Hello,
I would recommend that this very limited budget be spent on the development
of an aerosol delivery design which would be flexible enough in use to
attract other sources of funding. Most, if not all, SRM aerosol injection
proposals have been tightly focused on the primary goals of delivery at the
lowest cost and highest long term dependability. Yet, this may be an
opportunity to team up with other closely related proposals and efforts to
establish a funding pool.
The SRM Injection Delivery System I have in mind would be the High Altitude
Tether.
Here are a few examples of how that type of delivery system can be used by
other efforts.
1) The Jason Advisory Group has put out a technical report "Methods for
Remote Determination of CO2 Emissions". A tethered high altitude in situ
system could be a useful platform for some of the proposed CO2 monitoring
systems. http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/emissions.pdf
2) The NCAR High Altitude Observatory (HAO) web page lists 12 programs
which many may be able to find a use for a long term in situ platform at
the altitudes needed for SRM Injection. Multiple SRM Injection tethers
would represent a very unique general atmospheric interferometer research
tool. http://www.hao.ucar.edu/research/aim.php
3) Commercial Regional Telecommunications. Selling platform payload space
to telecommunications companies could generate substantial matching funds.
Even if the payloads were only used as "emergency backups" to the
terrestrial tower network. Another approach to funding further research
would be to install transponders and compete directly within that market.
I could add a number of other potential partnerships to this list, but, I
hope the point is made. The small yearly budget would be important in that
it gives potential partners the assurance that this work is being given
some serious thought. The development of a highly detailed computer
(engineering) model of a multi use high atmospheric tether and associated
systems can be an important focus for building group expertise. It can also
be a focus for building governmental/industrial/scientific cooperation on
the SRM climate intervention option.
If this "seed capital" is to be offered, make it grow....don't eat the seed.
On Apr 18, 2011 1:07pm, Holly Buck <[email protected]> wrote:
Greetings,
If I wanted to research geoengineering, I wouldn't form an formal
geoengineering society, because the press releases it would trigger would
likely be counter-productive to my research. Plus, my sense here in DC is
that the USG is still not really ready to have geoengineering officially
on the table. An official, federally-funded geoengineering board would
have foreign policy implications that no one really wants.
I would, however, give a small portion, say 10%, to social science
research investigating sentiment and knowledge about how people and
institutions in developing countries feel about geoengineering. It would
be particularly interesting to know how people in Brazil, Turkey,
Indonesia, China, India, and other key regional players are approaching
the topic. I would also put funding into cross-border collaboration
efforts.
Both of these might not seem important compared to test-scale deployments
and modeling. But done right, the social science research and
collaboration would pay off, because no amount of good natural science
research will likely be actualized if the political climate is hostile to
it. We don't actually know whether the developing world would dismiss
geoengineering as a first-world cop-out of mitigating emissions, or
embrace it as a humanitarian intervention that will benefit them locally
and allow them to keep developing. Solid data on this, and international
cooperation, would be key in going forward with any actual deployment,
should the worst-case scenarios materialize.
Best,
Holly Buck
Holly Jean Buck / 410.227.3316 (home) / [email protected]
Note: The opinions expressed are personal and do not represent the views
of any institutions or organizations of affiliation.
On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Fulkerson, William [email protected]> wrote:
Dear Ken et al.
Good question.
I would allocate the money to the Arctic. The loss of summer sea ice is
real and happening rapidly (within a century from linear extrapolations).
I would devote half the money to finding out how serious the loss of
summer sea ice would be for the ecology of
the region and the other half on research to evaluate the negatives of
regional SRM techniques including tropospheric sulfates. The SRM
evaluation should include analysis of the difficulty of getting
permission to do something: ie From the UN or by agreement from the
countries of the region. The first step would be to find out how much
money is presently being spent on R&D in the region, eg on clathrates.
With best regards,
Bill
Bill Fulkerson, Senior Fellow and LERDWG Chair
Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment
University of Tennessee
311 Conference Center Bldg.
Knoxville, TN 37996-4138
[email protected] mailto:[email protected]>
865-974-9221, -1838 FAX
Home
865-988-8084; 865-680-0937 CELL
2781 Wheat Road, Lenoir City, TN 37771
From: Ken Caldeira [email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:08:25 -0700
To: Google Group [email protected]>
Subject: [geo] How would you allocate US$10 million per year to most
reduce climate risk?
Folks,
There is some discussion in DC about making some small amount of public
funds available to support SRM and CDR research.
In today's funding climate, it is much more likely that someone might be
given authority to re-allocate existing budgets than that they would
actually be given significantly more money for this effort. Thus, the
modest scale.
If you were doing strategic planning for a US federal agency, and you
were told that you had a budget of $10 million per year and that you
should maximize the amount of climate risk reduction obtainable with that
$10 million, what would you allocate it to and why?
Best,
Ken
___________________________________________________
Ken Caldeira
Carnegie Institution Dept of Global Ecology
260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
+1 650 704 7212 [email protected]
http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab @kencaldeira
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