Re: New redraft of letter to Brian Cox, for comment.
John Nissen
Fine by me. Looks good.
From: Rebecca Bishop <rebe...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, 30 January 2023 5:49 PM
To: rob...@rtulip.net
Cc: Douglas Grandt <answer...@mac.com>; John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com>; Peter Wadhams <peterw...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: New redraft of letter to Brian Cox, for comment.
Yay, Robbie, thanks, I like the tweaks especially changing it to focus on lack of awareness, not support, which implies active disagreement.
Please see attached versions 4. I've also formatted nicely so it reads well in both Iphone and laptop, and will send it separately.
Can we please have John's and Robbie's approval to send? If it comes within about 2 1/2 hours, I will send tonight, dated 30 Jan.
No pressure, we all have lives and other commitments. We must be kind to each other and especially, each person looking after their own dear self.
I reckon Brian C. will know we have written this carefully and respectfully for him and for the whole planet.
For everyone's info, Brian C's email is hosted by "Universeodon" which has this in its homepage: https://universeodon.com/about
Universeodon.com is for those who have a little curiosity. The kind of person who enjoys edutainment, reads books, watches science shows and loves to connect with people who view the universe through wonder. There are no forced topics here, but I hope you will find scientists, engineers, philosophers, physicists, and connect with people who share similar interests & passions.
From exploring the universe, to exploring the world we all share - everyone is welcome here.
Whether you love music, movies, TV, sports, books or knitting or anything in between - We all live in this wonderful universe, and I hope to see you exploring your hobbies, passions, and interests with amazing people across the #FEDIVERSE - The Universe ;)
Universeodon.com is community supported and open source.
This service is community driven and runs on the Mastodon open-source platform. We're fully federated and connected to the over six million other people on the #fediverse.
On Mon, 30 Jan 2023 at 16:50, <rob...@rtulip.net> wrote:
Hi Rebecca, great work. I do have a few small comments, shown in the attached copy. Sorry to be late responding.
I think it is better to frame the problem as a lack of awareness rather than a lack of support. This keys in better to Dr Cox’s communication interest, with a focus on our positive message of the need to brighten the planet, rather than an adversarial context of criticising others.
There is some material in the Information Section on our request that I think belongs better in the letter.
With the difficulty of holding warming below 1.5, I think we should always emphasise that this is using currently accepted methods, indicating that brightening might be able to achieve this, as MacMartin argued.
I think Cox will welcome a framing of sympathy to Indigenous worldviews. I hope one day we can have a conversation on the science of connection.
Regards
Robert
From: Rebecca Bishop <rebe...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, 29 January 2023 10:48 PM
To: Douglas Grandt <answer...@mac.com>
Cc: John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com>; Robert Tulip <rob...@rtulip.net>; Peter Wadhams <peterw...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: New redraft of letter to Brian Cox, for comment.
Hi John, Doug, Robbie & Peter,
It's been a hot day here and it's been good to work in the cooler evening time.
Please see attached v3 (marked up) and 3.1 (clean copy).
I think the comments explain the detail and here are a few summary comments.
1) The letter is crafted to appeal to the intelligence and emotions of a new reader, specifically Brian Cox as an expert but he who may not have looked at the detail; and may be disturbed at the lack of solutions and not able to find his way through the vast forests of words
2) It uses both story telling and a professional public servant approach - we are trained to write for a 14 year old reader and to carefully structure the sequence and content, also see 4) below.
3) I have put what I can get about the arctic and jet stream controversy in plain language, toward the end. It's a diversion at the beginning, in my opinion. Please tweak if you'd like. Since it DOES seem this is of great importance, can we follow up with Brian Cox if / when we approach him again? Especially if we are able to make personal contact. Main article was the one John sent today and also John's wording in v2.
4) The scientific stuff is gobbledook to most people. Please see article from Sydney Morning Herald today which overlaps with what we're saying but is full of contradictions, and punchline from Bill Gates and others is still decarbonisation. So I would like to include the second section with a bit more detail on PRAG's views.
