(I put "nature" in quotes to start because humans are of course part of nature. We don't act on nature; we act in nature. But our capacity to change the functioning of many ecosystems previously largely uninfluenced by humans, is enormous. The fact that we are a part of nature does mean we can argue that we should be comfortable with any actions we take because they are "natural." That stance conveniently would discard any responsibility we have for considering the impacts of our actions.)

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 27, 2013, at 3:34 PM, "Ronal W. Larson" <rongre...@comcast.net<UrlBlockedError.aspx><mailto:rongre...@comcast.net<UrlBlockedError.aspx>>> wrote:

List cc Andrew

This interview is of course not good news; Dr. Shiva has a pretty strong following in environmental circles.

I add a few comments here for three reasons

First because she has said all of the same things about biochar (not mentioned in the transcript below) on several occasions. She wrote a very confused forward (as though she hadn't read it) to a major biochar book by Albert Bates (at his invitation) - should anyone want to see more on her CDR/biochar views. Albert, a leader in both fields, says that mostly the Permaculture movement is behind biochar, not listening to her. Her views on biochar are the same as given below.

Second, because I have today read the following in Oliver Morton’s excellent book (“Eating the Sun”) on photosynthesis. He comments on views like hers in the last chapter where he reports (pages 389ff) on the views of (former “Geo" list member) Peter Read.
a. Oliver wrote p 392: “What’s more, we are rearranging the world……. in a decentralized, slapdash way. The idea we might do it better should not be rejected for an unworkable if understandable desire that we not do it at all.”
b. A paragraph later: “We can’t let a romantic idea that nature should be free to carry on regardless dominate our thinking; nature is everywhere under our influence already.
c. One more paragraph later. We are on the flight deck, and we are alone. We are at the controls and we have no option but to use them. And we know where we want to go. The fact that we have only a dim idea of how to fly means we must act carefully and thoughtfully, not that we must not act.
All of Oliver’s book was written before the name “biochar” was selected (in 2007 at a biochar conference - because of Peter). Dr. Shiva’s views were probably the same then and I feel are refuted nicely above in these three excerpts. These apply as well to George Monbiot, whose similar views are on p 389. They were also given recently even more strongly in an e-mail response to Albert Bates, saying:

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[Oliver Tickell]

Vandana Shiva is a great woman that you really should have heard of! But
more as a campaigner for India's small farmers, environment, human
rights of indigenous peoples, etc, than as a scientist. If she says she
has been published in all these learned journals it's probably true, but
probably her articles are not deeply technical ones. Oliver.

[Brian Cartwright]

Just a few comments:

Ron - I think Vandana Shiva's cautions about biochar and other geoengineering ideas ("role ... should be zero") may be rhetorically overstated. But I just want to look at biochar to the extent that it can be called geoengineering. If I could characterize your views, you generally look to extrapolate the role of biochar to sequester the maximum atmospheric CO2. That would be large-scale geoengineering, I think we would agree. And because there could be substantial benefits to soil and energy supply, you argue that this is a superior tool to other CDR proposals.

Just removing CO2 from the atmosphere won't cool the planet quickly enough, because of numerous sinks and feedbacks. I advocate soil carbon sequestration for other primary benefits: reversing aridification of enormous areas of land that are increasingly radiating heat because of losing vegetative cover, reversing the damages done by industrial agriculture which have depleted carbon with the plow and with chemical inputs killing off microbes and other soil organisms, and restoring hydrology that comes from forests providing the biological seeds for clouds, and from supporting microclimates to hold moisture in the soil. These benefits use water vapor effects that cool much more effectively than CO2 reduction.

And yes, CO2 being sequestered is also urgent. Biochar obviously does that. But if you think that biochar has to be given the whole job, the logistical side-effects could be disastrous. I'd rather see us use biochar in concentrated doses (after all, it's still very expensive) as a catalyst and stimulant to effective prime soil carbon. quickly boosting mychorrizal fungi and microbial communities, and regreening landscapes. The soil carbon is the priority, and biochar is an invaluable tool for the purpose.

We agree on a lot of things about biochar. I just think you're putting the cart before the horse.

Brian

<snip> 

[Brian Cartwright]

to euggordon

If you read my message you will see I don't rely on reducing atmospheric CO2 but rather on using water vapor effects to cool the planet. Reducing CO2 would be a side benefit.
Brian

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[O Morton]

Dear David

Though obviously you couldn't know this, in the context of the preceding paras, it should be fairly clear that the flight deck metaphor applies to a range of choices of which climate geoengineering options are only a subset (new energy sources, new farming practices etc) The subsequent paras make the case that considering things "carefully and thoughtfully" will lead people not to wish to press the button marked OIF. So I still don't see how your response differs from what I said. 

The nature discussion is probably a long one for another place; my basic point is that there is nothing more socially constructed than what gets counted as natural. 

On another topic, I can't speak to Vandana Shiva's publication record, but those wanting to know more about her thought and rhetoric may find this interesting: http://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/vandana-shiva-fanatic-or-fantasist/ 

Best

Oliver

[Hawkins, Dave]

Thanks Oliver. That is the danger with out of context citation and the risk of using memorable language that tempts some to cite out of context.

Re "natural": I agree in the sphere of human discourse, "nature" and "natural" are social constructs. But as humans, we at least believe that science is based on an underlying reality (with ample supporting evidence) and science does place humans as a component of the biosphere. I don't think we disagree. The interesting topic is how the strains of human exceptionalism have influenced man's interactions with the rest of nature.
________________________________
From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com [geoengi...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of O Morton [omeco...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2013 12:17 PM
To: geoengi...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: [geo] TERRA FUTURA 2013: INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA ABOUT GEOENGINEERING | NoGeoingegneria

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[Ronal W. Larson]

List  cc Oliver

   1.  There was a message from David Hawkins after this one from Oliver - that seem to indicate David is better understanding Oliver’s position on CDR.  Good.  But I am not following that theme in this message.

  2.  This message is picking up on Oliver’s final paragraph below - returning to the thread title topic(couplng Dr. Shiva and “Geo”).  At the “carboncounter" site below, there is a 50 minute video of Mark Lynas talking mostly about GMO’s  (which I think has nothing to do with CDR and especially biochar - so hope we don’t go down that road).   There is also a video of Dr. Shiva - but only on GMO.

