Kolbert's book is great, as is the interview. But the introduction has
mistakes. Pinatubo erupted in 1991. It's resulting sulfuric acid cloud
covered the entire Earth. The current annual anthropogenic carbon
emissions (in 2019) were about 43 Gt CO_2 (
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-fossil-fuel-emissions-up-zero-point-six-per-cent-in-2019-due-to-china
), which is 11.7 Gt carbon, not 40 Gt carbon.
And saying "it seems unlikely that mankind will reach the two-degrees
celsius reduction target of the Paris Climate Accord" is confusing.
There is no temperature reduction target. But more importantly, this
defeatist attitude works against mitigation efforts. Certainly, mankind
can rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions with concerted educational
and governmental action to fight the selfish fossil fuel companies. See
Mike Mann's new book, /The New Climate Wars/, to educate yourself about
all their efforts to confuse and divide the public. Look at the efforts
and emphasis on this topic by the new Biden administration. And if the
risks of solar geoengineering, both in the physical climate system
(e.g., the title of Kolbert's book, /Under A White Sky/) and the very
difficult governance challenges become so overwhelming, this will aid
the increased push to mitigation. We face a problem created by humans.
And humans can solve it.
Alan
Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor
Chair-Elect, AGU College of Fellows
Associate Editor, /Reviews of Geophysics/
Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751
Rutgers University E-mail:
[email protected]
14 College Farm Road http://people.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 ☮ https://twitter.com/AlanRobock
"I've got a feeling 21 is going to be a good year" - The Who from the
album /Tommy/
Signature
On 2/19/2021 9:00 PM, Andrew Lockley wrote:
https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/02/in-a-warming-world-an-engineered-climate-edges-towards-reality/
<https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/02/in-a-warming-world-an-engineered-climate-edges-towards-reality/>
In a warming world, an engineered climate edges towards reality By
Alex Hodor-Lee
Above The Fold
In a warming world, an engineered climate edges towards reality
Read time 24 minutes
In a warming world, an engineered climate edges towards reality
Text by Alex Hodor-Lee
Photography by Alex Hodor-Lee
Interview by Elizabeth Kolbert
Posted February 9, 2021
Four environmental experts weigh in on the peril and promise of a
'geoengineered' Earth
1816 was dubbed “the year without summer.” In 1815, Indonesia’s Mount
Tambora erupted; the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, it
left a wake of catastrophic aftermath. “There were still on the
roadside the remains of several corpses, and the marks of where many
others had been interred: the villages almost entirely deserted and
the houses fallen down, the surviving inhabitants having dispersed in
search of food,” Sir Stamford Raffles, a British colonial officer,
observed. In addition to lava and an eight-inch blanket of ash, the
volcano belched out millions of tons of aerosol, effectively blocking
large swaths of sun rays from reaching Earth’s surface, cooling the
planet by three degrees celsius.
In 1992, in a province in the neighboring Philippines, there was
another cataclysmic explosion. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo released
20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, creating an
expansive chemical cloud spanning 200 miles long, again blocking the
sun’s rays, lowering Earth’s temperature by 0.5 degrees celsius over
the next two years.
These naturally occurring cooling phenomena have today’s climate
scientists wondering whether we, in service of combatting man-made
climate warming, can use science and technology to simulate organic
methods of lowering Earth’s temperature. Can we cool the planet? And,
if we can, should we? Once considered the stuff of science fiction,
geoengineering—the umbrella term for large-scale, intentional climate
intervention—is now a radical solution for an ever-warming world.
Much in the same way that social distancing, masks, and ultimately a
vaccine help flatten the Covid curve, climate intervention proponents
believe engineering techniques—chiefly, solar radiation
management—might “shave the peak” of average global temperatures by
using different technologies to re-radiate sunlight out of the
atmosphere. Shaving the peak may avert runaway climate scenarios or
hothouse effects—feedback loops triggered in Earth’s climatological
regime. One runaway scenario involves Greenland’s thawing permafrost:
if it indeed melts away, it will reveal heat-absorbing earth, and
possibly release methane deposits, the magnitudes of which will
severely accelerate warming.
With 40 gigatons of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere each year,
it seems unlikely that mankind will reach the two-degrees celsius
reduction target of the Paris Climate Accord. As we edge towards
climate midnight, radical solutions are looking more and more
appealing. In our failure to change our habits, we now consider
changing our habitat. So, geoengineering, once fringe science, has
entered into the debate over what is scientifically possible and
perhaps even necessary in the battle to preserve the planet.
“If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to
be more control,” writes author Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert, a staff
writer at The New Yorker, is the author of several books, including
the Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural
History. For two decades Kolbert has traversed our blue planet
investigating and communicating nature’s chief environmental stressor:
humans. Her latest book, Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future
(out today!), is a study of man’s interventions in nature, including
electrifying rivers and lab-grown super coral. “What could possibly go
wrong?” Kolbert writes of these solutions, later asking, “What’s the
alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to
bring back nature. The choice is not between what is, but between what
is and what will be, which often enough, is nothing.”
Kolbert joins Document to moderate a roundtable discussion with David
Keith, Kelly Wanser, and Holly Jean Buck, as they discuss—for all of
its peril and promise—the future of climate intervention.
For decades, Harvard professor David Keith has led research on
stratospheric aerosol injection, a solar radiation management
technique, which involves uniformly spraying aerosols into Earth’s
upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth, thereby
cooling the planet. Keith, with a team of Harvard University
scientists and researchers will undertake their first field experiment
in June.
Kelly Wanser is Executive Director of SilverLining, an NGO working
with stakeholders to advance research of large-scale technological
innovations, namely Marine Cloud Brightening. MCB, as it’s known,
involves seeding clouds with trillions of salt particles per second in
an effort to make them brighter, re-radiating the sun’s heat away from
Earth.
Holly Jean Buck is a professor of environment and sustainability at
the University at Buffalo. Her 2019 book, After Geoengineering:
Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration is a cogitation on power and
equity and adds an edge of stark moral conscience to intervention
discourse. Buck worries large-scale interventions will exacerbate
inequity as we near deployment scenarios. A best case scenario, Buck
writes, involves not writing these expansive programs or deploying
these technologies at all.
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