5) Doug G. and I have been chatting about swimming in our beautiful ocean et al, and he is OK with the longer version. He also says this above. Please can we limit the amount of editing as we're all becoming tired with it. I'm not "having a tantrum" and I do want to send the letter but I can't do much more on it.
Best wishes to all,
Rebecca.
Looming El Niño could push us into a new era of global heating
by Nick O'Malley
The language that Bill Gates used about climate change during his visit to Australia this week was more blunt than you tend to hear from either climate scientists or politicians. Indeed, it tended towards the brutal.
There was, he said, “no chance” that the world could meet its goal of holding warming to beneath 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels and little chance of holding it to 2 degrees.
Play Video
Play video
1:50
Anthony Albanese meets with Bill Gates
The Prime Minister has met with billionaire Bill Gates to discuss climate change and energy as well as healthcare.
“No one wants to be the first to say it,” he told Reuters in an interview published at around the same time he spoke in Sydney, “but the idea that [staying beneath 1.5 degrees] can be done brute force, there’s just no chance.”
Gates’ words appear to be based on a cold-blooded analysis of the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere, and the amount we can expect to add to it before breaking through 1.5 degrees of warming - a figure generally referred to as the carbon budget.
Scenes from Currarong Beach in 2019 as the Currowan fire closed in. CREDIT:NICK MOIR
According to the United Nations’ chief climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to have a 50 per cent chance of remaining beneath 1.5 degrees we can emit just 2890 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Of that amount, 2390 billion had already been emitted by 2019, leaving a pre-pandemic carbon budget of 500 billion tonnes.
As The Economist observed in its recent story “The world is going to miss the totemic 1.5 degrees climate target”, today around 400 billion tonnes still exist in that budget.
And all the while emissions keep growing. It is estimated that between 2021 and 2022, greenhouse gas emissions rose from 51 billion tonnes of carbon equivalents to 52 billion tonnes.
Gates is not the only voice suggesting not only that 1.5 degrees is now out of reach, especially with the prospect of the warmer El Nino weather pattern returning.
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“It’s very likely that the next big El Nino could take us over 1.5 degrees,” Professor Adam Scaife, the head of long-range prediction at Britain’s Met Office, told The Irish Times earlier this month.
Why 1.5 degrees matters
The target to stay within 1.5 degrees was embraced after frantic negotiations in the dying hours of the 2015 climate negotiations that resulted in the Paris Agreement. Climate-vulnerable nations used their leverage to extract agreements from global giants determined to get unanimous support for a climate deal from 195 nations.
Even then, the language was equivocal, with global leaders committing to adopting policies to hold warming “well below” 2 degrees and as close to 1.5 degrees as possible.
Dash aircraft fighting a wildfire near Landiras in south-western France, 2022. CREDIT:AP
Since then, the target has been embedded in climate diplomacy, championed by those nations - and indeed those climate scientists - who agree that every tenth of a degree of warming will have direct implications on millions of lives.
There has also been real progress on climate since Paris. Where once we were on a trajectory for over 3 degrees of warming by 2100, the United Nations Environment Program estimates the world is on track to 2.8 degrees if governments pursue their current policies. Should all the promises made at climate talks be met, we are on track for around 2.4 degrees.
Given the way the ratchet mechanism of the Paris Agreement is supposed to work - where nations are expected to keep raising ambitions as targets are met - that mark should fall further.
But 2.4 degrees of warming is still catastrophic. Some low-lying countries, such as the Maldives, that could survive 1.5 degrees of warming do not expect to live through 2 degrees.
Coral bleaching on Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef.
Today the world is now around 1.14 to 2 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial period, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). And the average temperature anomaly keeps growing.
Which brings us to the fears that 1.5 degrees is about to be breached.
Three key drivers
Obviously, the key driving force of heating is the ongoing and increasing emission of greenhouse gases.
