[geo] Re: World’s first SRM social science research programme for the Global South

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

Just want to say that this is very cool and that the trustees at the 
Degrees Initiative are chuffed beyond measure to see the team's efforts 
expanding in this way

On Wednesday 31 July 2024 at 16:01:52 UTC+1 Andy Parker wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The Degrees Initiative has announced the first nine teams to receive 
> research grants from our new Socio-Political Fund (SPF). The teams are from 
> the Americas, Africa and Asia, and they will spend the next couple of years 
> exploring the ethical, economic, public perception, and political 
> dimensions of SRM. A list of the team, PIs and research topics is below.
>
> The Socio-Political Fund is the world’s first SRM research programme aimed 
> exclusively at social scientists in the Global South. It follows in the 
> footsteps of the Degrees Modelling Fund, which was launched in 2018 and has 
> supported more than 150 scientists in 22 developing countries as they model 
> SRM impacts in their regions. The modelling fund was responsible for the 
> first SRM modelling projects in South America, the Caribbean, Africa, the 
> Middle East and Southeast Asia. It is now the largest SRM research 
> programme in the world and its Southern scientists are now at the centre of 
> the global SRM conversation.  
>
> We hope that the Socio-Political Fund will now do the same for the social 
> sciences. As with the modelling grants, the teams were selected by an 
> independent grant committee following an open call for proposals and expert 
> peer review. They chose their own research topics and methods and Degrees 
> will now support them to conduct their research, attend conferences and 
> publish papers, and take their place in the global conversation around SRM.
>
> Andy
>
> ---
>
> *Argentina  *
> PI: Dr Florencia Luna 
> Host institution: Latin American University of Social Sciences (FLACSO) 
> Title: Exploring the ethical implications of SRM for health justice in the 
> Global South  
> Page link: https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/argentina-luna  
>
>
> *Bangladesh *
> PI: Prof. Md. Sadique Rahman 
> Host institution: Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University 
> Title: Public perceptions of SRM in a climate-vulnerable South Asian 
> country 
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/bangladesh-2024-rahman/   
>  
>
> *Brazil *
> PI: Prof. Julia Silvia Guivant 
> Host institution: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) 
> Title: Challenges on solar radiation management: perspectives from Brazil
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/brazil-2024-guivant   
>
> *Brazil  *
> PI: Prof. Mauricio Uriona Maldonado 
> Host institution: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC)
> Title: Developing an integrated climate-economy stakeholder-based model 
> for assessing the future implications of SRM in Brazil, India and South 
> Africa 
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/brazil-2024-maldonado 
>
> *Ghana *
> PI: Dr Portia Adade Williams 
> Host institution: CSIR - Science and Technology Policy Research Institute 
> Title: Assessing knowledge, governance and social implications of SRM 
> across Africa  
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/ghana-2024-williams/
>
> *India *
> PI: Dr Manish Kumar Shrivastava 
> Host institution: The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi 
> Title: Exploring Asian perspectives on the governance of solar radiation 
> modification 
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/india-2024-shrivastava   
>
> *Mexico *
> PI: Dr Francisco Estrada Porrua 
> Host institution: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 
> Title: Assessing the economic risks and benefits of SRM for Latin America 
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/mexico-2024-porrua   
>
> *Pakistan *
> PI: Prof. Athar Hussain 
> Host institution: COMSATS University Islamabad 
> Title: Understanding the Socio-Political Dimensions of Climate Change and 
> Solar Radiation Modification in the Health Sector: A Pilot Demonstration in 
> Pakistan
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/pakistan-2024-hussain2   
>
> *Philippines *
> PI: Dr Lorena Sabino 
> Host institution: University of the Philippines Los Baños
> Title: ECLIPSE (Exploring Cultural, Legal, and Intergenerational 
> Perspectives on Solar Radiation Modification Ethics) – a study on 
> vulnerable ridge-to-reef communities and national-level context in the 
> Philippines, in collaboration with Ghana.
> Page link: 
> https://www.degrees.ngo/research-funds/projects/philippines-2024-sabino/  
>   
>

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[geo] Increasing level of aluminium in sulphate aerosols due to reentering satellites

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

This is interesting in terms of the re-entry flux that can be expected from 
Starlink, etc. Also, ablative heat shielding on Starship...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2313374120

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Re: [geo] SATAN

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

I am not condoning Andrew's action, but I am not convinced by Doug's 
argument that its results are necessarily harmful (though Doug says 
"non-zero", I think it is clear that he expects a negative result). If this 
leads to a fuller, open discussion of what sort of experiments are and 
aren't appropriate, and of what if any legitimate means there might be for 
discouraging the inappropriate, I think the community could find itself in 
a better place, and with better understood courses for future action. I 
think that requires constructive debate about pre-registration, applicable 
forms of suasion that are in line with liberal assumptions about research 
autonomy, national v international positions and more. 

It seems to me that if lots of serious people treat it as enough to simply 
denounce Andrew, they may, by so doing, empower the backlash Doug fears. An 
even tempered discussion about what was wrong with this and what should 
have been done differently might help more by defining what sort of 
envelope there should be around "respectable" experiments and what 
appropriate measures individuals, the community and authorities might take 
to discourage things outside that envelope.

I now intend to go and read Andrew's paper

o



On Thursday, 2 March 2023 at 14:58:26 UTC Andrew Lockley wrote:

> Doug,
>
> I'll answer your points in turn below. I've removed Dan from the cc list 
> as he wished to withdraw from the discussion. 
>
> Andrew 
>
>
> On Thu, 2 Mar 2023, 14:30 Douglas MacMartin,  wrote:
>
>> Andrew,
>>
>>  
>>
>> I second Dan, and your juvenile response to him regarding your choice of 
>> project name should leave no doubt on anyone’s part that you don’t take 
>> this subject seriously.  
>>
> What specifically was juvenile about my response to Dan?
>>
>
> How is a decade of unpaid work not serious? 
>>
>
> Is the project name sillier or less descriptive than these examples - some 
>> of which are now scientifically standard? 
>> https://www.businessinsider.com/15-fantastic-scientific-acronyms-2014-1
>>
>  
>>
>> Had you actually been paying attention to the field as you claim to have 
>> been, you would be aware that there are broad public concerns, that trust 
>> is paramount, and that transparency is essential, as has been consistently 
>> recommended in every list of recommendations ever written on the subject – 
>> and your excuse of hiding while waiting for peer review is pathetic given 
>> that what’s needed would be transparency in advance about the existence of 
>> the test and the purpose, not about results.
>>
> I submitted a paper to multiple journals describing the airframe test and 
> it was never even sent for review. I can't force publication or review of a 
> paper. Other than this strategy, when and how do you think I should have 
> announced the experiment? 
>
> What do you think that the consequences of any prior announcement would 
> have been? 
>
> How well has prior consultation worked, when it was tried previously? 
>
>>  
>>
>> You also know that your test has zero engineering value to the field 
>> since there’s no viable pathway to getting meaningful radiative forcing 
>> through balloons anyway. 
>>
> The purpose of the test was not to get "meaningful radiative forcing". It 
> was to demonstrate an inexpensive, multi role aircraft that could be used 
> for small scale experiments - much as scopex was intended, but with 
> cheaper, expendable and swarming aircraft. 
>
> I certainly do not know that balloons cannot be made to work at scale. I 
> have already got designs in mind that may overcome the limitations revealed 
> by this test. 
>
>> There are certainly plausible engineering tests that could have value, 
>> but IMO this isn’t one of them.
>>
> You've not had sight of the paper yet, AFAIK. I always value your 
> opinions, but recognise these may differ from my own, and that they may 
> change as more information becomes available. 
>
>>  
>>
>> So cost-benefit analysis… the benefit of your “test” is zero, but the 
>> cost, in terms of potentially setting back perceptions of the field and 
>> engendering a backlash against actual real legitimate science, is 
>> non-zero.  Hopefully people will appropriately ignore this stunt and 
>> recognize that it is neither directly damaging nor actually relevant to 
>> SAI. 
>>
> I've described the relevance above. 
>
>>  
>>
>> doug
>>
>>  
>>
>> *From:* geoengi...@googlegroups.com  *On 
>> Behalf Of *Andrew Lockley
>> *Sent:* Thursday, March 2, 2023 12:58 AM
>> *To:* Daniele Visioni 
>> *Cc:* geoengineering 
>> *Subject:* Re: [geo] SATAN
>>
>>  
>>
>> Dan,
>>
>>  
>>
>> Thanks for raising your concerns, although an initial private discussion 
>> would have been preferred. 
>>
>>  
>>
>> I believe you have had sight of the abstract a few weeks ago, via the 
>> GeoMIP conference submission. It's therefore surprising that you've chosen 
>> now to raise this issue. Did you have any concerns with the abstract 
>> specifically

[geo] Re: [CDR] Tiresome nomenclature squabbles

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

on a squabble over historic branding. Coca-Cola doesn't
> even have cocaine in anymore, but people don't argue with bar staff about
> it. So why argue with me, when my work is much more accurately described?
>
> People are free to use whatever words they like to describe what they do;
> my beef isn't with the string of related terms for the same things
> (geoengineering vs climate intervention; solar radiation modification vs
> solar radiation management; carbon removal vs CDR vs GGR; etc.). The
> problem I have is with the petty personal sniping and factionalism that's
> increasingly creeping in to the discipline, as a result.
>
> For the avoidance of doubt: I'm not rebranding everything I do just
> because a few CDR fans won't play nicely with their SRM counterparts. And
> I'm not going to jump into a silo, just because other people think I
> should.
>
> Notwithstanding the objectionable pettiness of this behaviour, I don't
> believe the core argument bears any real scrutiny. So let's get to that.
>
> With a quick Google I have found both present and historical references to
> the term "geoengineering" (relatedly climate engineering/intervention)
> being used to encompass CDR.
>
> Here's the OED
>
> https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095848469;jsessionid=8F01D3B289E2BB2911C69F51B5050E01#:~:text=Geoengineering%20is%20the%20intentional%20large,of%20reducing%20undesired%20climatic%20.
> ..
>
> NASEM
>
> https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18805/climate-intervention-carbon-dioxide-removal-and-reliable-sequestration
>
> Wikipedia
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
>
> Royal Society
>
> https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2009/geoengineering-climate/
>
> Futurelearn / Adam Smith
>
> https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/climate-change-and-public-policy/0/steps/291219
>
> ...I could go on.
>
> The issue here isn't the use of one word or another, it's the daftness of
> people shunning opportunities/people because of the utilisation of a
> standard (if not ubiquitous) term to describe the discipline.
>
> So please, let's not have wars over words reminiscent of the kids' book
> "Fatipuffs and Thinnifers"
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattypuffs_and_Thinifers
> ...as even the kids reading that book knew it was stupid. We have all got
> much more to lose than to gain from such silly squabbles. Just because we
> might not like words that have been used for 15y or more doesn't mean it's
> a valid excuse to shun people and opportunities.
>
> Thanks for listening. And best wishes to all my geoengineering friends -
> including both the SRM and CDR ones.
>
> Andrew
>
> --
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Re: [geo] Make Sunsets: Clarifications!

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

As Russell points out, helium is far too valuable to be used for this. As 
Daniele points out, hydrogen does chemistry with alacrtity -- and thus at 
very least wets the stratosphere to a degree which would seem disturbing. 
In suggesting methane i think Andrew has chosen...poorly.

And Josh has his finger on something absolutely crucial. As someone with an 
interest in developing-country solar geoengineering research via my 
relationship with Degrees, I think doing this work in Mexico without 
seeking to involve Mexican researchers or investigation of permitting is 
completely indefensible. As far as I can see, Luke has not provided an 
account for why the flights were launched from Mexico rather than the US, 
and in the absence of such an account it is very hard not to see this as 
developed world actors choosing a developing country venue for nefarious 
reasons. 

best, o





On Monday, 2 January 2023 at 19:15:40 UTC Andrew Lockley wrote:

> I don't understand your first question. And no, Reviewer 2 doesn't do any 
> background research / verification. It would be dumb to lie about it. 
>
> Andrew 
>
> On Mon, 2 Jan 2023, 19:14 Russell Seitz,  wrote:
>
>> Technically, there's no there there,  and their podcast performance makes 
>> one doubt the intellectual seriousness of their investors 
>>
>> As a matter of due diligence , have you contacted  the VC's whose 
>> allegiance Make Sunsets claims ?
>>
>> On Monday, January 2, 2023 at 12:24:55 PM UTC-5 Andrew Lockley wrote:
>>
>>> Could you please clarify how you think I've been "punked"? I interviewed 
>>> the founders for 2h, they weren't chatbots. 
>>> https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Fr15fdX20qyyfVX8VCF3Q?si=5Hq3ikM2QS6MVilqYvPZig
>>>
>>> I don't think using AI to create content is irresponsible, provided it's 
>>> checked for accuracy. 
>>>
>>> Andrew 
>>>
>>> On Mon, 2 Jan 2023, 17:09 Russell Seitz,  wrote:
>>>
 Has Andrew Lockley  been punked along with James Temple?

 *Legal Planet '* s sober fisking of Make Sunsets failed to notice its 
 executives most interesting potential  liability defense —   the  ChatGPT 
 AI did it !

  Iseman & Song's  offering website ran the following  

 *Author's note: 99% of this blog post and title was written using the 
 help of ChatGPT  and the hero image was 
 generated using DreamStudio . The title 
 was generated based off the content of the blog post.*



 On Monday, January 2, 2023 at 11:34:05 AM UTC-5 Chris Vivian wrote:

> Edward Parson has posted a commentary on Legal Planet about the Make 
> Sunsets concept - see - A Dangerous Disruption - Legal Planet 
> (legal-planet.org) 
>    
>
> Chris.
>
> On Sunday, 1 January 2023 at 02:34:52 UTC Russell Seitz wrote:
>
>> When I was at MIT, "War Surplus " stores abounded in $5 canned 
>> hydrogen  generators designed to fill radiosonde or  life raft rescue 
>> balloons. The gizmo opened with a can of sardines key  to expose  the 
>> calcium hydride within to sea water, and  filled  the attached 1- meter 
>> balloon in about 15 minutes. 
>>
>> Whereupon, it being sunset on the 4th of July on an easterly beach 
>> with a westerly wind, we attached a slow  magnesium ribbon fuse and let 
>> it 
>> go . it traveled some miles downwind  and rose perhaps one before 
>> exploding 
>> with a pale flash, but no audible pop
>>
>> The current  low cost balloon record seems to be held by   the 22 
>> meter Le Ballon Air de Paris,  filled with 6,000 m3 (210,000 cu ft) 
>> of helium  and  terthered with 
>> a cable winch.  It can board up to 30  tourists, max  total weigh 
>> 2,500 kg (5,500 lb) whom it takes to  150 m (490 ft) above Paris.  for 
>> 15 
>> minuteas a apsesent fare of sixteen Euros a head.
>>
>> Though hardly stratospherics, that works out to $194  a tonne 
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 6:18:14 AM UTC-5 alang...@gmail.com 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Andrew,
>>> I used Hydrogen for 20 years to use for weather balloons.  No 
>>> problem , even when one exploded fir a colleague in a balloon shed ( he 
>>> has 
>>> the doors firmly closed and there was a leak , which he knew about). 
>>> Probably millions of radiosondes were launched with hydrogen. We had a 
>>> fusion lab where hydrogen was piped around the facility.  However, in 
>>> the 
>>> Falklands they had a hydrogen making device … ( solid + water).  Now 
>>> that 
>>> was dangerous.   There was one hole in the ground in africa where a 
>>> hydrogen plant as above had been sited, but using the stuff is a safe.  
>>> obviously , if you plant a bomb nearby , little is safe ( wh

[geo] Re: AGU Fall Meeting 2022: GC012. Advances in Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) Research

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

Dear Daniele, others -- is this the only AGU solar geo session?

On Monday, 11 July 2022 at 10:18:10 UTC+1 daniele...@gmail.com wrote:

> Dear all,
> please find below the Description of this SRM-related session at the AGU 
> Fall Meeting 2022 that will be held in Chicago (and virtually) 12-16 
> December 2022.
> We look forward to your abstracts! The abstract submission deadline is *3 
> August (23:59 EDT/03:59 +1 GMT)*. 
> https://www.agu.org/Fall-Meeting/Pages/Present 
>
> *GC012. Advances in Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) Research*
>
> *Session Description:*
> Persistent CO2 emission growth casts some doubt over the chance of 
> stabilizing Earth's temperature over the next decades through emission cuts 
> alone. Solar Radiation Modification (SRM, also known as Geoengineering or 
> Climate Intervention) proposes to temporarily modify Earth's radiation 
> budget to reduce the effects of climate change in the near term alongside 
> decarbonization. Common proposed SRM methods include stratospheric aerosol 
> injection (SAI), marine cloud brightening (MCB), cirrus cloud thinning, 
> and surface albedo modification. Climate Intervention governance must be 
> grounded in a solid basis of natural science and engineering research which 
> quantifies the feasibility, risks, and benefits of each proposal. We 
> welcome all contributions focusing on the advancements in natural science 
> of climate engineering, including climate modeling studies, 
> ecological impacts, engineering investigations, experimental results, and 
> analogue observations (e.g. volcanoes, ship tracks).  We also encourage 
> broader scope studies that connect the climatic and ecological impacts with 
> the economic, social, political, or ethical implications of Climate 
> Intervention, and abstracts from underrepresented communities/locations 
> who may be disproportionately affected by climate change.
>
> Primary Section/Focus Group:
> Global Environmental Change
> Index Terms:
>
> 0305 Aerosols and particles [ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE]
> 0321 Cloud/radiation interaction [ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE]
> 3305 Climate change and variability [ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES]
> 3311 Clouds and aerosols [ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES]
>
> Conveners: Daniele Visioni, James A. Franke, Jadwiga Richter, Sarah J. 
> Doherty
>
>
>
>
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Re: [geo] Exploration of a novel geoengineering solution: lighting up tropical forests at night

[Oliver]

Hello Michael,

Absolutely agreed on your point about rich desert ecology, and that we 
need to be humble in the face of the complex earth system. In all 
likelihood, all goeengineering methods are in some way 'simplistic' 
because they intervene in processes which have evolved over time, in 
symbiosis with the Earth system's changing state, as driven from the 
outside by Milankovich cycles and tectonic processes.


However, we are at the point now where we are looking for 'least worst' 
solutions rather than magic bullets which moderate global forcing with 
little impact on important ecosystem services, as they probably don't 
exist. Hence, there is a risk calculation where we may need to accept a 
limited amount of damage to achive the greater good, i.e.,  a reduction 
in glocal forcing to preserve as many ecosystems as possible. Saving 
every desert ecosystem with little biomass may be a luxury we cannot 
afford.


Furthermore, I would argue that we need to shift away from a 'magic 
bullet' geoengineering paradigm to one which advocates a diverse mix or 
'package' of smaller scale solutions which all together have a 
synergetic impact on forcing, e.g., a mixture of regional aforestation, 
white roofs, marine cloud brightening, cirrus thinning, enhanced 
weathering, CCS and so on (these must be scaleable, sustainable and 
quickly reversible). By doing this, we retain the option to assess these 
pathways and then emphasize or deemphasize individual options over time 
as their impacts on society and environment become apparent.


In consequence, one must redefine 'geoengineering' in a way that removes 
the requirement that any one single method needs to have a measurable 
impact on global forcing. An example of this is instead is to call 
methods 'regional geoengineering'. We would also need to refine our 
notion of what success is for these solution. In other words, a 
reduction in forcing of 0.01 W m-2 might be called a success, instead of 
requiring 0.2 W m-2 or similar as a benchmark (arbitrary numbers).  
Research would need to reflect this complex mix instead of writing paper 
after paper on the impacts of e.g. global reforestation alone, or global 
SAI alone, and so on.


However, in my opinion SAI should be thought of in a different catgory 
to geoengineering. Recreating Pinatubo or Krakatoa is neither scaleable, 
or easily reversible and hence gives the rest of geoengineering 
proposals a bad name. On the other hand, marine or cirrus cloud seeding 
and its meteorological impacts can be stopped much more rapidly (of 
course, feedbacks with vegetation may be much slower).


Regards

Oliver

--
Dr. Oliver Branch
Inst. for Physics and Meteorology (120)
University of Hohenheim
Garbenstr. 30
D-70599 Stuttgart

phone: 0711 - 459 -23132


On 10/11/2021 23:52, Michael Kleeman wrote:
Irrespective of the benefits or risks of solar radiation management 
the ecosystem impacts are real.


And for reference deserts have a rich life and are sensitive to light, 
pressure, vibration and general disruption.   Different from forested 
area but no less alive in their own way


We need to be humble in the face of complex systems and not propose 
simplistic interventions that make assumptions based on too little data.


On Nov 10, 2021, at 12:55 PM, Oliver  
wrote:


 Do you not think this is rather a kneejerk reaction? Is it as awful 
an idea as injecting thousands of tons of silver dioxide or similar 
materials into the stratosphere? An action which will influence the 
global weather for a minimum of 4 years if done at the equator. Now 
that is a truly awful idea. On the other hand, I would say that the 
consequences of lighting forests are more predictable, and the idea 
is scalable and can be stopped easily.


In any case perhaps with some adjustment the idea may have merit. How 
about lighting desert plantations in marginal areas, not in pristine 
forest where delicate flora and fauna exist. Solar power can recharge 
batteries or lighting. Or extreme northern boreal forest, where few 
other animal forest species exist in large numbers. In areas of low 
radiation such a light boost may be just what it takes to increase 
productivity.


Oliver

--
Dr. Oliver Branch
Inst. for Physics and Meteorology (120)
University of Hohenheim
Garbenstr. 30
D-70599 Stuttgart

phone: 0711 - 459 -23132


On 10/11/2021 17:52, Jessica Gurevitch wrote:
This is a truly awful idea. These authors are apparently totally 
ignorant of, or uninterested in, the natural world of ecological 
communities and of biodiversity. Many, many organisms in tropical 
forests depend on nighttime darkness to survive and function. The 
"unintended (or uninformed) consequences" of this are horrifically 
mind blowing.

Jessica

~~
Jessica Gurevitch
Distinguished Professor and Co-Chair
Department of Ecology and Evolution
Stony Brook University
Stony Bro

Fwd: [geo] Exploration of a novel geoengineering solution: lighting up tropical forests at night

[Oliver]

Do you not think this is rather a kneejerk reaction? Is it as awful an 
idea as injecting thousands of tons of silver dioxide or similar 
materials into the stratosphere? An action which will influence the 
global weather for a minimum of 4 years if done at the equator. Now that 
is a truly awful idea. On the other hand, I would say that the 
consequences of lighting forests are more predictable, and the idea is 
scalable and can be stopped easily.


In any case perhaps with some adjustment the idea may have merit. How 
about lighting desert plantations in marginal areas, not in pristine 
forest where delicate flora and fauna exist. Solar power can recharge 
batteries or lighting. Or extreme northern boreal forest, where few 
other animal forest species exist in large numbers. In areas of low 
radiation such a light boost may be just what it takes to increase 
productivity.


Oliver

--
Dr. Oliver Branch
Inst. for Physics and Meteorology (120)
University of Hohenheim
Garbenstr. 30
D-70599 Stuttgart

phone: 0711 - 459 -23132


On 10/11/2021 17:52, Jessica Gurevitch wrote:
This is a truly awful idea. These authors are apparently totally 
ignorant of, or uninterested in, the natural world of ecological 
communities and of biodiversity. Many, many organisms in tropical 
forests depend on nighttime darkness to survive and function. The 
"unintended (or uninformed) consequences" of this are horrifically 
mind blowing.

Jessica

~~
Jessica Gurevitch
Distinguished Professor and Co-Chair
Department of Ecology and Evolution
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5245 USA
~~


On Wed, Nov 10, 2021 at 1:54 AM Geoeng Info  wrote:

https://esd.copernicus.org/preprints/esd-2021-85/


  Exploration of a novel geoengineering solution: lighting up
  tropical forests at night



Xueyuan Gao, Shunlin Liang, Dongdong Wang, Yan Li, Bin He, Aolin Jia

Abstract.

Plants primarily conduct photosynthesis in the daytime, offering
an opportunity to increase photosynthesis and carbon sink by
providing light at night. We used a fully coupled Earth System
Model to quantify the carbon sequestration and climate effects of
a novel carbon removal proposal: lighting up tropical forests at
night via lamp networks above the forest canopy. Simulation
results show that additional light increased tropical forest
carbon sink by 10.4 ± 0.05 petagrams of carbon per year during a
16-year lighting experiment, resulting in a decrease in
atmospheric CO2 and suppression of global warming. In addition,
local temperature and precipitation increased. The energy
requirement for capturing one ton of carbon is lower than that of
Direct Air Carbon Capture. When the lighting experiment was
terminated, tropical forests started to release carbon slowly.
This study suggests that lighting up tropical forests at night
could be an emergency solution to climate change, and carbon
removal actions focused on enhancing ecosystem productivity by
altering environmental factors in the short term could induce
post-action CO2 outgassing.
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Re: [geo] Fwd: [CDR] CO2 shrinks the stratosphere

[Wingenter, Oliver]

Alan
Does the temperature of the tropopause change? What is the impact, if any,
on the stratospheric exchange time? I am thinking about the effect on CFCs,
CH4, and stratospheric chemistry.
Is there a paper on this? Does added sulfate from SO2 injection into the
stratosphere warm the stratosphere significantly?

Regards
Oliver Wingenter

On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 12:44 AM Andrew Lockley 
wrote:

> I'm interested to understand the effect on SRM. Eg more technical
> difficulties with lofting, earlier rain out, etc. I'd welcome discussion.
>
> Andrew
>
> On Thu, 13 May 2021, 14:41 Alan Robock ☮, 
> wrote:
>
>> This is certainly not unexpected.  We wrote a paper on this 25 years ago:
>>
>> Vinnikov, Konstantin Ya., Alan Robock, Ronald J. Stouffer and Syukuro
>> Manabe, 1996: Vertical patterns of free and forced climate variations. 
>> *Geophys.
>> Res. Lett.*, *23*, 1801-1804.
>> http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/VinnikovVertical96GL01736.pdf
>>
>> And I don't think it is an important reason to do CDR.  There are other
>> good reasons, but this does not affect us nearly as much as other impacts
>> of global warming.
>>
>> 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 UniversityE-mail:
>> rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu
>> 14 College Farm Roadhttp://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*
>>
>> [image: Signature]
>>
>>
>> On 5/13/2021 6:33 AM, Andrew Lockley wrote:
>>
>>
>> -- Forwarded message -
>> From: Tom Goreau 
>> Date: Thu, 13 May 2021, 11:03
>> Subject: [CDR] CO2 shrinks the stratosphere
>> To: 'Greg Rau' via Carbon Dioxide Removal <
>> carbondioxideremo...@googlegroups.com>
>>
>>
>> *Yet another unexpected reason why CDR is needed!*
>>
>>
>>
>> *Stratospheric contraction caused by increasing greenhouse gases*
>>
>> To cite this article before publication: Petr Pisoft et al 2021 Environ.
>> Res. Lett. in press https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abfe2b
>>
>> P. Pisoft1 , P. Sacha1,2, L. M. Polvani3 , J. A. Añel4 , L. de la Torre4
>> , R. Eichinger1,5,6, U. Foelsche7 , P. Huszar1 , C. Jacobi8 , J.
>> Karlicky1,2, A. Kuchar1,8, J. Miksovsky1 , M. Zak1 , H. E. Rieder2
>>
>>
>>
>> *Abstract* Rising emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) have
>> led to tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling over recent decades.
>> As a thermodynamic consequence, the troposphere has expanded and the rise
>> of the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere,
>> has been suggested as one of the most robust fingerprints of anthropogenic
>> climate change. Conversely, at altitudes above ~55 km (in the mesosphere
>> and thermosphere) observational and modeling evidence indicates a downward
>> shift of the height of pressure levels or decreasing density at fixed
>> altitudes. The layer in between, the stratosphere, has not been studied
>> extensively with respect to changes of its global structure. Here we show
>> that this atmospheric layer has contracted substantially over the last
>> decades, and that the main driver for this are increasing concentrations of
>> GHG. Using data from coupled chemistry-climate models we show that this
>> trend will continue and the mean climatological thickness of the
>> stratosphere will decrease by 1.3 km following representative concentration
>> pathway 6.0 by 2080. We also demonstrate that the stratospheric contraction
>> is not only a response to cooling, as changes in both tropopause and
>> stratopause pressure contribute. Moreover, its short emergence time (less
>> than 15 years) makes it a novel and independent indicator of GHG induced
>> climate change.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD President, Global Coral Reef Alliance*
>>
>>
>> *Chief Scientist, Blue Regeneration SL President, Biorock Technology Inc.*
>>
>> *Technical Advisor, Blue Guardians Programme, SIDS DOCK*
>>
>> *37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139*
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *gor...@globalcoral.org  www.globalcoral.org
>> <http://www.globalcoral.org> Skype: tomgoreau Tel: (1) 617-864-4226 

Re: [geo] THE COOLING CONUNDRUM REVERSING CLIMATE CHANGE TO REFREEZE THE ARCTIC

[Wingenter, Oliver]

It would take 20 nuclear power plants running conventional refrigeration
to cool the Arctic Ocean.and refreeze it.


Virus-free.
www.avast.com

<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 3:10 PM Andrew Lockley 
wrote:

>
> https://climateemergencysummit.org/the-cooling-conundrum-event-profile/
>
> THE COOLING CONUNDRUM
> REVERSING CLIMATE CHANGE TO REFREEZE THE ARCTIC
> With rapidly rising global temperatures, the harm to people and nature is
> already too great. Signs that we are on the brink of triggering runaway
> global warming are increasing by the day, as the strain on major ecosystems
> reaches a new level of stress. Analysis shows that even a zero-emission
> pathway will not be enough alone to slow warming and avoid further
> devastation. This points to an urgent need to consider establishing an
> immediate way to cool the planet. Is reversing climate change a real
> possibility? What would it take to refreeze the Arctic and Antarctic ice to
> repair the climate?
>
> David Keith – Professor of Applied Physics, Harvard
> Ye Tao – Principal Investigator, Rowland Institute at Harvard
> Holly Jean Buck – Science Writer & Analyst
>
> --
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Re: [geo] The new left-right divide on climate

[Oliver Wingenter]

Perhaps the split is more generational.

On Sun, Nov 24, 2019, 3:32 PM Andrew Lockley 
wrote:

>
> Poster's note: is this too simplistic? I'd say the split is not
> necessarily the same for biochar, afforestation, and SRM. Is there any data
> on this?
>
>
> https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2019/11/22/913382/the-new-left-right-divide-on-climate#
> The new left-right divide on climate
>
> *With emissions still rising, climate geo-engineering is a topic we need
> to debate. But political researchers fear people are falling into the same
> left/right tribalism that has long plagued climate politics.*
>
> If there’s one thing Al Gore must know by now, it’s that all the
> verifiable evidence in the world doesn’t matter if someone dislikes you too
> much to listen.
>
> Gore's role as a champion of climate action was a mixed blessing for the
> planet – he raised awareness, but he also turned off people who were
> vehemently, politically opposed to the US Democrat.
>
> Now a US Republican movement for climate action has emerged, led
> by ex-congressman Bob Inglis, although the concept apparently remains so
> outlandish that its website  reassures
> visitors: ‘No, we’re not kidding.'
>
> Although worsening fires, droughts, diseases and floods will affect people
> of all political persuasions, studies have repeatedly shown that a sizeable
> chunk of the population uses their politics as a proxy when deciding
> whether to trust the scientific evidence on climate.
>
> As well as worsening climate damage, the resulting delays almost certainly
> cost money: last year, a report released by Westpac
> 
>  found that, in New Zealand alone, moving to a low carbon economy sooner
> rather than later would reap up to $30 billion in economic benefits.
>
> Now researchers fear that a new split is emerging, this time on climate
> geo-engineering - a catch-all term that is used to describe various ways of
> cooling the planet.
>
> This time, the left-right roles are reversed: left-aligned people are more
> likely to be cautious about relying on techno-fixes to cool the climate,
> while right-aligned people are more likely to support taking action.
>
> “Climate change is one of these issues that has become bigger than the
> scientific fact," says Rebecca Colvin, who researches conflict and the
> environment at Australian National University in Canberra. "It’s wrapped up
> in political affiliations and identities. Strong climate action is bundled
> up with left-wing political identities, while resisting climate action has
> been traditionally aligned with the right. The United States is most
> extreme in this regard, but Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand,
> show a similar pattern,” she says.
>
> With geo-engineering becoming a controversial topic, a left-right split is
> again emerging, though not as strongly as last time, says Colvin.
> “There are signs that it may fall along the political spectrum in the
> opposite way, with left-aligned political identities opposing it because it
> can be viewed as a reason to delay strong action on emissions reductions,
> and right-aligned political identities supporting geo-engineering because
> it can be seen as justifying the status quo."
>
> “There are some sensible reasons why the mindsets that underpin left- and
> right-aligned political identities would fall on the spectrum of supporting
> and opposing geo-engineering in this way," says Colvin. "But the problem
> is, once an issue becomes a polarised political object, discourse about the
> issue becomes less about the substance of the issue itself, and more about
> the different groups attempting to ‘win’ a debate."
> Rebecca Colvin researches conflict and the environment at Australian
> National University in Canberra. Photo: Supplied
>
> Having a debate about geo-engineering is urgent, because the longer
> nations delay making steep emissions cuts, the more dependent the world
> becomes on technologies that suck carbon away and/or geo-engineering.
>
> Colvin, along with other ANU researchers (including Mark Howden,
> Australia's top scientist on the IPCC) recently wrote a paper
> suggesting
> how to avoid the pitfalls of climate politics.
>
> While it might pain Gore and Inglis to hear it, they concluded that having
> a cogent discussion may mean keeping political champions out of it.
>
> “I think part of it is about who the messenger is,” says Colvin. “Al Gore
> speaking out about climate change is very persuasive if you’re the kind of
> person who is inclined to trust Al Gore. If you are not, you may be
> thinking ‘well, if Al Gore thinks that, I want no part of it.”
>
> “Folks who are not the usual suspects and who cannot be – fairly or
> otherwise – pigeon-holed into a pre-defined ideological position are likely
> to

[geo] Re: SRMGI - correcting a mistake by Ray Pierrehumbert

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

Dear Andy

Have you communicated this directly to Ray or to The Bulletin?

