Re: [geo] News from Asilomar?

[John Nissen]

Thanks Mike. The Asilomar organising committee statement refers to geoengineering techniques as "climate intervention methods (solar radiation management) and climate remediation methods (carbon dioxide removal)."  In the statement it says: We do not yet have sufficient knowledge of the risks associated with using methods for climate intervention and remediation, their intended and unintended impacts, and their efficacy in reducing the rate of climatic change to assess whether they should or should not be implemented. Thus, further research is essential. What's missing is that we also need to have sufficient knowledge of the risks associated with NOT geoengineering (i.e. the risks that geoengineering would be guarding against), particularly in the Arctic, to be sure that geoengineering is not needed urgently as a precaution. I am sorry I was not at the Asilomar meeting, but I was trying to make a similar point to some influential people at a Royal Society meeting last week [1].  One of the topics of discussion was whether the government should take precautionary actions in order to reduce the possibility of extreme events.  An example was the urgent action taken to reduce the probability of a serious pandemic from swine flu, for which action the UK government was to be commended, Peter Webster said.  (He strongly espouses the precautionary principle.) Why isn't a similar precautionary approach urged by responsible scientists, in order to save the Arctic sea ice?  We do not have sufficient knowledge of the risks of letting the sea ice disappear, to be sure it would not be catastrophic, do we? Beggars can't be choosers. Cheers, John [1] http://royalsociety.org/Handling-uncertainty-in-science/ --- Mike MacCracken wrote: Here is the Conference statement that was issued to the media. There was considerable discussion and revision based on discussions on Friday morning, so this is said at the moment to be only from the Scientific Organizing Committee, but in going over the next to last draft, there were only a few suggestions for fixes and the SOC tried to incorporate them. This statement is now being circulated to attendees (some of whom had left before the final session and most before it was completed) offering the opportunity to indicate their support of the statement. That process will be going on for a week. Other materials from the conference are presently in draft form and there will be some review cycles on them to get them into better shape. In that there were a considerable number of media there, there should be stories appearing about the meeting this coming week. Best, Mike MacCracken On 3/28/10 10:34 AM, "Josh" <joshuahorton...@gmail.com> wrote: Anyone have news from Asilomar for those of us who weren't able to attend? Josh Horton -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineer...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.