Despite a global surge in the deployment of renewables, there has been a return to fossil fuels such as coal due to the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Vehicles are stranded in floodwater near Zhengzhou railway station, China, 2021. CREDIT:GETTY IMAGES
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 419.94 parts per million on January 24, up from 419.8 a year ago and from 400 parts per million a decade ago.
But greenhouse gas emissions are no longer the only problem.
Global meteorological data also shows that during La Niña years, global average temperatures are cooler than in those years when the system is not in place. Similarly, the El Nino weather pattern brings us hotter temperatures.
Despite these cyclical peaks and troughs, the past eight years have been the hottest on average globally. As a result of this trend 2022, which coincided with a rare three-year La Niña period, was not the hottest year in history, but the fifth or sixth hottest.
It is clear now that each peak and trough is growing warmer than those before it. (These regular dips in the ever-growing heat of the planet also explain why sceptics like to announce every couple of years that “global warming has halted”.)
The WMO El Nino/La Niña Update indicates there is about a 60 per cent chance that La Niña will persist until March 2023, and should be followed by neutral conditions (neither El Nino nor La Niña).
This suggests temperatures will increase. When a new El Nino takes hold, that temperature increase will be even higher.
In a paper for Columbia University last year, leading climatologist Professor James Hansen and colleagues wrote: “We suggest that 2024 is likely to be off the chart as the warmest year on record.
“Without inside information, that would be a dangerous prediction, but we proffer it because it is unlikely that the current La Niña will continue a fourth year. Even a little futz of an El Nino – like the tropical warming in 2018-19, which barely qualified as an El Nino – should be sufficient for record global temperature.
“A classical, strong El Nino in 2023-24 could push global temperature to about 1.5 degrees higher relative to the 1880-1920 mean.”
Perversely, the third driver of dangerously hotter conditions in the coming years is likely to be the world’s success in efforts to decarbonise our energy and transport systems.
Burning fossil fuels causes warming carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere, but it also releases larger particles into our skies. These cause smog and can be dangerous, but they also reflect some of sun’s heat back into space.
Some recent research suggests that man-made sulphates in the atmosphere are responsible for short-term cooling of about half a degree, and that as China and India rapidly clean their skies, we can expect to lose some of that cooling impact.
So, what does it mean?
“To be frank, I dread the next El Nino,” says Dr Martin Rice, research director with the Climate Council. “The Black Summer bushfires scarred so many of us.”
That catastrophe - and the record-breaking drought that preceded and accelerated it - followed an El Nino, the same weather pattern that helped make 2016 the hottest year on record.
For eastern Australia this will mean a return to intensely hot and dry conditions, which are also likely to afflict Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, says Rice. In the Americas the pattern will likely spur floods and storms in the west from California down to Peru.
But should an El Nino set in - which is by no means certain yet - and should it drive global average temperatures beyond the 1.5-degree mark, it does not mean we have breached the Paris Agreement temperature threshold, says Rice.
“Climate science works on decadal trends. Under IPCC and UN [Framework Convention on Climate Change] terms, the 1.5-degree marker is based on a 30-year average.”
But breaching the barrier for even a year is likely to have a profound impact on the climate movement, some elements of which are embroiled in an internal dispute over how frank they should be in public about how far and fast heating is progressing.
For Rice, it is further evidence of the staggering amount of work the world must do in the short term to stave off long-term calamity.
Writing in December, Gates said that reaching net zero in time to hold warming to even 2 degrees will be the hardest thing humans have ever done.
“We need to revolutionise the entire physical economy - how we make things, move around, produce electricity, grow food, and stay warm and cool - in less than three decades.”
On Sun, 29 Jan 2023 at 10:20, Rebecca personal em <rebe...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Doug, I do of course agree that Brian is of the highest calibre as a scientist.
I’m going to digress slightly with a personal story. My dad was a physicist, he went to Macquarie Island doing cosmic ray research in about 1955, before he changed careers and became a minister in the Presbyterian Church. He brought us all up to love science and to understand how physics works in everyday life. Brian Cox has a huge following here, down under, and many of us have loved his ABC science presentations on the universe.