On Friday, 6 September 2019 19:23:08 UTC+1, Andy Parker wrote:
>
> Hi folks, 
>
>
> I’m writing to correct an error made by Ray Pierrehumbert in a recent 
> opinion piece on SRM, which has only just come to my attention. In an 
> article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Ray wrote: 
>
> “*it is apparent that over time, the Environmental Defense Fund is 
> gradually becoming, at the very least, a partner in a governance initiative 
> that, in my view, has taken it as a foregone conclusion that outdoor 
> experimentation at some scale will happen – and that the only question is 
> how to govern it so it takes place in a so-called safe way (SRMGI 2019). 
> The governance initiative fails to ask the deeper question of whether it is 
> wise at this point to engage in research that could facilitate the 
> deployment of a technology that may well prove ungovernable*”.
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654255
>
>
> I direct the governance initiative in question (SRMGI) and I wanted to 
> point out that we don’t have any position on outdoors experimentation and 
> we do explicitly ask the "deeper question" of whether it is wise to engage 
> in outdoors research. Earlier this week we ran a workshop in Abidjan, Cote 
> d’Ivoire, and I've attached the relevant slide from a group exercise. 
> Translated it reads:
>
>
> *Scientists from Harvard are planning an SRM experiment in the next year. 
> The experiment would involve releasing one kilogram of sulphur dioxide into 
> the stratosphere in order to better understand possible impacts on 
> atmospheric chemistry, including the destruction of ozone. The experiment 
> wouldn't have any negative environmental impacts and couldn't be done in a 
> lab, but some people are concerned about the sociopolitical impacts.*
>
> *1. Is this research welcome or unwelcome, and why?*
>
> *2. If the decision to approve the experiment were down to you, what 
> information would you want in order to make the decision?*
>
>  
>
> In case of interest, and quite unsurprisingly, the question returned a 
> wide range of views and a vigorous debate between the ~100 participants. 
> Some people were concerned about decision-making processes and about who 
> got to evaluate the experiment's physical risks, some people wondered what 
> future research projects this might lead onto, some people were happy to 
> see the research proceed as they thought that it might be useful and that 
> the levels of risk were acceptable.
>
>  
>
> Hope that this sets the record straight.
>
>  
>
> Andy
>

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Re: [geo] Re: SRM optical impacts

[Oliver Wingenter]

Andrew,

I remember some papers after Mt. Pinatubo blew discussing the impact on 
loss of stratospheric ozone on UV, the oxidant OH, and methane were 
published. Try googling something like "oh ozone uv mt. pinatubo"


On 4/7/2019 5:49 PM, Douglas MacMartin wrote:


The main reason to put in the middle of the ocean (or the first range 
of mountains that the air mass encounters) is to have a very stable 
atmosphere above the observatory, though it is true that Mt. Wilson 
above Pasadena used to be a very good site before the aerosol and 
light pollution…


Laser guide stars are 589nm (sodium)… My guess would be that the main 
effect would simply be a loss of photons from scattering; both the 
upward laser and the downward light from the sodium layer at 90km, so 
a squared effect, but still, if one is talking about 5% or so loss of 
light (to get 1% reflected back to space), not a huge deal.  But I 
should ask…


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
 *On Behalf Of *Russell Seitz

*Sent:* Sunday, April 7, 2019 3:14 PM
*To:* geoengineering 
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: SRM optical impacts

Stephen

Some of the biggest telescopes have been atop tall islands in the 
middle of the ocean like Hawaii and Grand Canaria to get away from 
light pollution and dust and aerosol scattering on land.


Douglas

I mentioned the UV because the  medical concernns Andrew mentioned 
largely arise from short wavelength photons. Can you tell us how 
stratospheric aerosols might effect the preformance of  the laser 
guide stars on which deformable mirror correction systems depend-   
would  ring images be a problem at the diffraction limit?


The  dimensionless aerosol scattering efficiency coefficient Ms is of 
the order of the Mie  integral of the number density over the range 
from  r max to r min-


*Q* Ms (r) πr2n (r) dr*Q*Ms (r) π*r2/N/* (r)/d/r



On Sunday, April 7, 2019 at 10:08:37 AM UTC-4, Stephen Salter wrote:

Russell

Some of my best friends are astronomers but few of them use
telescopes in mid ocean so you and I can remain on good terms.

Stephen

Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design. School of Engineering,
University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh EH9 3DW,
Scotland s.s...@ed.ac.uk , Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704,
Cell 07795 203 195, WWW.homepages.ed.ac.uk/shs
, YouTube Jamie Taylor Power
for Change

On 07/04/2019 14:31, Russell Seitz wrote:

Why would  reductions  in the  downwelling tropospheric light
flux increase any of the above?    I'd instead  ask
instrumental  astromomers what they think SO2 scattering would
do in the UV , as they have a lot to lose from  scattered
light, which can  cost them contrast and  degrade the signal
to noise ratio in interferometry and spectroscopy.

Try the Magellan and OWL teams

On Wednesday, April 3, 2019 at 7:47:35 AM UTC-4, Andrew
Lockley wrote:

Has there been any investigation of SRM effects on vision?
Eg perceived glare, macular degeneration, corneal sunburn,
vision development in infants, object recognition when
driving (and their equivalent in animals)?

Andrew Lockley

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Re: [geo] Re: SRM optical impacts

[Oliver Wingenter]

Here are some comments pertaining to Andrew's initial questions. Loss of 
ozone would have an impact on several health aspects. This lecture by 
Jose-Luis Jimenez maybe a good start on a literature search to assess 
optical impacts on UV. 
http://cires1.colorado.edu/jimenez/AtmChem/CHEM-5151_S05_L16.pdf


On 4/7/2019 3:28 PM, Russell Seitz wrote:
 Two centuries ago  Humboldt, Arago and others introduced 
'Cyanometers', color wheels usedto measure how blue the sky appeared 
as altitude and locales varied.  As I've  already asked the inventor 
of the hand held  Dobson Unit meter , Forrest Mims, to develop 
parallel gadgets for water reflectivity and ocean color, perhaps 
Andrew  should request an electronic sky color gizmo--  the  self 
driving car folk at  Tesla and Apple might add the cost to their  Due 
Diligence bill.


On Sunday, April 7, 2019 at 12:05:59 PM UTC-4, Andrew Lockley wrote:

For example, if it made skies whiter, it could potentially be more
difficult (or easier) for drivers to pick out pedestrians. Over
billions of people and decades, this could have a significant effect.

Andrew Lockley

On Sun, 7 Apr 2019, 17:01 Douglas MacMartin, > wrote:

There’s not that much ground-based astronomy in UV, relative
to optical and IR astronomy.

Impact on optical astronomy is straightforward; if you lose 5%
of the direct light, you need 5% longer integration time to
get same number of photons.

Impact on IR astronomy is less obvious, as limited by the
background from the sky, which depends on water vapour and
temperature through the atmospheric column (with most
telescopes being at 14000’ or so).  Shouldn’t be hard to
estimate, I’ve never gotten someone interested enough to do
the calculations but I could try again (my other job is being
on the design team for the Thirty Meter Telescope).

I did ask people whether they noted anything after Pinatubo,
and the answer I got was no… that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an
effect, but it wasn’t something that the astronomy community
by and large remembered.

*From:*geoengi...@googlegroups.com 
> *On Behalf Of
*Russell Seitz
*Sent:* Sunday, April 7, 2019 9:31 AM
*To:* geoengineering >
*Subject:* [geo] Re: SRM optical impacts

Why would  reductions  in the  downwelling tropospheric light
flux increase any of the above?    I'd instead  ask
instrumental  astromomers what they think SO2 scattering would
do in the UV , as they have a lot to lose from  scattered
light, which can  cost them contrast and  degrade the signal
to noise ratio in interferometry and spectroscopy.

Try the Magellan and OWL teams

On Wednesday, April 3, 2019 at 7:47:35 AM UTC-4, Andrew
Lockley wrote:

Has there been any investigation of SRM effects on vision?
Eg perceived glare, macular degeneration, corneal sunburn,
vision development in infants, object recognition when
driving (and their equivalent in animals)?

Andrew Lockley

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Re: [geo] Exploring accumulation-mode-H2SO4 versus SO2 stratospheric sulfate geoengineering in a sectional aerosol-chemistry-climate model

[Oliver Wingenter]

You might also check the HOx levels and impact on HCFCs. See Oltman and 
Hurst NOAA for water vapor. Has JPLCal Tech looked at this?



On 11/15/2018 3:32 PM, Douglas MacMartin wrote:


Oliver – do you think SOCOL has an error in its H2O concentrations?  
As long as they have the right values in the model, then the effect 
should be taken into account already.


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Andrew Lockley

*Sent:* Thursday, November 15, 2018 5:06 PM
*To:* oliver.wingen...@nmt.edu; geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Exploring accumulation-mode-H2SO4 versus SO2 
stratospheric sulfate geoengineering in a sectional 
aerosol-chemistry-climate model


That's not necessarily true. By the time CE is rolled out, we could be 
looking at significantly more methane in the atmosphere, due to 
permafrost. Much ultimately ends up as strat H2O.


I vaguely remember more tropospheric folding, too, which also 
transports water up. Can't remember the reference, tho


Andrew Lockley

On Thu, 15 Nov 2018, 21:02 Oliver Wingenter <mailto:oliver.wingen...@nmt.edu> wrote:


Water in the high lat strat is limiting particle growth. H2O is in
the ppm range.  See Hamil, Steele, Toon and Turco's work 1970-2000.

On 11/15/2018 1:51 PM, Andrew Lockley wrote:


https://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/acp-2018-1070/

Review status

This discussion paper is a preprint. It is a manuscript under
review for the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP).

Exploring accumulation-mode-H2SO4 versus SO2 stratospheric
sulfate geoengineering in a sectional
aerosol-chemistry-climate model

Sandro Vattioni et al.

Received: 07 Oct 2018 – Accepted for review: 02 Nov 2018 –
Discussion started: 15 Nov 2018

Abstract. Stratospheric sulfate geoengineering (SSG) could
contribute to avoiding some of the adverse impacts of climate
change. We used the global 3D-aerosol-chemistry-climate model,
SOCOL-AER, to investigate 21 different SSG scenarios, each
with 1.83MtSyr−1 injected either in the form of
accumulation-mode-H2SO4 droplets (AM-H2SO4), gas-phase SO2, or
as combinations of both. For most scenarios, the sulfur was
continuously emitted at 50hPa (≈20km) altitude in the tropics
and subtropics, zonally and latitudinally symmetric about the
equator (ranging from ±3.75° to ±30°). In the SO2 emission
scenarios, continuous production of tiny nucleation mode
particles results in increased coagulation, which together
with condensation produces larger coarse mode particles. These
larger particles are less effective for backscattering solar
radiation and sedimentation out of the stratosphere is faster.
On average, AM-H2SO4 injection increases stratospheric aerosol
residence times by 32% and stratospheric aerosol burdens
37–41% when comparing to SO2 injection. The modelled all-sky
(clear-sky) short-wave radiative forcing for AM-H2SO4
injection scenarios is up to 17–70% (44%–57%) larger than is
the case for SO2. Aerosol burdens have a surprisingly week
dependence on the latitudinal spread of emissions with
emission in the stratospheric surf zone (>15°N–15°S)
decreasing burdens by only about 10%. This is because the
faster removal through stratosphere-to-troposphere transport
via tropopause folds found when injection is spread farther
from the equator is roughly balanced by a decrease in
coagulation. Increasing injection altitude is also
surprisingly ineffective because the increase in burden is
compensated by an increase in large aerosols due to increased
condensation. Increasing the local SO2 flux in the injection
region by pulse or point emissions reduces the total global
annual nucleation. Coagulation is also reduced due to the
interruption of the continuous flow of freshly formed
particles. The net effect of pulse or point emission of SO2 is
to increase stratospheric aerosol residence time and radiative
forcing. Pulse or point emissions of AM-H2SO4 has the opposite
effect—decreasing stratospheric aerosol burden and radiative
forcing by increasing coagulation. In summary, this study
corroborates previous studies with uncoupled aerosol and
radiation modules, suggesting that, compared to SO2 injection,
the direct emission of AM-H2SO4 results in more radiative
forcing for the same sulfur equivalent mass injection strength
and that sensitivities to different injection strategies may
vary for different forms of injected sulfur.

How to cite: Vattioni, S., Weisenstein, D., Keith, D.,
Feinberg, A., 

Re: [geo] Exploring accumulation-mode-H2SO4 versus SO2 stratospheric sulfate geoengineering in a sectional aerosol-chemistry-climate model

[Oliver Wingenter]

Water in the high lat strat is limiting particle growth. H2O is in the 
ppm range.  See Hamil, Steele, Toon and Turco's work 1970-2000.



On 11/15/2018 1:51 PM, Andrew Lockley wrote:


https://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/acp-2018-1070/

Review status
This discussion paper is a preprint. It is a manuscript under review 
for the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP).
Exploring accumulation-mode-H2SO4 versus SO2 stratospheric sulfate 
geoengineering in a sectional aerosol-chemistry-climate model

Sandro Vattioni et al.
Received: 07 Oct 2018 – Accepted for review: 02 Nov 2018 – Discussion 
started: 15 Nov 2018
Abstract. Stratospheric sulfate geoengineering (SSG) could contribute 
to avoiding some of the adverse impacts of climate change. We used the 
global 3D-aerosol-chemistry-climate model, SOCOL-AER, to investigate 
21 different SSG scenarios, each with 1.83MtSyr−1 injected either in 
the form of accumulation-mode-H2SO4 droplets (AM-H2SO4), gas-phase 
SO2, or as combinations of both. For most scenarios, the sulfur was 
continuously emitted at 50hPa (≈20km) altitude in the tropics and 
subtropics, zonally and latitudinally symmetric about the equator 
(ranging from ±3.75° to ±30°). In the SO2 emission scenarios, 
continuous production of tiny nucleation mode particles results in 
increased coagulation, which together with condensation produces 
larger coarse mode particles. These larger particles are less 
effective for backscattering solar radiation and sedimentation out of 
the stratosphere is faster. On average, AM-H2SO4 injection increases 
stratospheric aerosol residence times by 32% and stratospheric aerosol 
burdens 37–41% when comparing to SO2 injection. The modelled all-sky 
(clear-sky) short-wave radiative forcing for AM-H2SO4 injection 
scenarios is up to 17–70% (44%–57%) larger than is the case for SO2. 
Aerosol burdens have a surprisingly week dependence on the latitudinal 
spread of emissions with emission in the stratospheric surf zone 
(>15°N–15°S) decreasing burdens by only about 10%. This is because the 
faster removal through stratosphere-to-troposphere transport via 
tropopause folds found when injection is spread farther from the 
equator is roughly balanced by a decrease in coagulation. Increasing 
injection altitude is also surprisingly ineffective because the 
increase in burden is compensated by an increase in large aerosols due 
to increased condensation. Increasing the local SO2 flux in the 
injection region by pulse or point emissions reduces the total global 
annual nucleation. Coagulation is also reduced due to the interruption 
of the continuous flow of freshly formed particles. The net effect of 
pulse or point emission of SO2 is to increase stratospheric aerosol 
residence time and radiative forcing. Pulse or point emissions of 
AM-H2SO4 has the opposite effect—decreasing stratospheric aerosol 
burden and radiative forcing by increasing coagulation. In summary, 
this study corroborates previous studies with uncoupled aerosol and 
radiation modules, suggesting that, compared to SO2 injection, the 
direct emission of AM-H2SO4 results in more radiative forcing for the 
same sulfur equivalent mass injection strength and that sensitivities 
to different injection strategies may vary for different forms of 
injected sulfur.


How to cite: Vattioni, S., Weisenstein, D., Keith, D., Feinberg, A., 
Peter, T., and Stenke, A.: Exploring accumulation-mode-H2SO4 versus 
SO2 stratospheric sulfate geoengineering in a sectional 
aerosol-chemistry-climate model, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2018-1070, in review, 2018.

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Oliver Wingenter
Assoc. Prof. of Atmospheric Chemistry
Research Scientist at the Geophysical Research Center
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
(New Mexico Tech)
Socorro, New Mexico 87801

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[geo] Having to decide

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

olar-geoengineering-risk-
> termination-shock-overplayed-study
>
>
>
> *GEOENGINEERING
> <https://www.carbonbrief.org/category/science/temperature/geoengineering>*
>
>
> 12 March 2018  0:01
> Solar geoengineering: Risk of ‘termination shock’ overplayed, study says
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The policy options put forward in the paper do not require decision-makers
> to “behave with perfect rationality”, the authors note, but that they “must
> just avoid wanton *irrationality*”.
>
> Although this may seem reasonable, says Prof Alan Robock
> <http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock/> of Rutgers University
> <https://newbrunswick.rutgers.edu/>, “unreasonable policy decisions are
> made all the time”. He asks: “Can we count on future political actors to be
> reasonable?”
>
> It is also worth remembering that the potential for termination shock is
> just one of many other potential risks and concerns with SRM, he tells
> Carbon Brief:
>
> “Even if termination shock were less likely, there are still many reasons
> why SRM would not be a robust policy option.”
>
> That said, Robock “completely agrees” with the last paragraph of the
> paper, which argues that the solution to global warming is mitigation and
> adaptation so that SRM is not necessary in the first place:
>
> “Our final conclusion is the most obvious and important. The best way to
> avoid termination would be to avoid a situation where a large amount of SRM
> would be needed to reduce committed climate risks. Strong action on
> mitigation would reduce the amount of SRM necessary to maintain a stable
> global temperature.
>
> *The development of safe and scalable CO2 removal techniques could reduce
> the cooling needed from SRM after deployment, and strong adaptation
> investment would reduce the suffering from the residual climate impacts to
> which Earth is already committed.”*
>
>
>
> Parker, A. and Irvine, P. J. (2018) The risk of termination shock from
> solar geoengineering, Earth’s Future, doi:10.1002/2017EF000735
> <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017EF000735/abstract>
>
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-- 
O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O

Oliver Morton
Senior Editor, Essays and Briefings
The 

[geo] Re: [CDR] SRM and CDR - The risk of termination shock from solar geoengineering

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

Cross posting to the geoengineering list, since as Wil pointed out
this might well sit better there.

At which point, Wil, I'm afraid my agreement sort of runs out. The
paper by Andy and Pete just doesn't have the flaws you claim.

You say it presumes that "The world community as a whole, without
unilateral dissent, agrees as to what the “optimal” temperature should
be over the course of the next 50-100 years"

It doesn't. While it suggests that risks might be lower if the
decision to implement were taken in such a way as to win the widest
possible support, it says nothing about an optimising decision by the
world community as whole. It devotes significant time to what the
options open to political opponents of SRM -- unilateral, or indeed
multilateral, dissenters -- might be, and what other conditions need
to be in place for that dissent to lead to a termination shock.
Specifically, that a unanimity of actors capable of SRM has to be
convinced -- or have the belief imposed on them by force majeure --
that a termination shock is preferable to either continuing SRM or
phasing SRM out over a relatively small number of decades.

You also say it presumes that "there’s a central authority with their
hand on the thermostat".

Again, it doesn't. Indeed it lays welcome weight -- welcome in the
sense that I think it has been underplayed in previous discussions --
on the high likelihood that a world with SRM would be highly likely to
have various independent or quasi-independent players capable of
shouldering the SRM burden. In such a world there will be a number of
different parties that can choose to increase levels of SRM, or to
slow down any decrease. No one party can unilaterally choose to lower
them. This clearly has its problems, as Gernot and Marty's "free
driver" analysis shows. But they are not the problem of a single hand
on the thermostat, nor do they stem from the unlikelihood of "binding
limits" and all countries "ceding sovereignty". And they are not
problems that lead to a termination shock.

Is a world with multiple SRM capabilities likely? Consider another
thing which might be considered a global good: satellite positioning
services. For such systems to work they needs must be global, and so
in some narrow economic sense there needs to be only one. But in terms
of geopolitical strategy that's a non starter -- no major power is
going to rely on another for something so strategically important. So
China and Russia have satellite navigation systems which China, at
least, is in a position to develop further, and Europe is starting to
deploy another. This sort of redundancy is not, as your post suggests,
a "belt and braces" approach that requires "a high level of
coordination at the international level that is belied by climate
politics to date" -- more or less the reverse; it grows out of
strategic uncertainty and the perceived need for an ability to keep
acting in a self-interested and un-coordinated way. Climate politics
suggest that that which is self-interested and un-coordinated is not
unlikely.

This leads to another point where I think your logic lets you down.
You say that large scale SRM would "require...governance for CENTURIES
or perhaps a MILLENNIUM." There are quite plausible scenarios where
this is not true -- you allude to one yourself, when you talk of "peak
shaving", but there are others. You seem to think such scenarios
unlikely and their discussion dangerous (indeed your critique seems
founded on the idea that this article is in some way an argument in
favour peak shaving scenarios, which I think is a stretch, since the
term is never used). But they are an example of relatively short-term
SRM. However, continuing on the point about a commitment of centuries
or even a millennium, you say that that would require "a governance
architecture unprecedented in the history of mankind." That is an
unwarranted leap. Continuous governance does not imply a preserved
governance architecture; it just implies that, at a given time,
something is governed.

There is also a reference I don't understand. You say that there is
"research that indicates that long-term bio-geochemical feedbacks
might severely  denude the effectiveness of said approach, creating a
'natural' termination effect" Could you say what you are referring to
here? Such feedbacks would have to not just impose diminishing returns
on SRM, but also to have a threshold beyond which the effects of SRM
vanish completely and rapidly. I am at a loss as to what such
feedbacks might be.

I also agree with Doug McMartin on the precautionary principle; it is
not remotely obvious which way it should point in this discussion.

Best wishes

Oliver

On 12 March 2018 at 14:52, Wil Burns  wrote:
> Since I already committed the cardinal sin of responding to an article focus
> on SRM, and f

[geo] Re: Intention matters in Climate Engineering

['Oliver Morton' via geoengineering]

I'm team Preston/Robock: intention matters. cf David, in 2000 -- confusing 
messing something up with engineering is an insult to engineers 
(paraphrased, from memory)

On CDR as climate geoengineering. Modality is very different from solar 
geo, but there are some clear similarities. Both decouple climate futures 
from cumulative emissions. Both require an analysis and a decision 
mechanism for deciding what final climate is desired (unless CDR is limited 
entirely to net zero, not net negative

On whether returning things to as they were means that it isn't 
geoengineering (Klaus's point); I think the thing that matters is change to 
the environment as is, not to a notional baseline of what it would have 
been if not for a, b c etc

I'm reminded of a distinction made by the satirist who used to write under 
the name of Peter Simple: To be a conservative is to oppose all change -- 
including change designed to return you to the conditions of the past. This 
is what distinguishes a conservative from a reactionary. In political terms 
that is quite weighted -- but it is a real distinction. To actively reduce 
CO2 ppm would be a more radical option; to sit at where one gets once one 
is at net zero is more conservative. 


On Saturday, 24 February 2018 01:12:10 UTC, Leon Di Marco wrote:
>
>EASAC has, in its recent report on NETs , ignored the fact that NETs 
> are simply another form of mitigation and instead  incorrectly placed 
> mitigation as a priority over NETs .   This is a fundamental error caused 
> by the notion that it is better to prevent pollution at its source than 
> trying to clean up the whole pool of pollution itself.   A similar 
> discussion is going on in the ocean plastic pollution space.Clearly, 
> as  a society, we are aware that our actions add up and we can all as 
> individuals do something to mitigate pollution of a given type, but that 
> doesnt mean that we dont have to clear up the mess that we have already 
> created.
> And as has been posted separately, the Chinese are attempting to clean up 
> the particulate pollution in the air in their cities caused by coal power 
> plants using huge filtration towers - the mitigation approach would have 
> been to switch off the power plants.
> Clearly this year is of special importance for the debate as the IPCC 
> process is going to put these issues before policymakers in various forms.  
>   There is already some sign that new US policy instruments for carbon 
> dioxide removal will influence that discussion.
>
>
> This is from Peter in another thread. 
>
> *One of the distinctive properties of CO2 is that it distributes itself 
> uniformly and so removing a CO2 molecular by flue gas capture and by Direct 
> Air Capture have identical impacts - and are thus both pure mitigation 
> approaches . The only distinction is that DAC can remove CO2 that was 
> previouslly emitted by flue gas so it has the additional capability to deal 
> with overshoot. In  this frame DAC is clearly not geoengineering any more 
> than any human activity is geoengineering because as all know too well 
> small emissions by individuals when there are billions of us is 
> geoengineering our plant by changing its climate . *
>
> Plus an extract from an early piece from Steve Rayner who was involved in 
> framing the Oxford Geoengineering Princliples-
>
>
> http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/rsis/nts/HTML-Newsletter/Insight/NTS-Insight-jun-1102.html
>
> NTS Insight June 2011
>
> Click here for the PDF version. 
> 
>
> Climate Change and Geoengineering Governance
>
> By Steve Rayner.
>
> How Might We Geoengineer the Climate?
>
> The first thing to emphasise is that geoengineering technologies do not 
> yet exist, although some of the components that might go into them are 
> already available or are under development for other purposes. For example, 
> carbon sequestration in geological formations, which is already being 
> explored for conventional carbon capture and storage (CCS) from power 
> stations,3 
> 
>  would 
> be an integral part of a geoengineering programme to capture CO2 from 
> ambient air by artificial means. However the front end of the system – the 
> removal of CO2 from ambient air – is currently only available on a very 
> small scale for use in submarines, where the very high cost of the current 
> technology is justified. In discussing geoengineering, therefore, it is 
> important not to fall victim to Whitehead’s (1919) fallacy of misplaced 
> concreteness, and talk about the comparative merits and drawbacks of 
> geoengineering technologies as if they were already well developed and 
> known.
>
> Second, it is essential to recognise that the term ‘geoengineering’ 
> currently encompasses a wide variety of concepts exhibiting diverse 
> technical characteristics with very 

Re: 9% for 36 gton/yr RE: [geo] Re: ocean fertilization

[Oliver Wingenter]

Mark,

Why would you consider fertilizing water that is not HNLC?

Oliver

On Nov 17, 2017 4:08 PM,  wrote:

> Chris,
>
> Please pass to David.
>
> See 2012 paper in *Process Safety and Environmental Protection* "Negative
> carbon via Ocean Afforestation
> <http://oceanforesters.org/uploads/NegativeCarbonViaOceanAfforestation2012Authors.pdf>
> ".
>
> The 2012 paper is a little outdated with only anaerobic digestion as the
> energy process.  Now estimating 5% of world's ocean surface to completely
> replace fossil fuels (600 quadrillion BTU/yr).  The more likely hybrid
> energy process of hydrothermal liquefaction and anaerobic digestion would
> mean somewhat less gigatons of CO2 stored each year.
>
> The paper discusses recycling plant nutrients from the energy process back
> to the seaweed.
>
> U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Project Agency - Energy is
> funding 18 seaweed-energy teams in MARINER.  Attached describes the two
> University of Southern Mississippi/OceanForesters teams and has links to
> the full list of teams.
>
> ARPA-E is not discussing CO2 recovery and storage.  Our favorite approach
> that can easily keep up with that rate of CO2 storage is explained in 
> *OCEANS'13
> MTS/IEEE Technical Program* "Secure Seafloor Container CO2 Storage
> <http://oceanforesters.org/uploads/Secure_Seafloor_Container_CO2_Storage_copy__Oceans_13.pdf>
> ."
>
> Mark E. Capron, PE
> Ventura, California
> www.PODenergy.org
>
>
>  Original Message 
> Subject: [geo] Re: ocean fertilization
> From: Chris Vivian 
> Date: Wed, November 15, 2017 2:58 am
> To: geoengineering 
>
> David,
> I seem to remember from quite some time ago that a figure of 25% of the
> global ocean would be required but I cannot remember the source of that
> figure.
>
> Chris.
>
> On Tuesday, November 14, 2017 at 6:32:08 PM UTC, David Sevier wrote:
>
>> Does anyone have any ideas of the area of ocean that would be required to
>> absorb 1 gigaton of CO2 if properly fertilized? It would be interesting to
>> understand the potential sized area required for this and the possible
>> volume of nutrients required. Usual caveats about that this has not been
>> tried and studied properly yet apply. I am trying to get an idea of scale
>> of this. It would also be useful to understand the potential fishing stock
>> increase for the area in question. Increased fishing could give an economic
>> underpinning to ocean fertilization.
>>
>>
>> David Sevier
>> Carbon Cycle Limited
>> 248 Sutton Common Road
>> Sutton, Surrey SM3 9PW
>> England
>> Tel 44 (0)208 288 0128
>> Fax 44 (0)208-288 0129
>> www.carbon-cycle.co.uk
>>
>> This email is private and confidential
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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Re: [geo] ocean fertilization

[Oliver Wingenter]

Dear David,

The SO is presently absorbing about 4.4 GT annually (Landschutzer, 
P.,/et al/.Science349,1221–1224(2015). To increase that by 1 GT would 
require about 1/20 to 1/50 the area based on our field, SOFeX, 
observation and the modeling work using the LANL Biogeochemical POP model.


Regards,

Oliver Wingenter


On 11/14/2017 11:32 AM, David Sevier wrote:


Does anyone have any ideas of the area of ocean that would be required 
to absorb 1 gigaton of CO2 if properly fertilized? It would be 
interesting to understand the potential sized area required for this 
and the possible volume of nutrients required. Usual caveats about 
that this has not been tried and studied properly yet apply. I am 
trying to get an idea of scale of this. It would also be useful to 
understand the potential fishing stock increase for the area in 
question. Increased fishing could give an economic underpinning to 
ocean fertilization.


David Sevier

Carbon Cycle Limited

248 Sutton Common Road

Sutton, Surrey SM3 9PW

England

Tel 44 (0)208 288 0128

Fax 44 (0)208-288 0129

www.carbon-cycle.co.uk <http://www.carbon-cycle.co.uk>

This email is private and confidential

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[geo] Re: Record Increase in Air CO2

[Oliver Morton]

see http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n9/full/nclimate3063.html

>>>>The recent El Niño event has elevated the rise in CO2 concentration 
this year. Here, using emissions, sea surface temperature data and a 
climate model, we forecast that the CO2concentration at Mauna Loa will for 
the first time remain above 400 ppm all year, and hence for our lifetimes.

On Wednesday, 15 March 2017 11:18:45 UTC, Oliver Morton wrote:
>
>
> Greg -- I think it's probably the El Nino for these latest figures, no? I 
> believe there will be some papers from OCO that nail this down in GRL quite 
> soon
>
>
> On Tuesday, 14 March 2017 18:41:37 UTC, Greg Rau wrote:
>>
>> https://phys.org/news/2017-03-carbon-dioxide-rose-pace-2nd.html
>>
>> "The two-year, 6-ppm surge in the greenhouse gas 
>> <https://phys.org/tags/greenhouse+gas/> between 2015 and 2017 is 
>> unprecedented in the observatory's 59-year record. And, it was a record 
>> fifth consecutive year that carbon dioxide 
>> <https://phys.org/tags/carbon+dioxide/> (CO2) rose by 2 ppm or greater, 
>> said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference 
>> Network."
>>
>> GR - If anthro emissions have plateaued, 
>> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/14/fossil-fuel-co2-emissions-nearly-stable-for-third-year-in-row
>>  why 
>> the dramatic increase in CO2? A runaway GH is upon us? Anyway, is it time 
>> yet to admit that anthro emissions reduction is failing and to find out if 
>> CDR is more than a figment of IPCC's imagination?
>>
>>
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[geo] Re: Record Increase in Air CO2

[Oliver Morton]

Greg -- I think it's probably the El Nino for these latest figures, no? I 
believe there will be some papers from OCO that nail this down in GRL quite 
soon


On Tuesday, 14 March 2017 18:41:37 UTC, Greg Rau wrote:
>
> https://phys.org/news/2017-03-carbon-dioxide-rose-pace-2nd.html
>
> "The two-year, 6-ppm surge in the greenhouse gas 
>  between 2015 and 2017 is 
> unprecedented in the observatory's 59-year record. And, it was a record 
> fifth consecutive year that carbon dioxide 
>  (CO2) rose by 2 ppm or greater, 
> said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference 
> Network."
>
> GR - If anthro emissions have plateaued, 
> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/14/fossil-fuel-co2-emissions-nearly-stable-for-third-year-in-row
>  why 
> the dramatic increase in CO2? A runaway GH is upon us? Anyway, is it time 
> yet to admit that anthro emissions reduction is failing and to find out if 
> CDR is more than a figment of IPCC's imagination?
>
>
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[geo] Global Risks 2017

[Oliver Morton]

Geoengineering and the WEF

Every year, just before its annual meeting in Davos, the World Economic 
Forum puts together a “Risk report” — a compendium of what the world (or at 
least the bits of the world that the WEF asked) is worrying about. Watching 
the release of this year’s report 
 I was struck by the fact 
that, for the first time, as far as I can tell, the report mentioned 
geoengineering. Unsurprisingly 
,
 
I was intrigued.
The mentions crop up in the section of the report on “Emerging 
technologies”, written by the WEF’s Nicholas Davis and Thomas Philbeck... 
Full post 
https://medium.com/@Eaterofsun/geoengineering-and-the-wef-422697209ef#.m76wq2qjr

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Re: [geo] CO2 capture may be our only option for stabilising temperatures - we need to find out the costs, fast | Oxford Martin School

[Oliver Morton]

Dear Dr Northcott

You are misinformed. International law does not ban SRM. 

Best wishes

Oliver

On Monday, 21 November 2016 21:53:04 UTC, NORTHCOTT Michael wrote:
>
> Dear Mike and Jonathan
>
> I enjoy quietly reading this list and learn, especially from atmospheric 
> and arctic scientists. 
>
> As a non-scientist I note that the economics and the science seem to 
> indicate that:
>
> CCS is expensive (because social costs of burning fossil fuels are 
> externalities not born by coal oil and gas corps.) and its climatic 
> effects are known (on large enough scale it will mitigate global warming 
> from ongoing fossil fuel use).
>
> SRM is expensive, its climatic effects are unknown (unfamiliar) because 
> unpredictable. Mt Pinatubo eruption 1991 provides best real world analogy 
> to human intentional injection of particulates designed to 'shade the 
> earth' from the sun, or 'cool the arctic' to use a phrase often seen on 
> this list. As others argue, the effects of SRM are relatively unknown but 
> in the case of Pinatubo included, counter-intuitively, tropospheric warming 
> in N Hemisphere winter according to NASA:  
> http://m.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Volcano/ Currently Arctic is 
> much warmer than it should be and winter ice formation is delayed. Pinatubo 
> '91 like atmospheric injections apparently won't fix this and they will 
> cause other unknown harms - as did Pinatubo '91.
>
> As a philosopher I can say, from my area of expertise, that there is no 
> moral equivalence between stopping intentional harm to the atmosphere and 
> trying to counter one kind of intentional harm (which is stoppable through 
> available tech and regulation and yes CCS) with another kind of intentional 
> harm whose externalities are unpredictable. This lack of moral equivalence 
> combined with extreme uncertainty is why currently international law 
> rightly bans SRM but not CCS. 
>
> Michael Northcott 
> (School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh)
>
> On 21 Nov 2016, at 21:13, Michael MacCracken  > wrote:
>
> Dear Jonathan--While I certainly agree that governance and the social 
> status quo are issues, I would just note that the notion of SRM is to 
> prevent further change and perhaps take us back a bit from the consequences 
> of the warming that we are experiencing (so back to more familiar 
> territory), whereas the no-SRM path is one heading into the future and to 
> much greater and unknown (at least more uncertain) changes. This is not to 
> say that SRM is a perfect response as there will be changes, but generally 
> back toward the more familiar and less likely to severe new extremes. And 
> if that is not what is happening, SRM can be stopped, and if things are 
> implemented and moderated relatively gradually and careful observations are 
> being taken and used in the planning, the phasing out would not also not be 
> so harmful as the future that lies ahead without SRM.
>
>
> So, I am a bit confused by all this talk of harm from doing (gradually 
> implemented) SRM as compared to the harm that seems to clearly lie ahead 
> from not doing this. Putting a tourniquet on a rapidly bleeding leg might 
> well cost me the leg, but otherwise I might well be dead. I'd like to hear 
> more about the social science and governance challenges of undertaking a 
> comparative analysis of ongoing GHG-induced change with and without there 
> being SRM; while to an external or long-term observer (like me, quite 
> probably), it would seem the rational choice is to gradually implement SRM, 
> in reality, acceptance of the ongoing upward trend might well be seen as 
> less disruptful of one's short-term interests (so the classic frog in the 
> warming pot of water dilemma)--this, at least, seems to me, to be the tenor 
> of the social science discussions, and, if the way society seems to be 
> going about its living, short-term interests seem to me to really have the 
> upper hand. Are there instances or approaches that might lead to greater 
> consideration of the long-term interests of society?
>
>
> Mike
>
> On 11/20/16 5:34 PM, Jonathan Marshall wrote:
>
>
> The real thing to remember about governance is that it is often about 
> politics and preserving the social status quo. 
>
> Just as current governance processes seem often to be about protecting the 
> fossil fuel industries from any harm.
>
> I would imagine the most likely result of changing the rules "in an 
> instant" will be to have rules which protect the people who impose SRM (and 
> impose is the right word, plenty of people will object to the potentially 
> disastrous consequences) from any legal liability for damages. The argu

Re: [geo] The trouble with negative emissions

[Oliver Morton]

Michael 

You ask: "How can producing enough biofuel to displace FFs to a large 
degree, or adjusting the pH of wide areas of the oceans, or moving vast 
amounts of sustainable marine carbon into the terrestrial space via 'Blue 
Biochar', or producing protein at the most efficient level, or producing 
globally significant amounts of freshwater (etc.) [be] a moral hazard?

