AUGUST 19, 2009, 9:27 AM
The Horror of Climate Engineering? By <http://*tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/author/john-tierney/>JOHN TIERNEY In response to my <http://*www.*nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11tier.html>column and <http://*tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/climate-engineering/>post on climate engineering, <http://*tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/climate-engineering/#comment-160331>Charlie offered a comment: "I am really surprised that a libertarian and climate skeptic such as yourself does not react with horror at the concept of geoengineering." He chastised me for putting too much faith in the computer climate models that would be used to engineer the climate, and for not being skeptical of "willful intrusion by state actors in a complex, chaotic, global system." As a matter of fact, I am horrified when I contemplate climate engineering. Although there's always been a gee-whiz part of me that likes big projects - in the 1980s I did a cover story for Esquire, "When Men Think Big," about plans for the English-French Chunnel and less realistic plans for a super-fast subterranean train from New York to Los Angeles - I've also gotten a lot more skeptical of the practicality of grand schemes. I shudder to imagine entrusting the global thermostat to the United Nations or some quasi-governmental agency (an entity that brings to my mind the U.S. Postal Service). I don't trust today's computer models to predict climate, much less tell us how to precisely control it. I don't know how much the world will warm up, and I hope climate engineering won't be necessary. As I noted, some scientists fear that artificially cooling the globe could lead to more drought and other disasters. But if you believe, as I do, that there's some risk of dangerous global warming, how can we afford not to study what might turn out to be the only practical alternative? When I asked J. Eric Bickel, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about criticism of his climate-engineering <http://*fixtheclimate.com/component-1/the-solutions-new-research/climate-engineering/>report from Copenhagen Consensus Center, he replied: It is very important to maintain the proper perspective. The choice we face is not between a climate-engineered world and a world without climate change. Rather, it is between a climate-engineered world and the world that will prevail without climate engineering. Climate models predict changes in precipitation patterns in a high CO2 world without climate engineering. As you may know, <http://*rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/4039.abstract>Calderia and Wood (2008) have produced model results that suggest precipitation in a climate engineered world would be close to that of a world without climate change. Dr. Bickel and his co-author of the Copenhagen report, Lee Lane, the co-director of the American Enterprise Institute's Geoengineering Research Project, recommend research into several approaches to climate engineering, including the direct cooling of the globe through reductions in solar radiation (by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere or by brightening clouds over the oceans) and also the indirect approach of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (know as air capture). They calculate that the direct cooling are especially promising and could deliver enormous benefits relative to the costs. In <http://*fixtheclimate.com/#/component-1/the-solutions-new-research/climate-engineering/>acritique of their report, Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, argues that the economics of the cooling climate engineers are so uncertain - in particular the potential costs if something goes wrong - that it's impossible to put any confidence in cost-benefit analyses of different approaches. Mr. Lane offered this response to Dr. Pielke: I have to disagree with him, although some economists whom I very much respect share his sentiment. Benefit-cost analysis, as we acknowledge, is sometimes difficult to apply especially when uncertainties are large. But there really isn't any alternative to it. Trying to substitute decision-rules for benefit-cost analysis, as Dr. Pielke does, is merely masking the benefit-cost comparison behind the choice among all the possible decision-rules that might plausibly be applied. As we quote Professor Richard Cooper in our paper, "Everyone who urges a change in policy (or resists one) is at least implicitly comparing costs and benefits." I believe that explicit comparisons are better than implicit ones. I also received some comments on the Copenhagen report from Robert Lempert of RAND, who is the director the Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition at the think tank. Here's his reaction: The report's basic finding is reasonable and consistent with much thinking on this topic - nations should conduct research to better understand the potential benefits and risks of geoengineering. But the report provides a significantly flawed application of cost benefit analysis because it uses best-estimates only and does not consider the risks that a deployed geoengineering system could fail. Not surprisingly, the cost-benefit for geoengineering systems appears to be dominated by the risk of failure unless one is very certain that a deployed system will have no unintended adverse consequences. These flaws in the Bickel and Lane analysis do not affect their conclusion that we ought to conduct research on geoengineering. It may affect their judgments that this research should focus on solar radiation management vs. air capture technologies, because the risks of the former are very different than those of the latter. The air-capture approach would be less controversial politically - by removing the carbon emitted by humans, politicians could say they were restoring the atmosphere to a a more "natural" condition. But I wonder how many devout greens would still object to such large-scale engineering and insist on cutting emissions as the only acceptable course. Would any Lab readers? And are there any readers with opinions on the cost-benefit analyses of climate engineering? <http://*www.*nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>Copyright 2009 <http://*www.*nytco.com/>The New York Times Company --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
