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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.'"
Great. Geoengineering. Us trying to "solve" a natural problem. Can you say "rabbits in Australia?" Everytime we try one of these "solutions" the result is trouble. I would be agreeable to letting the scientists play geoengineers if they agree to let us violently kill them WHEN it fucks things up even worse.
I guess we're going to learn how to terraform other planets by starting out with this one.
Because we have to.
If attempted this will likely turn out to be as stupid a decision as it was to introduce western predators to Australia in the hope that they would help fix the problem caused by introducing rats and rabbits. When it comes to nature and our ecosystem the rule of thumb ought to be "leave it the fuck alone".
schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms
that doesn't sound like a real great idea. Bonus points to the article for misspelling "fertilizing".
Because you should be wary of a law... the one that talks about unintended consequences.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
It wouldn't possibly be the same climate scientists that would design and implement these mega billion dollar projects, would it?
Highlander 2? Yeah, I tried to forget it too...
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Why shouldn't geoengineering climate (dumping Fe in the India ocean, for example) be a substitute for cutting CO2?
You know, when I was a kid they found out that aerosol spray cans (spray cans!) had eaten a huge hole in the ozone layer. Who could have anticipated that? But obviously nothing like that will happen this time.
And that's being optimistic.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Something tells me that if you do the math, cutting CO2 emissions will be way cheaper and safer than any of the options listed in the article. Seeding the oceans with iron, one of the more reasonable sounding ideas... OK, but how much iron would have to be mixed into the oceans to get rid of billions of tons of atmospheric carbon? At what cost?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I mean, the way I usually go around getting people to give me deeply considered answers is to do a poll. How many of these scientists actually thought the question through? How many actually have enough expertise and experience to make their responses meaningful even if they had thought it through.
Seriously, is this science or fucking American Idol?!?
With any poll, you also have to consider who commissioned the poll, who implemented it, what the agendas are, etc. Because nobody does this shit for free, and there's always an angle.
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The article was pretty short on details. First, I would hardly call 54% of 80 experts a statistically significant number. Also, who are these experts. I recall the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed some 2500 scientists and experts but when you actually looked at the make up of the group there were huge numbers of non scientists. Additionally, a good number of the scientists who were listed requested their names be removed from the list.
More importantly, when we try to "engineer" the atmosphere we are asking for trouble. We don't understand how all of this works and in fact, it may not be a problem at all. There is some evidence that suggests carbon FOLLOWS warming buy several hundreds of years. There seems to be a small but growing group of people that feel the sun's activities are far more responsible for warming and cooling that carbon.
Additionally, Methane and water vapor are far more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon.
Finally, I just read that temperatures peaked in '98 and have actually cooled by about a half degree or so. It seems that the earth has always warmed and cooled in cycles. I think it is far more effective to effect local solutions than to risk geo-engineering with processes that we don't understand and really can't control.
I see so many examples of mankind engineering something and then later finding out it was a mistake.
My reply to professor Kerry Emanuel, M.I.T.
Fine. You want to do geoengineering?
Get yourself on a probe launch to Mars and do it there. Leave the EARTH ALONE.
It is my belief that when we ON PURPOSE start trying to tune the atmosphere is where the real problems will begin.
People like this are so full of themselves, they are willing to risk the entire biosphere over crack pot, unproven ideas.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Like it's the climate scientists who design and implement CO2 abatement policies? No, that's economists and politicians. Geoengineering is an ENGINEERING project. Scientists might tell engineers how much needs to happen, but they're not the ones who would design, build, or deploy the devices.
Besides, if you're insinuating that climate geoengineering is all a scientific conspiracy to get funding dollars, that's pretty lame. Even if you're a conspiracy nutjob, how is inventing a cheaper solution (geoengineering) than existing plans (emissions abatement) going to get them more money?
Not everyone will be wiped out. The earth overall won't give a fuck and humanity won't die out either. The question is just how many [m|b]illions of humans will have to die before the natural control loops take effect.
