RE: [geo] Re: [CDR] COP24: here's what must be agreed to keep warming at 1.5°C

[Bernard Mercer]

100% agree, and so good that you articulate the case for collaborative 
approaches.

The options are not mutually exclusive. We can have regenerative 
agriculture/new forests and solar farms in arid lands (and elsewhere). But such 
thinking has become less and less evident in the Geoengineering and CDR posts 
(and within HCA), most folks seem to be content just to push their particular 
solution, and to argue that it is a greater priority than others.

I would like to see the original Socolow & Pacala stabilization wedges 
framework redeployed now, in a context where we need emissions reductions, CDR, 
GE. What could be the contribution of each of the array of interventions? Could 
the many great scientists and engineers on these lists come together to do this?

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com  On 
Behalf Of Veli Albert Kallio
Sent: 12 December 2018 01:00
To: rtulip2...@yahoo.com.au; adam.sa...@bio4climate.org
Cc: Andrew Lockley ; geoengineering@googlegroups.com; 
Carbon Dioxide Removal 
Subject: Re: [geo] Re: [CDR] COP24: here's what must be agreed to keep warming 
at 1.5°C

I agree Adam Sacks that utilisation of desertified biosphere needs to be done. 
I would add even more that there is a need to utilise arid land masses far 
better with drip water irrigation which would allow reforestation in some areas 
where forests can be restored and build more robust food supply system that is 
resilient against shocks by climate change and normal weather events and other 
types of crises. However, I would disagree that there is a necessary either - 
or situation for geoengineering versus desert reclamation. Some deserts should 
be used for solar farms as well to reduce fossil fuel.

Indeed, why do we always need to stand against each other in opposing of 
things, when there is market and space for both kind of activity to steer the 
earth from its disastrous current trajectory? Let's pull the rope together from 
the same end, rather than competing each other by pulling the ropes from the 
opposing ends to get results...

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>> on 
behalf of Adam Sacks 
mailto:adam.sa...@bio4climate.org>>
Sent: 11 December 2018 13:31
To: rtulip2...@yahoo.com.au
Cc: Andrew Lockley; 
geoengineering@googlegroups.com; Carbon 
Dioxide Removal
Subject: [geo] Re: [CDR] COP24: here's what must be agreed to keep warming at 
1.5°C

There is no technology anywhere close to photosynthesis.  It's available today 
and it's cheap to implement and we have 12+ billion anthropogenically 
desertified acres.  We have plenty of knowledge of how to do it, and there are 
currently practitioners on millions of acres.  Geoengineering is a distant and 
unproved set of options, fraught with unintended consequences.  The mainstream 
climate science doesn't understand the power of biology as they're mostly 
physical scientists, and even biologists are caught in the assumptions of the 
dominant paradigm.  Studies of the potential of biological carbon capture and 
the many many other positive effects of eco-restoration are mostly conducted on 
desertified land and the baseline of the possible is grossly underestimated.  
We know this from studies of positive variants.

If we're serious about addressing climate we will have to shift paradigms, and 
recover from our extreme technophilia.  Every time my cell phone or computer 
screw up, I marvel that we think for a moment that technology will save us - 
have we learned anything from dams, large cities, synthetic agricultural 
assault on soil life, etc.?  We don't know more than Nature, we're the global 
sorcerer's apprentice and we're not catching on.

When will we ever learn?

Check out our Compendium (links below), watch some of our videos, explore some 
of the many regenerative land management websites (you can start with 
Regeneration International).

Cheers!

Adam



===

Check out Bio4Climate's Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings 
Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global 
Warming, 3 issues, free download.

===

Adam Sacks, Executive Director
Biodiversity for a Livable Climate
P.O. Box 390469
Cambridge, MA 02139
781-674-2339

===

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, 
build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Buckminster Fuller

===



On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 7:40 AM 'Robert Tulip' via Carbon Dioxide Removal 
mailto:carbondioxideremo...@googlegroups.com>>
 wrote:
“Globally we emit around 40 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, so net zero CO₂ by 
2050 will require CO₂ removal of this scale, starting immediately.”

Not quite.  Net Zero requires that carbon removal equal total emissions.  While 
the primary focus 

RE: [geo] Environmentalists that denounce climate eng research; what to do?

[Bernard Mercer]

I think it is similar to the problems associated with climate scepticism. I 
remember when I first heard about “mirrors in space” as proposed (I think) by 
Paul Crutzen, in the early 2000s. I’ve worked in the biodiversity arena since 
the mid-1980s, and I was horrified. It seemed a license to continue spewing out 
CO2.