If you talk about it well enough to allow people, who may be otherwise 
motivated to do so, to act as if you will do it, and then you don't. 



On Thursday, 20 October 2016 06:13:49 UTC+1, Michael Hayes wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> I believe that the misconceptions about carbon negative technologies are 
> getting so far out of hand in the media, and even in peer reviewed papers, 
> that a strong statement needs to be made to the press (and or to a peer 
> reviewed journal) concerning the common errors being cemented into the 
> CDR/BECCS/CCUS literature. 
>  
> As an example of a common misconception; Growing biomass for bioenergy is 
> routinely pointed out as being too problematic as it will crowd out food 
> crops, use too much water, and take way too long to scale up (etc.). This 
> line of logic is constantly being inserted into the criticism of 
> CDR/BECCS/CCUS yet no author that I know of has realized, much less pointed 
> out, that by growing biomass in the marine space (which has happened on 
> this planet once or twice before), using currently available STEM in 
> innovative ways (which has also happened on this planet once or twice 
> before), makes most if not all objections to biomass production for 
> CDR/BECCS/CCUS largely moot.
>
> As Greg and others have pointed out for years, the marine space offers 
> vast scale renewable resources in terms of making a reasonable impact upon 
> the carbon cycle, the pH of the oceans, and even...if we actually have 
> to...the production of renewable energy. Attaching to those important 
> production needs the production of food, feed, fertilizer, biochar, 
> polymers and even freshwater is easily achieved...It's called routine 
> engineering!
>
> Moral Hazard??? How can producing enough biofuel to displace FFs to a 
> large degree, or adjusting the pH of wide areas of the oceans, or moving 
> vast amounts of sustainable marine carbon into the terrestrial space via 
> 'Blue Biochar', or producing protein at the most efficient level, or 
> producing globally significant amounts of freshwater (etc.) a moral 
> hazard??? We, at this time, can do those things and much more if provided 
> the funding! 
>
> Attaching the Moral Hazard argument to such activities is much like 
> arguing against using eunuchs as school crossing guards as 
> they...*might*...be 
> pedophiles. We need school crossing guards, eunuchs or not, far more than 
> we need paranoia and confusion in extremis. 
>
> Bucky Fuller once stated:
>
> *“There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis. This is 
> only a crisis of ignorance.”* I assume he did intend that statement to be 
> understood in a non-pejorative spirit yet I sometimes truly wonder about 
> the validity of my assumption.
>
> Best,
>
> Michael  
>
>
>
>  
>
> On Friday, October 14, 2016 at 12:46:49 PM UTC-7, Greg Rau wrote:
>>
>> To quote the article's conclusion:
>> "Negative-emission technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather 
>> an unjust and high-stakes gamble. There is a real risk they will be unable 
>> to deliver on the scale of their promise. If the emphasis on equity and 
>> risk aversion embodied in the Paris Agreement are to have traction, 
>> negative-emission technologies should not form the basis of the mitigation 
>> agenda. This is not to say that they should be abandoned (*14* 
>> , *15* 
>> ). They 
>> could very reasonably be the subject of research, development, and 
>> potentially deployment, but the mitigation agenda should proceed on the 
>> premise that they will not work at scale. The implications of failing to do 
>> otherwise are a moral hazard par excellence."
>>
>> GR - It's always great to wake up in the morning to read  that my 
>> research and that of my colleagues is an unjust, moral hazard and a threat 
>> to the planet "par excellence". We are indeed in a very "high stakes 
>> gamble", especially if we continue to rely exclusively on emissions 
>> reduction. This is the clear conclusion of the IPCC, otherwise there would 
>> have been no need  for them to bet  their reputations (and Earth) on 
>> unproven negative emissions.  That we do not yet know if or how we can do 
>> what the IPCC views as essential negative emissions should be seen as 
>> clarion call for supportive policies and R&D to find out what our options 
>> might be rather than framing any such action as dangerous.  
>>
>> Curiously, the authors do state that research on such alternatives should 
>> not be ab

[geo] L.A. officials seeded clouds

[oliver]

Dear Group,

I am not sure if you have seen this LA Times article on cloud seeding.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-l-a-officials-seeded-clouds-during-el-nino-storm-in-hopes-of-more-rain-20160308-story.html

Oliver

Dr. Oliver Wingenter
Assoc. Chair and Assoc. Prof. Department of Chemistry
Research Scientist Geophysical Research Center
Chair Space Utilization and Allocation Committee (SUAC)
New Mexico Tech
Socorro, NM 87801 USA




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[geo] TC: How exploring Mars could help us fight climate change on Earth

[Oliver Tickell]

https://theconversation.com/how-exploring-mars-could-help-us-fight-climate-change-on-earth-57164

Advocating an energy intensive highly engineered approach for CO2 
sequestration using olivine / pyroxene. See my comment.


--
Oliver Tickell

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Re: [geo] carbon sequestration by oysters

[Oliver Tickell]

Re "my preference here would be to generate dissolved bicarbonates" - 
that's exactly what olivine weathering achieves:

Mg2SiO4 + 4CO2 +4H2O -> 2Mg2+ + 4HCO3- + H4SiO4

I think that when oceanographers refer to 'alkalinity' that's something 
they measure in terms of moles of HCO3- (if I'm wrong, please correct me).


As Olaf Schuiling (cc'ed) has been saying for years, this is probably 
best achieved in the marine or coastal environment, letting the sea do 
most of the grinding work for you - either by wave action on beaches or 
tidal currents on the sea floor.


For those who are interested, this 2008 paper proposes a scheme to 
reverse the calcification process, turning CaCO3 + H2O + CO2 into Ca++ + 
2HCO3-, 
[https://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~gideonh/reports/Cquestrate_report.pdf]. The 
paper provides useful background to all this but IMHO it's a poor idea 
compared to 'olivine option'.


Oliver.

On 03/03/2016 19:06, Greg Rau wrote:

Further questionable shells-as-CO2-management advocacy here:
http://www.thefishsite.com/articles/615/carbon-sequestration-potential-of-shellfish/
http://earthtechling.com/2016/03/could-oyster-shells-sequester-carbon/

As Oliver points out, typical marine CaCO3 formation generates CO2 at 
the expense of dissolved seawater calcium and bicarbonate ions: 
Ca(HCO3)2aq ---> CaCO3s + CO2g + H2O. On the other hand, reverse this 
reaction and you might have something:

http://climatecolab.org/contests/2012/electric-power-sector/c/proposal/1304174
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es102671x

You can consume CO2 and generate marine CO3s by adding an externally 
derived source of alkalinity, e.g. silicate minerals, kinetics 
permitting.  However, my preference here would be to generate 
dissolved bicarbonates.  This about doubles the carbon stored per mol 
of alkalinity added, while the dissolved form helps counter the bio 
effects of ocean acidification.


Then there is the Franz's angle that shellfish consume and repackage 
plankton in a way that better sequesters this carbon and keeps it from 
regenerating CO2. This is probably true, but how big is this carbon 
pool relative to the CO2 generated above and generated by shellfish 
respiration that is the largest fate of plankton C consumed by 
shellfish? In general then, aren't shellfish net sources of CO2, and 
don't shellfish producers and consumers then need to be taxed 
according?  ;-)


Greg




*From:* Oeste 
*To:* oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org; andrew.lock...@gmail.com;
geoengineering 
*Cc:* Renaud de RICHTER 
*Sent:* Wednesday, March 2, 2016 5:37 AM
*Subject:* Re[2]: [geo] carbon sequestration by oysters

Completion of the argument from Oliver Tickell against oyster
farming in the ocean or shelf might induce the opposite result:
Oysters are filter feeders within the food chain. They remove all
kind of suspended matter from the water column inklusive
phytoplankton, phytoplankton detritus, clay
particles and bacteria. They produce faeces in the shape of rather
solid pellets containing organic C plus carbonate and silicate
shells of the phytoplankton plus some clay. The faeces
pellets become much faster sedimented than the suspended matter
they did feed with. This might be the reason that oysters induce a
lower loss of debris oxidation and dissolution to CO2 and/or
HCO3- on their way down as without the oyster action. The CaCO3
shell debris of dead oysters becomes as well part of the
sediment. These and similar processes of food chain dependence
turn ocean sediments into organic and inorganic C storages.
Have a look at an fictive ocean containing a food chain composed
only of phytoplankton and bacteria: Organic and inorganic waste of
phytoplankton sinks down to the sediment very slowly: The organic
debris would be consumed complete by bacteria during the slow
sinking of the debris, even the slow sinking small CaCO3
and SiO2 shells of the phytoplankton might even come to complete
dissolution on their way down.
This would result in an ocean much more acidified and probable
with much more oxygen deficient zones than any ocean habitat
containing oysters and further parts of the recent food chain.
All sediments within the deeper ocean basins below the calcium
carbonate compensation depth would be free of any inorganic and
organic C.
Franz D. Oeste
-- Originalnachricht --
Von: "Oliver Tickell" mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org>>
An: andrew.lock...@gmail.com <mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>;
"geoengineering" mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>>
Gesendet: 02.03.2016 10:30:25
Betreff: Re: [geo] carbon sequestration by oysters

There seems to be a fundamental error in this analys

Re: [geo] carbon sequestration by oysters

[Oliver Tickell]

There seems to be a fundamental error in this analysis. Far from 
sequestering CO2, this process emits CO2 to the atmosphere according to 
the reaction:


Ca++ + 2HCO3- => CaCO3 + CO2

In the process depleting ocean alkalinity.

Oliver.

On 01/03/2016 22:27, Andrew Lockley wrote:



http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25796916

Ying Yong Sheng Tai Xue Bao. 2014 Oct;25(10):3032-8.

Estimation and experiment of carbon sequestration by oysters attached 
to the enhancement artificial reefs in Laizhou Bay, Shandong, China


Gong PH, Li J, Guan CT, Li MJ, Liu C.

Abstract

Through sampling investigation of fouling organisms on the enhancement 
artificial reefs set up in Laizhou Bay, it was proved that oyster 
(Ostrea plicatula) was the dominant fouling species. Therefore the dry 
mass of shell (Ms), total fresh mass (Mt) and thickness (T) of oyster 
attached on the reefs were analyzed. The results showed that the Mt 
and Ms presented seasonal variation (P < 0.01), that is, the values 
were the lowest in April and the highest in December. The reef age and 
the length of the time the enhancement reefs placed in the sea had 
significant effect on Mt, Ms and T. With the increment of reef ages, 
all indices increased obviously. The carbon sinks of oysters attaching 
to the tube enhancement reefs constructed in 2009, 2010 and 2011 in 
Laizhou Bay were 17.61, 16.33 and 10.45 kg · m(-3), respectively. The 
oysters on the enhancement reefs of Jincheng marine ranch with an area 
of 64.25 hm2 had fixed carbon of 297.5 t C (equivalent to 1071 t of 
CO2) from 2009 to 2013 in Laizhou Bay. To capture and store the same 
amount of CO2 would cost about 1.6 x 10(5)-6.4 x 10(5) US dollars. 
Therefore, oysters attaching to the enhancement reefs bring about 
remarkable ecological benefits.


PMID: 25796916

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Re: [geo] Stratospheric sulfate geoengineering could enhance the terrestrial photosynthesis rate

[Oliver Wingenter]

Increased diffuse radiation will lead to higher summer cooling loads and 
decreased winter warming for passive solar buildings. Please do not 
confuse passive solar with active solar.



Oliver Wingenter

On 2/11/2016 1:35 PM, Lili Xia wrote:

Hi, Peter,

I think there are couples things which make the results different: (1) 
G1 doesn't have diffuse radiation increasing; (2) CLM in Xia et al. is 
CLM-SP instead of CLM-CN; (3) the climate forcing is quite different.


Lili

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 12:11 PM, p.j.irvine <mailto:p.j.irv...@gmail.com>> wrote:


Hi,

I wouldn't be so sure that this is a forcing difference. There are
VERY large differences in the model response to high CO2
scenarios, with much smaller differences between SRM and no-SRM
scenarios. These arise because different factors act to limit
vegetation productivity in the different models. In Susanne
Glienke's paper the only models which included a nitrogen cycle in
GeoMIP, a version of CLM, found the opposite trend to that
reported in Xia et al. They found greater tropical productivity in
the non-SRM scenario than the SRM scenario and only a small CO2
fertilization effect, likely arising from the fact that nitrogen
is the limiting factor in these regions and it is recycled more
rapidly in warmer soils boosting NPP.

I think it's still early days in the study of the vegetation
response to SRM.

cheers,

Pete

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 08:44:01 UTC-5, Alan Robock wrote:

Dear Bala,

Actually in our paper we say:

Kalidindi et al. (2015) showed that with a 20 Tg sulfate aerosol
(SO_4 ) stratospheric loading to balance the radiative forcing
of 2 xCO_2 , broadband diffuse radiation would increase
by 11.2 Wm^-2 compared with the reference run. However
they used a very unrealistic stratospheric aerosol distribution,
with a very small effective radius of 0.17 μm and uniform
geographical distribution.

So we did different experiments, and we used a much more
"realistic" aerosol size and space distribution.  I think the
differences in the results are because of the forcing and not
the models.

Alan Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor Editor, Reviews of
Geophysics Department of Environmental Sciences Phone:
+1-848-932-5751  Rutgers University
Fax: +1-732-932-8644 
14 College Farm Road  
E-mail:rob...@envsci.rutgers.eduNew Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA
http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
<http://envsci.rutgers.edu/%7Erobock> ☮
http://twitter.com/AlanRobock Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54

On 2/10/2016 10:32 PM, Govindasamy Bala wrote:

Interesting result. The conclusions seem to depend on model
configurations.

Our paper published last year in Climate Dynamics (attached)
did not find any such benefit from the enhanced diffused
radiation because of the offset from a reduction in direct
light. In fact we found a net reduction in GPP of about 1 PgC

Looks like Multi-model intercomparison would be needed to
resolve this issue.

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 7:39 PM, Alan Robock
 wrote:

Our most recent paper has just been published:

Xia, L., Robock, A., Tilmes, S., and Neely III, R. R.:
Stratospheric sulfate geoengineering could enhance the
terrestrial photosynthesis rate, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16,
1479-1489, doi:10.5194/acp-16-1479-2016, 2016.

http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/1479/2016/

-- 
Alan Robock


Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor
  Editor, Reviews of Geophysics
Department of Environmental Sciences Phone:
+1-848-932-5751
Rutgers UniversityFax: +1-732-932-8644
14 College Farm Road E-mail:
rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551  USA
http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
<http://envsci.rutgers.edu/%7Erobock>
☮ http://twitter.com/AlanRobock
Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54

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[geo] Re: Announcing the Gordon Research Conference-sponsored meeting on "Climate intervention by modifying Earth’s radiation," July 23 - 28, 2017

[Oliver Morton]

Thanks Alan -- while we're putting things in diaries two years hence, does 
anyone know if there are dates yet for CEC17 in Berlin?

On Wednesday, 30 December 2015 03:02:57 UTC, Alan Robock wrote:
>
> Dear Colleagues, 
>
> It is a long time in the future, but pencil this into your calendars.   
> There will be a Gordon Research Conference-sponsored meeting entitled 
> "Climate intervention by modifying Earth’s radiation" July 23 - 28, 2017 
> at the Sunday River Resort http://www.sundayriver.com/, in Newry, 
> Maine.  The Chair will be David Keith, Co-Chair Alan Robock, Vice-Chair 
> Douglas MacMartin, and Co-Vice Chair Trude Storelvmo.  Stay tuned for 
> more details. 
>
> Happy New Year to everyone. 
>
> -- 
> Alan Robock 
>
> Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor 
>Editor, Reviews of Geophysics 
> Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751 
> Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644 
> 14 College Farm Road  E-mail: rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu 
>  
> New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551  USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock 
> ☮ http://twitter.com/AlanRobock 
> Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54 
>
>
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Re: [geo] List of current Geoengineering?

[Oliver Morton]

Dear Michael

Thank you very much -- I'm glad you're enjoying the book.

For what it's worth, though, I agree with Andrew on this -- IMO 
desulphurization is not geoengineering sensu stricto, but the way in which 
it brings about a quasi global change in radiative forcing as a result of 
considered international policy makes it so geoengineeering-like, and so 
relevant to true geoengineering, that it needs to be looked at i this 
context

o

On Saturday, 26 December 2015 14:14:44 UTC, NORTHCOTT Michael wrote:
>
> If desulfurizing marine fuels is geoengineering then any activity 
> instigated to contribute to mitigation of anthropogenic climate change 
> becomes geoengineering (rendering the term almost meaningless) including 
> becoming a vegetarian (because of the significant climate impacts of meat 
> rearing) or cycling instead of driving. 
>
> Climate change mitigation refers to a range of behaviours and practices 
> that infinitesimally, tiny fraction by tiny fraction, reduce unintentional 
> human interference with the climate system. 
>
> Geoengineering is intentional redesign of the climate system to reduce the 
> climatic consequences of ongoing  human atmospheric pollution. 
>
> I am reading Oliver Morton's The Planet Remade (Christmas gift). It is 
> very well written and he gets the distinction between engineering the 
> atmosphere  intentionally and reducing atmospheric pollution which has 
> unintended (and unforeseen) consequences. 
>
> Michael Northcott 
> University of Edinburgh 
>
> > On 26 Dec 2015, at 12:56, Andrew Lockley  > wrote: 
> > 
> > Alan, 
> > 
> > I actually feel this is a legitimate line of discussion for the GE 
> > group.  Let's look, for example, at the issue of marine bunker fuels. 
> > They're currently being desulfurized, and this will have climate 
> > impacts. 
> > 
> > I think it's legitimate to describe this as 'geoengineering' - to the 
> > extent that radiative forcing issue has *any* potential effect on the 
> > outcome of political or scientific debate on desulfurization. 
> > 
> > Whilst it's perfectly legitimate that you hold a differing view, I 
> > think it's very important that we allow people with a range of 
> > opinions to debate on the group.  As such, (as a general point) it's 
> > perhaps best if any concerns about discussion content are addressed 
> > impersonally (or directly to the moderators), as otherwise that could 
> > deter people joining in discussions. 
> > 
> > Thanks 
> > 
> > A 
> > 
> >> On 20 December 2015 at 15:29, Alan Robock  > wrote: 
> >> None of those are geoengineering. Geoengineering is deliberate. That is 
> its 
> >> definition. 
> >> 
> >> There is no such thing as accidental geoengineering. Certainly we do 
> those 
> >> things, but please discuss them elsewhere. 
> >> 
> >> Alan Robock 
> >> 
> >> Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor 
> >> Department of Environmental Sciences 
> >> Rutgers University 
> >> 14 College Farm Road 
> >> New Brunswick, NJ  08901 
> >> 
> >> rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu  
> >> http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock 
> >> http://twitter.com/AlanRobock 
> >> ☮☮ 
> >> Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54 
> >> Sent from my iPhone. +1-732-881-1610 
> >> 
> >> On Dec 20, 2015, at 3:44 AM, em...@lewis-brown.net  
> wrote: 
> >> 
> >> Hi 
> >> 
> >> This made me wonder, do we have a list of current geo-engineering of 
> the 
> >> climate? It might include for eg:1) a wide range of ways we release of 
> ghg 
> >> to air (including water, all the ones under unfccc and those not) 
> >> 2) Release of black carbon, eg from LUC, 
> >> 3) Inputs of soil and sewage carbon to sea, 
> >> 4) Inputs of CO2 to ocean by air, 
> >> 5) Changes o albedo through ice, snow and forect cover change, 
> >> 6) Contrails and other particulates that cause global dimming 
> >> 7) Changes to the capacity of carbon sinks (via warming) eg menthane 
> and 
> >> ocean, 
> >> 8) Changes in clouds through chnagin temperature affecting how much 
> moisture 
> >> the air can hold? 
> >> Others? 
> >> 
> >> Happy for people to correct and contribute others, 
> >> I think it might make an interesting (mag or news, rather than science 
> >> publication?) article if anyone is interested in working with me on it. 
> >> 
> &

Re: [geo] Direct Separation Technology for Low Emissions Intensity Lime and Cement.

[Oliver Tickell]

The most interesting thing about this is that they appear to have 
completely ditched the carbon-negative magnesium-based cements they 
bought out from Novacem, a UK company that went into liquidation after 
spending millions on R&D. I have searched their site and not a mention 
anywhere. A disappointment as the idea appeared to hold considerable 
promise - but presumably it just ended up never quite making the grade 
as a construction material. Anyone out there know the story? Oliver.


On 29/10/2015 01:26, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : Tim Kruger proposed an ocean alkalinization process 
based on similar chemistry


http://www.calix.com.au/cement-and-lime.html?utm_content=buffer10eb0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Direct Separation Technology for Low Emissions Intensity Lime and Cement.

Calix’s Recent Patent Application spurs Commercial Interest and an EU 
Grant Application.


In our last newsletter, we announced a recent patent application for 
the use of Calix’s CFC technology in ordinary Portland cement 
production, to enhance efficiency and future-proof the industry by 
efficiently capturing CO2. Since then, we have applied for a European 
Union “Horizons 2020” grant – “Project LEILAC” – to demonstrate the 
technology, and numerous very positive discussions with major players 
in the global cement and lime industry on project participation and 
licensing the technology.


LEILAC is a joint European-Australian collaboration to develop a 200 
tpd pilot plant for lime and cement production using breakthrough 
technology to capture CO2, called Direct Separation. Lime and cement 
production together account for more than 5 % of global CO2 emissions. 
LEILAC will demonstrate the capture of ~60 % of this CO2 without 
significant energy or capital penalty.


Direct Separation is achieved solely by re-engineering the process 
flows used in the best available technology for lime and cement 
calcination. Carbonate calcination occurs by indirect counterflow 
heating, and consequentially the flue gases are not mixed with the CO2 
emitted from the carbonate minerals. This technology is already 
operating at a commercial scale for magnesite calcination. No 
separation technologies, new materials or processes are required.


Direct Separation is a breakthrough, and adds a new strategy for CCS. 
It can greatly assist the European Union to meet its target of 
80% emissions reduction by 2050, with around half of these emissions 
reductions coming from industries such as lime and cement.


- See more at: 
http://www.calix.com.au/cement-and-lime.html?utm_content=buffer10eb0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#.dpuf


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Re: [geo] new geoengineering method; plus energy policy simulator

[Oliver Tickell]

All good stuff but an astonishing willingness to countenance underground 
coal gasification, a horrifyingly polluting technology. See at

http://mwfrost.com/coal_retirement_plan/

Case against here:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2402220/coal_gas_company_warns_stop_campaigning_or_we_will_sue.html

I have written to MW Frost asking him to reconsider. Cheers, Oliver.

On 01/11/2015 16:43, Erik Neumann wrote:
Poster's note: unfortunately this geoengineering method is so new that 
it is not included as a choice in the energy simulator.


http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/every-climate-concerned-billionaire-should-do-this-to-save-the-world/413020/

Buy Coal Now!

Buying coal while it’s still in the ground, in effect, constitutes
a very inexpensive, very simple form of geoengineering.


So the key is to put less carbon into the atmosphere. Most
policies, accordingly, focus on preventing people from burning
fuels. But what if the fossil fuels were never taken out of the
ground in the first place? 


Frost believes that instead of regulating to limit the burning of
fossil fuels, we should just never remove the fuels from earth’s
crust in the first place.

“The U.S. coal deposits represent a potential store of future CO₂
emissions,” Frost told me. “The assumption, the policy assumption,
is that they need to be extracted. But what if we just sequester
this carbon while it’s still in coal form?”

By permanently keeping coal in the ground, carbon dioxide is, in
turn, permanently kept out of the atmosphere. It will never trap
heat in the atmosphere or debase the ocean. As such, buying
unmined coal constitutes an incredibly cheap form of offsetting
carbon consumption. But that’s not all it does: By sequestering
coal from the global market, coal’s price rises. So coal
retirement becomes a voluntary way of pricing in the mineral’s
considerable climate, environmental, and public-health costs.
Coal’s price could even rise internationally, weaning other
nations off the fuel.
the key is to put less carbon into the atmosphere. Most policies,
accordingly, focus on preventing people from burning fuels. But
what if the fossil fuels were never taken out of the ground in the
first place?

But if a billionaire (or a large non-profit with similar
purchasing power) really wanted to augment their coal-buying
efforts and buy the climate more time, they would have to invest
in what many people think of as “real” geoengineering, and what
the UN calls Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs). These are
processes that pull carbon out of the atmosphere so it can be
trapped on or below the surface. But you could do this without
fanciful technology. A recent economic study out of Oxford
University found that the most efficient NET over the next 50
years

<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-best-technology-for-fighting-climate-change-trees/385304/>
will not be carbon-capturing pumps or artificial photosynthesis
but trees. Afforestation—planting forests where there were none
before—is the best, most effective way in the short term to remove
carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it.

Were a donor or government to combine the two methods, they could
shape the global climate on both ends: removing carbon from the
atmosphere as they also reduced the influence of future carbon.



http://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9649518/energy-policy-simulator

Think you’ve got good energy policy ideas? This tool lets you see
if they’d work.

Energy Innovation <http://energyinnovation.org/>, a San
Francisco-based think tank, has created what may be the coolest
tool for energy nerds I've ever seen. It's called the Energy
Policy Simulator <https://www.energypolicy.solutions/>, and it
lets anyone see the impacts of their energy policy choices on a
whole range of outputs, including US greenhouse gas emissions.

The modeling is the result of two years of work and has been
peer-reviewed

<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/minecraft-for-energy-wonks-this-game-puts-you-in-control-of-america-s-climate-headaches>
 by
"scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Stanford, and Berkeley, U.S. national laboratories, and two
Chinese research groups." It shows not only the results of
individual policies, but how various policies interact.

The version accessible on the website is actually somewhat
stripped down, as the creators didn't want it to be overwhelming
to newbies. If you want the full meal deal, with the ability to
tweak all the options and parameters, you can download a complete
version, along with all the data and methodology. (The web version
is fun and easy to

Re: [geo] Evidence for deep-ocean frozen methane release VERY bad news?

[Oliver Wingenter]

Eric,

I read a paper a few years back showing measurements of the the 
temperature of the Norwegian current increasing 2 degrees C since the 1970s.


Oliver

On 10/15/2015 8:28 AM, Eric Durbrow wrote:

I found this recent article extremely disturbing but perhaps I am exaggerating the 
impact of possible deep-ocean methane release. Can someone provide a perspective? Is 
this a potential "game-over?”
Eric

Abstract: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GC005955/abstract

Press Release:

Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean 
in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But this is 
precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition from a 
dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.

New University of Washington research suggests that subsurface warming could be 
causing more methane gas to bubble up off the Washington and Oregon coast.

The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, shows 
that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a disproportionate 
number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of methane hydrates.

"We see an unusually high number of bubble plumes at the depth where methane hydrate would 
decompose if seawater has warmed," said lead author H. Paul Johnson, a UW professor of 
oceanography. "So it is not likely to be just emitted from the sediments; this appears to be 
coming from the decomposition of methane that has been frozen for thousands of years."

Methane has contributed to sudden swings in Earth's climate in the past. It is 
unknown what role it might contribute to contemporary climate change, although 
recent studies have reported warming-related methane emissions in Arctic 
permafrost and off the Atlantic coast.

Of the 168 methane plumes in the new study, some 14 were located at the 
transition depth -- more plumes per unit area than on surrounding parts of the 
Washington and Oregon seafloor.

If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere 
and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems to 
get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane into 
carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the deeper 
offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges into 
coastal waterways.

"Current environmental changes in Washington and Oregon are already impacting local 
biology and fisheries, and these changes would be amplified by the further release of 
methane," Johnson said.

Another potential consequence, he said, is the destabilization of seafloor 
slopes where frozen methane acts as the glue that holds the steep sediment 
slopes in place.

Methane deposits are abundant on the continental margin of the Pacific 
Northwest coast. A 2014 study from the UW documented that the ocean in the 
region is warming at a depth of 500 meters (0.3 miles), by water that formed 
decades ago in a global warming hotspot off Siberia and then traveled with 
ocean currents east across the Pacific Ocean. That previous paper calculated 
that warming at this depth would theoretically destabilize methane deposits on 
the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs from northern California to Vancouver 
Island.

At the cold temperatures and high pressures present on the continental margin, 
methane gas in seafloor sediments forms a crystal lattice structure with water. 
The resulting icelike solid, called methane hydrate, is unstable and sensitive 
to changes in temperature. When the ocean warms, the hydrate crystals 
dissociate and methane gas leaks into the sediment. Some of that gas escapes 
from the sediment pores as a gas.

The 2014 study calculated that with present ocean warming, such hydrate 
decomposition could release roughly 0.1 million metric tons of methane per year 
into the sediments off the Washington coast, about the same amount of methane 
from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout.

The new study looks for evidence of bubble plumes off the coast, including 
observations by UW research cruises, earlier scientific studies and local 
fishermen's reports. The authors included bubble plumes that rose at least 150 
meters (490 feet) tall that clearly originate from the seafloor. The dataset 
included 45 plumes originally detected by fishing boats, whose modern sonars 
can detect the bubbles while looking for schools of fish, with their 
observations later confirmed during UW research cruises.

Results show that methane gas is slowly released at almost all depths along the 
Washington and Oregon coastal margin. But the plumes are significantly more 
common at the critical depth of 500 meters, where hydrate would decompose due 
to seawater warming.

"What we're seeing is possible confirmation of what we predicted from the water temperatures: 
Methane hydrate appears to be dec

Re: [geo] Evidence for deep-ocean frozen methane release VERY bad news?

[Oliver Wingenter]

Oliver, the problem is if too much methane is released at once the bacteria 
will run out of nutrients. Nutrients could be pumped in using ocean pipes being 
fed by barges.



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 Original message 
From: Oliver Tickell  
Date:10/15/2015  12:04 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To: durb...@gmail.com, geoengineering  
Cc:  
Subject: Re: [geo] Evidence for deep-ocean frozen methane release VERY bad 
news? 

The message seems to be that most methane is oxidised to CO2 in the water.

That means the main consequence may not be a warming one. Seas margin 
destabilisation leading to collapse and tsunamis would not be nice. Nor 
would spread of anoxia. Nor would additional ocean acidification.

Oliver.

On 15/10/2015 15:28, Eric Durbrow wrote:
> Abstract:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GC005955/abstract
>
> Press Release:
>
> Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark 
> ocean in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But 
> this is precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition 
> from a dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.
>
> New University of Washington research suggests that subsurface warming could 
> be causing more methane gas to bubble up off the Washington and Oregon coast.
>
> The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 
> shows that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a 
> disproportionate number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of 
> methane hydrates.
>
> "We see an unusually high number of bubble plumes at the depth where methane 
> hydrate would decompose if seawater has warmed," said lead author H. Paul 
> Johnson, a UW professor of oceanography. "So it is not likely to be just 
> emitted from the sediments; this appears to be coming from the decomposition 
> of methane that has been frozen for thousands of years."
>
> Methane has contributed to sudden swings in Earth's climate in the past. It 
> is unknown what role it might contribute to contemporary climate change, 
> although recent studies have reported warming-related methane emissions in 
> Arctic permafrost and off the Atlantic coast.
>
> Of the 168 methane plumes in the new study, some 14 were located at the 
> transition depth -- more plumes per unit area than on surrounding parts of 
> the Washington and Oregon seafloor.
>
> If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere 
> and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems 
> to get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane 
> into carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the 
> deeper offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges 
> into coastal waterways.
>
> "Current environmental changes in Washington and Oregon are already impacting 
> local biology and fisheries, and these changes would be amplified by the 
> further release of methane," Johnson said.
>
> Another potential consequence, he said, is the destabilization of seafloor 
> slopes where frozen methane acts as the glue that holds the steep sediment 
> slopes in place.
>
> Methane deposits are abundant on the continental margin of the Pacific 
> Northwest coast. A 2014 study from the UW documented that the ocean in the 
> region is warming at a depth of 500 meters (0.3 miles), by water that formed 
> decades ago in a global warming hotspot off Siberia and then traveled with 
> ocean currents east across the Pacific Ocean. That previous paper calculated 
> that warming at this depth would theoretically destabilize methane deposits 
> on the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs from northern California to 
> Vancouver Island.
>
> At the cold temperatures and high pressures present on the continental 
> margin, methane gas in seafloor sediments forms a crystal lattice structure 
> with water. The resulting icelike solid, called methane hydrate, is unstable 
> and sensitive to changes in temperature. When the ocean warms, the hydrate 
> crystals dissociate and methane gas leaks into the sediment. Some of that gas 
> escapes from the sediment pores as a gas.
>
> The 2014 study calculated that with present ocean warming, such hydrate 
> decomposition could release roughly 0.1 million metric tons of methane per 
> year into the sediments off the Washington coast, about the same amount of 
> methane from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout.
>
> The new study looks for evidence of bubble plumes off the coast, including 
> observations by UW research cruises, earlier scientific studies and local 
> fishermen's reports. The authors included bubbl

Re: [geo] Evidence for deep-ocean frozen methane release VERY bad news?

