So I guess Joe won't be putting in a good word with NASA for the 10 million.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Whaley" <[email protected]>
To: "geoengineering" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 11:12
Subject: [geo] Re: New SRM risk/cost analysis
Seems to rehash so many of the canards, and to recommit so many of the
obvious fallacies.... sigh... are we condemned to a perpetual
groundhog day where even the Joe Romm's out there never pick up on the
main points?
0. We've got 700ppm baked in right now. So, mitigate, mitigate,
mitigate ain't going to cut it.
1. SRM is not an either or, it's an AND. I don't see aerosol
geoengineering ever being substituted for emissions reductions-- in
other words, if we admit that we're in trouble, we'll likely take
action to address the root cause. Intelligent people might disagree--
but I see it as a low probability outcome.
2. The notion that if we started, we might somehow abruptly stop.
(This is akin to suddenly stopping the production of rice, or
microchips, for instance... sure, I suppose we could, but why would
we? It's not like we'd somehow forget how, or lose the ability to.)
3. The concept that the Climate Intervention Bureau doesn't
effectively already exist. The IPCC/UNFCCC are already making a
determination that 2C is somehow the right number we should be aiming
at-- the geostat is already locked in. Precipitation impacts that
affect populations are already being decided. Why would the
deployment of strat aerosols be any different in nature than these
kinds of decisions?
4. The notion that we need to make the decision about whether this is
good or bad mojo now, before we do the research to find out.
D
On Apr 19, 7:35 pm, "Rau, Greg" <[email protected]> wrote:
http://climateprogress.org/2011/04/17/aerosol-geoengineering-economics/
Science Sunday: “The economics (or lack thereof) of aerosol
geoengineering”
Is the aerosol strategy intergenerationally unethical?
April 17, 2011
Joe Romm
The Gist: Putting reflective aerosols high into the atmosphere to slow
climate change is too risky and not cost effective.
That’s Climate Central describing the core conclusions of the Climatic
Change paper “The economics (or lack thereof) of aerosol geoengineering,”
(full paper online
here):http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/~kzk10/Goes_et_al_geoengineering_cc_2009_su...
This study would seem to support the view that if you don’t do aggressive
greenhouse mitigation starting now, you pretty much take aerosol
geo-engineering off the table as a very limited (but still dubious) add-on
strategy — as even geo-engineering experts like climatologist Ken Caldeira
have made clear.
What’s nice about this study is that it doesn’t just do an economic
analysis, but also discusses intergenerational ethics. I’ll excerpt the
study itself at length — after the full Climate Central summary:
Summary: Some have argued that if human society cannot sufficiently reduce
its greenhouse gas emissions, than we could still avoid the worst
consequences of global warming by putting highly reflective particles,
known as aerosols, high into the atmosphere. These aerosols would reflect
light back to space, thus counteracting warming from greenhouse gases.
The authors of this paper use an integrated assessment model to determine
how costly such a method would be. The authors discuss the potential side
effects of this so-called “geoengineering” strategy, since adding aerosols
to the atmosphere could have unintended consequences, such as
significantly altering weather patterns and damaging stratospheric ozone.
Also, aerosols are short-lived, and would have to be continuously added to
the atmosphere in order for this scheme to work. If society stopped
injecting them, the result would be a rapid shift in the climate,
something this paper argues would be highly damaging.
The authors calculate that if there is greater than a 15 percent chance
that such a method will be shut down, or if the unintended consequences of
aerosols are greater than half a percent of the world’s economy, then this
method of geoengineering is not worth the effort.
And let’s not forget that the aerosol ’solution’ does nothing to stop the
consequences of ocean acidification, which recent studies suggest will be
devastating all by itself (see Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell
marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).
Here is the conclusion to the study itself:
First, aerosol geoengineering hinges on counterbalancing the forcing
effects of greenhouse gas emissions (which decay over centuries) with the
forcing effects of aerosol emissions (which decay within years). Aerosol
geoengineering can hence lead to abrupt climate change if the aerosol
forcing is not sustained. The possibility of an intermittent aerosol
geoengineering forcing as well as negative impacts of the aerosol forcing
itself may cause economic damages that far exceed the benefits. Aerosol
geoengineering may hence pose more than just “minimal climate risks,”
contrary to the claim of Wigley (2006). Second, substituting aerosol
geoengineering for CO2 abatement fails an economic cost-benefit test in
our model for arguably reasonable assumptions. In contrast, (and as shown
in numerous previous studies) fast and sizeable cuts in CO2 emissions (far
in excess of the currently implemented measures) pass a costbenefit test.