       At the 27:53 point, we find 10 seconds for one sentence re Dr. Shiva (emphasis added):

    “The government in India is increasingly enthralled to backward looking ideologues like that of Vandana Shiva who idealized preindustrial village agriculture despite the fact it was an age of repeated famine and structural insecurity for everyone."

   3.  This sentence apparently caused Dr.  Shiva to respond on 3 January:  #MarkLynas saying farmers shd be free to grow #GMOs which can contaminate #organic farms is like saying #rapists shd have freedom to rape”.

I hesitated to include this, but think she would say the same with “Geo”replacing “GMO”. The reference to rape didn’t go over well at this site.

   4.  A little later,  Robert Wilson, owner of the site (which heading ends “fanatic or fantasist”  that Oliver has sent us to) said:   "The real issue however is whether Vandava Shiva is simply deluded, or actively malicious. In either case it is high time the environmental movement recognised that she is a deeply dangerous figure.”

    5.  I prefer to think that Dr.  Shiva, like the anti-biochar folks at BFW and ETC have simply forgotten how important it is to use the scientific method.  This (anti-science [not just a different science] - as similarly employed by climate deniers) is the message I got today after reading Mark Lynas.

   6.  Apologies for returning to the main point of this thread started a few days ago by Andrew - which I believe was that geoengineering (both CDR and SRM) is going to be much hampered by a very small group.  I agree with the several writers listed above that Dr. Shiva and supporters are dangerous, not because they have and anti-geo message, but because they are carrying an anti-science message.  I do not think they are either deluded or malicious - they only come from a misguided “moral?” position not supported by science.  She and her supporters are dangerous because they have a sizable and vocal following.  I hope someone/anyone can offer a best way to engage in dialog with Dr. Shiva - especially on whether she can support any means of CDR - and the ethics behind doing or not doing some form of CDR and/or SRM. 

Thanks to Oliver (who probably has a totally different take on this) for his additional alert (below, emphasis added) on Dr.  Shiva.

Ron

On Oct 28, 2013, at 10:17 AM, O Morton <omeco...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear David

Though obviously you couldn't know this, in the context of the preceding paras, it should be fairly clear that the flight deck metaphor applies to a range of choices of which climate geoengineering options are only a subset (new energy sources, new farming practices etc) The subsequent paras make the case that considering things "carefully and thoughtfully" will lead people not to wish to press the button marked OIF. So I still don't see how your response differs from what I said. 

The nature discussion is probably a long one for another place; my basic point is that there is nothing more socially constructed than what gets counted as natural. 

On another topic, I can't speak to Vandana Shiva's publication record, but those wanting to know more about her thought and rhetoric may find this interesting: http://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/vandana-shiva-fanatic-or-fantasist/ 

Best

Oliver

     <snip a following message from David - as not relating sat all to the topic of Dr.  Shiva and geoengineering as introduced by Andrew..>

[Ronal W. Larson]

Brian and list:

   See inserts below.  Re the first sentence below on Dr. Shiva,  see a message I just sent.  I go further than you about “rhetorically overstated”.  I agree with others that she is dangerous - because she is anti-science, much worse than no science.

   more below.

On Oct 28, 2013, at 7:58 AM, Brian Cartwright <briancar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just a few comments:

Ron - I think Vandana Shiva's cautions about biochar and other geoengineering ideas ("role ... should be zero") may be rhetorically overstated. But I just want to look at biochar to the extent that it can be called geoengineering. If I could characterize your views, you generally look to extrapolate the role of biochar to sequester the maximum atmospheric CO2. That would be large-scale geoengineering, I think we would agree. And because there could be substantial benefits to soil and energy supply, you argue that this is a superior tool to other CDR proposals.

    [RWL1:  Yes on last sentence.  But I favor Dr. Ken Caldera’s arguments on this list that geoengineering should be redefined to exclude biochar - because biochar and most CDR approaches are NOT large-scale.   I made the point a few posts ago that biochar experiments are happening worldwide at a rate that we can’t keep up with.  I see zero hazard to anyone with that happening.  Re last sentence - I hope there are other CDR approaches that are as good.  I am not trying to keep up with these others, except through this list.  The more approaches, the better.

Just removing CO2 from the atmosphere won't cool the planet quickly enough, because of numerous sinks and feedbacks.

     [RWL2:  Disagree.   I know of no peer-reviewed paper making this “irreversibility”  claim in a manner I can believe.  If we put our mind to it, we can be back at 350 ppm in 50 years.   There are others saying this.   Those saying there is a much lower maximum are also saying they are making conservative assumptions.]

I advocate soil carbon sequestration for other primary benefits: reversing aridification of enormous areas of land that are increasingly radiating heat because of losing vegetative cover, reversing the damages done by industrial agriculture which have depleted carbon with the plow and with chemical inputs killing off microbes and other soil organisms, and restoring hydrology that comes from forests providing the biological seeds for clouds, and from supporting microclimates to hold moisture in the soil.

    [RWL3:  All true.  But there is zero conflict I know about with any of these benefits and biochar (the main CDR approach falling under “soil carbon sequestration”)

These benefits use water vapor effects that cool much more effectively than CO2 reduction.

    [RWL4:   I have seen no peer-reviewed paper showing this.  Many point out that water vapor is a more effective GHG than CO2.   I do think that latent heat transfer has some potential - but believe that in no way conflicts with biochar.]

And yes, CO2 being sequestered is also urgent. Biochar obviously does that. But if you think that biochar has to be given the whole job, the logistical side-effects could be disastrous.

     [RWL5:  I have seen no “logistical side-effects" reported that I take seriously.    I am NOT arguing that biochar “be given the whole job”.  I just have not seen any other with biochar’s potential.  Clearly we can and must get a wedge or more of afforestation - but if managed, we can get more CDR by coupling afforestation with biochar.  Most analysts also ignore the out year potential of greater NPP and soil carbon - which I think (can’t prove yet) can double the CDR of what goes directly into the ground.  To repeat,  one Gt C of direct biochar application has a long term impact of any other CDR approach sequestering 2 wedges.  I know of no other CDR approach that can make that claim.

I'd rather see us use biochar in concentrated doses (after all, it's still very expensive) as a catalyst and stimulant to effective prime soil carbon. quickly boosting mychorrizal fungi and microbial communities, and regreening landscapes. The soil carbon is the priority, and biochar is an invaluable tool for the purpose.

    [RWL6:  I don’t see us in disagreement.  Obviously you will use the minimum amount possible (to maximize the NPP).   Many already are doing this with char placed only near the roots - not everywhere in a field.