The reason I crafted the letter with a bit of a story is to take Brian on a journey and help him look at things, emotionally, and intuitively, as well as the scientific evidence. I think the current version has gotten a little away from the power of emotions, which was a theme we had earlier been sharing on together. I am sure Brian is aware of much of what we say. I’d like to assemble it to connect evidence and emotions, in a way that will give him access into what we are asking.
I like your punchline in caps below.
As I’m doing this email on my iPhone, I’m not going to pull the pieces together until I get back to my laptop which could be this evening, Sydney time. I’ve been working carefully, as I see you and John have also, printing things out to to review both the content and the impression.
Today, I’ll be going to an exhibition on Frida Kahlo, and also having a swim in our beautiful ocean, and I hope you all have a good rest and restoration when sleep time comes.
🤗🤗
Rebecca
On 29 Jan 2023, at 9:57 am, Douglas Grandt <answer...@mac.com> wrote:
Rebecca,
Actually, I could simply flip a coin …
But the placement of the list of bullet points distills the essence of the paper for the reader—respect and convenience.
I do think Brian is savvy and may possibly already pondered 1) whether the decades and questionable success of meeting 2030 and 2050 targets is too risky, and 2) what if we fail without a contingency plan.
Most people may be comfortable putting all their eggs in one hopeful basket, but who plans for contingencies? WE MUST PLAN FOR THE WORST AS WE HOPE FOR THE BEST. That is surely second nature to a physicist of Brian’s caliber.
Doug
Sent from my iPhone (audio texting)
On Jan 28, 2023, at 4:20 PM, Rebecca Bishop <rebe...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you both John and Doug.
I can see it's nearing the end of the day in UK and afternoon in east coast USA.
I'll have a think, and see what Robbie thinks too, and let you know.
I have to say the longer letter was drafted from an intuitive who also has a logical brain (me) to a person I think is similar.
I'm not sure that this version conveys why public opinion or scientific consensus hasn't caught up with Steffen.
It's much better to workshop things ourselves, and will give it all some more thought today.
Best wishes to all,
Rebecca.
On Sun, 29 Jan 2023 at 06:21, Douglas Grandt <answer...@mac.com> wrote:
Brilliant, John!
You caught some omissions that I had intended, and the list of bullet points is perfectly/logically placed.
I view this, with a few appropriate modification, is suitable for follow-up to previous communications to my Senators and Representative in the immediate future.
BTW, I have made a very positive inroad to Michael Mann on facebook. He actually responded positively to a comment on one of his recent posts … this is a very sensitive balancing act. As you may recall, he has blocked me on Twitter for asking a rhetorical question about Bill McKibben's and his definition of geoengineering, prompted by McKibben’s November 22, 2022, New Yorker piece Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It (The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely) in an exchange of “love fest” comment and replies between them.
- Dr. Mann - https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1595529836470099975?s=20&t=wlyY064uIPHAAyU_AvXySQ
- My reply - https://twitter.com/Doug350/status/1599185157613039617?s=20&t=wlyY064uIPHAAyU_AvXySQ
- Reference - https://medium.com/predict/the-surprisingly-simple-approach-to-save-the-arctic-and-the-world-48ba04baf5c2
I have periodically made positive or rhetorical supportive comments to show agreement or to subliminally bolster his ego.
My facebook profile avatar is clearly obvious … In order to prevent his blocking me on Facebook, I have been posting screenshots of my comments along with screenshots of his posts as evidence of my posts, tagging him in the text, so he is aware of my public display. A kind of righteous blackmail, or hostage taking. Nothing nefarious, but nuanced putting him on notice that I have good intentions and will not tolerate being blocked … IF HE EVEN NOTICES ...
Eventually, some version of the letter should be considered for Dr. Mann’s consumption … but only when the time is right, i.e., trust is gained.
Cheers,
Doug
<Doug facebook profile avatar BLOCKED by MANN cropped white backgroung.png>
On Jan 28, 2023, at 11:08 AM, John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Rebecca,
I have saved Doug's draft as version 1 and marked up my changes for version 2, see attached.
