Hi Daniel
Glad you liked the interview. Robyn Williams is very highly regarded in the Australian science community as the most longstanding balanced and informed expert on science in the media. I was very pleased to get such a prominent run on his program with a viewpoint that so severely attacks the prevailing failing political consensus on climate change, and especially in the leadup to COP27. I am sure many influential people in Australia will have heard the interview. My experience is that advocacy for solar radiation management prompts severe cognitive dissonance among climate activists. On the Gandhian scale <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/13/stages/> of political engagement, it is still largely at the ‘ignore’ point, and has not yet even reached insult or attack, but I am sure we will win. I have several friends who have responded positively, and I have been invited to do a few more interviews, but in general there is little interest in dialogue. Some seem to be saying yes we know SRM is the only way to save the world, but we prefer to be liked than to be right. That is not a morally coherent view, so I hope it will be debated more. I observe climate politics with growing dismay about the pervasive inability to see that if we do not brighten the planet asap all the efforts we put into our future will come to nought. This is especially the case regarding Arctic methane, which could totally swamp all efforts at CDR and emission reduction in the absence of SRM. Albedo is our only tractable climate lever. The indefatigably prolific Andrew Lockley kindly shared the link on twitter <https://twitter.com/geoengineering1/status/1586545152444833794> , but so far my like is the only reaction to his post. If any Twitter experts are reading this I would welcome a Zoom call about the best way to promote it. People do tend to be exhausted with the volume of material on climate change, so I hope my simple advocacy can make a difference. I have never heard anyone on mass media state we should geoengineer urgently, so I am pleased to try to break new ground in this regard. In my observation many scientists tend to be cowards, lacking the courage to engage in politics and at best just supporting research on whether brightening is needed. My view is that it is obvious brightening is needed, so the research problem is how we do it, both politically and technically, not if we should. Regards Robert Tulip From: Daniel Kieve <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, 29 October 2022 10:32 PM To: [email protected] Cc: Planetary Restoration <[email protected]>; healthy-planet-action-coalition <[email protected]>; [email protected] Subject: Re: Geoengineering Interview on ABC Science Show Hi Robert, Thanks for sharing the link - excellent interview with you and initially Gaia Vince too. You addressed a lot of key points thoughtfully and clearly..hopefully it raises the level interest and support for R&D into all forms of SRM - have you had much of a response yet (via ABC)? Best regards, Daniel On Sat, 29 Oct 2022 at 05:00, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Science Show today broadcast an interview with me titled <https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/geoengineering-now-urgent/101589282> Geoengineering Now Urgent (9 minutes), and further comments from my interview at the start of the program (2 minutes). The Science Show has been presented weekly by Robyn Williams on ABC Radio National for 47 years. This is timely as COP27 prepares to convene next week. I hope the geoengineering analysis here can be discussed at COP. Today’s program (one hour) is titled Storms changing our coasts, plastic in the ocean, and a call for geoengineering. Link is <https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-science-show/14091532> https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-science-show/14091532. Here is a transcript of my comments used as the program introduction. “The reality is that climate politics has been pitched as a war between emission reduction and the fossil fuel industry, and the view is that geoengineering is on the side of the fossil fuel industries. So what it has meant is that within the climate science community there is this moral hazard concept, that people say if you take action to geoengineer the climate then you are just failing to address the real issue, which is our emissions. But let me explain. Our annual emissions are about 15 billion tonnes of carbon or 50 billion tonnes of CO2 [equivalent], but the historic emissions are more like 670 billion tonnes of carbon, pushing a trillion tonnes. So our annual emissions only worsen the problem, they add up, it is cumulative. This concept of committed warming from past emissions is really central. We have to see that this 670 billion tonnes of CO2 is what is causing the warming, its what’s causing the risk of sea level rise, and until we work out technologies that will remove this vast quantity of past emissions, then cutting our new emissions is really too small, too slow, to really make a difference. It will take us years, decades potentially, to work out how to remove all that committed warming, but we have to do it. The only thing that will stop us going over the edge – there is a great paper from a few years ago by Will Steffen and colleagues from the ANU called Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, and it points out that we face the risk of going over a threshold into a hothouse - the only thing that will stop us from going over that threshold is brightening the planet through geoengineering.” [Note – I don’t suggest Steffen et al support geoengineering, only that in my opinion brightening the planet is the only action that can prevent a hothouse phase shift.] My earlier comments that Robyn Williams refers to in the interview are at this video - Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions <https://youtu.be/MzZDDjHYAnk> (16 minutes) Robert Tulip Planetary Restoration Action Group https://planetaryrestoration.net/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC)" group. 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