Climate Scientist: Climate Engineering Might Be the Answer To Warming

Lasrick (2629253) writes "Tom Wigley is one of the world's top climate scientists, and in this interview he explains his outspoken support for both nuclear energy and research into climate engineering. Wigley was one of the first scientists to break the taboo on public discussion of climate engineering as a possible response to global warming; in a 2006 paper in the journal Science, he proposed a combined geoengineering-mitigation strategy that would address the problem of increasing ocean acidity, as well as the problem of climate change. In this interview, he argues that renewable energy alone will not be sufficient to address the climate challenge, because it cannot be scaled up quickly and cheaply enough, and that opposition to nuclear power 'threatens humanity's ability to avoid dangerous climate change.'"

Comments

What if we overcorrect?

[ubergeek2009]

I'd be leary of either overcorrecting for climate change or having massive unpredicted effects. I'm all for trying to fix the problem. I just don't think our climate modelling is yet good enough.

Re:What if we overcorrect?

[Knee Patch]

If you thought our influence on the environment was bad before... just imagine what it will be like when we are actually trying.

Re:What if we overcorrect?

[brxndxn]

Some people still try to debate things that are already settled and others look for solutions before everything becomes a problem. Mankind has a huge list of fuckups to fix - but we either continue as is or we continue to try to improve things. Your viewpoint is incredibly pessimistic. Very few people would say life was better 200 years ago than it is today. Let's take that viewpoint and move forward with it.. We need more Star Trek and less Water World.

Either way, we should be investigating options like these.. You're being pessimistic during the initial stages of discussion - so it brings very little to the table.

Re:What if we overcorrect?

[ShanghaiBill]

That's a bit of a problem with slow-changing things like climate... a high amount of effort is required for even a short-term budge, and when you found out you gave it too much gas, it's too late to stop it

This is not true for some proposals. For instance, fertilizing the oceans with trace amounts of iron can drastically increase the amount of CO2 taken up by phytoplankton. But if you stop spraying the fertilizer, the phytoplankton will absorb all the available iron within a few weeks, and then the process will stop. The iron will not only reduce CO2, but will also cause big increases in fish populations, thus relieving pressure from overfishing. Some may say we should leave the oceans alone, but that is silly considering what we are already doing to the oceans today. This could balance out some of the other harm.

Re:What if we overcorrect?

[MrBigInThePants]

If you don't mind I will leave it to the experts who spend years studying it and then devote their lives to it.

As opposed...say...to people who live near the ocean....

Re:What if we overcorrect?

[OneAhead]

where can we find a completely accurate (or even reasonably accurate) climate model?

Oh hello, where can we find completely accurate anything (outside the field of mathematics)?

Even pro-AGW climatologists would shy away from claiming that they have one.

Are they completely accurate? Of course not, only an idiot or someone intent of spreading FUD would ask for complete accuracy. Reasonably accurate? Hell yes, what do you think all these IPPC reports are based on?

This is disingenuous due to the fact that you left out *why* life is better now than it was 200 years ago. Was it primarily due to politics, culture, technology, medical/scientific knowledge... what? Most of what I just listed has bugger-all to do with the climate.

You completely missed GP's point. -1 reading comprehension.

to keep everything just like it is in the 1980s (or whenever) may do more damage than just letting it cycle naturally.

Good evening, debunked climate myth #56.

before your investigations turn into actions, you'd damned well better know for certain what you are doing - making mistakes on a global level will have global consequences, and will last for a very long, long time.

There's something I can agree with. While the climatological effect of reducing CO2 emissions has been reasonably well studied and falls within the parameter space on which we have real-life data, climate engineering is totally out there and gives me the creeps. The easy answers are usually not the right ones.

Re:What if we overcorrect?

[sg_oneill]

1) where can we find a completely accurate (or even reasonably accurate) climate model? Even pro-AGW climatologists would shy away from claiming that they have one. Point is, the science is not "settled", unless everyone is agreeing on the mere fact that climate does change over time (which, seriously, no one credibly argues against).

Lets be clear here. "Pro-AGW climatologists" is a redundant phrase. In the *scientific* community (Ie not in the blogger peanut gallery), theres no more "ANTI-AGW" climatologists then there are "Creationist biologists". A very very tiny minority of mostly unqualified right-wing think tank employees at best. But actually nobody is "Pro AGW". Nobody wants this. My sister has been working on the hydrological parts of the modelling for the past decade and she utterly hates the science because the implications are so dismal. But its what needs to be done. Its like saying Oncologists are "pro cancer".