[Oliver Tickell]

The message seems to be that most methane is oxidised to CO2 in the water.

That means the main consequence may not be a warming one. Seas margin 
destabilisation leading to collapse and tsunamis would not be nice. Nor 
would spread of anoxia. Nor would additional ocean acidification.


Oliver.

On 15/10/2015 15:28, Eric Durbrow wrote:

Abstract:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GC005955/abstract

Press Release:

Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean 
in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But this is 
precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition from a 
dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.

New University of Washington research suggests that subsurface warming could be 
causing more methane gas to bubble up off the Washington and Oregon coast.

The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, shows 
that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a disproportionate 
number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of methane hydrates.

"We see an unusually high number of bubble plumes at the depth where methane hydrate would 
decompose if seawater has warmed," said lead author H. Paul Johnson, a UW professor of 
oceanography. "So it is not likely to be just emitted from the sediments; this appears to be 
coming from the decomposition of methane that has been frozen for thousands of years."

Methane has contributed to sudden swings in Earth's climate in the past. It is 
unknown what role it might contribute to contemporary climate change, although 
recent studies have reported warming-related methane emissions in Arctic 
permafrost and off the Atlantic coast.

Of the 168 methane plumes in the new study, some 14 were located at the 
transition depth -- more plumes per unit area than on surrounding parts of the 
Washington and Oregon seafloor.

If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere 
and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems to 
get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane into 
carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the deeper 
offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges into 
coastal waterways.

"Current environmental changes in Washington and Oregon are already impacting local 
biology and fisheries, and these changes would be amplified by the further release of 
methane," Johnson said.

Another potential consequence, he said, is the destabilization of seafloor 
slopes where frozen methane acts as the glue that holds the steep sediment 
slopes in place.

Methane deposits are abundant on the continental margin of the Pacific 
Northwest coast. A 2014 study from the UW documented that the ocean in the 
region is warming at a depth of 500 meters (0.3 miles), by water that formed 
decades ago in a global warming hotspot off Siberia and then traveled with 
ocean currents east across the Pacific Ocean. That previous paper calculated 
that warming at this depth would theoretically destabilize methane deposits on 
the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs from northern California to Vancouver 
Island.

At the cold temperatures and high pressures present on the continental margin, 
methane gas in seafloor sediments forms a crystal lattice structure with water. 
The resulting icelike solid, called methane hydrate, is unstable and sensitive 
to changes in temperature. When the ocean warms, the hydrate crystals 
dissociate and methane gas leaks into the sediment. Some of that gas escapes 
from the sediment pores as a gas.

The 2014 study calculated that with present ocean warming, such hydrate 
decomposition could release roughly 0.1 million metric tons of methane per year 
into the sediments off the Washington coast, about the same amount of methane 
from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout.

The new study looks for evidence of bubble plumes off the coast, including 
observations by UW research cruises, earlier scientific studies and local 
fishermen's reports. The authors included bubble plumes that rose at least 150 
meters (490 feet) tall that clearly originate from the seafloor. The dataset 
included 45 plumes originally detected by fishing boats, whose modern sonars 
can detect the bubbles while looking for schools of fish, with their 
observations later confirmed during UW research cruises.

Results show that methane gas is slowly released at almost all depths along the 
Washington and Oregon coastal margin. But the plumes are significantly more 
common at the critical depth of 500 meters, where hydrate would decompose due 
to seawater warming.

"What we're seeing is possible confirmation of what we predicted from the water temperatures: 
Methane hydrate appears to be decomposing and releasing a lot of gas," Johnson said. "If 
you look syste

Re: [geo] Re: Smart reforestation must go beyond carbon: expert | CIFOR Forests News Blog

[Oliver Tickell]

See also this article on The Ecologist by Peter Bunyard:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2776099/without_its_rainforest_the_amazon_will_turn_to_desert.html


 Without its rainforest, the Amazon will turn to desert

Peter Bunyard

2nd March 2015

Tweet 


   Mainstream climatologists predict a 15% fall in rainfall over the
   Amazon if it is stripped of its rainforest. But the 'biotic pump'
   theory, rooted in conventional physics and recently confirmed by
   experiment, shows that the interior of a forest-free Amazon will be
   as dry as the Negev desert. We must save the Amazon before it enters
   a permanent and irreversible dessication.



On 30/05/2015 22:49, Brian Cartwright wrote:

To the geoengineering group,

I'm curious whether group members are familiar with the "biotic pump" 
model of Gorshkov and Makarieva; this article gives a quick introduction:


http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0130-hance-physics-biotic-pump.html

A big climate benefit of inland forests is that phase change from 
evapotranspiration -> condensation creates low-pressure areas that 
pull in moisture and create healthy weather circulation. Seems to me 
that widespread deforestation is aggravating stalled hot-weather 
trends by blocking this kind of circulation. The leaf area of a mature 
forest offers considerably more surface area for evaporation than the 
same area of open water on ocean or inland lake.


Brian Cartwright

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Re: [geo] Coral bleaching under unconventional scenarios of climate warming and ocean acidification - NCC

[Oliver Tickell]

On a technical point, is ocean acidification actually an IPCC 
responsibility? It's a separate issue from climate change (tho with 
common cause) and may be better dealt with under a separate institution 
with a better track record of actually achieving results, for example, 
the International Maritime Organisation and / or UNEP.


Oliver Tickell

On 28/05/2015 04:16, John Nissen wrote:

Hi Ron,

The inability of IPCC to get to grips with the ocean acidification 
problem is grounds for complaint.  Aggressive CDR may be the only path 
to reduce atmospheric CO2 to a reasonably safe level, given the 
uncertainty of the effects of ocean acidification on the food chain.  
A huge amount is at stake, since about 15% of the world population 
rely on fish for the protein in their diet [1].


Further measures specifically for acidification may be added to CDR - 
I am thinking of olivine rock crushing and ideas put to me by Oliver 
Tickell and Olaf Schuiling.  There is also the possibility of specific 
local cooling measures for helping corals, e.g. using cloud 
brightening as suggested by Stephen Salter and others.


None of this is mentioned by IPCC, yet disruption to coral life and 
the marine food chain could be a significant threat to humanity, 
affecting particularly the under-developed countries and small island 
states.


The Earth System is now well outside the safe limits (safe for 
humanity) which have been obtained during the past eight thousand 
years, during which human civilisation has developed and on which 
modern civilisation now relies.


A determined effort is needed to bring the Earth System back to the 
"old norm", rather than risk than we can adapt successfully to major 
change in the pipeline: a lethal combination of excessive ocean 
acidification, excessive global warming, excessive climate change and 
complete Arctic meltdown (coupled with meltdown of the West Antarctic 
Ice Sheet).


This effort is what IPCC should be demanding from governments, 
otherwise we are heading for global catastrophe from which 
civilisation might find it difficult to recover.


On the other hand, this is an unprecedented opportunity for 
international collaboration in the interests of all of us: to take 
charge of our own future on this planet and restore the 'old 
normality'.  It can be done, but only if the nettle of geoengineering 
is grasped straight-away.


Cheers, John

[1] https://www.msc.org/healthy-oceans/the-oceans-today/fish-as-food


On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 6:12 PM, Ronal W. Larson 
mailto:rongretlar...@comcast.net>> wrote:


List:  cc Greg et al

See below.

On May 27, 2015, at 12:28 AM, Greg Rau mailto:gh...@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:


Certainly agree that new and unconventional marine
management/mitigation methods are likely going to be needed

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n10/full/nclimate1555.html?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201210


*[RWL1:  Greg (overly modest?) was himself the first author of
this excellent 2012 plea for more thought needed on means of
reducing ocean acidification -  the topic of this thread, **with
an SRM slant, ** started yesterday by Andrew.  Unfortunately
behind the usual Nature paywall, fortunately I found hi above
Nature contribution, with its strong CDR slant, at:*

*http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/shs/Hurricanes/Greg%20Rau%20ocean%20carbon.pdf*
*I recommend it strongly and thank Greg for citing it.
*


That message has strangely fallen on deaf ears at the policy
level.  The current mantra is either adequately and quickly
reduce CO2 levels or hope that ecosystems will be resilient,
neither of which seems likely.  Check out the new NOVA production
"Lethal Seas" on PBS for a sobering look at the ocean
acidification problem and the preceding mantra again repeated.
Lethal indeed.

*[RWL2:  Only released this past few weeks, it is at:
*http://www.thirteen.org/programs/nova/#lethal-seas
*Agreed that NOVA is not talking Greg’s CDR option search, but the
video is indeed “sobering” - and highly supportive of Greg’s
concerns.*
*
*
*A bit more also below. *



Greg

On May 26, 2015, at 9:30 AM, Fred Zimmerman
mailto:geoengineerin...@gmail.com>>
wrote:y Ande


For skimmers:

The conclusions drawn from this body of work, which applied
widely used algorithms to estimate coral bleaching8 , are that
we must either accept that the loss of a large percentage of the
world’s coral reefs is inevitable, or consider technological
solutions to buy those reefs time until atmospheric CO2
concentrations can be reduced.

An optimum approach to preserve coral reefs would most likely
advocate a mitigation intensive scenario such as RCP2.6 (ref. 6)
that addresses global-scale ocean acidification concerns17 in
combination with detailed monitoring and the option of depl

Re: [geo] Mineral protection of soil carbon counteracted by root exudates : Nature Climate Change

[Oliver Tickell]

Does this mean that adding finely ground olivine to soils could (in 
addition to chemically sequestrating CO2) help to preserve soil carbon 
from oxidation - by neutralising oxalic acid perhaps, and by protecting 
soil carbon in 'mineral protected compounds'?


--

Oliver Tickell

On 05/05/2015 12:08, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : newly-identified mechanism for carbon release gives 
opportunity for management and geoengineering intervention


http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2580.html

NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE
Mineral protection of soil carbon counteracted by root exudates

Marco Keiluweit, Jeremy J. Bougoure, Peter S. Nico, Jennifer 
Pett-Ridge, Peter K. Weber & Markus Kleber

doi:10.1038/nclimate2580

30 March 2015

Abstract
Multiple lines of existing evidence suggest that climate change 
enhances root exudation of organic compounds into soils. Recent 
experimental studies show that increased exudate inputs may cause a 
net loss of soil carbon. This stimulation of microbial carbon 
mineralization (‘priming’) is commonly rationalized by the assumption 
that exudates provide a readily bioavailable supply of energy for the 
decomposition of native soil carbon (co-metabolism). Here we show that 
an alternate mechanism can cause carbon loss of equal or greater 
magnitude. We find that a common root exudate, oxalic acid, promotes 
carbon loss by liberating organic compounds from protective 
associations with minerals. By enhancing microbial access to 
previously mineral-protected compounds, this indirect mechanism 
accelerated carbon loss more than simply increasing the supply of 
energetically more favourable substrates. Our results provide insights 
into the coupled biotic–abiotic mechanisms underlying the ‘priming’ 
phenomenon and challenge the assumption that mineral-associated carbon 
is protected from microbial cycling over millennial timescales.


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Re: [geo] maybe of interest to some of you

[Oliver Tickell]

Thanks Olaf. It looks to me like you ought to get into the phyto-mining 
business! Rather than having to ask people for money and support, you 
could be making your own profit.


All you need is a business plan, and a lease on a few sq.km of 
nickel-rich minespoil.


On 25/03/2015 10:19, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:


I attach some slides from a presentation about the olivine concept, 
dealing with a way to make nickel mining less energy-intensive and 
more environmentally friendly, and save CO2 emissions, Olaf Schuiling


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Re: [geo] Generation of electricity from CO2 mineralization: Principle and realization - Springer

[Oliver Tickell]

But then, as Olaf has already told us, it's most effective to use Mg 
silicates 'nature's way' with natural weathering in large bulk with 
powder spread on land, beaches, mud flats, sea beds. The alkalinity is 
quite well locked up. For Ca silicates I think of Portland cement and 
it's not notably reactive stuff in mild acid. HCl does a good job 
cleaning it off bricklaying tools overnight but carbonic acid will 
surely take its time.


As I recall the activation process for these alkaline earth metal 
silicates is itself very energy intensive so 'first obtain your 
activated Mg silicate' is not a very helpful instruction. Not at all 
like digging olivine off a beach in Turkey or Oman! I do wish the 
authors luck with this but I'm not optimistic!


Thanks, Oliver.

On 09/03/2015 16:48, Greg Rau wrote:
Answer - not much.  But as the authors hint, if they can figure out 
how to use natural alkalinity say from silicates to maintain the 
required electrode pH gradient (the key to the process) then they will 
really have something:

"To cope with such gigantic amount of CO2, other abundant
source, such as calcium or magnesium silicates, might be
considered as potential alkaline source candidates. The current
study indicates that the calcium silicate after activation
is reactive and could be dissolved at pH value of 9.5–11
which is enough to generate the electricity in this CMFC
system [30]. Thus, how to activate the natural silicates efficiently
and harvest the electricity from carbonation of these
silicates is our next research focuses."

Another key feature is the use of H+/H2 redox as the internal energy 
carrier. If this H is not conserved then the cost/benefit changes.  In 
any case, a very cool idea that merits further research.


Greg

--------
*From:* Oliver Tickell 
*To:* andrew.lock...@gmail.com; geoengineering

*Sent:* Monday, March 9, 2015 3:06 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Generation of electricity from CO2
mineralization: Principle and realization - Springer


Where you have such alkaline wastes, clearly they can (and IMHO
should) be used to mineralise CO2, and great if you can generate
power at the same time. But the main question surely is: how great
is that resource? Use 100% of it for CO2 fixation, and how much
does it add up to? Oliver.

On 07/03/2015 09:17, Andrew Lockley wrote:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11431-014-5727-6
China Technological Sciences
December 2014, Volume 57, Issue 12, pp 2335-2343
Date: 11 Dec 2014
Generation of electricity from CO2 mineralization: Principle and
realization
HePing Xie et al
Abstract
Current CO2 reduction and utilization technologies suffer from
high energy consuming. Thus, an energy favourable route is in
urgent demanding. CO2 mineralization is theoretically an energy
releasing process for CO2 reduction and utilization, but an
approach to recovery this energy has so far remained elusive. For
the first time, here we proposed the principle of harvesting
electrical energy directly from CO2 mineralization, and realized
an energy output strategy for CO2 utilization and reduction via a
CO2-mineralization fuel cell (CMFC) system. In this system CO2
and industrial alkaline wastes were used as feedstock, and
industrial valuable NaHCO3 was produced concomitantly during the
electricity generation. The highest power density of this system
reached 5.5 W/m2, higher than many microbial fuel cells. The
maximum open circuit voltage reached 0.452 V. Moreover, this
system was demonstrated viable to low concentration CO2 (10%) and
other carbonation process. Thus, the existing of an
energy-generating and environmentally friendly strategy to
utilize CO2 as a supplement to the current scenario of CO2
emission control has been demonstrated.
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Re: [geo] Generation of electricity from CO2 mineralization: Principle and realization - Springer

[Oliver Tickell]

Where you have such alkaline wastes, clearly they can (and IMHO should) 
be used to mineralise CO2, and great if you can generate power at the 
same time. But the main question surely is: how great is that resource? 
Use 100% of it for CO2 fixation, and how much does it add up to? Oliver.


On 07/03/2015 09:17, Andrew Lockley wrote:


http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11431-014-5727-6

China Technological Sciences
December 2014, Volume 57, Issue 12, pp 2335-2343
Date: 11 Dec 2014

Generation of electricity from CO2 mineralization: Principle and 
realization


HePing Xie et al

Abstract
Current CO2 reduction and utilization technologies suffer from high 
energy consuming. Thus, an energy favourable route is in urgent 
demanding. CO2 mineralization is theoretically an energy releasing 
process for CO2 reduction and utilization, but an approach to recovery 
this energy has so far remained elusive. For the first time, here we 
proposed the principle of harvesting electrical energy directly from 
CO2 mineralization, and realized an energy output strategy for CO2 
utilization and reduction via a CO2-mineralization fuel cell (CMFC) 
system. In this system CO2 and industrial alkaline wastes were used as 
feedstock, and industrial valuable NaHCO3 was produced concomitantly 
during the electricity generation. The highest power density of this 
system reached 5.5 W/m2, higher than many microbial fuel cells. The 
maximum open circuit voltage reached 0.452 V. Moreover, this system 
was demonstrated viable to low concentration CO2 (10%) and other 
carbonation process. Thus, the existing of an energy-generating and 
environmentally friendly strategy to utilize CO2 as a supplement to 
the current scenario of CO2 emission control has been demonstrated.


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Re: [geo] Survivable IPCC projections are based on science fiction - the reality is much worse - The Ecologist

[Oliver Tickell]

I would rather see it as an attack on the IPCC's pre-emptive stance 
that, before there is such a thing as field-proven CDR, political will 
behind it, public acceptance for it, funding mechanisms, etc etc, that 
the one and only climatically viable emissions scenario they put forward 
sneakily / covertly assumes that CDR will take place on the 100s of Gt 
scale late this century and puts this forward with no statement that 
this is what is is doing leaving it to others to unpick their assumptions!


Oliver.

On 27/02/2015 19:21, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : probably one of the more robust attacks on the 
viability of CDR I've seen for a while.


http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2772427/survivable_ipcc_projections_are_based_on_science_fiction_the_reality_is_much_worse.html

The Ecologist

Survivable IPCC projections are based on science fiction - the reality 
is much worse

Nick Breeze
27th February 2015

The IPCC's 'Representative Concentration Pathways' are based on 
fantasy technology that must draw massive volumes of CO2 out of the 
atmosphere late this century, writes Nick Breeze - an unjustified hope 
that conceals a very bleak future for Earth, and humanity.


It is quite clear that we have no carbon budget whatsoever. The 
account, far from being in surplus, is horrendously overdrawn. To 
claim we have a few decades of safely burning coal, oil and gas is an 
utter nonsense.


The IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published in 
their latest report, AR5, a set of 'Representative Concentration 
Pathways' (RCP's).
These RCP's (see graph, right) consist of four scenarios that project 
global temperature rises based on different quantities of greenhouse 
gas concentrations.


The scenarios are assumed to all be linked directly to emissions 
scenarios. The more carbon we emit then the hotter it gets. Currently 
humanity is on the worst case scenario of RCP 8.5 which takes us to 
2°C warming by mid century and 4°C warming by the end of the century.


As Professor Schellnhuber, from Potsdam Institute for Climate Research 
(PIK) said, "the difference between two and four degrees is human 
civilisation."
In 2009 the International Union of Forest Research Organisations 
delivered a report to the UN that stated that the natural carbon sink 
of trees could be lost at a 2.5°C temperature increase.
The ranges for RCP 4.5 and RCP 6 both take us over 2.5°C and any idea 
that we can survive when the tree sink flips from being a carbon sink 
to a carbon source is delusional.


Where does this leave us?

Of the four shown RCP's only one keeps us within the range that 
climate scientists regard as survivable. This is RCP 2.6 that has a 
projected temperature range of 0.9°C and 2.3°C.
Considering we are currently at 0.85°C above the preindustrial level 
of greenhouse gas concentrations, we are already entering the range 
and as Professor Martin Rees says: "I honestly would bet, sad though 
it is, that the annual CO2 emissions are going to rise year by year 
for at least the next 20 years and that will build up accumulative 
levels close to 500 parts per million."


The recent US / China agreement supports Rees's contentions. But even 
if Rees is wrong and we do manage to curtail our carbon emissions, a 
closer look at RCP 2.6 shows something much more disturbing.


In his image (see graph, right), IPCC SMP Expert Reviewer David 
Tattershall has inserted vertical red lines to mark the decades 
between years 2000 and 2100. Within this 21st Century range he has 
also highlighted a steep decline in atmospheric concentrations of 
greenhouse gases (shown by the steep declining thick red line).
It is interesting that concerted action for emissions reductions is 
timed to occur just beyond the date for the implementation of a 
supposed legally binding international agreement.
Stopping emissions does not reduce atmospheric carbon. The emissions 
to date are colossal and the warming effect is delayed by around 40 
years. Therefore, even if we halt emissions, we know there is much 
more warming to come. That will also set off other positive feedbacks 
along the way that will amplify the warming further, stretching over 
centuries.


So how does the IPCC achieve these vast reductions in greenhouse gases?

If we look at the vertical red lines, at around 2025 the steep decline 
in atmospheric greenhouse gases begins. Accumulated emissions not only 
are reduced to zero in 2070 but actually go negative.


This chart shows that carbon is removed from the atmosphere in 
quantities of hundreds of billions of tonnes, for as far ahead as 2300 
to sustain a temperature beneath 2°C.


What makes this idea of projected large-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal 
(CDR) even more perverse is the talk by policymakers of a "carbon 
budget". This refers to the amount of fossil fuel that can be burned 
before we 

Re: [geo] Re: Washington Post op ed

[Oliver Morton]

What's the proposed SAI mechanism enhancing PSC?

On 4 February 2015 at 01:48, Michael Hayes  wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> This level of discussion on SAI seems to be premature. We have yet to see
> any...any...models concerning the highly predictable increase in Polar
> Stratospheric Cloud (PSC) production which will be caused by SAI. This is
> not a trivial precondition to further discussion. As, the triggering of an
> Arctic Methane Tipping Point, through increasing PSC production, would make
> SAI simply a dysfunctional option.
>
> Please read the following paper concerning the vital need
> tonot...increase PSCs through SAI.
>
> Polar Stratospheric Clouds: A high latitude warning mechanism in an
> ancient greenhouse world.
> <ftp://ftp.tudelft.nl/pub/TUDelft/irctr-rse/Mieke/Papers/SloanPollard98-PSCforHighLatPTMwarmArctic.pdf>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Michael
>
> On Friday, January 30, 2015 at 12:54:21 AM UTC-8, Andy Parker wrote:
>>
>> Hey folks, the Washington Post just published an op ed on the messy
>> politics of solar geoengineering, written by David Keith and me:
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whats-the-right-
>> temperature-for-the-earth/2015/01/29/b2dda53a-7c05-11e4-
>> 84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html
>>
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The Economist

+44 20 7830 7041

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Re: [geo] Re: The olivine reaction

[Oliver Tickell]

It look interesting, however I am unconvinced. It turns out that the 
seawater acidity is lowered only by concentrating out HCl, in 
potentially huge amounts. Some of this may displace existing manufacture 
of HCl by chemical industry, but beyond that it's a hazardous waste. 
Then there is the problem of MgO discharge: as soon as the ocean is made 
alkaline, that provokes precipitation of carbonate, rather than 
formation of HCO3- as solute. And then there is the increased energy 
use, which even if from solar panels, might be more effectively used to 
displace fossil generation.


Oliver.

On 01/02/2015 19:39, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Attached

On 1 Feb 2015 18:25, "Renaud de_Richter" <mailto:ecologi...@gmail.com>> wrote:


*Thanks to Magnesium, desalination plants could become net
absorbers – rather than net emitters – of carbon dioxide*


  
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/01/desalination-plant-carbon-dioxide-source-sink



  Switching desalination plants from carbon dioxide source to sink

22 January 2015 Katie Lian Hui Lim
<http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/more/?author=896>

A UK researcher has proposed a new process to decompose waste
desalination brine <http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/c4ew00058g>
using solar energy that could allow desalination plants to act as
a sink rather than a source of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and
*help to neutralise ocean acidity*.^1
( ^P A Davies, /Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol./, 2015, DOI:
10.1039/c4ew00058g <http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/c4ew00058g> 
(This paper is free to access.))



Approximately 30 billion m^3 of freshwater is produced by
desalination each year, and this is predicted to double within the
next decade
<http://www.globalwaterintel.com/market-intelligence-reports/> to
meet global demand.^To combat the increased energy consumption and
carbon dioxide emissions associated with this growth in capacity,
research efforts have turned to employing renewable energy.

In the system devised by Philip Davies
<http://www.aston.ac.uk/eas/staff/a-z/dr-philip-davies/> at Aston
University, magnesium chloride in waste brine is hydrolysed by
energy generated by heliostat fields to magnesium oxide, which is
discharged to the ocean. Due to its alkaline nature, this
subsequently neutralises ocean acidity and gradually removes
carbon dioxide through the conversion of magnesium oxide to
bicarbonate, similar to ocean liming, with the advantage that the
neutralising material is sourced from the seawater itself rather
than mined. Hydrochloric acid produced as a byproduct could
potentially be sequestered into silicate rocks.

Although this approach would increase the energy requirement of
the plant by 50%, Davies calculates that this is offset by the
carbon dioxide absorption capacity; each plant would remove 18,200
tonnes of carbon dioxide per year rather than emitting 5300
tonnes. This would result in 0.4% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide
emissions being absorbed given a doubling in the current
desalination capacity.

Davies acknowledges that lowering the energy required to dewater
brine prior to decomposition would be a major benefit. ‘Not much
energy is needed to decompose magnesium chloride in brine to
magnesium oxide, which makes the use of solar energy potentially
very attractive,’ he says. ‘If we could find better ways to
dewater the brine this would become very energy efficient as a
means of avoiding carbon dioxide.’ He also warns that the effects
of magnesium oxide discharge on local marine environments should
be thoroughly assessed, a sentiment echoed by Silvano Mignardi
<http://www.dst.uniroma1.it/Mignardi>, an Earth scientist at the
Sapienza University of Rome in Italy: ‘Environmental issues
involved in the ocean discharge of magnesium oxide and in the
management of hydrochloric acid have to be carefully evaluated.’

Phil Renforth
<http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/earth/academic-staff/dr-phil-renforth/>,
a geo-environmental engineer from Cardiff University, highlights
that a major advantage of Davies’ process is that it can be
appended to existing technology. ‘This approach may allow the
industry to transform itself from a carbon dioxide villain into a
force for good in the climate change debate.


Le mercredi 28 janvier 2015 14:16:16 UTC+1, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf)
a écrit :

I think that not everybody realizes that some 300 million tons
of CO2 are captured every year by the weathering of basic
silicates, notably the most common one, olivine. To
demonstrate this, the diagram below shows the analytical data
of some 20 spring water samples in olivine rocks in Turkey. It
shows what happens when rain fall

Re: [geo]_Re:_A_graphic_to_help_map_the_Carbon_Dioxide_Removal_(“CDR”)_field_|_Deich

[Oliver Tickell]

Interesting!

Clearly this reaction is good in a biodigester - but does it also take 
pleace in ordinary open air/water weathering? If so then it reduces the 
benefit to be gained from weathering olivine, as CH4 is a powerful GHG.


Best, Oliver.

On 31/01/2015 12:39, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:


And if you add fine-grained olivine to the biodigester you add three 
advantages:


1.You shift part of the CO2 in the biogas to the liquid as 
bicarbonate. So the biogas becomes richer


2.The digester doesn’t smell anymore, because the iron in the olivine 
combines with the H2S as iron sulphide


3.The absolute amount of produced methane also increases thanks to the 
reaction


6 Fe2SiO4 +  CO2 + 14 H2O à4 Fe3O4 + *CH4*+ 6 H4SiO4 . This reaction 
is catalyzed by the fine-grained magnetite crystals that form, and has 
been tested at several dutch universities. The reaction is well-known 
from places where the ocean bottom is composed of olivine rocks, and 
where seawater seeps into fractures, Olaf Schuiling


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of 
*markcap...@podenergy.org

*Sent:* zaterdag 31 januari 2015 2:02
*To:* voglerl...@gmail.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Subject:* RE: 
[geo]_Re:_A_graphic_to_help_map_the_Carbon_Dioxide_Removal_(“CDR”)_field_|_Deich


Noah,

Nice clear graphic.  Love it.

Please add "C from N separation" within your Transformation approach.

C (carbon) from N (plant nutrients, a big one being nitrogen as 
ammonia or nitrate) separation can be a fermentation or a chemical 
process.  The most common fermentation is anaerobic digestion (AD). 
 An up and coming chemical process is hydrothermal liquefaction (HL). 
 Both processes economically produce energy in the form of CH4 and 
longer chain hydrocarbons.  Both have a by-product of CO2 at about 40% 
of the biogas produced.  (The HL biogas production is at 200 atm and 
350C, which allows for very inexpensive production of pure CH4 
separate from the pure CO2.)


You should show both separation processes because they each scale much 
larger than any of the three (Biomass burial, Pyrolysis, or BECCS) you 
show currently.  They scale larger because the plant nutrients are not 
sequestered with the carbon and they are both economically viable on 
the energy alone with wet biomass such as seaweed forests: as low as 
1% solids for AD and as low as 10% solids for HL.


Include an arrow over to "Pure compressed CO2" from each separation 
process.


Your chart will be much more complete and accurate.

Thank you

Mark E. Capron, PE
Ventura, California
www.PODenergy.org <http://www.PODenergy.org>

 Original Message 
Subject:

[geo]_Re:_A_graphic_to_help_map_the_Carbon_Dioxide_Removal_(“CDR”)_field_|_Deich
From: Michael Hayes mailto:voglerl...@gmail.com>>
Date: Fri, January 30, 2015 10:49 am
To: geoengineering@googlegroups.com
<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>

Noah,

The statement that "...biochar can be burned to create electricity
instead of applied to soils as a carbon sink." is questionable as
biochar 'fuel' is charcoal. Only that which is buried is 'biochar'.

Yet, I believe Ron Larson (IBI) can best express this point.

Also, your mission objective of "map the most prominent aspects of
CDR" would seem to open up the effort to listing the many
important 'prominent aspect' of the biotic approach such as the
production of food, feed, fuel, fertilizer, polymers and fresh
water (etc.). In short, the biotic can pay for itself while the
non-biotic can not.

This is a profoundly important aspect which many authors in this
field ignore. We must ask ourselves if we wish climate change
mitigation to be at the whims of the political purse sting or
financially independent and based solely on the science...not the
thin ice of political popularity.

Best,

Michael


On Thursday, January 29, 2015 at 10:53:49 AM UTC-8, andrewjlockley
wrote:


https://carbonremoval.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/a-graphic-to-help-map-the-carbon-dioxide-removal-cdr-field/

Everything and the Carbon Sink

Noah Deich's blog on all things Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)

A graphic to help map the Carbon Dioxide Removal (“CDR”) field

JANUARY 22, 2015

For the carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”) field, breadth is
simultaneously a blessing and a curse. On the bright side, the
numerous approaches to CDR suggest the potential for deploying a
diverse portfolio of CDR projects that reduces both the risks and
costs of preventing climate change. But the down side of breadth
is complexity, which makes the CDR field difficult to explain and
envision, and can lead to confusion about how to catalyze
development of CDR approaches as a result.

In the graphic below, I

Re: [geo] Re: Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

As I recall there are nickel mines in Canada that have released large 
volumes of olivine-rich overburden.


Also SA diamond mines produce a lot of kimberlite, also olivine rich. 
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberlite


Oliver.

On 28/01/2015 09:23, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:


There are a fairly large number of open-pit chromite mines which occur 
in olivine rocks (dunites). This means that they have large dumps of 
crushed dunites, which provide of course even cheaper olivine to use 
than mining fresh rocks. The same holds for magnesite mines, the 
magnesite is in veins in olivine rock. The one I know best is in 
northern Greece, and there are at least 10 million tons of crushed 
olivine rock on the tailings. The olivine mines in Norway, notably 
Aheim are practically free of overburden (no climate for laterite 
formation, and fairly steep topography), Olaf Schuiling


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Andrew Lockley

*Sent:* dinsdag 27 januari 2015 23:59
*Cc:* Geoengineering
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Energy Planning and Decarbonization 
Technology | The Energy Collective


Can anyone shed any light on whether there are already large opencast 
mining operations in the world with significant amounts of 
olivine-rich overburden?


If that's the case, they'll already have all the necessary mining and 
transport equipment in place. Furthermore, dumping the overburden is a 
massive headache for miners. CDR could solve this.


Getting rid of overburden olivine by marine dumping for CDR could be 
like the EOR of the oil industry.


Combining it with erosion reduction would make this a win-win operation.

Any coal mine with a 3:1 ratio of overburden to coal becomes carbon 
neutral, and metal ore mines become massively carbon negative.


A

On 27 Jan 2015 16:42, "Mike MacCracken" <mailto:mmacc...@comcast.net>> wrote:


Hi Greg—The flaw in both of our arguments seems to be our assumption 
that the world is rational. Right now there are tremendous 
opportunities for cost-effective (i.e., few-year payback) efficiency 
steps and yet, as noted in a CEO survey in the news yesterday, despite 
the clear risk and the opportunities to do something about it, the 
surveyed CEOs don’t seem to think this is a significant issue. There 
are also tremendous opportunities to slow the warming by cutting 
short-lived species—all quite straightforward and with many 
co-benefits to health, air quality, biomass preservation and 
more—maybe the world is moving slowly to eventually do that. 
Fortunately, the cost of renewables/alternative energy sources is 
coming down so that change is starting, but lots more could be done 
that is cost effective (witness solar panels on my roof giving me a 
9+% guaranteed after tax return on investment) and there is just not a 
real sense of urgency even though the Social Cost of Carbon studies 
(not just the new one in Nature) show an external cost of order 
$200/ton of CO2. Where is rationality in all of this? In a rational 
world, lots would be going on in mitigation and then there would still 
be value in pulling CO2 lower, and augmented weatherization would be 
then a really key step (certainly worth researching, but given all the 
cost effective opportunities right now not being taken advantage of, 
diverting money to go forward with mineral weathering seems to me a 
diversion of money form the most cost effective approaches). So, my 
problem is not with air CO2 management in concept, just that it would 
be so much more cost effective not to put the CO2 into the air in the 
first place.


Mike

On 1/26/15, 11:27 PM, "Greg Rau" <http://gh...@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:


Mike et al.,
I don't think anyone is asking mineral weathering to singlehandedly 
solve the problem, though the fact that it  can and will naturally 
solve the problem given enough time means it does have the proven 
capacity to do so, unlike any other CDR scheme I am aware of. How much 
accelerated weathering we do does largely come down to extraction, 
processing, and movement of mineral mass. Yes, Gt's of CO2 mitigation 
does require Gt's of mineral, but why is this necessarily a 
showstopper if we fail to stabilize CO2 by other means? We currently 
extract about 2.5 Gt of minerals/yr. Is it unthinkable that we 
wouldn't/couldn't double or triple this in the interest of helping to 
stabilize air CO2, climate and ocean acidity? Or would you prefer to 
impact vastly larger land areas and potentially disrupt food and fiber 
production by employing IPCC-endorsed BECCS or afforestation? All 
methods of air CO2 management have benefits, costs, impacts, and 
tradeoffs.  Let's hope that we invest in the research to well 
understand these for all of the CO2 management options available,  and 
that we then make rational decisions on their deployment (in time) 
 based on this info. Given

Re: [geo] Olivine costs

[Oliver Tickell]

Even a very low $/t price becomes  a large sum when multiplied by many 
Gts. The questions are surely:

1. Is it cheap compared to alternatives?
2. Is it cheap relative to the impacts of climate change and ocean 
acidification? And
3. Is it affordable in the context of the global economy, and the 
expenditures we have no trouble making such as those on 'security'?