We agree on a lot of things about biochar. I just think you're putting the cart before the horse.

   [RWL7:   Sorry,  I am not understanding this.   What is the cart and what is the horse?   If this means I am proposing too aggressive an introduction schedule,  I admit to thinking we are going too slowly.  Almost no government funds are now being employed - at least in the USA.  I think my schedule is about the same as proposed by Dr.  James Hansen.   Any biochar user getting large-scale bad results deserves what they get - prior testing is quick, cheap and easy.  We have thousands of years of experience in many places besides the terra preta experience in the Amazon.  To my knowledge - all positive.

  Ron]

Brian

<snip> 

[Brian Cartwright]

To Ron, I will just insert a few things like so to clarify what I think:

On Monday, October 28, 2013 8:07:27 PM UTC-4, Ron wrote:

Brian and list:

   See inserts below.  Re the first sentence below on Dr. Shiva,  see a message I just sent.  I go further than you about “rhetorically overstated”.  I agree with others that she is dangerous - because she is anti-science, much worse than no science.

   more below.

On Oct 28, 2013, at 7:58 AM, Brian Cartwright <briancar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just a few comments:

Ron - I think Vandana Shiva's cautions about biochar and other geoengineering ideas ("role ... should be zero") may be rhetorically overstated. But I just want to look at biochar to the extent that it can be called geoengineering. If I could characterize your views, you generally look to extrapolate the role of biochar to sequester the maximum atmospheric CO2. That would be large-scale geoengineering, I think we would agree. And because there could be substantial benefits to soil and energy supply, you argue that this is a superior tool to other CDR proposals.

    [RWL1:  Yes on last sentence.  But I favor Dr. Ken Caldeira’s arguments on this list that geoengineering should be redefined to exclude biochar - because biochar and most CDR approaches are NOT large-scale.   I made the point a few posts ago that biochar experiments are happening worldwide at a rate that we can’t keep up with.  I see zero hazard to anyone with that happening.  Re last sentence - I hope there are other CDR approaches that are as good.  I am not trying to keep up with these others, except through this list.  The more approaches, the better.

Just removing CO2 from the atmosphere won't cool the planet quickly enough, because of numerous sinks and feedbacks.

     [RWL2:  Disagree.   I know of no peer-reviewed paper making this “irreversibility”  claim in a manner I can believe.  If we put our mind to it, we can be back at 350 ppm in 50 years.  

But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years.   

There are others saying this.   Those saying there is a much lower maximum are also saying they are making conservative assumptions.]

I advocate soil carbon sequestration for other primary benefits: reversing aridification of enormous areas of land that are increasingly radiating heat because of losing vegetative cover, reversing the damages done by industrial agriculture which have depleted carbon with the plow and with chemical inputs killing off microbes and other soil organisms, and restoring hydrology that comes from forests providing the biological seeds for clouds, and from supporting microclimates to hold moisture in the soil.

    [RWL3:  All true.  But there is zero conflict I know about with any of these benefits and biochar (the main CDR approach falling under “soil carbon sequestration”)

These benefits use water vapor effects that cool much more effectively than CO2 reduction.

    [RWL4:   I have seen no peer-reviewed paper showing this.  Many point out that water vapor is a more effective GHG than CO2.   I do think that latent heat transfer has some potential - but believe that in no way conflicts with biochar.]

And yes, CO2 being sequestered is also urgent. Biochar obviously does that. But if you think that biochar has to be given the whole job, the logistical side-effects could be disastrous.

     [RWL5:  I have seen no “logistical side-effects" reported that I take seriously.    I am NOT arguing that biochar “be given the whole job”.  I just have not seen any other with biochar’s potential.

I'm just looking for biochar to be presented as a well-engineered component of the re-establishment of healthy carbon-rich soils worldwide. The difference is in the message presented and the democratic potential of empowering people to reverse climate change. If that empowering message doesn't get received then there is the potential to use climate crisis to force top-down solutions which tend to be heavy-handed. Bad biochar is possible in such circumstances.

 Clearly we can and must get a wedge or more of afforestation - but if managed, we can get more CDR by coupling afforestation with biochar.  Most analysts also ignore the out year potential of greater NPP and soil carbon - which I think (can’t prove yet) can double the CDR of what goes directly into the ground.  To repeat,  one Gt C of direct biochar application has a long term impact of any other CDR approach sequestering 2 wedges.  I know of no other CDR approach that can make that claim.

I'd rather see us use biochar in concentrated doses (after all, it's still very expensive) as a catalyst and stimulant to effectively prime soil carbon. quickly boosting mychorrizal fungi and microbial communities, and regreening landscapes. The soil carbon is the priority, and biochar is an invaluable tool for the purpose.

    [RWL6:  I don’t see us in disagreement.  Obviously you will use the minimum amount possible (to maximize the NPP).   Many already are doing this with char placed only near the roots - not everywhere in a field.

We agree on a lot of things about biochar. I just think you're putting the cart before the horse.

   [RWL7:   Sorry,  I am not understanding this.   What is the cart and what is the horse?  

Soil carbon is the cart. Biochar is one of the team of horses that can serve to build it up, and the others are good agricultural and forestry practices that bring countless ecological benefits. There needs to be a great deal of public discourse and education to show these potential benefits and to show how depletion of soil carbon had a great deal to do with CO2 levels being where they are. That's why we need to talk about soil carbon and not just biochar.

By the way, these benefits are directly threatened by the kind of agricultural practices that support GMOs. Vandana Shiva has led a principled fight against native seeds being displaced by GM seeds. Robust biodiversity means a healthy web of microbes and other organisms in the soil. But if you have a vulnerable GM seed, those organisms and all their carbon-based food chain don't belong.

To put it more simply, healthy soil carbon and GMOs do not go together. For all of people's legitimate worry about GMOs' health and economic side effects, the harm done to soil, and by extension to climate, gets too little attention.  I believe farmers need to be in the front lines of reversing climate change, so to me Vandana Shiva is heroic.  And advocating biodiversity in natural systems strikes me as very good science.

Brian

[Ronal W. Larson]

Brian (cc list)  This to respond to your three inserts in my yesterday’s response to you

BC1:    But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years.   

    [RWL1:   Brian’s “that” refers to my just previous statement (see below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years.   Brian is NOT arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so.  He is arguing for increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable at best - given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric carbon.

