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More Climate Scientists Now Support Geoengineering
ofcourseyouare writes "The Independent is a UK newspaper which has been pushing hard for cuts in CO2 emissions for years. It recently polled a group of 'the world's leading climate scientists,' revealing a 'growing support for geoengineering' in addition to cutting CO2 — not as a substitute. For example, Jim Lovelock, author of The Gaia Theory, comments: 'I disagree that geoengineering the climate is a dangerous distraction and I disagree that on no account should it ever be considered. I strongly agree that we now need a "plan B" where a geoengineering strategy is drawn up in parallel with other measures to curb CO2 emissions.' Professor Kerry Emanuel of MIT said, 'While a geoengineering solution is bound to be less than desirable, the probability of getting global agreement on emissions reductions before it is too late is very small.'"
Bonus points to the article for misspelling "fertilizing".
OMG troll. It's from a UK newspaper. Your local dialect and its alternative spellings are irrelevant to them.
You just got troll'd!
Then of course there is the ph problem with fertilizing the oceans discovered in the past 2-3 years. Forcing the absorption of CO2 into the ocean tends to cause the creation of carbonic acid, which eats calcium. Calcium provides the building blocks and protective shells for many simple microscopic oceanic plant/animal life. It also will eat away at the sells of crustaceans.
Just a small pH change in the ocean can collapse the entire food chain.
Of course you can counter this by adding quicklime to the ocean (which is pretty costly). And you can balance the nutrition loss by adding more nitrogen to the water. Of course that means that you essentially have dumped a bunch of materials you mined (by producing a lot of CO2) into the ocean to re-balance an already balanced ecosystem.
Considering just 5 years ago the prevailing thought was that the ocean could sequester an almost unlimited amount of CO2, its pretty obvious that we don't fully understand how badly tinkering with it could f-things up.
Not really. All we know is that the general trend of the earth's temperatures have been rising.
We know a hell of a lot more than that. Start here.
We don't have a clue what caused it, if it will continue, or anything.
We know that the greenhouse effect predicts enhanced surface warming, stratospheric cooling, changes in the diurnal cycle, etc., which have been observed. We know that the warming isn't coming from the oceans (they're gaining heat, not losing it). We know that the heat isn't coming from the Sun (irradiance hasn't gone up to match the temperatures), or reduced volcanic activitiy, etc. Basic atomic physics predicts that the greenhouse effect exists and will grow as CO2 levels increase.
Plus, it isn't even global warming, its local warming some places have higher highs and others don't.
It is global warming, as the global average temperature has increased, as has the average temperature of most locations on Earth.
Just take a look in an Almanac and you will see that the highest temperatures for a given day don't correspond with the CO2 emissions for the year.
Duh. They're not supposed to. The existence of weather doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist.
Ok, so some of the costland is gone and cities must be moved further inland.
Oh, that's all. Let's just relocate some cities. Need to move Manhattan? No problem, technology will solve that, it'll be cheap. Venice goes underwater for good? Who cares, it has no historic value, we can build a new city. 10 million coastal Bangladeshis decide they need to move to India or Pakistan? I'm sure that won't have any political consequences. Technology will just solve that anyway.
That is also assuming that technology will not advance to where that is no longer a problem which my guess is based on technology throughout history is that if there is a problem humans will solve it.
Yeah, that's why there aren't any more problems in the world. Technology solved them all.
Because we have done such a wonderful job in the past. Things like killing off the wolves in Yellowstone, and changing the hydrology of Florida. Yes, we are so good at "geoengineering" that this could not possibly go wrong.
*snirk* I crack myself up.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
the ozone hole that appeared over antarctica and caused all the panic is a natural and annual phenomena.
Uh, you know that's bullshit, right?
the annual ozone hole was first measured in 1956-57, long before the ozone destroying CFCs were in common use.
You're confused. There is a seasonal cycle in ozone concentrations. CFCs have added a long-term downward trend on top of that seasonal cycle, meaning that each winter the hole is on average larger it used to be.
There is no overall or permanent depletion of the ozone layer.
The data disagree.
I'll add one more thing to my post - people old enough will remember back in the 70 and early 80's when we thought we were causing a massive cooling and heading towards and ice age.
"We" (meaning the climate science community) didn't actually think that (see, e.g., here). There were a few papers that got a lot of media hype, but the general view among scientists at the time was "we don't know enough yet, but it's more likely to warm than cool". 30+ years later and the view is "it's very likely to warm, but we're not totally sure how much".
We better be *damn* sure we know what will happen when we intentionally release more change into the world than what we are trying to fix.
Well, one virtue of some of the present geoengineering schemes is that they're fast-acting, and conversely, quick to turn off if they start having side effects. Take stratospheric aerosol injection. Aerosols precipitate out of the atmosphere in a year or two; CO2 stays up for a century or more. If erroneously think the planet is warming and cool it with aerosols, you can turn them off within a few years if you need to. If you erroneously think the planet is cooling and warm it with CO2, your mistake stays around a lot longer. The decision problem is asymmetric.
That being said, your basic point is valid: geoengineering is a lot riskier than just reducing CO2 concentrations back to earlier levels.
The IPCC figures are extremely suspect.
And you believe that because a skeptic web site said so. Perhaps you should investigate the science a little more closely and, I don't know, read something written by climate scientists. You might want to re-evaluate your biases if your default response is to automatically dismiss pretty much the entire scientific literature on every climate related topic.
When, for some reason, their modelling produces figures they don't like, there always seems to be an "adjustment" in their favor.
That's nonsense. There are places where models agree with data, and places where models disagree with data, which is the case in any science. There isn't any conspiracy to make everything fit; if there were, there wouldn't ever be any disagreement.
There is an interesting website examining the work on global temperature mesurement, Urban Heat Islands etc somewhere, damed if i can find it though.
You're probably thinking of "Watts Up With That". They were crowing a lot about the urban heat island effect, but got a lot quieter after one of their own contributors analyzed the data from stations with no risk of urban contamination and found basically no difference in the temperature record. This is unsurprising, because the urban heat island effect was already found to be insignificant, and at least one of the surface records cross-checks against rural stations anyway. Not to mention the oceans are also warming (no urban heat islands there), the satellites agree with the surface stations (no contamination there), etc.