Oliver

On 26/01/2015 22:28, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

At Andrew Lockley's suggestion, I am posting what I sent him off-line.
David

Well, the overburden assumption is clearly a key one.  But let's accept your 
assumption that both the mining and the transport costs for olivine are 1/10th 
that of coal.  That still results in a cost of 1/3 the coal investment for each 
ton of coal dealt with by olivine.  Still not cheap.
And you seem to assume that society will be fine with mining all that olivine 
with no remediation of the mine sites at all.  That seems a questionable 
assumption.
I am not arguing that olivine should be rejected as a tool in the toolbox; only 
that calling it cheap is questionable.



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Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

We can certainly agree that more research is desperately needed - and 
needs to be funded. Govts way prefer highly engineered 'solutions' like 
nuclear power and 'classic' CCS, which are also far more expensive. I 
don't get it, but then I'm not a politician.


Well done with your own research on the lugworms BTW.  In a way it does 
not matter, though it's clearly interesting, what the precise mechanism 
is - the important thing is that the biotic weathering enhancement does 
indeed take place.


Two things are needed: 1) some very well thought out and effective 
experimental designs, and 2) the money to carry those experiments out.


Re the permits, one thing we do know is that the experiments are not in 
any sense 'dangerous'. This stuff is naturally occurring and widespread 
in the environment anyway. The 'worst case' is really just that it does 
very little at all!


Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 17:42, Francesc Montserrat wrote:

Dear Oliver, dear list

First off: I never had the intention to be rude about either Olaf or 
his work. I recognise his work for what it is, but we have to be fair 
here: He did his shaking experiments in freshwater, which naturally 
then rises to be pH 9 and beyond. The farmland experiment fizzled a 
bit, because the initial groundwater conditions were not measured and 
as for the biotic acceleration by lugworms, that's my own work. Yes, 
they increase the dissolution of olivine. But as of yet, I cannot say 
whether that is by intestinal action, or simply by the fact that they 
also exhale CO2 and thus increase olivine dissolution. Also I have 
performed some 10 different shaking/agitation experiments in SEAwater, 
which is a strongly buffered and complex system so that the 
theoretical 1:4 relationship does not hold. In fact, from our results 
it seems that the Mg in the seawater is interfering in the expected 
alkalinity increase. From all those agitation experiments, the main 
message is: alkalinity up (but not 1:4), DIC up, Silicate up, Nickel 
up...but ONLY when olivine is added in high enough amount. The story 
that Nickel is not an olivine constituent is thus not true. I have a 
molar Ni:Mg ratio of ca. 1:150 in the olivine I use which comes from 
the well-known dunite mine in Aheim, Norway.


If we "know" those model results (of Hangx and Spiers) to be off by 
orders of magnitude, this implies that someone has some solid 
observations, right ? Where are those published ? Same goes for all 
the other claims that you stake about the diatom blooms. From your 
words it seems it is already known what the downstream ecological 
effects will be. If so...if this is already known and in the white 
literature, please accept my apologies and let us bundle all this 
knowledge and step up to some of the larger dredging companies here in 
The Netherlands or to a govermental body. If there actually already IS 
a fool-proof method, then we should definitely jump on it !


Please, get me straight: I am NOT trying to discredit Olaf, because I 
do think that the principle of his idea will work. What I do want to 
advocate is to go about this a bit more scientific than just coming up 
with grand plans that no governing body will ever issue permits for 
because the boundary conditions are not known. If I would get my way, 
I'd be doing the same as Olaf: trying out these fantastic plans, 
preferably on larger scales. But the reality is that you need hard 
bloody numbers to convince those who issue the permits. Again, if that 
knowledge is already there: I humbly bow my head and ask for 
apologies. Until then, let's not pretend that we don't know what we 
don't know, and get our bloody arses working on it !


Francesc



On 26-01-15 17:30, Oliver Tickell wrote:


It's actually very rude to dismiss Olaf's work on this as 'just so' 
stories. He has done laboratory tests of olivine dissolution rates in 
water under conditions of agitation, field tests of olivine particle 
evolution in farmland in the Netherlands, and is in touch with other 
who have, eg, measured biotic acceleration of olivine dissolution by 
lugworms on coastal mudflats.


That's not to say that there is not much more work to be done. But 
field experimentation is expensive and few funders are coming forward 
to pay for this kind of work. Some promise, for sure, but are very 
short on delivery.


Your idea that it's somehow 'scientific' to stick with 'results' that 
we know to be false by several orders of magnitude is to my mind 
somewhat paradoxical.


We know about the silicate, and indeed in many marine areas - those 
polluted by agricultural and sewage runoff - the bloom of diatoms at 
the expense of other algae would be a considerable benefit, replacing 
carpets of chocking algae with healthy populations of fish. Diatoms 
also do not expel CO2 from marine bicarbonate as part of the she

Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

It's about 1:1 by mass CO2:olivine. Theoretically you should get a bit 
more CO2 but after allowances for impurities etc 1:1 is probably a 
better figure.


I would just note: there have been comments that it's not realistic to 
have to shift Gt of stuff in order to sequestrate Gt of CO2. But IMHO 
that's precisely what you should expect.


Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 16:54, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

Apologies if this has been answered before but what mass of olivine is required 
per ton of CO2 uptake?  Mining an moving bulk material around is not cost free. 
 Is the olivine to CO2 uptake ratio 1/10th that of coal to CO2 release ratio; 
1/1th of that; some other fraction?

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 26, 2015, at 11:47 AM, Oliver Tickell 
mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org>> wrote:

Nice idea! As Olaf has written (doubtless he can share the paper with us) there 
are areas of the North Sea with very strong tidal currents that would very 
effectively tumble any olivine gravel / sand placed on the seabed, so all you 
have to do is dump the stuff off ships into suitable areas of sea.

Of course you would have to perform experiments tracking the fate of the gravel 
/ sand once put there in order to justify any claims re scale and rates of 
carbon sequestration - and that's the difficult bit!

Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 10:49, Andrew Lockley wrote:

As regards transport: costings must follow strategy. To consider the civil 
engineering :

I suggest that spreading on beaches is unnecessary and logistically difficult. 
Far better to dump the material in shallow coastal waters with active material 
transport - especially where erosion threatens settlements, such as around much 
of the UK coast. It will be on the beach soon enough!

Open water deposition can be done with bulk carriers (either split hull or 
conveyor / auger fed) . Plenty of ships used for transport of minerals, grain, 
bulk powders, etc are available. A better spread will be less harmful to marine 
life, so slower deposition rates will be safer. This suggests conveyor or auger 
carriers .

For transport from the mine, using open river flows (if that was what was 
implied) seems irrational. Rivers would quickly silt, and local ecosystem 
effects would be disastrous. In larger rivers, barges would be viable, but most 
mines will not be near major rivers. Rail to the coast also avoids the need to 
change transport mode. Again, bulk dry materials are routinely transported by 
rail, and no innovation is required. Ports also are commonly fed by rail, so 
only track to the mine head from the nearest railway need be newly laid. In 
Europe, one is rarely more than a few dozen miles from a railway. A large mine 
will function for decades, meaning track civils costs are trivial.

I'm happy to help publish on this. I think a paper that goes down to site 
specifics would be very useful. Engineering publications give clarity and 
precision to methods - IKEA flat-pack instructions for fixing the climate.

A
Where do you get that number of $100 per ton of CO2 captured from? You come 
close to that number  if you use that silly CCS, capture CO2 from the chimneys 
of coal-fired power plants, clean it with expensive and poisonous chemicals and 
then compress it to a few hundred bars and pump it in the subsoil. If you use 
enhanced weathering of olivine you have
$4 for the mining of bulk rock in large open-pit mines
$2 for milling it to 100 micron
?? for transport and spreading (but ?? is certainly not $94); strategically 
selecting new mine sites will help to reduce costs of transport.
So when you do some economic calculations, use realistic figures, Olaf 
Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf)

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com> 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>] On 
Behalf Of Mike MacCracken
Sent: zondag 25 januari 2015 17:27
To: Greg Rau; Geoengineering
Subject: Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy 
Collective

Let me expand my quick description to be 90% cut in human-induced emissions (on 
top of all the natural sinks), so natural CDR does not count.

And on the proposed removal industry, for $100 per ton of CO2, an awful lot 
could be done to replace fossil fuels with other sources of energy, or even 
better efficiency, a huge amount of which could be done for much less, if we’d 
try. So, nice that there is a CO2 removal approach as a backstop to what the 
cost of changing energy would be—basically, you are suggesting it should cost 
less than $100 per ton of CO2 to address the problem. With the new paper in 
Nature (lead author is a former intern that worked with me at the Climate 
Institute) that the social cost of CO2 is more than twice the cost of, then it 
makes huge economic sense to be addressing the problem. So, indeed, let’s get 
on with it—research plus actually dealing with the issue.

Mike




On 1/24/15, 1:40

Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

Nice idea! As Olaf has written (doubtless he can share the paper with 
us) there are areas of the North Sea with very strong tidal currents 
that would very effectively tumble any olivine gravel / sand placed on 
the seabed, so all you have to do is dump the stuff off ships into 
suitable areas of sea.


Of course you would have to perform experiments tracking the fate of the 
gravel / sand once put there in order to justify any claims re scale and 
rates of carbon sequestration - and that's the difficult bit!


Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 10:49, Andrew Lockley wrote:


As regards transport: costings must follow strategy. To consider the 
civil engineering :


I suggest that spreading on beaches is unnecessary and logistically 
difficult. Far better to dump the material in shallow coastal waters 
with active material transport - especially where erosion threatens 
settlements, such as around much of the UK coast. It will be on the 
beach soon enough!


Open water deposition can be done with bulk carriers (either split 
hull or conveyor / auger fed) . Plenty of ships used for transport of 
minerals, grain, bulk powders, etc are available. A better spread will 
be less harmful to marine life, so slower deposition rates will be 
safer. This suggests conveyor or auger carriers .


For transport from the mine, using open river flows (if that was what 
was implied) seems irrational. Rivers would quickly silt, and local 
ecosystem effects would be disastrous. In larger rivers, barges would 
be viable, but most mines will not be near major rivers. Rail to the 
coast also avoids the need to change transport mode. Again, bulk dry 
materials are routinely transported by rail, and no innovation is 
required. Ports also are commonly fed by rail, so only track to the 
mine head from the nearest railway need be newly laid. In Europe, one 
is rarely more than a few dozen miles from a railway. A large mine 
will function for decades, meaning track civils costs are trivial.


I'm happy to help publish on this. I think a paper that goes down to 
site specifics would be very useful. Engineering publications give 
clarity and precision to methods - IKEA flat-pack instructions for 
fixing the climate.


A

Where do you get that number of $100 per ton of CO2 captured from? You 
come close to that number  if you use that silly CCS, capture CO2 from 
the chimneys of coal-fired power plants, clean it with expensive and 
poisonous chemicals and then compress it to a few hundred bars and 
pump it in the subsoil. If you use enhanced weathering of olivine you have


$4 for the mining of bulk rock in large open-pit mines

$2 for milling it to 100 micron

?? for transport and spreading (but ?? is certainly not $94); 
strategically selecting new mine sites will help to reduce costs of 
transport.


So when you do some economic calculations, use realistic figures, Olaf 
Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf)


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com> 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>] *On Behalf Of *Mike MacCracken

*Sent:* zondag 25 januari 2015 17:27
*To:* Greg Rau; Geoengineering
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | 
The Energy Collective


Let me expand my quick description to be 90% cut in human-induced 
emissions (on top of all the natural sinks), so natural CDR does not 
count.


And on the proposed removal industry, for $100 per ton of CO2, an 
awful lot could be done to replace fossil fuels with other sources of 
energy, or even better efficiency, a huge amount of which could be 
done for much less, if we’d try. So, nice that there is a CO2 removal 
approach as a backstop to what the cost of changing energy would 
be—basically, you are suggesting it should cost less than $100 per ton 
of CO2 to address the problem. With the new paper in Nature (lead 
author is a former intern that worked with me at the Climate 
Institute) that the social cost of CO2 is more than twice the cost of, 
then it makes huge economic sense to be addressing the problem. So, 
indeed, let’s get on with it—research plus actually dealing with the 
issue.


Mike




On 1/24/15, 1:40 PM, "Greg Rau" <http://gh...@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:


Mike,
If it takes "a 90% cut in CO2 to stop the rise in atmospheric 
concentration", we are already more than half way there thanks to 
natural CDR. About 55% of our CO2 emissions are mercifully removed 
from air via biotic and abiotic processes. So just 35% to go?
As for "CDR replacing the fossil fuel industry", here's one way to do 
that: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10095.full 
<http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10095.full> , but low fossil 
energy prices (or lack of sufficient C emissions surcharge) are 
unlikely to make this happen. Certainly agree that we need all hands 
and ideas on deck in order to stabilize air CO2. But for reasons that 
cont

Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

It's actually very rude to dismiss Olaf's work on this as 'just so' 
stories. He has done laboratory tests of olivine dissolution rates in 
water under conditions of agitation, field tests of olivine particle 
evolution in farmland in the Netherlands, and is in touch with other who 
have, eg, measured biotic acceleration of olivine dissolution by 
lugworms on coastal mudflats.


That's not to say that there is not much more work to be done. But field 
experimentation is expensive and few funders are coming forward to pay 
for this kind of work. Some promise, for sure, but are very short on 
delivery.


Your idea that it's somehow 'scientific' to stick with 'results' that we 
know to be false by several orders of magnitude is to my mind somewhat 
paradoxical.


We know about the silicate, and indeed in many marine areas - those 
polluted by agricultural and sewage runoff - the bloom of diatoms at the 
expense of other algae would be a considerable benefit, replacing 
carpets of chocking algae with healthy populations of fish. Diatoms also 
do not expel CO2 from marine bicarbonate as part of the shell building 
process, and are good at sequestering carbon to deep water. The silicic 
acid will only cause 'massive diatom blooms' where all the other 
nutrients are already present to cause massive algal blooms in any case, 
so the effect will only be to replace one algal bloom with another.


The main metals liberated by the dissolution of olivine are Mg (already 
abundant) and Fe which is in many places a limiting nutrient. Nickel is 
not normally considered an olivine constituent, though olivine is often 
found with nickel bearing ores.


Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 11:22, Francesc Montserrat wrote:
As for now, Suzanne Hangx and Chris Spiers provided a working model, 
resulting in a set of (dissolution rate) values. Until the time that 
someone comes up with a better model and/or more accurate values, I 
think that the scientific method dictates we stick with the previous one.
You know I agree with you in principle, Olaf, but mentioning "just-so" 
anecdotes/facts/observations is not enough to discredit a 
model...fortunately. Most, if not all, models start with being a very 
strong abstraction of reality, only to be tuned as mechanistic 
knowledge of the process under investigation increases. Slowly, such 
models become the minimal adequate models (MAM) we normally use to 
explain and/or predict those processes.


Let's be scientific about it and come up with a better tuned model for 
olivine dissolution and relevant consequences in terms of carbonate 
system, carbon sequestration and downstream ecological impacts in 
natural waters, including seawater.


As for Andrew's questions on location of the mines etc., I think that 
Nils Moosdorf, Phil Renforth and Jens Hartmann have done a good job in 
their paper answering the primary questions 
(http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4052022). As for coastal 
defense win-win: have a look at this 
(http://www.dezandmotor.nl/en-GB/), and then imagine one (partially) 
made up of olivine...but be careful to also imagine that the olivine 
in such a semi-natural structure releases concomitant amounts of 
silicate (conceivably causing massive diatom blooms, especially in the 
later months of the year when silicate is depleted in seawater) and 
considerable amounts of Nickel (of which we simply don't know what it 
does to the foodweb).


Cheers,
Francesc


On 26-01-15 10:33, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:


Well, you better forget the model of Hangx and Spiers, as it has no 
relation to reality. They forget that grains roll on the beach and 
collide and scour each other knocking off micron sized slivers, they 
use weathering rates obtained in clean laboratories under exclusion 
of biotic factors, and they assumed that waters of the sea do not 
move. I attach a rebuttal of it (Schuiling, R. (2014) Climate Change 
and CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere. Natural Science, 6, 659-663. 
doi: 10.4236/ns.2014.69065 
<http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ns.2014.69065>). A nice walk along the 
beach would have saved them a lot of wasted time.


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Christoph Voelker

*Sent:* zondag 25 januari 2015 17:15
*To:* andrew.lock...@gmail.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | 
The Energy Collective


Well, firstly there has been the study of Hangx and Spiers (2009),

Hangx, S. J. T., & Spiers, C. J. (2009). Coastal spreading of olivine 
to control atmospheric CO2 concentrations: A critical analysis of 
viability. /International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control/, /3/(6), 
757–767. doi:10.1016/j.ijggc.2009.07.001


who arrive at the conclusion

"The feasibility of the concept depends on the rate of olivine 
dissolution, the sequestration capacity

[geo] John Nissen interview from COP20 on The Ecologist

[Oliver Tickell]

http://bit.ly/1waCUIa


John Nissen speaking at AMEG's COP20 press conference. Photo: still from 
video on unfccc6.meta-fusion.com/ . 
 




 The melting Arctic - John Nissen's emergency call to action
 

 /15th December 2015/

The Earth faces an imminent crisis caused by runaway Arctic warming. So 
says climate campaigner John Nissen, who travelled to COP20 in Lima to 
impress the dangers on delegates - and urge them to emergency action to 
cool the Arctic before it's too late. Tomás d'Ornellas, editor of 
Tecnews.pe, met him there ...


/Read More... 
/ 


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[geo] River rectification as an historical antecedent to geoengineering

[Oliver Morton]

My latest column in Intelligent Life stems from time spent at the 
Heidelberg summer school in July, and may be of interest to some. The first 
half of it is pasted below. 

[Note: The piece was published under the heading "Geoengineering's 
Drawbacks: a river in Germany shows how, when man channels the landscape, 
he channels history too. Oliver Morton dives in" I like neither the 
headline nor the subhed, but if I had an opportunity to object to either -- 
I honestly can't remember if I did -- I obviously didn't take it, or not 
vociferously enough. Such is life.] 

Earlier this year, I was on the faculty of a summer school at the 
University of Heidelberg. My daily walk to the campus took me across a 
footbridge over the Neckar. By British standards the Neckar, like most 
rivers that have chunks of a continent to drain, rather than just slices of 
an island, is impressively large. It is also impressively constrained. For 
most of its span, the footbridge passed over a system of weirs and gates 
which, when open, let the river tumble a few metres with a pleasing power 
into a downstream bed laced with gravel banks and willow trees. At the 
north end a drop-free navigable channel allowed barge traffic to remain 
above the fray as it moved to and from a set of locks downstream. The weir 
gates opened and closed according to a logic I could not fathom; the barges 
passed through according to the rhythms of trade.

In his excellent book “The Conquest of Nature”, David Blackbourn tells the 
story of how the Germans came to control their often unruly rivers. The 
star of the show is the upper Rhine, into which the Neckar flows at 
Mann­heim, about 20 kilometres downstream. In its southern part the upper 
Rhine was, in the 18th century, a broad, braided maze of lagoons and 
backwaters; in the north, a higgledypig of meanders. In both parts it was 
capricious, changing its mind regularly about which way to flow, flooding 
towns and villages regularly and, sometimes, permanently.

In the 19th century it was brought to heel, in large part by Johann 
Gottfried Tulla and those who carried on his vision after his death. “No 
river…needs more than one bed,” Tulla declared, and he set about putting 
the upper Rhine into what he decided was its place. Its course was 
shortened, its flow quickened, its lines straightened. The process Tulla 
set in train continued through the 19th century to the 20th, constraining 
Germany’s rivers more and more.

Learning all this added to my appreciation of the subject that had brought 
me to Heidelberg in the first place. The summer school was being held for 
the benefit of young researchers from all sorts of disciplines who had an 
interest in climate geoengineering—the deliberate use of technology to 
counteract, in whole or in part, the anthropogenic warming of the planet. 
Such efforts could well be seen as Tulla’s sort of thing: one of the 
justifications he gave for his great labours in “On the Rectification of 
the Rhine” was that “the climate along the Rhine will become more 
pleasant”. To his Enlightenment mind, improving on nature through grand 
engineering schemes seemed, well, second nature—a second nature, superior 
to the first, that it was human nature to create.

...

The rest of the piece can be found here:
 
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/oliver-morton/science-controlling-rivers
 
<http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/oliver-morton/science-controlling-rivers>

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Re: [geo] Article in Toronto Star quoting Jim Fleming and me

[Oliver Wingenter]

Hi Stephen,

1. Cloud brightening (and any change in albedo) by sea spray or sulfate 
particles from DMS will change the heat distribution and temperature of 
the planet and therefore the winds.


Best,

Oliver

Oliver Wingenter
Assoc. Professor Department of Chemistry
Research Scientist Geophysical Research Center
New Mexico Tech
Socorro, NM 87801 USA



On 11/15/2014 4:56 AM, Stephen Salter wrote:

Hi All

Engineers who have to design reliable hardware are always glad to get 
advice from colleagues which might prevent mistakes. This advice is 
particularly valuable if it comes from people who have read the 
papers, studied the drawings and checked the algebra of the design 
equations.


When I read Jim's comment about Rube Golberg ideas I immediately sent 
him a paper on the design ideas, asked him for technical criticism and 
offered to send him all my calculations.  He has not got back to me 
yet but when he does, and with his permission, I would like to share 
them around the community.  The more scutiny I can get the less chance 
of mistakes.  If there is anyone else who can offer help in spotting 
potential problems about marine cloud brightening, please contact me 
and John Latham.


Alan has done some valuable work with his list of 26 problems for 
solar radiation management using stratospheric sulphur. But there is 
not much overlap to marine cloud brightening in the troposphere and I 
hope he can produce a similar list.


Stephen



Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design. School of Engineering. 
University of Edinburgh. Mayfield Road. Edinburgh EH9 3JL. Scotland 
s.sal...@ed.ac.uk Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704 Cell 07795 203 195 
WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs YouTube Jamie Taylor Power for Change



On 10/11/2014 15:03, Alan Robock wrote:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/11/09/many_experts_say_technology_cant_fix_climate_change.html


  Many experts say technology can't fix climate change


There are several geoengineering schemes for fixing climate
change, but so far none seems a sure bet.

*By:* Joseph Hall <http://www.thestar.com/authors.hall_joe.html> News 
reporter, Published on Sun Nov 09 2014


As scientific proposals go, these might well be labelled pie in the sky.

Indeed, most of the atmosphere-altering techniques that have been 
suggested to combat carbon-induced global warming are more science 
fantasy than workable fixes, many climate experts say.


“I call them Rube Goldberg <http://www.rubegoldberg.com/>ideas,” says 
James Rodger Fleming, a meteorological historian at Maine’s Colby 
College, referring to the cartoonist who created designs for 
gratuitously complex contraptions.


“I think it’s a tragic comedy because these people are sincere, but 
they’re kind of deluded to think that there could be a simple, cheap, 
technical fix for climate change,” adds Fleming, author of the 2010 
book /Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate 
Control./


Yet the idea that geoengineering — the use of technology to alter 
planet-wide systems — could curb global warming has persisted in a 
world that seems incapable of addressing the root, carbon-spewing 
causes of the problem.


And it emerged again earlier this month with a brief mention in a 
United Nations report on the scope and imminent perils of a rapidly 
warming world.


That Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report 
<http://www.ipcc.ch/>, which seemed to despair of an 
emissions-lowering solution being achieved — laid out in broad terms 
the types of technical fixes currently being studied to help mitigate 
climate catastrophe.


First among these proposed geoengineering solutions is solar 
radiation management, or SRM, which would involve millions of tons of 
sulphur dioxide (SO2) being pumped into the stratosphere every year 
to create sun-blocking clouds high above the Earth’s surface.


Anyone Canadian who remembers the unusually frigid summer of 1992, 
caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines 
a year earlier, grasps the cooling effects that tons of stratospheric 
SO2 can have on the planet.


And because such natural occurrences show the temperature-lowering 
potential of the rotten-smelling substance, seeding the stratosphere 
with it has gained the most currency among the geoengineering crowd.


One method put forward for getting the rotten-smelling stuff into the 
stratosphere could well have been conceived by warped cartoonist 
Goldberg.


“You could make a tower up into the stratosphere, with a hose along 
the side” says Alan Robock, a top meteorologist at New Jersey’s 
Rutgers University who has long studied SRM concepts.


The trouble is that any stratosphere-reaching tower built in the 
tropics, where the SO2 would have to be injected for proper global 
dispersal, would need to be at least 18 kilometres high.


Other stratospheric seeding suggestions include filling balloons with 
the cheap and readily available gas — it’s routine

Re: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | Science/AAAS | News

[Oliver Tickell]

Your reasoning is sound, in principle, but here's the funny thing. All 
the climate 'solutions' that are getting picked up on are seriously big, 
technical and expensive, offering very poor value for money. CCS is one 
example. Nuclear power is another. And come to think of it, you coud say 
the same for carbon trading systems that have cost consumers dear, and 
handed over billions to polluters.


So in fact, I disagree, I do not support 'all of the above' in carbon 
sequestration, but rather doing what is low-cost, low impact, low-tech, 
low-risk and could be begun pretty much immediately on a large scale.


Despite Olaf and others working hard for many years to get the word out 
about 'Rock Weathering CCS' - RW-CCS - it has picked up close to zero 
traction. What does this tell us about the world? And the world of 
climate change mitigation?


Answers welcome, Oliver.

On 17/10/2014 18:15, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

The argument for including CCS in a portfolio of methods to manage GHGs is that 
is a technique that may facilitate the adoption of policies to make power 
generators and large industrial plants responsible for limiting/eliminating 
releases of CO2 from their facilities.  CCS is not the only technique that 
could play this role but it is one that could contribute to a broader effort.

Keeping CCS in the mix should not be seen as dismissing other options.  If we 
get policies adopted to make large emitters responsible for their CO2 emissions 
then there will be markets for a broad range of options and competition will 
determine whether there is a single winner, or more likely, there emerges an 
ecosystem of techniques occupying different niches.
At the moment, the technical availability of CCS has enabled the adoption of 
CO2 emission limits for coal-fired power plants in Canada and proposed CO2 
limits in the U.S.
David

Sent from my iPad


On Oct 17, 2014, at 12:24 PM, Oliver Tickell  wrote:

See also: 
http://www.ecojustice.ca/media-centre/press-releases/sask.-family-demands-answers-on-carbon-capture-and-storage-risks

This does raise the question - if these entirely new problems were not caused 
by the CCS, what was it?

It looks a bit like air and water contamination from fracking. The gas cos say 
it's nothing to do with them - but if it's not them, then why did the problems 
suddenly kick off the moment fracking started?

Anyway, as Olaf says, you can chemically sequester CO2 from the atmosphere in 
Mg silicate bearing rock for about $10/tonne. So what's the point in the 30% 
extra coal burn, the expensive chemical engineering, the pipelines, and the 
non-zero hazard anyway?

Oliver.


On 17/10/2014 16:39, Hawkins, Dave wrote:
On the Weyburn leak claims, these were promptly investigated and determined to 
not be related to the Weyburn field operations.  See a summary here:  
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bmordick/investigations_find_no_evidenc.html


Sent from my iPad

On Oct 17, 2014, at 6:58 AM, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) 
mailto:r.d.schuil...@uu.nl>> wrote:

Researchers also calculated that the CO2 pumped into the Weyburn field could 
never escape. Fortunately it is a very thinly populated area so only a number 
of cattle and wild animals died when it started to leak. I am not claiming that 
all potential CCS would start to leak, but there are safer ways to capture CO2. 
There is no reason to capture CO2 from coal fired plants, you can capture it 
anywhere, so go for the safest and cheapest solution(see attachment), Olaf 
Schuiling

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com> 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Lockley
Sent: donderdag 16 oktober 2014 16:52
To: geoengineering
Subject: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | 
Science/AAAS | News


http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/10/storing-greenhouse-gas-underground-million-years

MARC HESSE

Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years

When Canada switched on its Boundary Dam power plant earlier this month, it signaled 
a new front in the war against climate change. The commercial turbine burns coal, 
the dirtiest of fossil fuels, but it traps nearly all the resulting carbon dioxide 
underground before it reaches the atmosphere. Part of this greenhouse gas is pumped 
into porous, water-bearing underground rock layers. Now, a new study provides the 
first field evidence that CO2 can be stored safely for a million years in these 
saline aquifers, assuaging worries that the gas might escape back into the 
atmosphere."

It's a very comprehensive piece of work," says geochemist Stuart Gilfillan of the 
University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. "The 
approach is very novel."

There have been several attempts to capture the carbon dioxide released by the 
world's 7000-plus coal-fired plants. Pilot pr

Re: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | Science/AAAS | News

[Oliver Tickell]

See also: 
http://www.ecojustice.ca/media-centre/press-releases/sask.-family-demands-answers-on-carbon-capture-and-storage-risks


This does raise the question - if these entirely new problems were not 
caused by the CCS, what was it?


It looks a bit like air and water contamination from fracking. The gas 
cos say it's nothing to do with them - but if it's not them, then why 
did the problems suddenly kick off the moment fracking started?


Anyway, as Olaf says, you can chemically sequester CO2 from the 
atmosphere in Mg silicate bearing rock for about $10/tonne. So what's 
the point in the 30% extra coal burn, the expensive chemical 
engineering, the pipelines, and the non-zero hazard anyway?


Oliver.

On 17/10/2014 16:39, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

On the Weyburn leak claims, these were promptly investigated and determined to 
not be related to the Weyburn field operations.  See a summary here:  
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bmordick/investigations_find_no_evidenc.html


Sent from my iPad

On Oct 17, 2014, at 6:58 AM, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) 
mailto:r.d.schuil...@uu.nl>> wrote:

Researchers also calculated that the CO2 pumped into the Weyburn field could 
never escape. Fortunately it is a very thinly populated area so only a number 
of cattle and wild animals died when it started to leak. I am not claiming that 
all potential CCS would start to leak, but there are safer ways to capture CO2. 
There is no reason to capture CO2 from coal fired plants, you can capture it 
anywhere, so go for the safest and cheapest solution(see attachment), Olaf 
Schuiling

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com> 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Lockley
Sent: donderdag 16 oktober 2014 16:52
To: geoengineering
Subject: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | 
Science/AAAS | News


http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/10/storing-greenhouse-gas-underground-million-years

MARC HESSE

Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years

When Canada switched on its Boundary Dam power plant earlier this month, it signaled 
a new front in the war against climate change. The commercial turbine burns coal, 
the dirtiest of fossil fuels, but it traps nearly all the resulting carbon dioxide 
underground before it reaches the atmosphere. Part of this greenhouse gas is pumped 
into porous, water-bearing underground rock layers. Now, a new study provides the 
first field evidence that CO2 can be stored safely for a million years in these 
saline aquifers, assuaging worries that the gas might escape back into the 
atmosphere."

It's a very comprehensive piece of work," says geochemist Stuart Gilfillan of the 
University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. "The 
approach is very novel."

There have been several attempts to capture the carbon dioxide released by the 
world's 7000-plus coal-fired plants. Pilot projects in Algeria, Japan, and 
Norway indicate that CO2can be stored in underground geologic formations such 
as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep coal seams, and saline aquifers. In 
the United States, saline aquifers are believed to have the largest capacity 
for CO2 storage, with potential sites spread out across the country, and 
several in western states such as Colorado also host large coal power plants. 
CO2 pumped into these formations are sealed under impermeable cap rocks, where 
it gradually dissolves into the salty water and mineralizes. Some researchers 
suggest the aquifers have enough capacity to store a century's worth of 
emissions from America's coal-fired plants, but others worry the gas can leak 
back into the air through fractures too small to detect.

To resolve the dilemma, geoscientists need to know how long it takes for the 
trapped CO2 to dissolve. The faster the CO2 dissolves and mineralizes, the less 
risk that it would leak back into the atmosphere. But determining the rate of 
dissolution is no easy feat. Lab simulations suggest that the sealed gas could 
completely dissolve over 10,000 years, a process too slow to be tested 
empirically.

So computational geoscientist Marc Hesse of the University of Texas, Austin, 
and colleagues turned to a natural lab: the Bravo Dome gas field in New Mexico, 
one of the world's largest natural CO2 reservoirs. Ancient volcanic activities 
there have pumped the gas into a saline aquifer 700 meters underground. Since 
the 1980s, oil companies have drilled hundreds of wells there to extract the 
gas for enhanced oil recovery, leaving a wealth of data on the site's geology 
and CO2storage.

To find out how fast CO2 dissolves in the aquifers, the researchers needed to 
know two things: the total amount of gas dissolved at the reservoir and how 
long it has been there. Because the gas is volcanic in origin, the researchers 
reasoned that it must have arrived 

Re: [geo] Re: Dr Evil

[Oliver Wingenter]

I think your estimates do not include the changes in the global warming 
potentials as the atmospheric windows will decrease sharply with higher 
atmospheric concentrations of SF6 and other gases.


Oliver

On 9/29/2014 10:51 AM, Stolaroff, Joshuah K wrote:
For the equivalent of doubling the current atmospheric CO2 
concentration, you'd need ~120 Mt of SF6. That is about 1/4 of the 
U.S. annual commodity chemical production (500 Mt in 2000).


-Josh


*From:* geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[geoengineering@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Andrew Lockley 
[andrew.lock...@gmail.com]

*Sent:* Sunday, September 28, 2014 10:10 AM
*To:* David Lewis
*Cc:* geoengineering
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Dr Evil

But to get an equivalent amount of warming with CFCs or similar would 
actually be quite practical, I think. It could potentially be 
weaponised quite easily. It would probably be quite easy to conceal 
the necessary volumes of SF6 or similar, eg in old salt mines.


It would even possibly be within our technology horizon to make a 
spaceship that could crawl slowly to another planet and crash land 
that kind of volume of chemicals into their atmosphere. Basically a 
crude geoengineering version of the death star.


A

On 28 Sep 2014 17:22, "David Lewis" <mailto:jrandomwin...@gmail.com>> wrote:


Goldblatt said in 2013:  "our estimate is that it would take
30,000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere to make it warm enough to trigger
this runaway greenhouse", i.e. boil the oceans away.  He said this
was a finding in the Goldblatt et.al <http://et.al>. Low simulated
radiation limit for runaway greenhouse climates
<http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n8/full/ngeo1892.html>
paper published at that time.  He was quoted

<http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/runaway-greenhouse-easier-trigger-earth-thought-study-says-f6C10761164>
in an NBC interview, saying this "really seems quite unlikely".

Would 30,000 ppm seem unlikely to Dr. Evil?  The man had a base on
the Moon. Is *ISIS* just Dr. Evil diverting our attention from his
extraterrestrial carbon import program?


On Saturday, September 27, 2014 5:48:55 PM UTC-7, andrewjlockley
wrote:

If Dr Evil wanted to destroy the world with geoengineering,
how easy would it be? How much super greenhouse gas would have
to be released to boil the oceans? How much SRM would be
needed to snowball the Earth?

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Re: [geo] Fwd: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?