     I do not know enough on either SRM or the latent-heat-transfer topic to argue on either point.  I will say that I think there is good enough literature around to say that getting back to 350 ppm in 50 years would be thought by most analysts to be virtually miraculous.

    I am all for faster means of cooling in addition to  (not instead of)  removing the CO2.  But I cannot yet endorse either SRM or the still-unanalyzed hypothetical cooling attributed to latent het transfer.

BC2:  I'm just looking for biochar to be presented as a well-engineered component of the re-establishment of healthy carbon-rich soils worldwide. The difference is in the message presented and the democratic potential of empowering people to reverse climate change. If that empowering message doesn't get received then there is the potential to use climate crisis to force top-down solutions which tend to be heavy-handed. Bad biochar is possible in such circumstances.

    [RWL2:   I agree with all.  Any new approach can be done badly.  It can also be done well.  I see enough advantages to biochar users that the latter seems more likely.  The argument it WILL be done badly is the only complaint that BFW and Dr. Shiva seem to be making - that is not science.  I repeat my claim that anyone finding a bad result from biochar deserves what they got.]

BC-last:  We agree on a lot of things about biochar. I just think you're putting the cart before the horse.

   [RWL7:   Sorry,  I am not understanding this.   What is the cart and what is the horse?  

Soil carbon is the cart. Biochar is one of the team of horses that can serve to build it up, and the others are good agricultural and forestry practices that bring countless ecological benefits. There needs to be a great deal of public discourse and education to show these potential benefits and to show how depletion of soil carbon had a great deal to do with CO2 levels being where they are. That's why we need to talk about soil carbon and not just biochar.

By the way, these benefits are directly threatened by the kind of agricultural practices that support GMOs. Vandana Shiva has led a principled fight against native seeds being displaced by GM seeds. Robust biodiversity means a healthy web of microbes and other organisms in the soil. But if you have a vulnerable GM seed, those organisms and all their carbon-based food chain don't belong.

To put it more simply, healthy soil carbon and GMOs do not go together. For all of people's legitimate worry about GMOs' health and economic side effects, the harm done to soil, and by extension to climate, gets too little attention.  I believe farmers need to be in the front lines of reversing climate change, so to me Vandana Shiva is heroic.  And advocating biodiversity in natural systems strikes me as very good science.

     [RWL3:

          a.  I also responded (see below) about my possibly asking for too much speed on introducing biochar.  Brian did not address that, so that is not the cart-horse issue.

         b.  Re para #1,  I admit to placing lots of attention on soil carbon - and on this list especially - to the huge sequestration potential that is there, without any conflict at all between the two objectives.   It seems to me that I am not guilty of putting your soil carbon cart ahead of your biochar horse.  They are to me one and the same.  If you are arguing that there are other ways to increase soil carbon, that is a different issue.  Good luck in getting them adopted as well.

        c. Re para #2  - I refuse to get into anything related to GMO - especially on this list. In a different response to Oliver Morton yesterday,  I said I see zero relation between biochar and GMO materials - and said I refuse to talk about any purported relationship between them, as proposed by BFW (and probably believed by Dr. Shiva).

        d.   Re para #3.  Glad to see you agree (I think) here on not appropriate to couple soil carbon (including biochar as the main way likely to increase soil carbon) and GMOs (so I don’t understand your raising it in Para #2).  Re Dr.  Shiva,  I hope you recognize that she is thoroughly against biochar (not natural enough?).  So I strongly disagree on her being heroic.  Re your final sentence,  I presume we agree (and disagree with Dr. Shiva) that adding biochar will improve (not reduce) biodiversity?  I repeat that I view most of her negative views on biochar (largely copied from BFW) as being based on her anti-science (pro “nature”) perspectives (as discussed by other list members recently).  She is highly dangerous to the goal of CDR - mainly because of her anti-business and anti-science biases.

Ron 

        

        

[Ronal W. Larson]

List and Brian:

   I just noted a mis-statement.  See below.

On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net> wrote:

Brian (cc list)  This to respond to your three inserts in my yesterday’s response to you

BC1:    But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years.   

    [RWL1:   Brian’s “that” refers to my just previous statement (see below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years.   Brian is NOT arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so.  He is arguing for increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable at best - given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric carbon.

   RWL:   The last word was supposed to be “moisture”  - NOT “carbon”.  Apologies.  I am too used to following “atmospheric” with “carbon”.

Ron

  <snip remainder>

[Michael Hayes]

Dr. Shiva states: "the role of geo-engineering should, in a world of responsibility, in a world of scientifically enlightened decision making and ecological understanding, it should be zero.".

That statement, in itself, seems to reflect a profoundly unrealistic and unsupportable view of geoengineering, of scientifically enlightened decision making, of modern humanity and of our current planetary ecology.

With all due respect to Dr. Shiva, I find this transcript to be little more than a self serving loosely compacted grouping of key words with little coherence or even minimal relationship to well established science.

Is this a poorly done translation?

Her statement of "The people are pushing it have a money interest. The people who are pushing it have a military interest. , people are pushing to have a military interest. The players merely have the arrogance that ” I have the solution”." I personaly find that statement offensive and no more than an ignorant ad hominum attack.

I.... have no money interest! I...... have no interest in 'pushing to have military interest"! I do wonder where and how she herself gained "the arrogance ....(to claim)....I have the solution" of no GE?

Her final statement of: "And in civilizational issues you don’t look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!" is no more than the basic receipt for propaganda which has been used to manipulate ignorant masses through out history. This yellow journalistic rant seems to be no more than Green Fascism looking for funding and political support.

 

 

Best,

 

 

Michael

 

[Greg Rau]

Further exploration of social revolution as the solution, to the apparent exclusion of technology including GE, by influential Naomi Klein.
"...there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed."

While I might agree that a revolution (in thinking and behaviour) is needed, in my opinion social revolution minus technology revolution still equals f**ked.

Greg

Published on Tuesday, October 29, 2013 by New Statesman
How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt
by Naomi Klein
In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.
But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).
What scientists and experts are saying, says Klein, is "that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules."
Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less."
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.
Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.
Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.
Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s melting ice sheet.
“I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also.”
This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.
That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems – particularly the climate system – is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.
Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.
"The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes."
But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.
With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.
Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target – an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 – has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no scientific basis”. That’s because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future – rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately – there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° “carbon budget” and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.
Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreedupon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.
To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbonpricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.
 Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.
If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).
So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.
In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:
 . . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.
In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demandsrevolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).
We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.
But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.
If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.
But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.