Cheers, John
On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 7:28 PM Rebecca personal em <rebe...@gmail.com> wrote:
Good morning, all,
I’m up nice and early for a swim with my mother Isobel, 6:15 am Sydney time.
John, I really like the summary you have done about the Earth system in the Arctic and the tipping point there.
It seems Robbie agrees with me, we could use one email letter to give our views to Brian Cox and also ask for his help. I’ll do a re-draft when I get home, and the purpose of this email is to ask about strategy and timing.
Would it be possible to follow up with Brian Cox in a few weeks with another email summarising the information in your email below, and asking if he’s had time to think about a) the info and b) his ability to help?
Another follow-up could be for someone who knows him to reach out.
Now that we have a good summary of our position, I’m thinking we could send it also to people like the Australian Climate Council and Prof Tim Flannery, with a different cover covering intro. One thing at a time.
Robbie, I like your edits and will resend to everyone with a few small tweaks later in the morning. John/Doug, Robbie and I enjoy working this way, I did a close edit of his algae paper early on, after I’d first heard his presentation about these topics 🤗🤗
Doug, any comments from you?
Best wishes to all,
Rebecca
On 27 Jan 2023, at 11:44 pm, rob...@rtulip.net wrote:
Hi Rebecca
Here are my suggestions, changes shown in red. Congratulations on this work, I hope Dr Cox will respond positively.
Many thanks again, and very happy to clarify any questions.
Dear Professor Cox,
Greetings to you for 2023.
I'm writing with a request from the Planetary Restoration Action Group (PRAG), a group of scientists,**engineers, inventors, public policy experts and community activists from across the world: https://planetaryrestorationaction.group
** do we actually have any scientists? Yes there are five in the member list at https://groups.google.com/g/planetary-restoration/members
Your work in communicating science is truly inspiring. We are excited to see that your presentation "Horizons: a 21st Century Space Odyssey" will be shared in European cities in 2023, after successful tours of the UK, US and Australia. It is so heartening that you will share an optimistic vision of our future based on scientific advances, based on exploring nature with humility and valuing ourselves as humans, and the fellow creatures we share this earth with. It is also wonder-filling that you help people explore the deep questions and develop their knowledge of black holes, time and the universe. Speaking as an Australian, I am glad you have experienced our night sky and the powerful Siding Spring Observatory. Australia, as a nation, is starting to learn from the Australian First Nations science of connection with mother earth. Their living culture of at least 65,000 years gives hope for all people.
In the spirit of your presentations, we in PRAG would like to ask for your help with shaping strategy and actions on climate change, which is the immediate crisis preceding all others in importance. This letter contains a summary of our perspective and our request to you.
Our key point is that reducing our emissions, or even removing Greenhouse Gases, will not be enough to keep warming below 1.5°C or even 2°C, as attested by the recent paper from James Hansen, Global Warming in the Pipeline. Conventional approaches must be augmented by action to enhance planetary albedo to ensure we don’t cross dangerous tipping points, especially in the Arctic. These planetary risks have been described in prominent recent research, summarised at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/08/world-on-brink-five-climate-tipping-points-study-finds
Because of the committed warming in the earth system from past emissions, we need to embrace planetary cooling in the short term, in addition to the current goal of reducing and removing emissions. This will allow time for emissions reduction and carbon removal strategies to grow to scale, and offers hope to prevent tipping points.
We see a message of hope. Technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening and Stratospheric Aerosol Injection together promise a capability for refreezing the Arctic and cooling the planet more generally, in a benign way. We recognise that these technologies, part of a wider suite known as geoengineering, encounter legitimate concern in both the climate community and the wider public. Unfortunately, currently accepted climate strategy offers no prospect to reverse tipping processes in the Arctic and elsewhere. The climate community needs now to embrace the additional focus on cooling intervention. This can be done in safe and effective ways, in our considered opinion.
Consistent with Dr Hansen and others, we call for a reframing of both the causes of the climate crisis and the solutions. In essence, humans have arrived at this place through what Dr Hansen calls uncontrolled geoengineering, being the large increase in CO2 and equivalent gases. Careful, thoughtful geoengineering is now necessary to get us out of the predicament.
We in PRAG see the best way to address practical and governance questions with climate cooling technologies as including agreement to implement small, practical field tests. This will help enable the intergovernmental agreements that will be needed for the deployment of cooling technologies at planetary scale.
Our request to you is for help with developing scientific and public support for this change in direction. We want to create a compelling scientific picture of our reality, explaining where we are and the need for planetary brightening as a short term measure to buy time. Both the academic communities and the broader public need to be better informed, so as to generate permission and trust for governments to begin small trials.
Institutions already working on this approach include the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University, led by Sir David King. We are looking to you for your gifts in science communication, helping to generate a paradigm shift for what’s needed and recognising that we still have time, if we begin now.
If you are interested in helping, the two convenors of PRAG are cc’d and we would be pleased to have any thoughts on how to proceed.
Yours sincerely, and in hope,
Rebecca Bishop,
Sydney, Australia
INFORMATION ON CLIMATE RESTORATION GOALS AND STRATEGIES
The Planetary Restoration Action Group (PRAG) is concerned that most public climate campaigns are focused on achieving "net zero emissions" in the belief that this can limit the increase in global warming to a level manageable for humans and other creatures. Keeping below the Paris COP 1.5°C aspiration is proving impossible and 2°C could be breached within a decade or two on the current trajectory.
Some key facts are not generally understood. Firstly, the large stock of extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, accumulated since the industrial revolution, will cause warming until they are removed. That means reducing future emissions to net zero is not enough, we also need to remove the extra CO2 and equivalent gases that cause radiative forcing and committed warming. Secondly, melting of the polar sea ice is a major factor increasing human-induced global warming, as the exposed ocean absorbs more heat. The Arctic is now warming at 3 to 4 times the global mean rate, while large glaciers are at risk in both Greenland and Antarctica. We are close to tipping points when it will become much harder, if not impossible, to return to a planet that is human and creature-friendly. Efforts to directly cool the Arctic and the Antarctic should be global earth system priorities. Any comment on the Antarctic? Sounds silly/northern hemisphere parochial to only talk about the arctic. I understand it’s more complex, just don’t want to appear biased.
A recent paper by James Hansen and 14 other scientists, Global Warming in the Pipeline, may prove to be a turning point in scientific understanding. They argue that with the committed warming from past emissions, the equilibrium temperature rise could be as much as 10°C even if we rapidly decarbonise the world’s economy; reference https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04474
Here is the authors’ summary of the paper:
“Global warming in the pipeline is greater than prior estimates. Eventual global warming due to today's GHG forcing alone -- after slow feedbacks operate -- is about 10°C. Human-made aerosols are a major climate forcing, mainly via their effect on clouds. We infer from paleoclimate data that aerosol cooling offset GHG warming for several millennia as civilization developed. A hinge-point in global warming occurred in 1970 as increased GHG warming outpaced aerosol cooling, leading to global warming of 0.18°C per decade. Aerosol cooling is larger than estimated in the current IPCC report, but it has declined since 2010 because of aerosol reductions in China and shipping. Without unprecedented global actions to reduce GHG growth, 2010 could be another hinge point, with global warming in following decades 50-100% greater than in the prior 40 years.
The enormity of consequences of warming in the pipeline demands a new approach addressing legacy and future emissions. The essential requirement to "save" young people and future generations is return to Holocene-level global temperature. Three urgently required actions are: 1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions, 2) purposeful intervention to rapidly phase down present massive geoengineering of Earth's climate, and 3) renewed East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs.”
The key statement in the Hansen et al paper in our view is its recognition of the need “to temporarily affect Earth Energy Imbalance via solar radiation management (SRM), if the world is to avoid disastrous consequences, including large sea level rise.”
