[geo] Climate Engineering: From ‘Slippery slope’ to ‘uphill struggle’??
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901117310821 “Abstract It is increasingly recognised that meeting the obligations set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change will not be physically possible without deploying large-scale techniques for either removing greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. In this article we report on the findings of a scenarios method designed to interrogate how far these ‘climate engineering’ ideas may develop in the future and under what governance arrangements. Unlike previous studies in climate engineering foresight that have narrowly focussed on academic perspectives, a single climate engineering idea and a restricted range of issues, our approach sought to respond to theoretical imperatives for ‘broadening out’ and ‘opening up’ research methods applied to highly uncertain and ambiguous topics. We convened a one-day event with experts in climate change and climate engineering from across the sectors of government, industry, civil society and academia in the UK, with additional experts from Brazil, Germany and India. The participants were invited to develop scenarios for four climate engineering ideas: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, direct air capture and storage, stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening. Manifold challenges for future research were identified, placing the scenarios in sharp contrast with early portrayals of climate engineering research as threatening a ‘slippery slope’ of possible entrenchments, lock-ins and path dependencies that would inexorably lead to deployment. We suggest that the governance challenges for climate engineering should therefore today be thought of as less of a slippery slope than an ‘uphill struggle’ and that there is an increasingly apparent need for governance that responsibly incentivises, rather than constrains, research. We find that affecting market processes by introducing an effective global carbon price and direct government expenditure on research and development are incentives with broad potential applications to climate engineering. Responsibly incentivising research will involve a pluralistic architecture of governance arrangements and policy instruments that attends to collective ambitions as well as national differences and emerges from an inclusive and reflexive process.” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[geo] Irrigation as a geoengineering technique
As the world energy supply transitions to renewables, we'll have a lot of stranded power. One potential use of this is in desalination. Obviously, a lot of water could be used in agriculture and landscaping, but I've never seen a study of the geoengineering potential of mass irrigation using desalinated water (although it features in some BECCS models). The main constraint on the spread of forests into grasslands, and the spread of grasslands into desert, is water limitation. Taking away that water limitation would allow transition of landscapes from one biome to another. Could this be engineered? It's non-trivial to calculate the fluxes involved, as water circulates within ecosystems. Distribution is clearly an issue - you can't cover the entire world with lawn sprinklers. One possible approach is to fill depressions with water - either freshwater or seawater, which is then topped up with freshwater as it evaporates. This would create new or extended endorheic basin lakes, leading to local and regional lake-effect precipitation increases. The reliance on such water bodies would enable this technique to be treated as an engineering monolith - without the distributional issues associated with irrigation of wider landscapes. This approach was previously discussed on the group many years ago, but the intention was to store sea water as a buffer against rising sea levels, not to trigger ecosystem transformations. I'd be pleased to see some critiques of this nascent concept. The most obvious questions are: *What % of forest ecosystem water is internally recycled (obviously highly variable) *To what extent could lake-effect precip be engineered from artificial lakes? *What are the volumes of suitable basins - and what pumping and desalination costs could be expected? *Assuming steady falls in the cost of renewables, how much energy, and at what prices, might be available for such endeavours? As an alternative, is pumping water into the Antarctic interior an appealing engineering intervention? It would grow no forests, but it could tackle sea level rise more effectively Looking forward to hearing views on this idea. A -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[geo] An Audience with Dr Nathan Myhrvold: How Invention Can Spur Development (London, 22 February)
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-audience-with-dr-nathan-myhrvold-how-invention-can-spur-development-tickets-42419727547?aff=eand The speaker is a prominent supporter of geoengineering research, and I'm unaware of any other opportunities to hear him speak. A -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
