Professors Robock and Fleming and list
1. Thanks for your added very recent and informative article. As I
requested in a separate response today to the Zhang-Posch paper, I hope
stratospheric aerosol SRM proponents will take up this chance to rebut you and
Professor Fleming. I am not qualified to enter that debate, but your list of
26 risks looks reasonable. I understand that your list only relates to one
non-CDR technology.
2. Three questions on the first sentence of your last paragraph (all
of which I support) reads:
“Even at this late date, a global push to rapid decarbonization, by
imposing a carbon tax, will stimulate renewable energy, and allow solar, wind,
and
newly developed energy sources to allow civilization to prosper without using
the atmosphere as a sewer for CO2.
a. A carbon tax would stimulate all CDR as well as your list of
beneficiaries. Did you mean to so include CDR?
b. Almost the same question: By “decarbonization” do you include both
carbon neutral (solar, wind, [also bioenergy??]) and carbon negative (CDR)
technologies?
c. Is a technology which has both carbon neutral and carbon negative
characteristics included in the quoted sentence even if not passing the first
two questions (as regards “civilization to prosper”)?
4. The last part of your final paragraph reads “Adaptation will
reduce some of the negative impacts of global warming. Geoengineering does not
now appear to be a panacea, and research in geoengineering should be in
addition to strong efforts toward mitigation, and not a substitute. In fact,
geoengineering may soon prove to be so unattractive that research results will
strengthen the push toward mitigation. “
The term CDR is not included here, so I fear this final paragraph may
be used against CDR, even though you elsewhere emphasize that your paper is
related to a subset of geoengineering - a word used three times here. I admit
to trying to get you to be supportive of at least the biochar component of CDR
in the spectrum of your options that already spans mitigation and adaptation.
You are clearly excluding at least one part of geoengineering, but some trying
to discredit CDR will surely use this paragraph to discredit all parts of
geoengineering. Hope you can clarify.
5. Apologies to the list. I had a typo in the “Fleming” part of my
message below. The quoted phrase “all the capture of industry.” should have
read “all the carbon of industry.” (I blame a gremlin in my computer.)
Again thanks for the report on (mostly) GeoMIP.
Ron
On Nov 10, 2014, at 2:03 PM, Alan Robock <[email protected]> wrote:
> The 26 reasons (and 5 benefits) are in:
>
> Robock, Alan, 2014: Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering, Issues Env. Sci.
> Tech. (special issue “Geoengineering of the Climate System”), 38, 162-185.
> http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockStratAerosolGeo.pdf
>
> See Table 2, p. 181. And it is specific not to just SRM, but stratospheric
> aerosol SRM.
> Alan Robock
>
> Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor
> Editor, Reviews of Geophysics
> Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program
> Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751
> Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644
> 14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected]
> New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
> http://twitter.com/AlanRobock
> Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54
>
> On 11/10/2014 3:16 PM, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
>> Alan cc List adding Professor Fleming
>>
>> 1. Interesting news release; thanks. Could you give a cite for your
>> expanded-to-26 list? I found reference to a ppt on your website, which I
>> could download but not open.
>>
>> 2. Although called a “Geoengineering” list, your 20-list is only for SRM.
>> It would be very helpful to know if you or anyone has a similar list for CDR.
>>
>> 3. For those who have not seen Professor Robock’s list of 20, it is
>> available at
>> http://www.atmos.washington.edu/academics/classes/2012Q1/111/20Reasons.pdf
>>
>> 4. Professor Fleming (being cc’d) had this to say below about biochar in
>> the article:
>>
>> “Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning
>> it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment.
>> “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the
>> world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.”
>>
>> 5. Minor objections to the first sentence (“burning” and “burying”), but
>> I hope he or others could provide cites for “not large enough”. For one, a
>> large amount (100 Gt??) of the removed carbon can appear as future
>> additional above-ground biomass (now about 500 Gt C). But also there are
>> numerous citations of anthropogenic removal of perhaps 400 Gt C of soil
>> carbon - that need return. In addition, the 60 Gt C per year in flux is not
>> obviously incapable of adding another 10% or so. Finally there is a similar
>> increased carbon flux potential to biochar from ocean resources - and if
>> some inadvertently returns as char, it is probably even more recalcitrant
>> there.
>>
>> 6. I of course agree with his main thrust here - we need to stop, not
>> capture, “all the capture of industry.” But the two actions can/must be
>> concurrent.