It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.

[Tom Wigley]

Dear all,

Dropping CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm in 50 years is impossible
unless we can find a cheap way to suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the
atmosphere.

Some simple calculations are attached.

Tom.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=

On 10/29/2013 2:18 PM, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
> List and Brian:
>
> I just noted a mis-statement. See below.
>
>
> On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net

> <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>> wrote:
>
>> Brian (cc list) This to respond to your three inserts in my

>> yesterday�s response to you
>>
>> BC1: */But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like

>> methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are
>> irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need

>> methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years. /*
>>>
>> *[RWL1: Brian�s �that� refers to my just previous statement (see

>> below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years. Brian is NOT
>> arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so. He is arguing for
>> increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable
>> at best - given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric

>> carbon.*
>
> RWL: The last word was supposed to be �moisture� - NOT �carbon�.
> Apologies. I am too used to following �atmospheric� with �carbon�.
>
> Ron
>
> <snip remainder>

[Andrew Lockley]

Greg raises some interesting points on the political settlement needed for an effective geoengineering programme to occur.

I've come across Klein-like thinking a lot in the environmental movement. Recently, I've heard it described as "watermelon politics": ie apparently green - but actually red, with a thin green skin. It's a prevalent attitude among geoengineering opponents.

Once you have a name for something, it's easier to spot it. I've found the watermelon label very helpful in spotting phony environmentalist thinking. I can't count the number of times I've had to endure people arguing that the only way you can save the planet is to have a second crack at Communism (but strangely they never name it as such).

This is one of the reasons I left the 'green' movement. It's become dominated by washed up socialists who are all out of ideas, and use a green veneer to flog their tired old statist ideology.

We can clearly see from history that nominally socialist republics deliver neither social justice (preferring autocracy) nor environmental responsibility (preferring the voices of the party and industrial elite to the voices of those affected by environmental degradation).

Since studying economics at school I've been able to see that it's more typically market failure (ie not pricing pollution) than failure of the market system itself, which is the problem in capitalism's treatment of the environment. Calling for sound economic interventions, and shutting out the favoured lobbyists from the decision making process, is much more effective at delivering real environmental change than is calling for the overthrow of the entire political-economic system.

However, we must also be cautious of the equally weak arguments of the right. As exemplified by freakonomics thinking, they commonly argue for unfettered consumption, with geoengineering deployment as a band aid solution. This is bad science, and politics which is based on bad science is bad politics.

Extremist geoengineering stances therefore suit those on both extremes of the political spectrum.  To achieve affected environmental policy on geoengineering, we must resist extremists' attempts to Hijack the debate.

A

--

[Brian Cartwright]

To Ron,

This thread is getting unwieldy but let me clarify what I was saying on this point.

Warming deniers sometimes bring up the fact that water vapor is a more significant greenhouse gas than CO2, because there is more of it -- up to 50,000 ppm - while scientists have generally treated it as if it moves in lockstep with CO2. But does it? Everyone's observed evaporative cooling effects such as when hot ground breathes moisture out after a shower. That is significant for large aridified areas of the earth. But then that water vapor goes into the atmosphere; will it then act as a greenhouse gas? That depends on whether it is in tiny droplets of haze or if it is coalesced into denser clouds, then precipitates, resulting in more cooling. What causes vapor to coalesce? The nucleation happens around various materials, but many of these nuclei turn out to be bacteria from forest leaves and other vegetative sources, which can combine in the upper atmosphere with ice crystals.

So please, everybody, leave room for biology to help solve climate problems. It's a science too, you know.

Brian 

[Stephen Salter]

Brian

Water vapour certainly acts like a powerful green house gas, but it also condenses in contact with a cool sea surface just as fast as it evaporates from a warm one.� Shame that this seems to be harder for CO2 but maybe not quite impossible from a high structure at the south pole.

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

On 30/10/2013 11:12, Brian Cartwright wrote:

To Ron,

This thread is getting unwieldy but let me clarify what I was saying on this point.

Warming deniers sometimes bring up the fact that water vapor is a more significant greenhouse gas than CO2, because there is more of it -- up to 50,000 ppm - while scientists have generally treated it as if it moves in lockstep with CO2. But does it? Everyone's observed evaporative cooling effects such as when hot ground breathes moisture out after a shower. That is significant for large aridified areas of the earth. But then that water vapor goes into the atmosphere; will it then act as a greenhouse gas? That depends on whether it is in tiny droplets of haze or if it is coalesced into denser clouds, then precipitates, resulting in more cooling. What causes vapor to coalesce? The nucleation happens around various materials, but many of these nuclei turn out to be bacteria from forest leaves and other vegetative sources, which can combine in the upper atmosphere with ice crystals.

So please, everybody, leave room for biology to help solve climate problems. It's a science too, you know.

Brian�

On Tuesday, October 29, 2013 4:18:18 PM UTC-4, Ron wrote:

List and Brian:

� �I just noted a mis-statement. �See below.

On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net> wrote:

Brian (cc list) �This to respond to your three inserts in my yesterday�s response to you

BC1: � �But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years.���

� � [RWL1: � Brian�s��that��refers to my just previous statement (see below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years. � Brian is NOT arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so. �He is arguing for increased�latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable at best -�given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric carbon.

� �RWL: � The last word was supposed to be �moisture� �- NOT �carbon�. �Apologies. �I am too used to following �atmospheric� with �carbon�.

Ron

� <snip remainder>

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[Brian Cartwright]

To Andrew,

I agree that too many so-called environmentalists are, as you say, washed-up socialists with no new ideas. But this thread has been casting a wider net than I think is warranted. 

We started with Ron's imputation of Vandana Shiva's dismissal of geoengineering as extending to biochar. The foreword she wrote to the Bates book "The Biochar Solution" is easy to access to read for free:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ppEVwFVcLysC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=vandana+shiva+on+biochar&ots=gS2t0uPkLX&sig=Oak7DEnc4xiy0SkTktg7I_xvaQE#v=onepage&q=vandana%20shiva%20on%20biochar&f=false

I think it's a good piece of scientific writing on the soil food web and the damage done to it by industrial agriculture. She doesn't mention this, but that damage is done to the climate as well, because soil carbon has been an enormous source of atmospheric CO2. 

