Climate Security Timeline
Robert Tulip
The attached Climate Security Timeline shows a new suggestion on climate priorities.
It calls for a shift away from emission reduction as the main agenda, to instead focus at global level on albedo enhancement. Brightening the planet to reflect more sunlight can stabilise and reverse the movement toward a hotter world as the foundation of a new climate approach. Agreed systems to increase albedo should be in place before 2030. With a brighter planet as the foundation, the direct cooling effects make time available to scale up greenhouse gas conversion and removal to levels well above emissions. By the 2040s, GGC&R can produce steady decline in GHG levels over the second half of this century. Carbon dioxide conversion can store hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon in valuable locations such as soil, biomass, etc, reducing the need to sequester as CO2. Market demand can regulate global emissions, which at annual scale are a minor factor in radiative forcing compared to albedo and GHG concentrations.
The critical engineering path suggested for the planetary climate is like building a house. Albedo is the foundation, greenhouse gas conversions and removals are the walls, and decarbonisation caps the roof by a future move away from fossil fuels. You cannot build walls and roof until you have laid the foundation. That creates a timeline whereby global focus on a brighter world in this decade can replace the sole political emphasis on emissions and can give practical support to the recognition that removal of atmospheric carbon is essential.
Without higher albedo, GHG effects cannot cool the planet. Higher albedo can only be engineered by peaceful global cooperation on new technologies such as marine cloud brightening. Albedo needs to be addressed first, especially at the poles, where refreezing should be an immediate global priority for climate security. Turning the polar oceans from dark to light by stopping the melting of summer ice will make a critical difference in the planetary energy balance. A main focus on albedo will give time for the slower effects of GHG conversion, removal and reduction to contribute over the next decades to a stable and secure and productive planetary climate. This order of priorities can sustain the biosphere conditions that have enabled humans and all other living species to flourish on our planet Earth.
Robert Tulip
Robert Chris
Robert, nothing new here. This was
considered and dismissed at least as far back as 2009 (see Royal
Society report here),
and repeatedly since then by those that understand that climate
change and global warming are not synonymous.
Albedo management is now necessary to refreeze the Arctic, as you note. However, this has only because of the fossil fuel industry blocking progress on transitioning to renewables. Far from making albedo management the priority action, their behaviour has now made both emissions reductions and albedo management more urgent. They have nowhere to hide. Their industries are in their final sunset phase. They have a simple choice, do they get behind the transition and make things better for everyone, or continue to resist and place us all in peril. Their fate is sealed either way.
Perhaps you can explain this to me. If I was
running a major corporation and I knew that the market for my
primary product would more or less disappear in a matter of a
few decades, why would I not now do everything in my power to
reposition my business to be best placed to capitalise on what
will follow it and to minimise the losses from my stranded
assets? The fossil fuel sector has the finance, skill set and
the global reach to rapidly totally transform the global energy
sector. Why don't they do that, instead of paying lip service
to the need for change but all the while consigning themselves
to a slow and painful death that will hurt countless others in
the process? Is it so difficult for them to go from zero to
hero?
Regards
Robert Chris
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Carbon Dioxide Removal" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to CarbonDioxideRem...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/061801d8741a%240aecc350%2420c649f0%24%40yahoo.com.au.
Robert Tulip
To Robert Chris
H Robert,
I don’t agree with your comment that the need to manage albedo “has only been because of the fossil fuel industry blocking progress on transitioning to renewables.”
Transition to renewable energy was never going to be the main climate solution. Faster progress on cutting emissions would not make much difference to ice melt.
Most radiative forcing is from past emissions, with annual emissions worsening the problem by maybe 5%.
Cutting emissions in half would slow the worsening annual effect of committed warming by about 2.5% on that measure, marginal to the scale of the climate problem.
Albedo management and carbon management could combine to return the planet to 280 ppm CO2, the amount that gave us stable sea level. That could occur alongside ongoing emissions.
To blame the fossil fuel industry for not jumping to give up its property rights while still supplying the world with plentiful energy creates a polarised climate debate. It would be better to find a climate strategy that both left and right can agree on. Easing off on emission reduction (~20% of the problem) while expanding geoengineering technologies (~80% of the solution) is the best way to build climate consensus.
Regards
Robert Tulip
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/a952e272-a15f-0f50-00a5-01c9c19d0186%40gmail.com.
Robert Chris
Hi Robert
I'll leave others better
qualified to comment on your numbers and in particular, your
statement that 'Albedo management and carbon management could
combine to return the planet to 280 ppm CO2 [...]. That could
occur alongside ongoing emissions.' I suspect there might be
a little push back on that.
Nevertheless, I am pleased that we've established that the core driver for you is the protection of the fossil fuel industry's property rights. An extension of that is that by truly embracing renewable energy the industry could retain its pre-eminent position in supplying the world with plentiful energy and in so doing create a whole new set of property rights to replace those that are causing most of our GHG related the problems. Those new property rights will emerge. Whether the current fossil fuel industry is one of their primary owners depends on the choices they now make.
Framing this as an ideological 'left/right' issue is also interesting. I don't see it that way at all. For me it's about the internal functioning of complex adaptive systems. Too big a topic to deal with here but briefly, such systems always grow and die. Their temporal and spatial extent goes from the tiny to the huge, but they all eventually die. Empires, governments, economic systems, cities, corporations, industries, species, and so on. Sometimes they collapse due to overwhelming external events such as the volcanic destruction of Pompeii. Other times they collapse due to human failure such as Enron and Lehman Bros. Sometimes they collapse because the world just moves on and despite their best efforts, what they offer is no longer required - where are all the farriers, thatchers and candlestick makers? But in every case, the collapse arises due to the failure of the system to adapt to changing circumstances. Sometimes the change is too great or sudden for such adaptation to be possible. Other times it is due to a lack of foresight.
There are probably very few
who do not now consider the glory days of the fossil fuel
industry to be numbered. What that number is, is an open
question, as is the depth of foresight within the industry and
in government about how to manage the transition. You frame
that as an ideological question, I see it in systemic terms.
In systemic terms, there is a sweet spot on one side of which
a system can be sustained by continual adaptation, and on the
other side of which attempts to preserve elements that
undermine the system, hasten its collapse. Where we are right
now in relation to that sweet spot can only be known
retrospectively. Foresight isn't an exact science but a lack
of it is.
Robert Chris
rob...@rtulip.net
Diane and Harold, thank you for these comments – I have added my responses below.
In summary, the focus on cutting emissions as the main priority ignores the real scale of the climate problem.
Regards
Robert Tulip
From: healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Diane Warren
Sent: Tuesday, 31 May 2022 11:49 AM
To: Harold Hedelman <haroldh...@gmail.com>
Cc: JOHN ENGLANDER <johneng...@gmail.com>; Doug Grandt <answer...@mac.com>; Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>; geoengineering <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>; Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; Healthy Climate Alliance <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>; healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; noac-m...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Assuming we know how to increase albedo Re: [HCA-list] Climate Security Timeline
What would those of you who think we should not shift the primary focus away from emissions propose to do with the trillion tons of excess CO2 that are now warming the planet, will do so until it is removed, and will stay for hundreds to a thousand years?
- This question gets to the Pareto 80/20 logic of climate change – over 80% of climate effort goes into investment in emission reduction that can deliver at best 20% of results. Those proportions have to be reversed. Large scale measures to stabilise the climate should get most of the available funds, to directly target cutting radiative forcing.
What would you propose to do about tipping points that were met approximately 15 years ago that are feedback loops now adding methane and CO2 at an alarming rate that will continue to get worse until we face and fix the problem?
- Another great question! The immediate task to stop tipping points from accelerating is to increase planetary albedo. Against that urgency, cutting emissions is a second order priority.
If we were to quit emissions by some miracle in the near future, we would still have the urgent problem of past emissions and current tipping points wreaking havoc. They are wreaking more havoc than what we are emitting right now.
- The world shows no intention of quitting emissions. Governments agreed at Paris that annual emissions would increase until 2030. The disruption involved in changing the energy system too fast is a distraction from cooling. Decarbonisation has no prospect of being agreed by major emitters at climate-relevant scale and speed, and would cause needless delay through economic and political conflict.
Our emissions got us into this mess and stopping emissions is necessary but not sufficient.
- It is not true that stopping all emissions is necessary. If/when CO2 removal and conversion achieves a bigger scale than total emissions, there may be no great problem in allowing some emissions to continue. It is also possible that coal emissions will be fully utilised to grow algae biofuel to create a circular energy system.
Removing CO2 at 50 billion tons per year will give us time to continue to lower emissions.
- It is amusing that you use the phrase “continue to lower emissions” when apart from the tiny pandemic blip, invisible on the Mauna Loa CO2 graph, world emissions have continued to increase quite remorselessly.
Lowering emissions will not give us time to remove GHG's from the atmosphere.
- This is a critical point about both time and capacity. The trajectory to net zero emissions should mainly be met by greenhouse gas conversion and removal. Consider the hypothetical alternatives, at extremes of a spectrum of options. If by 2050 all combustion has stopped, and CDR is zero, the world will have achieved net zero emissions. The 600 ppm CO2e in the atmosphere will continue to exist, and will continue to destabilise planetary climate until a new equilibrium is reached. As well, with no CDR, there would be no capacity to remove committed warming from past emissions. Or, at the other extreme, if combustion continues with business as usual and GGR scales up to equal emissions, the world will have achieved net zero, and will also have created technological capacity to drive a trajectory for GGR to continue to increase, surpassing CO2 emissions and lowering the CO2 level toward Holocene norms. As well as your point about not giving us time for GGR, cutting emissions as the main climate focus crowds out investment that should go into GGR and SRM. Cutting emissions can be great for the economy and environment, but does very little about climate change.
OK, to the scientists - did I get that right?
Warmly,
Diane
- Thanks again Diane, your strategic commentary here is very astute. I am not a scientist, but I do follow the science closely and your comments align with my understanding. Robert Tulip.
More comments below in response to Harold Hedelman.
On Mon, May 30, 2022 at 5:20 PM Harold Hedelman <haroldh...@gmail.com> wrote:
Doug, first of all, hi!!!
I concur with John, that it is a mistake to talk about shifting the focus AWAY FROM emissions reduction. Rather than framing albedo reduction as an EITHER/OR choice, a BOTH/AND framing would be better.
- Hi Harold, the existential situation is one of either/or. Either we continue the failed IPCC refusal to promote cooling strategies using geoengineering, by continuing to frame climate policy as a war on fossil fuels, or we recognise that the focus on cutting emissions has largely been a blind alley, and can usefully be deferred for twenty years. Strategies to scale up GGRs can allow emissions to continue. Strong emission cuts would reduce GHGs by a few gigatonnes each year, when the overall problem scale is a thousand gigatonnes. Different thinking is needed. Given the tiny contribution that emission cuts can make to cutting radiative forcing, the political benefits of easing up pressure on emissions far outweigh the disadvantages. It means left and right have to cooperate, which would be good for social cohesion. A shift to a geoengineering climate policy would unlock the resources, skills, networks and funds of the fossil fuel industry to support climate stability, as it would end the fear that their assets will be stranded due to political manipulation of climate policy.
In fact, no matter what climate restoration specifics we advocate for, the same both/and framing will likely be more successful and face less opposition.
- I disagree. The emission reduction paradigm is broken and has to be replaced by a stronger quantitative focus on practical ways to repair the climate. Right wingers already point out that full achievement of Paris pledges would barely slow the temperature increase. They use that to deny climate science. Meanwhile leftists say go in harder and sacrifice more to cut standards of living by making energy more expensive. A balanced view can recognise the Paris decarbonisation program is in a futile hole and more digging will not escape it. Obviously those with vested commercial or ideological interests in the existing climate policies will oppose change, but it is likely that the broader community will see the logic of a shift to albedo as the main climate concern for the 2020s
Harold Hedelman || 510-473-6897
On Mon, May 30, 2022 at 7:56 AM JOHN ENGLANDER <johneng...@gmail.com> wrote:
Robert and all —
I get the appeal and reasoning, but find this a misleading and dangerous position.
