Salif, my belief is that he suggests other avenues are far more sensible and that this avenue isn't one to seek a solution from, hence his: "We shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about them. Some people will anyway, but they’re just crazy." Admittedly, it's quite full on, albeit similar sentiments have been echoed before by some of the world's most prominent scientists/policy researchers etc., e.g.: "In delivering the prestigious Tyndall Lecture at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting last December, he said the idea of putting sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere was “barking mad.” Pierrehumbert also rejects the value of doing field experiments. “The whole idea of geoengineering is so crazy and would lead to such bad consequences, it really is pretty pointless. We already know enough about sulfate albedo engineering to know it would put the world in a really precarious state. Field experiments are really a dangerous step on the way to deployment, and I have a lot of doubts what would actually be learned.”"
It seems that Tim Palmer holds the belief that impressions will change a lot when models become better (although he doesn't use a comparable tone): "the nations of the world should come together to fund the sort of supercomputers that would allow us to simulate the climate of the coming century with much greater reliability than is currently possible. The impact that this will have for mitigation, adaptation and geoengineering policies is likely to be enormous.", and so on. Al Gore does discuss other things he think may bring about solutions though - just not involving SRM in any way. And anyway, it seems quite obvious that there exists no necessary condition for a statement involving the pointing out of what an individual considers to be a major obvious issue/flaw to be coupled with a solution, no? Simon ________________________________________________ Simon Driscoll Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department of Physics University of Oxford Office: +44 (0) 1865 272930 Mobile: +44 (0) 7935314940 http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/driscoll ________________________________ From: Salif KONE [[email protected]] Sent: 24 August 2013 15:19 To: Simon Driscoll; [email protected] Subject: Re: [geo] Al Gore on geoengineering I do disagree with this Al Gore' statement " ...We shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about them. Some people will anyway, but they’re just crazy.". He exposes the problems without proposing a solution; Geo-engineering is trying to find a solutin through techniques as SRM... **************************************************** Salif KONE, M.Sc.Université Joseph Fourier/OSUG Grenoble/ UniversitéMontpellier II, 2007. Enseignant à l’Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs Abderrhamane Baba Touré (ENI-ABT) Adresse: 410 Av. Van Vollenhoven BP.: 242, Bamako-Mali. PhD Student(Oct. 2011- present), ISFRA-Bamako. Tel.:+223 76 39 60 09 / +223 64 59 67 99 BP.:7048, Bamako-Mali. Email:[email protected] ________________________________ De : Simon Driscoll <[email protected]> À : "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Envoyé le : Vendredi 23 août 2013 21h20 Objet : [geo] Al Gore on geoengineering Al Gore: "Let me deal with the geoengineering part of your question first. That’s complex because there are some benign geoengineering proposals like white roofs or efforts to figure out a way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere , though no one has figured out how to do that yet. But the geoengineering options most often discussed, like putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere or orbiting tinfoil strips — these are simply nuts. We shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about them. Some people will anyway, but they’re just crazy. To the broader part of your question, innovation is already playing a major role in bringing about new potential solutions to the climate crisis. The tech world had a bitter experience after the burst of enthusiasm in 2005 and 2006 because of a perfect storm made up of four elements: First, the great recession, which had a huge, destructive impact on business generally. Number two, the Chinese juggernaut, which subsidized the production of several prominent renewable energy technologies to the point where their sales price fell below the price of production in the West. Third, the shale gas boom dropped the retail price of electricity to levels below what many renewable energy plans needed to be viable. And fourth there was the policy failure I mentioned earlier in the U.S. Senate and Copenhagen. And all the while there was this massively funded climate denier campaign by the Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobile and others that hired tobacco industry veterans to work with them on consumer advertising and lobbying activities. But that setback was only temporary because reality has a way of reasserting itself. There has been a 100-fold increase in the number of extreme, high-temperature events around the world in the distribution curve. And people have noticed for themselves — the rain storms are bigger, the droughts are deeper and the fires are more destructive. All of these things have not escaped notice and people are connecting the dots. The cumulative amount of energy trapped by manmade global warming pollution each day in the earth’s atmosphere is now equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima bombs going off every 24 hours. It’s a big planet, but that’s a lot of energy. The consequences are now hard to escape. Every night on the news, it’s like a nature hike through the book of revelations. Eleven states today are fighting 35 major fires! People are noticing this. And simultaneously they’re noticing the sharp drop in the cost of carbon-free, greenhouse gas-free energy, and the combination is pushing us over this political tipping point and the trend is unstoppable." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/21/al-gore-explains-why-hes-optimistic-about-stopping-global-warming/ ________________________________________________ Simon Driscoll Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department of Physics University of Oxford Office: +44 (0) 1865 272930 Mobile: +44 (0) 7935314940 http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/driscoll -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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