The Earth is a ball of rock and couldn't care less what that layer of thin, greenish paste on the surface does with itself. But my point is still valid: yes, the Aztecs, the Incas, and other early civilizations fell because they didn't know how to manage their immediate environment, but societies elsewhere were unaffected. Assuming that global warming is, in fact, the threat that some of us think it is, can we claim that we understand the system enough to fix it? Most would consider the deaths of a billion or more human beings to be an inadequate solution, regardless of whether our species survives (or not.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Plant more trees.
Sig this!
Few people seem to want to accept it but we are already committed to a course of action where we have to mess around even further with the ocean ecosystem to keep it in something like its current state. Global warming's effect on land is in all honesty not going to be too severe. Weather patterns might shift a bit, areas of farmland will probably be lost, but that's about it. Major problem for humanity that needs the farmland, but not so bad for all other life on land. Rising ocean acidity will lead to radical changes in ocean life though. At the very least, we're going to have to be dumping alkalis into areas around coral reefs for a while to come yet.
Use the same process the U.S. used to get everyone else to help invade Iraq. That worked like a charm!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The so-called climate scientists interviewed in the article are mostly oceanographers, engineers, museum directors and authors. It looks like only about half are literally climate scientists/physicists.
Would you abolish medicine because it sometimes has side effects? Meanwhile, we have a raving addiction to crack (coal and gasoline) which definitely do have known negative effects, which we are not treating at all. I doubt the unintended consequences will be nearly as bad as completely uncontrolled consequences we are headed for.
With over 6.5 billion people on the planet, we DO have an environmental impact, so opting out is simply not an option. The only choice is whether to (1) run headlong into disaster (which I predict is a good description of mankind will actually do); (2) minimize the impact; or (3) counterbalance the impact. You can't simply rule out (3) on a vague generality.
Maybe there don't have to be any unnatural deaths, just less births. All life requires energy to exist. The human race tripled in size over the 72 years between 1927 and 1999. Where has the energy come from to enable that to happen ? Fossil fuels. Stored energy which we have used to establish ourselves as masters of the planet. But when those fossil fuels run out, or they cause the climate to change (meaning we can't use them), then the numbers of humans must re-adjust to the available energy. Unless you want to live in a world like a cube farm.
This is why I want to see manned space exploration. It is getting critical that we plant seeds elsewhere, before the energy required is more than we are prepared to expend, due to needing it to keep people alive here on earth. You can already hear it - why waste money on space when there's $problem on earth to fix first.
I believe that the earth is a seed. It has just enough energy encapsulated within it to enable intelligent life to grow, learn and then leave to plant life elsewhere. Once the energy is used up, this earth will die. This is nature. We are part of nature, however much we pretend otherwise. We are supposed to leave this planet. Do young birds stay close to the nest once they're able to fly ? Do plants forsake the light in favour of their own seed ? Why then do so many people desire to hide behind their fears by condemning expense.
More people + same space = less for all. (Wars, plagues, tyranny, misery)
More people + more space = enough for all. (Freedom, Insulation, Happiness, Expansion)
Anybody who complains that manned space exploration is a waste of money, is penny wise and pound foolish.
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.
To the tune of "There was an old lady"
So we dump Fe into the water
To make the planet
a little less hotter
And....
Then we spray Agent Orange ...
to cut back on the O2
Shit, you can't rhyme Orange with anything to do with oxygen fires...
Yes, all that extra research and development, and all that spending on new technology sure is horrible for the economy.
Yeah, it is horrible for the economy to spend billions inefficiently. Its called the broken window fallacy. If global warming can be mitigated for less than the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then that's what we should do. To do anything else is to throw away money and resources.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
DDT isn't that toxic,
DDT is classified as "moderately toxic" by the US National Toxicological Program[40] and "moderately hazardous" by WHO, based on the rat oral LD50 of 113 mg/kg.[12] It is not considered to be acutely toxic, and in fact it has been applied directly to clothes and/or used in soap.[41] DDT has on rare occasions been administered orally as a treatment for barbiturate poisoning.[42]DDT toxicity
and it's not forbidden all over the world either,
DDT was subsequently banned for agricultural use worldwide under the Stockholm Convention, but its limited use in disease vector control continues to this day in certain parts of the world and remains controversial.[5] DDT
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The side effect of medicine occasionally kills a person, or a few. Perhaps a few thousand, if bad enough.
