Hi Andrew, I think you're absolutely right about the Russian roulette, I'm afraid. People are avoiding the stark facts. Even zero emissions may not get us out of the multiple holes we've dug. Has anybody done the modelling for zero emissions overnight? And if so, does it take into account the risk of Arctic sea ice disappearance, revised back from 2100 or later to 2030 or sooner?
Cheers, John ----- Original Message ----- From: Andrew Lockley To: Peter Read Cc: geoengineering ; [email protected] ; Davies, John Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2009 8:30 PM Subject: [geo] Re: The emissions reductions gospel is failing - we need something more You can't take a simple decline to zero, as you have to consider the balance between different fuels, and other changes such as replacement of primitive stoves. These lead to massively significant changes to brown haze, soot and tropospheric sulfur aerosols. How are you proposing these will decline? You also need to look at enteric fermentation (cow farts), fertilizer-triggered, and landfill emissions (rotten vegetables), which will grow even in the event that we move to a carbon-free energy economy due to the increasing/urbanizing population. I think you need to address these irritating hard-to-calculate factors to make your arguments robust. I'm not levelling you any kind of personal accusation, but I've never really found a suite of data that satisfy me that all likely effects have been integrated into a single model. Quite simply I do not have confidence that the scientific community fully understands the risks we've already taken. IMO, there's a significant chance in my view that emissions reduction which is ill planned could even make things worse, if for example soot is uncontrolled but sulfur pollution is controlled quickly. I feel like we're playing Russian roulette with the whole planet - but without knowing how many bullets we have in the chamber. Please someone, tell me I'm an idiot and we at least understand the science? A 2009/4/25 Peter Read <[email protected]> Many thanks for this comment Andrew - it is a matter of judgement what to take as the alternative emissions reductions scenario, but I avoided an abrupt stop as I felt that that would alienate readers. I took a reduction to zero between 2010 and 2035 to be the outcome of an imaginable Manhatten Project style drive to reduce emissions That leads to the tripling of my proposed cumulative heating metric by 2060 with no end in sight). That assumes that pre-industrial levels represent safety, by no means certain. If you take Hansen's 350 ppm to represent safety then the metric is increased by more than three since raising the safe level cuts out a larger proportion of the pre-2010 integral than it does of the 2010-2060 integral (eye-ball integration, areas A and B in fig 2 in "Global Gardening with a Leaky Bucket: Addressing climate catastrophe through Art 3.3 of the UNFCCC" which can be accessed at http://seat.massey.ac.nz/personal/p.read/GGLBnqf25ix08.pdf ) However, I would welcome comments in response to my question " If anyone sees anything wrong with this suggestion could they please comment". Lenton does recognize cumulative heating as a possible metric but, in his 2008 paper, only in relation to the slow process of ocean thermal expansion. If accepted as reasonable in relation to the much quicker process of ice sheet destabilization then it has dramatic implications for policy. Can anyone see a fault in the argument I have made for this metric in relation to that threat? Cheers Peter ----- Original Message ----- From: Andrew Lockley To: [email protected] Cc: geoengineering ; [email protected] ; Davies, John Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2009 3:56 AM Subject: [geo] Re: The emissions reductions gospel is failing - we need something more As a general comment, I think it's best to consider an immediate cut to zero emissions when analysing climate effects. Whilst totally unrealistic, it gets across the message that we may have already fallen over the waterfall, and no amount of emissions reduction can save us from catastrophic effects. Based on this 'zero-option': From my personal understanding of the research, we've got at least 40 years of further warming in the pipeline, whilst we wait for the oceans to warm up (100rs is probably more likely). Then, we've got the feedbacks from Amazon burn and permafrost melting (not to mention clathrates). We've also got the summer ice-albedo feedback in the North pole. Added to that, we've got the impending collapse of ice sheets, shelves and glaciers - together with the resulting albedo changes. In my view, it's only when the media start reporting on studies that show +ve feedbacks and catastrophic effects EVEN WITH ZERO EMISSIONS that we will see a sea-change in attitudes to geoengineering from politicians and the public. The current fashion for mitigation has lead to a research focus that's not based on detailed consideration of this zero-option, so people are largely unaware of its consequences. A 2009/4/25 Peter Read <[email protected]> Hi folks John does me too much credit with the word 'modest'. Thought I had circulated, actually, but as it seems not, the word is 'forgetful'. Be that as it may, and given : A that time may be running out B that the last time I had something substantial to say it took three years to reach the light of day through the formal peer review process [ Climatic Change, 87/3-4 (2008) Biosphere carbon stock management: addressing the threat of abrupt climate change in the next few decades: an editorial essay Peter Read 305-320 ) ] and C that I don't have the modelling capacity at my disposal to turn the idea into a formal paper, beyond what I presented to the IPCC meeting in Berlin, Nov 2007, http://ecf.pik-potsdam.de/past-events/ipcc-conference-1/documents-1/Peter-Read-Berlin%20IPCC%20statement.pdf/view which I find difficult to access but is also viewable at http://ips.ac.nz/publications/publications/show/219. would it be possible to use this blog for peer review of the language in my guardianonline article reproduced by John? viz: "A measure of the threat is the accumulation of warmth from successive summers, which is making the glaciers' undersides increasingly mushy. Even a deeply implausible reduction of emissions to zero in 25 years sees that measure treble over the next half-century with no end in sight." This metric is discussed at slightly greater length in sections 4 and 5 of my long essay "Global Gardening with a Leaky Bucket: Addressing climate catastrophe through Art 3.3 of the UNFCCC" which can be accessed at http://seat.massey.ac.nz/personal/p.read/GGLBnqf25ix08.pdf . If anyone sees anything wrong with this suggestion could they please comment, but note there are several danger metrics discussed in Tim Lenton's paper last year and others may turn out to be correct. When discussing threats all possibilities need to be considered unless demonstrably incorrect. Ken once mentioned to me that there is a more academic blog for less informal discussion of geo-engineering issues and maybe he could circulate this message there also. If anyone wants to use the concept I would quite like to be cited. I mention that because I find my ideas - or something like them - being used without acknowledgement, e.g. in scenarios involving substantial carbon removals developed recently by Hansen's group and not so far different from results that I published in the 1990's and reproduced at pp273 (I think it was, I' ve lost my copy) of the IPCC's 2000 LULUC report. Attempting to communicate, possibly to collaborate, with Hansen, I got this message from one of his colleagues (Pushker Kharecha) whom I suppose didn't want Jim to know that some of his analysis was not exactly new. I fully understood what you were requesting, and I was trying to be reasonably polite about the whole thing, but let me now be more blunt. Completely setting aside my assessment of your essay and draft paper, your email messages alone contain too many erroneous statements to even count at this point, much less attempt to correct. I don't know what your academic background is, but it's unfortunately clear that you not only have a fundamental lack of understanding about much of our paper, but you also don't seem to grasp some key aspects of general carbon cycle science. Given all of this it simply wouldn't make sense for Jim to endorse your presentation. Again, I sincerely regret to tell you these things, since ultimately you do seem well-intentioned and genuinely concerned about the issues. Dirty work at the academic crossroads? Cheers Peter ----- Original Message ----- From: John Nissen To: geoengineering Cc: [email protected] ; Davies, John Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 3:01 AM Subject: [geo] The emissions reductions gospel is failing - we need something more Contribution from our geoengineering comrade, Peter Read (since he's probably too modest to post it himself): http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/apr/15/geoengineering-emissions-reduction Interviewed last week, John Holdren, President Obama's chief scientific adviser, said that drastic measures should not be "off the table" in discussions on how best to tackle climate change and that geo-engineering could not be ruled out. Making clear these were his personal views, he said: "It's got to be looked at. We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table." He's right. We don't have that luxury – not only because the Kyoto protocol's first phase, running to 2012, is manifestly failing, but because the emissions reduction approach that it embodies cannot succeed. It is manifestly failing because emissions are going ahead faster than even the worst scenarios considered by the IPCC, which provides scientific assessments to the UN Climate Convention and because many rich countries are on course to fall short of their emissions reductions commitments. Research since the IPCC's last assessment reveals that the threat of climatic disaster is more serious than previously supposed. Several threats exist but the most imminent is probably a collapse of substantial areas of land-based ice into the oceans, as studies of ancient climates show happened in previous warming phases. This seems likely to be due to the lubrication of Greenland's ice floes by water that accumulates year after year, with warmer summers melting the surface and rivers of melt-water flowing down crevasses to the bedrock, making the underside of the ice increasingly mushy and prone to slip down towards the ocean. Reports from Greenland, of increased frequency of "ice-quakes", suggest that areas of the ice cover have slipped and bumped into other areas that are still stuck. When the last bit gives way there may be an unstoppable rush of ice into the ocean, as with ancient warming phases, raising ocean levels by several metres over a few decades. "Probably"? "Likely"? "Suggest"? "Maybe"? Yes, all is uncertain and the models are inadequate. But you don't drive full-speed down a twisty lane on a foggy winter's night hoping there's no ice round the next bend. A measure of the threat is the accumulation of warmth from successive summers, which is making the glaciers' undersides increasingly mushy. Even a deeply implausible reduction of emissions to zero in 25 years sees that measure treble over the next half-century with no end in sight. So something more than emissions reductions is needed. We must take CO2 out of the atmosphere or prevent some of the sun's radiation from reaching the surface. But geo-engineering is usually thought of as shielding the earth from solar radiation by whitening clouds and by putting reflectors in space between earth and sun. The latter seems difficult to reverse and perhaps a very last resort. But whitening clouds can be quickly halted. It involves putting sulphur aerosols into the clouds in amounts that are trivial compared with the effects of either volcanic eruptions or coal burning worldwide. Or injecting saltwater micro-particles into ocean clouds which, whitened, then rain slightly salty water back into the oceans. Amazing though it may seem, these apparently hopeful options are opposed by NGOs that seem more willing to run the risk of climatic catastrophe than deviate from the emissions reductions gospel. Their concern seems to be that geo-engineering will result in relaxed pressure to reduce emissions, which neglects the reality that more ambitious commitments will obviously go with increased capability to mitigate. They even oppose research, unlike Holdren's "it's got to be looked at". The British researcher Tim Lenton uses the term geo-engineering to mean any way of cooling the earth that is not emissions reductions (even growing trees, which is included under the Kyoto protocol). His definition puts me – somewhat to my surprise – among the ranks of geo-engineers, as I have long advocated widespread tree-planting programmes, such as those initiated by the Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Muta Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, which has planted more than 30m trees across Kenya. Growing trees is one way of stocking carbon out of the linked ocean-atmosphere system. Others advocate fuelling power stations with energy crops and capturing CO2 from flue gases and piping them into deep saline aquifers. A third option is biochar, current darling of the policy community, which promises not only to store carbon in the soil but to provide rural energy supplies and raise soil productivity as the basis for sustainable rural development. Yet even this win-win-win prospect is rejected by 129 NGOs who have declared "Biochar – a new big threat to people land and ecosystems". I would rather listen to the 1,500 poor subsistence farmers in Kumba, south-west Cameroon, who are already experiencing its benefits and who deny rich-country NGO claims that civil society in the developing world rejects biochar. • Peter Read is an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Energy Research, Massey University, New Zealand -------------------------------------------------------------------------- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.0.238 / Virus Database: 270.12.4/2080 - Release Date: 04/25/09 08:29:00 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