First, it indicates that we know how to increase the albedo in a benign way, with confidence, which is not the case.
Second, following this logic takes the emphasis off of slowing the increase in GHG.
JOHN ENGLANDER
Twitter: @johnenglander
LinkedIN: linkedin.com/in/johnenglander/
On May 30, 2022, at 10:18 AM, 'Doug Grandt' via Healthy Climate Alliance <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Excellent analogy, Robert. I like it!
Good on ya, mate !
Doug Grandt
BTW, I am inspired to weave it into a May 1st presentation that I recorded last Sunday—there are a couple hiccups or verbal typos and rough unrehearsed sections that need to be cleaned up for an updated re-recording. Your thoughts and critique are welcome to streamline this 32 minute video Bit.ly/DougsMayDay
dg
Sent from my iPhone (audio texting)
On May 30, 2022, at 7:40 AM, 'Robert Tulip' via Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Planetary Restoration" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to planetary-restor...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/061801d8741a%240aecc350%2420c649f0%24%40yahoo.com.au.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
<Climate Security Timeline.png>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Climate Alliance" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-climate-al...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-alliance/2DEC7785-9B89-411B-82C7-A4D0F276F2FE%40mac.com.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Climate Alliance" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-climate-al...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-alliance/7186EBED-A66F-4783-9C1B-CC07F55D1942%40gmail.com.--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Climate Alliance" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-climate-al...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-alliance/CANgs4ro54p%2Bz2Me%3DgPwizX49LmoYz2hKwpd%2BYONz4jRKfq1Nxw%40mail.gmail.com.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Climate Alliance" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-climate-al...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-alliance/CACSDze1S3jXwsZo%2B7TzHuRGNwDj2UuwZnXzcKt_XZ6BJgj-vPQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Robert Tulip
Further response to Robert Chris, dot points in email below.
From: Robert Chris <robert...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 31 May 2022 4:42 PM
To: Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: 'healthy-planet-action-coalition' <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; 'Planetary Restoration' <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; 'geoengineering' <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>; carbondiox...@googlegroups.com; 'Healthy Climate Alliance' <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] Climate Security Timeline
Hi Robert
I'll leave others better qualified to comment on your numbers and in particular, your statement that 'Albedo management and carbon management could combine to return the planet to 280 ppm CO2 [...]. That could occur alongside ongoing emissions.' I suspect there might be a little push back on that.
- Happy to debate numbers. Total emissions by the end of this century will be about one billion gigatonnes of carbon, while annual emissions are about 15 gigatonnes C including equivalents. The yearly amount is roughly 1.5% of the GHG forcing, leaving aside factors like ocean interactions and the additional forcing from albedo feedbacks. I have not seen a peer reviewed statement of the ratio between annual emissions effect and total radiative forcing so this is just my estimate. Another way to calculate the ratio might be to set the proxy for radiative forcing as the CO2e increase since the Holocene, about 200 ppm, and note that the annual 2.3ppm increase is just over 1% of that total. Even rounded up to 5% of RF, cutting emissions is still marginal to climate stability. 280 ppm CO2 is an important target as it represents the stable climate that enabled our current sea level with beaches and ports and fragile coastal ecosystems. These would all be destroyed under current climate policies but could be saved by a rapid shift to an albedo focus. The main constraint to starting SRM and scaling up GGR much bigger than emissions is political understanding.
Nevertheless, I am pleased that we've established that the core driver for you is the protection of the fossil fuel industry's property rights.
- Excuse me Robert, I appreciate this is a fraught topic, but such wilful distortion does you no credit. The core driver for me is climate security, as clearly stated in this thread. I am simply pointing out that snide dismissal of property rights inevitably causes social conflict. Climate solutions that preserve legal rights are to be preferred when this gives their owners an incentive to cooperate in measures to solve their own and wider problems. That is the situation for fossil fuel industries and geoengineering.
An extension of that is that by truly embracing renewable energy the industry could retain its pre-eminent position in supplying the world with plentiful energy and in so doing create a whole new set of property rights to replace those that are causing most of our GHG related the problems. Those new property rights will emerge. Whether the current fossil fuel industry is one of their primary owners depends on the choices they now make.
- And an extension of a proposed strategy to rely mainly on transforming the energy sector is a burning earth. Renewable energy potential is far too small, slow, contested and expensive to stop dangerous warming.
Framing this as an ideological 'left/right' issue is also interesting. I don't see it that way at all. For me it's about the internal functioning of complex adaptive systems.
- The political left largely want to destroy the fossil fuel industry, on the misguided assumption that to do so would stop climate change, while the political right and centre largely want to protect these industries from unjustified attacks. That political divide opens the need for dialogue on how ongoing emissions could be compatible with a path to a stable climate.
Too big a topic to deal with here but briefly, such systems always grow and die. Their temporal and spatial extent goes from the tiny to the huge, but they all eventually die. Empires, governments, economic systems, cities, corporations, industries, species, and so on. Sometimes they collapse due to overwhelming external events such as the volcanic destruction of Pompeii. Other times they collapse due to human failure such as Enron and Lehman Bros. Sometimes they collapse because the world just moves on and despite their best efforts, what they offer is no longer required - where are all the farriers, thatchers and candlestick makers? But in every case, the collapse arises due to the failure of the system to adapt to changing circumstances. Sometimes the change is too great or sudden for such adaptation to be possible. Other times it is due to a lack of foresight.
- I am pointing out that a good way for the fossil fuel industry to adapt to a changing climate is to support geoengineering. That will solve the warming problem and enable a more gradual tradition away from fuel sources that are less economic. I do need to point out that the world now relies on fossil fuels for over 80% of energy use. Blithe elegies for the main infrastructure of our economy are very premature, and certainly not inevitable in our lifetimes. If we can scale up GGR enough then ongoing emissions will not harm the climate. It is disturbing to revel in predictions of the demise of industries that are central to world prosperity
There are probably very few who do not now consider the glory days of the fossil fuel industry to be numbered. What that number is, is an open question, as is the depth of foresight within the industry and in government about how to manage the transition.
- “Glory days” could still be ahead if this industry opens a conversation on the potential of geoengineering to salvage its business models. If the oil majors offered to cooperate to refreeze the Arctic Ocean, in exchange for greater social and political licence to operate, it would be a good deal. A frozen Pole would slow down tipping points, whereas a few more gigatonnes of emissions is neither here nor there in the greater scheme of climate stability and security.
You frame that as an ideological question, I see it in systemic terms. In systemic terms, there is a sweet spot on one side of which a system can be sustained by continual adaptation, and on the other side of which attempts to preserve elements that undermine the system, hasten its collapse. Where we are right now in relation to that sweet spot can only be known retrospectively. Foresight isn't an exact science but a lack of it is.
- Your ‘sweet spot’ analogy does not work in the way you suggest, which seems to imply the precautionary principle requires accelerated decarbonisation. A far more precautionary approach is to shift focus to albedo, as the main urgent global cooperation priority for climate. But the sweet spot does apply to climate policy. What an irony it would be if the main “element that undermines the system” turns out to be the popular tribal myth that emission reduction is enough to fix the climate. Thanks for interesting comments. Regards, Robert Tulip
Robert Chris
Robert Chris
Hi Robert
Nothing snide about my comments. I was merely noting that your focus is a climate change policy regime that addresses the property rights of the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to an industrial policy that responds to the needs of climate change. It's a subtle distinction but it establishes the order of priority. It may be that that the two are not in conflict and therefore the distinction is irrelevant, but if they are, your positioning puts the property rights first.
An issue that you'll need to
address when promoting an albedo management (AM) driven
climate policy regime is the substantial body of research that
suggests that a climate cooled by AM is a quite different
climate from one cooled by lower atmospheric GHG
concentrations and quite different from the one we have now.
It entrains environmental impacts that are different from
those from unrestrained warming, but not necessarily less
impactful. In addition, AM does nothing for ocean
acidification, which would accelerate in your scenario.
Your comments about the
availability and economics of renewables are interesting.
There is certainly not enough of them available today but new
renewables are already generally cheaper than new fossil
fuels, and even more so if the imbalance in subsidies were
addressed. But much the same could be said about AM. That
doesn't yet exist as a deliverable technology at scale, so
there's an equal timing problem about its availability.
Refreezing the Arctic is a great idea and some people are
thinking about it. But no one is doing it. There's no sense
of urgency outside of a few academics waving their arms
frantically, and ignored by most everyone else. The resources
are available to promote either or both AM and renewables to
get to climatically significant scale within a couple of
decades. It's a choice. Will the fossil fuel industry now
start putting some serious money into AM to realise the future
climate management you envisage? Or are they expecting that
this will be funded by the public purse? If so, it'll raise
an interesting debate about which is more deserving of public
funds, renewables or AM. Securing social licence for extensive AM is also
likely to be significant challenge, quite apart from the
technology aspects .
I am fully aware that 80% of energy is currently provided from fossil fuels. Indeed, that defines the scale of the problem we face. I share your scepticism about our capacity to invert that percentage, the historical record going back more than 200 years demonstrates the unprecedented nature of the challenge. I have no illusions about the likelihood of it being achieved. While I have never doubted that we have the wherewithal to do so, that doesn't mean that we can organise ourselves to actually make it happen. Human history is littered with such failures. The systems point I was making is that not doing everything we can to retire fossil fuels at the earliest opportunity, is a good indicator of the likelihood of success (or failure!).
I rather like your comment about the 'popular tribal myth that emission reduction is enough to fix the climate'. I'm not sure what 'fixing the climate' actually means and how you can know in advance that any policy will 'fix' it. It's more likely to be a continuing process of trial and error, like almost all public policy interventions. Do people really believe that emissions reductions are enough? I'm not sure about that. I think that most informed commentators would argue that the evidence strongly suggests that emissions reductions are an important part of the mix, yet might still not be enough. However, that they might not be enough is not a reason not to do as much of them as possible. I also think that most informed commentators would argue that the evidence strongly suggests that more emissions are not likely to 'fix' the climate.
Your comments bring to mind a suggestion from John Maynard Keynes about how to solve the unemployment crisis in the 1930s depression. He said:
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
Burning fossil fuels that emit GHGs and then
paying to have them sucked out of the air and disposed of, or
using AM to mask their warming effects, is much like burying
banknotes and then paying someone to dig them up.
Robert Chris
Jim Baird
Robert, how about making scaling the solution the cheapest available option?
In 2020 the world consumed an estimated 88 million barrels of oil a day. For the year this was 32,120,000,000 barrels and the Brent Crude spot price as of April 20, 2022, was 107.20 USD barrel. The notional cost of energy is therefore about 3.44 trillion USD for an equivalent of 171,240 terawatt hours in 2019, which equates to 19.5 terawatts. (TW).
It is estimated the equivalent of 408 TW of heat went into the oceans between 1991 and 2016 and this rate is doubling every 16 years.
It took about 225 years of warming to reach the current level of warming and it will take at least thirty years to scale a solution to the point it can start reversing the problem. At which point the annual increase of the ocean heat will be about 1650 TW and it will take another 225 years before that level of warming can be brought down to the preindustrial baseline.
Reverting to the mean, the 1991-2016 heat content will be about the average for the previous 225 years by 2054.
The experimental physicist Melvin Prueitt calculated 7.6% of this heat can be converted to work with a system like Thermodynamic Geoengineering (TG), which would produce 31 TW/year. Which is 59% more energy than we are currently using.
