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The Royal Society Proposes First Framework For Climate Engineering Experiments
Jason Koebler writes The Royal Society of London, the world's oldest scientific publisher, has unveiled a proposal to create the first serious framework for future geoengineering experiments. It's a sign that what are still considered drastic and risky measures to combat climate change are drifting further into the purview of mainstream science. The scientific body has issued a call to create "an open and transparent review process that ensures such experiments have the necessary social license to operate."
If I were a schill for big business, I'd be all, "Yeah yeah! Do it! Let's compensate by geoengineering!"
DO NOT DO THIS. If it works and you overshoot, you'll induce another ice age, which can happen in as few as a couple of years. Unlike moving in from the oceans over 100-300 years (a nuisance, and less damaging to human life than slowing technological advancement by massive intervention in the economy) an ice age will indeed, and actually, and rapidly kill billions of people.
Lik Willy Wonka, I will sigh and burble flatedly, "No. Stop. Don't do it." but the children won't listen.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
When they say "open and transparent" what they mean is that anyone who's even vaguely sceptical will be hounded out at the first opportunity.
I'm skeptical about the ability of geoengineering to solve the problems created by climate change. The climate is chaotic: obviously in its form as weather, but longer-term as well. Is it going to be possible at all to un-stir that pot?
Climate effects of CO2 go well beyond the change in temperature. It also acidifies the ocean, to the detriment of the life there. It also shifts weather patterns: even if we manage the temperature of the globe on average, it won't fix the alternations made to rainfall patterns and local temperatures, which will affect plant and animal life and require changes (perhaps drastic) to the way farming is done. I worry that geoengineering would fight global warming but cause even more climate change.
I guess we won't know if we don't do the research, but it concerns me that it could be seen as "Don't worry, we'll just put everything back, so go ahead and dig up that last ounce of fossil fuel." Even if the geoengineering approach can do more good than harm, it doesn't let us off the hook to produce less carbon, which will mitigate the damage. And we're having a hard enough time getting anything done on that score without adding a new phase to climate change denialism: "We can fix it."
If without sounding like a conspiracy theorist too much, there is a small group of people controlling the world, which it seems, technology such as this leads to a weapon greater than the nuclear bomb. Until there is peace for at least a generation we can not be trusted to do this. However, it would appear that we also need this to survive.
The current dichotomy between power and freedom is unbalanced. Balance is what is needed. But as we live in the silent crusade, where only 10 nations are not engaged in border disputes, a scenario such as the world of Snowpiercer, The Matrix or, all those other dystopias is what I feel will result. But then again the only hope for peace is to ignore the cynic within.
May his greatness Elon Musk deliver us to the heavens and bring peace to all.
lol.
Oh yeah, that sweet sweet grant money. Everyone knows scientists who support global warming are all riding around on their private yachts paid for with the grant money they lied in their research to get, whereas the poor defenseless honest scientists who are sceptical of global warming are all broke and starving because no one will pay them a dime.
-AndrewBuck
Instead of potentially dangerous experiments, may I suggest the oldest known and proven solution to global warming?
This is extremely complicated, so please bear with me for a minute or two:
Plant. More. Trees.
Don't believe me? Fine, don't take my word for it. Heck, even that bastion of free enterprise, The Economist got behind that idea!
So, why is not implemented on a large scale? Because planting trees is not techonologically "sexy" - it is well known, has been well known for centuries, and, for maximum effect, would require rich countries to invest serious money in poorer countries, to save the rainforest (which is where tree-planting would have maximum impact). And we cannot allow these natives to get money to do something as simple as plant a tree, right?
In other words, the wealthiest have decided it is a lot more fun to throw money at dangerous or even foolish and ineffectual solutions rather than provide for jobs and development in the poorest countries of the world -- precisely the countries that will suffer the most due to global warming. Make of that what you will.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
How about we just stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and see how that goes? If not, why not? Then the real priorities are revealed.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Oh yeah, that sweet sweet grant money. Everyone knows scientists who support global warming are all riding around on their private yachts paid for with the grant money they lied in their research to get, whereas the poor defenseless honest scientists who are sceptical of global warming are all broke and starving because no one will pay them a dime.
No, they are not running around on their yachts. They are fighting for a living share of a dwindling supply of cash. They are coming out of the woodwork trying to protect their livelihoods and paychecks for fear they might have to get an industry job where there is accountability for results, not just being able to get grant money. They are fighting to stay relevant, so they can keep their PHD students in subjects do develop and defend, right or wrong.
You see, this is academia we are discussing, not business. If this was a business venture, we would have had our answer years ago and wouldn't need another round of National Science Foundation funding to investigate this, or come up with another model that disagrees with the 20 we already have which are not good enough. We certainly wouldn't need a "frame work" to more fairly dole out the funds.
