Hi All
Paragraph 5 says that doing nothing about ocean acidity is a risk.
Should we object to work on olivine for acidity reduction because it
would do nothing about Arctic ice?
There is never a mention of marine cloud brightening or the posibility
that, if it was done at the right times and places, the 'redistribution
of precipitation in different regions' might even be beneficial.
Did we get 'virtual unanimity in international governance' to cause the
problem in the first place?
Stephen
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design. School of Engineering,
University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, Scotland
[email protected], Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704, Cell 07795 203 195,
WWW.homepages.ed.ac.uk/shs, YouTube Jamie Taylor Power for Change
On 29/06/2015 20:04, Andrew Lockley wrote:
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/nordhaus-unwittingly-shows-flaws-in-case-for-carbon-tax/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nordhaus-unwittingly-shows-flaws-in-case-for-carbon-tax
Extract
There are two ways to slow climate change, and thereby to reduce the
likelihood of catastrophic damages. One is the hard slog of reducing
emissions. The other is to use geoengineering that attempts to offset
the CO2-induced warming.
Wagner and Weitzman provide an illuminating discussion of the dilemmas
of geoengineering. Geoengineering here means management of solar
radiation—techniques that reflect sunlight back into space and prevent
it from warming the earth’s climate. You can think of the process as
making the earth “whiter” or more reflective, so that less sunlight is
absorbed by the surface of the earth. This cooling effect will offset
the warming that comes from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The whitening process is similar to what occurs after large volcanic
eruptions. After Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blasted 20 million
tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in 1991, global
temperatures fell by about half a degree centigrade because the
particles reflected sunlight away from the earth. Geoengineering can
be understood as creating artificial volcanic eruptions, where several
artificial Pinatubo-sized eruptions may be needed every year to offset
the warming effects of CO2 accumulation.
Many proposals have emerged to whiten the earth. These, along with
many of the ethical, political, national security, and environmental
dimensions of such projects, are discussed in a recent report by the
National Academy of Sciences. The standard approach is to deliver
sulfur-bearing compounds, presumably specially engineered ones that
would act as small mirrors, into the lower stratosphere. A number of
techniques have been proposed to do this, such as using naval guns,
aircraft, or rockets. Recent studies indicate that such geoengineering
can lower global temperatures at very low cost relative to other
approaches, such as reducing carbon emissions.
Even though the costs are low and the average impacts on temperature
are clear, the dangers are frightening, as is emphasized by Wagner and
Weitzman as well as by the National Academy report. The NAS committee
concludes that climate “modification strategies are limited primarily
by considerations of risk, not by direct costs.” Among the risks are
the facts that geoengineering does nothing to reduce the ocean
acidification caused by increased CO2; that countries would need to
keep a program going virtually forever; that there is a mismatch
between the cooling and heating effects; and that there is a high
likelihood for redistribution of precipitation in the different
regions of the world. An effective program would require virtual
unanimity in international governance so as to reduce political
frictions among countries. [Nordhaus, bold added]
What is fascinating is that if you go to the actual book review and
read the full discussion, you will see that people like Weitzman and
Nordhaus are discussing whether people should even be conducting
cursory research into geoengineering options.
Why in the world would interventionists who think the fate of humanity
hangs in the balance not want scientists to broaden the options at our
grandchildren’s disposal? What they fear is that if the public
realizes there are techniques “on the shelf” that could very quickly
and cheaply bring down global temperatures, then it would be hard to
get humanity whipped up into a frenzy in spending trillions of dollars
to merely reduce the probability of a future unlikely “fat tail”
catastrophe.
Remember, the cutting-edge case for aggressive intervention against
emissions has stopped trying to claim that a high carbon tax will
likely produce large net benefits. For example, in this post I use the
latest IPCC report to show that in the most likely future scenario,
the economic costs of limiting temperature to 2 degrees Celsius of
warming will exceed the benefits of avoided climate change damage.
So already the aggressive interventionists have to make the “fat tail”
argument of Weitzman and others—they have to say a disaster might
occur if humans keep pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. But then in that case, it becomes very relevant to know
that one of the leading geoengineering proposals would cost $250
million total to limit Earth’s warming. That’s less than Al Gore’s
foundation is spending to “raise awareness” on the issue of climate
change.
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