Her caution about biochar is:
"To cultivate the future, we need to cultivate life in the soil. We need to cultivate the humility that the soil makes us, we do not make the soil, and we can only serve her processes of making life."

Ecologists like Dr. Shiva and many predecessors have been important contributors to pulling us all back from poisoning the earth much more quickly. If we take her cautions seriously, we can make biochar a much more useful tool by virtue of soil's ability to exponentially support carbon-based organisms, rather than burning them off with chemical inputs.

But if you treat her as a dangerous loose cannon with a political agenda, it reflects badly on your cause.

Brian

[Albert Bates]

Having seen my name dropped here I thought I might make a small comment. My thoughts are that it would be strategically ill-advised for the geoengineering community to denigrate Dr. Shiva or challenge her to debate. I have read her writings extensively and agree with some of the comments about weak on the science. She is a scientist only at the margins, but she is a public policy advocate of the greatest talent and acuity. Because I admire her I have attempted to better inform her about soil and carbon cycles. Given time I feel she may warm up to recalcitrant carbon and afforestation strategies, although she will never admit to favoring geoengineering, for the reasons she gives in the interview.

I agree with Ron that it is unfortunate that biochar, remineralization and reforestation/afforestation have been associated with geoengineering. These are natural processes that have been going on since the dawn of life, and although they are susceptible to human intervention (what isn't?), likely will continue long after we are gone (unless we screw the pooch even worse).

Lines are being drawn and sides are being taken in this debate over "natural" versus "engineered" remedies and while we can lament the polarization and call it "anti-science" or "pro-science", chances are none of that will change the direction or acceleration of the debate. I lean more towards nature-driven processes as inherently safer, having the benefit of billion-year trials, but cannot exclude the possibility they may not be fast enough to preserve our species, to say nothing of our civilization. We have the examples of post-Colombian encounter reforestation, and post-Mongolian incursion reforestation, lowering atmospheric PgC dramatically on multi-century time scales. Clearly those are sequestration techniques having relative cost and risk advantages over many others and I think even Naomi Klein and Vandana Shiva might buy in to those strategies eventually. The limitation is the "multi-century" part.

Vandana Shiva seems to think that going back to organic farming practices can entirely solve the climate crisis. She has pounded a stake in the ground and tied herself to that. If she is to be countered, it will be on the issues of urgency and degrees of effectiveness, IMHO.

[Fulkerson, William]

Dear Tom:
I agree 350ppm(V) is likely an impossible mark, but stopping at a
concentration equivalent to a two degree limit this century is not.

See, for example, the Global Environmental Assessment (GEA) published last
year by IIASA. It defines some 41 pathways that would work to stay below 2
degrees. Further, these pathways are compatible with achieving three
other goals:achieving global energy security, assuring universal access to
clean cooking fuels and electricity for the poor, and avoiding pollution
and other environmental damage from the use of energy. The Global Energy
Assessment is available for free at
GlobalEnvironmentalAssessment.org. It is in hard copy from Cambridge
University Press.
The best,
Bill Fulkerson
1-865-680-0937
Wf...@utk.edu
Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment
The University of Tennessee

On 10/30/13 3:19 AM, "Tom Wigley" <wig...@ucar.edu> wrote:

>Dear all,
>
>Dropping CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm in 50 years is impossible
>unless we can find a cheap way to suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the
>atmosphere.
>
>Some simple calculations are attached.
>
>Tom.
>
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=
>
>On 10/29/2013 2:18 PM, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
>> List and Brian:
>>
>> I just noted a mis-statement. See below.
>>
>>
>> On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net
>> <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>> wrote:
>>
>>> Brian (cc list) This to respond to your three inserts in my

>>> yesterday¹s response to you

>>>
>>> BC1: */But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like
>>> methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are
>>> irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need
>>> methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years. /*
>>>>

>>> *[RWL1: Brian¹s ³that² refers to my just previous statement (see

>>> below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years. Brian is NOT
>>> arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so. He is arguing for
>>> increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable
>>> at best - given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric
>>> carbon.*
>>

>> RWL: The last word was supposed to be ³moisture² - NOT ³carbon².
>> Apologies. I am too used to following ³atmospheric² with ³carbon².

[Fulkerson, William]

Dear Tom:
I agree that returning to 350 ppm(v) would be very difficult, but what is
not out of reach is stopping anthropogenic warming at less than 2 degrees
Kelvin. The 2012 Global Environmental Assessment managed by IIASA found
41 energy pathways for the world that met this goal. All 41 also met the
goals of energy security, of universal access to clean cooking fuels and
electricity for the poor, and of controlling environmental damage from
energy use.
GEA is available for free, all 1865 pages are on the web at
GlobalEnergyAssessment.org
It was published by Cambridge University Press.

I think this enormous, data rich and comprehensive analysis could provide
a roadmap for each nation and for the world. Only politics stand in the
way.
The best,
Bill
1-865-680-0937
Wf...@utk.edu

On 10/30/13 3:19 AM, "Tom Wigley" <wig...@ucar.edu> wrote:

>Dear all,
>
>Dropping CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm in 50 years is impossible
>unless we can find a cheap way to suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the
>atmosphere.
>
>Some simple calculations are attached.
>
>Tom.
>
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=
>
>On 10/29/2013 2:18 PM, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
>> List and Brian:
>>
>> I just noted a mis-statement. See below.
>>
>>
>> On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net
>> <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>> wrote:
>>
>>> Brian (cc list) This to respond to your three inserts in my

>>> yesterday¹s response to you

>>>
>>> BC1: */But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like
>>> methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are
>>> irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need
>>> methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years. /*
>>>>

>>> *[RWL1: Brian¹s ³that² refers to my just previous statement (see

>>> below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years. Brian is NOT
>>> arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so. He is arguing for
>>> increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable
>>> at best - given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric
>>> carbon.*
>>

>> RWL: The last word was supposed to be ³moisture² - NOT ³carbon².
>> Apologies. I am too used to following ³atmospheric² with ³carbon².

[Ronal W. Larson]

Tom and list:

1. I have no disagreement with any of your computations. The question of “irreversibility” in the absence of CDR is well established. This note is to add CDR to your analysis, and address your helpful "unless”. In addition to your program, I have tried the following 50 year 100 ppm total in a simple program at David Archer’s website. A paper by Boucher etal given in AR5, chapter 12 talks of a very similar scenario. (Apologies for lack of citations - I am in a rush today).

