Thanks for this very interesting interview that finally convinces me
that we truly really need to accept climate intervention as a very
important method to avoid catastrpohe.
One question: Everywhere I read about 2,4 or 2,7 Degree celsius of
warming by 2100. Would it not be important to talk about warming past 2100?
We will have way more than "jus" 2,7 degrees warming, right?
I think it´s time to communicate that clearly.
Best,
Maiken
Am 21.11.2021 um 20:46 schrieb Geoeng Info:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/geoengineering-climate-change
Climate Expert: Stop Talking About "Geoengineering"
<https://spectrum.ieee.org/geoengineering-climate-change>
Term is a distraction from crucial research on climate interventions
The leaders of the world have just returned from the UN's latest
climate change summit, COP26 <https://ukcop26.org/>, in which the
countries that have signed on to the Paris Agreement upped their
commitments to fight climate change. Everyone solemnly agreed, again,
to follow the science, which has shown in exhaustive detail that
humanity will suffer from heat, fire, floods, and droughts
<https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf> if
the world warms beyond 1.5° C
<https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Full_Report_High_Res.pdf> above
pre-industrial levels.
Yet if countries continue on their present course, the world will
likely have warmed by 2.7° C by the year 2100
<https://climateactiontracker.org/press/Glasgows-one-degree-2030-credibility-gap-net-zeros-lip-service-to-climate-action/>,
according to Climate Action Tracker
<https://climateactiontracker.org/>. If they meet all the pledges
they've made for emission reductions by 2030, global temperature rise
will be at 2.4° C by then. Hardly the breakthroughs we need to stave
off disaster.
In light of this situation, there's increasing talk
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/climate/geoengineering-sunlight.html> of
actions that governments can take beyond reducing greenhouse gas
emissions—actions that could either remove existing greenhouse gases
from the atmosphere or reduce the amount of sunlight
<https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25762/reflecting-sunlight-recommendations-for-solar-geoengineering-research-and-research-governance> coming
into the atmosphere. Nobody's proposing relying solely on such
tactics, but they could potentially help the planet in the short-term.
Such approaches are usually called geoengineering
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering>, and they're
controversial: Many people worry about the unintended consequences of
interfering with nature on a global scale. But Kelly Wanser
<https://www.silverlining.ngo/executive-director>, the executive
director of the non-profit Silver Lining
<https://www.silverlining.ngo/>, argues that humanity is already
interfering with nature on a global scale; that's what climate change
is all about. She spoke with /IEEE Spectrum/ about her work in
encouraging basic scientific research on climate interventions.
*/IEEE Spectrum/: What role does Silver Lining play in climate
research or advocacy?*
*Kelly Wanser: *Silver Lining's focus is on near-term climate risk:
the exposure that we have to climate change between now and the middle
of the century. The IPCC report
<https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/> released this past August
said that in all of the realistic scenarios that they look at for
climate change, warming continues to increase between now and 2050.
And right now, we don't have enough ways to significantly reduce that
warming.
*
Wanser:* It's partly a play on words. One approach to reducing warming
has to do with brightening clouds with salt from seawater. But it's
also a way of indicating that there is hope and possibility in
navigating the dangerous part of the climate change
situation.*/Spectrum/: Where does the name of the organization come from?*
*/Spectrum/: I've been reporting on this topic recently, and I think I
irritated a few researchers by using the term "geoengineering." Do you
object to that term, and if so, what term do you prefer?*
*Wanser: *We do object to it, because we don't think it's a good
reflection of what is being proposed in these rapid responses to
climate change. In 2015, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
published a report on these types of technological approaches to
reducing warming or reducing greenhouse gases, and the term that they
arrived at was "climate intervention
<https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2015/02/climate-intervention-is-not-a-replacement-for-reducing-carbon-emissions-proposed-intervention-techniques-not-ready-for-wide-scale-deployment>."
It's a useful term because it speaks to the problem it's aimed at,
climate, and expresses the uncertainty involved—we're trying to
influence a system, but we don't have a high degree of control, like
we would in an engineering context.