[Oliver Tickell]

I could take an article for The Ecologist about this apparent attempt to 
'bounce' the scientific community into accepting a proposal that has not 
been adequately discussed and over which no consensus exists.


If anyone wants to write it, please mail, Oliver.

On 20/08/2014 12:41, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Posted at the request of John, as below.

A

-- Forwarded message --
From: "John Shepherd" mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk>>
Date: 20 Aug 2014 13:35
Subject: Fwd: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?
To: "Andrew Lockley" <mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>>
Cc: "Steve Rayner" <mailto:steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk>>, "Woods, Emma" 
mailto:emma.wo...@royalsociety.org>>


Andrew

You are correct in suspecting that the Royal Society had nothing to do 
with this. Please see message below… Please could you post a link to 
this, and if possible also re-title the thread so that any 
misunderstanding is minimised ? Meanwhile I am seeking to get a more 
accurate correction approved so that you can post that too…


Best wishes

John

Begin forwarded message:

*From: *"Woods, Emma" <mailto:emma.wo...@royalsociety.org>>

*Subject: **RE: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?*
*Date: *20 August 2014 11:01:28 BST
*To: *John Shepherd <mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk>>, Steve Rayner 
mailto:steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk>>

*Cc: *Andy Parker mailto:apark...@gmail.com>>

Hello again,
Just to say that if you're not already aware, the article 
onmotherboard.vice.com <http://motherboard.vice.com/>now contains the 
following (making an RS response even less likely):
/Update: This article formerly stated that the Royal Society of 
London was behind the proposal; it is fact written by an affiliated 
scientist, but has not yet formally been endorsed or recognized by 
the organization. Motherboard regrets the error./

//
All the best,
Emma
-Original Message-
From: Woods, Emma
Sent: 20 August 2014 10:47
To: 'John Shepherd'; Steve Rayner
Cc: Andy Parker
Subject: RE: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?
Thanks for flagging this up, John. I've passed it on to our Press 
Office, who will decide whether to issue a correction - I suspect 
not, but I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again,
Emma
-Original Message-
From: John Shepherd [mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk]
Sent: 19 August 2014 19:16
To: Steve Rayner
Cc: Woods, Emma; Andy Parker
Subject: Re: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?
Steve & Andy
That’s what I thought: unfortunate….
I’ll leave it to Emma to decide whether a media correction is needed, 
but maybe one (or both) of you could post something on the Google 
group in response to Andrew Lockley’s posting ?

John
On 19 Aug 2014, at 16:39, Steve Rayner <mailto:steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk>> wrote:

> John
>
> This is an egregious misattribution. I think that the author confused
> my membership of the RS Working Group with ³membership²of the RS
> despite the fact that I specifically said that the 3 social scientists
> on the WG were not FRSs
>
> Steve
>
> On 19/08/2014 15:43, "John Shepherd" <mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:

>
>> Emma
>>
>> I¹ve just picked up this report on the web
>>
>>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/geoengineering/XhxpmuYOmIo 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/geoengineering/XhxpmuYOmIo>

>>
>> I don¹t know whether there was any RS involvement in this framework
>> (nothing that I know of) but if it¹s a mis-attribution you may want
>> to issue a clarificationŠ
>>
>> John
>


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[geo] Cloud brightening via Iron

[Oliver Wingenter]

Dear Group:

We saw the best response in terms of in chlorophyll production in the 
Los Alamos Biogeochemical Parallel Ocean Program model where diazatrophs 
first responded to Fe and subsequent nitrogen was fixated.  2 femtomolar 
additions of iron led to about a 20 fold increase in Chlorophyll in the 
area  which lasted a few weeks. This would have a tremendous impact on 
dimethyl sulfide production and cloud brightening.


Oliver

Oliver Wingenter
Assoc. Professor Department of Chemistry
Research Scientist Geophysical Research Center
New Mexico Tech



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Re: [geo] A Little Question on Marine Cloud Brightening

[Oliver Wingenter]

Nathan,

I suggest you do a proper literature search before you come to any 
conclusions.


Oliver Wingenter

On 5/18/2014 10:22 AM, Nathan Currier wrote:

Hi, Stephen –

Thanks much. First, please see:

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n9/full/ngeo1910.html
or -
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10./j.1600-0889.2005.00163.x/abstract 



and you'll see that the projected DMS warming feedback is the opposite 
of what you have been assuming.


I’m rather disappointed that Ken Caldeira would have nothing to add 
about this. Are there no relevant papers on this that he can point to?
This is intended to be a primary forum for technical questions on 
geoengineering – and neither John Latham nor Stephen seem
to have dealt with the issue at all, and yet it seems of obvious 
import to gauging the effectiveness of their proposed technique, which 
has been put forward
in a fair number of places as one of the best options for 
geoengineering. So clearly it should be dealt with here, if it hasn't 
already.
If I were one of the anti-geoengineering folks who follow this column 
- (I'm not) - I'd be taking careful note of this thread.


It's true that eventually, with high acidification, if CO2 is very 
high, DMS:DMSP ratio is projected to go down a lot

(see here: http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/1893/2013/bg-10-1893-2013.pdf)
but that isn't the expected driver of what happens now when you lose 
the rest of the arctic sea ice, where multiple
studies suggest an increase. Although I don't have the full Gabcric 
linked paper above, at Los Alamos, with the COSIM project,
(where there's been work underway to develop a full 
sea-ice/methane/DMS model)
there's mention that it projects DMS arctic zonal forcing is -7.4W/m2. 
So, not something you can just forget about.


In terms of the rest of what Stephen says about the "two thermostats" 
metaphor, I once happened to live in a place
with two thermostats whose influences would get entangled. I always 
thought it was a most fascinating metaphor
for interactions of intertwined feedback loops within a complex 
system. Certainly the result was NOT that they simply
"shared the work", as Stephen suggests. It depended where they were 
set: at certain settings and externalities
(i.e., outdoor conditions), one could prevent the other from working, 
and parts of the house would become uncomfortable.
In the MCB/CLAW question, one is (perhaps) a mild /bio/-thermostat, 
and so vastly more complicated still.


Cheers,

Nathan




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Re: [geo] Climate science: Stratospheric folly : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

[Oliver Tickell]

I'm sure we all values Tim's opinions greatly, but $18 does seem a bit 
steep.


Meanwhile you can read this for free:

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic is home to large reservoirs of 
methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory. 
 




 We must cool the Arctic before it's too late
 

 /29th April 2014/

The decline of Arctic sea ice demands a response, writes Matthew 
Worsdale. As Arctic temperatures rise, so does the danger of huge 
eruptions of methane - a powerful greenhouse gas - that will tip the 
climate into 'hot'. The only solution is geo-engineering.


/Read More... 
/


On 29/04/2014 08:13, Andrew Lockley wrote:


http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v508/n7497/pdf/508457a.pdf

Climate science: Stratospheric folly

Tim Kruger
Nature 508, 457 (24 April 2014)
doi:10.1038/508457a
Published online 23 April 2014

Tim Kruger examines an argument against injecting aerosols into the 
atmosphere to counter climate change.


No abstract. Hopefully someone can provide the article

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Re: [geo] Lohafex results

[Oliver Morton]

Tried that -- dominated by 2009 pubs. But now I see a few later ones


On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Greg Rau  wrote:

> Go to googlescholar and search "Lohafex"
> Greg
>
>   --
>  *From:* O Morton 
> *To:* geoengineering@googlegroups.com
> *Sent:* Friday, April 25, 2014 7:15 AM
> *Subject:* [geo] Lohafex results
>
> Does anyone know where the final results from Lohafex were published (or
> indeed if they were published?) There were, I think, some preliminary
> results published within a year or so, but there doesn't seem to be a big
> synoptic publication anywhere, or a special issue, or anything like that.
> Am I missing something?
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>


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Re: [geo] new article by Clive Hamilton

[Oliver Morton]

As far as I am concerned all IPCC plenaries should be in open session,
and I have made this point on a number of occasions. The IPCC seems to
feel differently, but there are enough people who agree and are inside
the meetiongs that a pretty good account of what went on would
probably be possible, if any news gatherers cared. Mostly, they/we
dont


On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Ronal W. Larson
 wrote:
> Oliver etal
>
> 1.  I support everything you say below.
>
> 2.  I learned a bit about Bolin at
> http://www.bolin.su.se/index.php/about-bert-bolin .  Thanks for using his
> name.
>
> 3.  The current issue is how much of the week of political discussions
> should be in “Executive Session” (not to be reported)?   Is there a place to
> view the rules?  I believe most corporate boards would say that the meetings
> need to be closed and minutes can be pretty skimpy.  But most public elected
> or appointed boards have strict rules on closure (personnel topics can
> exclude reporters but not much else). I presume the latter model for the
> IPCC?  How do we learn how the consensus discussions took place?  Or should
> we not - so that something/anything can emerge?
>
> Ron
>
>
> On Apr 24, 2014, at 5:21 AM, O Morton  wrote:
>
> I kind of object to the idea that the SPM process constitutes "tampering by
> politicians". First: it's the process, an intergovernmental process, that
> gives the IPCC heft. It was baked into the design by Bert Bolin in order to
> create a document that would fulfill politcal functions. If you don't want a
> consensus document with heft that's fine. But if you do want one, you have
> to explain how that could be achieved without having governments in the
> process. Second: it sort of assumes that only the politicians bring the
> politics. there's politics throughout the process of various sorts. The
> politicians' are more overt. But they also remove politics (cf the removal
> of preliminary matter in WGIII about ethics)
>
> best, o
>
> On Thursday, 24 April 2014 07:25:10 UTC+1, kcaldeira wrote:
>>
>> These figures should appear in the underlying chapters, which, unlike the
>> Summary for Policy Makers, is not tampered with by politicians.
>>
>> The underlying chapters can be found here:
>> https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/
>>
>> It would be interesting to do a comparison of the initial draft of the SPM
>> and the draft as finally approved by governments, with some documentation
>> for who objected to what and why.
>>
>>
>> ___
>> Ken Caldeira
>>
>> Carnegie Institution for Science
>> Dept of Global Ecology
>> 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
>> +1 650 704 7212 kcal...@carnegiescience.edu
>> http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab
>> https://twitter.com/KenCaldeira
>>
>> Assistant:  Dawn Ross 
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Ronal W. Larson 
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Ken, Alan, List:
>>>
>>> Thanks for the lead on the “Science”  story.  I learned a little more.
>>>
>>> Apparently the week’s political negotiations resulted in the deletion of
>>> five figures and considerable text.  It sure would be interesting to have a
>>> separate “pirate” publication that only showed these deletions.  Even better
>>> would be an added guide to which countries were most responsible for these
>>> changes.  Anyone already done this?
>>>
>>> Ron
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 23, 2014, at 3:04 AM, Ken Caldeira 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> As far as I can tell, Hamilton provides no citation in this work to
>>> support the following assertion, other than his own book:
>>>
>>> Already, conservative forces in the United States are promoting it as a
>>> substitute for emissions reductions.
>>>
>>> I further note the incongruity of reading a section titled "A world
>>> controlled by scientists" the same day that Science magazine publishes an
>>> article about how the politicians ignore the recommendations of scientists
>>> when it comes to climate change:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/04/scientists-licking-wounds-after-contentious-climate-report-negotiations
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ___
>>> Ken Caldeira
>>>
>>> Carnegie Institution for Science
>>> Dept of Global Ecology
>>> 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
>>> +1 650 704 7212 kcal...@carnegiescience.edu
>>> http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/ca

Re: [geo] Re: What Is Climate Geoengineering? Word Games in the Ongoing Debates Over a Definition

[Oliver Morton]

Dear Ron

Very large (eg 2TW - 20TW) wind installation will have effects on the
climate system by changing wind patterns, though the scale is not yet I
think well agreed; similarly large biomass plantations have albedo and
evapotranspiration effects. They could thus be seen as fitting the Royal
Society defintition of geoengineering as
>>deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system, in
order to moderate global warming.

On your second point, I'm trying to be quite precise here; climate
geoengineering involves decoupling climate outcomes from cumulative carbon
emissions. I don't see ocean acidification as a climate issue. It's an
issue that, like the climate issue, can be traced to anthropogenic carbon
emissions, but that doesn't mean it's the same thing, or that climate
geoengineering has to address it in order to be climate geoengineering. If
people want to say of carbon dioxide reduction that it doesn't just offer
hope as a climate engineering solution but also has the benefit of reducing
ocean acidification, then that is fine by me.

To explain my use of decoupling: solar methods do their decoupling by
changing the energy inputs; carbon methods do their decoupling by changing
the link between cumulative emissions and atmospheric levels.

As I said in previous post, the purpose of this definition is really just
to try and express a bit more analytically the status-quo solar+carbon
methods definition that most people were I think using before the Royal
Society report and went on to use afterwards. I think there is some
advantage in this not least because it links climate geoengineering
directly to cumulative carbon emissions, currently seen as a particularly
useful proxy for human intervention in the climate system (cf Myles Allen,
passim). But it obviously does little to settle the differences between
carbon-dioxide-reduction-would-be- practitioners and
carbon-dioxide-reduction-policy-people I mentioned in my previous post.

Ken may be right to worry that "geoengineering" ends up an epithet that
hurts approaches, such as BECCS, that have little in common with
stratospheric sulphates and the like. Worth noting though that if BECCS
were to be moved out of the geoengineering camp people who opposed it, as
many would, would point to the name change itself as evidence of perfidy:
"they used to call it geoengineering but then they changed its name to try
and hide what it really is," etc.

o




On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 10:53 PM, Ronal W. Larson  wrote:

> Oliver and ccs.
>
> I mostly agree with all you say below, including your final "I*s that
> not..*" question below.  But I ask that you say more about two items:
>
> 1.  How can your *"very large scale deployment of wind energy"* (highlighted
> below) fit into the Royal Society's two part (SRM and CDR) geoengineering
> definition?  To me, wind is firmly in the mitigation category and not
> helpful to try to fit it into geoengineering.
>
> 2.  I am concerned about your "*definition*" (also highlighted
> below and repeating from your message following Ken's below which read:
>
> *For me, climate geoengineering is distinguished by, and can be defined
>>> through, its capacity to decouple climate outcomes from cumulative carbon
>>> dioxide emissions. *
>>>
>>
>>> My concern is with the word "decouple".  I see SRM saying it is going to
>>> ignore ocean acidification - which is certainly decoupling but I believe
>>> acknowledged to be quite harmful, and perhaps the main reason for
>>> opposition to SRM.  I see CDR saying it intends strongly to couple (not
>>> decouple) with the ocean acidification issue.  Can you clarify your word
>>> "decouple" as applying to both parts of geoengineering?
>>>
>>> Ron
>>>
>>
> On Feb 17, 2014, at 3:02 AM, Oliver Morton 
> wrote:
>
> I'm struck by how much everyone wants a definition of geoengineering to do
> something -- to include ethics, to be a tool, not to be bad PR. I'm dubious
> about this in various ways. First, while understanding that language is
> inevitably value laden, I think it's helpful to try and be transparent
> about seeking to minimise that burden especially in contentious areas like
> this -- not to ask what definitition is helpful, but to ask what broadly
> fits with the history of the discourse, the current general perception of
> the processes involved, and the need to be able to say of future ideas
> whether they are or aren't geoengineering. I appreciate that this sounds
> like a counsel of perfection, but trying to get to a place where people can
> just speak clearly isn't surely too much to ask.
>
> Second, I think that tryi

Re: [geo] Re: What Is Climate Geoengineering? Word Games in the Ongoing Debates Over a Definition

[Oliver Morton]

group, send email to 
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>
>


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[geo] John Nissen's article published on The Ecologist

[Oliver Tickell]

http://bit.ly/1g5L7E1

Preservation of the fragile Arctic sea ice is essential if we are to 
prevent abrupt climate change. Photo: NASA. 
 




 We must prevent abrupt climate change
 

 /8th February 2014/

Weird weather from serious flooding in the UK to acute cold and drought 
in the USA follows from the warming Arctic and disruptions to the jet 
stream, writes John Nissen. We must act now to prevent sudden changes in 
global climate.


/Read More... 
/


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<>

Re: [geo] TERRA FUTURA 2013: INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA ABOUT GEOENGINEERING | NoGeoingegneria

[Oliver Tickell]

Vandana Shiva is a great woman that you really should have heard of! But 
more as a campaigner for India's small farmers, environment, human 
rights of indigenous peoples, etc, than as a scientist. If she says she 
has been published in all these learned journals it's probably true, but 
probably her articles are not deeply technical ones. Oliver.


On 28/10/2013 10:38, Tom Wigley wrote:

Folks,

I'd never heard of Vandana Shiva before this. I was intrigued by the
statement in her biosketch that she had published "300 papers in
leading scientific and technical journals".

No matter what else she has done, she certainly does not have much of
a record as a bona fide scientist, at least as far as publications
goes. From Web of Science I find ...

... under Shiva, Vandana: 4 papers, the most cited of which has been 
cited a grand total of 2 times


... under Shiva, V: 41 papers, the most cited of which has been cited
a grand total of 14 times and 21 of which have zero citations.

Whoever wrote the biosketch must be close to the record for inflation
of the facts.

Tom.

+++

On 10/28/2013 4:26 AM, O Morton wrote:

Dear David

When you're responding to my arguments, how do you get from "carefully
and thoughtfully", in the quotation Ron offers, to "in all ways the
human imagination can conceive"? To me, and I suspect most readers,
"carefully and thoughtfully" means precisely what you say is required:
that people should asses specific climate geoengineering proposals on
their merits -- as they should assess other responses to the
carbon/climate crisis -- and pass over some that they find unsupportable

On "humans are of course part of nature"; I don't think there's any of
course about it. How much and in what ways humans are part of nature
seems to me to be the question which anthropocene politics attempt to
answer, not an agreed ground from which people start.

Best as ever

Oliver

On Sunday, 27 October 2013 21:01:22 UTC, David Hawkins wrote:

Without making an argument that we should never pursue any form of
geoengineering, let me note an obvious response to Oliver's
arguments quoted below.
The fact that we are already manipulating "nature" in many ways does
not support an argument that we should therefore manipulate it in
all ways that human imagination can conceive.  Our job is to
exercise good judgement in deciding where to go and where to stop.
  So purely as an intellectual matter, the option of not doing some
forms of geoengineering cannot be rejected.  It is not a valid
argument to respond to criticisms of specific forms of
geoengineering by saying we already manipulate nature a lot.

(I put "nature" in quotes to start because humans are of course part
of nature. We don't act on nature; we act in nature.  But our
capacity to change the functioning of many ecosystems previously
largely uninfluenced by humans, is enormous.  The fact that we are a
part of nature does mean we can argue that we should be comfortable
with any actions we take because they are "natural."  That stance
conveniently would discard any responsibility we have for
considering the impacts of our actions.)

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 27, 2013, at 3:34 PM, "Ronal W. Larson"
<mailto:rongre...@comcast.net
>> wrote:

List   cc Andrew

 This interview is of course not good news;  Dr.  Shiva has a
pretty strong following in environmental circles.

 I add a few comments here for three reasons

  First because she has said all of the same things about
biochar (not mentioned in the transcript below) on several
occasions.  She wrote a very confused forward (as though she hadn't
read it) to a major biochar book by Albert Bates (at his invitation)
- should anyone want to see more on her CDR/biochar views. Albert,
a leader in both fields, says that mostly the Permaculture movement
is behind biochar, not listening to her.  Her views on biochar are
the same as given below.

 Second,  because I have today read the following in Oliver
Morton’s excellent book (“Eating the Sun”) on photosynthesis.  He
comments on views like hers in the last chapter where he reports
(pages 389ff) on the views of (former “Geo" list member) Peter Read.
   a.  Oliver wrote p 392:   “What’s more, we are rearranging
the world……. in a decentralized, slapdash way.  The idea we might do
it better should not be rejected for an unworkable if understandable
desire that we not do it at all.”
b.  A paragraph later:  “We can’t let a romantic idea that
nature should be free to carry on regardless dominate our thinking;
nature is everywhere under our influence already.
  c.  One more

Re: [geo] Hybrid CDR/SRM system for consideration

[Oliver Tickell]

Hi Sev, interesting paper. Where are you proposing to get your hydrated 
silicon from? I did not see that in your discussion. Have you thought of 
simply including ground olivine in your flakes?


Regards, Oliver.


On 06/10/2013 00:07, sevcla...@me.com wrote:
Geoengineering is a near continuum. Jostling for pre-eminence between 
CDR and SRM approaches is both unnecessary and weakens our collective 
voice. Some geoengineering concepts span both categories. My concept 
of /Organic Mariculture and Biosequestration/ is one such newcomer. It 
uses rice husks coated with iron-silicon-phosphate rich material to 
produce buoyant fertiliser flakes which deliver natural, ultra-slow 
release nutrients to oceanic phytoplankton. Disseminated to suitable 
and nutrient-deficient oceanic sites, these flakes are expected to 
cause increased: marine biomass; carbon flux to the sediments of deep, 
cold oceans; and albedo from the additional chlorophyll, DMSP-derived 
cloud cover, and DMS-derived sulphate aerosols. By my rough 
construction, they may be made to do this profitably, at scale, and 
with acceptable speed and safety, once the science has been validated 
and approvals obtained. The concept also benefits from offering a 
sustainable, reversible and likely-politically-acceptable solution in 
which all nations may participate and receive net benefits.


I ask this community to consider the attached summary. Supporting 
documents are available from me at sevcla...@me.com for those 
interested, or these could be posted online here should the demand be 
there. I am emboldened to make this request for constructively 
critical discourse because the work has been encouraged by Martin, 
Lord Rees, the immediate past president of The Royal Society in a 
personal communication and because of our desperate need for viable 
solutions.

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Re: [geo] The National Academies Contemplate Geoengineering - GeoSpace - AGU Blogosphere

[Oliver Tickell]

This "observation" is completely wrong.

Yes, limestone is dissolved by carbonic acid H2CO3 to create bicarbonate 
Ca(HCO3-)2. But the deposits in caves are carbonate, formed by the 
reverse reaction in which CO2 is emitted. So no carbon is locked away. 
Carbonate is just moved from one place to another.


If the bicarbonate makes it to the sea, then it may remain in solution 
for some time. But as soon as carbonate is deposited, the carbon gain is 
lost.


This is the problem with putting quicklime into oceans. It has to be 
done very carefully and at very low concentrations or it just 
precipitates out as carbonate emitting CO2 in the process - all those 
emissions kilning lime for zero benefit!


The proper reaction to utilise is the weathering of olivine as 
previously discussed many times ... Oliver.


On 01/10/2013 14:42, Fred Zimmerman wrote:
I think there is some value in the layman's perspective. Sometimes it 
helps to be further away from the discussion. For example I thought 
this observation was rather telling.


The committee gave respectful attention to schemes that even their
proponents consider iffy. Schrag, for instance, mentioned an
“impractical” idea he and his colleagues had to create a massive
acid exchange to remove carbon from the air.When carbon dioxide is
mixed with water, it forms a mild acid called carbonic acid
(carbonated water). Limestone can neutralize the acid, as it does
in caves, where the carbon gets bound up in stalactites and
stalagmites.Schrag’s proposal uses massive amounts of quicklime –
the product of breaking down limestone using heat – to neutralize
atmospheric and ocean carbon. Multiple times throughout his
description Schrag branded the plan “completely impractical” – it
requires massive amounts of energy and manpower to operate – yet
the committee asked thoughtful follow-up questions.




---
Fred Zimmerman
Geoengineering IT!
Bringing together the worlds of geoengineering and information technology
GE NewsFilter: http://geoengineeringIT.net:8080


On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 5:31 AM, Andrew Lockley 
mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>> wrote:


Poster's note : little new content other than a few names in this
layman's report.


http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2013/09/27/the-national-academies-contemplate-geoengineering/

The National Academies Contemplate Geoengineering

By Thomas Sumner

The ideas seem lifted from a James Bond super villain’s dastardly
plot: carpeting the Earth with whitened clouds, constructing giant
solar reflectors in space, using chemicals to change the makeup of
the atmosphere. But with scientific models predicting potentially
devastating changes in the world’s climate, seemingly impractical
and improbable geoengineering solutions become more and more
alluring.This month at the National Academy of Sciences in
Washington D.C., a 16-person ad hoc committee of scientists held
its second meeting to discuss the practicality of various methods
of purposefully changing Earth’s environment to combat climate
change, sometimes called climate engineering or geoengineering.
Convened purely for investigation and discussion rather than
making recommendations, the group cast a wide net for ideas, even
those they might ultimately reject as made- for-Hollywood only.One
geoengineering approach would inject aerosols into the
stratosphere to reflect away solar radiation. A 2009 scientific
paper evaluated benefits, risks, and costs of using aircraft,
balloons, and other means to loft aerosols, as depicted in this
figure from the paper. Credit: Brian West.The first morning of the
September 10-11meeting, Harvard University geology
professor Daniel Schrag addressed the committee, laying out the
climate issues geoengineering hopes to solve.Schrag said the
consequences of climate change—sea level rise, more severe weather
extremes, ocean acidification—demand action. However, even in a
best case scenario with a perfect political climate and a quick
move to low-emission energy sources, Schrag said fixing carbon
dioxide emissions within the foreseeable future would be
impossible.“Scientifically we can’t fix this problem for 100
years,” he argued.This lack of a single simple and viable solution
is what makes geoengineering worth considering, according to Gary
Geernaert, director of the US Department of Energy’s Climate and
Environmental Sciences Division, who spoke to the
committee.“There’s no silver bullet for climate change,” said
Geernaert said. “We need to look at all the available solutions.”

Wild potential plans
Geoengineering breaks down into two main approaches: capturing
carbon and reflecting solar radiation.The first aims to remove
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby reducing the
greenhouse effect warmi

Re: [geo] Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia

[Oliver Tickell]

See 
http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/climatepdfs02/ClimImpts1258VolcaClimChg00.pdf

for discussion of impacts on climate.

On 01/10/2013 00:48, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas 
volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia


 Authors

Significance

Based on ice core archives of sulfate and tephra deposition, one of 
the largest volcanic eruptions of the historic period and of the past 
7,000 y occurred in A.D. 1257. However the source of this “mystery 
eruption” remained unknown. Drawing on a robust body of new evidence 
from radiocarbon dates, tephra geochemistry, stratigraphic data, a 
medieval chronicle, this study argues that the source of this eruption 
is Samalas volcano, part of the Mount Rinjani Volcanic Complex on 
Lombok Island, Indonesia. These results solve a conundrum that has 
puzzled glaciologists, volcanologists, and climatologists for more 
than three decades. In addition, the identification of this volcano 
gives rise to the existence of a forgotten Pompeii in the Far East.


-- Forwarded message --
From: "Article Notifications" >

Date: Oct 1, 2013 12:46 AM
Subject: Link to an Article from PNAS
To: mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>>
Cc:


The following article from "PNAS" may be of interest to you:

Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas 
volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia 



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Re: [geo] CO2 mitigation: $$/benefit

[Oliver Tickell]

Ken, I do like your way of looking at this!

FYI I attach the part of my book Kyoto2 which addresses these questions. 
Oliver.


On 14/09/2013 17:02, Ken Caldeira wrote:
Had the Romans discovered fossil fuels, and invented automobiles and 
power plants and so on, and applied the logic recommended by Nordhaus, 
right now


-- the great ice sheets would be melting, with sea-level probably 
rising a meter per century

-- oceans would be acidified, coral reefs gone
-- the arctic as we know it today would be gone
-- the tropics would be suffering from blistering heat
-- etc

Would we be glad that the ancient Romans listened to their economists, 
and maximized their net present value so they could go on a 
fossil-fueled spending binge for a century or two?




As an aside, when I say we should or should not do something, or that 
something is good or bad, I am presenting my personal opinion as a 
human being and not pretending that it is a scientific result.


When Eduardo Porter repreresents Nordhaus as says, "If investments in 
CO_2  abatement are not competitive, we would do better by investing 
elsewhere and using the proceeds to cover warming’s damage.", is this 
supposed to be a representation of personal values, or is this a 
finding of the "science" of economics?  If the latter, then I would 
know to see how this "science" proceeds from empirical facts to 
prescriptive statements about what we ought to do.  What is the 
experiment that would demonstrate the truth of the quoted sentence?


Science tells us facts about the world. Religion and morality tell us 
about what we ought or ought not to do.  Is economics a science or a 
religion?




I prefer the speed of light to be 6 x 10**8 m/s, instead of a measly 3 
x 10**8 m/s. Is this like Nordhaus saying he prefers a discount rate 
of 4%? Do facts matter here, or do we just dress up our values with a 
little mathematics and pretend it is a science?




___
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science
Dept of Global Ecology
260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
+1 650 704 7212kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu 
<mailto:kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu>

http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab@kencaldeira




On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 11:40 AM, Greg Rau <mailto:gh...@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:




http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/business/counting-the-cost-of-fixing-the-future.html

Interesting article navigating the SCC (social cost of carbon)
issue, critical measure for evaluating the applicability of any
mitigation action/technology.

One revealing quote from Nordhaus:

“Investments in reducing future climate damages to corn and trees
and other areas should compete with investments in better seed,
improved rotation and many other high-yield investments.” If
investments in CO_2  abatement are not competitive, we would do
better by investing elsewhere and using the proceeds to cover
warming’s damage. We would still have money left over. Professor
Nordhaus says he prefers a 4 percent discount rate. Using it in “A
Question of Balance,” he calculates that the optimal carbon tax
comes in at around $11 per ton of CO_2 .

Greg
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Title: Costing the future


 

Costing the future - From Kyoto2 chapter 4 by Oliver Tickell (Zed Books) 
 How are we value the future? The question is an important one in considering the economics of climate change, as we have to balance the optimum balance 

Re: [geo] Re: DAC vs CRD?

[Oliver Tickell]

Using olivine is indeed dirt-simple - in principle. Rather harder is to 
move beyond common sense and back-of-envelope calculations to develop 
the kind of certainty of outcome (in terms of time frame for example) 
that big spenders would probably need before spending on it. Tracking 
the fate of <1mm olivine particles in dynamic areas of ocean and 
coastline over several years is not a trivial matter, nor cheap.


Interesting article on the sea otters. But what exactly do the authors 
propose to do, to increase their numbers? The obvious answer is to kill 
off some of the killer whales, but I can imagine enormous protest at the 
mere idea of it.


Oliver.

On 28/08/2013 03:30, Michael Hayes wrote:
Can anyone explain to me why the use of olivine, to adjust ocean pH 
and thus increase natures CDR, should not be used? It does seem 
somewhat dirt simple.


Also, here is an eye opener concerning the importance of maintaining 
balance in the marine environment:


Otters and Climate Change 
<http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=12-P13-00037&segmentID=4>


According to two scientists at the University of California at Santa 
Cruz, a small animal could have a big impact on climate change. 
Professor Chris Wilmers explains how sea otters could be key to 
preserving kelp forests, one of the world’s great carbon sinks.


Best,

Michael


On Friday, August 23, 2013 11:05:20 AM UTC-7, Greg Rau wrote:

Article below. The usual suspects and viewpoints, e.g. :

"Pulling vexing carbon emissions straight from the sky might
become an important way to keep climate change in check. As pilot
projects move forward, the prospect of capturing carbon dioxide
from the air is growing increasingly plausible, though it may be
some time before the technology, the demand and the costs align to
make a dent in global emissions."

To review, pulling those pesky carbon emissions straight from the
sky already annually consumes 55% of our emissions for free, and
the absolute quantity of this "DAC" is (lucky for us) increasing:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/08/07/science.1239207.full
<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/08/07/science.1239207.full>
If one is interested in further "denting" global emissions,
perhaps the first thing to do is to figure out how to additionally
accelerate/enhance/modify/engineer these existing, highly
successful systems, rather than ignoring nature and designing a
new air capture process from the ground up.

"for carbon capture systems [DAC], the main energy sink isn't
so much in collecting CO2 in the first place, but in regenerating
the absorber and making a pure stream of the gas."

Exactly. This is why nature's existing, very successful CRD
assiduously avoids this step and why our attempts at further
"denting" air CO2 should also. On the other hand if CO2 EOR is
your end game, then you are obviously stuck with making conc CO2
while also increasing atmospheric CO2: typically in EOR CO2 in<<
oil CO2 out. How such schemes get mentioned in the context of
saving the planet is something I find breathtaking.

Speaking of actually saving the planet, if you haven't already
done so, there's still time to vote for The Planet Physician's air
capture (and so much more) concept here:

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/20/planId/1303630

<http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/20/planId/1303630>

and/or vote for this point source CO2 mitigation idea:

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304003

<http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304003>

Your humble messenger,
Greg


CARBON CAPTURE:


  Air capture needed as a tool to fight climate change, scientists say

Umair Irfan, E&E reporter

Published: Friday, August 23, 2013

Pulling vexing carbon emissions straight from the sky might become
an important way to keep climate change in check. As pilot
projects move forward, the prospect of capturing carbon dioxide
from the air is growing increasingly plausible, though it may be
some time before the technology, the demand and the costs align to
make a dent in global emissions.

Earlier this year, instruments showed atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentrations rising above 400 parts per million for the first
time in 800,000 years (/ClimateWire/
<http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1059979974/>, April 24).

Energy consumption, and consequently carbon emissions, is poised
to grow further even as cars, homes and aircraft become more
efficient. Fossil fuels will continue to be the major energy
source in the coming century as countries like China ha

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

Thanks - useful papers. I did not know about Olaf's paper looking at 
spreading olivine sand on dynamic areas of seabed. I prefer his approach 
of letting the movement of the sea do the grinding for you, rather than 
using 30% of the C gain to grind the olivine to a fine powder using 
fossil energy. But one way this approach could make sense is, when solar 
PV gets even cheaper than it is now, to use solar electricity to do the 
grinding so there is very little carbon debt. Also it is interesting to 
know that dispersal of 1um olivine powder by commercial shipping could 
provide an appropriate amount of carbon drawdown to offset current 
emissions. This something that environmentally responsible shipping 
companies should consider, at least on a scale to offset their own 
emissions.


Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 19:11, Rau, Greg wrote:
If one is interested in silicate addition to the ocean (both for 
direct chemical and indirect bio effects on C), then I refer you to 
these links and refs therein:

http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014009/pdf/1748-9326_8_1_014009.pdf
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/2/551/2011/esdd-2-551-2011.pdf

Lots more silicate minerals around than just ash, and yes potential 
for positive (and negative) cation and anions effects on bio C, but 
lets find out.

Greg

From: Oliver Tickell <mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org>>

Organization: Kyoto2
Reply-To: "oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org 
<mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org>" <mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org>>

Date: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 7:59 AM
To: geoengineering <mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>>
Subject: Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean 
fertilization in MEPS


Thanks! My last sentence should have read "And of course the other 
question is re the chemical composition of the silicate in the ash and 
its particle size as this will determine its quality as a source of 
silicic acid." So you understood.


the rate of weathering is proportionate to surface area so small 
particles are hugely more effective at releasing silicic acid than 
large ones. Olivine grain sizes of 0.1mm are proposed for terrestrial 
application and far smaller than this (~ micrometre scale) for marine 
use so that the particles can weather during their residence in the 
water column. The 'powdery' fraction of the ash will give the greatest 
silicic acid contribution.