2. I hope we all agree that there is a Technical (not necessarily Economic ) potential for CDR to achieve the (roughly) 400 Gt C removal (half coming out of the ocean). Over 50 years this requires an average of 8 Gt C/yr - very close to an annual 1% per year. We all know 8 Gt C/yr is huge, but few would say that 1% change per year is huge.

3. Of course we have to also drop fossil resources and land use changes by an even larger annual percentage, but renewables have been growing by a much larger percentage annually. There is also a huge untapped potential for energy efficiency (that can pay for the needed CDR). We also should consider (but I haven’t) the externality costs of the fossil resources. I feel we will save money by going to CDR. This is NOT a financially burdensome scenario I propose.

4. In my view of the needed 8Gt C/yr, I assign 2 to afforestation. so (over 50 years) we add 100 Gt C to the roughly 500 Gt C of standing biomass. I believe this number is assumed by Jim Hansen. I don’t believe he attributes any thing new to the roughly 1500 Gt C of soil carbon (roots, microbes, fungi, etc). I would add 100 Gt C there as well - now having gotten half way to the needed 400 Gt C transfer of atmospheric and ocean carbon to the biosphere.

5. The 4 Gt C/yr remainder must come from 8 to 10 other CDR approaches. My knowledge base is only in the biochar area, which I believe (hope I am wrong - that there is a better) is the cheapest, so I will give only the biochar argument. I make a similar (not the same) assumption as for afforestation - that a tonne of C in char placed in soil will provide an additional tonne C of out-yr sequestration benefits. Unlike the above argument for afforestation, which only assumed new soil carbon, here I am assuming that but also a new additional out-year above ground biomass C. So this is perhaps 1 Gt C added above and below ground with an assumption of 2 Gt C/yr of directly-applied biochar (by chance the same number as for afforestation).

6. The standard reference for biochar’s maximum future contribution is an article by Wolff, Amonette, etal - with (at about 1 Gt C/yr) half of my needed 2 Gt C/yr total. They assumed there was no increase in out-year carbon capture. They also stated that they had made only conservative assumptions; they mostly used ag “wastes”. The contributions of woody biomass and “plantations” were minimal. They assumed no perennial woody species productivity improvement seen for the last century in ag species. Later calculations by others of land use attributed land use for both ag and char purposes to the char column alone. The most promising source of biomass and land I have seen since their paper is agave and similar plants that capture CO2 mainly at night (and much higher water use efficiency) in the “CAM” (not C3 or C4) form of photosynthesis.

7. I recognize this is not proof of anything, but doubling a conservative analysis leading to 1 Gt C/yr does not seem extreme. Authors such as Tim Lenton and Johannes Lehmann have given annual sequestration biochar numbers many times larger than my assumed placement of 2 Gt C/yr.

8. So now to address Tom W’s question of “cheap”. This is not the place for a full dialog on that, but I think biochar purchase (or local production) can be made for about $100/t char ($120/t C or $35/t CO2). If twice that, I believe it would still be cheap enough. The reason for this optimism is that biochar provides energy and soil improvement benefits that allow the char production costs to be spread 3 ways - not only for sequestration. One can buy char (produced badly and probably illegally) for as little as $100/t today in some places.

9. Is there enough land? I say plenty given the land (2 Gha?) we have ruined over the last several hundred years and arid land (3 Gha?) which the “CAM” photosynthesis approach can hopefully turn productive. To get 2 Gt C/yr from just 1 Gha of land requires only 2 t C/ha-yr (same as 200 gms C/sqm-yr). Roughly half the carbon in biomass can be turned to char (much of the remainder being available as carbon neutral energy to back up solar and wind). So we need an NPP of only 0.4 kg C/sqm-yr (or 4 t C/ha-yr) - just about what we are now doing in a global average sense (using 60 Gt C/yr/13 Gha). In many places we do ten times better today.

10. I am not claiming great accuracy above - but if we double these numbers then the annual average expenditures on the biochar side, would be $200/t C * 2 Gt C/yr = $400 billion per year - a small portion of today’s annual GDP of $80 trillion. Appreciably less than the 1% of GDP one often reads for CDR - and no-one is expecting global GDP to stay flat at $80 trillion.

11. I don’t believe a doubling for biochar sequestration subsidy cost is appropriate, as we are beginning to see quite substantial (60% by one recent corporate announcement) annual yield improvements for land receiving biochar treatment. A few years earlier we talked of 10% average improvement. I trust solid scientists to do even better when we truly understand how to make biochar most effective. . The above numbers are also not taking account of numerous other biochar financial benefits - possibly of equal societal magnitude

12. Where are the most inappropriate assumptions in the above? Is $200 or $400 billion per year a bargain or out of the question?

Apologies for a rush response (that I tried hard to keep short).

Ron

On Oct 30, 2013, at 1:19 AM, Tom Wigley <wig...@ucar.edu> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Dropping CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm in 50 years is impossible
> unless we can find a cheap way to suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
>
> Some simple calculations are attached.
>
> Tom.
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=
>
> On 10/29/2013 2:18 PM, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
>> List and Brian:
>>
>> I just noted a mis-statement. See below.
>>
>>
>> On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net
>> <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>> wrote:
>>
>>> Brian (cc list) This to respond to your three inserts in my

>>> yesterday’s response to you

>>>
>>> BC1: */But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like
>>> methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are
>>> irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need
>>> methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years. /*
>>>>

>>> *[RWL1: Brian’s “that” refers to my just previous statement (see

>>> below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years. Brian is NOT
>>> arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so. He is arguing for
>>> increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable
>>> at best - given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric
>>> carbon.*
>>

>> RWL: The last word was supposed to be “moisture” - NOT “carbon”.
>> Apologies. I am too used to following “atmospheric” with “carbon”.

>>
>> Ron
>>
>> <snip remainder>
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>> Groups "geoengineering" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
>> an email to geoengineerin...@googlegroups.com.
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>
> --
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> <350ppm.doc>

[Michael Hayes]

Albert et. al.,

The degree of negative generalization which Dr. Shiva applies to GE and its supporters is troubling. Attacking the supporters, as opposed to the science, is simply unprofessional and highly counter productive. Such rantings would not be tolerated coming from a freshman in school. She devalues her training and maturity through such acts.

