An inconvenient truth on when it might make sense for intervention to begin is that as long as other people keep digging carbon out of ground, others will be unwilling to pay for its extraction from the air. This is what I see as the ultimate political challenge as people wanting to do it will be seen as wasters of taxpayer monies while others are pouring more carbon into air. People remain rightfully sceptical about CDR viability of extracting and storing vast amounts of CO2 that has been put into air. The geological cavities have been only used couple sites in the very limited most optimal situation where methane is being separated from carbon dioxide and the separated carbon dioxide is pumped back into the well in Norway. No carbon dioxide is being solidified or liquefied for transport by boats or tankers at the power stations, let by stand-alone CDR air CO2 extraction facilities.
Most people do not understand the concept of lead time in ocean warming, glacier warming, soil warming, or atmospheric warming. The fossil fuel people know this and they actively exploit it by misleading simple-minded people enjoying their car drives and overseas holidays and other polluting activities which they see as God-given 'necessities' or 'blessings' to themselves (I meant this in a secular, nor religious sense). In my view, therefore, it will make sense for the general public the intervention to begin once something catastrophic has occurred. I also suspect that there exists this point in future. I do not have the relevant research paper at my disposal right now here but I cited it in my Parliament evidences in 6th and 24th April 2017 (links of which I have previously posted here). When the Pleistocene climate was transiting to Holocene stability, there were warmings with huge rapid cold swings. After the Arctic Ocean becomes ice free in summers there will be exhaustive surface ponding by melt water and from flash-floods across the broad and low-lying North Greenland Ice. The moulins and crevasses accummulate water within and beneath ice sheet for number of years providing the ice softening, lubrication and subglacial pothole filling by water. As the Glacier Debris Flow (GDF) like Heindrich Ice Berg Calving Event emerges, the ocean fills rapidly with ice cooling the ocean and atmosphere massively in just one melting season which I believe to be the Last Dryas event (and the earlier Dryases being similar GDF-like events where large sections of ice sheets or shelves suddenly ended up pulverised in the ocean. This will create a film of cold fresh water and melting ice over the ocean making it suspectible for freezing. As a result both the marine sea ice cover and the terrestrial snowcover expand. As this natural cooling occurs after a collapse of major ice sheet or ice shelf, the general public will see their contribution and consequences from the fossil fuel use which no propaganda by fossil fuel businesses can cover up. Then people will accept their collective guilt unequivocally with the fossil fuel propagandists finally being punished for their climate crimes and scientific deception. However, by this time the atmospheric load of greenhouse gases (methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, CFCs) have so much increasted that the cold Dryas will be very transitional due to huge greenhouse gas forcing (remember during the Palaeolithic times people were breathing air which had only 185 p.p.m. CO2 in the air and thus this absence of carbon dioxide delayed the melting of oceanic ice debris considerably). Today, we will need massive geoengineering effort at this moment of time to prolong the Last Dryas for the ocean to absorb carbon, the plant life to recover and geoengineers to have time to destroy atmospheric methane and carbon dioxide. My view above is that during the above period general public finally agrees on necessity of geoengineering, before that time it remains a debated academic technology. My view is largely based on view that the driver from Pleistocene glaciations to Holocene warmth was methane from depressurised and sunlight-exposed seabeds and the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the tipping point where this switchover happened. The lack of methane in the ice cores is explicable by the fact that the gas is lighter than air and tends to raise in the atmosphere above the level where glaciers form. Hence also the mismatch between the onset of warming and the appearance of greenhouse gases in the ice cores. The other contributor being the regressive state of ice sheets in melting temperatures with the most recent deposits melting away under methane-warmed Bollinger suns. Keep doing the good job, I think if we are ready to employ en masse at that point, some of the most dangerous runaway risks might be reversed although the world would be in great mess after the coastal flooding associated with a major GDF-like dispatch of ice into the world ocean. I hope my GDF-view would be the cause of the sudden and extreme Dryases. Veli Albert Kallio, FRGS Vice President, Sea Research Society Environmental Affairs Department ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Michael Hayes <[email protected]> Sent: 08 November 2017 04:57 To: Mike MacCracken Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; geoengineering Subject: Re: [geo] Re: On when it might make sense for intervention to begin Mike & List, Going with the most well known is understandable. Yet SAI is actually, from a Polar perspective, not any more well known than Hydroxyl Cryogenesis Geotherapy or Global Electrical Circuit Enhancement. Polar modeling is a separate