It's hard for me to comment further without seeing the paper but it's 
good to know that these questions have been considered, Oliver.


On 21/08/2013 15:05, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
Bear in mind that the North East Pacific is a high-nutrient, 
low-chlorophyll (HNLC) area that is known to be limited by iron. The 
paper gives estimated sea water concentrations of silicate in the 
North East Pacific in the top 20 metre mixed layer in August 2008 
when the volcanic eruption occurred of 5,000-15,000 nM (nana molar) 
compared to an estimated 6-20 nM supply from the ash fallout over the 
fertilized area in the Gulf of Alaska.
Your second point was unclear but I assumed you were querying the 
release rate of the silicate from the ash. The ash used in the 
experiment was collected on a fishing boat during the eruption and 
stored dry in containers. The experiment only used the < 2 mm size 
fraction. The release rate of silicate in the experiments was 170 
nmol silicate per gram of ash in the first hour and up to 585 nmol 
silicate per gram of ash after 20 hours.

Chris.

On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 10:12:19 AM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:


IMHO the significance of the silicic acid would depend on the
time of year. In the spring silicic acid is generally abundant so
adding more of it would make little difference. One it has all
been used up and diatoms are giving way to other phytoplankton a
boost of silicic acid would give rise to a second diatom bloom -
so it would be very significant. And of course the other question
is how effectively the chemical composition of the silicate in
the ash and its particle size as this will determine its quality
as a source of silicic acid.

Have the authors given any serious examination to such questions?
Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 09:55, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
ï¿1Ž2
I have seen the paper but cannot post a copy online. In the
paper the authors did measure the release of nitrate, nitrite,
ammonia, phosphate and silicate in leaching experiments and
concluded that the impact of these macronutrients released from
Kasatochi ash on primary productivity was probably
minimal.ï¿1Ž2They also suggested that the release of trace
metals other than iron could also have influenced phytoplankton
growth.

ï¿1Ž2

Chris.
ï¿1Ž2
On Monday, August 19, 2013 4:23:59 PM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet,
bu

Re: [geo] Governance of Geoengineering – A personal view

[Oliver Tickell]

I think the characterisation of Germany's Energiewende as a regression 
to fossil fuelled energy system is both cheap and wrong. Yes, they are 
closing nuclear power stations, but they are also making a huge shift of 
truly global significance to renewables and in the process creating a 
model of how to do it, that other countries will surely follow. Coal 
burning in the power sector has increased across Europe, but not because 
of nuclear closures. The main reason is that coal prices are very low 
(thanks in part to US switch to shale gas in power sector so much of 
their coal is now exported) while the EUETS carbon price has collapsed. 
Coal burning in Europe has increased to the detriment of much more 
expensive gas.


I note that your paper is for African Academy of Sciences. Surely all 
the more important for African audience to stress the importance of a 
switch to renewable energy, solar in particular, especially as huge coal 
burning projects in southern Africa are getting off the ground with 
ruinous consequences for climate.


Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 22:31, Andrew Lockley wrote:


This is a draft article I wrote for the African Academy of Sciences. 
I'd really appreciate any comments on it - before I irrecoverably 
embarrass myself!


Thanks

A

---

Governance of Geoengineering – A personal view

Climate change is here to stay.  That much is certain.  Due to the 
heat capacity of the oceans, we always feel the effect of emissions 
past.  Meanwhile, not only do emissions continue, but there’s still a 
breakneck rush to build carbon-spewing plant and vehicles.  This is 
true not only in the developing world, but also in affluent countries 
that are switching back to fossil – such as Germany, which has turned 
against nuclear. So not only are we bracing ourselves for the climate 
change that’s already in the mail, we’re also wilfully accelerating 
the process.
But it gets worse.  As emissions are cleaned up in the developing 
world, the aerosol haze which mutes global warming will fade away – 
exposing us to the full glare of a changing climate.  Furthermore, we 
are potentially exposed to major tipping points in the Earth’s climate 
system, such as the postulated release of methane in the Arctic.  Even 
in the unlikely event that we manage to rapidly decarbonise the 
economy, we may still find find that any intervention is too little, 
too late.
As a technology, geoengineering – and specifically solar radiation 
management -  is also here to stay.  We know we can do it.  We know we 
can do it fairly cheaply - certainly much more cheaply than rapid, 
large-scale mitigation.  We also know that it will work, albeit 
imperfectly, in reducing the impacts of climate change.  So what to do 
with this terrifyingly powerful technology?  We must bear in mind two 
facts.  Firstly, we are still emitting.  Secondly, even if we stop 
emitting there is at least a chance the climate is already in a 
dangerously unstable state.  Faced with a position like that, it’s 
hard to argue that we shouldn’t at least explore geoengineering 
technology.  And we’d be exploring for a very good reason:  committing 
to NOT geoengineering is rapidly beginning to look like a very 
dangerous idea indeed.
Beyond exploring, what could deployment actually look like? Well 
here’s the problem: the real world is a messy, dirty place.  We live 
in a world which tolerates reckless emissions, and much more besides.  
Protectionism, warfare, human rights abuses, genocide.  These are all 
ugly things that go on and the world tolerates them, to a greater or 
lesser extent.  We don’t have an effective global governance policy 
for such things, although we do try sometimes.  We have treaties, 
which are optional.  We have resolutions, which are ignored.  We have 
sanctions, which are ineffective.  And we have bombs, which yield 
highly unpredictable outcomes, and are more effective as a threat than 
as an intervention.  None of the above is terribly efficient at 
getting people or countries to behave themselves. So why do we pretend 
geoengineering will really be ‘governed’ by anything, or anyone?
My argument is that it won’t be governed at all.  Or at least, there 
isn’t any reason to assume that there will be a single, overall 
framework of governance that delivers an effective policy – regardless 
of whom that single, effective policy favours.
Could we not image a world where a chaotic muddle of overlapping and 
competing geoengineering schemes exists?  Take for example, a 
situation where a power bloc determines a policy of minimal 
intervention, but is overruled by a private carbon offset firm who 
offer to ‘top up’ the intervention.  This seems superficially 
possible, if not necessarily plausible.  Or perhaps a top up scheme 
could be provided by a nation state looking to preserve its glaciers?  
This top up could be provided in defiance of a state looking for a 
‘light touch’ geoengineering scheme, which allows it 

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

Thanks! My last sentence should have read "And of course the other 
question is re the chemical composition of the silicate in the ash and 
its particle size as this will determine its quality as a source of 
silicic acid." So you understood.


the rate of weathering is proportionate to surface area so small 
particles are hugely more effective at releasing silicic acid than large 
ones. Olivine grain sizes of 0.1mm are proposed for terrestrial 
application and far smaller than this (~ micrometre scale) for marine 
use so that the particles can weather during their residence in the 
water column. The 'powdery' fraction of the ash will give the greatest 
silicic acid contribution.


It's hard for me to comment further without seeing the paper but it's 
good to know that these questions have been considered, Oliver.


On 21/08/2013 15:05, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
Bear in mind that the North East Pacific is a high-nutrient, 
low-chlorophyll (HNLC) area that is known to be limited by iron. The 
paper gives estimated sea water concentrations of silicate in the 
North East Pacific in the top 20 metre mixed layer in August 2008 when 
the volcanic eruption occurred of 5,000-15,000 nM (nana molar) 
compared to an estimated 6-20 nM supply from the ash fallout over the 
fertilized area in the Gulf of Alaska.
Your second point was unclear but I assumed you were querying the 
release rate of the silicate from the ash. The ash used in the 
experiment was collected on a fishing boat during the eruption and 
stored dry in containers. The experiment only used the < 2 mm size 
fraction. The release rate of silicate in the experiments was 170 nmol 
silicate per gram of ash in the first hour and up to 585 nmol silicate 
per gram of ash after 20 hours.

Chris.

On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 10:12:19 AM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:


IMHO the significance of the silicic acid would depend on the time
of year. In the spring silicic acid is generally abundant so
adding more of it would make little difference. One it has all
been used up and diatoms are giving way to other phytoplankton a
boost of silicic acid would give rise to a second diatom bloom -
so it would be very significant. And of course the other question
is how effectively the chemical composition of the silicate in the
ash and its particle size as this will determine its quality as a
source of silicic acid.

Have the authors given any serious examination to such questions?
Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 09:55, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
�
I have seen the paper but cannot post a copy online. In the paper
the authors did measure the release of nitrate, nitrite, ammonia,
phosphate and silicate in leaching experiments and concluded that
the impact of these macronutrients released from Kasatochi ash on
primary productivity was probably minimal.�They also suggested
that the release of trace metals other than iron could also have
influenced phytoplankton growth.

�

Chris.
�
On Monday, August 19, 2013 4:23:59 PM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet,
but here is a related one.
http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf 
<http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf>
They do recognise that diatoms need silicic acid but do not
seem to have thought of volcanic ash as a source of silicic
acid, only of iron.

Re olivine application, it is worth noting that olivine is a
mixture of Mg silicate and Fe silicate. Some proportion, to
be determined, of the iron in olivine will become
bioavailable as weathering progresses.

Oliver.
===

The ocean response to volcanic iron fertilisation after the
eruption of
Kasatochi volcano: a regional-scale biogeochemical ocean model
study
A. Lindenthal1
, B. Langmann1
, J. Patsch �
2
, I. Lorkowski2
, and M. Hort1
1
Institute of Geophysics, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
2
Institute of Oceanography, KlimaCampus, University of
Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence to: B. Langmann (baerbel@zmaw.de)
Received: 29 June 2012 � Published in Biogeosciences
Discuss.: 26 July 2012
Revised: 18 April 2013 � Accepted: 8 May 2013 �
Published: 5 June 2013




On 19/08/2013 15:03, Oliver Tickell wrote:

This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind
paywall) it appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to
iron fertilisation. Oddly they have not considered the role
of silicic acid from the dissolution of Mg silicate species
in the finely powdered volcanic ash. Silicic acid is 

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

IMHO the significance of the silicic acid would depend on the time of 
year. In the spring silicic acid is generally abundant so adding more of 
it would make little difference. One it has all been used up and diatoms 
are giving way to other phytoplankton a boost of silicic acid would give 
rise to a second diatom bloom - so it would be very significant. And of 
course the other question is how effectively the chemical composition of 
the silicate in the ash and its particle size as this will determine its 
quality as a source of silicic acid.


Have the authors given any serious examination to such questions? Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 09:55, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
I have seen the paper but cannot post a copy online. In the paper the 
authors did measure the release of nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, 
phosphate and silicate in leaching experiments and concluded that the 
impact of these macronutrients released from Kasatochi ash on primary 
productivity was probably minimal. They also suggested that the 
release of trace metals other than iron could also have influenced 
phytoplankton growth.


Chris.

On Monday, August 19, 2013 4:23:59 PM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet, but
here is a related one.
http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf
<http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf>
They do recognise that diatoms need silicic acid but do not seem
to have thought of volcanic ash as a source of silicic acid, only
of iron.

Re olivine application, it is worth noting that olivine is a
mixture of Mg silicate and Fe silicate. Some proportion, to be
determined, of the iron in olivine will become bioavailable as
weathering progresses.

Oliver.
===

The ocean response to volcanic iron fertilisation after the
eruption of
Kasatochi volcano: a regional-scale biogeochemical ocean model
study
A. Lindenthal1
, B. Langmann1
, J. Patsch ¨
2
, I. Lorkowski2
, and M. Hort1
1
Institute of Geophysics, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
2
Institute of Oceanography, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence to: B. Langmann (baerbel@zmaw.de )
Received: 29 June 2012 – Published in Biogeosciences Discuss.: 26
July 2012
Revised: 18 April 2013 – Accepted: 8 May 2013 – Published: 5 June 2013




On 19/08/2013 15:03, Oliver Tickell wrote:

This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind
paywall) it appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to iron
fertilisation. Oddly they have not considered the role of silicic
acid from the dissolution of Mg silicate species in the finely
powdered volcanic ash. Silicic acid is often the limiting
nutrient for diatoms, as they use it to make their silica shells.
There is ample geological evidence of diatom (specifically)
blooms being associated with falls of volcanic ash.

Is anyone able to post the actual article? Oliver.

On 17/08/2013 17:13, Wil Burns wrote:

FYI. wil


MEPS - Vol. 488 - Table of contents
<http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/>

*Mar Ecol Prog Ser (Print ISSN: 0171-8630; Online ISSN: 1616-1599)*
Copyright © 2013 Inter-Research. Published August 15


*Olgun N, Duggen S, Langmann B, Hort M, Waythomas CF, Hoffmann
L, Croot P *
Geochemical evidence of oceanic iron fertilization by the
Kasatochi volcanic eruption in 2008 and the potential impacts on
Pacific sockeye salmon
MEPS 488:81-88
<http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/p81-88/> | Full text
in pdf format
<http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2013/488/m488p081.pdf>


-- 
Dr. Wil Burns, Associate Director

Master of Science - Energy Policy & Climate Program
Johns Hopkins University
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Room 104J
Washington, DC  20036
202.663.5976 (Office phone)
650.281.9126 (Mobile)
wbu...@jhu.edu 

http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/environmental/master-of-science-in-energy-policy-and-climate/index.html

<http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/environmental/master-of-science-in-energy-policy-and-climate/index.html>

SSRN site (selected publications): http://ssrn.com/author=240348


Skype ID: Wil.Burns

Teaching Climate/Energy Law & Policy Blog:
http://www.teachingclimatelaw.org
<http://www.teachingclimatelaw.org>

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Re: [geo] sperm whales and oif

[Oliver Tickell]

I believe this is well authenticated. I read a New Scientist feature on 
the topic maybe a year ago. The main thrust was that this maintains the 
populations of fish and other marine life. With the huge reductions in 
whale populations the oceans as a whole have become less productive - 
and fish catches have declined not only as a result of over-fishing. It 
turns out that Greenpeace did well to choose the whales as their iconic 
life form as they are "keystone species" in the functioning of global 
marine ecosystems. Oliver.


On 19/08/2013 21:34, Greg Rau wrote:
If whales increase the ocean carbon sink (and I've got to read the 
fine print to be convinced), then the obvious geoengineering response 
is to breed more whales. And/or will whale harvesters now need to pay 
a carbon tax? Could partnering with ETC and Greenpeace on this be far 
behind?

Greg


*From:* Fred Zimmerman 
*To:* geoengineering 
*Sent:* Monday, August 19, 2013 9:49 AM
*Subject:* [geo] sperm whales and oif


  *Reference: *Proc Roy SocBhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0863


  Sperm whale poo offsets carbon by fertilising the oceans with
  iron
  
<http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/16/sperm-whale-poo-offsets-carbon-by-fertilising-the-oceans-with-iron/>

By Ed Yong <http://discovermagazine.com/authors?name=Ed+Yong> |
June 16, 2010 8:00 am
Sperm_whales

<http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/files/2010/06/Sperm_whales.jpg>
While the world wrangles over ways of reducing carbon emissions,
some scientists are considering more radical approaches to
mitigating the effects of climate change. Dumping iron dust into
the world’s oceans is one such strategy. Theoretically, the iron
should act as fertiliser
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization>, providing a key
nutrient that will spur the growth of photosynthetic plankton.
These creatures act as carbon dioxide pumps, removing the
problematic gas from the air and storing the carbon within their
own tissues. When the plankton die, they sink, trapping their
carbon in the abyss for thousands of years.
It may seem like a fanciful idea, but as with much of our
technology, nature beat us to it long ago. Trish Lavery from
Flinders University has found that sperm whales fertilise the
Southern Ocean in exactly this way, using their own faeces. Their
dung is loaded with iron and it stimulates the growth of plankton
just as well as iron dust does.
Sperm whales <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale> are
prodigious divers, descending to great depths in search of prey
like squid. When they’re deeply submerged, they shut down all
their non-essential bodily functions. Excretion is one of these
and the whales only ever defecate when they reach the surface. By
happy coincidence, that’s where photosynthetic plankton
(phytoplankton) make their home – in the shallow column of water
where sunlight still penetrates. So by eating iron-rich prey at
great depths and expelling the remains in the shallows, the whales
act as giant farmers, unwittingly seeding the surface waters with
fertiliser.
There are approximately 12,000 sperm whales left in the Southern
Ocean. By modelling the amount of food they eat, the iron content
of that food, and how much iron they expel in their faeces, Lavery
calculated that these whales excrete around 50 tonnes of iron into
the ocean every year.  And based on the results of our own iron
fertilisation experiments, the duo calculated that every year,
this amount of iron traps over 400,000 tonnes of carbon in the
depths, within the bodies of sinking plankton.
Previously, scientists assumed that whales (and their carbon
dioxide-rich exhalations) would actually weaken the Southern
Ocean’s ability to act as a CO2 pump. But according to Lavery,
this isn’t true. She worked out that the whales pump out just
160,000 tonnes of carbon through their various orifices. All of
these figures are probably conservative underestimates but even
so, they suggest that sperm whales remove around 240,000 more
tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere than they add back in. They
are giant, blubbery carbon sinks.
However, their true potential will go largely unfulfilled thanks
to our harpoons. Many sperm whales have been killed by industrial
whalers, and the population in the Southern Ocean has declined by
some 90%. On the bright side, the Southern Ocean’s population
represent just 3% of the global total, so this species may have an
even greater role as a warden for carbon than Lavery has
suggested. Other seagoing mammals probably have a part to play
too, provided that they feed at depth an

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet, but here is a 
related one.

http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf
They do recognise that diatoms need silicic acid but do not seem to have 
thought of volcanic ash as a source of silicic acid, only of iron.


Re olivine application, it is worth noting that olivine is a mixture of 
Mg silicate and Fe silicate. Some proportion, to be determined, of the 
iron in olivine will become bioavailable as weathering progresses.


Oliver.
===

The ocean response to volcanic iron fertilisation after the eruption of
Kasatochi volcano: a regional-scale biogeochemical ocean model
study
A. Lindenthal1
, B. Langmann1
, J. Patsch ¨
2
, I. Lorkowski2
, and M. Hort1
1
Institute of Geophysics, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, 
Germany

2
Institute of Oceanography, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, 
Germany

Correspondence to: B. Langmann (baerbel.langm...@zmaw.de)
Received: 29 June 2012 -- Published in Biogeosciences Discuss.: 26 July 2012
Revised: 18 April 2013 -- Accepted: 8 May 2013 -- Published: 5 June 2013




On 19/08/2013 15:03, Oliver Tickell wrote:
This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind paywall) 
it appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to iron fertilisation. 
Oddly they have not considered the role of silicic acid from the 
dissolution of Mg silicate species in the finely powdered volcanic 
ash. Silicic acid is often the limiting nutrient for diatoms, as they 
use it to make their silica shells. There is ample geological evidence 
of diatom (specifically) blooms being associated with falls of 
volcanic ash.


Is anyone able to post the actual article? Oliver.

On 17/08/2013 17:13, Wil Burns wrote:

FYI. wil


MEPS - Vol. 488 - Table of contents
<http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/>

*Mar Ecol Prog Ser (Print ISSN: 0171-8630; Online ISSN: 1616-1599)*
Copyright © 2013 Inter-Research. Published August 15


*Olgun N, Duggen S, Langmann B, Hort M, Waythomas CF, Hoffmann L, 
Croot P *
Geochemical evidence of oceanic iron fertilization by the Kasatochi 
volcanic eruption in 2008 and the potential impacts on Pacific 
sockeye salmon
MEPS 488:81-88 <http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/p81-88/> | 
Full text in pdf format 
<http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2013/488/m488p081.pdf>



--
Dr. Wil Burns, Associate Director
Master of Science - Energy Policy & Climate Program
Johns Hopkins University
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Room 104J
Washington, DC  20036
202.663.5976 (Office phone)
650.281.9126 (Mobile)
wbu...@jhu.edu <mailto:wbu...@jhu.edu>
http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/environmental/master-of-science-in-energy-policy-and-climate/index.html 


SSRN site (selected publications): http://ssrn.com/author=240348


Skype ID: Wil.Burns

Teaching Climate/Energy Law & Policy Blog: 
http://www.teachingclimatelaw.org


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Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind paywall) it 
appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to iron fertilisation. 
Oddly they have not considered the role of silicic acid from the 
dissolution of Mg silicate species in the finely powdered volcanic ash. 
Silicic acid is often the limiting nutrient for diatoms, as they use it 
to make their silica shells. There is ample geological evidence of 
diatom (specifically) blooms being associated with falls of volcanic ash.


Is anyone able to post the actual article? Oliver.

On 17/08/2013 17:13, Wil Burns wrote:

FYI. wil


MEPS - Vol. 488 - Table of contents
<http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/>

*Mar Ecol Prog Ser (Print ISSN: 0171-8630; Online ISSN: 1616-1599)*
Copyright © 2013 Inter-Research. Published August 15


*Olgun N, Duggen S, Langmann B, Hort M, Waythomas CF, Hoffmann L, 
Croot P *
Geochemical evidence of oceanic iron fertilization by the Kasatochi 
volcanic eruption in 2008 and the potential impacts on Pacific sockeye 
salmon
MEPS 488:81-88 <http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/p81-88/> | 
Full text in pdf format 
<http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2013/488/m488p081.pdf>



--
Dr. Wil Burns, Associate Director
Master of Science - Energy Policy & Climate Program
Johns Hopkins University
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Room 104J
Washington, DC  20036
202.663.5976 (Office phone)
650.281.9126 (Mobile)
wbu...@jhu.edu <mailto:wbu...@jhu.edu>
http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/environmental/master-of-science-in-energy-policy-and-climate/index.html 


SSRN site (selected publications): http://ssrn.com/author=240348


Skype ID: Wil.Burns

Teaching Climate/Energy Law & Policy Blog: 
http://www.teachingclimatelaw.org


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Re: [geo] Global Warming: Geoengineering Trucks and Climate Change Adaptation

[Oliver Tickell]

Evaporating water using heat after a flood may be effective in the case 
of flooded bedroom, to dry it out, but never to dispose of bulk flood 
waters for the simple reason that the amount of thermal energy required 
is far too great - 2.25MJ/kg. In simple terms, to evaporate a gram of 
water per second requires 2.25kW + the heat needed to bring the water to 
boiling point, so say 3kW. And after an hour you have evaporated 3.6kg 
of water. In very round numbers 1kWh/kg. Let's say that your flood has 
dumped 1m of water over 100 square km  = 100,000,000,000 kg. To 
evaporate that you will need 100 terawatt hours of energy. To put that 
in context, total UK electricity consumption is 345 TWh/y.


Oliver.

On 18/07/2013 15:34, Stephen wrote:

Thanks,

The technology was also explained in aprevious post  
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/geoengineering/Nh0WI7Ur6Mg>  and 
will be more effective in moving water, since most times, flooded areas have no 
'empty spaces' to pump water to.



The technology has some potential, and could be developed using

On 2013-07-18 09:20, rongretlar...@comcast.net wrote:
> Stephen:
>
>  Very sorry to hear of the serious flooding in Freetown. But this
> list is not the correct one to look to for support. I would suggest
> that using electricity to turn water to steam would be a good more
> expensive than a wood-fired system. Some electricity would of course
> be needed for pumping - and one would hope that most of the water
> could be moved by pumping, not through steam generation.
>
> Ron
>
> -
> FROM: "Stephen" 
> TO: geoengineering@googlegroups.com
> SENT: Thursday, July 18, 2013 7:31:17 AM
> SUBJECT: [geo] Global Warming: Geoengineering Trucks and Climate
> Change Adaptation
>
> http://www.sierraexpressmedia.com/archives/59059
>
> Flood makes headlines -- many times -- every year for havoc it brings to
> individuals, communities, cities and nations. It affects developed and
> developing countries. It results, at varying magnitude, from natural and
> human activities. Floods can be harsh with impact lasting for several
> months. Control and management methods increasingly used, most times,
> fall short of preventing damage.
>
> In recent months, climate change has been cited as responsible massive
> flooding experienced around the world. Climate change also, is ascribed
> to other anomaly in weather condition noticed around. Global warming,
> for which reason we have climate change, is internationally debated for
> agreement concerning control.
>
> Flooding is severe for developing countries -- where erosion ravages
> too. In sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, there is crisis with
> these situations and recovery -- most times -- is minute, or never. There
> is a solution; a truck, about the size of the regular gas truck, having
> a system of electric steam boiler rather than the tank, to steam away
> floods, or erosion.
>
> This is a fresh concept, with power to cut water amounts from any site
> within minutes. An electric steam boiler system will be attached to a
> truck. It will have an inlet, and outlet. The inlet will draw in water,
> into a distillation chamber of low pressure and mid-temperature.
>
> Processed water after this stage would go into the immersion heating
> element chamber, to be transformed to steam, then to the outlet, into
> the atmosphere. The system will steam up to 20 liters of water -- per
> minute -- for a session of three hours, with efficiency of more than 90%.
>
> Three to five trucks can be used at the same time, to hasten the
> objective and reduce damage. The electric steam boiler system will be
> powered by the new rechargeable systems used in electric cars, and will
> work independently of the vehicle engine. In future the electric system
> may power the vehicle and the boiler, but for more uptime and
> efficiency, all the available energy will go towards delivering steam.
>
> Design of the truck, its features and impact on meteorology is a
> research report away. Details in the report will visit components,
> arrangement, scale, usability, control, environmental impacts and
> advantages. The trucks will be preferably used in daylight, when steam
> can easily mix with air, and not 'immediately' affect 'humidity' or
> alter the weather.
>
> Setting up the technology is not going to be rocket science, but work
> to be done, will lie mostly on its impact on the meteorology. This
> aspect makes the technology similar to Geoengineering. Geoengineering
> (or climate engineering) is the deliberate and large-scale intervention
> in the Earth's climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming.
>
> Geoengineering targets the root causes of 

Re: [geo] Re: Oli Morton with Opinion Article on "Nitrogen Geoengineering"

[Oliver Tickell]

An interesting thought, but of course there is much more to it than 
botanical gardens. Commercial introductions, seeds in shoes, gardeners, 
military usage ... and then of course all the animals, from rats to cane 
toads to sheep to anopheles mosquitos ... and let's not forget the 
fungi, such as the phytophera now causing havoc. Oliver.


On 14/07/2013 01:05, Russell Seitz wrote:
In writing of " homogocene issues " Oliver Morton  has floated a 
variation of the theme of  the 'anthropocene ' that might  take on a 
life of its own .


Though Greek-Latin portmanteau words are deservedly suspect , there 
has long been a need for an adjective to designate and reify a very 
important ecological consequence of the age of exploration--  the 
nonchalant  homogenization of the biosphere that arose from the 
 intercontinental exchange of flora via the botanical gardens of the 
imperial powers of the 18th and 19th centuries.


By darwin's day, every nation had one , and they collectively 
transferred such no-longer-exotics as rhododendrons, eucalypts and 
arucaria,  to name but a few, together with their symbionts and soil 
fauna, from  uninhabited regions and obscure refugia to the four 
corners of the earth.


There's no getting around it-  the Homogocene is to the Anthropocene 
as the  Pleistocene is to the Holocene




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Re: [geo] Artificial Photosynthesis – The Future of Carbon Dioxide Removal?

[Oliver Tickell]

Why the concern over removing carbon dioxide? The important thing about 
such technology is that it produces hydrogen directly, which can in turn 
be stored and used to generate electricity or propel vehicles in its own 
right, or used as feedstock for methane  or ammonia production. In this 
way it will displace fossil fuels and lead to less CO2 being emitted. 
Oliver.


On 09/07/2013 22:18, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Article link
http://www.ecopedia.com/environment/artificial-photosynthesis-the-future-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-in-solar-forests/

Paper link
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl401615t

In a May, 2013 paper in NANO Letters, titled “A Fully Integrated 
Nanosystem of Semiconductor Nanowires for Direct Solar Water 
Splitting.” With co-authors are Chong Liu, Jinyao Tang, Hao Ming Chen 
and Bin Liu, Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s 
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the 
first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. The 
article is about as fun to read as the title, but it makes a very 
clear point – artificial photosynthesis is not only possible, it can 
potentially be done at even greater efficiency than by the plants it 
is based on. The research is based on solar cells that split water 
molecules and combine them with airborne carbon dioxide to produce the 
simple sugar glucose and oxygen. Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley 
Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, explains it like this, “The 
photo-generated electrons in the silicon nanowires migrate to the 
surface and reduce protons to generate hydrogen while the 
photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide nanowires oxidize water to 
evolve oxygen molecules. The majority charge carriers from both 
semiconductors recombine at the ohmic contact, completing the relay of 
the Z-scheme, similar to that of natural photosynthesis.” In English, 
the artificial photosynthesis cells are comprised of two sides, one 
made of titanium oxide and the other of silicon. There are also a host 
of co-catalysts that help the process get started. Each cell works 
almost identically to a standard solar voltaic cell, but instead of 
using the displaced electron to create a current, it uses the electron 
to chemically adjust the structure of molecules in the cell. The 
photosynthesis inside the artificial leaf structures is currently not 
very efficient; in fact it is a paltry 12% efficient. That’s slightly 
lower than the efficiency of plants. Up to this point, all such 
projects have been focused on a single solar leaf. This is the first 
successful attempt at creating a viable network of integrated leaves 
that act in a similar manner as trees. The total output of the system 
was similar to that of a 10 ft. Maple tree. This could be a hugely 
important advance in solar technology as it has the potential to 
remove the need for inverters or batteries in solar applications. The 
solar leaf will produce a storable energy and remove carbon dioxide 
from the air. This would allow the installation of solar leaves in 
areas where traditional battery storage systems are not feasible. At 
the current efficiency level, it doesn’t make sense to pursue this 
technology, but there are several carbon reducing catalysts that, in 
theory, should be able to break the 12% threshold. The only real 
sticking point in the entire artificial photosynthesis game is that 
artificial catalysts are still not able to efficiently utilize carbon 
dioxide in the concentrations that are currently in the atmosphere. 
Until researchers are able to overcome this fundamental issue, even 
the most efficient carbon dioxide transferring solar trees will not be 
feasible on a large scale.


See more at:
http://www.ecopedia.com/environment/artificial-photosynthesis-the-future-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-in-solar-forests/#sthash.PQDVflEm.dpuf

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[geo] Fwd: New Publication: The role of Geoengineering in China's Strategic Response to Climate Change

[Oliver Tickell]

 Original Message 
Subject: 	New Publication: The role of Geoengineering in China's 
Strategic Response to Climate Change

Date:   Sun, 07 Jul 2013 23:52:35 -0500
From:   jon symons 
Reply-To:   jon symons 
To: Climate Change Info Mailing List 



Dear Colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to a new paper published by The Pacific 
Review concerning China's approach to solar radiation management:

Edney, K and Symons, J. (2013) "China and the blunt temptations of geoengineering: 
the role of solar radiation management in China’s strategic response to climate 
change" The Pacific Review 26(4).

The paper can be downloaded here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/m7PvHD8PDrb9iGaKtbz3/full

Amid growing alarm over the rising atmospheric concentration of greenhouse 
gases, increasing attention is being given to ‘geo-engineering’ technologies 
that could counteract some of the impacts of global warming by either reducing 
absorption of solar energy (solar radiation management (SRM)) or removing 
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Geo-engineering has the potential to 
dramatically alter the dynamics of global climate change negotiations because 
it might cool the climate without constraining fossil fuel use. Some scholars 
have expressed concern that certain states may be tempted to act unilaterally. 
This paper assesses the approach that China is likely to adopt towards 
governance of SRM and the implications this holds for broader international 
climate negotiations. We survey Chinese public discourse, examine the policy 
factors that will influence China's position, and assess the likelihood of 
certain future scenarios. While Chinese climate scientists are keenly aware of 
the potential benefits of geo-engineering as well as its risks, we find that no 
significant constituency is currently promoting unilateral implementation of 
SRM. China will probably play a broadly cooperative role in negotiations toward 
a multilaterally governed geo-engineering programme but will seek to promote a 
distinctive developing world perspective that reflects concerns over 
sovereignty, Western imperialism and maintenance of a strict interpretation of 
the norm of common but differentiated responsibility.

I hope that some of you find this paper useful.

Best regards,

Jonathan Symons
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Re: [geo] OIF vs. Agricultural Dead Zones. Irony. Hippocracy.

[Oliver Tickell]

Another thing to bear in mind is that by draining wetlands we have 
greatly reduced the flow of iron into the oceans. This is because peat 
produces complex organic acids (eg, humic acid) which dissolve and 
chelate iron - abundant in many rocks - and carry it down to the ocean. 
So we have already "experimented" inadvertently by reducing iron inputs 
to the ocean. And of course this is the most useful form of iron as it 
is in a highly soluble and bio-available form. And we have replaced that 
iron with masses of silt, nitrate and phosphate from stupid kinds of 
agriculture.


Oliver.

On 26/06/2013 09:38, Joshua Jacobs wrote:
Because of the torrential summer rains, potentially driven by regional 
climate instability, the largest dead zone ever is predicted in the 
Mississippi river delta.  Regardless of the climate influences, 
agricultural run off from "business as usual" economic activity is 
driving greater environmental impacts than any Ocean Iron 
Fertilization experiment ever has.  As of yet, I am unaware of any 
intentional ocean fertilization experiment that has had the impact of 
a single dead zone of any river anywhere.  The irony being that the 
worst case scenarios imagined for any small ocean fertilization 
experiment have yet to compare, by orders of magnitude, to the impact 
of dead zones created from accepted practices.  The hippocracy being 
the deriders of ocean fertilization have nothing to say about the dead 
zones.


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130621-dead-zone-biggest-gulf-of-mexico-science-environment/
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Re: [geo] Money

[Oliver Tickell]

Excuse my ignorance - AGU? EGU?

What I do know is that people very often omit any discussion of ARW in 
their papers, reviews, etc, on CO2 drawdown. And that it is entirely 
absent from the policy debate. Probably because it comes in at a tenth 
of the cost, and zillionth the risk, of their preferred options.


Since ARW has been published quite widely, and is included in the Royal 
Society's review of geoengineering, it is hard to see the omission as 
accidental.


Oliver.

On 08/06/2013 04:35, Russell Seitz wrote:
Instead of adding yet another interest group to the crowded scene, 
many of the aims discussed here could be accomplished by established 
by creating  new sections within the the AGU and EGU,  automatically 
qualifying them  for a place at those organizations'policy discussion 
table,


As can be seen from the absence of SRM  from the agenda AGU's 
forthcoming  ( June 24-26) science policy conference in Washington , 
the absence of such sections from the scene is already consequential.


On Wednesday, June 5, 2013 10:26:18 AM UTC-4, Oliver Tickell wrote:

There has been sod all funding for studies of accelerated rock
weathering. Some work has been done, on farmland in Holland for
example,
but to get this wiely accepted it's important to know how fast ground
olivine weathers in different grain sizes, on land, on coast,
different
climates, effects on rivers draining olivined catchments, effects on
marine biota from washout of Fe (if any) / H4SiO4, usefulness as
fertiliser to restore Mg where lacking in soils, etc etc.