The side effects of geoengineering could kill EVERYTHING.
There should be at least some care taken before any major operation is undertaken, with that in mind.
Not to mention that it might interfere with my plan to buy up land in Florida a half-mile from the ocean, and sell it as waterfront property in 20-30 years.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Most the opposition argues that we didn't contribute to global warming because we are so insignificant - largely because they lost their previous arguments big time.
They have no right to oppose climate engineering on the grounds that it might cause problems when they argue humans couldn't have significantly contributed to the crisis.
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Well, we had a real problem in the southeastern US with soil erosion - especially on road embankments as our highway system expanded.
What to do? All sorts of theories were proposed, finally many states decided to import Kudzu as it yielded *great* soil erosion techniques and even looked pretty. Anything that might happen would have to been less worse than the Kudzu.
Well, except that we didn't understand the effect on our environment that the Kudzu would play. Turns out that it wasn't such a hot idea and was SIGNIFICANTLY worse than just letting nature grow plants back on the bare soil (let alone if we had just planted grass - but people felt that would take too long). Many of the same arguments, in fact if you look at pretty much any of those "unintended consequences" you will see VERY similar arguments.
Of course, this time we truly understand things - right? There is a great scientific consensus on the subject so it can not be wrong. We are smarter than that now - nothing we ever do any more does something we didn't intend and that something be very bad for us.
If this has the equivalent impact of the Kudzu we are going to kill the planet faster than Global Warming (even in it's wildest forms) could ever do. Your analogy of medicine can not do that. Heck, in fact as well tested and regulated as medicine is we still have MAJOR unintended consequences - we only have to look towards medicines like Thalidomide for examples of where unintended consequences are quite bad.
Personally when we start playing with things that can sterilize the planet if we do not understand it well enough I get kinda cautious - others, well, CO2 is the Devil and must be eradicated (after all, nothing is ever worse than the Devil). But, alas, like any other religion rational thought isn't what got many to where they are today and rational thought isn't going to get them to a reasonable stance. It will not be recognized as bad until those unintended consequences get bad enough that there is not choice but to see them and then everyone else will be blamed.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
It's a bit late to decide not to affect the planet. We already have done so. If we can get everyone to cut their carbon use, and all plant trees, then this is geoengineering. If we decide not to do that, and carry on emitting carbon dioxide and other stuff, then that will be geoengineering too - the bad sort.
Unfortunately, it is not always easy to distinguish between good and bad proposals. The solutions originally proposed for acid rain back in the 1970's - reducing exhaust gas temperatures and using scrubbers - would have resulted in us consuming more coal for the same energy production, and would probably have made things worse. In fact, the sulphur compounds are probably helping the cloud cover, so we might be in other trouble if we got rid of them too quickly. Making methanol biofuel from waste sugar cane seemed good back in the 1970's too.
Well, anyone can make mistakes. The scary thing about geoengineering is that we only get one stab at it. We can't even do a proper experiment with a control. Any changes we make will be hard to measure because there are natural random events, such as sunspots, weather patterns, volcanoes, and so forth. So we want a proposal that should be effective, have some measureable effect before going global-scale, and should be capable of being turned of smartly if we find it is not working.
Top of the proposals in may view, are the ships that spray seawater into the air. This could create cloud cover and rain, and absorb heat at sea level, and re-emit it at the top of the atmosphere where it may radiate into space. If it is not doing the right thing, then we can turn off the sprays, and everything is back where we started.
Number two would be adding iron salts to the sea. Iron is scarce in seawater, and the lack of iron throttles algae growth. A small amount of iron will produce a lot of algae, fixing carbon, and providing food for other sea creatures. This is all measurable. If we find we are doing the wrong thing, then we can't get the iron back out of the sea again, so we have to start small scale and work upwards.
Most of the other solutions in the article are a bit scary for me. There are many other smaller-scale proposals not mentioned that will not provide a global solution by themselves, but should give a cost effective contribution. Examples are capping old coal mines to store methane emissions, or generating fuels from bacteria to fix carbon. For completeness' sake, I add the virtuous proposal of getting people to use less energy, but that isn't happening nearly fast enough.