The problem is our collective yen to mythologize: that image of great big 
reflectors in space still probably underpins much of the hostility to 
geoengineering (apologies in advance to Oliver Morton as I am sure he goes into 
all of this in his book, which I have, but not yet read).

Now of course (and in large part by learning from the exchanges on this list) I 
know better – of course we need geoengineering, and in addition we now know 
(which I don’t think most of us knew in say, c.2006) that we need a massive 
amount of negative emissions. DAC was not on the table as a serious solution, 
back then, but it is now.

So that is what I think this community needs to concentrate on its 
media/celebrity outreach: the potential of geoengineering solutions to remove 
atmospheric CO2. That is a quite different narrative from the prevention of 
global warming by deflecting solar rays.

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] 
On Behalf Of Andrew Lockley
Sent: 28 August 2017 19:37
To: durbrow ; geoengineering 

Subject: Re: [geo] Environmentalists that denounce climate eng research; what 
to do?

Centrally controlled CE certainly isn't the only approach. It can be democratic 
or decentralised. I'm working on a paper concerning decentralised governance

A

On 28 Aug 2017 19:29, "Eric Durbrow" 
> wrote:


Attenborough referred to climate engineering as “fascist" (he meant that a 
small group of people would control the climate) and Gore has called it 
“insane…delusional". Bill McKibben called it a "serious deadend”

Is it too late to reach out to environmental leaders and get them to change 
their minds for *research* in climate engineering? E.g. an open-letter 
editorial in the Times, etc.

Or do celebrity leaders actually have minimal impact among grassroots 
environmentalists and activists?


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RE: [geo] Plan C

[Bernard Mercer]

Hi Michael,

I love the invocation of Neil Young, but want to add another perspective to 
this. Yes, physics is a part of the problem, but so are other disciplines. 
Clive Hamilton points the finger at academics in the social sciences and the 
humanities in his brilliant recent article in The Guardian, see 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/05/the-great-climate-silence-we-are-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss-but-we-ignore-it.

>From the article: ‘Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do 
>not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on 
>their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans 
>engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on 
>as we please. The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and 
>humanities is reinforced by our total absorption in representations of reality 
>derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a 
>spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.’

This leads me to reflect on the passage at the end of Oliver Morton’s book (see 
pp375-378 in the Granta edition of The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could 
Change the World). Oliver probes the use of ‘we’ in discourses, noting that ‘as 
far as geoengineering goes – as far as almost all international issues go – 
there is no we.’

Perhaps the real beginning point is to blame ourselves (I certainly blame 
myself for not having done enough, so far, to build a ‘we’ in the forests 
arena) rather than a putative ‘they’.

Best,

Bernard

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] 
On Behalf Of NORTHCOTT Michael
Sent: 06 May 2017 23:59
To: jonathan.marsh...@uts.edu.au
Cc: geoengineering@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [geo] Plan C

Steven Hawking has said this about moving planets before. This is why ultra 
physics is in some ways part of the problem. It makes people think purely in 
terms of equations and possibility theorems.

Neil Young considered this escape option more memorably and critically in the 
1970s. He noted there would just be a chosen few. And they wouldn't be 
peasants. He thought it was wrong then and it still is.

There is one home planet. We need to clean up our act.

Michael

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armour coming, saying something about a 
queen.
There were peasants singing and drummers drumming and the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing to the sun that was floating on the breeze.
Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.
Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.

I was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes. I was 
hoping for replacement when the sun burst through the sky There was a band 
playing in my head and I felt like getting high. I was thinking about what a 
friend had said, I was hoping it was a lie. Thinking about what a friend had 
said, I was hoping it was a lie.

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the 
sun,
There were children crying and colors flying all around the chosen ones.
All in a dream, all in a dream, the loading had begun.
They were flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun.
Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home.




On 6 May 2017, at 05:21, Jonathan Marshall 
> wrote:

I  don't really think he's talking 6-7 billion people either  - but I think it 
needs to be pointed out because people tend to think it would include them. 
 No it won't.

Even so, doing this for a couple of thousand people, "the select few", would 
take hellish amounts of effort and money - and if you are going to do all that, 
then its much better to work on ending the problem.

jon





From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
> on 
behalf of Greg Rau >
Sent: Saturday, 6 May 2017 1:17 PM
To: geoengineering@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [geo] Plan C

I don't think Hawkins is talking 6-7B people, but a select few who could keep 
the species going somewhere.  Who gets to stay and who gets to go and why ought 
to pose a moral dilemma that could keep our ethicist friends busy for years. 
I'm not religious, but wouldn't this be like the Rapture 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture
Anyway, we've transcended geoengineering, but what the heck it's Friday.
Greg



From: Jonathan Marshall 
>
To: "geoengineering@googlegroups.com" 
>
Sent: Friday, May 5, 2017 7:46 PM
Subject: Re: [geo] Plan C

RE: [geo] Woody Biomass for Power and Heat Impacts on the Global Climate

[Bernard Mercer]

Hi all,

Below is a link to a short synthesis report from Chatham House that accompanies 
their “Woody Biomass for Power and Heat” report, which Andrew referenced below.

