The David Hawkins Challenge

[David Schnare]

In an earlier posting, David Hawkins made a statement that should
occasion some serious discussion. Before I get to that, let me
(re)introduce him to all of you. He is a valued member of the
environmental advocacy community and an important player on the
national stage well beyond geoengineering.

David Hawkins is the director of Natural Resources Defense Council's
climate center. He joined NRDC as an attorney in 1971 and worked on
air pollution issues until 1977 when he was appointed assistant
administrator for Air, Noise, and Radiation at the Environmental
Protection Agency in the Carter administration. David returned to NRDC
in 1981 and worked throughout the decade primarily on reauthorizing
the Clean Air Act, including the development of a national program to
combat acid rain. David has an English degree from Yale College and a
law degree from Columbia University.

The NRDC styles itself as "The Earth's Best Defense". It is a public
interest law firm and its mission is "to safeguard the Earth: its
people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all
lifhe depends."

The NRDC website offers no formal positions on geoengineering. It
does not discuss the topic and provides no link to this group or to
any other group interested in geoengineering. Its main global warming
focus is reduction of GHG. The only references to geoengineering on
its website appear as negative articles about geoengineering that have
appeared in the press.

With all this in mind, David's recent statement on these pages raises
an extremely important question. Here is what David wrote:

"There are good arguments for paying more attention to understanding
geoengineering possibilities."

(See: http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering/browse_thread/thread/539a5069b4f669db/cd5c71019d824967#cd5c71019d824967)

So I pose the question to David and to others on this list that
generally eschew geoengineering -

What are the good arguments for paying more attention to understanding
geoengineering possibilities?

Best,
David Schnare

[Hawkins, Dave]

In Letterman fashion I will start with reason 10:
If we don't murder board a geoengineering approach we may be mislead
into thinking it is effective and easier than mitigation.

[Nick Woolf]

David:
Your wrong assumption is that natural climate
is benign, and that if left alone it will not lead
into disasters for humanity. Mitigation is
a concept related to the assumption that we
screwed up, rather than it is just Nature doing
its thing.

How would we deal with a climate as it was
a mere 20,000 years ago? Maybe put
CO2 into the atmosphere? And now, what
should we do beyond cutting our CO2
output into dead slow? That is the
geoengineering viewpoint.

We can hopefully fix Nature being
bloody-minded. We will never fix
humanity being obstianately stupid.

Nick Woolf

[Dan Whaley]

david...

those that eschew geoengineering are probably unlikely to offer good arguments for paying more attention to it.

we have an extreme situation.  precaution dictates that we understand the options we might have-- and, as hawkins points out, knowing which of the possibilities are not actually viable is perhaps almost as important as knowing which might be. 

this is clearly the primary reason to explore these concepts. 

i take issue with Nick's statement that people in this area "assume natural climate change is benign".  clearly natural events over time have proven quite disastrous to some populations.  but this is a distraction.

the point is that a reasonable interpretation of evidence is that we have quite clearly been the cause of recent changes.    obviously we need to cut emissions.  who disagrees?  but can we do more to mitigate the situation, to take the edge off accumulated emissions?   should we not ask these questions? 

did i miss some recent data which suggests that this is all overblown and that we're in for a soft landing?

d