Prorating the current rate of consumption to 31 TW, the notional cost of energy is 5.47 trillion USD. Which compares poorly to the cost of between 2.1 trillion to 2.9 trillion USD, depending on whether the plants are producing electricity or hydrogen, for TG platforms per this open source spreadsheet.
The spot price for oil was $107.20 whereas the average retail price for gas at the pump was $4.11 in April 20. And since there are 42 gallons in a barrel, the equivalent cost of fuel was $172.62 a barrel times 32.12 billion barrels, times 31TW/19.5TW, which equates to 8.81 trillion USD, which is over 4 times the cost of electricity generation with TG.
Current prices for oil are high but we have seen spikes before and even at half the current price, oil can’t compete with TG on price. Let alone when the $5,9 trillion fossil fuel subsidies the IMF calculated consumers paid in fossil fuel subsidies are added in. Which would bring the true price of oil to 14.7 trillion USD or 15.6% of the $94 trillion world economy. Whereas energy should be at most only 3% of GDP with the difference being the opportunity cost of not addressing the other concerns of humanity.
And it gets worse. In The Atlantic article, We’ve Never Seen a Carbon-Removal Plan Like This Before, Nan Ransohoff of Stripe says “the carbon-removal market will probably need to reach $1 trillion a year” to keep the planet’s average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level. Whereas TG can remove 4.4 gigatonnes of carbon a year, with 31,000 one-gigawatt platforms at a profit of 6.3 trillion USD simply by cooling the surface by shifting the 92.4% of the heat of warming not converted to work to a depth of 1,000 meters.
This heat will diffuse back to the surface at a rate of 4 meters and in 225 years can be recycled to produce 31 more TWs of electricity. With a process that can be repeated 12 more times to produce 3,000 years of climate respite and abundant energy.
The consulting firm Wood Mackenzie says it will cost 4.5 trillion USD to fully upgrade the US grid. Which is another unnecessary expense avoided with TG which decarbonizes every sector of the global economy by loading raw materials on one side of an ocean basin and delivering finish products made with electricity produced on board on the other side of the basin.
The shipbuilding industry currently has about 50,000 ships plying the oceans transporting raw materials and finished goods from one of side of an oceans to the other and most of these will need to be replaced over the course of the next 30 years.
Those 50,000 ships can be superseded by 31,000 one gigawatt TG platforms that service both transport as well as manufacturing functions.
The Guardian article IPCC: We can tackle climate change if big oil gets out of the way points out “criticism of oil and gas’s ‘climate-blocking activities’ cut from the (IPCC’s) final draft are reflective of the industry’s power and influence.”
This power and influence are not only blocking climate activities, it is also an impediment to scientific advancement and energy innovation.
Since fossil fuel industry’s prime motivation is money, the best way to defeat it is in the marketplace on cost.
Ken Caldeira said in The Guardian article, “Back in the 80s, we believed in the information deficit model of social change, and that if we could only get the information to policymakers, they would do the right thing. And now we see that really, it’s not about information deficit, it’s about power relations, and people wanting to keep economic and political power. And so just telling people some more climate science isn’t going to help anything.”
What will help is showing the public how they are being gaslit about energy by those wanting to keep the economic and political power for themselves.
Jim Baird, Thermodynamic Geoengineering
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Carbon Dioxide Removal" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to CarbonDioxideRem...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/02fc01d874bd%24afb7aa00%240f26fe00%24%40rtulip.net.
Robert Tulip
1 June Reply to Robert Chris, dot points below
Robert Tulip
From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com <geoengi...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Robert Chris
Sent: Tuesday, 31 May 2022 10:52 PM
To: Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: 'healthy-planet-action-coalition' <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; 'Planetary Restoration' <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; 'geoengineering' <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>; carbondiox...@googlegroups.com; 'Healthy Climate Alliance' <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [geo] Re: [CDR] Climate Security Timeline
Hi Robert
Nothing snide about my comments. I was merely noting that your focus is a climate change policy regime that addresses the property rights of the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to an industrial policy that responds to the needs of climate change.
- You are still distorting my view, perhaps understandably as my perspective is counter cultural and I have only explained it briefly. The entire point of the house analogy is to construct an industrial policy that responds to the needs of climate change, so how you could say otherwise is surprising. The “needs of climate change” are for action that stops dangerous warming. GGR and emission reduction can’t achieve that on relevant timeframes (effect within decades), so we need to research the only method that could, solar radiation management, which for convenience and simplicity I call albedo enhancement, although it does also include radiation methods like cirrus brightening that do not involve albedo.
It's a subtle distinction but it establishes the order of priority. It may be that that the two are not in conflict and therefore the distinction is irrelevant, but if they are, your positioning puts the property rights first.
- The order of priority should flow from defining a critical engineering path that can stop dangerous warming. As in building a house, we start with the foundations and then build the walls and roof. We can identify the analogy in climate by looking at the triage process. In any emergency, triage requires the identification of the third of cases where action can make most difference. If we triage climate change, looking at albedo, GGR and emission reduction, the situation is that delaying action on emission cuts would make little different to temperature and tipping points, whereas delaying action on albedo would make an enormous difference to temperature and tipping points. And GGR cannot have much effect for several decades but needs immediate investment in order to scale up when needed. So the rule of triage indicates that albedo should be our priority.
- It just so happens that this analysis can align with the commercial interests of fossil fuel companies to preserve their business model. Please note I have never had any direct contact with the fossil fuel industry, except for a few incidental conversations while I ran AusAID’s mining for development program ten years ago that went nowhere. My point is not to shill but to understand policy that can actually work. Far from putting property rights first, I am simply observing that a policy of expropriating the expropriators, despite its revolutionary ring, will inevitably create reaction and conflict (Trumpism), and is physically unable to achieve key climate objectives. The expropriation line of seeking to strand fossil assets only deals with future emissions, not the much bigger problem of past emissions. Happily, a policy that sidesteps this conflict is available, promoting cooperation on albedo with the fossil fuel industry, and with others who stand to benefit from the prevention of extreme weather and sea level rise such as insurance and shipping.
An issue that you'll need to address when promoting an albedo management (AM) driven climate policy regime is the substantial body of research that suggests that a climate cooled by AM is a quite different climate from one cooled by lower atmospheric GHG concentrations and quite different from the one we have now.
- I just don’t think the climate policy regimes based on GGR, let alone decarbonisation models, properly factor in just how politically difficult it would be for those scenarios to produce genuine cooling. The high risk, identified in scientific papers such as Trajectories for the Anthropocene by Steffen et al, is that a phase shift would make any scenario driven by lowers GHGs irrelevant. That does not apply for albedo driven approaches which are designed to minimise the risk of phase shift.
- I read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert and would like to read her Under a White Sky, although the reviews I have read suggest she does not quite get the strategic problem that indicates the urgent need for albedo increase.
AM entrains environmental impacts that are different from those from unrestrained warming, but not necessarily less impactful.
- How could AM have worse impactful than business as usual? Higher albedo would directly reverse warming, mitigating coral bleaching, poleward migration and numerous other harmful environmental impacts.
In addition, AM does nothing for ocean acidification, which would accelerate in your scenario.
- My friend Stephen Salter explained that his work on marine cloud brightening has been no-platformed by the British Government for this bizarre reasoning. Nothing will help stop acidification until GGR ramps up to a bigger scale than total emissions. Global work on albedo can provide a governance framework that will help to optimise work on deacidification through GGR. In the meantime, we should address the immediate climate crisis by brightening the planet. Emissions make almost no difference.
- To illustrate the hypocritical absence of logic and evidence among those whose ritual incantation is to follow the science, the Australian Greens have a slogan “Stop Adani Save the Reef”. While it is true there are some direct reef impacts, the emissions from a single mine have basically zero impact on climate change. The total emissions from Adani would worsen warming by about one part in a thousand. If warming without Adani would be four degrees, warming with Adani would be about 3.99 degrees, a rounding error.
Your comments about the availability and economics of renewables are interesting. There is certainly not enough of them available today but new renewables are already generally cheaper than new fossil fuels, and even more so if the imbalance in subsidies were addressed.
- If so, fossil fuels can be allowed to die a natural death without government help to smooth the dying pillow. The political backlash from increasing fuel prices is high, and in my view is not worth it as a way to save the planet. I tend to be suspicious of all such projections on price as there is a large element of motivated reasoning involved.
But much the same could be said about AM. That doesn't yet exist as a deliverable technology at scale, so there's an equal timing problem about its availability.
- Your “much the same” here is unclear. A global moonshot approach could establish a major albedo industry in this decade, largely stabilising the climate by 2030. That is not the case for carbon based solutions. Research funding can ensure any AM deployments are rapid, safe, cheap and effective, once the implicit UN fatwa is removed. Also, the accounting for carbon credits needs to change to instead be based on radiative forcing, directing investment to the activities that are most effective to cool the planet.
Refreezing the Arctic is a great idea and some people are thinking about it. But no one is doing it. There's no sense of urgency outside of a few academics waving their arms frantically, and ignored by most everyone else.
- I am working quite closely with groups on refreezing the Arctic. Given that Trump’s Secretary Pompeo trumpeted the benefits for shipping and mining of an ice-free pole, alongside the rather distracted situation at the moment in Moscow, getting geopolitical agreement is tough. I think the quid pro quo to bring China into play is likely to be ice canals between the Pacific and Atlantic.
- Antarctica is likely to be easier, with Australia well positioned to mobilise a coalition of nations to test marine cloud brightening for the Southern Ocean, building upon its research for the Great Barrier Reef. This would reduce sea ice melt, glacial collapse, biodiversity loss, sea level rise and warming of ocean currents, bringing major benefits and providing the governance cooperation model that could then be applied in the Arctic where the methane emergency really has to be addressed quickly.
The resources are available to promote either or both AM and renewables to get to climatically significant scale within a couple of decades. It's a choice.
- I dispute that renewables can achieve climatically significant scale. Total annual emissions are 10-15 GtC against a climate problem approaching 1000 GtC. Projections are that emissions will barely fall by 2050, despite much banging of heads against brick walls and corrupt Borisian spin about the wonders of net zero long after current politicians have left office. And there is the slight problem that accelerating the renewable shift antagonises some rich and powerful interests, making it more difficult and risky.
- By contrast, intensive AM could stabilise the climate in this decade, and its main opponents are uninformed green activists. Scientists are certainly worried, but can be brought on board by rigorous assessment such as proposed by GESAMP.
- Better to just chill out about the evils of the current energy system and put effort into activities that have a prospect of being climatically significant. The carbon-based activity with most cooling promise may be converting CO2 into useful commodities like soil. The earth has a billion hectares of arable land. To just toss around an order of magnitude illustration, adding ten tonnes of carbon per hectare as biochar (1 kg per square metre) to all agricultural soils would address 1% of the carbon problem while increasing food production, and could probably be scaled up beyond that level.
Will the fossil fuel industry now start putting some serious money into AM to realise the future climate management you envisage? Or are they expecting that this will be funded by the public purse? If so, it'll raise an interesting debate about which is more deserving of public funds, renewables or AM.
- Before private investment can scale up, governments need to give regulatory permissions. I think marine cloud brightening for Antarctica could proceed as a public private partnership, with industries chipping in to improve their public image and to develop the concept of radiative forcing credits. I cannot for the life of me understand why the insurance industry has not yet realised that MCB can prevent or mitigate Atlantic hurricanes, with all their immense destruction. It shows there are some strange psychological blockages at work in this space. Renewable energy does not deserve public subsidy and should be driven by market economics.
Securing social licence for extensive AM is also likely to be significant challenge, quite apart from the technology aspects .
- It is essential to integrate the technological and social analysis, for example showing how cooling the planet can benefit indigenous and other marginalised people and prevent ecological damage. It is a shame that the great benefits of AM have not been properly publicised, and that scurrilous fear campaigns have misinformed the public.