What we really have is survival of the fittest, capitalistic, style. A bunch of these folks will be taking up new avenues of research, getting other jobs, or just retiring without their Nobel Peace Prize. The question is who will make the cut and what will they do when they get desperate.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If this was a business venture, we would have had our answer years ago and wouldn't need another round of National Science Foundation funding to investigate this, or come up with another model that disagrees with the 20 we already have which are not good enough.
So just to be clear, what you are saying is that the science is in such broad agreement that climate change is real and is man made, that it is not even worth spending more money to research it, right?
-AndrewBuck
A scientist who doesn't consider all paths to solving a problem is not a very good scientist. Let me emphasise.....CONSIDER all paths. To ignore geoengineering as a possible solution to what is happening NOW would be foolish and irresponsible.
Experiment on Venus first. I'd rather not suffer through yet more perturbations on Earth thankyouverymuch.
Venus has a serious greenhouse problem. Fix that, then we'll talk.
DO NOT DO THIS. If it works and you overshoot, you'll induce another ice age, which can happen in as few as a couple of years.
No, an ice age is not something that can happen in a couple of years. The thermal capacitance of the oceans pretty much guarantees that. If you look at the records of past ice ages (glaciations) over the past million years the drop into them is usually much slower than the rise out of them.
Besides that, nothing about geoengineering is long lasting. It pretty much requires that you keep doing it to maintain the effect. That will be an ongoing expense without any clear end.
Nope, not what he said.
DO NOT DO THIS. If it works and you overshoot, you'll induce another ice age,
It's taken us a long time and a lot of energy to fuck up the biosphere this badly. We won't reverse the trend that quickly even if we try. There are other concerns, though. For example, secondary effects from attempts to fix the problem...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you know ... if only we could establish a connection between co2 gas in a mostly nitrogen gas matrix and rising background radiation then we could maybe say that the increasing man-made background radiation is resonating with the co2 molecules and making them white-hot angry ....
obviously we dont need less background radiation because we need more for profit but we can make people breath less.
Not even close to what I said because I don't believe climate change is "settled science". Actually, to me, it's a boondoggle that is a lot like a boat. It's a hole in the water that you dump your money into. We are barking up the wrong tree, in the wrong forest, in the wrong country, on the wrong planet.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
'Royally Fucked'". That's what the 'Royal Society of London' should honestly tell its public, and add: "unless you cut down on Carbon Dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use".
But they know what that means.
If they can make hurricanes only hit denier neighborhoods, I'm all in!
Table-ized A.I.
You have to keep the flow up as the environment gets worse, and at some point you run out of the resources to geoengineer, which causes a kickback effect that is a large multiple of the geoengineered impact.
Think of it as applying the brakes lightly at the same time that you're flooring the accelerator.
Then you take your foot off the brake while you're going down a steep decline, where you started at a mild decline.
Suddenly you're careening down the hill, out of control.
The best thing to do is stop subsidizing bad behavior that increases it (e.g. fossil fuels) and start requiring all new construction to meet new energy codes (half of all energy use is to heat and cool buildings, and passive solar and insulation can cut that dramatically) while you retrofit any existing fossil fuel plants (e.g. using cogeneration for all pre-2000 coal plants, and phasing out the dirtiest plants by expiring reauthorizations for permits when they come due.
People like to pretend massive change is needed. Energy is not a Binary On/Off thing - a partial change by the largest consumers (e.g. China) causes massive change. Air travel is the largest personal behavior change for people who live in cities (replace old jets with 787s and turboprops and build high speed rail).
There, that's half your carbon impact.
Now stop whining.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's taken us a long time and a lot of energy to fuck up the biosphere this badly.
Energy is irrelevant since it pretty much is gone from the system in a few days. The CO2 build up on the other hand is something that's not going away in a few days.
Actually, you have a point. And so does the plan to make plans for geological engineering. The climate has not been stable for 2 million years. If we don't manage to overheat it (by which I mean get back to at least mid-Miocene standards), then it will fall into another ice age. Like the last one that pushed all the way down to Long Island.
So one way or another humans are going to have to stabilize the climate, or go back to migrating around the edges of the ice (whereever they may be). And the coast lines as well, remember that sea level goes up and down 100 meters during an ice age cycle. Try keeping your ports operating through that.
In light of reporting in the July-August issue on Harvard’s position on fossil fuel divestment, we wrote Messrs. Paul J. Finnegan and James F. Rothenberg [members of the Harvard Corporation, and Treasurer and past Treasurer, respectively], expressing the perspective summarized below.
Harvard currently holds substantial investments in fossil fuel. The past is no longer prologue for this asset class.