We actually conducted a public poll on the terms "geoengineering" and
"climate intervention" and found that people were better able to
comprehend what was meant by climate intervention, and also were less
fearful.
*/Spectrum/: When you talk about climate interventions, are you
including carbon removal and sequestration in that category?*
*Wanser: *We do include that in the broad category. But we focus on it
less, because we've opted to focus on approaches that are likely to be
most rapid and most likely to help address near-term risks. We've also
focused on the parts of the portfolio where there are fewer people and
fewer investments that are moving things forward. So, we focus
significant energy on solar climate intervention, or sunlight
reflection. We do some work on carbon removal, but that's pretty big
space with a lot of investment. Which is good.
*/Spectrum/: When you talk about the rationale for research on climate
interventions, do you start with moral arguments or economic arguments?*
*Wanser: *We start from the point of view of public safety, which is a
concept in international environmental law and environmental law in
the United States. We're really focused on the fact that we have quite
a serious safety problem—potentially a catastrophic safety problem—in
terms of human life, displacement and suffering, and the natural
systems that we rely on.
The projections are that up to a billion people
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/09/climate-crisis-could-displace-12bn-people-by-2050-report-warns> could
be displaced between now and 2050, meaning that many parts of the
world will become uninhabitable by then. What do we have to offer
these billion people? We see it as similar to the ozone hole problem,
where we really needed a tight, science-based focus on the limits to
human inputs to the system--and howthose inputs affected the ozone
layer's ability to keep people safe.
*/Spectrum/: You've spoken before about tipping points
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system>:
the idea that we may exceed thresholds in natural systems and thus
cause drastic and irreversible changes. Which ones do you worry about?*
*Wanser: *I'll focus on the one for which there is the most robust
information. The Amazon rainforest is called the lungs of the planet
because it gives oxygen back to the system and takes in a lot of CO2.
But a combination of deforestation and warming pressure have caused
the Amazon to now release more greenhouse gas than it absorbs
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/14/amazon-rainforest-now-emitting-more-co2-than-it-absorbs>,
which is considered to be a big accelerant of climate change.
We are working with climate modelers to try to figure out how that
changes the projections. But the IPCC report
<https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/> that came out in August
does not include this newly discovered state of the rain forest. And,
therefore, the curves in that report's [warming] pathways may not
reflect the real amplification this might create. In almost all
previous projections for climate, tipping events like these were far
in the future. For the Amazon rain forest, the climate modelers that
we talked to said there were almost no climate simulations where the
rain forest tips in this century.
*/Spectrum/: You're saying the situation is even more dire than we
thought. And yet there's a lot of resistance to research on climate
interventions that you say could help with near-term risks. I
typically hear two critiques. The first is the moral hazard
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard> argument: If we embark on
this research, it will undermine attempts to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. People will think it's a get-out-of-jail-free card. How do
you guys respond to that?*
*Wanser: *Well, I usually respond with some sympathy for it. If we had
started ratcheting back greenhouse gas emissions in the 1980s, that
would have been the wisest and the safest thing to do. I like to use
the analogy of medicine. It's not very smart to not take simple
precautions and to let the patient get sick. But when the patient is
very sick, then preventative measures like healthy diet and exercise
don't help effectively enough or quickly enough. The treatment options
aren't the same when a patient is sicker, and it appears we have quite
a sick patient now.
*/Spectrum/: The second critique I usually hear is that we will never
understand enough about our complex climate systems to be able to
intervene safely, and that we're guaranteed to mess things up and
create massive side effects. How do respond to people who say the
precautionary principle
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle> applies here?*
*Wanser: *This is one of the reasons that we don't like term
geoengineering. If you think of it as something wholly new and
different, then there's this understandable thought: Why would we do
something totally new and different than we don't understand? But a
dirty, unmanaged variation of this is happening already.