And some other links to post-publication comment and critique. If nothing else, 
the report has brought the strong academic disagreements on bioenergy out into 
the open (125 academics criticising the report, a different group of 50 
academics supporting it).


  *   The synthesis report (“The Environmental Impact of the Use of Biomass for 
Power and Heat”) is at 
https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/impacts-demand-woody-biomass-power-and-heat-climate-and-forests.


  *   See a BBC article summarizing the disagreement between the two groups of 
academics, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39267774.


  *   The letter from Piers Forster and 124 other academics (“gives an 
inaccurate interpretation of the impact of harvesting on forest carbon stock") 
was issued via IEA Bioenergy Technology Collaboration Programme, the letter and 
other supporting documents are here, 
http://www.ieabioenergy.com/publications/iea-bioenergy-response/?utm_source=AEBIOM+AM+ONLY+%28official%29_campaign=41bd2d3162-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_13_medium=email_term=0_00bf999edc-41bd2d3162-245804889.



  *   The author of the report wrote a rebuttal of the IEA Bioenergy letter, 
see 
https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/publications/2017-04-05-ResponsetoIEABioenergy.pdf.



  *   There is an interesting article reviewing the dispute, from the Institute 
of Materials, Minerals, and Mining, 
http://www.iom3.org/materials-world-magazine/news/2017/mar/31/scientists-react-chatham-house-biomass-rebuttal.



  *   I have not been able to find the letter from the 50 scientists supporting 
the report (referenced in the BBC article).

 Best wishes,

Bernard

Bernard Mercer
Mercer Environment Associates
15 Beardell Street
London
SE19 1TP

44 (0)7710 407809

bmer...@mercerenvironment.net<mailto:bmer...@mercerenvironment.net>
www.mercerenvironment.net<http://www.mercerenvironment.net/>

Mercer Environment Associates Ltd, Registered in England and Wales. Company No: 
8180100. Registered address: 1-6 The Stables, Ford Road, Totnes, Devon, TQ9 5LE.



From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] 
On Behalf Of Andrew Lockley
Sent: 15 April 2017 09:00
To: geoengineering <geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [geo] Woody Biomass for Power and Heat Impacts on the Global Climate

Poster's note : full report on link. BECCS section below

https://reader.chathamhouse.org/woody-biomass-power-and-heat-impacts-global-climate?_ga=1.89601309.723207103.1492243082#<https://reader.chathamhouse.org/woody-biomass-power-and-heat-impacts-global-climate?_ga=1.89601309.723207103.1492243082>

Woody Biomass for Power and 
Heat<https://reader.chathamhouse.org/woody-biomass-power-and-heat-impacts-global-climate>
Impacts on the Global Climate
[Image removed by sender. Woody Biomass for Power and Heat]
DATE
 23 February 2017
PROJECTS
Energy, Environment and Resources Department, 
<https://www.chathamhouse.org/taxonomy/term/203> The Environmental Impact of 
the Use of Biomass for Power and 
Heat<https://www.chathamhouse.org/taxonomy/term/591>
AUTHOR
Duncan Brack<https://www.chathamhouse.org/node/3651>Associate Fellow, Energy, 
Environment and Resources
ISBN978 1 78413 190 6
DOWNLOAD PDF 470 
KB<https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/publications/research/2017-02-23-woody-biomass-global-climate-brack-final2.pdf>
CONTENTS
Executive Summary

The use of wood for electricity generation and heat in modern (non-traditional) 
technologies has grown rapidly in recent years. For its supporters, it 
represents a relatively cheap and flexible way of supplying renewable energy, 
with benefits to the global climate and to forest industries. To its critics, 
it can release more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than the 
fossil fuels it replaces, and threatens the maintenance of natural forests and 
the biodiversity that depends on them. Like the debate around transport 
biofuels a few years ago, this has become a highly contested subject with very 
few areas of consensus. This paper provides an overview of the debate around 
the impact of wood energy on the global climate, and aims to reach conclusions 
for policymakers on the appropriate way forward.

Although there are alternatives to the use of wood for biomass power and heat, 
including organic waste, agricultural residues and energy crops, they tend to 
be less energy-dense, more expensive and more difficult to collect and 
transport. Wood – and particularly wood pellets, now the dominant solid biomass 
commodity on world markets – is therefore likely to remain the biomass fuel of 
choice for some time.