art. Michael Hayes On Nov 7, 2017 6:01 PM, "Michael MacCracken" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Peter--I'm all for DAC and hoe you can scale up and do it as you suggest, but to limit impacts, we should not let the temperature go above 1.5 C and should be aiming to pull it down to less than 0.5 C, and I agree therefore that CDR is absolutely essential. I know nothing on pricing and challenge of scaling up, but it does seem a bit hard to accept that it can be scaled up fast enough unless we really do get into a Pearl Harbor to D-Day type of scale up (Manhattan Project was small potatoes compared to overall scale up). There is now report coming out I think tomorrow that focuses how close to the climate impacts edge we are but it still seems that we are very far from scaling up far enough and fast enough. I'd be delighted to avoid SRM, but just don't think that is going to happen (even if possible in the way you suggest) and a little SRM could help to save the species and impact commitments that will really grow as the temperature heads beyond 1.5 C (or even 1 C for the ice sheets). I also think there is the chance that the fact that SRM may be needed might well help scale up the CDR push rather than tamp it down--it really will depend on how things are framed. What seems to bother both of us, in any case, is this failure to be acting strongly enough on any of the various possibiliities, much less on all of them, which is what would be prudent/precautionary thing to be doing. Mark Cane, at an NRC/BASC meeting yesterday offered the challenge of naming an emerging problem that was dealt with before it became really problematic, suggesting the only one he had come up with was buying up the Catskill and Adirondack watersheds to provide water for NYC, and that effort was during Tammany times and involved a good bit of graft and profiteering; he did suggest that water for LA likely was achieved with similar shortcomings (as a read of the excellent book "Cadillac Desert" documents). Thus, he was a bit pessimistic that we can rouse public action before disaster strikes, which will be too late given the time and magnitude scales of this problem. I'd be delighted if your approach succeeded sufficiently to avoid SRM, but I think at moment instead of being concerned about the other, it would be better to be working together (and with this new report/declaration that is coming) to get attention to the real seriousness of the situation we are in and that there are potential ways to deal with it, none without effort and uncertainty, and we had better get to work on not only researching but early deployment of them. Best, Mike On 11/6/17 2:47 PM, Peter Eisenberger wrote: I believe the winner take all perspective is highly flawed and is a major contributor why those of us who share the concern for the climate risk are not being effective in making our case. The winner take all lanquage is appropriate for academic and commercial efforts but not for a Manhatten Project Perspective where finding the approach to focus ones efforts on is the primary challenge and vigorous internal debate is the process. The opportunity cost of addrsssing SRM that cannot solve the problem and could make it worse before we as a community support CDR which can solve the problem and has minimal risk is very large and made larger when so called experts argue in support of SRM that one cannot depend upon or worse it is unlikely CDR can work in time . The self fulling and self serving aspect of that is clear . And by the way those who oppose taking the climate threat seriously will vigorously support doing more research rather than having a manhatten like project where we all cooperate to address the treat we face. Someone or some organization that supports the concern should provide a process to have that vigorous internal debate with the pledge that one will support the consencus approach that emerges . We can n o longer afford to fagment our efforts by viewng this as an area of competition for support rather than an emergency we need to come together on and confront as best we can . On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Michael Hayes <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Mike, Well said and reasonable. Yet we seem to be drawn to a winner takes all type of strategy. If stratospheric injection presents unknowns, as all large scale actions will, and time is of the essence, why not field as many a plausible to filter out, and or adjust, as many as possible. There was once concern that one method would somehow contaminate another. Frankly I don't see that happening. Will SAI trouble MCB? Will AWL sink Biochar or BlueBiochar. How would SAI, MCB, or even OIF negate Olivine? Lets approach this as it is, a critical deployment phase which must reach for the best basket of tech coming on line and do so as soon as plausible. Table top neatness in experimentation eats far too much time and, fankly, is not needed. As a side note on SAI, the same equipment can be used to test out wetted C as an air dehydrator/electrical bridge to the GEC (GEC+) and the Hydroxyl Cryogenesis Geotherapy (HCG) approach. All of the methods need to be tested in the most informative, and thus challenging, set of conditions. I propose an Arctic high altitude field campaign involving SAI, HCG, and GEC+ be immediately ramped up for and deployed this Arctic Winter. The balloon station and tether components are all off the shelf. I propose a $3M budget. The law HR 353 peovides the budget. The aviation tech development during this Arctic build and deploy exercise will be valuable to the weather forecasting field for many decades. $3M is cheap for this amount of immediate science as well as new tool development. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/353 Michael Hayes On Nov 5, 2017 7:45 PM, "Michael MacCracken" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Doug--In response to your Nov 4 post below, I am all for learning, but the problem with waiting and waiting is that the Earth will keep warming and warming and impacts will keep growing and growing--including especially ones that are or near irreversible, such as to biodiversity and commitment to sea level rise. If the goal were, during this 20-year learning time, only to reduce or offset year-by-year warming as might be done, based on our understanding of volcanic effects, using quite small annual increments to the stratospheric sulfur loading, and basically iterating as we go on something like 5-year running averages, we would very likely be in a much more favorable situation to evaluate how to proceed, both having better model analyses and having some experience to work with. If we find the 20-year accumulation is worse than ongoing global warming with GHGs or that mitigation is working particularly well, the stratospheric injection level could be gradually reduced instead of continuing with ongoing augmentation. While there would of course be uncertainties, it is not really clear that they would be more serious than the increasing changes and impacts that are occurring. It just seems to me that to do nothing while continuing with research just lets the situation get worse and then the cure having to be so much stronger than deployment itself could be problematic. If, as Santer et al suggest, early 21st century rate of warming was slowed by the cooling influences of small volcanic eruptions that injected amounts that were barely noticeable even with advanced instruments and really not at all noticeable by the general public, I'd suggest that we actually have a natural analog of the type of influence that I am suggesting be pursued. And, in that we will be learning along the way through the 20-year research program (let's assume that the research is funded), so it just seems, as noted above, that the uncertainties associated with such an approach would not be less than the impacts and uncertainties of deferring all intervention efforts until some probably pretty arbitrary level of understanding in the future. Regarding my favoring of regionally focused alterations, I would make that a research priority, but I'd suggest that the earlier one started injecting enough sulfur to offset each year's forcing increment or so, the better--just thinking that, in the type of relative risk framing that I view as appropriate to the situation given where we are, that, with mitigation ramping up virtually everywhere (and the US doing somewhat well despite the Administration's mistaken actions), starting very modestly with stratospheric aerosol climate intervention could really help in making sure that the situation is not so bad by the time we learn enough to "make reasonably informed decisions" (whatever that means) that we will be unable to avoid significant overshoot of the global average temperature without such aggressive intervention that we'll be suffering from both the growing impacts and then the supposed cure. At the very least, I would think a good case could be made for such an effort. Best regards, Mike MacCracken On 11/4/17 11:43 AM, Douglas MacMartin wrote: Both SAI and MCB probably need of order of 20 years of research before we could make reasonably informed decisions; both have a long list of unknowns. (In the case of MCB, we don't even really know if it "works" in any meaningful sense of the word, because cloud-aerosol interactions are too uncertain today, so we really don't know whether there is a useful fraction of cloud meteorological conditions in which the albedo is significantly enhanced. We should all really really hope that it doesn't work very well, because if it doesn't, that means the indirect aerosol effect is smaller than current best guess and climate sensitivity will be on the low end...) (And, of course, at the current level of worldwide funding, that "20" above is probably off by a few orders of magnitude.) -----Original Message----- From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Michael Hayes Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2017 10:00 AM To: geoengineering <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [geo] Can anyone offer a CE perspective on this SLR article? Holly and List, The use of sulfur needs proper polar field level testing. Testing is planned yet may not be done in areas prone to Polar Stratospheric Cloud formation. Time of the season is also of the essence for testing. Until that is done, SAI has a large question to answer; in general terms. MCB, used in key areas, is a critical first step. There should be no deflection at that engineering level. Once MCB paves the way, other marine capable systems can gain traction. What marine engineering minded person or institution would not give Steven's word heavy weight? This is a marine issue. -- 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]<mailto:[email protected]>. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION: This email message and all attachments contain confidential and privileged information that are for the sole use of the intended recipients, which if appropriate applies under the terms of the non-disclosure agreement between the parties. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. 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