It would be interesting to get her views on the use of large scale offshore mariculture operations as both a means for climate change mitigation and meeting the accelerating need for commodities like food, biofuel, organic fertilizer and fresh water. A deep water version of the NASA OMEGA Project, which uses nutricline water as the nutrient input, has significant potential to address many concerns in this field, as well as, the global need for jobs, taxes and living space. 

Yet, to be offhandedly condemned as an evil empire sociopathic plot to rule the world, by the highly vocal yet scientifically challenged, would be simply childish and distracting. We need long term solution, not school yard ad hominem attacks. She needs to focus on the prior.

Best,

Michael 

[Greg Rau]

Tom,

Your CO2 trajectory would seem overly optimistic unless I'm misreading Archer's treatment:

http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/TXVr5xrStR8vCEuTmECx/full/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206

Indeed, we can't get to 350 ppm any time soon with anthro emissions reduction alone. That's why it's worth considering more proactive measures, e.g., attached and argued here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6140/1522.2.full

not to mention broached in AR5 and elsewhere. A daunting task to be sure, but trying would seem better than the alternative. 

One piece of encouragement - atmospheric CO2 does intra-annually decline at most latitudes by as much as 16 ppm via natural air capture, and this uptake is increasing*. So we are not starting with zero CDR - how tough would it be to safely enhance/accelerate this uptake? Nor as I argue, do we need to necessarily enhance air capture.  We can achieve the same effect by reducing the leakiness of Nature's carbon storage, the largest emitter on the planet by far.

* http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6150/1085.full?sid=4adfc7d3-e42f-46e4-9f5b-3507b927672e

 

Greg

---

From: Tom Wigley <wig...@ucar.edu>
To: geoengi...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 12:19 AM

Subject: Re: [geo] TERRA FUTURA 2013: INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA ABOUT GEOENGINEERING | NoGeoingegneria

Dear all,

Dropping CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm in 50 years is impossible
unless we can find a cheap way to suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the
atmosphere.

Some simple calculations are attached.

Tom.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=

On 10/29/2013 2:18 PM, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
> List and Brian:
>
>    I just noted a mis-statement.  See below.
>
>
> On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongre...@comcast.net
> <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>> wrote:
>
>> Brian (cc list)  This to respond to your three inserts in my

>> yesterday’s response to you

>>
>> BC1: */But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like
>> methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are
>> irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you need
>> methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years. /*
>>>

>> *[RWL1:  Brian’s “that” refers to my just previous statement (see

>> below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years.  Brian is NOT
>> arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so.  He is arguing for
>> increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable
>> at best - given the strong warming potential of increased atmospheric
>> carbon.*
>

>    RWL:  The last word was supposed to be “moisture”  - NOT “carbon”.
>  Apologies.  I am too used to following “atmospheric” with “carbon”.

>
> Ron
>
>    <snip remainder>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "geoengineering" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send

> an email to geoengineering+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

> To post to this group, send email to geoengi...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Tom Wigley]

Greg,

Thanks for this addition. My carbon cycle model has a convolution model
for the ocean. This does have a long tail, but it is not as large as in
the papers you cite. So, if these studies are correct, and I do believe
they are, then my results are indeed optimistic.

The main point is that we cannot get back to 350 ppm by mitigation
alone. There are still many who think we can, and my simple sums were
presented as a reality check for those people. As your papers and the
others you cite, and papers cited in these, show, this is not new news.

Tom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On 10/30/2013 4:02 PM, Greg Rau wrote:
> Tom,
> Your CO2 trajectory would seem overly optimistic unless I'm misreading
> Archer's treatment:
> http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/TXVr5xrStR8vCEuTmECx/full/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206
>
> Indeed, we can't get to 350 ppm any time soon with anthro emissions
> reduction alone. That's why it's worth considering more proactive
> measures, e.g., attached and argued here:
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6140/1522.2.full
>
> not to mention broached in AR5 and elsewhere. A daunting task to be
> sure, but trying would seem better than the alternative.
>
> One piece of encouragement - atmospheric CO2 does intra-annually decline
> at most latitudes by as much as 16 ppm via natural air capture, and this
> uptake is increasing*. So we are not starting with zero CDR - how tough
> would it be to safely enhance/accelerate this uptake? Nor as I argue, do
> we need to necessarily enhance air capture. We can achieve the same
> effect by reducing the leakiness of Nature's carbon storage, the largest
> emitter on the planet by far.
>
> *
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6150/1085.full?sid=4adfc7d3-e42f-46e4-9f5b-3507b927672e
>
>
> Greg
>

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Tom Wigley <wig...@ucar.edu>
> *To:* geoengi...@googlegroups.com
> *Sent:* Wednesday, October 30, 2013 12:19 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [geo] TERRA FUTURA 2013: INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA

> ABOUT GEOENGINEERING | NoGeoingegneria
>
> Dear all,
>
> Dropping CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm in 50 years is impossible
> unless we can find a cheap way to suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the
> atmosphere.
>
> Some simple calculations are attached.
>
> Tom.
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=
>
> On 10/29/2013 2:18 PM, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
> > List and Brian:
> >
> > I just noted a mis-statement. See below.
> >
> >
> > On Oct 29, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Ronal W. Larson
> <rongre...@comcast.net <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>

> > <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net

> <mailto:rongre...@comcast.net>>> wrote:
> >
> >> Brian (cc list) This to respond to your three inserts in my

> >> yesterday�s response to you

> >>
> >> BC1: */But that's not very good. Warming-induced feedback loops like
> >> methane deposits are already very scary. I don't say CO2 levels are
> >> irreversible; my point is about warming from all causes, and you
> need
> >> methods of cooling that are much quicker than 50 years. /*
> >>>

> >> *[RWL1: Brian�s �that� refers to my just previous statement (see

> >> below) that we could drop to 350 ppm in 50 years. Brian is NOT
> >> arguing for SRM here, although it may seem so. He is arguing for
> >> increased latent heat transfer - an approach that seems questionable
> >> at best - given the strong warming potential of increased
> atmospheric
> >> carbon.*
> >

> > RWL: The last word was supposed to be �moisture� - NOT �carbon�.

> > Apologies. I am too used to following �atmospheric� with �carbon�.

> >
> > Ron
> >
> > <snip remainder>
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> > Groups "geoengineering" group.
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
> send

> > an email to geoengineerin...@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:unsub...@googlegroups.com>.

> > To post to this group, send email to
> geoengi...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:geoengi...@googlegroups.com>.

> > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering.
> > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
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>
>
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