Yes, geoengineering is a bit scary. But, right now, it is a lot less scary than the geoengeneering we are doing right now by carrying on as we have always done.
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.
Because that money doesn't disappear from the economy, it circulates? And more money circulated means a stronger economy? Especially since oil profits leave the country, while wind or solar profits wouldn't?
Because more expensive energy means more researching to energy efficiency, driving industry forward, leading to a stronger economy?
Because energy sources don't have static costs, but depend heavily on the amount of utilization and research and development put into them?
If global warming can be mitigated for less than the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions
It can't. Geoengineering can only mitigate the symptoms, and likely only for a while. It gives us more time to solve the actual problem, but that's all it does.
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.
Yes, we are addicted to coal and gasoline... just as I am addicted to food and water. We need energy to have a modern civilized society. I am not convinced that eliminating the use of coal and oil is such a great idea. That is because that cheap energy derived from coal and oil has brought about the lifestyle that we (in "western" society) enjoy and other nations tend to want to have.
Those of us with the luxury of nuclear technology, silicon refining capability, and computer controlled manufacturing can experiment with things like wind, solar, and nuclear sources of power. Those that are living in grass huts and have primitive (by our standards) metal working capability do not have the luxury to experiment. If they have coal and oil in the ground they are going to use it. Telling them that they cannot have internal combustion engines because of some distant threat of global warming, sea levels rising, and the terrific storms that tend to follow will fall on deaf ears. The global temperature rising by one degree and sea levels rising by one foot in the next decade does not compare to the next meal.
The unintended consequence of the efforts to save humanity through reducing CO2 induced global warming is that people will die because they do not have access to electricity, heat, transportation, and refrigeration.
I have a better idea than experimenting with geoengineering, deal with the climate change regardless of the cause. The reason I say that is not only because I am not convinced of human induced global warming but because even if we stop producing CO2 (outside of actually breathing) today the effects of that CO2 will be with us for a very long time.
Sea level rise could be because of increased insolation melting glaciers, or increased greenhouse gasses, or because the Earth's core is cooling (and therefore shrinking). The solution in my mind is the same, move inland.
The same with climatic temperature rise, adapt the crops grown in the area, get air conditioning if you don't already, etc.
If we want geoengineering to be successful we will need the cooperation of many nations. Some nations will not participate because of the cost. Some nations will not participate because they want global warming. (Take Canada or Russia for example, large areas of land could turn from frozen wastelands into fertile cropland.) Some may not participate because of the principle of national sovereignty, they don't want some outside influence telling them how to run their country.
I'm OK with reducing our use of coal and oil but not at the cost of reducing our standard of living. I was just hearing on the radio this week about how the coal waste is threatening municipal water supplies. (I don't recall where.) If we can move to solar, wind, and nuclear power then we will no longer have the threat to our water quality. Problem is determining the cost of moving to another energy source vs. dealing with the coal waste in a more responsible manner. It may make more sense to just dispose of the waste elsewhere.
Importing something on the order of one TRILLION dollars of oil per year is an economic disaster for the USA. Solutions to that problem include domestic sources of oil, electric transport (cars and/or light rail), synthetic fuel (which would require another energy source such as nuclear), conservation and efficiency improvements, and probably more I cannot come up with right now.
(Corn ethanol and soybean diesel fuel is just trading one economic and environmental disaster for another.)
I agree that burning coal and oil have known negative effects. NOT burning coal and oil has known negative effects. In my mind the negative effects of burning the coal and oil is nothing compared to the negative effects of not burning coal and oil.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Its not about money. Its about resources. It takes more of them to build solar & wind farms than it costs to burn more coal and oil. To actually stop global warming, we would have to pretty much stop using fossil fuels entirely. We would also have to do it before the planet heats up to a point at which what we are doing is pointless anyways.
As minds and materials are diverted to this project, there would be less to go around everywhere else. There would be no immediate help (until fossil fuels are actually as costly as alternative energy sources) so people would be less well off. On average, individual standard of living would drop, probably by quite a bit. Since pretty much any business is effected by energy costs, they would all have to increase prices (or fail). As prices increase, and salaries don't (I don't see why they would increase), people would be forced to buy fewer things. Many poorer people wouldn't be able to get by. Many businesses that are more dependent on energy costs would fail.