I am fully aware that 80% of energy is currently provided from fossil fuels. Indeed, that defines the scale of the problem we face.
- No, the scale of the problem we face is defined by the total amount of carbon in the air, not the pace at which we are increasing it.
I share your scepticism about our capacity to invert that percentage, the historical record going back more than 200 years demonstrates the unprecedented nature of the challenge. I have no illusions about the likelihood of it being achieved. While I have never doubted that we have the wherewithal to do so, that doesn't mean that we can organise ourselves to actually make it happen.
- I did not suggest cutting fossil energy to 20%, but rather targeting that 80% of climate investment should be in geoengineering, based on the Pareto 80/20 Principle that 20% of work delivers 80% of results.
Human history is littered with such failures. The systems point I was making is that not doing everything we can to retire fossil fuels at the earliest opportunity, is a good indicator of the likelihood of success (or failure!).
- “Doing everything we can to retire fossil fuels at the earliest opportunity” means supporting investments with high opportunity cost, where that money could be better used elsewhere to cool the planet more effectively. The system we should be most worried about is the earth system equilibrium, and that can best be protected by albedo management.
I rather like your comment about the 'popular tribal myth that emission reduction is enough to fix the climate'. I'm not sure what 'fixing the climate' actually means and how you can know in advance that any policy will 'fix' it. It's more likely to be a continuing process of trial and error, like almost all public policy interventions.
- Fixing the climate means treading a path back toward Holocene stability, removing the drivers of tipping points, stepping back from the current hothouse precipice.
Do people really believe that emissions reductions are enough? I'm not sure about that.
- The popular media narrative on climate gives almost no space to the scientific recognition that emission reduction is not enough, let alone to the central role of albedo in warming. When I explained this to the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, they asked me to keep my view to myself as it conflicted with their simple narrative on climate action.
I think that most informed commentators would argue that the evidence strongly suggests that emissions reductions are an important part of the mix, yet might still not be enough.
- Yes, the IPCC scientific consensus recognises the need for GGR, but not albedo management. Your weasel word “might” is rather like saying the earth “might” orbit the sun.
However, that they might not be enough is not a reason not to do as much of them as possible.
- I do admire your valiant defence of a failed paradigm here Robert. Remember Einstein’s purported definition of insanity?
I also think that most informed commentators would argue that the evidence strongly suggests that more emissions are not likely to 'fix' the climate.
- That is pretty obvious, but more emissions alongside a global albedo program could prevent dangerous tipping points. World emissions have such a marginal total system effect at annual scale that it is not worth expending precious political energy trying to stop them. If people want to burn stuff and can pay for it, just let them, within the boundaries of local environmental rules.
Burning fossil fuels that emit GHGs and then paying to have them sucked out of the air and disposed of, or using AM to mask their warming effects, is much like burying banknotes and then paying someone to dig them up.
- No. Burying banknotes has no value, whereas there are massive global industries that find immense value in combustion. Incidentally, this banknote metaphor shows why BECCS is a really bad idea. Rather than storing CO2 underground, what is needed is to find ways to convert CO2 into useful commodities. I call it the 7F strategy – fuel, food, feed, fish, fertilizer, fabric and forests. This could be done with large scale ocean based algae production, once a strategic vision gains political traction.
Robert Chris
--
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.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/cc8faa14-7324-b0bf-27c8-d9aaac83bf55%40gmail.com.
Robert Chris
Hi Robert
The fundamental issue here is
the extent to which emissions abatement supported by
greenhouse gas removal (GGR) can take us down the 'path
back toward Holocene stability, removing the drivers of tipping
points, stepping back from the current hothouse precipice'
without recourse to AM. The UNFCCC process is driven by the
notion of net zero by 2050 being sufficient to deliver that
objective, and that is based on MacDougall et al (2020) who
concluded that at net zero surface temperature quickly (<20
years) stabilises at the the level then reached. Moreover, even
without any help from GGR, within a century, atmospheric CO2
drops by ~100ppmv. The 2050 timeline comes (for example) from
IPCC AR6 WGIII that states: Global net zero CO2 emissions are
reached in the early 2050s in modelled pathways that limit
warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot.
In short, net zero by 2050 gives a better than
evens chance that by 2100 the temperature increase will not
exceed 1.5degC with no or limited (<0.1degC) overshoot.
That's the justification for emissions abatement. GGR is
necessary to deliver the 'net' because we can't get to 'zero
emissions' in the foreseeable future. We don't need AM. So
sayeth 'the experts'.
Perhaps the place to start is to explain what the IPCC and its cadre of scientists have got so wrong. For better or worse, the UNFCCC supported by its IPCC inputs, drives global climate policy. Without shifting them from their fixation with net zero by 2050, the prospects of getting governments to get behind AM are probably close to zero. They've only just woken up to the essential role to be played by GGR in the net zero scenario, so getting them to abandon all that in favour of AAM (accelerated albedo management!) is going to be quite a challenge.
How would you feel about a global cancellation of
all fossil fuel subsidies throughout the production and
consumption chain by, say, 2025? That would put fossil fuels on
a level playing field with renewables. This could be done very
easily and equitably. The $6tr/yr
that would be saved could be distributed back to households (on
a per household or per capita basis) to compensate them for the
likely increase in energy prices, but so as to be revenue
neutral for governments.
Robert
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/08d001d875b6%24ec43e5c0%24c4cbb140%24%40yahoo.com.au.
Dan Galpern
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/08d001d875b6%24ec43e5c0%24c4cbb140%24%40yahoo.com.au.
Robert Chris
Hi Dan & Robert
I didn't pick up on the insanity point in my response to Robert's post because I thought it a bit odd. What Einstein said was that 'insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.' If we apply that to our current discussion, it's not the decarbonisation of the energy supply and GGR that we're repeating, we're not actually do that much of either. The growth in renewables has yet to exceed the growth in energy consumption, and GGR is virtually non-existent. The behaviour we are repeating is the emission of GHGs by burning fossil fuels. The question here is not whether I'm insane, I may or not be, but whether I'm right. I could be both! Similarly, the question is not whether Robert's preference to maintain emissions and offset their warming effect with AM marks him out as insane, which he may or may not be, but whether he's right. Which offers the better approach to 'preventing dangerous human interference in the climate system', that's all that matters. Either way it's a judgement call. Our grandchildren will be the jury, or rather those of them that survive long enough will be.
It is worth remembering that human history is
replete with cases of insanity caused by the failure of the
wider community to heed later to be proved correct warnings from
those whose contrariness was dismissed as crazed. Being insane
is no bar to being right.
And the 'weasel words', ah yes, the weasel words.
There I plead guilty. I didn't used to use so many of these
little qualifiers but my bumbling attempts to make my utterances
more robust and less vulnerable to pedantic attacks, and
generally to follow the practice I observe from seasoned
academics who are always careful not to over-claim their
findings, has caused me to introduce more of them. I still find
it quite challenging to strike a balance between being
authoritative and being an opinionated bigot. I'd really value
helpful tips on how to handle this from those of you with
relevant experience. But please, not through the listservs, it
might upset the moderators as being a bit off-topic. (NB:
Experience has painfully taught me that even between Anglophone
communities there is wide cultural semantic diversity.
Accordingly, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, I feel
obliged to issue a weaselly
'irony alert'.)
Robert Chris
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/CANNDMDqKW-_zkUaHe-B0SHvy5X-iUzgf2ksb0n02AuYq6-uApA%40mail.gmail.com.
Greg Rau
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/a274578e-757e-709a-2749-2ce0120693f2%40gmail.com.
Institute of Marine Sciences
Univer. California, Santa Cruz
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Greg_Rau
Co-founder and manager, the Carbon Dioxide Removal Google group
Co-founder and CTO, Planetary Technologies, Inc.
510 582 5578
Kevin Lister
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/a274578e-757e-709a-2749-2ce0120693f2%40gmail.com.
Ron Baiman
Hi Aaron,Thanks for pointing us to that video with a simple exposition of how the natural Earth System (ES) cycle of the ice ages has broken through our CO2 emissions [1]. The conclusion is that humans are now in control of the ES cycle: we have become responsible for our own destiny.
The narrator states that we can never go back to the natural ES cycle without getting CO2 below 350 ppm; but actually we don't want to go back into the cycle because that would mean starting a glacial period! Rather we want to restore Holocene norms: the norms of the past few thousand years. This should be our ambition, now that we are in control! This is where we should be heading.To go into more detail: for the past 2.5 million years the ES cycle has been driven by Milankovitch warming signals in the NH summer [2][3]. This signal is amplified in the Arctic mainly by albedo positive feedback. Humans have mimicked a Milankovitch warming signal through the global warming from excess CO2. This warming has been amplified in the Arctic. The Arctic is now warming 3-4 times faster than the global mean. The repercussions are:The alarming conclusion is that our destiny is catastrophic climate change and sea level rise unless the Arctic is not quickly cooled/refrozen. This absolute necessity is recognised by Sir David King and Sir David Attenborough, but is yet to be recognised by the IPCC and scientific consensus. It will require powerful cooling intervention.
- an escalation of the extremes of weather and climate;
- an escalation of sea level rise;
- an escalation of methane emissions from permafrost, adding positive feedback to Arctic warming.
On a positive note, refreezing the Arctic can pave the way for a restoration of Holocene norms giving a safer and more sustainable state of the planet for us all.Thus:Denying the urgency of Arctic cooling is denying a decent future for humanity.If follows:Denying the most powerful means of Arctic cooling is denying the best chance of a decent future for humanity.Cheers, John
[1] The world’s best rock record of sea level change
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGpGKXMzMVBWshPQNXMxLpkGFsz?projector=1
Where are we in the natural cycle (of the ice ages) and where should we be heading? Within a few thousand years we should be going back into another natural glaciation. The warming and CO2 level is unprecedented for 3 million years. If the warming continues we are unable to naturally go back into another cold period. We’ve put enough CO2 into the atmosphere that we cannot go back into another ice age. So this is an amazing thing humans have done through the burning of fossil fuels. We have changed the natural pattern of the ice ages. And that is said with 100% confidence by the IPCC. We cannot get back to another glacial unless we reduce our emissions back to about 350 ppm. Then we have a chance to restore the natural rhythm of the ice ages. We have taken the Earth off its natural climate cycle, and we are now into the Anthropocene. Humans are controlling what the future climate will look like.
[2] Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles and Their Role in Earth's Climate
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/
[3] Milankovitch cycles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Theory constraints
Materials taken from the Earth have been studied to infer the cycles of past climate. Antarctic ice cores contain trapped air bubbles whose ratios of different oxygen isotopes are a reliable proxy for global temperatures around the time the ice was formed. Study of this data concluded that the climatic response documented in the ice cores was driven by northern hemisphere insolation as proposed by the Milankovitch hypothesis.
On Fri, Jun 3, 2022 at 10:40 AM Aaron Franklin <stateoft...@gmail.com> wrote:
------
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NOAC Meetings" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to noac-meeting...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/noac-meetings/061801d8741a%240aecc350%2420c649f0%24%40yahoo.com.au.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NOAC Meetings" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to noac-meeting...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/noac-meetings/CAK4jk%3DqiJxmxJzU93O3G%3DkB9%3DRzdtkyUuvOD_qN-_w7oaD%2BA3Q%40mail.gmail.com.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Planetary Restoration" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to planetary-restor...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/CACS_Fxpzor2LBCwOJOYjdMBNHDPah95qx8GnR_RQKHkdGxtCyw%40mail.gmail.com.
Robert Chris
Hi Kevin
Greg Rau has asked us to terminate this thread but since you've re-engaged with its CDR origins, perhaps he'll forgive us.
