There was good news from the Cambridge SRM conference if you consider that the problem of climate change is coming decades from now. One might be lulled into this sense of security from the climate models which indicate that dangerous climate change is in the distant future. And one might not be overly concerned about ocean acidification – assuming ones own life will carry on, pretty much as normal, without coral and shellfish.
If you think like this, then geoengineering is rather an academic problem, over which we can take our time, and deliberate endlessly on associated ethical, moral, social and justice issues arising from considerations of its possible deployment when the climate talks have failed and climate change gets really bad. But if you, like me, are concerned about the rapid demise of the Arctic sea ice, the Cambridge SRM conference was extremely bad news. Hardly anyone at the conference seemed concerned about the Arctic. The people who you might expect to be developing tools to fight against sea ice disappearance are simply not prepared for the speed of its departure. They are assuming the problem is long term, because they believe the models from IPCC which say that the sea ice will last till near the end of the century – even though the top sea ice expert, Peter Wadhams, says that we could lose the sea ice in September this year. There is a complete disconnect between the modelling community and the people who have been doing the observations of what is actually happening. We ignore the observed exponential downward trend in sea ice volume [1] at our peril. (Don’t be fooled by an apparent recovery in 2013 and 2014, when broken ice created anomalous extent and volume figures.) Look at what is happening to the weather. Since 2000 we have had growing weather extremes in northern latitudes, especially with longer spells of “stuck weather” [2] [3]. This can be explained by a warming Arctic disrupting the polar jet stream behaviour, causing it to meander more and to get stuck for longer periods. As I pointed out in my comment on the recent NAS report on albedo enhancement [4], one only has to put these two things together – accelerated Arctic warming causing accelerated climate change – and one has a potential catastrophe. And I believe that this catastrophe can only be averted by geoengineering to cool the Arctic and save the sea ice. When I talked to people at the Cambridge SRM conference about this, they seemed confident that geoengineering could cool the Arctic sufficient to save the sea ice. But they still seem to be making assumptions about the sea ice based on out-dated models, which underestimate the amount of radiative forcing from Arctic albedo loss by an order of magnitude. And they seem to assume that current climate change is the result of global warming rather than Arctic warming. Cheers, John [1] PIOMAS volume trend: http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.uk/2013_02_01_archive.html [2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weird-winter-weather-plot-thickens-as-arctic-swiftly-warms/ [3] New Scientist, 12th March, Fred Pearce writes: *Warming Arctic blamed for worsening summer heatwaves* http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27150-warming-arctic-blamed-for-worsening-summer-heatwaves.html [4] http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/climate-intervention-brief-final.pdf -- 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.
