Re: [geo] Re: Reply to Ken Caldeira
Clive's problem is that he seems to think Haroon and Lee are foxes. And that anyone associated in any way with organizations like AEI and Exxon must be a fox. And that anyone who doesn't realize this must be naive. He's wrong. Tom. ++ On 6/1/2013 6:05 AM, euggor...@comcast.net wrote: There is an old saying that takes the form, don't invite the fox into the henhouse. As an independent reader it seems to me that this is just what Clive Hamilton is saying. He has a point of view. It ought to be respected but we must go on discussing the prospects and need for geoengineering and watch the fox. You ought to know that the US has spent $400 billion on cancer research during the last 40 years and still there is no cure for cancer, only mitigation. This year $20 billion is being spent in the US. It seems to me that global warming could be a worse prospect for the world than the continuing scourge of cancer and we ought to be spending for research on possible cures like a drunken sailor. My instinct is that the warming is a result of a warm spell that will end in time but I respect the opinion of those who believe it is atmospheric CO2. We ought to do the research because we really don't know, and we need to be ready. -gene *From: *Clive Hamilton m...@clivehamilton.com *To: *Dave Hawkins dhawk...@nrdc.org *Cc: *kcalde...@gmail.com, Ross Salawitch r...@atmos.umd.edu, geoengineering@googlegroups.com *Sent: *Saturday, June 1, 2013 2:23:57 AM *Subject: *Re: [geo] Re: Reply to Ken Caldeira Dear David Thanks for your response to my post; it provides a helpful perspective on the NASA-Ames meeting and subsequent report. However, I think you have misunderstood the point I was making. I am not suggesting that Ken is or was somehow in league with ExxonMobil and the AEI. I was making two points. First, I was pointing to the ethical problem of inviting representatives from the two organizations in the United States perhaps most responsible for propagating climate science denial and undermining efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the NASA meeting was convened /because /ExxonMobil and the AEI have been so successful in their political ambitions. To invite representatives of the organisations that did so much to wreck Plan A to a meeting to help formulate Plan B was, in my view, immoral. Secondly, there is the practical question of 'moral hazard'. ExxonMobil and the AEI both have an interest in promoting geoengineering as a substitute for mitigation, one commercial, one political and ideological. They are in no sense independent. Allowing representatives of those organisations to influence the assessment of geoengineering is likely to distort any analysis in favour of geoengineering over mitigation. Lee Lane's paper purporting to show that sulphate aerosol spraying is the cheapest and best response to global warming is a travesty by any measure, and it is not surprising that it was published and heavily promoted by Bjorn Lomborg. So my critique is aimed at the political naivety of many scientists engaged in geoengineering research and advocacy, including Ken. They do not see how their activities play into the hands of forces that do not share their admirable desire to protect the world from the ravages of climate change. And I must say, David, that your argument that Lane and Kheshgi were invited for their intellectual skills is another instance of this naivety. ExxonMobil and the AEI are hard-ball political players. Lane and Kheshgi are hired for their intellectual skills, skills that they are paid to deploy to their employers' benefit. That is how the world works. To imagine that they can somehow be purified, and become independent intellectuals as they walk into a meeting with well-meaning scientists, is ... well, I don't want to be rude, but I hope you see what I mean. The political dangers of the scientific push for geoengineering research is one of the principal themes of my book, /Earthmasters,/ and there is a great deal more in it on these questions. On the question of the anti-democratic sentiments of the NASA group's report, I read the report very carefully and, in the context of the report overall and the composition of the group, I think my interpretation is a reasonable one. I invite others to read the NASA report and perhaps to peruse the more extensive analysis in my book. Put it this way; if I had been a member of that group and we wanted to write that in an emergency “ideological objections to solar radiation management may be swept aside” and that this is an “obvious political advantage”, all sorts of alarm bells would have gone off. But it appears that in the group none did. Yes, the report does come down more in favour of the buying time argument than the emergency framing, but it does so because the authors calculated that governments would
RE: [geo] Re: Reply to Ken Caldeira