>>
>> Ron
>>
>>
>>> Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning
>>> it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment.
>>>
>>
>> “
>>
>>> Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning
>>> it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment.
>>>
>>
>> “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the
>> world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.”
>>
>>> Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning
>>> it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment.
>>>
>>> “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the
>>> world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.”
>>>
>>
>> On Nov 10, 2014, at 8:03 AM, Alan Robock <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/11/09/many_experts_say_technology_cant_fix_climate_change.html
>>>
>>> Many experts say technology can't fix climate change
>>>
>>> There are several geoengineering schemes for fixing climate change, but so
>>> far none seems a sure bet.
>>>
>>> By: Joseph Hall News reporter, Published on Sun Nov 09 2014
>>> As scientific proposals go, these might well be labelled pie in the sky.
>>>
>>> Indeed, most of the atmosphere-altering techniques that have been suggested
>>> to combat carbon-induced global warming are more science fantasy than
>>> workable fixes, many climate experts say.
>>>
>>> “I call them Rube Goldberg ideas,” says James Rodger Fleming, a
>>> meteorological historian at Maine’s Colby College, referring to the
>>> cartoonist who created designs for gratuitously complex contraptions.
>>>
>>> “I think it’s a tragic comedy because these people are sincere, but they’re
>>> kind of deluded to think that there could be a simple, cheap, technical fix
>>> for climate change,” adds Fleming, author of the 2010 book Fixing the Sky:
>>> The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.
>>>
>>> Yet the idea that geoengineering — the use of technology to alter
>>> planet-wide systems — could curb global warming has persisted in a world
>>> that seems incapable of addressing the root, carbon-spewing causes of the
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> And it emerged again earlier this month with a brief mention in a United
>>> Nations report on the scope and imminent perils of a rapidly warming world.
>>>
>>> That Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which seemed to
>>> despair of an emissions-lowering solution being achieved — laid out in
>>> broad terms the types of technical fixes currently being studied to help
>>> mitigate climate catastrophe.
>>>
>>> First among these proposed geoengineering solutions is solar radiation
>>> management, or SRM, which would involve millions of tons of sulphur dioxide
>>> (SO2) being pumped into the stratosphere every year to create sun-blocking
>>> clouds high above the Earth’s surface.
>>>
>>> Anyone Canadian who remembers the unusually frigid summer of 1992, caused
>>> by the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines a year
>>> earlier, grasps the cooling effects that tons of stratospheric SO2 can have
>>> on the planet.
>>>
>>> And because such natural occurrences show the temperature-lowering
>>> potential of the rotten-smelling substance, seeding the stratosphere with
>>> it has gained the most currency among the geoengineering crowd.
>>>
>>> One method put forward for getting the rotten-smelling stuff into the
>>> stratosphere could well have been conceived by warped cartoonist Goldberg.
>>>
>>> “You could make a tower up into the stratosphere, with a hose along the
>>> side” says Alan Robock, a top meteorologist at New Jersey’s Rutgers
>>> University who has long studied SRM concepts.
>>>
>>> The trouble is that any stratosphere-reaching tower built in the tropics,
>>> where the SO2 would have to be injected for proper global dispersal, would
>>> need to be at least 18 kilometres high.
>>>
>>> Other stratospheric seeding suggestions include filling balloons with the
>>> cheap and readily available gas — it’s routinely extracted from petroleum
>>> products — and popping them when they get up there.
>>>
>>> But Robock says “the most obvious way to go” would be to fly airplanes up
>>> and then spray SO2 into the stratosphere.
>>>
>>> Once up there, the sulphur dioxide particles would react with water
>>> molecules and form thin clouds of sulphuric acid droplets that could
>>> encircle the Earth and reflect heating sunlight back into space.
>>>
>>> Placing the cloud in the stratosphere is a must as the droplets last about
>>> a year there while they fall within a week in the lower troposphere.
>>>
>>> Still, the clouds, which would rain sulphuric acid back down on the Earth’s
>>> polar regions, would require frequent replenishment, with about 5 million
>>> tons of SO2 being needed each year to maintain their reflective capacity,
>>> Robock says.
>>>
>>> Due to uncertainties about the droplet sizes that would be produced by SO2
>>> cloud-seeding, no one is certain how much cooling the technique would
>>> create.