Biomass is classified as a source of renewable energy in national policy 
frameworks, benefiting from financ

RE: [geo] Scientists Focused on Geoengineering Challenge the Inevitability of Multi-Millennial Global Warming

[Bernard Mercer]

I agree Adam. I’m currently doing some synthesis on aspects of the potential 
implications of disruptive / exponential technologies (e.g. in relation to 
ecosystems and clean energy) and while some topics (e.g. electric cars, 
Blockchain) are now media-visible, others are not.

I think that a key problem is lack of requisite collective endeavour by 
scientists, technologists, assorted others. Where are the attempts at holistic 
overviews, syntheses, analyses?

We have done this in the past. For example, the 1955 Wenner-Gren symposium that 
produced Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, and the 1987 follow-up, 
The Earth as Transformed by Human Action. It may be the case that we assume 
there is no longer a need for such collaborations, now that we have IPCC. But 
this is wrong: IPCC has a quite different remit – it is essentially a reporting 
mechanism. For the topics covered in this thread, the need is as much for 
argument, debate, and the advancement (and debunking) of hypotheses.

To pick two examples from the thread:

Greg argued that ‘Isn't biology naturally designed to recycle rather than store 
most C and nutrients such that there has to be intervention to increase the 
photosynthesis/respiration ratio to make bio CDR area and energy efficient 
(e.g.,biochar, CROPS, BECCS, etc)? For these reasons isn't this why abiotic 
rather than bio processes dominate natural CO2 management on big time and space 
scales, and therefore shouldn't enhancing these proven, global scale processes 
take a rather large seat at the CDR table?’

There are some huge assumptions in here: do abiotic rather than bio processes 
really dominate natural CO2 management? Where in the world of publications is 
the marshalling of evidence to support this? As an aside, I think it ignores 
the fact that biotic CDR does demonstrably provide a form of permanence over 
millennia, e.g. in standing forests that renew themselves, slowly increasing 
aggregate carbon storage in the process. The implication is that we need to 
finesse definitions of ‘recycling’ and ‘cycling’, and grapple properly with 
interpretations of ‘transience’ in ways that are meaningful in the now. 
Measures to regenerate degraded forests, if continued, will in principle be 
able to ensure carbon storage over several upcoming centuries, a big slab of 
time in the context of the current CDR imperative.

Ray noted that ‘Whatever you put into the atmosphere by deforestation can (in 
principle) be taken  back on a century time scale by reforestation, if there is 
political will to do so.  Beyond that, it is extremely dicey to rely on an 
equilibrium forest to be a carbon sink.  There is very little soil carbon that 
is truly recalcitrant, and most studies of average age of soil carbon show 
rather little that is much older than a century. This is a rather unsettled 
area of the carbon cycle, though.’

Similar points to Greg; but what caught my eye is the statement that this area 
of the carbon cycle is ‘rather unsettled’. Why? And where is the report that 
provides the best possible analysis of the challenges in ways that neither 
dumb-down nor lock up knowledge in technical garb such that policymakers can 
make no sense of it?

It seems to me that we have a wealth of knowledge that should help us make the 
right calls on which abiotic and biotic interventions should be prioritised - 
when, and where, and how (and I can see, and I am sure that many others can 
too, that we need both). But if this is grappled with in a somewhat ideological 
and individualistic manner (each advocate only promoting their favoured 
solution) then it will not be surprising if policymakers turn away, throw up 
their hands, and ignore. Why should they listen if what they hear is cacophony, 
not choir?

Best,

Bernard




From: adamd...@gmail.com [mailto:adamd...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Adam Dorr
Sent: 06 September 2016 00:57
To: Greg Rau <gh...@sbcglobal.net>
Cc: R. T. Pierrehumbert <phys1...@nexus.ox.ac.uk>; Bernard Mercer 
<bmer...@mercerenvironment.net>; andrew.lock...@gmail.com; geoengineering 
<geoengineering@googlegroups.com>; Andrew Revkin <rev...@gmail.com>; 
cla...@onid.orst.edu; Oliver Morton <olivermor...@economist.com>; Oliver Morton 
<omeconom...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [geo] Scientists Focused on Geoengineering Challenge the 
Inevitability of Multi-Millennial Global Warming

Very interesting discussion all around! But I would add that I have my usual 
concerns about the way in which folks are thinking about future technologies. 
With few exceptions, the contributes to the discussions commit one or more of 
the general errors in reasoning about the future that I've analyzed in depth in 
my recent paper (attached). I touched on this very briefly in my response to 
Clarke et al. (2016) that Nature Climate Change published which called out 
their unspoken assumptions about future technological progress and the need to 
think ser