Slashdot Mirror
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.
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".
Because you should be wary of a law... the one that talks about unintended consequences.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
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.
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
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.
Sheesh, do you get all your climate science off skeptic web sites? Your whole post is nothing but a laundry list of long-debunked talking points.
There is some evidence that suggests carbon FOLLOWS warming buy several hundreds of years.
You're talking about the glacial-interglacial cycle. That's long been a prediction of Milaknovitch theory, well before any such lag was actually measured. It doesn't mean that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that it doesn't cause warming. It means that there are feedbacks between the climate and the carbon cycle. When glacial temperatures rise, CO2 levels increase (due to, e.g., outgassing from the oceans), as predicted by theory. Increased CO2 levels, in turn, add to the temperature rise. If you leave out the CO2 greenhouse effect, you can't reproduce the amount of warming observed in the glacial-interglacial cycle.
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.
If you're talking about the modern warming period, there isn't a growing group of climate scientists who believe that; far fewer believe that now than they did 10 or 20 years ago. The evidence is strongly against it, since the Sun's activities during that period don't actually agree with the warming which is observed.
In the past, solar activity has indeed had significant effects on climate. It can explain a substantial amount (but by no means all) of the warming in the early 20th century. However, solar irradiance simply hasn't changed very much since the 1950s, and can't explain the warming since then, even if you appeal to speculative indirect effects like cosmic ray modulation of cloud cover (as comic rays also haven't changed in a way to explain the observed warming).
Additionally, Methane and water vapor are far more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon.
Once again, that has nothing to do with the fact that CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, and we're adding a lot of it to the atmosphere.
Finally, I just read that temperatures peaked in '98 and have actually cooled by about a half degree or so.
That's wrong. January 2008 was 0.5 degrees cooler than 2007 on average, but a monthly fluctuation in temperature does not mean the Earth is experiencing a cooling trend.
It seems that the earth has always warmed and cooled in cycles.
The Earth has natural cycles, but there isn't any natural cycle which predicts what we've observed in the modern warming period.
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.
Global solutions may be required to global problems, but geoengineering is indeed riskier than other alternatives.
Oh right, I forgot about all those times in history when innovation completely ceased and everything stayed where it was for ~200 years. Sure, we can't assume that there will be some miracle, but you can assume that in 200 years we will have enough technology to deal with the problem,
No, you can't. Economists who study this problem include technological innovation in their models (mostly in terms of reduced costs of abatement, but also sometimes in adaptation), but that still doesn't get rid of economic damages either now or in the future or the need for abatement as a risk management option.
The fact is, we don't know what will be possible in 200 years. It's even possible that the world will be poorer, more war torn, or otherwise in LESS of a position to deal with the problem.
Even if technological improvements exist, that still doesn't mean that we want to commit to a certain level of climate change. Suppose we can build artificial islands to replace lost shorelines. Hell, we can probably do that with existing technology. And for the sake of argument, even assume that they cost nothing. That still doesn't mean we want to have to build them. Maybe we want to keep our existing coastal cities. By committing to, say, sea level rise now, we eliminate options for future generations. There are a whole host of ethical questions and impacts that can't be waved away with technology, the dreams of utopian technophiles notwithstanding.
Climate change has large global impacts. 200 years ago we didn't have the technology to avert those impacts. In 200 years we may not either. The climate system is huge, has huge inertia, and affects everything on Earth. It's not easy to control, nor are its changes easy to adapt to, even with high technology. And, my main point, just because we can introduce technological "fixes" doesn't mean that those "fixes" are more desirable than just mitigating the problem in the first place.
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.
What is this 'global average temperature' of which you speak?
The surface temperature averaged over the Earth's surface.
Temperature is an intensive thermodynamic property and as such cannot be averaged meaningfully in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere.
You can average it. It's not conserved or anything like that, so it's not really a fundamental physical quantity like heat is. It's still useful as a climatic indicator: it's not going to directly tell you what the planetary radiation balance is (which is what you really want to know), but it's a starting point in inferring it.
Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful.
It's more meaningful than average temperature, but it's also not measured. That's why people use temperature.
It is perfectly possible for the temperature to fall everywhere on Earth and the heat content of the atmosphere to increase.
It's possible, but please note that what we mostly care about in terms of impacts is the surface temperature, not the total atmospheric heat content.
Global ocean temperature, now... that's meaningful, and increasing, but I would take global warming a lot more seriously if the people who are all het up about it showed an even rudimentary grasp of basic physics,
My Ph.D. was in statistical thermodynamics. I stand by my statements.
A sceptic about the magnitude of the effect of CO2 on global heat content may be reasonable. A person who puts there argument in terms of a problematic quality such as global average temperature is not.
That's nonsense. It is perfectly possible to compare hypothetical forcing mechanisms on the basis of their observed influence on globally averaged temperature, if they give different predictions for that quantity. It's not nearly as useful as heat content, but that quantity is also not known. Certainly ocean temperature changes are one line of evidence, but so are surface temperatures, as well as tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures.
Furthermore, since every single story we have seen recently about global warming has announced loudly and clearly that climate scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate,
That's false. "Arctic ice melting faster than expected" doesn't mean "scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate".
Each of these stories, if read by someone who hadn't bought into a religious belief in the infallibility of climate scientists, would be taken as clear-cut evidence that climate science as a whole is terrible at predicting anything to do with climate,
Climate science is reasonably good at predicting radiation balance, heat budgets, and surface temperatures over large scales and decadal time periods. They're still bad at predicting regional climate, and precipitation is mediocre. Weather events like hurricanes are still terrible.