Your take on Robert Tulip's position does not accord with mine. He is certainly implying that 'It's AM or death for us all' (although I'm not keen on the hyperbole) but he is also saying that emissions abatement cannot be sufficient. I take issue with that on the basis that the modelling indicates that net-zero by 2050 is sufficient. I expanded on this in another posting in this thread that was skipped below and not sent to all of the listservs on this post. For convenience it's copied here.
1 Jun 2022, 15:22:36 (yesterday)
Hi Robert
The fundamental issue here is the extent to which emissions abatement supported by greenhouse gas removal (GGR) can take us down the 'path back toward Holocene stability, removing the drivers of tipping points, stepping back from the current hothouse precipice' without recourse to AM. The UNFCCC process is driven by the notion of net zero by 2050 being sufficient to deliver that objective, and that is based on MacDougall et al (2020) who concluded that at net zero surface temperature quickly (<20 years) stabilises at the the level then reached. Moreover, even without any help from GGR, within a century, atmospheric CO2 drops by ~100ppmv. The 2050 timeline comes (for example) from IPCC AR6 WGIII that states: Global net zero CO2 emissions are reached in the early 2050s in modelled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot.
In short, net zero by 2050 gives a better than evens chance that by 2100 the temperature increase will not exceed 1.5degC with no or limited (<0.1degC) overshoot. That's the justification for emissions abatement. GGR is necessary to deliver the 'net' because we can't get to 'zero emissions' in the foreseeable future. We don't need AM. So sayeth 'the experts'.
Perhaps the place to start is to explain what the IPCC and its cadre of scientists have got so wrong. For better or worse, the UNFCCC supported by its IPCC inputs, drives global climate policy. Without shifting them from their fixation with net zero by 2050, the prospects of getting governments to get behind AM are probably close to zero. They've only just woken up to the essential role to be played by GGR in the net zero scenario, so getting them to abandon all that in favour of AAM (accelerated albedo management!) is going to be quite a challenge.
How would you feel about a global cancellation of all fossil fuel subsidies throughout the production and consumption chain by, say, 2025? That would put fossil fuels on a level playing field with renewables. This could be done very easily and equitably. The $6tr/yr that would be saved could be distributed back to households (on a per household or per capita basis) to compensate them for the likely increase in energy prices, but so as to be revenue neutral for governments.
Robert Chris
I'd welcome a substantive response
to the points made in that post. Also, with regard to the point
about governments being led by the IPCC, the next Assessment
Report will not be for another 5 years at least, so unless a way
can be found to move international policy in line with science
emerging after AR6 but before AR7, there's little reason to
suppose that there'll be any imminent change from the net zero
by 2050 policy. Which means that for the foreseeable future
we're stuck with emissions abatement goals that are challenging
to meet, an unspecified amount of GGR and no AM.
As regards your comments on the probability of reaching a climate change agreement being vanishingly small, why would that not also apply to an agreement to deploy AM at climatic scale, or are you suggesting that those with the capacity to undertake it, just get on with it, without seeking international agreement?
The idea of AM being a key
component of a comprehensive approach to climate change dates
back many years. In 1965 it was the only idea on the table
(report commissioned by President Johnson). More recently it
has been presented as a means of capping the surface temperature
increase while emissions abatement and GGR take effect. How
much AM would be needed would clearly depend on how fast and
deep the emissions reductions and GGR growth were. But certainly
since the Royal Society report in 2009, it has been recognised
that AM cannot be a comprehensive 'solution' to climate change.
The fundamental problem here has
little if anything to do with the science and technology. We've
known enough about the science for more than three decades and
if we'd started acting then, the technologies then available
would have been sufficient as a basis from which to get the
problem cracked. Procrastination and prevarication,
particularly the latter, have meant that the problem is now an
order of magnitude greater than it was in 1990 and that means
that the remedies have to be commensurately more powerful.
That's very scary.
We can argue about whether we need
more emissions reductions or GGR or AM, but at the moment we're
doing precious little of any of them and, at least from where
I'm sitting, it doesn't look like that's going to change any
time soon. That isn't to say that there isn't a lot of activity
in academia, in the commercial sector and in government, but
activity and effective and timely action are not the same.
Moreover, the mood music right now (e.g. COP26 and WEF) doesn't
sound like there is any real understanding amongst those with
the real power to effect change, that the change now needed is
inescapably going to be painful, and will get more painful the
longer it's deferred. How the global geopolitical scene and the
global economy works is likely to be very different 50 years
from now. That transition will be smoother the sooner it starts.
On the other hand, maybe they do realise that any effective
response to climate change would be painful but can't see a way
to implement such responses without some self-harming.
I'm not the first to claim that
climate change is now all about the politics. More climate
science is always welcome but we don't actually need it. We
need engineers building things that are going to move climate
mountains. Subject to convincing arguments that the IPCC has
grossly under-called the climatic benefits of net zero by 2050,
those things include first and foremost aggressive
reductions in carbon intensity and that means emissions
abatement. It also includes aggressive GGR, in the short term
focussing on methane where there are some quick low-cost wins,
but simultaneously locking into the two or three carbon dioxide
sequestration methods capable of being scaled to 5GtCO2/yr and
above - scalability at speed is an essential criterion. And we
need to get some AM up and running to smooth the transition.
And we need to stop kidding ourselves that all this can be done
in an orderly, timely, effective and profitable manner by the
private sector. Markets created this problem. Unregulated and
poorly regulated markets in the last 40 years have made it much
worse. Those quoting Einstein might reflect on what mistakes
are being repeated there. Indeed, I have been astounded for
some time that it is not recognised that globalisation and
capitalism, at least in their current forms, are likely to be
early causalities of uncontrolled climate change. I would have
thought that that was a sufficient reason to act decisively now.
Robert Tulip's preference for 'a
shift away from emissions reductions as the main agenda' and his
claim that AM is the foundational response without which nothing
else will work, grossly overstates the value
of AM and understates that of emissions abatement (see my post
copied above). This will change dramatically if the historical
failure to act decisively continues. But this is non-linear:
effective responses inevitably become disproportionately more
draconian the longer they are delayed. And the more draconian
the responses, the more severe their undesirable side effects.
Now is the time to recognise the precariousness of humanity's
situation. But our geopolitics has not shown itself to be
well-adapted for this..
The
problem for policy makers is that being proactive in the face
of existential threats calls for a degree of foresight and
fortitude that is in very short supply. It requires them to
imagine a new and better world and transition from here to
there. That's tough because it threatens
their power base, and it threatens those with vested
interests in the status quo, and the doom-mongers might all be
wrong and the risk might never materialise. Safer to sit on
your hands and deal with it reactively. Well, good luck with
that approach in the face of climate change where inertia in
the climate system requires decisive action many years before
its benefits are felt.
Kevin, maybe you should dig out
your old calculations and rerun them for today's world including
AM as part of the package. I suspect that the (6E-64)^n won't
have changed too much. The irony is that the global elites who
are failing us will be long gone by the time their successors
have to start picking up the pieces from their failures. On the
other hand, if they were to attempt to implement the kind of
tough policies now necessary, they'd probably
be gone much sooner and be replaced by others, equally
weak-kneed.
Perhaps if governments started
putting in place measures to protect against the worst vagaries
of climate change (>3degC warming?), in effect accepting
climate catastrophe as a plausible future, that might awaken a
realisation of what's at stake and provoke more concerted
precautionary efforts .
I received a private email in response to this thread while I've been writing this post. It references this article - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2021.100379 - the thrust of which is that AM is now necessary because feasible emissions reductions and deployments of GGR will not be sufficient - AM is needed to bridge the gap (which is not the same framing as it being foundational as per Robert Tulip). What is happening here is that an increasing number of informed commentators are recognising that the likelihood of reaching net zero by 2050 doesn't look good and therefore we should be thinking more about AM. This seems to me to be fundamentally flawed logic - linear reductionist thinking applied to a non-linear and complex system. If the global community has proven itself incapable over a period of several decades of dealing effectively with the approaching threats from climate change, and we believe that this failure will continue, why should we assume that it will now suddenly be able to cohere around a global scale AM policy that will almost certainly not preserve the historical climate, and would introduce wide regional variations from which many will suffer, even while the global average surface temperature is kept at whatever level is agreed upon, and also not be a lasting solution to global warming that is always going to require the elimination of fossil fuels?
By all means factor some AM into a Plan B that caters for inadequate emissions abatement and GGR, but more prudently we should now be thinking about local and regional Plan Cs that address continuing policy paralysis and surface temperatures rising by 3degC or more in the coming decades. That seems to me to be the more prudent and realistic response to our political and business leaders showing no signs of doing what really needs to be done. As things stand our grandchildren's grandchildren will be born into a world more different from ours, than ours is from that into which our grandparent's grandparents were born. And many of the differences are not going to be for the better.
We still have time to make emissions abatement and GGR do the heavy lifting, but we do need to see a gear change from the global policy community within the next couple of years. We know how to decarbonise the energy supply and we are beginning to know how to do GGR at scale. The problem now is the same as it has been for decades, how to make it happen in the rapidly shrinking time available.
Much of this debate was rehearsed
in my 2015 book Systems Thinking for Geoengineering Policy.
Regards
Robert Chris
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/CAE%3DUieyyysFrnu1Ntg3HAbKheoqY8dpOfRX6jbNrdHoV7Ocx0Q%40mail.gmail.com.
Robert Tulip
Reply to Robert Chris
Dear Robert,
Thanks for these comments. On the thread status, I felt Dan Galpern was unfair in accusing me of calling interlocutors insane. My comment about not repeating mistakes was mainly intended to say the Emission Reduction Alone viewpoint is not scientific. No interlocutors here advance that ERA view. And on his other point about weasel words, you (Robert) accepted that it is a weaselly argument that ERA “might still not be enough” when data shows it definitely will not be enough to stop dangerous warming. Saying ERA might not be enough leaves open the weasibility (weasel possibility) that it might be enough in some unlikely scenario. Modern science shows we need to do far more than ERA to achieve a reasonable climate security timeline.
Further responses below as dot points.
Robert Tulip
From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com carbondiox...@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Robert Chris
Sent: Saturday, 4 June 2022 4:06 AM
To: Kevin Lister kevin.li...@gmail.com
Cc: CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com; rtuli...@yahoo.com.au >> Robert Tulip rtuli...@yahoo.com.au; Dan Galpern dan.g...@gmail.com; 'Planetary Restoration' planetary-...@googlegroups.com; 'healthy-planet-action-coalition' healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com; 'geoengineering' geoengi...@googlegroups.com; gra...@bestfutures.org
Subject: Re: [geo] Re: [CDR] Climate Security Timeline
Hi Kevin
Greg Rau has asked us to terminate this thread but since you've re-engaged with its CDR origins, perhaps he'll forgive us. Your take on Robert Tulip's position does not accord with mine. He is certainly implying that 'It's AM or death for us all' (although I'm not keen on the hyperbole) but he is also saying that emissions abatement cannot be sufficient. I take issue with that on the basis that the modelling indicates that net-zero by 2050 is sufficient.
- Kevin’s paper for the Talanoa Dialogue with Mike MacCracken and others including Eelco Rohling and Tom Goreau explains some of the limitations of emission abatement, noting it cannot prevent significant temperature overshoot. They say “increasing planetary albedo through low risk marine cloud brightening … could substantially cancel out the increase in global heating caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from preindustrial levels.”
