Dear Mike and Jon,
I agree with Jon.
And Mike, I think you are ignoring all the unsolvable problems with
geoengineering (considering only stratospheric aerosols - the most
likely option). First, it looks like the aerosols will grow as more SO2
is injected. As Niemeier and Timmreck (2015) found, "[A] solar
radiation management strategy required to keep temperatures constant at
that anticipated for 2020, whilst maintaining ‘business as usual’
conditions, would require atmospheric injections of the order of 45
Tg(S)/yr which amounts to 6 times that emitted from the Mt. Pinatubo
eruption each year."
Niemeier U., and C. Timmreck, 2015: What is the limit of stratospheric
sulfur climate engineering? /Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss./, *15*,
10,939–10,969.
And how will you deal with everyone of these risks? From Robock (2014),
updated:
_Benefits___
_Risks___
1.Reduce surface air temperatures, which could reduce or reverse
negative impacts of global warming, including floods, droughts, stronger
storms, sea ice melting, land-based ice sheet melting, and sea level rise
1.Drought in Africa and Asia
2.Perturb ecology with more diffuse radiation
3.Ozone depletion
4.Continued ocean acidification
5.Will not stop ice sheets from melting
6.Impacts on tropospheric chemistry
2.Increase plant productivity
7.Whiter skies
3.Increase terrestrial CO2sink
8.Less solar electricity generation
4.Beautiful red and yellow sunsets
9.Degrade passive solar heating
5.Unexpected benefits
10.Rapid warming if stopped
11.Cannot stop effects quickly
12.Human error
13.Unexpected consequences
14.Commercial control
15.Military use of technology
16.Societal disruption, conflict between countries
17.Conflicts with current treaties
18.Whose hand on the thermostat?
19.Effects on airplanes flying in stratosphere
20.Effects on electrical properties of atmosphere
21.Environmental impact of implementation
22.Degrade terrestrial optical astronomy
23.Affect stargazing
24.Affect satellite remote sensing
25.More sunburn
26.Moral hazard – the prospect of it working would
reduce drive for mitigation
27.Moral authority – do we have the right to do this?
Robock, Alan, 2014: Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering. /Issues Env.
Sci. Tech./ (Special issue “Geoengineering of the Climate System”),
*38*, 162-185.
Don't you think that the more we look at geoengineering, the more it is
clear that it will not be a solution, and the more imperative mitigation
is? I agree that Obama, who is the best President ever on this subject,
could be doing much more. This just means he needs more pushing, and
the Chinese and Indians need to agree to take strong steps. We're
certainly not there yet, but let's not tell them that geoengineering
will give them an out.
Alan
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: rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu
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 6/2/2015 8:29 PM, Mike MacCracken wrote:
Re: [geo] On why we'll very likely need climate engineering Dear
Jon—While I think you overstate the situation with climate engineering
in terms of both uncertainties and costs (i.e., keeping the climate
roughly as it is likely has fewer uncertainties that heading to a 2 to
4 C climate with its uncertainties; and the costs of climate
engineering may well be a good bit less than mitigation—though
mitigation costs do seem to be dropping), I would generally agree with
your logic when one assumes rational leaders and policymakers thinking
in terms of long-term interests and rights and idealized situations
(e.g., no vested interests effectively pushing their views).
Unfortunately, it is not at all clear to me that these (and some
related) assumptions are valid, at least based on actions that
seemingly rational leaders are taking, much less ones that are focused
more on ideology than rational thinking. It seems to me this situation
could perhaps be achieved with an approach that is relatively robust
to the particular foibles of those making the decisions (e.g., a
really aggressive energy technology development effort that makes the
cost of transitioning energy systems less than the cost of staying as
we are—a situation that might well be achieved with a reasonable
carbon tax with substantial resources devoted to the transition), but
getting to this type of solution is also problematic. And so, given
all that is at risk and the behavior of the leaders that we are seeing
(so, for example in the US, leasing public lands for coal mining and
the Arctic seabed for drilling), it becomes hard to see how at least
some climate engineering is not inevitable as a means to reduce
overall suffering and loss.
Mike MacCracken
On 6/2/15, 7:46 PM, "Jon Lawhead" <lawh...@usc.edu> wrote:
As a philosopher working on this issue, it seems to me that this
provides a really strong argument in favor of focused attention on
mitigation. There's at least some degree of popular perception
that geoengineering provides a "fail safe" for fixing the climate
if/when we fail to successfully implement sufficient mitigation
policies. In some cases, this leads to more lukewarm (or
downright cold) support for mitigation than it otherwise would
have. Philosophers and social scientists call this a "moral hazard."
But it seems to me that this position isn't just wrong--it's
exactly backward. If a failure to adequately mitigate climate
change means that our only recourse will be geoengineering, that's
a /very/ strong reason to mitigate early and mitigate often. The
costs associated with geoengineering--both in terms of financial
commitments and in terms of potentially dangerous
side-effects--are just too numerous for it to be reasonable to
think of a large-scale geoengineering program as a "fail safe." I
think we would do well to work harder to promulgate that message
more widely and more forcefully than we do now.
Naturally,
Jon Lawhead, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Southern California
Philosophy and Earth Sciences
3651 Trousdale Parkway
Zumberge Hall of Science, 223D
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0740
http://www.realityapologist.com <http://www.realityapologist.com/>
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Greg Rau <gh...@sbcglobal.net>
wrote:
Amen, Mike. Given this dangerous trajectory, I'd say it's time
for another reading from our experts on the ethics of
alternative climate management methods. And I don't mean
adaptation.
Greg
--------------------------------------------
On Sun, 5/31/15, Mike MacCracken <mmacc...@comcast.net> wrote:
Subject: [geo] On why we'll very likely need climate engineering
To: "Geoengineering" <Geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, May 31, 2015, 10:28 AM
For those who argue that it is best
to keep relying on mitigation as the
only acceptable approach, it is because of disgraceful
decisions such as
described in:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-10-billion-tons-of-coal-that-could-eras
e-obamas-progress-on-climate-change
that this will be the case. I've done declarations for a
couple of lawsuits
trying to fight the leasing of such coal lands. The
Administration could
have acceded to their calls for a high quality environmental
review of the
consequences of such leasing (so including GHG effect), but
instead they
have fought those lawsuits and rely on a really outdated EIS
(their analysis
starts on page 4-130--and is only a few pages long). Or they
could have
imposed the social cost of carbon as an additional fee if
one wants to use
the free market system to level the field across
technologies--but no,
leases would be at very low prices.
So, first, the criticism that those of us favor
geoengineering first are
just wrong--we've been fighting hard for mitigation. But
decisions like this
keep coming, and I would suggest have nothing to do with
whether
geoengineering might or might not help. So, we keep having
to go deeper and
deeper in to the barrel to try to find some way to slow the
devastating
consequences of warming lying ahead.
Second, given decisions like this by the US, no wonder the
rest of the world
is not yet really making commitments that are strong enough
to make a
difference for the future. Truly embarrassing decision--it
makes all the
clamor over stopping the Keystone pipeline to limit tar
sands development
ring very hollow.
Mike MacCracken
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