>>>
>>> “We don’t know how thick a cloud we could actually make and how much
>>> cooling there would be,” Robock says.
>>>
>>> Though he’s devoted much of his career to studying sun-blocking proposals,
>>> Robock is in no way convinced of their merits.
>>>
>>> “I have a list of 26 reasons why I think this might be a bad idea,” he says.
>>>
>>> Chief among these is that the cooling produced by SRM would be uneven
>>> around the globe, with the greatest temperature drops being seen in the
>>> tropics.
>>>
>>> “And so if you wanted to stop the ice sheets from melting . . . you’d have
>>> to overcool the tropics.”
>>>
>>> The scheme would also produce droughts in heavily populated areas of the
>>> world such as the Indian subcontinent, he says.
>>>
>>> “Another thing on my list is unexpected consequences. I mean, we don’t know
>>> what the risks would be. We only know about one planet in the entire
>>> universe that sustains intelligent life. Do we want to risk this one planet
>>> on this technological fix?”
>>>
>>> Though SRM thinking still centres on sulfates as the best cloud-seeding
>>> compounds, some are now looking at manufactured nanoparticles to send into
>>> the stratosphere, meteorological historian Fleming says.
>>>
>>> “There’s some talk about designer particles . . . but I don’t know of any
>>> production stream, and that would make it much more expensive.”
>>>
>>> The second major proposed geoengineering strategy to combat global warming
>>> is based on carbon dioxide (CO2) removal.
>>>
>>> This could take place either at large sources of CO2 such as power plants
>>> or from the air itself, where even at today’s climate- threatening levels,
>>> it exists in low concentrations of about 400 parts per million.
>>>
>>> Know variously as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or carbon capture and
>>> sequestration (CCS), there are several strategies being discussed.
>>>
>>> All the plans, however, would likely entail huge costs, the use of
>>> dangerous chemicals and uncertain storage prospects, Fleming says.
>>>
>>> “There are chemical means that would use some very alkaline, harsh
>>> chemicals.”
>>>
>>> He notes that there are also thermodynamic means — kind of the way they
>>> make dry ice and they just suck it out and condense it (into a liquid or
>>> solid).”
>>>
>>> But thermodynamic removal and compression techniques, Fleming says, are
>>> prohibitively expensive and require the use of large amounts of
>>> carbon-producing energy.
>>>
>>> This is largely due to the increased weight carbon acquires by combining
>>> with oxygen during the burning process.
>>>
>>> A ton of coal, for example, produces more than three tons of carbon dioxide
>>> because of the added oxygen load, Fleming says.
>>>
>>> “To make it really effective you’d have to have about a 30-per-cent
>>> increase in world energy use. But it would have to come from renewable
>>> (sources), which are not in the offing right now.”
>>>
>>> Other removal plans would employ membrane filters that are permeable to all
>>> the air’s component molecules except carbon.
>>>
>>> “This seems viable on a small scale, but the question is, as in all these
>>> projects: how do you make it a very large and very viable and economically
>>> feasible?” Fleming says.
>>>
>>> Most plans would see the captured CO2 turned back into a burnable fuel by
>>> removing the oxygen component, or have it condensed into a liquid form and
>>> pumped into underground caverns or ocean trenches.
>>>
>>> But the fuel idea would also requite massive energy inputs to crack the
>>> molecule into its two elements, and the storage scheme would likely produce
>>> leakage.
>>>
>>> Others are proposing to turn the captured carbon into charcoal by burning
>>> it in oxygen-free fires and burying it underground for soil enrichment.
>>>
>>> “The problem with that one is the scale,” Fleming says. “The topsoil of the
>>> world is not large enough to capture all the carbon of industry.”
>>>
>>> Climate altering schemes go back to at least 1841, when pioneering U.S.
>>> meteorologist James Pollard Espy published a rather ruinous proposal.
>>>
>>> “He observed that oftentimes it rained after giant fires,” Fleming says.
>>> “So he thought, well, maybe we can stimulate artificial rains by lighting
>>> the Appalachian forests all the way down the east coast of the U.S. and
>>> then the westerly winds would bring the rains across the eastern seaboard.”
>>>
>>> --
>>> Alan Robock
>>>
>>> Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor
>>> Editor, Reviews of Geophysics
>>> Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program
>>> Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751
>>> Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644
>>> 14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected]
>>> New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
>>> http://twitter.com/AlanRobock
>>> Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54
>>>
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>>
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