Hi Diana,
The geoengineering debate is largely forced upon us for the human unwillingess to cut emissions. Had you followed tonight's announcement the United States are not prepared to reduce their emissions more than 3-4% from 1990 levels, they present the matter using figures just couple years ago as the period 1990-2005 saw the CO2 emissions to raise 21-22% over the period, effectively announcing a status quo. Until you can get the emitters like the United States to agree a substantial cut, 3-4% cut is less than Kyoto cut well over decade ago, the only other option, people unwilling to rain in greehouse gases that have global warming forcing effect on the athmosphere and acidification effect on the oceans, the remaining option in the toolbox to combat the committed warming and the future projected warming, may well be geoengineering. The scope of geoengineering is not unlimited but always stay relatively marginal for practical intents and purposes at least. If the overall global warming projected is 4C to 6C which appear in recent models, geoengineering hardly could make our planet too cool to mitigate even half of that warming whatever we wished to implement with our finite financial resources. I would draw attention to your language here which seems prejuducial and prescriptive: "how a more comprehensive, democratic and sustainable approach could be devised should we ever be in the unimaginably horrible situation where deployment could be considered as a serious option." This seems to have the pre-trial judgement that "unimaginably horrible situation" of deployment is the answer before the question is even made, a totally unscientific and prejudiced approach, giving a value-based assessment before anything is done. With this kind of attitude the 19th century diggers of the Suez Canal were told that the Red Sea and the Mediterranean fish populations would transfer diseases and both seas would go into extinction due to pathogenic pollution from one sea to the other once the ships started to take short cut. So much better then to make all the ships to go around Africa and pour billions of tonnes extra fuel each year. Your prejudiced approach is scare-mongering. Similarly, many geoengineering solutions loose their effect immediately or almost immediately when turned off. You also include everything and anything, as a way to stymify any reasonable outcome within acceptable time frames. There is also the issue of indigenous, the Chinese consider themselves indigenous, the Japanese industrial revolution was indigenous, also large nations can be indigenous although this is now hijacked to mean small, stateless, tribal, et cetera, making the consultations in complex scientific issues infinite due to need of raising the educational standards to comprehend the geo and climate science in detail. Does this mean that the indigenous need to be fed and opinionated by Greenpeace and the kind of folk to do what their patrons in the West want indigenous say. "It must be democratic, participatory, informed and international. Those on the front line of the fight against climate change (think Arctic peoples, Indigenous Peoples, small island states, least developed countries, coastal peoples) need to be involved. For the most part, they have not participated in this conversation and are largely unaware it is even going on." When doctor needs to do an operation and remove appendicitis or do judgemental decisions in case of food poisonings or some unclear inflammatory condition, is the patient put through the science classes learn how the operations are conducted. No. The good scientific judgement is there to determine whether the operation delivers more benefits than harms, all in balance of probabilities. Sometimes people do worsen and die as they did not respond to the operations as was hoped for. But does that mean that no operation must go aheat until every patient is fully acquainted with the medical trials or knows the pharmaceutical studies of the tablets he eats to control his condition. No. If the effect is bad the treatment is suspended. Trials of new therapies are also made to minimise the impact in sample size or in duration. This sounds like Greenpeace in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s saying that nuclear energy is bad, coal-power stations were tolerable and cleaner. It goes the same way like in 1960s DDT was banned claimed to kill millions of people. In fact the malaria deaths that stood at 50,000 per year in 1960 increased to over 1,000,000 cases per year in the areas where DDT treatment was withdrawn, resulting in over 40,000,000 deaths. WMO finally reintroduced DDT for malaria battle back in 2006 and the cases are rapidly falling in areas where pandemics had grown so large. When AIDS were discovered and only 500 cases were diagnosed it was suggested that quarantine for the sexual intercourse transmitted disease would be contained if all the infected people would be stopped from having sex in outside community. The result: world-wide epidemic with tens of millions: 46 million infected people in some continents with 7.8% of entire population is today HIV positive, plus 26,000,000 AIDS deaths. Was the prevention of the right of travel and freedom to practise sex by 500 (mostly drug addicts or homosexuals) more