Third, aerosol geoengineering constitutes a conscious temporal risk
transfer that arguably violates the ethical objectives of
intergenerational justice.
Our analysis has barely scratched the surface and is silent on many
important aspects. More than a decade ago, a Unites States National
Academies of Science committee assessing geoengineering strategies
concluded that “Engineering countermeasures need to be evaluated but
should not be implemented without broad understanding of the direct
effects and the potential side effects, the ethical issues, and the risks”
(COSEPUP, 1992). Today, we are still lacking this broad understanding.
Caldeira made some similar points to me in a 2009 e-mail interview:
Nobody has written about this that I know of, but ….
If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the
global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the
stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high
greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to
main[tain] more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world
out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been
heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past.
We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 /
low sunlight conditions — similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of
millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse — maybe good
for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.
We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in
different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects
temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes
in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that
would grow with time.
And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do
to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth’s climate system that we
depend on?
On top of all of these environmental considerations, there are
socio-political considerations: We we have a cooperative world government
deciding exactly how much geoengineering to deploy where? What if China
were to go into decades of drought? Would they sit idly by as the Climate
Intervention Bureau apparently ignores their plight? And what if political
instability where to mean that for a few years, the intervention system
were not maintained … all of that accumulated pent-up climate change would
be unleashed upon the Earth … and perhaps make “The Day After” movie look
less silly than it does.
Long-term risk reduction depends on greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
Nevertheless, there is a chance that some of these options might be able
to diminish short-term risk in the event of a climate crisis.
I would add the grave risk that that after injecting massive amounts of
sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere for a decade or more, we might
experience some unexpectedly bad side effect that just gets worse and
worse. After all, the top climate scientists underestimated the speed and
scale of greenhouse gas impacts (and the magnitude of synergistic ones,
like bark beetle infestations and forest fires).
We would be in incompletely unexplored territory — what I call an
experimental chemotherapy and radiation therapy combined. There is no
possible way of predicting the long-term effect of the thick stratospheric
haze (which, unlike GHGs, has no recent or paleoclimate analog). If it
turned out to have unexpected catastrophic impacts of its own (other than
drought), we’d be totally screwed (see “the definitive killer objection to
geoengineering as even a temporary fix”).
Or, rather, our children and grand-children would be totally screwed, not
that our actions today suggest we care about them very much (see Is the
global economy a Ponzi scheme?). The study has this to say about the
intergenerational ethics issue:
While there have been careful analyses of the significance of
intergenerational justice in the wider context of climate change
(Gardiner, 2009; Page, 2006; Wolf, 2009), our study is the first to
quantitatively examine issues of intergenerational justice raised by
aerosol geoengineering for the case that aerosol geoengineering can be
intermittent and the aerosol forcing can cause harm. Our analysis shows,
for example, that substituting aerosol geoengineering for CO2 emissions
abatement is a risk transfer from current to future generations (Figures 4
to 7). In addition, the impacts of the abrupt warming due to a
discontinuation of the aerosol forcing would place a heavy burden on human
communities and ecosystem integrity (Alley et al., 2002) and thus threaten
the conditions required to satisfy basic welfare rights of future
generations. Substituting aerosol geoengineering for CO2 emissions
abatement decreases the required abatement costs in the near term but
imposes sizeable risks for more distant generations (Figure 4 a, b). Since
Rawlsian intergenerational distributive justice requires that current
generations avoid policies that create benefits for themselves but impose
costs on future generations, substituting aerosol geoengineering for CO2
abatement fails on the grounds of this particular approach to ethics.
It would appear that what science advisor John Holdren reasserted in 2009
remains true today, “The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far
appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage,
and a high likelihood of serious side effects.“
Mitigate, mitigate, mitigate — or punish countless future generations.
Related Post:
Key ‘geoengineering’ strategy — cloud whitening — may yield warming, not
cooling
Science on the Risks of Climate Engineering: “Optimism about a
geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of
currently observed climate changes”
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