We in PRAG think the goal for planetary restoration should be to return to the norms of Holocene temperature, ice cover and climate. We think this is possible if we add two actions to the current goal of achieving zero net emissions, with suggested short-term targets to indicate the extreme urgency for cooling intervention. Our suggested actions and targets are:
· Refreeze the Arctic (halting Arctic warming within 5 years)
· Cool the rest of the planet (halting global warming and glacier retreat within 10 years)
· Reduce atmospheric CO2 and equivalents by both decarbonisation and removal of carbon from the atmosphere (getting it below 280 ppm by the end of this century).
There is a message of hope. There are technologies, such as Marine Cloud Brightening, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection and others, which together promise a capability for refreezing the Arctic and cooling the planet more generally, in a benign way. Members of the Planetary Action Restoration Group, and others, have done extensive work on prototypes. What is needed is agreement for governments and scientific institutions to rapidly increase work on funding, testing and evaluating them. Questions include what type of aerosol (salt, sulphates or other particles), where and when they should be emitted, what impacts they will have regionally and on climate tipping points.
Some preliminary tests are underway. The US Council on Foreign Relations and other leading bodies have articulated the need for the US Government to take a lead in developing these technologies (see Stewart paper for Council on Foreign Relations, below). A clear public understanding of the need for climate cooling, along with the results of field tests, is needed for the available technologies to be scaled up and sound nternational governance to be developed.
Our request is for help to focus and generate support for this change in direction, for example
· assembling the range of information into a cohesive and compelling scientific story that humans need to do different things, specifically planetary brightening as a short term measure to buy time
· helping prepare for intergovernmental cooperation on testing of solar radiation management, to brighten and hence cool the planet
· preparing initial test cases for marine cloud brightening and an evaluation and public feedback strategy
· preparing the groundwork for stratospheric aerosol injection, the other main technology to manage solar radiation
· anything else you recommend, including institutions or people who can help.
PRAG and other groups have assembled a number of resources to explain both the issues and the solutions, but we are concerned that time is running out, seen in the steady worsening of extreme weather. Finding the right information for the various audiences is a challenge, and currently (we feel), people are misinformed about the new technologies and are focusing on "net zero" in the belief the Paris Accord is enough. We hope public concerns can be nurtured to become trust and hope, with good scientific information, but there is still a gap in understanding.
In addition to a solid scientific, evidence-based story of the potential solutions, humanity will need leadership to change course. We take heart that the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) process and Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could become a seedbed for public support of these additional strategies. The IPCC has helped humanity recognise we must act. Over the years, both carbon removal and a wide range of geoengineering technologies have been considered, but they have not received public or governmental support as yet. Due to the accelerating climate crisis, PRAG would like to influence public opinion initially outside the COP process. One of COP’s drawbacks is its size; it’s hard to do anything decisive in a forum that represents many countries. However, once the consensus changes and it's recognised that cooling the planet is both possible and urgent, the IPCC may be relevant as a forum for more scientific work, and COP for disseminating information.
We would be pleased to send further information and resources but first we would like to establish your interest and availability to engage on communicating this major area of climate science, or other suggestions you may have to develop our campaign.
Selected references in addition to information on the PRAG website https://planetaryrestorationaction.group/
Reflecting Sunlight to Reduce Climate Risks: Priorities for Research and International Governance. Stewart M Patrick, US Council on Foreign Relations, April 2022 https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/Patrick-CSR93-web.pdf
Article on the potential of solar radiation management: https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/with-mitigation-climate-change-research-should-add-solar-geoengineering/
Reflections on Ice: Why we need to urgently cool the planet. Video presentation by Doug Grandt, PRAG member, April 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iojaSF5t3MA
Why Increasing Albedo is more urgent than removing greenhouse gases for climate policy. Video presentation by Robert Tulip, Convenor PRAG, August 2022 https://youtu.be/MzZDDjHYAnk
Why Geoengineering is now urgent, interview on the ABC Science Show with Robert Tulip, 29 October 2022 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/geoengineering-now-urgent/101589282
<Letter to Brian Cox v2.doc>
