Day 3 - Are we comparing apples with apples? And who likes "them apples"?
http://www.spp-climate-engineering.de/symposium-blog-single/items/day-3-are-we-comparing-apples-with-apples-and-who-likes-them-apples.html
The third and final full day of the symposium again included two
sessions of talks. The first, entitled "A Comparative View of Climate
Engineering Options and Metrics," was aimed at taking a good look at the
concepts and terms we use to evaluate and assess different types of CE
technologies to establish if researchers from different fields,
countries and disciplines are assessing the technologies in a comparable
way.
In the first talk of the day, Peter Irvine outlined a way to move
towards a comprehensive review and comparison of the impacts and risks
of CE methods. His suggested review process included and empirical
evaluation of given CE method to attempt to project changes for the
system affected, and a normative evaluation to attempt to judge the
projected changes as good/bad, just/unjust, etc. Peter envisioned
assessing all CE methods in this way and then aggregating the results to
put the assessed climate risk of one given CE technology into a broader
perspective by comparing its risks with those of other suggested
technologies. He suggested that this bottom-up approach would be quite
slow and would probably result in a complex picture comprised of patchy
assessments with variation across regions. But the advantage of starting
with the individual evaluation of each technology and slowly building up
the bigger picture one "pixel" at a time would be that the resulting
picture would have very detailed resolution. An alternative to the
bottom-up approach would be a top-down, derivate approach using the
metrics and tools established by the IPCC to assess the key risks of all
CE technologies. Starting from the big picture and working down to the
individual level would have the advantage of being faster and allowing a
more uniform, comprehensive comparison, but would perhaps produce a less
detailed picture of the risks of individual technologies. Peter
suggested that a combination of both approaches would allow the most
comprehensive evaluation.
Duncan McClaren's talk centered around the concept of justice in CE
assessment. As CE technologies would have an uneven effect around the
world, the "justness" of their deployment is central to the debate. But
as Duncan pointed out, justice is not a universal concept. He called for
a categorization of the global range of justice concepts, claims and
metrics, which could then be used these to compare and contrast the
justice of CE techniques, emphasizing the need for a move towards a
plurality of concepts of justice, suggesting this could be achieved by
means of deliberative and participative approaches to combine
contradictory metrics.
Harald Stelzer followed in the same tone, calling for an overview of the
normative criteria for the evaluation of CE technologies that would
emphasise distributive impacts and elaborate on ethical aspects of
ongoing projects. This would allow an interdisciplinary exchange on the
ethical, societal and political feasibility of CE technologies. He
pointed out that normative evaluations of CE ask much the same questions
as empirical assessments - including how much technologies "cost" and
who would benefit how much etc. – but such normative approaches simply
provide an added ethical perspective. He concluded that ethical
assessment is an essential part of all questions on CE and emphasized
that interdisciplinary dialogue is imperative to understanding and
evaluating the social, political, economic, ethical and moral dimensions
of CE feasibility.
The next talk, given by Hermann Held, focused in on one of the many
aspects of CE evaluation listed by the previous speakers: Cost
effectiveness. Using economic modelling he showed that if you ignore the
risks of SRM deployment, it would completely "crowd out" mitigation in
economic climate policy. By comparing economic effects of mitigation
with and without added SRM deployment, he showed that about one third of
the costs of maintaining a 2 degree target could be saved by using SRM.
However, he then went on to show that two thirds of the economic gains
of SRM are lost after regional climate risk is taken into account.
Andreas Oschlies took a very long-range view in his talk about modelling
the millennial effects of CE deployment. His model runs looked at the
state of the climate system in 3000 after multiple centuries of
large-scale deployment of a range of CE techniques, including
stratospheric aerosol injection, iron fertilization, alkalinity
enhancement and artificial upwelling in the ocean, and afforestation on
land. The simulations showed that the only two technologies which had a
high impact in a high emission world over a long period of time were
stratospheric aerosols and ocean upwelling, but there was no future
"mission accomplished moment" in which the climate returned to a stable
state and CE could safely be terminated. The models showed that
termination problem persists even after several hundred years of CE
deployment because the CDR technologies included in the simulations did
not have a significant effect on the atmospheric CO_2 concentration.
Andreas emphasized that, due to its incredibly long life-time in the
climate system, managing carbon is key in the long term.
