There have been quite a few messages posted this week from attendees at the
Fourth Interdisciplinary Summer School on Geoengineering held at Harvard
last week August 5-9, but I haven't seen an overview, so I thought I would
take a stab at it.
*Atmospheric overview: *There were about 65 people present; about 2/3 were
graduate students and postdocs in their 20s and 30s with a variety of
outliers (like me) of different (i.e. older) ages and roles. The gender
split appeared to be about 70/30 and about 75% of attendees were from the
Northern and Western (i.e., Kardashian) hemispheres. Despite the best
intentions of all concerned, it was still difficult to escape being struck
by the perception that at this juncture North/Western elites are proceeding
ahead with very little input from the global South. Meetings were held in
Pierce Hall (old red brick, comfy leather chairs) and Maxwell Dworkin
(newer, named after the mothers of donors Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer).
The agenda was jam-packed: 10-15 speakers the first day with 300+
powerpoints, 170 the next day, an all-star debate Wed. night--and it was,
frankly, quite tiring! The dorm accommodations at Tufts were slightly
inferior to a minimum-security Federal prison (no TVs in the rooms,
linoleum floors) so it was a relief to set off every day on the morning
hike to campus which passed through Davis and Porter Squares. Overall, the
student organizers did a great job.
*Substance:* Here are a few of the points that seemed most interesting *to
me* -- others surely have different perspectives.
- There is still considerable controversy about whether SRM sulfate
injection can deliver sufficient negative radiative forcing to offset
anthropogenic component to warming. From reading enthusiastic articles I
had formed the impression that this was settled. In fact, there is
considerable debate over whether there is a saturation point that limits
the RF from stratospheric sulfate injections.
- A relatively lightweight SRM plan described by David Keith could cut
the *rate *of climate change in half. I think of this as the "mini-Me"
plan since the resources required are within the reach of the average
mini-mogul, i.e. 2 Gulfstreams a year ultimately ramping up to 40. Because
the sulfate injections in this plan are much less than required to set off
2xCO2 doubling, the costs and potential side effects are also much less.
Crucially the lower level of injections reduces the risk from "termination
shock" of discontinued SRM causing rapid warming. Keith was arguing that
the mini-me plan should be included in assessments of geoengineering impact
and feasibility and he convinced me.
- A presentation by Eva Ahbe et al. showed what the sky would look like
after an injection of sulfates sufficient to offset 2xCO2: a halo around
the sun and no more blue sky -- anywhere on earth. (!!!!)
- Everyone still wants to talk about governance. David Keith made a
persuasive argument that NSF and other funding agencies can and should get
involved in laying out guidelines in the very near future. In all
likelihood these guidelines would set de facto standards going forward
which can stand in while the global community struggles to agree upon a
192-country framework.
- There was relatively little discussion of climate science. Most of the
discussion was within the framework of "we may find that we have to deliver
an emergency negative radiative forcing, here are some of the issues." I
found this rather jarring as I am more accustomed to reading and writing
about the climate system as an integrated system-of-systems, terrestrial,
atmospheric, oceanic, land use, water use, energy metabolism, etc., etc.
SRM would be a new subsystem that would plug in to the existing system of
systems and have interactions and feedbacks with all of them. In terms of
geo*engineering* this systems perspective is also important: systems
integration is often a major source of technical and project risk.
- There was relatively little discussion of natural variability in
climate and climate history. I thought this was a problem as it seems to
me that there will be a lot of challenges in untangling SRM contributions
from an already extremely tangled web of physical signals that we are
already struggling to understand (the error bars in many RFs are still
quite high). I would think that with the commencement of SRM everyone who
is measuring forcings would have to revisit their methods to account for
the new influence. That is a huge ripple effect on all of climate science
and would add uncertainty throughout the system precisely when the major
research focus of the IPCC is to reduce it.
- Oliver Morton of the Economist gave a reading from his work in
progress on geoengineering entitled "The Deliberate Planet". Morton is a
very talented writer - he reminds me (in an inverse way) of those studies
of Alzheimer's patients where they show that thought density of journals at
age 20 is a good predictor of susceptibility to Alzheimer's in later age.
Morton's writing style has a very high thought density or level of useful
brain convolutions! In this title he puts his fingers on something I find
fascinating about geoengineering, which is the question whether this would
be a brutal and hopefully one-time emergency intervention, or whether it is
instead a natural evolution in the progress of the species towards
conscious ongoing management of Earth's habitability (e.g. the work by
Rockstrom, Hansen et al. to identify safe planetary boundaries for climate
change).
Enough for the moment; too short on time to expound further and probably at
the useful limit for email anyway. Please no one be offended by my
paraphrase of your thoughts or words!
Cordially,
Fred Z.
Fred Zimmerman
Geoengineering IT!
Bringing together the worlds of geoengineering and information technology
GE NewsFilter: http://geoengineeringIT.net:8080
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