- The paper you referenced, Is there warming in the pipeline? A multi-model analysis of the Zero Emissions Commitment from CO2, by MacDougall et al, Biogeosciences, 17, 2987–3016, 2020 https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-2987-2020 has as I understand it been accepted as heralding a new consensus by climate heavyweights like David Keith, with his claim that ‘average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop” and Michael Mann, who told Sixty Minutes “if you stop burning carbon right now … temperatures remain pretty much flat. We are only committed to the warming that has happened already.” This view has been rebutted by Ye Tao, Brian Von Herzen and others. It is incompatible with Rohling’s analysis of committed warming in The Climate Question. Committed warming means the planet would continue to warm after a hypothetical end to emissions because the earth system is not in equilibrium, and temperature and sea level would continue to rise until equilibrium is reached.
I expanded on this in another posting in this thread that was skipped below and not sent to all of the listservs on this post. For convenience it's copied here.
Hi Robert, The fundamental issue here is the extent to which emissions abatement supported by greenhouse gas removal (GGR) can take us down the 'path back toward Holocene stability, removing the drivers of tipping points, stepping back from the current hothouse precipice' without recourse to AM.
- The decision to have no recourse to AM is foolhardy. Albedo was a big driver of ice age temperature reversals, and can be harnessed to stabilise the climate now. Increasing ocean brightness can give breathing room for the planet, providing more time to lower GHG levels.
The UNFCCC process is driven by the notion of net zero by 2050 being sufficient to deliver that objective, and that is based on MacDougall et al (2020) who concluded that at net zero surface temperature quickly (<20 years) stabilises at the level then reached.
- UNFCCC analysis has systematically ignored potential of direct cooling methods. A carbon-driven cooling policy is too slow, risky, expensive and contested to remain the immediate climate priority. A new consensus on direct cooling can challenge the flawed science of MacDougall et al.
Moreover, even without any help from GGR, within a century, atmospheric CO2 drops by ~100ppmv. The 2050 timeline comes (for example) from IPCC AR6 WGIII that states: Global net zero CO2 emissions are reached in the early 2050s in modelled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot.
- ERA is a bit like balancing plates on sticks in the circus trick and claiming the plates are stable. All they need is ongoing twirling of the sticks. Such a slow drop in CO2, allowing a rise above 600 ppm CO2e without any balancing AM, gives too much impetus for dangerous tipping points to offer a reasonable path to climate stability. Cutting the forcing from albedo and radiation can provide a gradual climate landing path toward restoration of Holocene stability, giving time for GGR to ramp up.
In short, net zero by 2050 gives a better than evens chance that by 2100 the temperature increase will not exceed 1.5degC with no or limited (<0.1degC) overshoot. That's the justification for emissions abatement. GGR is necessary to deliver the 'net' because we can't get to 'zero emissions' in the foreseeable future. We don't need AM. So sayeth 'the experts'.
- This analysis of whether we need AM begs the question of whether we want AM. Governments should want AM. They should welcome opportunity to prevent climate damage by restoring planetary albedo, as a way to cooperate for international peace and prosperity and stability. Safeguarding biodiversity, and mitigating sea level rise, extreme weather and heat, are objectives that albedo increase will support. GGR is not enough.
Perhaps the place to start is to explain what the IPCC and its cadre of scientists have got so wrong.
- The politics of the IPCC process began from the assumption that cutting emissions was the best way to mitigate climate change. This presupposition has excluded geoengineering advocacy, such that there has been a scientific failure to analyse or test geoengineering models. It remains difficult to get serious conversation about rival climate paths prioritising albedo in any public forum.
For better or worse, the UNFCCC supported by its IPCC inputs, drives global climate policy.
- Yes, and this means a UN study of geoengineering, as scotched by Trump and the Saudis, is urgent. The irony of this study rejection was that the fossil fuel advocates thought discussion of geoengineering might harm their business model, when in fact it is essential for them to create a feasible transition strategy.
Without shifting them from their fixation with net zero by 2050, the prospects of getting governments to get behind AM are probably close to zero. They've only just woken up to the essential role to be played by GGR in the net zero scenario, so getting them to abandon all that in favour of AAM (accelerated albedo management!) is going to be quite a challenge.
- People have not woken up to the role of GGR, which has to be the 80 in the 80/20 Pareto balance with decarbonisation as the 20, after AM has taken the edge off the risk. There is widespread disquiet that NZB2050 is unworkable and lacks a critical path. I think it is likely that conservative political parties will come to see a focus on albedo as an attractive alternative climate strategy, enabling a rapid switch away from the current IPCC consensus.
How would you feel about a global cancellation of all fossil fuel subsidies throughout the production and consumption chain by, say, 2025? That would put fossil fuels on a level playing field with renewables. This could be done very easily and equitably. The $6tr/yr that would be saved could be distributed back to households (on a per household or per capita basis) to compensate them for the likely increase in energy prices, but so as to be revenue neutral for governments. Robert Chris
- Cancelling fossil fuel subsidies faces enormous political obstacles and is highly disruptive. Removing subsidies by 2025 has big opportunity cost. Investing this political energy in albedo enhancement would bring far better climate return. And ‘a level playing field with renewables’ would do little to affect the climate for decades, whereas AM can bring near-immediate results, for example by regulating ocean surface temperature.
I'd welcome a substantive response to the points made in that post. Also, with regard to the point about governments being led by the IPCC, the next Assessment Report will not be for another 5 years at least, so unless a way can be found to move international policy in line with science emerging after AR6 but before AR7, there's little reason to suppose that there'll be any imminent change from the net zero by 2050 policy. Which means that for the foreseeable future we're stuck with emissions abatement goals that are challenging to meet, an unspecified amount of GGR and no AM.
- Great summary of the situation! I don’t think AM needs immediate IPCC endorsement. Governments can agree on field trials such as MCB in the Southern Ocean through processes such as suggested by GESAMP that will inform the next IPCC assessment. In the meantime, techno-economic analysis of the comparison between climate paths focused on albedo and those focused on emissions and GGR would put the debate on a more quantitative empirical basis.
As regards your comments on the probability of reaching a climate change agreement being vanishingly small, why would that not also apply to an agreement to deploy AM at climatic scale, or are you suggesting that those with the capacity to undertake it, just get on with it, without seeking international agreement?
- I’m not sure the probability of reaching a climate change agreement is vanishingly small. After all, governments reached a climate agreement in Paris, even if many had little intention of honouring it.
- AM can be tested at regional level where interested governments agree. Intergovernmental processes to manage scientific activities in the Southern Ocean are well established and could provide governance for no-regrets MCB field trials. The geopolitics of a focus on cooling Antarctica is attractive, given the difficulty of cooperative action in the Arctic.
The idea of AM being a key component of a comprehensive approach to climate change dates back many years. In 1965 it was the only idea on the table (report commissioned by President Johnson).
- A Shell blog presents this 1965 report to President Johnson - https://blogs.shell.com/2013/03/22/1965geo/
More recently it has been presented as a means of capping the surface temperature increase while emissions abatement and GGR take effect.
- It is not just capping surface temperature increase; AM can refreeze the poles to reduce surface temperature, with numerous co-benefits.
How much AM would be needed would clearly depend on how fast and deep the emissions reductions and GGR growth were.
- The converse is also partly true: How much emissions reductions and GGR growth would be needed would depend on how fast and deep AM is implemented.
But certainly since the Royal Society report in 2009, it has been recognised that AM cannot be a comprehensive 'solution' to climate change.
- I agree AM cannot be a comprehensive 'solution' to climate change. Like a tourniquet, AM is an emergency response, requiring follow-up with GHG cuts. Both are needed.
The fundamental problem here has little if anything to do with the science and technology. We've known enough about the science for more than three decades and if we'd started acting then, the technologies then available would have been sufficient as a basis from which to get the problem cracked. Procrastination and prevarication, particularly the latter, have meant that the problem is now an order of magnitude greater than it was in 1990 and that means that the remedies have to be commensurately more powerful. That's very scary.
- Your comment here is based on flawed arithmetic. Committed warming, not new emissions, has been the main cause of radiative forcing since the Industrial Revolution. Zeroing emissions would stop only the 2% increase in radiative forcing each year, leaving the 98% of past forcing in place. Emission reduction can do little about previously committed warming. In any case, the scale of economic disruption involved in decarbonisation is so great that imagining it could have happened faster is a counterfactual that is open to challenge.
- I don’t find it scary that powerful remedies are needed. It is possible to be optimistic about the potential for AM to anchor an effective climate strategy.
We can argue about whether we need more emissions reductions or GGR or AM, but at the moment we're doing precious little of any of them and, at least from where I'm sitting, it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon.
- Climate politics suffers from a ‘learned helplessness’ due to the view, as noted by Trump in his Paris withdrawal speech, that current Paris pledges would barely cut the projected temperature increase. Trump said “Even if the Paris agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100” compared to business as usual. Discussion of albedo modification can be a circuit breaker in this debate, putting options on a better empirical footing.
- I will comment later on points below as this post is long enough.
Robert Tulip
kevin lister
And apologies Greg for persisting with this thread again on this group, ……
Dear Robert Chris,
In answer to your request to me for a substantive response:
I’ll start by putting the 'It's AM or death for us all' statement in perspective as I don’t think it is hyperbole.
I'll start with the reality of the situation facing us. We are almost certainly going to be on the worst case CO2 emissions pathway and the objective of net-zero by 2050 is completely unattainable with the current global political system. The second is that our society is already unable to adapt to the temperature rise we are seeing today, let alone a further sustained temperature increase and that it is not just the temperature rise that is important, but the area under the temperature graph, i.e. the integral of the temperature function is equally important.
In answer to your request for a substantive response to your previous post:
When discussing ‘paths back to Holocene stability’ we must also understand what constitutes stability. We argued in our submission to the UN Talanoa Dialogue that the safe temperature rise was less than 0.5degC and we passed this around about 1980. This safe target is based on the first observation of interacting self reinforcing feedbacks being observed, such as sea ice loss, subsea methane releases and coral reef collapse and the ability of these to influence each other. We also argued that the biggest determinant was the number of feedback mechanics and the correlation between them, neither of which are known with certainty.
We must also understand what safe CO2 level would be needed to achieve this. I have previously written that without AM, it would be in the order of 280ppm once hysteresis in the climate system has been considered. To achieve this by 2050 would require the removal of ~16GTC per year assuming zero emissions, and this is most likely impossible.
We also explained how interacting feedback mechanisms will almost certainly result in a super exponential change. The rapid increases in Arctic temperatures seen since 2018 supports this prognosis. It is also of note that the draft of AR6 acknowledged for the first time that they cannot model Arctic Amplification because of the interactions between feedback mechanisms.
By contrast, the 1.5degC temperature target is an arbitrary value and even before reaching it, global political systems are breaking down. The Ukraine crisis being the current apex of instability. This is made acute given Russia’s deliberate seizing of grain because world food supplies are at risk, so this is very much a climate change related war. With a further 3 billion to be added to the global population by the mid century the weight of global challenges will go well beyond breaking point. Put simply, there is no resilience in the socio-political-economic-ecological governing system and upwards pressure on emissions will persist.
You say “The UNFCCC process is driven by the notion of net zero by 2050 being sufficient to deliver that objective, and that is based on MacDougall et al (2020) who concluded that at net zero surface temperature quickly (<20 years) stabilises at the the level then reached.” There are two things wrong with this sentence.
My comment on the first thing that is wrong is said without having read the MacDougall paper nor understanding the assumptions he is using. However, his conclusion does not accord with a basic common sense understanding of emissions. CO2 has generally increased exponentially since the industrial revolution with half the accumulated emissions happening since 1997. Also the accepted wisdom is that there is at least a 30 year time response from a CO2 emission pulse to stabilization of the temperature. So half of all CO2 emissions have been made within the short term response period. It therefore makes no sense to suggest that after the enormous slug of greenhouse gas emissions we have seen in the last 30 years there will be no transient response which is what the MacDougall paper is proposing.