Two graphs labelled Contributions to warming based on two
complementary approaches showing red and blue bars based on
contributions to warming
Humanity is already reducing global warming... by spewing pollution
into the air. IPCC REPORT: CLIMATE CHANGE 2021
The 2021 IPCC report
<https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf> includes
a chart where they show the human influences on the climate system,
with pink bars for warming effects and blue bars for cooling. The
largest blue bar is the effect of pollution particles on clouds. [[The
particles attract water to increase the number of droplets in clouds,
and those clouds reflect more sunlight away from the Earth.]] It's a
cooling effect and it's happening all over the world as a result of
pollution from factories, ships, and cars. We're planning to remove
that pollution, so it would be wise for us to understand that effect.
And it would be interesting for us to think about whether there's a
clean variation that we might want to replace it with. For example,
some scientists are proposing to use a salt particles from seawater to
brighten clouds over the ocean and send more sunlight back to space.
If you think about it that way, then this isn't a question of should
we do something totally new or not, but how do we manage this
situation that we already have, which includes these existing
dynamics, these variations of things that are happening now.
*/Spectrum/: In September, /Spectrum/ published an article
<https://spectrum.ieee.org/climate-change> by the researchers working
on that marine cloud brightening project. But do you want to sum up
what they're doing?*
*Wanser: *It's one of the few research efforts in the world that is
looking at the process-level science around these climate intervention
techniques for reflecting sunlight from the atmosphere: How would it
actually work? How would you disperse the particles? How would they
move in the atmosphere and affect the reflection of sunlight? For
years, they have been developing technology for local dispersal and
figuring out how to make the size and quantity of particles they think
will work best. Now they have a large scientific collaboration to do
[atmospheric and climate] modeling from very local to regional to
global scales and to maybe step out and spray at very small scales to
study those dynamics and inform the models.
It's exciting because they have the potential to do really important
science about how pollution is impacting clouds and climate and also
because they can likely determine, in a fairly reasonable amount of
time, whether or not marine cloud brightening might be an option to
significantly reduce warming.
*/Spectrum/: Imagine that the researchers find that marine cloud
brightening is effective at reflecting sunlight and doesn't have
negative impacts. How would it be implemented?*
*Wanser: *There are three parts of the world that have large banks of
marine stratocumulus
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratocumulus_cloud> clouds that are
very susceptible to this effect. Scientists propose having ships or
autonomous vessels that would cruise around and spray particles in
these regions, maybe be in the low-digit thousands of ships. Their
goal would be to brighten these clouds by something like five to seven
percent, so probably not in a way that's visible from the ground, and
maybe not even visible from space.
*/Spectrum/: Where are these three parts of the world?*
*Wanser:* One of them is in the Pacific off the west coast of North
America, another is off the west coast of South America, the third is
off the coast of southern Africa.
*/Spectrum/: The marine cloud project deals with adding particles to
low-level clouds, but I also wanted to get your perspective on the
SCoPEx project <https://www.keutschgroup.com/scopex> from Harvard,
which wants to test the effect of stratospheric particles. They'd
hoped this past year to simply test the technology platform, not to
actually do any kind of experiments with spraying reflective
particles. And yet the research group's advisory board stopped them
and said they had to postpone it and think it through more. What's
your perspective on both that project and that decision?*
*Wanser:* We think that this early science is really important to
inform decision-making. This was meant to be a test of a research
apparatus, it wasn't even a test of something that would release any
material. This was a balloon for research—like the balloons that go up
every day to do atmospheric science.
The problem is, this valuable early science was positioned as a moment
for a societal decision about research in this category. The testing
they proposed wouldn't have had any environmental impact or impact on
people. So the basis for the decision was not scientific; it was
really about a small set of people's opinions about whether or not
this kind of research should go forward. While the intentions were
good, they inadvertently set up an undemocratic situation where a very
tiny group of people are deciding whether scientific information would
be available for everybody else.
We think that scientific independence and integrity is really
important, especially in this research. We need scientists doing
independent science, and when they have generated a lot of information
for people around the world to review, we then need the societal
moment where everybody can weigh in.
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