Ditto. I appreciate the difficult task you are doing. - Greg From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [geoengineering@googlegroups.com] on behalf of John Latham [john.latha...@manchester.ac.uk] Sent: Saturday, June 01, 2013 12:42 PM To: andrew.lock...@gmail.com; ebic...@mail.utexas.edu; geoengineering Subject: RE: [geo] Re: Reply to Ken Caldeira Hello Andrew, I think you do a very difficult job extremely well, handling tricky issues fairly and with great sensitivity. Thank you! John (Latham) John Latham Address: P.O. Box 3000,MMM,NCAR,Boulder,CO 80307-3000 Email: lat...@ucar.edu or john.latha...@manchester.ac.uk Tel: (US-Work) 303-497-8182 or (US-Home) 303-444-2429 or (US-Cell) 303-882-0724 or (UK) 01928-730-002 http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/people/latham From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [geoengineering@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Andrew Lockley [andrew.lock...@gmail.com] Sent: 01 June 2013 19:33 To: ebic...@mail.utexas.edu; geoengineering Subject: Re: [geo] Re: Reply to Ken Caldeira I'm responding because of the criticism of my moderation. Clive has previously been unable to defend himself, as for technical reasons he's been unable to post to the group. Accordingly, I allowed him fairly free rein to respond as he saw fit. Members can draw their own conclusions about his arguments and conduct. I note that, on occasion, people on both sides of this debate haven't conducted themselves particularly well. I'm aiming for a light touch moderation strategy, but a firmer hand may soon be needed. If the present squabbling continues, I'll be putting a large number of people on moderation without warning, and without thinking too carefully in any particular individual's case. I hope this won't be necessary. I suggest that there's been adequate exploration of this incident, and of Clive's recent arguments and conduct. To protect everyone's nerves and your inboxes, it may be time we put this particular issue to bed. A On Jun 1, 2013 6:57 PM, Bickel ebic...@mail.utexas.edumailto:ebic...@mail.utexas.edu wrote: Having just read Clive Hamilton’s response to Lee Lane’s post, I found myself wondering if this list is still moderated. First, Clive levels ad hominem attacks against my co-author, Lee Lane, and fails to take any account of the facts Lee just provided. Second, as Tom points out, Clive lays out a logic that because someone is associated with a group Clive disapproves of (or even if they are pre-associated as the case with Lee and AEI) that they must have ill intentions or, at least, intentions that Clive defines as nefarious. This assertion is false on its face. One cannot correctly claim that everyone associated with ExxonMobil or AEI believes or does x, y, or z. Thus, these attacks must be false, yet they allowed through by the moderator. I fear the discussion on this group is devolving to the point where serious members need to consider a different venue. Now, let me address another of Clive’s misunderstandings or “mistakes” that may be due a correction in the next edition his new book. Clive states that: “Lane is responsible for an ‘economic analysis’ (published by the AEI) purporting to show that SRM would be a much cheaper way to deal with global warming than cutting greenhouse gas emissions and is to be preferred.” “Lee Lane's paper purporting to show that sulphate aerosol spraying is the cheapest and best response to global warming is a travesty by any measure, and it is not surprising that it was published and heavily promoted by Bjorn Lomborg.” Clive appears to be referring to the paper that Lee and I contributed as part of the 2009 Copenhagen Consensus on Climate. This paper was drafted in early 2009 and published in Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits in 2010 (Bjorn Lomborg, Cambridge University Press, pp. 9-51). It is interesting that Clive associates the paper only with Lee and AEI, when, in fact, I was also an author on the paper. It could be that it is harder to claim that everyone at the University of Texas at Austin is part of the right-wing conspiracy to destroy the planet. Clive’s claim about the paper’s message is provably false. Lee and I do not “purport to show that sulphate aerosol spraying is the cheapest and best response to global warming” or that SRM is “preferred” to emissions reductions. Rather we argue that the potential benefits of SRM appear to be large, but that the indirect costs are uncertain and could be large. Thus, we should pursue RESEARCH. A more careful reading of our paper may be in order. In terms of SRM vs emissions reductions, here is a quote from the second paragraph: “The reader should not interpret our focus on climate engineering as implying that other responses to climate change are unneeded. The proper mix and relative priority of various responses to climate change is in the purview