This is where I also challenge Robert Tulip's idea that we don't need to concern ourselves with cutting emissions because there is so much cumulated emissions in the ecosystem. The problem is that emissions are now so high that it is likely in the next 20 years we could double the burden of cumulative CO2 emissions. In times of exponential growth, it is what is to come that is important, not what has passed. Furthermore, due to the lowering of Energy Return on Energy Invested, there is liable to be even more upwards pressure on emissions.
The second thing that is wrong with the MacDougall statement is that there is effectively no chance of a net zero position by 2050. Instead there will be upwards pressure from population growth and adaptation to climate change. But more importantly, and less understood, are the dynamics that make the probability of a success as low as (6E-64)^n. This is based on game theory, and importantly the concept of multiple interconnected games. When games are interconnected, such that the payoff matrix in one game is a function of the outcome of the other games, then it can be shown that if one game is in a Nash equilibrium, where cooperation has been permanently replaced by competition, then all connected games will be in a Nash equilibrium and the collective cost to all players will be at its highest.
That is the problem today. We fundamentally have three games that are interconnected. These are (1) climate negotiations, (2) security and arms negotiations, and (3) economic and resource negotiations. Games (2) and (3) are locked in Nash equilibrium states. In game (2) nuclear weapons negotiations have collapsed and we are effectively at war with Russia. In game (3) we have not even started discussing how resources should be fairly allocated and debts written off. As these are locked in Nash Equilibrium states, then climate change negotiations must also be in a Nash equilibrium state, so no negotiations on emission cut backs will be made, irrespective of effort and goodwill. We are seeing this today with the West basically giving up on climate change action and focusing on new fossil fuel extraction to ensure that the war against Russia can be fought, and Russia is doing the same.
What is more concerning with this dynamic is that it is in the interest of every nation to maximize fossil fuel consumption rather than minimize it, so the world will most likely be committed to the worst case CO2 projections.
In answer to your question about the failures in process with the IPCC, the principle of putting the cart before the horse seems to me to be at the root of the problem. I would suggest that COP and IPCC have been working opposite to the way that they should have been. The process they have followed has been that the COP sets the target, first 2degC, then 1.5 degC. Having set the target, the IPCC goes away to investigate things like carbon budgets and sea level rises at these temperature increases. In reality the process should always have been the other way round. The IPCC should have set the safe temperature target and determined the risk profiles if it was to be exceeded, then the COP should have determined what economic and political responses were needed to avoid catastrophe. The reality was that the risk of failure was never properly considered by the IPCC nor recognised by COP.
Having got this initial start point wrong, everything else is academic, such as the pretense to be able to model the climate beyond the boundaries of stability when the key feedbacks and the correlations between them are unknown.
You also say, “In short, net zero by 2050 gives a better than evens chance that by 2100 the temperature increase will not exceed 1.5degC with no or limited (<0.1degC) overshoot.” However, global temperature rises are already near 1.5degC, and amplifying mechanisms such as ice loss and methane emissions are not yet at their maximum extent and the energy in the sea surface is still increasing and for the game theoretical reasons above there is no reasonable probability of us being at net zero by 2050 or by 2100.
“We don't need AM. So sayeth 'the experts'”. You can always choose your expert, but at the end of the day, the best decisions are based on reality and understanding of the facts. This does not support the idea that we don’t need AM.
“ For better or worse, the UNFCCC supported by its IPCC inputs, drives global climate policy. Without shifting them from their fixation with net zero by 2050, the prospects of getting governments to get behind AM are probably close to zero. They've only just woken up to the essential role to be played by GGR in the net zero scenario, so getting them to abandon all that in favour of AAM (accelerated albedo management!) is going to be quite a challenge.” As governments realize that the probability of getting to net zero is also zero, then perhaps they may start taking the necessity for AM more seriously. It is important that the science community genuinely starts debating the likelihood of net-zero, and that includes the potential of GGR. It should also stop perpetuating the optimistic nonsense which has bedeviled the first 25 rounds of COP talks.
The Vostok ice core data puts the GGR concept into context. It shows extremely consistent CO2 reduction rates after warm periods for each of the last 4 interglacials. Given the reasonable assumption that this is the natural rate of CO2 removal, then it would take approximately 250,000 years for CO2 to fall to levels that are commensurate with a top end estimate for a CO2 concentration necessary for a stable climate. Even if ocean fertilization or enhanced tree growing can increase the sequestration rate by a factor of 10 we are still looking at ultra high CO2 levels for the ultra long term.
“How would you feel about a global cancellation of all fossil fuel subsidies throughout the production and consumption chain by, say, 2025” I’m ambivalent about this. I can’t see any democratic nation voting for it and I can’t see any dictatorship imposing it. It would mean deep cuts in living standards, bankruptcy and security threats. What I would favor is far reaching security agreements, such as a revised Baruch Agreement that links nuclear weapon controls with climate change agreements.
Your other points:
“The next Assessment Report will not be for another 5 years at least.”
The IPCC process no longer reflects the high risk that we are likely to be in a period of extremely rapid climate change where significant change is likely in a time period considerably less than 5 years. We now need a process that allows reporting on a real time basis.
“As regards your comments on the probability of reaching a climate change agreement being vanishingly small, why would that not also apply to an agreement to deploy AM” Because AM can be deployed quickly (assuming that we don’t leave it too late), and because AM does not suffer from the increasing upwards pressure on CO2 emissions that I referred to above.
“But certainly since the Royal Society report in 2009, it has been recognised that AM cannot be a comprehensive 'solution' to climate change.” I agree, without deep cuts in emissions it will be overwhelmed and we need to understand the realistic capabilities of GGR. We may already be at the threshold of AM’s ability to counter global heating.
“Kevin, maybe you should dig out your old calculations and rerun them for today's world including AM as part of the package. I suspect that the (6E-64)^n won't have changed too much.” I did some crude analysis in this draft paper which shows that even if the payoff matrices can be changed with AM or GGR to reflect an improved outcome, then there is still a strong likelihood of Nash Equilibriums developing. In this context I support the concerns you expressed relating to the article - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2021.100379 with regard to AM not being successfully managed in the long term, but not for the reasons that you quote.
So as Robert Tullip says, we have to use AM as an immediate response, and now is the time to start. We also have to find ways of making deep cuts in CO2 emissions, and this is where Robert Tulip and I have a difference of views. We also need to quantify the likely effectiveness of GGR, but recognise this is likely to be small in relation to the rate at which CO2 needs to be removed. And while I agree that we need to prepare for a 3degC world, I cannot see how we can do this, especially with the nuclear weapons proliferation that we have seen over the last 70 years and a population heading towards 10 billion.
I am currently working on a more advanced mathematical model to explore these concepts, written in Julia. I don’t think it will change any of the conclusions above, but I hope that it can give a perspective of the different choices facing us.
With regards,
Kevin
Sent from Mail for Windows
1. Happy to debate numbers. Total emissions by the end of this century will be about one billion gigatonnes of carbon, while annual emissions are about 15 gigatonnes C including equivalents. The yearly amount is roughly 1.5% of the GHG forcing, leaving aside factors like ocean interactions and the additional forcing from albedo feedbacks. I have not seen a peer reviewed statement of the ratio between annual emissions effect and total radiative forcing so this is just my estimate. Another way to calculate the ratio might be to set the proxy for radiative forcing as the CO2e increase since the Holocene, about 200 ppm, and note that the annual 2.3ppm increase is just over 1% of that total. Even rounded up to 5% of RF, cutting emissions is still marginal to climate stability. 280 ppm CO2 is an important target as it represents the stable climate that enabled our current sea level with beaches and ports and fragile coastal ecosystems. These would all be destroyed under current climate policies but could be saved by a rapid shift to an albedo focus. The main constraint to starting SRM and scaling up GGR much bigger than emissions is political understanding.
Nevertheless, I am pleased that we've established that the core driver for you is the protection of the fossil fuel industry's property rights.
2. Excuse me Robert, I appreciate this is a fraught topic, but such wilful distortion does you no credit. The core driver for me is climate security, as clearly stated in this thread. I am simply pointing out that snide dismissal of property rights inevitably causes social conflict. Climate solutions that preserve legal rights are to be preferred when this gives their owners an incentive to cooperate in measures to solve their own and wider problems. That is the situation for fossil fuel industries and geoengineering.
An extension of that is that by truly embracing renewable energy the industry could retain its pre-eminent position in supplying the world with plentiful energy and in so doing create a whole new set of property rights to replace those that are causing most of our GHG related the problems. Those new property rights will emerge. Whether the current fossil fuel industry is one of their primary owners depends on the choices they now make.
3. And an extension of a proposed strategy to rely mainly on transforming the energy sector is a burning earth. Renewable energy potential is far too small, slow, contested and expensive to stop dangerous warming.
Framing this as an ideological 'left/right' issue is also interesting. I don't see it that way at all. For me it's about the internal functioning of complex adaptive systems.
4. The political left largely want to destroy the fossil fuel industry, on the misguided assumption that to do so would stop climate change, while the political right and centre largely want to protect these industries from unjustified attacks. That political divide opens the need for dialogue on how ongoing emissions could be compatible with a path to a stable climate.
Too big a topic to deal with here but briefly, such systems always grow and die. Their temporal and spatial extent goes from the tiny to the huge, but they all eventually die. Empires, governments, economic systems, cities, corporations, industries, species, and so on. Sometimes they collapse due to overwhelming external events such as the volcanic destruction of Pompeii. Other times they collapse due to human failure such as Enron and Lehman Bros. Sometimes they collapse because the world just moves on and despite their best efforts, what they offer is no longer required - where are all the farriers, thatchers and candlestick makers? But in every case, the collapse arises due to the failure of the system to adapt to changing circumstances. Sometimes the change is too great or sudden for such adaptation to be possible. Other times it is due to a lack of foresight.
5. I am pointing out that a good way for the fossil fuel industry to adapt to a changing climate is to support geoengineering. That will solve the warming problem and enable a more gradual tradition away from fuel sources that are less economic. I do need to point out that the world now relies on fossil fuels for over 80% of energy use. Blithe elegies for the main infrastructure of our economy are very premature, and certainly not inevitable in our lifetimes. If we can scale up GGR enough then ongoing emissions will not harm the climate. It is disturbing to revel in predictions of the demise of industries that are central to world prosperity
There are probably very few who do not now consider the glory days of the fossil fuel industry to be numbered. What that number is, is an open question, as is the depth of foresight within the industry and in government about how to manage the transition.
6. “Glory days” could still be ahead if this industry opens a conversation on the potential of geoengineering to salvage its business models. If the oil majors offered to cooperate to refreeze the Arctic Ocean, in exchange for greater social and political licence to operate, it would be a good deal. A frozen Pole would slow down tipping points, whereas a few more gigatonnes of emissions is neither here nor there in the greater scheme of climate stability and security.
You frame that as an ideological question, I see it in systemic terms. In systemic terms, there is a sweet spot on one side of which a system can be sustained by continual adaptation, and on the other side of which attempts to preserve elements that undermine the system, hasten its collapse. Where we are right now in relation to that sweet spot can only be known retrospectively. Foresight isn't an exact science but a lack of it is.
7. Your ‘sweet spot’ analogy does not work in the way you suggest, which seems to imply the precautionary principle requires accelerated decarbonisation. A far more precautionary approach is to shift focus to albedo, as the main urgent global cooperation priority for climate. But the sweet spot does apply to climate policy. What an irony it would be if the main “element that undermines the system” turns out to be the popular tribal myth that emission reduction is enough to fix the climate. Thanks for interesting comments. Regards, Robert Tulip
Robert Chris
Robert Chris
I have replied to this email
privately.
Regards
Robert Chris
Robert Tulip
Kevin
You wrote “in the next 20 years we could double the burden of cumulative CO2 emissions.”
