Albedo
Robert Tulip
Friends
Here is commentary I have written on current climate policy.
Robert Tulip
Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions
I have made a YouTube Video – 16 minutes - https://youtu.be/MzZDDjHYAnk - explaining this topic.
The Problem
Cutting emissions and removing greenhouse gases can’t stop climate tipping points
Politics and economics make cutting emissions difficult, expensive and slow.
The world situation is like a canoe headed for a waterfall
Viable cooling technologies lack funds, publicity and political support
The Solution
Reverse the IPCC priority order and put increasing albedo first
A brighter planet can avoid the climate danger zone.
Cooling technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening are quick, safe and cheap
Fund large scale solar geoengineering research
Governments must cooperate to implement direct cooling measures.
Climate change shows that political psychology in mass movements is primarily mythological. Deniers and decarbonisers form opposing climate tribes with conflicting myths, bifurcating climate policy into two conflicting worldviews. Both denialists and decarbonists are equally guilty of reliance on what President John F. Kennedy called “the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought”.
Arctic refreezing must become the top priority for climate policy, through international cooperation between governments to make directly cooling the planet, removing greenhouse gases and cutting emissions three co-equal priorities, as proposed by the Healthy Planet Action Coalition.
Counterpunch magazine published a recent article on this healthy planet vision of climate repair and restoration - Monumental Plans to Fix the Planet, showing how this approach to climate change is gaining an audience.
Three actions – cooling, removing and reducing - can be equal in priority while having different time horizons. The problem with current policy is that emission reduction is marginal to climate stability and security, due to the urgency of the tipping point problem. The likelihood and impact of a dangerous climate phase shift due to Arctic tipping points is an extreme planetary security risk. Warming can only be mitigated if the world community institutes direct immediate measures to increase planetary albedo. This is a challenge to the prevailing political orthodoxy in climate policy, proposing an evolutionary shift in planetary management. Our planet has to reflect more sunlight as a primary public policy priority. As ecological stewards, global humanity must manage and guide and regulate the planetary atmosphere, ocean and temperature toward optimum conditions for the abundant flourishing of life.
Making the three legs of the climate policy stool – cool, remove, reduce - equal in priority would involve a shift of funding from decarbonisation to new cooling technology. That would require new funding for climate policy earmarked to planetary brightening. Once brightening is accepted as a legitimate and central goal of the world climate conversation, the rapid potential, low cost, safety, and security and biodiversity benefits of measures to increase albedo will become obvious.
President Kennedy told Yale University in 1962 that “the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
This description of the role of myth in politics speaks well to climate policy and science, as a political and philosophical insight into psychology, neuroscience and culture. Political psychology in mass movements is primarily mythological in character, due to our neural tribal instincts of loyalty and belonging. As already noted, climate policy is now bifurcated into two conflicting mythological tribes, the denialists and the decarbonists. President Kennedy's description of “the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought” shows the difficulty of scientific policy, the high inertia of politics and society when confronted with calls to change.
Both sides of the climate debate are equally guilty of reliance on beliefs that conflict with evidence. There is an element of lying, but the majority of participants in climate discussion are sincere. However, sincerely held but empirically wrong ideas are a form of fantasy. Denial that climate change is real and dangerous is a fantasy, as is the false belief that emission reduction alone could prevent dangerous climate change. Good faith acceptance of sincerity enables scientific policy conversation based on logic and evidence. We can rise above the tyranny of myth, asking how we can transition from our current destructive planetary trajectory to find a path toward universal flourishing.
An analogy to the climate policy situation comes from Eat Fat Get Thin, a nutrition book where author Dr Mark Hyman challenges the high carbohydrate diet paradigm of the USDA Food Pyramid of 1992 promoted strongly for decades by government dietary authorities. Carbohydrate as main staple food has been questioned over the last thirty years by the view that a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrate delivers better health outcomes, but this scientific discovery has confronted indifference and denial. Meanwhile, the Standard American Diet has produced the obesity epidemic, mainly from sugar, with impacts on cancer, dementia, sloth, heart disease and stroke. The bad health impacts of sugar have been widely ignored, as have the dangers of carbon dioxide and methane for global warming.
Upton Sinclair explained in The Jungle, his study of the Chicago meatworks a century ago, that a man will not accept a fact when his income requires him to deny it. This syndrome applies to the food industry today. Climate policy contains an equivalent level of error. An equivalent paradigm shift is needed in climate as in nutrition. And yet climate policy change faces an equal or greater level of entrenched and intransigent opposition as nutrition – including from many who maintain they support good outcomes. It shows how people’s beliefs that their own views are true and rational can be wrong on a massive scale. We construct social myths, especially when conflict of interest influences the discussion.
The 27th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change needs a paradigm shift, prioritising albedo to make the planet brighter and more reflective, to immediately cool and stabilise the climate.
https://planetaryrestoration.net/
Alan Robock ☮
You assert "Cooling technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening are quick, safe and cheap." None of these claims is supported by evidence.
Quick: The technology does not exist, so to even try it is impossible. We don't even know if it would work. And even if it did and we could develop the technology in a decade, it would work on ocean temperatures, which would be slow to respond.
Safe: No evidence for this. There are many potential problems, including impacts on ocean biosphere, and remote impacts, including precipitation reduction over the Amazon.
Cheap: We don't have any technology, so how can you calculate how much it would cost? And those are just the direct costs. What about all the potential damages?
Don't you think we need a lot more research so we can quantify these issues?
Alan Robock
Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor
Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751
Rutgers University E-mail: rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu
14 College Farm Road http://people.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 ☮ https://twitter.com/AlanRobock
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Robert Tulip
Dear Alan
Thank you for your comments and questions. My replies are below in your email.
Robert Tulip
From: Alan Robock ☮ <rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu>
Sent: Thursday, 22 September 2022 8:55 AM
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Subject: Re: [geo] Albedo
Dear Robert,
You assert "Cooling technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening are quick, safe and cheap." None of these claims is supported by evidence.
Professor Stephen Salter has compiled strong evidence to support these claims. A summary of MCB by Paul Beckwith is here. He expands this at his YouTube Channel with four short talks published last year that provide a good introduction to the science.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4rVwR0wY-0&t=275s
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYYk8lR_Go
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA79vWAM2Tc
Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Ko60kXk6w&t=770s
Australian research on MCB for the Great Barrier Reef to prevent coral bleaching provides a starting point for broader research on potential use of MCB to increase albedo. My view is that Australia could lead research for the Southern Ocean to use MCB to cool Antarctica, with major climate and biodiversity benefit. Slowing the melt of sea ice would slow glacial melt and cool ocean currents that create atmospheric rivers.
Quick: The technology does not exist, so to even try it is impossible. We don't even know if it would work. And even if it did and we could develop the technology in a decade, it would work on ocean temperatures, which would be slow to respond.
MCB technology has been proposed, and is under research in Australia and through the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. The Covid vaccine response showed that new technology can be developed quickly. A similar intensive international process could solve technical questions for Marine Cloud Brightening and other solar geoengineering technologies within months or years.
Safe: No evidence for this. There are many potential problems, including impacts on ocean biosphere, and remote impacts, including precipitation reduction over the Amazon.
MCB could mitigate the intensity of hurricanes by cooling the ocean where hurricanes form. The safety benefit of less intense storms is considerable, as is the benefit of re-freezing the poles. Shifting salt from the ocean to the atmosphere through mist expands what occurs naturally. The protective effect of brighter clouds to bring ecosystems back to a cooler state would reduce poleward drift and protect biodiversity. Targeted deployment of MCB to mitigate processes like the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Pacific El Nino cycle could improve precipitation patterns.
Cheap: We don't have any technology, so how can you calculate how much it would cost? And those are just the direct costs. What about all the potential damages?
The current carbon accounting methods fail to engage radiative forcing, which is the primary measure of global warming. MCB and other solar geoengineering technologies would directly cut radiative forcing at low capital and operating cost, and therefore provide a far more efficient cooling mechanism than either cutting emissions or removing greenhouse gases. Albedo is our primary lever to cool the planet, operating far faster and more directly than carbon-based approaches. The potential damage of unchecked climate change far outstrips any that could be caused by brightening the planet. Increasing planetary albedo in fact would reduce climate damage as a primary objective. An albedo focus could mobilise cooling investment from emitters.
Don't you think we need a lot more research so we can quantify these issues?
I really liked David Keith et al’s recent article (attached), and also the article by Doug MacMartin et al. Together with papers like GESAMP, these papers set out useful research agendas. Keith argues the benefits of a research program could be 5000 times its cost. MacMartin says geoengineering could cut temperature rise by 2°C. The problem is that research on the scale needed lacks investment, policy and support.
Robert Tulip
rob...@rtulip.net
Hi Daniel, picking up on the diet analogy, I did not mention protein, your focus in your comment, but rather fat.
The counter-intuitive observation in nutrition, comparable to the observation that cutting emissions cannot rapidly cool the planet, is that in general eating fat does not make you fat, according to numerous scientific studies.
Body fat mainly comes from excess sugar and refined carbohydrate, metabolised into fat by the liver and pancreas, not from eating fatty food.
In both cases, cutting fat intake and cutting GHG emissions, we have what Mencken called “a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
The natural process is more complex than at first thought. Cutting emissions marginally slows the speed of future warming, but fails to address either the committed warming from past emissions, the need to prevent climate tipping points and extreme weather, or the observation that albedo is the most tractable planetary lever to reverse and manage climate change.
Could prioritising albedo also fall foul of Mencken’s warning against clear and simple answers? I don’t think so. Scientific evidence for the potential of solar geoengineering to cool the planet is strong, unlike for decarbonisation.
The situation is that climate policy has drifted on from its original claim that cutting emissions can mitigate climate change without really examining this proposition.
The confusion is aided by the IPCC wrongly defining mitigation as cutting emissions alone, in the popular jargon. As a result, the methods that actually do mitigate climate change, SRM and CDR, have been sidelined, and we are left with no effective tools to mitigate the serious dangers of warming.
It is a bit like how low-fat diets did nothing to slow the obesity epidemic.
Robert Tulip
From: planetary-...@googlegroups.com <planetary-...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Daniel Kieve
Sent: Thursday, 22 September 2022 10:18 AM
To: Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: geoengineering <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>; CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com> <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>; Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; Arctic Methane Google Group <arctic...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Albedo
Thanks Robert. Very insightful. I'd be a bit wary of the diet analogy though.
The modern Western approach where foods are grouped into 'carbs' and 'proteins' is an oversimplification, which suits the narrative of a diet based on processed foods (white flour etc) and overconsumption of meat products. Consumption of excess of either food type is associated with heightened risk of serious / chronic illness.
In fact many of the healthiest natural, unprocessed food items are a combination of protein and carbs...combined with other nutritional attributes (vitamins, fibre etc). Lentils, quinoa, nuts, seeds and certain wholegrains contain substantial amount of both protein and carbohydrate - as do the healthiest diets (eg Mediterranean diet).
For example, red split lentils contain over 25% protein (higher than much meat or eggs), as well as 55% carb - but only 1.5% is sugars, so lentils are a combined protein + complex carbohydrate + fibre source - not an either or food type!
In the same way, HPAC advocates a 'healthy' three pronged approach rather than the narrow, oversimplified, disastrous decarb only (or protein only) narrative!
Best wishes,
Daniel
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Jessica Gurevitch
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Robert Tulip
Jessica
Here is a response I received that contrasts with your idea to increase albedo:
“VERY impressed with your straightforward logic here. I've been a fan of Will Steffen for quite a while, and you explain with clarity why we need a more drastic approach. That said, do you think humanity has the collective ability to do something like this? We couldn't stop a war in Ukraine.”
The point you are missing Jessica is the straightforward logic that urgent action to increase planetary albedo is a matter of global security. Focus on GHGs offers no prospect to limit looming tipping points.
As you suggest, it is important to consider UV and ozone, but these would not be affected by marine cloud brightening.
My correspondent says a ‘straightforward logic’ requires a more drastic approach than the current IPCC endorses. An albedo focus for climate policy is something that would involve drastic change to the current focus on decarbonisation, but could be achieved with less political conflict. Brightening the planet is a goal that could plausibly be readily agreed by governments. Increasing albedo can provide a practical cooling strategy that can take burden off emission reductions alone as the sole current climate response.
In my YouTube presentation linked below I use Will Steffen’s diagram on climate trajectory in the Anthropocene, showing why ‘bending the needle’ sufficiently from business as usual requires an albedo focus for climate policy. I really am not sure why Dr Steffen and so many of his colleagues refuse to accept this in view of the hothouse tipping points they have identified, other than my previously mentioned psychological suggestion of tribal loyalty.
On the question whether ‘humanity has the collective ability to do something like this’ I am sure we do, but it requires new vision. Useful starting points might include the papal encyclical Laudato Si that calls for integration of care for humanity and care for the planet, and also my suggestions that albedo enhancement should be led by major emitters, and that we should replace carbon credits with radiative forcing credits. These go against the grain of the IPCC, but indicate that new thinking and more open dialogue is essential to recognise and address the climate emergency. Tired calls to accelerate decarbonisation are absurd, such as the recent UN/WMO call for seven times greater effort by 2030. Such calls from leaders in the climate debate involve a wilful blindness to the capacity of albedo to become the primary fulcrum for climate policy.
On the Ukraine War, the absence of a viable global climate policy helped create the security vacuum that Putin entered. Working with China, Japan, Korea, Europe, Canada and the US to build an ice canal across the North Pole to connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans for trade while refreezing the Arctic Ocean would do far more for Russian security than invading its peaceful neighbours. As well as providing an exit path for Russia from the war, such a cooperative peaceful Arctic Ocean climate restoration project would reverse the melting of permafrost and sea ice that are primary planetary climate security risks.
Robert Tulip
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