It might even be worse than doing nothing and just dealing with the costs of global warming later. Eventually we are going to run out of fossil fuels and will need to utilize nuclear, solar, and wind power anyways. Might as well let those technologies continue to develop and get cheaper as the price of oil rises. At some point they will be competitive on their own.
Now, I'm not saying that the solution is to do nothing. I think its important to remember that this is not going to be easy. There is no ideal solution. However, the idea that forcing people to use something that is more expensive would actually help the economy is insane.
The only choice is whether to (1) run headlong into disaster (which I predict is a good description of mankind will actually do); (2) minimize the impact; or (3) counterbalance the impact. You can't simply rule out (3) on a vague generality.
Thank you. Yes, we should obviously be *very* cautious with stuff like this, but I really don't understand the prevailing opinion that it's Just Wrong. I suspect many people consider the environment to be a moral issue rather than a practical one, so any solution that doesn't require us to make substantial sacrifices is "cheating".
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The lower level of atmospheric CO2 was stable for a long period of time - basically all of human history prior to the Industrial Revolution. Although it is possible (in fact, virtually assured) that increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 as rapidly as we have since then has altered the environment in such a way that a true rollback is not possible, rolling back as best we can to a previously stable state is less likely to have negative consequences than transitioning to an altogether new state.
It is a good idea to have a plan B, however, since that rollback looks unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.
It is crazy how scientific community behaves like just any other group where scientific methods are trumped by polls and consensus.
Scientific methods aren't trumped by polls. There's nothing wrong with polling scientists to see what they think.
It is exactly this herd mentality that prevented the community to look outside string theory for the grand unified theory.
That's nonsense. There are plenty of other theories which compete with string theory. (e.g., in quantum gravity there's loop quantum gravity, dynamical triangulations, etc.)
And "herd mentality" snipes notwithstanding, it's simply the case that some venues are deemed more promising than others. If you gave equal attention to every theory, you'd be spending most of your time on crap, because 90% of everything is crap (Sturgeon's Law). You may be upset that the HEP community decided string theory was the most promising, but if it wasn't string theory, there still would be some theory which was deemed most promising.
Folks like Garrett Lisi had to resort to virtually getting away from civilization to make progress their own radical new ideas.
Yeah, and he ended up with a wrong theory (see, e.g., Distler's detailed analysis), so that's not really supporting your point. It might help your position if he came up with a successful theory.
So when we were trying to get rid of underarm odor, we punched a hole in the ozone layer.
This time we're trying to engineer the atmosphere.
Yeah, I'm sure it'll be fine.
Iron fertilization is such an obviously good thing to test out it never ceases to amaze me how much traction stupid arguments against gradually expanded iron fertilization experiments get.
On the one hand you have folks who object to such expanded experiments by saying "We don't know what global iron fertilization will do to the environment!" Well, I know this will come as a shock to some of these so-called "scientists" but that's precisely why you run EXPERIMENTS.
On the other hand, you have folks who are "worried" that some of the carbon might end up creating a food chain out in the middle of huge ocean desert areas because.... well... who needs all those fish? And, by the way, what are we going to do about all the natural fisheries that are being depleted by overfishing?
Seastead this.
It's a great example of unintended consequences though. DDT isn't that toxic. So we used it. A lot. Turns out it's got this other little peculiarity - that it accumulates in organisms instead of being eliminated like other toxins. So although it isn't particularly toxic, there's an unintended mechanism whereby it can reach toxic levels.
Whoops.
Is it wise to give time to people who were WRONG about global warming?
Isn't it like hiring the former head of Goldman Sachs to save USA's banking system??
I'd rather follow the advice of the people who were right from the beginning.
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Because that money doesn't disappear from the economy, it circulates? And more money circulated means a stronger economy?
Only in a free market. If you force the circulation in a particular direction, you might have a strong economy in that particular area, but not in general - maybe even a weakened economy.
Imagine a law that would subsidize the bicycle industry - you would get *paid* for using the bicycle, since it has less emissions. Clearly that would boost the bicycle industry, but I doubt that you would get your fresh tomatoes in time and your taxes would stay the same.
