Gates funding of geoengineering research
Diana Bronson
Would it be possible for David Keith or Ken Caldeira to clarify how
this money is being spent? What criteria are being used to select
research projects and public reporting is involved?
Thank you.
Diana Bronson
ETC Group
Bill Gates Funding Geoengineering Research
by Eli Kintisch
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has been supporting a wide array
of research on geoengineering since 2007, ScienceInsider has learned.
The world’s richest man has provided at least $4.5 million of his own
money over 3 years for the study of methods that could alter the
stratosphere to reflect solar energy, techniques to filter carbon
dioxide directly from the atmosphere, and brighten ocean clouds. But
Gates’s money has not funded any field experiments involving the
techniques, according to Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for
Science in Palo Alto, California.
Caldeira and physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary in
Canada have been in charge of deciding how to dispense the money. The
pair have been informal energy and climate advisers to Gates for
several years, and they say they remain independent. "This is
philanthropic money and when it arrives [to Calgary] Gates does not
control it," says Keith.
Recipients of the funding include Armand Neukermans, an inventor based
in Silicon Valley who is working with colleagues to design spray
systems for the marine clouds, and students and scientists working for
Keith and Caldeira. Funding has also helped support scientific
meetings in geoengineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Edinburgh,
Scotland, and aeronautics research related to altering the stratosphere.
There are other grantees, Keith says, but he declined to identify them
or say why. "This is like a little private funding agency," he says,
though he says they plan to release more information.
Gates has shown interest in geoengineering research before. He is an
investor in Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle, Washington–area firm
that pursues inventions and has applied for patents on techniques to
geoengineer the stratosphere. Along with officials from that
organization, Gates applied for a patent in 2008 to sap hurricanes of
their strength by mixing surface and deep ocean water.
What's his ultimate goal? Gates "views geoengineering as a way to buy
time but it's not a solution to the problem" of climate change, says
spokesperson John Pinette. “Bill views this as an important avenue for
research—among many others, including new forms of clean
energy.” (Pinette works for BCG3, a think-tank type firm Gates started
last year which has no apparent role thus far in supporting
geoengineering.) “Scientific and technological advances are making it
possible to solve big, complicated problems like never before,” writes
Gates on the Web site of the Gates Foundation, which is also not
involved in the geoengineering work.
his blog...Thoughts on Super FreakonomicsPosted
01/21/2010Entertaining, well-written, and full of surprises and
insights,Super Freakonomics is Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s
follow up to Freakonomics.
I had a chance to read a prepublication copy Super Freakonomics before
it was officially released. I really liked Freakonomics and I think
Super Freakonomic is even better.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner like to cover a lot of ideas, in
contrast to Malcolm Gladwell, whose books I like a lot too. Gladwell
tends to take a few ideas and illustrate them in depth with a lot of
examples.
I recommend this book to anyone who reads nonfiction. It is very well
written and full of great insights.
I could be accused of bias in recommending it because I had some
limited involvement in three of the stories.
In discussing U.S. health care, the authors work with Craig Feied and
Mark Smith to use the data-gathering software now called Almaga which
was bought by Microsoft. It is an amazing piece of technology with its
ability to let you look at patient trends. The book explains how this
data can be used to look at the quality of doctors and different
medical procedures.
When they talk about how you might reduce hurricane damage, they
mention Nathan Myhrvrold and the team at Intellectual Ventures and
their idea to mix hot water on the surface of the ocean with cooler
water below to reduce hurricane strength. Unfortunately the authors
don’t figure out how the economics should work and who would authorize
an experiment that would change the local weather with mostly good
effects, but perhaps some bad effects as well.
When they focus on global warming they again mention Intellectual
Ventures and you meet Lowell Wood and Ken Caldeira for a discussion of
how geoengineering can probably delay the effects and provide many
extra decades to make the changes in energy production and use that
are necessary. Levitt and Dubner do a great job of describing the idea
but don’t go into the question of how it should be applied.
One of my favorite things in the book is the debunking of many of the
studies economists have done that they use as the basis for claiming
that people are irrational in their choices. Dubner and Levitt cover
new research that shows that the wrong conclusions were drawn. I think
what researchers are seeing is a reflection of the social rewards/
risks for the students involved in the tests rather than some basic
flaw in human economic thinking.