important than protection of overall world population now 46 million infected like uncontrolled epidemic of leprocy in antiquity, in addition to 26 million that has already died. Biofuels? All well-intentioned efforts, but wrong. It is easy to be retrospectively saying this and that. Many things can go many ways. But demonising geoengineering before anything is done is wrong: is simply as wrong as claiming the Suez Canal was a dasngerous idea and the whole ecology of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea would collapse if the Indian Ocean was connected to the Mediterranean by the artificial channel. If we did not have dug that, how much more CO2 would the ocean going vessels have dumped into skies, then to acidify the ocean. Millions, billions tonnes of CO2. If Greenpeace has shut up and Europe had built its energy supply based on nuclear energy instead of coal-fired power stations, claimed safe, in 1970s anti-nuclear hysteria, would we have even found out the global warming problem yet. Alas, much because switchover from nuclear to coal, we see the well intentioned, poorly engineering acquainted people acting as advisers, that the problem has come to be what it is today. With the United States today 25.11.2009 declaring that they cannot afford CO2 beyond 3-4% of 1990 levels of fossil fuel consumption, there is no other realistic solutions for us left by politicians except to try to patch up the awesome gap by geoengineering as far as we can. It is certain that if the United States cannot reduce its fossil fuel emissions beyond 3-4% levels from 1990 base year without seriously affecting economic growth, consumption and the acceptable living standards of its citizens, that China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and other countries with much lower per capita consumption of energy are unable to rain in their own consumption as politicians stating otherwise will not get elected to help the USA maintain its high level of consumption while asking others to cut theirs from very much lower emission positions without rising poverty. I may have sounded harsh on this judgement, but as it stands 3-4% reduction in the USA per capita emission of 25 tonnes of CO2 for 2020 is certain to call for geoengineering to take up the bits and sort out the anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing thus forced upon the rest of world. Kr, Albert From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: [geo] scale, scope, structure Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:44:12 -0500 Dear Ken and other Geoengineering Group members, I am not sure exactly who the "we" in Ken Caldeira's message refers to, but I think it would be premature (to be generous) to assert there is meaningful consensus about the need to do research into climate intervention/geoengineering. In fact, in the major intergovernmental forum where responses to climate change are being discussed (the UNFCCC meetings in preparation for Copenhagen) there has not been any discussion of this topic. Recent relevant decisions in other fora, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity , the London Convention and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea have tended to caution against real world experimentation in geoengineering technologies (mostly ocean fertilization) . The vast majority of the world's governments, peoples, environmentalists and other civil society groups involved in these processes have very little -- if any -- knowledge of what is being proposed in the field of geoengineering. While one of the four pillars of the UNFCCC talks is technology, there is no reference to geoengineering anywhere in the draft text. Surely if this was a matter of consensus, one would find such a reference. I think the consensus that Ken is referring to is maybe one amongst a narrow group of climate scientists, or perhaps amongst an even narrower set of individuals interested in geoengineering. Such as most of the members of this group? The recent flurry of reports, many of which were authored by regular contributors to this group cannot possibly be construed as a consensus. There is no way that a question of such magnitude and far reaching implications should be conceived as a technical matter to be resolved by a small group of scientists. Trying to restrain the debate and frame it in such narrow technical terms will yield conclusions that are wrong, incomplete and counter-productive to meeting the climate challenge. Let me be clear – Apart from geoengineering diverting funds from other climate related research that in my view would be more fruitful, there is some research into geoengineering technologies that is harmless. Climate scientists should be free to explore whatever interventions they wish in the laboratory or via computer modelling (‘behind closed doors among consenting adults’ as it has been eloquently expressed). But we know how limited those results can be and how such models often drive demands for real world analogues to verify or disprove the In silico results and how pressure for field trials follows quickly on the heels of interesting modelling results. It is quite another matter when it comes to leaving the lab and pursuing experimentation "outside" as James Fleming usefully framed it last week