Hi All, I think it's important to realize that we live in a world where the risk of "termination shock" is omnipresent in terms of dozens of technologies including transportation, energy, agriculture, and to a less apocalyptic extent medications.
Fertilizer production might be one of the best examples. We are globally-dependent on the fertilizer industry to pump out many metric tons of nitrogen and phosphate each year. If this supply were to fail, billions of people would likely starve in a few years as agricultural yields dropped and food prices climbed. This is an activity which I imagine is roughly equivalent to the scale of activity required for SRM. These are large industrial facilities and mining operation with global economic and strategic importance, they are dominated by three major countries (China, Morocco, USA). Yet the system hums along just fine. We don't worry about fertilizer termination shock, at least not very much. It's an imperfect system where we have shortage and excess, but it gets the job done and has been working like this for nearly 50 years. We could argue about the merits of any potential comparison, but the point is that there are dozens of similar industrial examples, many of which come down to the production of critical products in just a few facilities globally. We live in this world each day without worry or fear. I think the risk of SRM termination shock is oversold. It requires basic contingency planning or a market-based supply/demand system, but not a whole lot more than that. The value in the termination shock concept was in identifying this as a potential issue, but now that this knowledge is widespread, I think the concept has outlived its useful life. Cheers, Stephen Romaniello -- 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 geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