The scientific community—including Harvard’s distinguished climate-related faculty—assert the world must hold global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees C above the preindustrial figure. Governments agree. And, yet, we have already gone half the distance to this ceiling, and are actually accelerating our rapid approach to it. We face an existential planetary threat.
By investing in fossil fuel companies that cling to the outdated business model of measuring success by discovery of new reserves, Harvard is encouraging (and expecting to profit from) the search for more fossil fuel—which will become unburnable if we stabilize global temperatures at levels necessary to sustain life as we know it. When the lid is put on, and carbon emissions are severely limited—as they must be—Harvard will be left holding stranded and devalued assets that can never be burned. (Proven reserves are three to four times what’s needed to transition to renewables by 2050.)
Across the country, hundreds of student organizations work to persuade their institutions’ endowments to divest. Sooner or later, as in the case of companies doing business in apartheid South Africa, divestment from fossil fuel companies will occur. Harvard should be among the first to do so. There are strong, independently sufficient arguments beyond the financial one of stranding to justify divestment. They include the moral (it is repugnant to profit from enterprises directly responsible for carbon emissions or to allow shareholder funds to be deployed in searching for more fossil fuel), the practical (a well-led institution should not wound itself by permitting endowment holdings to demoralize faculty and students, with adverse effects on quality of education, enrollment, and campus environment) and, in Harvard’s case, the unique opportunity (and corresponding duty) it has, as one of a handful of world leaders in education, to lead on this planetary issue.
We support these other arguments for divestment. However, we wanted to bring the financial argument, in particular, to Harvard’s attention. Over the past three years, equities in the coal industry declined by over 60 percent while the S&P 500 rose by some 47 percent. Coal, we submit, is the “canary in the oil well.” Disinvestment now, before this opinion becomes commonplace, is just sound, risk-averse investment judgment, fitting well within the duties of a fiduciary.
Bevis Longstreth, J.D. ’61
Retired partner, Debevoise & Plimpton; former member, Securities and Exchange Commission
Timothy E. Wirth ’61
Former U.S. Senator, president of the United Nations Foundation, and Harvard Overseer
http://harvardmagazine.com/201...
Please fund a study to test the effects of piracy versus global warming.
It's a no-brainer. It is clear that the rise in mean global temperatures is positively correlated both with increasing numbers of pirates and with the transition from wind-power to fossil-fuel powered vessels used by those pirates. However since correlation isn't causation this tells us little. Ergo it would be a waste of money to fund the study you suggest.
Try harder next time ... for trolling! x^D
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The problem with relying on planting more trees to absorb excess CO2 is that in some parts of the world (e.g. southern Australia) the climate is dry yet warm enough to create conditions rife for bushfires to easily spread rapidly, undoing all the human effort spent on planting them in a matter of minutes.
Quite often these bushfires start by lightning strikes, so it's very difficult to eliminate the prospect of them entirely. The only practical alternative is to do periodic controlled prescribed fuel-reduction burn-offs, which again produce CO2 that reduces the overall CO2 reduction by the forest itself.
It should be row 8, plot 31. Unless it can take more than one person, and then on the 2nd person they fake the name of the first person, and the titles on the tombstones will be correct, except the order, of who's on top, will be mixed up.
And by the way, what happened to the idea of cremation and recycling of the bone phosphate as fertilizer into the living world, as opposed to letting it sit and waste down below forever before it fully becomes recycled - bones and skulls last forever underground, holding up precious phosphate in them? Even if there is a reducing environment during the cremation and the phosphorous ends up as elemental gas and evaporates, as soon as it's out of the chimney it turns back to phosphoric acid - same thing as the sour stuff in cola - and fertilizes the grass nearby the crematory, and lets the earthworms pick it up from the grass, then the birds from the worms, and carry it all over the place.