RE: [geo] Re: Reply to Ken Caldeira
While I want to respect Ken's wishes to get back to his work, I have a few points to add. First, I too do not like the tone of many of the comments on this list recently about Clive Hamilton and his position. They are unnecessarily dismissive and incorrectly (in my view) treat the issues Clive raises as though they were non-issues. One can disagree with his conclusions without attacking him for publishing his views. But I want to respond directly to Clive's description of Ken's role in the 2006 SRM meeting hosted at NASA Ames. I too attended this meeting and I think Clive's criticism of Ken for his choice of invitees and report co-authors is way off base. Clive takes Ken to task for having invited Haroon Kheshgi of ExxonMobil and Lee Lane, then with AEI, to the workshop and for involving Lee Lane as a co-author of the workshop report. I have not read Clive's book so I am reacting only to his email. I have spent a fair amount of my professional career fighting the positions of ExxonMobil and AEI but I think there is no basis for the innuendo that Clive draws from the fact that Ken involved Haroon and Lee in this workshop. There is a style of advocacy writing that uses the mere fact of a person's employer as an explanation for the findings of various reports. Sometimes there are sufficient associated facts to warrant the implication that the employer explains the position taken. But that is not the case here. Clive seems to have decided to claim that Ken is somehow in league with anti-GHG-mitigation agendas of ExxonMobil and AEI just because he included their employees in the workshop and worked with Lee as a report co-author. There is a much simpler, non-conspiratorial (and in my opinion, more truthful) explanation for Haroon and Lee's workshop involvement: they both possess intellectual skills and had some familiarity with the topic and Ken knew them. (As Haroon and Lee both know, I have had lots of occasion to disagree with positions they have espoused but there is nothing sinister or untoward in their participation in discussions like those at NASA Ames.) As to Clive's claim that the workshop report puts forth a profoundly anti-democratic analysis, that is really a distortion of what the report says. The report described two competing strategic visions for SRM techniques. The first would do some research but put deployment on the shelf -- reserved for use akin to an emergency brake -- deployed only when a greater calamity was unavoidable. The second vision contemplated deployment of SRM in advance of calamitous change as a time-buying technique. The report's comment about the political advantages of the emergency-use vision was an observation that in an emergency, issues that might require some time to work through, tend to get ignored. I would agree that labeling this feature as a political advantage was a poor choice of words, since it can be misrepresented as an endorsement of that form of decision-making. But, if anything, the report's description of the pros and cons of the two strategic visions leans rather heavily in the direction of making the case against the emergency-use approach. I would be surprised if Clive actually believed the report was endorsing that approach and did so because it avoided democratic processes. Clive's highlighting this as the most disturbing aspect of the NASA workshop report comes across to me more as a gotcha quotation approach; rhetorically useful but not an accurate account. Personally, I share a lot of Clive's misgivings about how societies might misuse the prospect of geoengineering having some potential utility in fending off climate disaster but I don't see that advocating a ban on research is a wise approach to dealing with geoengineering's very real downsides. I respect Clive's right to hold and defend a different opinion but as someone who knows Ken pretty well, I think impugning his integrity or judgment as Clive seems to be doing is unsupportable. David Hawkins From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ken Caldeira Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2013 11:48 AM To: Clive Hamilton Cc: Ross Salawitch; geoengineering@googlegroups.com Subject: [geo] Re: Reply to Ken Caldeira Clive Hamilton wrote He [Gates] is an investor in Silver Lining, a company pursuing marine cloud brightening methods. This is false. Bill Gates made no such investment. I could be wrong, but I do not believe that there is any such company. There are some related facts (i.e., David Keith and I made a grant [i.e., gift] to Armond Neukermans to explore indoors the feasibility of making a nozzle, under the specific condition that the grantors and funders would have no financial interest in the outcomes of his work). Clearly, there was never any investment by Bill Gates in any company called Silver Lining. I leave it to Clive, the ethicist, to tell us what
