I think all of us in favour of geoengineering look upon the space sunshades
idea as something put into articles by journalists to discredit
geoengineering. It is totally irrelevant because it couldn't be implemented
till very late in this century and we will have sorted out the CO2 balance
and energy systems by then.
The time for SRM is the near future till we get CO2 extraction and non
carbon energy sorted.
john gorman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul" <[email protected]>
To: "geoengineering" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 7:48 PM
Subject: Re: WWF also on geo-eng Re: [geo] Re: Friends of the Earth calls
for geoengineering research & states that mitigation is not enough to stay
safe
Ken -- Excellent post.
The British Friends of the Earth statement includes the sensible line:
“For the solar radiation techniques solar shades remains the stuff of
children’s sci-fi films.”
Geoengineering is giving itself a bad name by appearing overly
enthusiastic about "Edward Teller" type ideas
[Remember Teller -- the 'father of the H-bomb', and proposer of many
schemes to use nuclear devices for such purposes as extracting natural
gas from tight formations, building a new 'Panama Canal' and building
a deep water port in the far northwestern part of Alaska. The last of
these lead to Inuit (Native Alaskan) self-protective reactions with
consequences that last to this day. The long-term side-effects ended
up being larger than the proposed main effect].
The Sierra Club surely counts itself among organizations supporting
well-understood activities that sequester carbon (e.g. forests) or
change the albedo constructively (e.g. white roofs), and supporting
sensible research (e.g. on CCS). This focus is implicit in the name
or our main program: Climate Recovery Partnership (http://
www.sierraclub.org/crp/)
Research on concepts that will lead to increased ocean acidification
might be acceptable if married to technologies to offset those
effects. While "Everything is connected to everything else" is almost
tautologically true, connections are often small enough that they can
be ignored. With many geoengineering proposals -- not so.
If the geoengineering community hopes to bring on board environmental
groups, it will need good answers to the kinds of questions implied by
the above. There's some good thinking in the as yet small
geoengineering literature on raising this kind of question. There's
as yet a dearth of compelling responses.
Paul Craig
Sierra Club
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