By mobilizing the buyers of the world to not purchase products that are hurting the environment. It's amazing how much industries react to not getting any money. Now the problem is down to getting the monied nations to get their acts together and start wising up to how much we're destroying our planet in regards to human inhabitation. A tremendous challenge but not quite as challenging as getting everyone to agree.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
The side effect of not geoengineering will kill everything.
Geoengineering is a skill we will need to master sooner or later. One day, whether we're the cause or not, this planet will not be inhabitable. We have three options: 1) direct our planet towards a consistently inhabitable state, 2) create an inhabitable world elsewhere, 3) die.
I don't really consider (3) to be much of an option, and (2) is so far beyond our current capabilities even experimentation is not a consideration. That leaves option (1).
Personally I'd rather we start our apprenticeship now by correcting our own effects on the environment rather than waiting until the planet makes it an unavoidable necessity regardless.
It's sad that you think this might not be the case. We've spilled far worse into the oceans than iron, so try not to be offended when people that know what they're doing dismiss out of hand this hysteria over small scale experimentation.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
I ran the numbers the other day for uranium extraction from sea water, the refresh rate of uranium due to erosion, and the energy produced by a fast breeder reactor using a natural uranium isotope mix.
We could produce double the energy output of the earth currently for tens of thousands of years with current technology without lowering the uranium content in seawater below 25%.
Most of these people are not "climate scientists". Many are activists and science bureaucrats who haven't done any real science in decades. The best that can be said of them is that they are well-connected mathematicians, engineers and scientists with an opinion on Geoengineering. One of them is a lawyer.
For the rest, David Archer, Steven Sherwood, Frank Schwing and Andrew Gettleman are not too keen on the idea. Kevin Trenberth and LuAnne Thompson are dead-set against it.
Steven Ghan stands pretty much alone as a practicing geophysicist and climatologist in favour of geoengineering (as long as it is constrained to CO2 reduction).
Finally, it's notable that only half, 22 out of 44, of the respondents come out in favor of the idea.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
"More to the point, who thought that James Lovelock was a 'climate scientist'? That Gaia thing seems like crackpottery to me..."
James Lovelock has been called the the father of Earth Science, climate science is a subset of Earth science. The term Gaia is more or less interchangeable with the term Biosphere. The hippies picked up the idea and made Gaia into some sort of god that has feelings, this initially confused the hell out of many of his scientific peers (eg: gaia was initially critisied by Dawkins & Gould). Those who have a vested interest in fucking up the planet still encorage that mis-informed view and consequently the term has fallen into disrepute since the general population now see gaia as the God of the bush-bunnies rather than the glue that holds the Earth sciences together.
The term "climate scientist" was not invented when he gained his Phd. He was initially trained in medicine so it's no surprise that he proposes that problems with the Earth's biosphere be tackled the same way as a doctor treats a patient (patient = unique living system), "first do no harm". However, Lovelock is no Hippie, he has upset Greenpeace and other like minded political organisations for proposing nuclear reators as a short term (50-100yr) solution to AGW. In my book he is a genuine "giant" of the 20th century who's theories/ideas have allowed others to see further and have upset both sides of environmental politics at various times over the last four or five decades.
There are piles and piles of papers available that treat the biosphere as an oragisim (unique living system), eg: life makes it possible for methane and oxygen to exist together in atmosphere, plants and plankton consume C02 and produced the ALL the available oxygen currently in the atmosphere, limestone and peat are produced by life, islands are built from coral, rainforests create their own rain, etc, etc, etc. It's definitely not crackpottery, in fact the idea that the biosphere is a unique living system is now so entrenched in modern science that most papers don't even bother defining "biosphere".
BTW: In TFA (which I have not read), I believe he is not speaking as a climate scientist but as a "futurist", futurists are confined by their imagination not by practicalities (eg: Dyson).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's only more expensive if you discount the costs to the environment, which will be borne by future generations. It's not like environmentalists have not been saying for years that fossil fuels are artificially cheap because some of the cost is externalized. It is not "forcing people to use something that is more expensive", but "making them pay the cost of what they use".
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS