John:
I'm willing to take part. Lowell Wood has better economic calculations. I did a brief estimate and found we could aerosol the Arctic for a few hundred million dollars/year. That's with adequate prior engineering studies, etc. Support for a real program seems unlikely. Many, like Alan Robock, apparently oppose any experiments without much more simulation. My experience with many decades running combined theory/experiment physics program is that using just one of those is like walking on one leg, missing the point of the rhythm of science. But...what funding source? Government, of course, is paralyzed. Gregory Benford -----Original Message----- From: John Nissen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Ken Caldeira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; geoengineering <[email protected]> Cc: David Schnare <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; John Latham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Alvia Gaskill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; John Gorman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Stephen Salter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; David Keith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 4:48 am Subject: [geo] Climate restoration and ecosystem recovery - new proposal Hi Ken, Are you willing to help prepare a project proposal based on a combination of stratospheric and tropospheric SRM techniques, but not ruling out other geoengineering? I believe that a combined SRM approach would have many advantages, such as: 1. reducing risk of one technique failing by itself; 2. tuning for target ting the Arctic sea ice and other regions/ecosystems as required; 3. minimisation of any serious side-effects; 4. minimisation of cost (subject to above). Making the project broader than just SRM would have the additional benefits: 5. encouraging integration of other geo-scale technology; 6. encouraging integration of local technology/engineering for particular regions/ecosystems, esp to save the Arctic sea ice; 7. engaging environmentalists, bio-engineers and people from other disciplines. This needs to be a "all hands on deck" proposal. Who else could help in its preparation? Our number one priority must be to cool the Arctic. I've just heard rumour of a new report suggesting the Arctic sea ice could go in 3-7 years. And massive methane release could start at any time. Cheers from Chiswick, John P.S. It seems I'm not the first to suggest a Manhattan Project with geoengineering: http://www.metatronics.net/lit/geo2.html ----- Original Message ----- From: Ken Caldeira To: John Nissen Cc: David Schnare ; John Latham ; Alvia Gaskill Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 5:38 AM Subject: Re: the science and technology of climate cooling ??? Isn't 'remediation' closer to the intended meaning than 'restoration'? Remediation: Efforts to20 counteract some or all of the effects of pollution after it has been released into an environment. Restoration: The process of bringing an object back to its original state ___________________________________________________ Ken Caldeira Carnegie Institution Dept of Global Ecology 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dge.stanford.edu/DGE/CIWDGE/labs/caldeiralab +1 650 704 7212; fax: +1 650 462 5968 On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 4:18 PM, John Nissen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Ken, 1. Don't we actually want something suggesting good value? Don't we want people to say "why wasn't this done ages ago, because it's so obviously a good thing?"? 2. We are restoring climate, not climate parameters. 3. My point about "restoration" is that it gives useful leeway - it begs the questions "towards what state/date?" and "how far". In the case of the Sahara, there was flourishing agriculture at one time, so one might like to restore the climate to allow agriculture back. In most cases one would aim to restore a region or ecosystem part-way or all-way to some pre-industrial state when life was flourishing. Indeed, perhaps one should consider "ecosystem restoration" o r "ecosystem recovery" rather than "climate restoration". One of the great potential benefits of geoengineering is in reducing species extinctions - we have estimates of 30-50% extinctions with 2 degrees C of warming. The Arctic ocean is a very significant ecosystem, which is in desperate need of recovery, not only for animals like polar bears, but also for marine life. "Improvement" has the disadvantage that some climates may have been improved by global warming, for some people. For example the Arctic is improved for oil exploration by sea ice retreat. And "improvement" is rather more subjective than "restoration". But shouldn't we talking about a joint project? This could be for submission to the Royal Society by Dec 11th, to give us a deadline and incentive. Ken, John, Stephen, would you be game for a project proposal combining stratospheric and tropospheric techniques? Who else could we bring in? Alvia, could you advise? For example, could/should Alan Robock be persuaded/invited? Cheers, John (to bed as past midnight here) ----- Original Message ----- 20 From: Ken Caldeira To: John Nissen Cc: David Schnare ; John Latham ; Stephen Salter Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 5:34 PM Subject: Re: the science and technology of climate cooling ??? My problem with 'climate restoration' is threefold: 1. It is too obviously value laden, so it will never be adopted by people who are both for and against this work. 2. We are not restoring the climate system's longwave and shortwave fluxes to any earlier state. We are partially offsetting a change in longwave fluxes with a change in short wave fluxes. The scientific climate community will not see this as a restoration, even if certain fields are more similar to the earlier state. 3. I do not agree that the goal is 'restoration'. I think the goal is something closer to 'improvement'. (If climate change were to make the Sahel moister, would we want to restore them back to crippling droughts?) ___________________________________________________ Ken Caldeira Carnegie Institution Dept of Global Ecology 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]; kcald [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dge.stanford.edu/DGE/CIWDGE/labs/caldeiralab +1 650 704 7212; fax: +1 650 462 5968 On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:20 AM, John Nissen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Dear David, I proposed that we refer to "climate restoration" rather than "climate cooling", as I believe that should be our objective in using some of the proposed geoengineering techniques. But you are concerned by side-effects. The side-effects of the proposed climate restoration techniques, using stratospheric aerosols and marine cloud brightening, are well researched because we can study the effects of volcanoes (like Pinatubo) and contrails from ships respectively. It turns out that both techniques are relatively benign - and benefits (including the protection of both terrestrial and oceanic carbon sinks, which threaten to decline due to global warming) vastly outweigh the negative side effects (such as a small amount of ozone depletion and acid rain in the case of sulphate aerosols). Neither technique is life threatening. Further more neither technique is expensive - we are talking of a few billion dollars per annum at most. On the other hand, without geoengineering, the cost of adaptation to global warming, even just the global warming in the pipeline, is enormous - and millions of lives would be affected. It seems that the media are determined to poke fun at geoengineering, but they are producing a lot of disinformation which distracts the policy makers from the task at hand, i.e. to save ourselves from getting caught in a spiral of global warming and sea level rise, which would most likely follow from loss of sea ice or massive methane release in the Arctic region. However, if it is a scientific advisor to the government who denigrates geoengineering [1] [2], then I am concerned that they may not be giving good advice to policy makers, which would be a breach of duty and moral obligation. I challenge anyone to come up with a strong argument why we should not deploy geoengineering, when this appears the only way to guard aga inst the risks of Arctic sea ice disappearance and massive methane release, either of which could happen in the next few years. Surely geoengineering has to be top priority for government, although it should be done in conjunction with mitigation efforts. Kind regards, John John Nissen Chiswick, London W4 [snip] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