Sebastian Sonntag continued the theme of comparing the effectiveness of
land, ocean and atmosphere-based CE methods in his presentation on the
modeling of stratospheric aerosol injection, alkalinity enhancement and
afforestation. In contrast to the previous speaker, Sebastian's
simulations indicated that afforestation could have a substantially
larger CDR potential, as the model includes terrestrial feedback effects
of increased CO_2 . The models indicated that there was cooling due to
CO_2 reduction, but as forests are darker than cropland, there was some
local warming, and increasing evaporation additionally had a cooling
effect. The end effect of large-scale afforestation on the climate was a
minor net effect cooling with large regional variations.
Staying with the topic of the effects of land-based, or terrestrial CDR
methods, Vera Heck then told us about her investigations into the
potential climatic side effects of biomass plantations. Her results
challenged the assumption that terrestrial CDR (tCDR) is a "safe and
green" CE method by comparing the impacts of tCDR to the biochemical
effects human alterations to land use have historically had. Vera's
models included biochemical metrics to measure changes in water flux,
plant production, land carbon storage and vegetation carbon resistance
time. Her simulations showed that tCDR could be expected to cause larger
future biochemical changes than humans have caused so far historically
by altering natural environments for agriculture, meaning the impacts of
large scale biomass plantations would be even larger than past land use
changes and would move the climate system into a completely new state.
Additionally, Vera showed that plantations could have large effects on
biodiversity and food production, that fertilization required for the
plantations would be 420 % of current nitrogen demand, and that 30–50 %
more water would be required than current land use requires. She
therefore summarized that her models indicate that tCDR is not a "green"
option.
Jessica Strefler then went on to present her work on the integrated
assessment of mitigation and CDR. She looked at four types of CDR:
Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), afforestation,
direct air capture and terrestrial enhanced weathering and compared them
based on price, energy and land use requirements. Comparing the land use
of the different CDR methods, Jessica showed that as unrestricted
afforestation and BECCS are expected to reduce the amount of land
available for food crops, both these methods are expected to cause food
prices to increase dramatically. Despite these problems, Jessica's work
showed that CDR could play a key role in achieving low stabilization of
carbon in the climate system, and that its strategic value lies in
compensating the emissions that are most expensive to reduce.
Before we broke for lunch the audience and a panel of the session's
speakers were given the chance to discuss any open questions raised
during the day. Points made during the panel discussion included a
reiteration that concepts of justice are always contested, and obtaining
an overview over the range of these concepts essential to communicate on
CE. However the open question remained as to whether these multitude of
justice concepts would be useful for comparing types of CE responses.
With regard to questions of the justice of CE deployment, it became
clear that the intentionality would play a huge role, and that thus far
there has not been much consideration of the topic.
Another issue discussed is that it is essential to make explicit what
models of the effects of CE deployment are being compared to. When
making empirical and normative evaluations of CE, It makes a big
difference if the reference climate being referred to is today's climate
or pre-industrial climate or runaway climate change in the future.
Additionally, there was lively discussion about the tension between the
need for simplification and the desire for complexity when evaluating
CE. While some were of the opinion that it is dangerous to draw general
conclusions from general observations, and emphasized that detailed
assessment is needed before statements about the effectiveness of
specific CE technologies can be made, others pointed out that at the
same time we need to reduce complexity to a point that we can make
decisions on CE. Additionally, it was suggested that we, as researchers,
need to generalize a little to be able to communicate about issues in an
interdisciplinary way, as there is not a way to wait until we have a
final answer before discussing these topics.
And finally, summarizing the overall take-home message of the session on
comparing the concepts and terms we use to evaluate and assess different
types of CE technologies, it was empathized that the difficult task of
identifying and deciding upon meaningful metrics can only be achieved as
part of an interdisciplinary community effort.
After a restorative lunch, we started the afternoon's session on the
perceptions of and perspectives on CE research and deployment with new
energy. We jumped right into the issue as to what "people" think about
CE technologies and why with a presentation by Jack Stilgoe on how the
framing of CE affects not only the perception of the field in civil
society, but also how members of the research community see their role.
Jack described research and experiments as "ways of making and remaking
the world" and called on researchers to be aware of their role as frame
shapers. He then went on take a closer look at the composition of the
field. As CE research is recent, the field is expectedly quite small. It
is very interdisciplinary, but some disciplines are more strongly
represented than others - what is especially evident is that there is a
relative absence of engineers in the field of climate /engineering./
Jack then addressed the way in which researchers in the field perceive
the way scientific enquiry should proceed. Using streetscapes as an
analogy, he asked if should we rather delineate a "safe space" by draw
red lines around what we consider to be acceptable/unacceptable research
and imposing strict entrance criteria, or if we should rather see the
field as a "shared space" in which there is no clear delineation between
disciplines, blurring lines and removing barriers to participation.