All of which really should be done before any large scale deployment.
Oliver.

On 05/06/2013 10:58, Andrew Lockley wrote:
>
> Where do people think extra money is needed to further the study of
> geoengineering?
>
> A
>
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Re: [geo] The Caldeira "If you Sterilize the Ocean We'd Still Have Chicken McNuggets Hypothesis" questioned by Ocean expert

[Oliver Tickell]

And I challenge anyone to construct a plausible narrative in which human 
civilization survives the extinction of life in the oceans.


Oliver.

On 08/06/2013 10:01, Ken Caldeira wrote:

Andrew,

Please respond to what I said and not what you imagine I said.

The issue has to do with a hypothetical case of sterilization of the 
oceans. There was no reference to climate change in my statement.


I challenge anyone to construct a plausible causal chain that would 
lead from sterilization of the oceans to downfall of human civilization.


This is not an expression of my values, this is an expression of my 
scientific understanding.


Let all realize that I spend a large chunk of my time trying to 
investigate and protect human threats to ocean ecosystems.


*This Scientist Aims High to Save the World's Coral Reefs*
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=176344300&m=178462367 
<http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=176344300&m=178462367>

(Aired Monday, 4/22 on NPR's All Things Considered; 7 minutes, 49 seconds)

Best,

Ken

On Saturday, June 8, 2013, Andrew Lockley wrote:

In my view, history provides the best guide to the future.

Civilisations are not long lived at the best of times, and their
messy and painful demise is usually accompanied by minor climate
disruption.

The more complex the civilisation, the less robust it is, as there
is a greater interconnectedness, and hence a greater ability to
transmit shocks through the system. To further explain : our
ancestors would not have heard about an antipodean earthquake,
whereas now such a tremor can send markets into meltdown in minutes.

The idea that despite this much more vulnerable society, the
American middle class will survive the worst climate change in
human history without disruption to the Chicken McNugget supply,
or to the ability of Hollywood to produce Game of Thrones, is
completely bizarre.

Someone, somewhere will likely be eating a piece of battered
chicken meat. Someone, somewhere will probably still have a
working digital camera and some kind of transmission equipment .
This does not equate to an uninterrupted experience for the US
middle class.

A

On Jun 8, 2013 8:42 AM, "Emily L-B"  wrote:

Hi all, I'd propose you put this hypothesis to Dan Laffolley
(you can google him).
There are so many responses to this I am overwhelmed and can't
respond coherently. Apart from anything else, my understanding
is that decay of ocean matter would release noxious gases. So
while there may be O2, it may be polluted.
Best wishes,
Emily.
Sent from my BlackBerry

*From: * Ken Caldeira 
*Sender: * geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Date: *Sat, 8 Jun 2013 15:05:06 +0800
*To: *jrandomwin...@gmail.com
*ReplyTo: * kcalde...@gmail.com
*Cc:
*geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Subject: *[geo] The Caldeira "If you Sterilize the Ocean We'd
Still Have Chicken McNuggets Hypothesis" questioned by Ocean
expert

David,

The residence time of oxygen in the atmosphere + ocean +
biosphere with respect to the lithosphere is millions of years.

There are about 4 x 10 ** 19 mol of O2 in the atmosphere. The
rate of removal of this O2 by organic carbon weathering is
about 4 x 10 ** 12 mol per year.  I am not sure about pyrite
oxidation and so on but you can check out the attached paper
for an entree into the literature.

In any case, the 1000 year number you cite is not based on any
reliable literature value. A better guess might be that we
would have breathable oxygen on the order of a million years
if you eliminated all life on land and sea.  If life were
eliminated in the oceans only, I don't know of anything that
would impede our ability to eat Chicken McNuggets and watch TV
indefinitely.

Let me make it clear that I value life in the oceans quite
highly and do not at all like Chicken McNuggets.  (For some
reason, nutters on the web think that you can't discuss
anything unless you are advocating actually doing it.)

Best,

Ken

On Saturday, June 8, 2013, David Lewis wrote:

During the Q&A after his 2012 AGU talk entitled "/Ocean
Acidification:  Adaptive Challenge or Extinction
Threat?/", Ken Caldeira said:  "I actually think*if you
sterilize the ocean*, yes vulnerable people would be hurt,
poor people would be hurt, but that*we'd still have

Re: [geo] Money

[Oliver Tickell]

There has been sod all funding for studies of accelerated rock 
weathering. Some work has been done, on farmland in Holland for example, 
but to get this wiely accepted it's important to know how fast ground 
olivine weathers in different grain sizes, on land, on coast, different 
climates, effects on rivers draining olivined catchments, effects on 
marine biota from washout of Fe (if any) / H4SiO4, usefulness as 
fertiliser to restore Mg where lacking in soils, etc etc.


All of which really should be done before any large scale deployment. 
Oliver.


On 05/06/2013 10:58, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Where do people think extra money is needed to further the study of 
geoengineering?


A

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Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

[Oliver Tickell]

From David A's article:
"One interesting initiative is
the Virgin Earth Challenge, which was launched in
2007. Sponsored by Richard Branson, it offers $25m
to whoever can demonstrate a sustainable and scalable design to 
permanently remove a billion tonnes

of carbon from the air every year for 10 years. Some
2600 groups applied to the challenge and last November the finalists 
were picked – six from the US and

one each from Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands,
Switzerland and Canada – who now have five years
in which to win the prize."

I think all involved were expecting the winner to be announced a few 
years ago. It seems to be dragging out unnecessarily. Since after all, 
the whole predicate of this is that urgent action is needed!


Oliver.

--
Oliver Tickell
Kyoto2 - for an effective climate agreement.

On 03/06/2013 16:59, RAU greg wrote:


Thanks. Yes, lots of great ideas out there.
Speaking of the Virgin Earth Challenge (apparently the only CDR game 
in town), what the heck happened to the prize? Did they quietly select 
a winner, split the money among finalists, or say "sorry, no winner, 
thanks for all of the great ideas, we were just kidding."??? For all 
of the initial splash, the VEC seemed to end very somberly. Given the 
importance of the topic and Branson's apparent enthusiasm, why?

-Greg

--------
*From:* Oliver Tickell 
*To:* gh...@sbcglobal.net
*Cc:* david.app...@gmail.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com; 
m2des...@cablespeed.com

*Sent:* Mon, June 3, 2013 2:42:47 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

But why no mention of CDR by accelerated rock weathering (AGR)? This 
is one of the solutions selected by the Virgin Challenge - the one 
from Netherlands. And it is being promoted by Olaf Schuilling, who is 
a member of this Geoengineering Group.


This is a low tech, low cost approach - which consists of mining 
olivine bearing rock, grinding it up to approx 0.1mm, and spreading it 
land / coast where it will completely weather away over a period of 
under 10 years, converting CO2 to bicarbonate in solution. All for 
~$10/tCO2. Emissions for mining, transport, grinding, just a few % of 
the CO2 gain.


So what's not to include about it? Oliver.

On 02/06/2013 20:29, RAU greg wrote:
Thanks, David, very nice review. Where our technology departs from 
the higher profile abiotic methods you discuss is: 1) expensively 
concentrated CO2 is not formed (or stored), 2) reactions occur at 
ambient T and P - exotic chemicals and conditions are avoided (so 
far), 3) excess ocean rather than excess air CO2 can be mitigated, 
avoiding the need for more complex air scrubbing technology. Why go 
to the added expense/effort of getting air CO2 into solution to then 
do chemistry when vast areas of the surface ocean are already 
supersaturated in CO2?  Doing the chemistry there completely avoids 
the giant land footprint and energy required for air scrubbing that 
you mention, as well as avoids the need for molecular CO2 
sequestration or use.  Obviously, the safety of doing this in the 
ocean needs to be researched, but generating ocean alkalinity would 
seem an improvement over our current ocean acidification "program". 
I'm not alone in my thinking; this builds on Kheshgi (1995), House et 
al. (2007), and Harvey (2008) among others.

-Greg


*From:* David Appell 
*To:* geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Cc:* m2des...@cablespeed.com
*Sent:* Sun, June 2, 2013 10:55:22 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

Mark:

I have an article in this month's Physics World magazine that answers 
some of these questions:


“Mopping Up Carbon,” Physics World, June 2013, pp. 23-27.
http://www.davidappell.com/articles/PWJun13Appell-air_capture.pdf

David


On 6/2/2013 8:05 AM, Mark Massmann wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone can respond to these questions:
>
> I could be missing this, but how long is it estimated to take for 
the devices to capture each ton of CO2? If the systems were installed 
to capture coal plant emissions, I'd imagine that the capture rate 
would be maximized. However installing the systems outside of those 
sources might lower the capture rate to the point that the system 
becomes impractical (i.e. like installing a wind farm in a location 
that's simply not windy enough on average)



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Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

[Oliver Tickell]

But why no mention of CDR by accelerated rock weathering (AGR)? This is 
one of the solutions selected by the Virgin Challenge - the one from 
Netherlands. And it is being promoted by Olaf Schuilling, who is a 
member of this Geoengineering Group.


This is a low tech, low cost approach - which consists of mining olivine 
bearing rock, grinding it up to approx 0.1mm, and spreading it land / 
coast where it will completely weather away over a period of under 10 
years, converting CO2 to bicarbonate in solution. All for ~$10/tCO2. 
Emissions for mining, transport, grinding, just a few % of the CO2 gain.


So what's not to include about it? Oliver.

On 02/06/2013 20:29, RAU greg wrote:
Thanks, David, very nice review. Where our technology departs from the 
higher profile abiotic methods you discuss is: 1) expensively 
concentrated CO2 is not formed (or stored), 2) reactions occur at 
ambient T and P - exotic chemicals and conditions are avoided (so 
far), 3) excess ocean rather than excess air CO2 can be mitigated, 
avoiding the need for more complex air scrubbing technology. Why go to 
the added expense/effort of getting air CO2 into solution to then do 
chemistry when vast areas of the surface ocean are already 
supersaturated in CO2?  Doing the chemistry there completely avoids 
the giant land footprint and energy required for air scrubbing that 
you mention, as well as avoids the need for molecular CO2 
sequestration or use.  Obviously, the safety of doing this in the 
ocean needs to be researched, but generating ocean alkalinity would 
seem an improvement over our current ocean acidification "program". 
I'm not alone in my thinking; this builds on Kheshgi (1995), House et 
al. (2007), and Harvey (2008) among others.

-Greg


*From:* David Appell 
*To:* geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Cc:* m2des...@cablespeed.com
*Sent:* Sun, June 2, 2013 10:55:22 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

Mark:

I have an article in this month's Physics World magazine that answers 
some of these questions:


“Mopping Up Carbon,” Physics World, June 2013, pp. 23-27.
http://www.davidappell.com/articles/PWJun13Appell-air_capture.pdf

David


On 6/2/2013 8:05 AM, Mark Massmann wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone can respond to these questions:
>
> I could be missing this, but how long is it estimated to take for 
the devices to capture each ton of CO2? If the systems were installed 
to capture coal plant emissions, I'd imagine that the capture rate 
would be maximized. However installing the systems outside of those 
sources might lower the capture rate to the point that the system 
becomes impractical (i.e. like installing a wind farm in a location 
that's simply not windy enough on average)



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Re: [geo] Fwd: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2 world

[Oliver Tickell]

Where there is a specific need to reduce acidity around a particular 
coral reef, or other location, of course you would want to target the 
ground rock application to that particular place. This might indeed be 
to land in a catchment from which streams run into a coral lagoon, for 
example, or it may be to beaches where dissolution would be helped by 
wave action. It would also be possible to grind the rock to 
nanometer-scale dimensions so as to rapidly dissolve the rock in the 
water. However the much larger energy input required to grind very fine 
powders would make this less effective in reducing global CO2.


Oliver.

ps - agreed that you would want to be careful of raising river pH too 
much - but remember we are already reducing river pH by CO2 / SO2 / NOx 
acidification.


On 15/05/2013 13:17, Andrew Lockley wrote:

That would surely depend on the ocean circulation around reefs.  It
would be impractical to exert short-term control over reef pH if the
surrounding water was from the ocean.  Only where ripurine and coastal
flows were a significant part of the local budget would adjusting the
pH of either be effective.  There's only so much adjustment to a
river's pH you could make before destroying its ecosystem, so
well-mixed reef water wouldn't be controllable using river pH tweaks.

A

On 15 May 2013 13:09, Oliver Tickell  wrote:

This problem of ocean acidification is surely best solved by application of
ground up olivine bearing rock to land / coast, so removing carbonic acid
and replacing it with alkaline Mg++ and HCO3- (bicarbonate). The runoff from
land will of course end up in the oceans.

Oliver.


On 15/05/2013 12:52, Andrew Lockley wrote:

Please see below and attached.

A


-- Forwarded message --
From: E Couce 
Date: 15 May 2013 12:47
Subject: Re: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2
world
To: Andrew Lockley 
Cc: geoengineering 


Dear Andrew and all,

thanks for the interest on the paper. It can be accessed on
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50340/abstract

Attached is an unformatted draft (also available for download free of
charge on my website)

Best regards,
Elena



On 15 May 2013 00:26, Andrew Lockley  wrote:

Poster's note:  Hopefully the author (see cc ) will be kind enough to
submit her paper to this list, as I lack a URL or copy

Citation

Couce, EM, Irvine, PJ, Gregorie, L, Ridgwell, AJ & Hendy, E 2013,
‘Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2world’. Geophysical
Research Letters, vol 40.

Abstract

Continued anthropogenic CO2 emissions are expected to impact tropical
coral reefs by further raising sea surface temperatures (SST) and
intensifying ocean acidification (OA). Although geoengineering by means of
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) may mitigate temperature increases, OA will
persist, raising important questions regarding the impact of different
stressor combinations. We apply statistical Bioclimatic Envelope Models to
project changes in shallow-water tropical coral reef habitat as a single
niche (without resolving biodiversity or community composition) under
various Representative Concentration Pathway and SRM scenarios, until 2070.
We predict substantial reductions in habitat suitability centered on the
Indo-Pacific Warm Pool under net anthropogenic radiative forcing of
≥3.0 W/m2. The near-term dominant risk to coral reefs is increasing SSTs;
below 3 W/m2 reasonably favorable conditions are maintained, even when
achieved by SRM with persisting OA. ‘Optimal’ mitigation occurs at 1.5 W/m2
because tropical SSTs over-cool in a fully-geoengineered (i.e.
pre-industrial global mean temperature) world.

Key Points:

• Large reductions in reef habitat suitability under net radiative
forcing >3 W/m2
• Rising SSTs are greater threat for tropical coral reefs than ocean
acidification
• Solar Radiation Management may help maintain coral reef habitat over
near-term




--

---
Dr. Elena Couce
School of Geographical Sciences
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
E-mail: e.co...@bristol.ac.uk
Web: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/elena-m-couce



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Re: [geo] Fwd: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2 world

[Oliver Tickell]

This problem of ocean acidification is surely best solved by application 
of ground up olivine bearing rock to land / coast, so removing carbonic 
acid and replacing it with alkaline Mg++ and HCO3- (bicarbonate). The 
runoff from land will of course end up in the oceans.


Oliver.

On 15/05/2013 12:52, Andrew Lockley wrote:

Please see below and attached.

A


-- Forwarded message --
From: E Couce 
Date: 15 May 2013 12:47
Subject: Re: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2 world
To: Andrew Lockley 
Cc: geoengineering 


Dear Andrew and all,

thanks for the interest on the paper. It can be accessed on
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50340/abstract

Attached is an unformatted draft (also available for download free of
charge on my website)

Best regards,
Elena



On 15 May 2013 00:26, Andrew Lockley  wrote:

Poster's note:  Hopefully the author (see cc ) will be kind enough to submit 
her paper to this list, as I lack a URL or copy

Citation

Couce, EM, Irvine, PJ, Gregorie, L, Ridgwell, AJ & Hendy, E 2013, ‘Tropical 
coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2world’. Geophysical Research 
Letters, vol 40.

Abstract

Continued anthropogenic CO2 emissions are expected to impact tropical coral 
reefs by further raising sea surface temperatures (SST) and intensifying ocean 
acidification (OA). Although geoengineering by means of Solar Radiation 
Management (SRM) may mitigate temperature increases, OA will persist, raising 
important questions regarding the impact of different stressor combinations. We 
apply statistical Bioclimatic Envelope Models to project changes in 
shallow-water tropical coral reef habitat as a single niche (without resolving 
biodiversity or community composition) under various Representative 
Concentration Pathway and SRM scenarios, until 2070. We predict substantial 
reductions in habitat suitability centered on the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool under 
net anthropogenic radiative forcing of ≥3.0 W/m2. The near-term dominant risk 
to coral reefs is increasing SSTs; below 3 W/m2 reasonably favorable conditions 
are maintained, even when achieved by SRM with persisting OA. ‘Optimal’ 
mitigation occurs at 1.5 W/m2 because tropical SSTs over-cool in a 
fully-geoengineered (i.e. pre-industrial global mean temperature) world.

Key Points:

• Large reductions in reef habitat suitability under net radiative forcing >3 
W/m2
• Rising SSTs are greater threat for tropical coral reefs than ocean 
acidification
• Solar Radiation Management may help maintain coral reef habitat over near-term




--

---
Dr. Elena Couce
School of Geographical Sciences
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
E-mail: e.co...@bristol.ac.uk
Web: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/elena-m-couce




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Re: [geo] Natural iron fertilization by the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption - Achterberg, GRL

[Oliver Tickell]

Too bad they did not explore the effect on relative abundance of 
phytoplankton. Seabed deposits show that volcanic ash is associated with 
increased populations of diatoms - to be expected since diatoms tend to 
predominate so long as the silica they need to be build their shells is 
present as silicic acid. This has implications for CO2 since diatoms are 
effective at sequestering surface water CO2 to deep ocean layers (as 
various forms of solid / dissolved C). more so than other phytoplankton. 
Oliver.


On 23/03/2013 11:48, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : paper from earlier thread, which commentators describe 
as demonstrating limited potential for OIF generally, due to low macro 
nutrient supply. (Eg 
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0322-iron-fertilization-fail.html)


http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50221/abstract

Keywords:

iron fertilization;volcanic eruption;Eyjafjallajökull Volcano

Abstract

[1] Aerosol deposition from the 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano 
Eyjafjallajökull resulted in significant dissolved iron (DFe) inputs 
to the Iceland Basin of the North Atlantic. Unique ship-board 
measurements indicated strongly enhanced DFe concentrations (up to 10  
nM) immediately under the ash plume. Bioassay experiments performed 
with ash collected at sea under the plume also demonstrated the 
potential for associated Fe release to stimulate phytoplankton growth 
and nutrient drawdown. Combining Fe dissolution measurements with 
modeled ash deposition suggested that the eruption had the potential 
to increase DFe by >0.2 nM over an area of up to 570,000 km2. Although 
satellite ocean color data only indicated minor increases in 
phytoplankton abundance over a relatively constrained area, comparison 
of in situ nitrate concentrations with historical records suggested 
that ash deposition may have resulted in enhanced major nutrient 
drawdown. Our observations thus suggest that the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull 
eruption resulted in a significant perturbation to the biogeochemistry 
of the Iceland Basin.


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[geo] Fwd: Climate Radio 2013

[Oliver Tickell]

 Original Message 
Subject:Climate Radio 2013
Date:   Mon, 4 Mar 2013 14:16:44 +
From:   Phil England 
To: Phil England 



*Climate Radio is back in 2013 with a new monthly programme. The first 
two shows are available now to listen online, download or subscribe to 
in iTunes. You can also check out the programmes on the New 
Internationalist website.*


---

*#1: An Arctic Wake-Up Call 
*


Starting the series in our traditional way with a look at the science, 
we speak to Professors *Tim Lenton* and *Peter Wadhams* about the 
surprising rate of change we are now seeing in the Arctic's natural systems.


/"In the absence of urgent action on climate change, there may be a 
number of tipping points in climate-driven systems in the Arctic, which 
threaten to rapidly escalate the danger for the whole planet. A collapse 
of summer sea-ice, increased methane emissions from thawing permafrost, 
runaway melting of the Greenland ice-sheet, and a collapse of the 
thermo-haline circulation, may all be approaching in the Arctic and will 
have disastrous consequences for global climate and sea levels. These 
together comprise a wake-up call to reinvigorate efforts to tackle 
climate change. A lack of consensus on precisely how fast any tipping 
points are approaching in the Arctic should not be used as an argument 
for inaction." (Environment Audit Committee, Protecting The Arctic 
, 
September 2012, p.21)./


*#2: Protecting the Arctic *

Where scientists see warning signs, oil companies and their friends in 
government see only economic opportunity. Last September a cross-party 
parliamentary committee of MPs in the UK called for a moratorium on 
drilling in the Arctic – concerned about the potential impact on climate 
change and about the lax safety regime surrounding this high-risk 
activity. In January this year, the UK government rejected the 
committee’s key recommendations using old science to suggest that Arctic 
drilling could be compatible with avoiding dangerous climate change. At 
the same time a Freedom of Information Act request discovered the 
government had been lobbying against EU legislation designed to make 
Arctic drilling safer.


Over the course of 2012 Shell’s claims that they were “Arctic Ready” 
collapsed after a succession of calamities while investors and other oil 
companies started getting cold feet. We look at how Shell’s Arctic 
drilling plans pose a risk to your pension and what you can do about it. 
Featuring *Joan Walley MP* (Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee), 
*Charlie Kronick* (Greenpeace), *Louise Rouse* (Fair Pensions) and 
*James Marriott* (Platform).


---
Full descriptions of the programmes can be found at: 
http://climateradio.org/

---
You can follow Climate Radio on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClimateRadio
---
Many thanks to Artists Project Earth for their support for these programmes
---
*If you no longer wish to receive these email, just reply with 
"unsubscribe" as the subject line*




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[geo] Fwd: Geoengineering event in Oxford

[Oliver Tickell]

>

Forumers, FYI:

Geoengineering - the problem of competing values in environmental and 
technological governance 


Professor Steve Rayner, Co-Director, Oxford Geoengineering Programme, 
Oxford Martin School; Director, Institute of Science, Innovation and 
Society, Oxford Martin School and James Martin Professor of Science and 
Civilization


This event is part of a seminar series:'Ethics and 21st Century 
Challenges'. All the seminars are free and open to all; however booking 
is recommended. Sandwiches provided on a first-come, first-served basis.


1 March from 12:00 to 13:30 Humanities Building Lecture Theatre 2nd 
Floor, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG


Acess event details: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/oxfordenv 




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Re: [geo] CDR: Stanford weighs in

[Oliver Tickell]

It is frankly somewhat amazing that this review contains no mention at 
all of what appears to be the single lowest cost and lowest impact way 
of removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere, namely the accelerated 
weathering of magnesium silicate bearing rock by spreading the 
pulverised rock at land and littoral zones.


Given that this system is now quite widely published, such ignorance is 
surely deliberate. How is it to be explained? Oliver.


On 18/02/2013 23:31, Rau, Greg wrote:



  
http://planetsave.com/2013/02/18/stanford-scientists-aim-to-remove-co2-from-atmosphere/


  Stanford Scientists Aim To Remove CO2 From Atmosphere

Joshua S Hill
*
*

Turn the clock back a decade and we had all sorts of grand plans for 
reducing our greenhouse gas emissions levels, hoping that by 2020 we 
would be on the path to saving our planet.


Reducing Carbon Means Destroying Carbon 
<http://c1planetsavecom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2013/02/750px-Cwall99_lg.jpg> 



Image Credit: Wikimedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cwall99_lg.jpg>

Welcome to 2013 and … not so much.

Unsurprisingly, scientists at Stanford University have recently come 
out and said that curbing our CO2 emissions may simply not be enough 
any more. Instead of simply hoping the long-tail of emissions 
reductions do /something/, they believe we need to start looking at 
carbon-negative technologies that actively remove carbon dioxide from 
the atmosphere.


“To achieve the targeted cuts, we would need a scenario where, by the 
middle of the century, the global economy is transitioning from net 
positive to net negative CO2 emissions,” said report co-author Chris 
Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system 
science at Stanford. “We need to start thinking about how to implement 
a negative-emissions energy strategy on a global scale.”


The Stanford scientists findings are summarised in a report 
by Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), which describe 
a suite of emerging carbon-negative solutions to global warming.



BECCS

“Net negative emissions can be achieved when more greenhouse gases are 
sequestered than are released into the atmosphere,” explained Milne, 
an energy assessment analyst at GCEP. “One of the most promising 
net-negative technologies is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture 
and storage.”


For example, a BECCS system could convert woody biomass, grass, and 
other vegetation into electricity, chemical products, or fuels such as 
ethanol, leaving the CO2 emissions released during the process to be 
captured and stored.


Estimates show that by 2050 BECCS technologies could sequester 10 
billion metric tonnes of industrial CO2 emissions from installations 
like power plants, paper mills, ethanol processors, and other 
manufacturing facilities. But we have a ways to go before we are 
technologically able to manage this.



Biochar

Biochar is a plant byproduct similar to charcoal that is made from 
lumber waste, dried corn stalks, and other plant residues. A process 
called pyrolysis — which heats the vegetation slowly without oxygen — 
produces carbon rich chunks of biochar that can be placed in the soil 
as a fertiliser, which locks the CO2 underground instead of letting 
the CO2 re-enter the atmosphere as the plant decomposes as it 
naturally would.


EHowever, long-term sequestration “would require high biochar 
stability,” they wrote. “Estimates of biochar half‐life vary greatly 
from 10 years to more than 100 years. The type of feedstock also 
contributes to stability, with wood being more stable than grasses and 
manure.”



Net-negative Farming

Another option included in the GCEP report is the idea of net-negative 
farming. The authors cited research done by Jose Moreira of the 
University of Sao Paulo who found that from 1975 to 2007, ethanol 
production from sugar cane in Brazil resulted in a net-negative 
capture of 1.5 metric tons of CO2 per cubic meter of ethanol produced.


“In this model, the system took 18 years to recoup carbon emissions, 
with most reductions coming from soil replenishment from root growth 
and replacement of gasoline with ethanol,” the GCEP authors wrote.


However, questions remain about the long-term effects of ethanol 
combustion on climate.



Other Options

The report also explored other options, such as sequestering carbon in 
the ocean, specifically the problem of ocean acidification. Currently, 
the more CO2 the oceans absorb the more acidic they become, resulting 
in algae blooms often seen in locations throughout Asia as well as the 
Gulf of Mexico in the US.


However, research by David Keith of Harvard University suggests that 
adding magnesium carbonate and other minerals to the ocean to reduce 
acidity would also sequester atmospheric CO2 in absorbed in seawater.


For more information on these options, check out the full report here 
<http://gcep.stanford.edu/events/workshops_negemissions2012.html

Re: [geo] Volcanos and climate change: Location, location, location

[Oliver Tickell]

Precisely - the aerosol cooling effect takes place on a timescale ~ 1-10 
years, the CO2 warming effect over ~ 1-10,000 years.


It is well known that volcanic outpourings can have major effects of 
this type, especially when extensive outpourings of the kind that 
produced the Deccan Traps and Siberian Traps. The Siberian Traps are 
associated with the Permian Triassic boundary and in this case the ~ 3 
million km3 of molten lava poured over a huge Permo-Carboniferous coal 
basin causing massive methane and CO2 emissions over ~600ky. something 
similar happened when a large bolide struck the Yucatan limestone 
formation ~ 65My ago - causing the end-Cretaceous extinction event.


--
Oliver Tickell
e: oli...@its.me.uk

On 11/02/2013 22:03, Rau, Greg wrote:



  Interesting – no discussion of cooling effects of aerosol release?
  Short-lived relative to CO2? -Greg



  Volcano Location: Greenhouse-Icehouse Key? Episodic Purging of
  'Carbonate Capacitor' Drives Long-Term Climate Cycle

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130207115014.htm

Feb. 6, 2013 — A new Rice University-led study finds the real estate 
mantra "location, location, location" may also explain one of Earth's 
enduring climate mysteries. The study suggests that Earth's repeated 
flip-flopping between greenhouse and icehouse states over the past 500 
million years may have been driven by the episodic flare-up of 
volcanoes at key locations where enormous amounts of carbon dioxide 
are poised for release into the atmosphere.


"We found that Earth's continents serve as enormous 'carbonate 
capacitors,'" said Rice's Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study in 
this month's /GeoSphere/. "Continents store massive amounts of carbon 
dioxide in sedimentary carbonates like limestone and marble, and it 
appears that these reservoirs are tapped from time to time by 
volcanoes, which release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the 
atmosphere."


Lee said as much as 44 percent of carbonates by weight is carbon 
dioxide. Under most circumstances that carbon stays locked inside 
Earth's rigid continental crust.


"One process that can release carbon dioxide from these carbonates is 
interaction with magma," he said. "But that rarely happens on Earth 
today because most volcanoes are located on island arcs, tectonic 
plate boundaries that don't contain continental crust."


Earth's climate continually cycles between greenhouse and icehouse 
states, which each last on timescales of 10 million to 100 million 
years. Icehouse states -- like the one Earth has been in for the past 
50 million years -- are marked by ice at the poles and periods of 
glacial activity. By contrast, the warmer greenhouse states are marked 
by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and by an ice-free 
surface, even at the poles. The last greenhouse period lasted about 50 
million to 70 million years and spanned the late Cretaceous, when 
dinosaurs roamed, and the early Paleogene, when mammals began to 
diversify.


Lee and colleagues found that the planet's greenhouse-icehouse 
oscillations are a natural consequence of plate tectonics. The 
research showed that tectonic activity drives an episodic flare-up of 
volcanoes along continental arcs, particularly during periods when 
oceans are forming and continents are breaking apart. The continental 
arc volcanoes that arise during these periods are located on the edges 
of continents, and the magma that rises through the volcanoes releases 
enormous quantities of carbon dioxide as it passes through layers of 
carbonates in the continental crust.


Lee, professor of Earth science at Rice, led the four-year study, 
which was co-authored by three Rice faculty members and additional 
colleagues at the University of Tokyo, the University of British 
Columbia, the California Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University 
and Pomona College.


Lee said the study breaks with conventional theories about greenhouse 
and icehouse periods.


"The standard view of the greenhouse state is that you draw carbon 
dioxide from the deep Earth interior by a combination of more activity 
along the mid-ocean ridges -- where tectonic plates spread -- and 
massive breakouts of lava called 'large igneous provinces,'" Lee said. 
"Though both of these would produce more carbon dioxide, it is not 
clear if these processes alone could sustain the atmospheric carbon 
dioxide that we find in the fossil record during past greenhouses."


Lee is a petrologist and geochemist whose research interests include 
the formation and evolution of continents as well as the connections 
between deep Earth and its oceans and atmosphere..


Lee said the conclusions in the study developed over several years, 
but the initial idea of the research dates to an informal 
chalkboard-only seminar at Rice in 2008. The talk was 

Re: [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture and storage - Catalysis Science & Technology (RSC Publishing)

[Oliver Tickell]

There is nothing trivial about ocean chemistry! Many a salt water 
aquarium owner knows this all too well. Thanks for the link, Oliver.


On 08/02/2013 14:01, lidijasil...@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Oliver,
I think it is not so trivial as you wrote - different steps of 
reactions which you wrote are prefered at different pH.
Please for example see this web link and graph on the bottom of the 
web page:
http://ion.chem.usu.edu/~sbialkow/Classes/3650/Carbonate/Carbonic%20Acid.html 
<http://ion.chem.usu.edu/%7Esbialkow/Classes/3650/Carbonate/Carbonic%20Acid.html>

best wishes,
Lidija

On Friday, 8 February 2013 11:52:15 UTC, Oliver Tickell wrote:


Unfortunately my confusion is only deepening ...
There is more CO2 in the np system - but I thought it was meant to
be H2CO3, not CO2.
There is HCO3- on the nickel - but no bicarbonate in the system.
If the solution is acidic (ie, there is lots of H+ in the
solution), where is the acidity coming from if not from
dissociation of carbonic acid:
H2CO3 + H2O <=> H+, HCO3- <=> 2H+, CO3=  ?
But you say only carbonic acid present.

Oliver.

On 07/02/2013 23:51, gaurav bhaduri wrote:

Dear all

Thank you for your interest in our work and your comments. To
clarify some of the misunderstanding in the process conditions
that I'd like to clarify. When we bubble CO2 in water with and
without the nanoparticles, we observed that there is more CO2 in
the nanoparticle system than in pure water. We also observed that
there was HCO3- ions on the surface of the Ni nanoparticles
surface, we thus explained that this enhancement could be due to
adsorption of the HCO3- (from the acid) onto the Ni surface. We
in no place claim the formation of CO3-- ions, to be clear on
this point the system we are addressing in this article is at a
acidic pH (<5). Thus there is only carbonic acid species present
no bicarbonate or carbonate system as they exist at higher pH values.

Now coming to the point of mineralization. We are currently
working on this (as explained by Dr Siller, previously) and would
like to use silicates as our metal source (Ca2+ or Mg2+).

Regarding the confusion of sea or oceanic system. We do not tend
to imply the use of Ni nanoparticles in the ocean or any thing
around it. The relation with sea urchin (or the marine
environment) is just that, the use of Ni to study the hydration
reaction we triggered by the studies done on the sea urchin by Dr
Siller and my other colleagues.

Our major application is to use this system as a satellite unit
(plant) to an operational point source emitter (for example a
power plant). The carbonate mineral thus produced would be used
as landfill or in any other useful application. As mentioned
above, we are working on the use of silicate sources
(terrestrial) for the source of the alkali earth metals (Ca2+ or
Mg2+), thus ruling out acidification of the ocean or any relation
to the ocean.

Hope I was able to explain the application of our technology. If
you still have any doubts, please feel free to ask. We will try
our level best to clarify any confusion.

Thanks to all

Kind regards
Gaurav

On Thursday, 7 February 2013 18:49:41 UTC, Greg Rau wrote:

Thanks for responding.  I really don't follow this. If I have
a beaker of water fully equilibrated with air (CO2) and add
your Ni particles, you are saying that more HCO3-
and ultimately CO3s will spontaneously be produced. This
won't happen unless thermodynamically favored, and if that
water if fully equilibrated with air CO2 there is no
thermodynamic condition that will force a change in the C
chemistry.  If your Ni particles are somehow consuming H+ or
producing OH- then you've got a driving force, but you still
need a source cations to make CaCO3s (am very interested to
learn how you cheaply extract cations from silicates.)
 Otherwise, adding a catalyst to a system at thermodynamic
equilibrium does nothing.  On the other hand, adding
something to seawater that overcomes the natural, chemical
inhibition of abiotic CaCO3s precipitation could really cause
some serious precipitation and CO2 injection into the
atmosphere. No?
-Greg

From: "lidija...@gmail.com" 
Reply-To: "lidija...@gmail.com" 
Date: Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:32 AM
To: geoengineering 
Subject: [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible
hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture
and storage - Catalysis Science & Technology (RSC Publishing)


With presence of Ni we have increases at the same
time trapping of CO2 and increased the rates of c