Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway*, in "The Collapse of Western Civilization*" write that you can heat a planet by starting and stopping SRM. I've never heard this "meme" before, i.e. that merely starting and stopping SRM heats the planet to a higher temperature than it would have reached had SRM never been employed.
They call the effect "termination shock". After the 4 year SRM project described in the book is halted “*temperature rapidly rebounded, regaining not just the 0.4 degrees C that had been reduced during the project but** an additional 0.6 degrees*”. They use this rapid 1 degree C temperature rise, which they say happens in 18 months, as the trigger of a "*fatal chain of events*" which ends Western Civilization. Permafrost melting doubles the total carbon in the atmosphere in 10 years which drives planetary temperature upward an additional 5 degrees C, the West Antarctic ice collapses, Greenland ice slides into the sea, the Black Death reappears and kills half the population of Europe, etc. Mayhem ensues. Survivors of this collapse of civilization are then threatened with a "runaway greenhouse" which "would have followed", unless..... Oreskes, when interviewed in WBUR "On Point" <https://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/07/29/climate-change-science-fiction-future> promoting the book, said: "This is a work of fiction, but it has footnotes". She also says: "*Absolutely everything that happens in the book is based on scientific data and projections*" The source Oreskes and Conway cite in support of their idea is Climate Engineering and the risk of rapid climate change <http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/4/4/045103/pdf/1748-9326_4_4_045103.pdf> by Ross and Matthews. That paper does not support the Oreskes/Conway idea. Ross and Matthews find that in all model runs, at all times the temperature of the planet is lower where SRM is started and stopped than in runs where it is never employed at all. 2b. Why do you suspect the correctness of that meme? > > 2c. (optional) Can you provide a citation or a link to where someone is > assuming the meme is true? > > Thoughtful responses would be most appreciated. If you want to start > discussion about a meme, please do so in a separate thread so that this > thread can be easily used to develop a list. > > Thanks, > > Ken > > _______________ > Ken Caldeira > > Carnegie Institution for Science > Dept of Global Ecology > 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA > +1 650 704 7212 [email protected] <javascript:> > http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab > https://twitter.com/KenCaldeira > > Assistant: Dawn Ross <[email protected] <javascript:>> > > -- 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]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