at a forum in Montreal. As we have already seen in the case of ocean fertilization, scientists and companies are anxious to try out their theories in the real world on ever larger and larger scales and won’t take disappointing or downright negative results as a red light. In the case of ocean fertilization, despite 13 small trials with poor results and high-profile calls for caution, a rather large state-sponsored experiment (Lohafex) was given a green light as some sort of cause celebre for free scientific enquiry, despite the fact that that same state (Germany) has helped to broker a moratorium at the Convention on Biological diversity less than year earlier. That the results appeared to back up some of the reasons for the moratorium is not exactly cause for celebration. By that time any possible harm is already done. When it comes to the commons, like the atmosphere, the stratosphere or the oceans, surely a more robust system of regulation and governance would be required before "we" can allow a series of experiments to be launched. And while the recently announced UK and US Hearings into the question of governance of geoengineering, it would be the height of arrogance to think that such a process is a replacement for a global conversation. The order in which these things happen is of utmost importance and I would hope that there would be a consensus on ironing out these governance issues BEFORE real-world experimentation gets any serious consideration amongst responsible scientists. Indeed, given that the purpose of the UNFCCC is to "prevent dangerous anthopogenic interference with the climate system" (article 2), it could be argued that such experimentation directly contravenes the express purpose of the treaty. I am not qualified to make a legal assessment of that eventuality but surely the only (however flawed) international legal instrument we have on climate change cannot be ignored. But that is not all we have either. A quick scan of international institutions would reveal a number of treaties and international agencies with a direct interest in climate "intevention" ranging from the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) to an agency like the FAO whose goal to eliminate hunger could be further set back by droughts provoked by stratospheric aerosol injections or poorly executed modifications of soil through biochar addition; or the Convention on Biological Diversity that has already expressed concerns about geoengineering, or the human rights system which aims to protect peoples rights to free, prior and informed consent or to health or food or other matter that could very well be affected not only by deployment, but even by experimentation. Obviously any country that might be affected would also want to have its say. And if we agree that some rules need to be determined before experimentation gets any consideration, we must be clear that such rules cannot be established only by scientists, only to be followed if people sign up to them and only to be followed when it suits a scientific programme to follow them. Exclusivity will not work. Elitism will not work. Voluntarism will not work. The discussion on governance cannot be led by scientists who will receive the research grants, corporations who will own the patents and institutions with close connections to the corporations. It must be democratic, participatory, informed and international. Those on the front line of the fight against climate change (think Arctic peoples, Indigenous Peoples, small island states, least developed countries, coastal peoples) need to be involved. For the most part, they have not participated in this conversation and are largely unaware it is even going on. Others on this list have made the point that silence should not be mistaken for consent. In this case, since you are seeking input on what should be prioritized, I would suggest that what is most urgently needed is some serious research on the international governance mechanisms that are currently in place, the gaps in terms of covering off the different geoengineering technologies that exist and the beginning of a plan for how a more comprehensive, democratic and sustainable approach could be devised should we ever be in the unimaginably horrible situation where deployment could be considered as a serious option. Also required is a throrough engagement with communities beyond this narrow technical community that allows those groups to bring their knowledge and their wisdom to bear upon the question of whether large scale climate intervention is a wise approach, not merely whether it is feasible. Determining the wisdom of the course of action should at least come before sinking large amounts of taxpayers money into building the mechanisms to deploy such systems. And never should such technologies be allowed to be privately owned or unilaterally experimented or deployed (as we know, with several of these technologies, experimentation IS deployment). Thank you for opening up this debate - I just think it should move beyond the technical and embrace some of the critical political questions that need to be asked prior to those technical issues. Regards -- Diana Bronson -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. 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