As far as the main topic goes, all the Brits gotta do is set up a rocket launching base on one of their colonies near the equator - Tristan da Cunha is not too far - then set up a base on the Moon, from which to shoot materials up into space orbit, and put up a giant flippable shade at the Lagrange point between the Earth and Sun, and also mirrors around the perimeter, so you have the option to increase the solar input if we're getting an iceage, or decrease it, if there is global warming. But once you got them shades up and ready, humans can invade the deserts, like Sahara, and grow food there and live there, with greenhouses. You don't really need to cover up the whole Earth with the shades, something like 1% or 3% probably goes a long way, with huge effects, for starters, but the Sahara does have a huge reflectivity, to where if you turn it dark green, you get instant global warming from that. In the meantime, if people are tight on global food supply, and need more places to grow food, irrigation in the desert is probably not the best idea, but instead moving into the oceans, and growing seaweed or kelp, for starters, that something else is willing to eat, like cows would be. All you need in the ocean is a huge plastic bag, with phosphate detergent fertilizer, with salicyl chelated iron fertilizer, and iodine, as kelp is really high on iodine. Make your own little ecosystem floating on top of the ocean. Extra food, or extra carbon-neutral biofuel, extra carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere. The Brits may be sane enough to pull it off, but even they are under racial issues and tensions back at home. Like last year, right near the Boston Marathon bombings, some black muslim dudes butchered another white guy in broad daylight in the streets, shouting it's payback for all the murdered muslims. And a decade or so ago, I saw on PBS a program about South Africa, where there used to be apartheid beaches, segregated ones, for white only, and the mixes and blacks would have to go other places. So there was this black guy who murdered two white women on the beach, and when asked why he did it, it was to make the white man suffer, because he hates the white man. There are all kinds of issues around the world, a lot of them racial or tribal, for instance Iraq, people that look exactly alike, blow each other up over tribal rivalry. What Iraq needs is a strong dictator like Saddam, to reign in the crazy people with terror. Or if the Brits take over the world again, like 100 years ago the British Empire ran the business in much of the world, they'd have to be strong armed without fighting feuding battles against other similar monarchies or empires, along the lines of the Battle of Jutland, because in the nuclear age there are no winners to rivalries between empires. People need to figure out how to coexist, while maintaining respect for the genetic variability their peers represent. For instance one could agree to deport the white people from South Africa back to Europe, deport black people from Europe back to Africa, deport non-native Americans out of the reservations in the US, other then t
Actually I wasn't referring to scientists and their private incomes, although they have mortgages like everybody else. I'm mostly referring to the main method of career progression in academia which involves attracting government money to your institution. The better you are at doing this, the more likely you are to get tenure or a professorship. If you work in academia you have to play this game.
Or simply send round the "Welcome to the Global Climate Conspiracy!" email that you seem to think everyone gets, and instantly name your prize.
If the conspiracy exists, it takes just one scientist to blow it open and receive riches beyond their wildest dreams, guaranteeing their research for the rest of their life.
Have you noticed you can't argue with the science, so you are now arguing against the scientists? You sound desperate, childish, and really pathetic.
Besides that, nothing about geoengineering is long lasting. It pretty much requires that you keep doing it to maintain the effect. That will be an ongoing expense without any clear end.
I do not feel confident that what you are saying is true. I see it as possible that a "new" process could interfere with another which would interfere with another, etc. The cascade effect might not stop just because the original process was stopped.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
But once started? Where do you go till the mistakes are rectified? Are " you" just going to allow millions of people to die just because you forgot to convert from imperial? It sounds so. What's wrong with a cyclic world as it is?
Usually, reducing carbon dioxide comes under climate change mitigation. So, air capture of carbon dioxide for sequestration would be a mitigation effort already covered by treaty just like planting forests. It would be a big engineering undertaking, yes, but the aim is mitigation. The geoengineering ideas have more to do with changing albedo while leaving the carbon dioxide high. So, pumping sulphates into the stratosphere or putting dust in an orbit between the Earth and the Sun come in as geoengineering. Now, ocean fertilization is aimed at removing carbon dioxide but is often called geoengineering rather than mitigation so it is not cut and dry.
We simply do not know enough about the planet to 'engineer' it.
Every past effort to 'engineer' nature, even the simplest, has discovered things it failed to take in to account eg. introduction of 'control' species that became 'invasive'.
On top of which, we don't have to engineer our way out of this. The clear solutions arepresent albeit mundane: more trees, less waste.
'Engineering' the planet simply means finding a way to allow us (humans) to continue to make inefficient or wasteful use of our resources.
So this is where I personally opt out.
I will deny climate change simply in an effort to keep people from screwing with the planet and to encourage others to protest experiments.
My next house will have two airconditioners, four cars (all SUV's), two pools, and as much 'always on' electronic gadgetry as I can stuff in it.
All my future purchases will be quadruple wrapped in plastic, all my food processed, and I'll no longer recycle.
If you're going to engineer the planet, I'm going to make it worth your while.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Did you dive your car under a beer truck in the snow? Sue. Was your flight cancelled because of the weather? Sue. Did it rain on your picnic? Sue. The possibilities are endless.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt17...
>... it means giving up land that could otherwise be cultivated or developed. And that's something humans have never willingly done...
Perhaps you meant globally, and over many centuries. But in the US and since WWII you are wrong; we are willingly reforesting land that has previously been cultivated
From the linked article:
"Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s."
"the average standing wood volume per acre in US forests is about one-third greater today than in 1952; in the East, average volume per acre has almost doubled."
It's great instrumentality would suggest it foolish to abandon modern science ...
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke