Bill:
Good report on NAS. Your comment: "Alan Robock on the panel said that his modeling results were different from Ken's. He found that stratospheric aerosols injected at high latitudes would have significant global consequences if I understood him correctly." --suggests that we thrash out the true implications of the difference between Alan's & Ken's work, and get a qualitative sense at least of what happens to the Indian monsoon, etc. As I remarked long ago, a lesser monsoon is not necessarily worse, for monsoons bring destruction and flooding as well as rainfall needed for crops. I've stood in a drowned rice paddy and seen the crop fail. But what levels of reduced rainfall are threatening? We've got to improve models, of course. But only the dance between theory and experiment gives science its power, and in the end scaling up experiments will be the first true test. DARPA can do that. I see no one on the horizon who could or would. And John's remark is valid: this is a threat and we should treat it as such, not just another interesting problem. Gregory Benford -----Original Message----- From: Bill Fulkerson <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Wed, Jun 17, 2009 10:07 am Subject: Re: National Academy geoengineering workshop Dear John:Th e Arctic risk was ignored by all but one speaker at the NAS Workshop on geoengineering, but Mike MacCracken did mention it in a question to one of the panels on the second day. He pointed out that geoengineerng does not have to be global to be useful. He referred to the decline in SO2 over the Arctic as something that could be reversed. I followed with another question to the same panel: "Isn't there a risk that is immediate? It is the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic. How important is this risk? I don't know but the possible positive feedbacks are worrisome. The only way to reduce this risk is geoengineering. It is the only strategy with the right time constant. SRM can be limited to higher latitudes, and it may work as Ken Caldeira's modeling shows. The deployment decision would involve only a handful of nations and indigenous populations. It is a perfect limited application. It puts a time clock on getting the needed R&D done. This risk and its implications for the clock on geo has not been discussed at the meeting. How should this risk be treated by the workshop and by the full ACC Committee?"Alan Robock on the panel said that his modeling results were different from Ken's. He found that stratospheric aerosols injected at high latitudes would have significant global consequences if I understood him correctly.If I had20 had the wit I would have followed up by saying that an intense R&D effort should be focused on the Arctic because of the immediate risk. It should be in the context of a broader R&D program more global in nature. The Arctic problem would need to confront most of the issues faced by a global program of governance, ethics, management and verification, physical and life sciences ( the Arctic ecosystem impacts need to be estimated), modeling, and of course engineering. I found the workshop as highly relevant and most important. I believe it focused the attention of the ACC full Committee very well from a few comments I heard. I believe we all owe a debt to those who organized and carried out the meeting including the speakers. With best regards,Bill On Jun 17, 2009, at 6:43 AM, John Nissen wrote: Hi Gregory, Thanks for that. But I share Alvia's frustration that opportunities are lost at such meetings. In particular I'm always disappointed that the issue of Arctic warming and sea ice retreat seems never to be mentioned - at least never reported. I think we are all agreed that geoengineering to cool the Arctic and halt sea ice retreat is needed, for risk reduction (see the "Pros and Cons of geoengineering" thread). I don't think even Alan Robock would dispute that the risk of inaction is greater than the risk from possible side-effects (in particular mon soon weakening, which could actually be beneficial). And I also share David Schnare's frustration, that we pussy-foot over the seriousness and urgency of the problem - the risk of not geoengineering in time. Especially there is the risk that the Arctic warms sufficiently for massive methane release. And it is a life and death issue, if ever there was one. There is no way civilisation could survive the global warming that the methane could produce. Re DARPA, I agree with you that they could be useful. In particular, I'd like to see somebody treat global warming as an enemy (or at least as an extreme security threat), against which we need to use all the weapons at our disposal - together with some (such as Salter/Latham cloud brightening) that need to be developed. Only when we see global warming as a lethal threat will our instinct to fight for survival cut in. At present it seems that we, as a global society, are sleepwalking into oblivion. Cheers, John --- [email protected] wrote: All: I agree with Ken that it's a tad dismaying that earnest efforts by NAS get deplored. It's true we have some concrete agendas with a short time scale: the Arctic, and Slater/Latham methods, etc. Focus on those and set a firm ground for research. The Atlantic and other pieces are froth: neon ads for an actual set of ideas. Let them run; it's part of dealing with the many-heaqded moster of The M edia. The DARPA initiative Ken and I disagree on. They can be useful: their method is to put worked out possibilities on the table, mostly for other agencies. They developed the internet this way; I had an email address in 1969. But so often, they go first. I don't think DARPA automatically colors our efforts, any more than they did the internet we receive this email on. Or the mobile robots they encouraged these last ten years. Or... Gregory Benford -----Original Message----- From: Margaret Leinen <[email protected]> To: Alvia Gaskill <[email protected]>; [email protected]; geoengineering <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Jun 16, 2009 8:17 pm Subject: [geo] Re: NPR radio story on National Academy geoengineering workshop While many meetings indeed do little to advance thinking about geoengineering, I think that the mere fact that the NAS convened this meeting did a lot. The study by the Royal Society, the workshop and the inclusion of its results by the NAS in their 'climate c hoices' study