Continuing the street analogy, he suggested that, as having shared
streets slows traffic, so a shared research space may result in slower
science, but the end result has the potential be much more complex and
inclusive.
Wil Burns then provided us with an overview of the concept of
intergenerational justice and how some CE technologies have the
potential to violate principle of intergenerational equity. He took up
the topic of the termination effect, suggesting that even if our
generation did not stop using it, we would still be transferring a
"Damocles sword" to hang over the heads of future generations who will
then need to keep using CE to avoid the termination effect, saying this
too is a potential violation of principle of intergenerational equity.
Other CE related issues which may contravene the principle of
intergenerational equity suggested by Wil included that if CE affects
the replenishment of the ozone layer, future generations may face
increased skin cancer related problems, and if ecosystems are altered,
future generations may be denied access to recourses. To reduce the
likelihood of this happening, Wil indicated that we should restrict the
scope of CE to keep options open for future generations and reduce
emissions to reduce the amount of time that CE would need to be used. He
went on to argue for a strong legal coupling of any permission to deploy
CE to aggressive mitigation.
An overview of the African perspective on CE was provided by Mary
Mutiso, who emphasised that the peoples of different regions have
potentially very different perceptions about the utility and morality of
CE. She pointed out that knowledge about and research on CE is limited
in African nations, and expressed the concern that decisions about CE
would be imposed upon Africa by the global north. She stressed the need
for transparency of research, knowledge transfer and consensus on CE
governance to ensure participation by scientists, politicians and the
public in as many nations as possible.
Gert Pönitzsch briefly presented the results of an online survey of CE
experts and laypeople which asked how much of the total budget should be
spent on mitigation, CDR, adaption and SRM. The results indicated
respondents thought mitigation should receive the most funding, and the
median amount of budget respondents allocated to CE was 15 %, with CDR
receiving the most of that funding. Further questions on what sort of
solar aerosol injection (SAI) research should be funded showed that
while most respondents supported research, support for limited field
research and global field research was much lower among both experts and
laypeople. The results Gert presented indicated that there was no bias
among CE researchers towards deployment, and that experts were slightly
more cautious regarding risks and benefits of SAI than lay people.
Christine Merk went on to show us the results of an experiment to assess
whether individuals reduce mitigation efforts when they are informed
about SAI. The experiment was organized as an online survey in which
each participant was given 10 Euro and told they could use this to buy
voluntary carbon offsets (1 Euro per offset) or keep it and do what they
liked with it. Participants included a baseline group and group who had
been informed about SAI. This information was provided in a way that
tried to avoid all framing by keeping the information neutral and
included details about potential benefits, negative effects and high
uncertainty. The results Christine presented showed that people who were
informed about SAI bought more carbon offsets, indicating that knowledge
about aerosol injection increases individual mitigation, although she
emphasized that it is unclear if this behaviour would carry over into
real life.
Next Nils Matzner and Daniel Barben presented details about two studies
on the nexus of science and policy and the CE discourse in science,
policy and civil society arenas. Daniel emphasized the role of knowledge
in the legitimization of political action and the way in which knowledge
can create the responsibility to take action. We were shown why who says
what in what context to what audience matters in the CE discourse by
indicating how statements by high profile speakers Paul Cruzten and Al
Gore have the potential to change the course of the debate on CE. Nils
presented some results from the discourse analysis of the CE discourse
in science, policy and civil society arenas which showed that the terms
"governance" and "responsibility" are very central. Other results
included that the attribution problem is important for science and
science policy interface, while civil society emphasizes negative side
effects.
The last talk of the day was given by Tim Kruger. He used analogies to
explore the moral implications of the future availability of cheap,
safe, scaleable CDR and whether 'can' implies 'ought'. He emphasized
that if we could remove CO_2 out of the atmosphere, it would crystallise
a price for carbon, and questioned why we are pumping so much money into
renewables and not into CO2 removal technologies.
After a day packed with interesting presentations and discussions, the
session ended with a general discussion and some closing remarks on the
idea of "slow science" introduced by Jack Stilgoe. As one participant
put it, slow science could be like slow food - better quality, with more
criteria considered, but not as fast. It was suggested we could "go
slow now to go fast later", but others emphasized that there is a need
for speed with relation to CDR innovation. We ended the discussion by
agreeing to disagree on some points and left with even more to think
about than when we arrived.
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