That humans are causing climate change isn't a debate anymore. Hasn't been for a long time, the science is fundamental and would require major revisions to fundamental science that we'd have to throw away 50+ years of scientific progress across the board. A whole new system of chemistry, a whole new physics going back to the 1800s (When scientists first started warning about the 'greenhouse effect' after discovering CO2's infra-red properties in the lab) , a whole new system of optics to account for why CO2 appears to be creating banding in the infra-red spectrum, it just goes on and on.

There are two things required for AGW to be false.
1) A mechanism that is stopping the CO2 humans are putting in from following the laws of physics by trapping IR light and introducing energy into the atmosphere.
2) A mechanism that is making measuring devices pretend that physics is still working as expected.

Perhaps when man makes CO2 its different to natural CO2 and instead of creating heat it creates some sort of strange particle that causes physicsts to lie, like orgone energy.

Does this sound strange? Well it exactly how strange science needs to get for AGW to be false. At this stage, scientists are happy to use the standard scientific model that says if you have a theory that predicts an effect and then the effect turns up in the observation, its a good bet the effect is true.

As for models, well yes, they are not without peril, however certain things can be predicted with certainty.Namely If you introduce x amount of CO2, it will trap in y percent of Infra red (and certain other spectra) light that is passing throught the atmosphere at the time. Since we have a good understanding of how much CO2 is in the air (We've more or less doubled it), we can do a back of the napkin calculation to work out how much energy is being added to the climate system. Remember, this is 1870s science here, nothing is controversial about this, and it can be verified in a high school laboratory.

The question then is how this energy manifests. The options are by heat (Warming) , by kinetic manifestations such as increased winds, cyclones, hurricanes, etc, by increased pressure gradients, such as the one that caused the huge chill over winter in the US, and so on.

Thats what the models are trying to work out. Whatever the case is, we know that the very minimal baseline is still pretty bad.

More to the point, the state of the art in modelling is that our models can attach error bands to the predictions. So "We think this is 80% likely to happen, give or take 5-10%" Currently we're pushing close to 100% certainty give or take a few percent. Not quite the sigma-5 type certainty of 'we've proven it" (Although we *HAVE* proven AGW), but pretty damn close.

At this stage its highly unlikely that the least-bad models will turn out over-done, and we can safely say with certainty that SOMETHING is going to happen.

Thus the precautionary principle states that even taking into account the small likelyhood we are wrong about it, we've g

Maybe if Clinton...

[Bodhammer]

had not be so busy getting a knobber, we might not have this problem:

Then again AlGore would not have a job being a global alarmist alarmist either...

"BAS: Are you surprised that so many environmental groups remain vehemently opposed to nuclear power?

Wigley: “Saddened” would be a better word. Often the main concern of those groups is proliferation—the use or theft of nuclear material to make weapons. I think that that is a misrepresented issue as well. One of the saddest things was when the Clinton administration shut down the program on fast reactors.1 Clinton, [Al] Gore, and John Kerry are to blame there. If that program had not been shut down, and fast reactors had continued to develop, within maybe three years we could have started building Integral Fast Reactor systems with the whole nuclear cycle on one site—reprocessing waste materials onsite and having very little residual waste to deal with. If that had happened, I don’t think we would have a global warming problem now at all. We could have started on a pathway of rapid introduction of fourth-generation nuclear technology, and we would have gained 20 years in solving the climate problem

Re:nuclear power means unintended geoengineering

[geekoid]

http://www.caithnesswindfarms....

Climate lobby won't accept this as an answer

[Karmashock]

What they want is control over global industry, insane amounts of unaudited "international aid money" and absolute moral authority.

Solve the problem and you take away their power, their money, and their claims to moral superiority.

This is something they will never let die.

If we fixed the climate tomorrow they'd still be harping about it.

Re:The Chinese could pull this off

[blue trane]

So does the US. The Constitution gives the government the power to coin money. The Fed gives the government zero cost borrowing. The Modigliani-Miller theorem of finance shows that how you finance a good idea doesn't matter. If climate engineering is a good idea, we can finance it.

Finance should never be used as an excuse not to carry out a good idea.