The book also talks about how people underestimate how much life has
improved in every way during the last 100 years. The example they use
is the risk of dying in childbirth and how that has changed. They also
talk about progress on diseases (particularly vaccines such as polio)
and car safety. I knew that seat belts were an amazing intervention
but I hadn’t realized how little extra safety airbags and children’s
car seats provide on top of what is provided by the full use of seat
belts.
One area where the book doesn’t quite get the story right is in
discussing how important nitrogen fertilizer was in increasing food
production. The Vaclav Smil book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber,
Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production tells this
incredible story in great depth. Super Freakonomics talks about
ammonium nitrate as if it was the silver bullet that made the advance
possible. There was some ammonium nitrate that was mined from South
America but that quickly ran out. The real advance was the process to
extract nitrogen gas from the air and turn it into the nitrogen
compounds that plants can use.
There are tons more things in this book that you will find cool that I
don’t mention.
>
Ken Caldeira
This article is a bit misleading.
The funds that I receive through this avenue primarily are helping to support several post-docs in my group doing a wide variety of work, some of which is related to intentional intervention in the climate system, but much of which is related to broader climate and energy concerns.
Work that my group contributed to, published over the past two years, supported in part through these funds include:
==> Archer, C.L., and K.Caldeira., 2009. Global Assessment of High-Altitude Wind Power, Energies, 2(2), 307-319; doi:10.3390/en20200307.
==> Archer, CL; Caldeira, K, 2008. Historical trends in the jet streams, Geophysical Research Letters 35 (8), DOI: 10.1029/2008GL033614.
==> Archer D, Eby M, Brovkin V, Ridgwell, A., Cao, L., Mikolajeicz, Caldeira, K., Matsumoto, K, Munhoven, G.,
Montenegro, A., and K. Tokos, 2009, Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil Fuel Carbon Dioxide, Annual Review of
Earth and Planetary Sciences 37,117-134.
==> Cao, L., G. Bala, K. Caldeira, R. Nemani, and G. Ban-Weiss, 2009. Climate response to physiological forcing of carbon dioxide simulated by the coupled Community Atmosphere Model (CAM3.1) and Community Land Model (CLM3.0). Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L10402, doi:10.1029/2009GL037724.
==> Cao, L; Caldeira, K, 2008. Atmospheric CO2 stabilization and ocean acidification, Geophysical Research Letters 35 (19), DOI: 10.1029/2008GL035072.
==> Matthews, HD; Caldeira, K, 2008. Stabilizing climate requires near-zero emissions, Geophysical Research Letters 35 (4), DOI: 10.1029/2007GL032388
==> Matthews, H.D., L. Cao,and K. Caldeira. 2009. Sensitivity of ocean acidification to geoengineered climate stabilization. Geophysical Research Letters,. 36, L10706, doi:10.1029/2009GL037488/
To characterize all of this research as "geoengineering" grossly distorts the breadth of work that Bill Gates has been kind and wise enough to support.
These funds are being used to support post-doc salaries, access to computational resources, and related research expenses. My salary is 100% supported by other sources of funds and none of my time has been billed to this account.
Furthermore, I have no formal control over any funds not directly supporting my group at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. I have considered my role in the allocation of other funds as advisory.___________________________________________________
Ken Caldeira
Carnegie Institution Dept of Global Ecology
260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
kcal...@carnegie.stanford.edu
http://dge.stanford.edu/DGE/CIWDGE/labs/caldeiralab
+1 650 704 7212; fax: +1 650 462 5968
Would it be possible for David Keith or Ken Caldeira to clarify how this money is being spent? What criteria are being used to select research projects and public reporting is involved?
Thank you.
Diana Bronson
ETC Group
Bill Gates Funding Geoengineering Research
by Eli Kintisch
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has been supporting a wide array of research on geoengineering since 2007, ScienceInsider has learned. The world’s richest man has provided at least $4.5 million of his own money over 3 years for the study of methods that could alter the stratosphere to reflect solar energy, techniques to filter carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, and brighten ocean clouds. But Gates’s money has not funded any field experiments involving the techniques, according to Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Palo Alto, California.
Caldeira and physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada have been in charge of deciding how to dispense the money. The pair have been informal energy and climate advisers to Gates for several years, and they say they remain independent. "This is philanthropic money and when it arrives [to Calgary] Gates does not control it," says Keith.
Recipients of the funding include Armand Neukermans, an inventor based in Silicon Valley who is working with colleagues to design spray systems for the marine clouds, and students and scientists working for Keith and Caldeira. Funding has also helped support scientific meetings in geoengineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Edinburgh, Scotland, and aeronautics research related to altering the stratosphere.
There are other grantees, Keith says, but he declined to identify them or say why. "This is like a little private funding agency," he says, though he says they plan to release more information.
Gates has shown interest in geoengineering research before. He is an investor in Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle, Washington–area firm that pursues inventions and has applied for patents on techniques to geoengineer the stratosphere. Along with officials from that organization, Gates applied for a patent in 2008 to sap hurricanes of their strength by mixing surface and deep ocean water.
What's his ultimate goal? Gates "views geoengineering as a way to buy time but it's not a solution to the problem" of climate change, says spokesperson John Pinette. “Bill views this as an important avenue for research—among many others, including new forms of clean energy.” (Pinette works for BCG3, a think-tank type firm Gates started last year which has no apparent role thus far in supporting geoengineering.) “Scientific and technological advances are making it possible to solve big, complicated problems like never before,” writes Gates on the Web site of the Gates Foundation, which is also not involved in the geoengineering work.
his blog...Thoughts on Super FreakonomicsPosted 01/21/2010Entertaining, well-written, and full of surprises and insights,Super Freakonomics is Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s follow up to Freakonomics.
I had a chance to read a prepublication copy Super Freakonomics before it was officially released. I really liked Freakonomics and I think Super Freakonomic is even better.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner like to cover a lot of ideas, in contrast to Malcolm Gladwell, whose books I like a lot too. Gladwell tends to take a few ideas and illustrate them in depth with a lot of examples.
I recommend this book to anyone who reads nonfiction. It is very well written and full of great insights.
I could be accused of bias in recommending it because I had some limited involvement in three of the stories.
In discussing U.S. health care, the authors work with Craig Feied and Mark Smith to use the data-gathering software now called Almaga which was bought by Microsoft. It is an amazing piece of technology with its ability to let you look at patient trends. The book explains how this data can be used to look at the quality of doctors and different medical procedures.
When they talk about how you might reduce hurricane damage, they mention Nathan Myhrvrold and the team at Intellectual Ventures and their idea to mix hot water on the surface of the ocean with cooler water below to reduce hurricane strength. Unfortunately the authors don’t figure out how the economics should work and who would authorize an experiment that would change the local weather with mostly good effects, but perhaps some bad effects as well.
When they focus on global warming they again mention Intellectual Ventures and you meet Lowell Wood and Ken Caldeira for a discussion of how geoengineering can probably delay the effects and provide many extra decades to make the changes in energy production and use that are necessary. Levitt and Dubner do a great job of describing the idea but don’t go into the question of how it should be applied.
One of my favorite things in the book is the debunking of many of the studies economists have done that they use as the basis for claiming that people are irrational in their choices. Dubner and Levitt cover new research that shows that the wrong conclusions were drawn. I think what researchers are seeing is a reflection of the social rewards/risks for the students involved in the tests rather than some basic flaw in human economic thinking.
The book also talks about how people underestimate how much life has improved in every way during the last 100 years. The example they use is the risk of dying in childbirth and how that has changed. They also talk about progress on diseases (particularly vaccines such as polio) and car safety. I knew that seat belts were an amazing intervention but I hadn’t realized how little extra safety airbags and children’s car seats provide on top of what is provided by the full use of seat belts.
One area where the book doesn’t quite get the story right is in discussing how important nitrogen fertilizer was in increasing food production. The Vaclav Smil book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production tells this incredible story in great depth. Super Freakonomics talks about ammonium nitrate as if it was the silver bullet that made the advance possible. There was some ammonium nitrate that was mined from South America but that quickly ran out. The real advance was the process to extract nitrogen gas from the air and turn it into the nitrogen compounds that plants can use.
There are tons more things in this book that you will find cool that I don’t mention.
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