There is no Plan B for dealing with the climate crisis: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Vol 75, No 5

[Andrew Lockley]

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654255

ABSTRACT

To halt global warming, the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human activities such as fossil fuel burning, cement production, and deforestation needs to be brought all the way to zero. The longer it takes to do so, the hotter the world will get. Lack of progress towards decarbonization has created justifiable panic about the climate crisis. This has led to an intensified interest in technological climate interventions that involve increasing the reflection of sunlight to space by injecting substances into the stratosphere which lead to the formation of highly reflective particles. When first suggested, such albedo modification schemes were introduced as a “Plan B,” in case the world economy fails to decarbonize, and this scenario has dominated much of the public perception of albedo modification as a savior waiting in the wings to protect the world against massive climate change arising from a failure to decarbonize.

But because of the mismatch between the millennial persistence time of carbon dioxide and the sub-decadal persistence of stratospheric particles, albedo modification can never safely play more than a very minor role in the portfolio of solutions. There is simply no substitute for decarbonization.

KEYWORDS: Global warming, geoengineering, climate change, carbon budgets, decarbonization, climate crisis, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas

[Stephen Salter]

Hi All

Let us agree that 'there is simply no substitute for decarbonisation'.

But doing it will be difficult and slow.

Geoengineering will give more time and so make it slightly less difficult.

Stephen

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

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[Andrew Lockley]

That's classic moral hazard 

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[Robert Tulip]

Dear GEO and CDR lists

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, There is no Plan B for dealing with the climate crisis, by Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert of Oxford University, is important as a statement of the apparent prevailing political consensus among climate scientists. Professor Pierrehumbert is a distinguished Oxford scholar in physics and climate change, so his views deserve respect and consideration.  Yet many of the assertions in his article are highly questionable and confusing, illustrating how current climate thinking lacks strategic direction or coherence.

His core argument is that “fossil fuel burning, cement production, and deforestation need to be brought all the way to zero” in order to respond adequately to climate change.  This goal is absurdly impossible in political and economic terms, considering the momentum, inertia and power of the fossil fuel system which now supplies about 85% of world energy.  More so in light of his bleak observations that emission rates are increasing, not falling.  Decarbonisation of the world economy does not serve as a coherent “Plan A” for dealing with climate change, because cutting emissions is too small, slow, costly, divisive and risky compared to the “Plan B” of solar radiation management combined with the “Plan C” of mining carbon from the air.  His gloomy numbers, that “world emissions rose 1.5 percent in 2017, and an estimated 2.7 percent in 2018”, should lead to investment in carbon dioxide removal as a realistic option, not to the fantasy assertion that “the first order of business is to double down on efforts to decarbonize.”

Recall the numbers.  Oxford’s doomsday website trillionthtonne.org just ticked over the marker of 635 billion tonnes of carbon added to the air by humans, increasing at 20,000 tonnes per minute or 10 billion tonnes per year.  The decarbonisation Plan A only addresses the 10 billion tonnes, doing nothing about the far bigger radiative forcing problem of the already emitted 635, with its destabilisation of earth system sensitivity and committed warming.  Dealing with the real climate problem must focus on geoengineering.

There is a bitter irony in his statement that “so-called “natural” solutions have been oversold by the mass media. Their contributions, while useful, will be minor.”  Unfortunately, this observation applies far more pointedly and accurately to his own oversold claims about the role of decarbonisation of the world economy, which can only be a minor useful adjunct to the real climate restoration business of geoengineering, implemented through partnerships between governments and major industries.

The power to control or reduce emissions is completely lacking, while the ongoing incentives to emit carbon remain high.  This fact is illustrated by a rather strange suggestion from the Professor, that if the nations of the world combined in a peaceful cooperative global endeavour to refreeze the Arctic Ocean, recognising the planetary security imperative of stopping the dangerous accelerating warming feedback of a dark pole, this whole radiation reflection effort could be prevented by climate war with Russia.  What he derisively terms ‘albedo hacking’, turning the North Pole from dark water back to white ice to reflect sunlight, could theoretically be stopped if Russia went rogue and reversed this cooling effort by releasing massive quantities of a warming agent such as sulphur hexafluoride.   The Professor does not seem to notice that his critique of so-called ‘albedo hacking’ applies even more potently to his preferred method of decarbonisation. So his political argument against efforts to freeze the Arctic equally indicates the futility of his own “Plan A” involving cement, trees and emission reduction.

An even more severe cognitive dissonance enters with his widely accepted claim that “the harm done by carbon dioxide emissions is, in effect, irreversible on human time scales”.  This claim is simply false, a popular myth serving only to justify emission reduction as the main climate response.   The Professor himself immediately contradicts his argument by observing that “technological breakthroughs allowing for the active removal of massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere” could theoretically deliver just such a reversal of the harm caused by emissions.  It is just that Professor Pierrehumbert dismisses this CDR possibility, which we could call Plan C, out of hand. Overall, he displays a dismissive scepticism about the prospect of carbon dioxide removal, in a way that does not engage adequately with the orders of magnitude involved, even while making the welcome statement that CDR deserves vastly increased research funding. 

Considering Plan A as decarbonisation, Plan B as what he ferociously attacks as ‘albedo hacking’, more often known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM), and Plan C as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), the inconvenient truth is that Plan A offers no hope of stabilising the climate.  Stability requires immediate staunching of the current dangerous warming, stopping CO2 level from rising above its current dangerous level of 415 parts per million, and then reduction toward the stable Holocene level of 280 ppm.  But Plan A would only result in the 415 number gradually increasing, not decreasing, while doing nothing to stop feedback accelerators.  The real solution is to begin with the emergency tourniquet of Plan B, increasing planetary albedo, while we invest in a global Climate Security Project to work our practical methods to remove carbon from the air at scale.  

Robert Tulip

On Friday, 6 September 2019, 06:38:40 pm AEST, Stephen Salter <S.Sa...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi All

Let us agree that 'there is simply no substitute for decarbonisation'.

But doing it will be difficult and slow.

Geoengineering will give more time and so make it slightly less difficult.

Stephen

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

On 05/09/2019 22:23, Andrew Lockley wrote:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654255

ABSTRACT

To halt global warming, the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human activities such as fossil fuel burning, cement production, and deforestation needs to be brought all the way to zero. The longer it takes to do so, the hotter the world will get. Lack of progress towards decarbonization has created justifiable panic about the climate crisis. This has led to an intensified interest in technological climate interventions that involve increasing the reflection of sunlight to space by injecting substances into the stratosphere which lead to the formation of highly reflective particles. When first suggested, such albedo modification schemes were introduced as a “Plan B,” in case the world economy fails to decarbonize, and this scenario has dominated much of the public perception of albedo modification as a savior waiting in the wings to protect the world against massive climate change arising from a failure to decarbonize.

But because of the mismatch between the millennial persistence time of carbon dioxide and the sub-decadal persistence of stratospheric particles, albedo modification can never safely play more than a very minor role in the portfolio of solutions. There is simply no substitute for decarbonization.

KEYWORDS: Global warming, geoengineering, climate change, carbon budgets, decarbonization, climate crisis, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas

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The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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