both show substantial acceptance of the importance of geoengineering research by mainstream academies. This is enormous progress in a very short timeframe. And the studies are important stepping stones to federal funding in the US. The opportunity to attend the NAS workshop was on the web, but it wasn't advertised, so I do understand the frustration about attendance. -- Margaret Leinen, PhD. Climate=2 0Response Fund 119 S. Columbus Street Alexandria, VA 22314 202-415-6545 From: Alvia Gaskill <[email protected]> Reply-To: <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:52:10 -0400 To: <[email protected]>, geoengineering <[email protected]> Subject: [geo] Re: NPR radio story on National Academy geoengineering workshop These meetings accomplish little or nothing as it is the same people saying the same things over and over again. Just filling up that resume. If you are truly so conflicted about the subject, (doubt it) why don't you get out of the business or better yet, stop interfering with others who are in it (The I'm going to the DARPA meeting to stop it stunt you pulled a while back). Better yet, next time you guys schedule one of these get togethers, you can announce you are going to hold it so you can stop it. At least announce it far enough in advance so we can all plan not to go. BTW, I've come up with a new job description for people like Alan Robock and Dale Jameison: Professional Critic. Since they are both employed by universities, let's ad an un to that. Yeah, that sounds right: Unprofessional Critic. More candidates as I get time. ----- Original Scientists Debate Shading Earth As Climate Fix by Richa rd Harris All Things Considered, June 16, 2009 · Engineering our climate to stop global warming may seem like science fiction, but at a recent National Academy of Sciences meeting, scientists discussed some potential geoengineering experiments in earnest. Climate researcher Ken Caldeira was skeptical when he first heard about the idea of shading the Earth a decade ago in a talk by nuclear weapons scientist Lowell Wood. "He basically said, 'We don't have to bother with emissions reduction. We can just throw aerosols - little dust particles - into the stratosphere, and that'll cool the earth.' And I thought, 'Oh, that'll never work,' " Caldeira said. But when Caldeira sat down to study this, he was surprised to discover that, yes, it would work, and for the very same reasons that big volcanoes cool the Earth when they erupt. Fine particles in the stratosphere reflect sunlight back into space. And doing it would be cheap, to boot. Caldeira conducts res earch on climate and carbon cycles at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. During the past decade, he said, talk about this idea has moved from cocktail parties to very sober meetings, like the workshop this week put on by the National Academy of Sciences. "Frankly, I'm a little ambiv alent about all this," he said during a break in the meeting. "I've been pushing very hard for a research program, but it's a little scary to me as it becomes more of a reality that we might be able to toy with our environment, or our whole climate system at a planetary scale." Attempting to geoengineer a climate fix raises many questions, like when you would even consider trying it. Caldeira argued that we should have the technology at the ready if there's a climate crisis, such as collapsing ice sheets or drought-induced famine. At the academy's meeting, Harvard University's Dan Schrag agreed with that - up to a point. "I think we should consider climate engineering only as an emergency response to a climate crisis, but I question whether we're already experiencing a climate crisis - whether we've already crossed that threshold," Schrag said. In reality, carbon-dioxide emissions globally are on a runaway pace, despite rhetoric promising to control them. University of Calgary's David Keith suggested that we should consider moving to ward experiments that would test ideas on a global scale - and do it sooner rather than later. "It's not clear that during some supposed climate emergency would be the right time to try this new and unexplored technique," Keith said. And experiments could create di sasters. Alan Robock of Rutgers University cataloged a long list of risks. Particles in the stratosphere that block sunlight could also damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harsh ultraviolet light. Or altering the stratosphere could reduce precipitation in Asia, where it waters the crops that feed 2 billion people. Imagine if we triggered a drought and famine while trying to cool the planet, Robock said. On the plus side, it's also possible that diffusing sunlight could end up boosting agriculture, he said. "We need to evaluate all these different, contrasting impacts to see whether it really would have an effect on food or not," he said. "Maybe it's a small effect. We really don't know that yet. We need more research on that." Thought experiments to date have focused primarily on the risks of putting sulfur dust in the stratosphere. There are many other geoengineering ideas - like making clouds brighter by spraying seawater particles into the air. But none of them is simple. "I don't think there is a quick and easy answer to employing even one of those quick and cheap and easy solutions," said social scientist Susanne Moser. There's no mechanism in place to reach a global consensus about doing this - and a consensus seems unlikely in any ev ent. Who gets to decide where to set the global thermostat? And will this simply become an excuse not to control our emissions to begin with? These were all questions without answers at the academy's meeting. Message ----- From: Ken Caldeira To: geoengineering Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 6:17 PM Subject: [geo] NPR radio story on National Academy geoengineering workshop http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105483423 ___________________________________________________ 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 Bill Fulkerson, Senior FellowInstitute for a Secure and Sustainable EnvironmentUniversity of Tennessee311 Conference Center Bldg.Knoxville, TN [email protected] -9221, -1838 FAXHome865-988-8084; 865-680-0937 CELL2781 Wheat Road, Lenoir City, TN 37771 = --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. 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