Your twenty year doubling claim looks too high. My calculation using Climate Action Tracker data is that the maximum increase of cumulative emissions over this period will be 40% on current policy, well short of doubling. However there are many ways to analyse the numbers so I may be missing something.
https://www.globalwarmingindex.org/ estimates cumulative CO2 emissions to date as 2.45 trillion tonnes.
Annual emission data and projections are presented in this very useful global emissions time series spreadsheet from Climate Action Tracker.
CAT estimates world emissions for 2022 at 50-52 Gt CO2e, including equivalents. This is calculated under current policy projections to be much the same in 2050 (range 47-57 Gt), or to fall by half to 25 Gt under an ‘optimistic scenario (net zero pledges)’.
Over the next twenty years to 2042, the CAT chart shows current policy projections would add a further trillion tonnes of CO2e to the atmosphere. That is 40% of cumulative emissions to date, well short of doubling.
CAT data says its ‘optimistic scenario’ could cut the 20 year addition by about 10% to 900 Gt, a marginal reduction. This shows the gross inadequacy of current climate policy, and does not give grounds for optimism. As we have discussed, it is not realistic to suggest removing most of this coming trillion tonnes of CO2e by decarbonising the economy, which is the assumption of the popular NZB2050 fantasy. CAT calculates the most optimistic scenario it can see would slow the annual growth in cumulative emissions by half by 2050, while staying below 1.5°C would need a cut of 80-90%. That is nowhere near enough to deliver a secure climate and faces major political and economic barriers.
Removing more of this warming forcing requires GGR at scale. In the meantime, while GGR scales up, direct cooling is needed to increase albedo and prevent dangerous tipping points.
There is no way cutting emissions can achieve what is hoped for it. Accelerating decarbonisation would make little difference, as the CAT data shows.
Advocacy of decarbonisation now blocks potentially effective climate policy. Analysis of the CAT global emissions time series data can help to understand where real solutions can come from.
Regards
Robert Tulip
From: geoengi...@googlegroups.com <geoengi...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of kevin lister
Sent: Monday, 6 June 2022 6:23 AM
To: Robert Chris <robert...@gmail.com>
Cc: CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com; rtuli...@yahoo.com.au >> Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>; Dan Galpern <dan.g...@gmail.com>; Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; geoengineering <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>; gra...@bestfutures.org
Subject: RE: [geo] Re: [CDR] Climate Security Timeline
And apologies Greg for persisting with this thread again on this group, ……
Dear Robert Chris,
In answer to your request to me for a substantive response:
I’ll start by putting the 'It's AM or death for us all' statement in perspective as I don’t think it is hyperbole.
I'll start with the reality of the situation facing us. We are almost certainly going to be on the worst case CO2 emissions pathway and the objective of net-zero by 2050 is completely unattainable with the current global political system. The second is that our society is already unable to adapt to the temperature rise we are seeing today, let alone a further sustained temperature increase and that it is not just the temperature rise that is important, but the area under the temperature graph, i.e. the integral of the temperature function is equally important.
In answer to your request for a substantive response to your previous post:
When discussing ‘paths back to Holocene stability’ we must also understand what constitutes stability. We argued in our submission to the UN Talanoa Dialogue that the safe temperature rise was less than 0.5degC and we passed this around about 1980. This safe target is based on the first observation of interacting self reinforcing feedbacks being observed, such as sea ice loss, subsea methane releases and coral reef collapse and the ability of these to influence each other. We also argued that the biggest determinant was the number of feedback mechanics and the correlation between them, neither of which are known with certainty.
We must also understand what safe CO2 level would be needed to achieve this. I have previously written that without AM, it would be in the order of 280ppm once hysteresis in the climate system has been considered. To achieve this by 2050 would require the removal of ~16GTC per year assuming zero emissions, and this is most likely impossible.
We also explained how interacting feedback mechanisms will almost certainly result in a super exponential change. The rapid increases in Arctic temperatures seen since 2018 supports this prognosis. It is also of note that the draft of AR6 acknowledged for the first time that they cannot model Arctic Amplification because of the interactions between feedback mechanisms.
By contrast, the 1.5degC temperature target is an arbitrary value and even before reaching it, global political systems are breaking down. The Ukraine crisis being the current apex of instability. This is made acute given Russia’s deliberate seizing of grain because world food supplies are at risk, so this is very much a climate change related war. With a further 3 billion to be added to the global population by the mid century the weight of global challenges will go well beyond breaking point. Put simply, there is no resilience in the socio-political-economic-ecological governing system and upwards pressure on emissions will persist.
You say “The UNFCCC process is driven by the notion of net zero by 2050 being sufficient to deliver that objective, and that is based on MacDougall et al (2020) who concluded that at net zero surface temperature quickly (<20 years) stabilises at the the level then reached.” There are two things wrong with this sentence.
My comment on the first thing that is wrong is said without having read the MacDougall paper nor understanding the assumptions he is using. However, his conclusion does not accord with a basic common sense understanding of emissions. CO2 has generally increased exponentially since the industrial revolution with half the accumulated emissions happening since 1997. Also the accepted wisdom is that there is at least a 30 year time response from a CO2 emission pulse to stabilization of the temperature. So half of all CO2 emissions have been made within the short term response period. It therefore makes no sense to suggest that after the enormous slug of greenhouse gas emissions we have seen in the last 30 years there will be no transient response which is what the MacDougall paper is proposing.
This is where I also challenge Robert Tulip's idea that we don't need to concern ourselves with cutting emissions because there is so much cumulated emissions in the ecosystem. The problem is that emissions are now so high that it is likely in the next 20 years we could double the burden of cumulative CO2 emissions (bold added RT). In times of exponential growth, it is what is to come that is important, not what has passed. Furthermore, due to the lowering of Energy Return on Energy Invested, there is liable to be even more upwards pressure on emissions.
- Happy to debate numbers. Total emissions by the end of this century will be about one billion gigatonnes of carbon, while annual emissions are about 15 gigatonnes C including equivalents. The yearly amount is roughly 1.5% of the GHG forcing, leaving aside factors like ocean interactions and the additional forcing from albedo feedbacks. I have not seen a peer reviewed statement of the ratio between annual emissions effect and total radiative forcing so this is just my estimate. Another way to calculate the ratio might be to set the proxy for radiative forcing as the CO2e increase since the Holocene, about 200 ppm, and note that the annual 2.3ppm increase is just over 1% of that total. Even rounded up to 5% of RF, cutting emissions is still marginal to climate stability. 280 ppm CO2 is an important target as it represents the stable climate that enabled our current sea level with beaches and ports and fragile coastal ecosystems. These would all be destroyed under current climate policies but could be saved by a rapid shift to an albedo focus. The main constraint to starting SRM and scaling up GGR much bigger than emissions is political understanding.
Nevertheless, I am pleased that we've established that the core driver for you is the protection of the fossil fuel industry's property rights.
- Excuse me Robert, I appreciate this is a fraught topic, but such wilful distortion does you no credit. The core driver for me is climate security, as clearly stated in this thread. I am simply pointing out that snide dismissal of property rights inevitably causes social conflict. Climate solutions that preserve legal rights are to be preferred when this gives their owners an incentive to cooperate in measures to solve their own and wider problems. That is the situation for fossil fuel industries and geoengineering.
An extension of that is that by truly embracing renewable energy the industry could retain its pre-eminent position in supplying the world with plentiful energy and in so doing create a whole new set of property rights to replace those that are causing most of our GHG related the problems. Those new property rights will emerge. Whether the current fossil fuel industry is one of their primary owners depends on the choices they now make.
- And an extension of a proposed strategy to rely mainly on transforming the energy sector is a burning earth. Renewable energy potential is far too small, slow, contested and expensive to stop dangerous warming.
Framing this as an ideological 'left/right' issue is also interesting. I don't see it that way at all. For me it's about the internal functioning of complex adaptive systems.
- The political left largely want to destroy the fossil fuel industry, on the misguided assumption that to do so would stop climate change, while the political right and centre largely want to protect these industries from unjustified attacks. That political divide opens the need for dialogue on how ongoing emissions could be compatible with a path to a stable climate.
Too big a topic to deal with here but briefly, such systems always grow and die. Their temporal and spatial extent goes from the tiny to the huge, but they all eventually die. Empires, governments, economic systems, cities, corporations, industries, species, and so on. Sometimes they collapse due to overwhelming external events such as the volcanic destruction of Pompeii. Other times they collapse due to human failure such as Enron and Lehman Bros. Sometimes they collapse because the world just moves on and despite their best efforts, what they offer is no longer required - where are all the farriers, thatchers and candlestick makers? But in every case, the collapse arises due to the failure of the system to adapt to changing circumstances. Sometimes the change is too great or sudden for such adaptation to be possible. Other times it is due to a lack of foresight.
- I am pointing out that a good way for the fossil fuel industry to adapt to a changing climate is to support geoengineering. That will solve the warming problem and enable a more gradual tradition away from fuel sources that are less economic. I do need to point out that the world now relies on fossil fuels for over 80% of energy use. Blithe elegies for the main infrastructure of our economy are very premature, and certainly not inevitable in our lifetimes. If we can scale up GGR enough then ongoing emissions will not harm the climate. It is disturbing to revel in predictions of the demise of industries that are central to world prosperity
There are probably very few who do not now consider the glory days of the fossil fuel industry to be numbered. What that number is, is an open question, as is the depth of foresight within the industry and in government about how to manage the transition.
- “Glory days” could still be ahead if this industry opens a conversation on the potential of geoengineering to salvage its business models. If the oil majors offered to cooperate to refreeze the Arctic Ocean, in exchange for greater social and political licence to operate, it would be a good deal. A frozen Pole would slow down tipping points, whereas a few more gigatonnes of emissions is neither here nor there in the greater scheme of climate stability and security.
You frame that as an ideological question, I see it in systemic terms. In systemic terms, there is a sweet spot on one side of which a system can be sustained by continual adaptation, and on the other side of which attempts to preserve elements that undermine the system, hasten its collapse. Where we are right now in relation to that sweet spot can only be known retrospectively. Foresight isn't an exact science but a lack of it is.
- Your ‘sweet spot’ analogy does not work in the way you suggest, which seems to imply the precautionary principle requires accelerated decarbonisation. A far more precautionary approach is to shift focus to albedo, as the main urgent global cooperation priority for climate. But the sweet spot does apply to climate policy. What an irony it would be if the main “element that undermines the system” turns out to be the popular tribal myth that emission reduction is enough to fix the climate. Thanks for interesting comments. Regards, Robert Tulip
Robert Chris
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/74D7ED62-41E4-4947-BC9E-29C9559964C6%40hxcore.ol.
Carl Page
Termination Shock The #1 New York Times bestselling author returns with a visionary technothriller about climate change ‘Stephenson’s reputation as a sci-fi titan is deserved’ Sunday Times ‘His most visionary, and timely, book yet’ Chicago Review of Books ‘Absorbing speculative fiction’ Guardian ‘Brilliantly entertaining... at science fiction’s cutting edge’ SFX ‘Ingenious and sometimes prophetic’ Telegraph Neal Stephenson’s sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world where the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics. One man has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied? As only Stephenson can, Termination Shock sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential solutions and dire risks, and wraps it all together in an exhilarating, witty, mind-expanding speculative adventure. |
What people are saying - Write a review
User ratings
| 5 stars |
| ||
| 4 stars |
| ||
| 3 stars |
| ||
| 2 stars |
| ||
| 1 star |
|
LibraryThing Review
User Review - MaggieFlo - LibraryThingThis is a speculative fiction story about climate change and the use of geo engineering to slow down damage to the atmosphere. The story centres around four characters: the Queen of the Netherlands ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - Guide2 - LibraryThingSomewhat slow after the opening, with two very different threads. Some interesting concepts mixed with current event commentary. So ok overall, but not his best work. Read full review