Another day, another baffling and/or pointless Washington Post climate article.
Today’s winner is “Turning down the world’s temperature: A job for a fake tree? A boat?“ It begins promisingly enough:
In case you haven’t heard, the Earth is getting hotter, and most scientists blame mankind. The average global temperature has risen 1.3 degrees in the last century, and the future might be quite a bit warmer. As international climate negotiators convene in Cancun, Mexico, this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is projecting that the temperature could rise as many as 10 degrees more by the year 2100 if we do nothing to stop it.
I know what you’re thinking — this is a great lead paragraph for a story on all of the things that we can do to stop that catastrophic 10°F warming. Not.
Is there any way to get ourselves back to those 19th-century temperatures in a hurry?
Not without extraordinary risk. Even if we immediately stopped burning fossil fuels and all became vegans, average temperatures probably wouldn’t drop much for about 500 years, according to Ken Caldeira, a climatologist at the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University.
Whoa! The Post jumps immediately from “we face 10° warming if we do nothing to stop it” — a challenging but ultimately straightforward problem — to immediately stopping temperature rise and going back to 19th century temps — an all but impossible endeavor.
There are two reasons for that. First, carbon is really persistent. For every four molecules we release into the atmosphere, one will still be there five millennia later. Second, the oceans have been absorbing extra heat for a long time, and it would take more than a century for all of it to radiate through the atmosphere and into space.
Uhh, well, yes. That’s why it is so important to embrace low-cost commercial clean energy strategies that avoid putting carbon into the atmosphere in the first place — and that have myriad positive co-benefits, like reduced urban air pollution. But hey, the Post’s wants to write an article about high cost, uncommercial strategies that have many dangerous risks, mostly don’t address dangerous ocean acidification, and leave readers with the impression that there’s nothing we can do to avoid putting carbon into the atmosphere.
The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which released 20 million tons of sulfur and cooled the Earth by about a degree for a year, proved that shading can affect the temperature rather quickly. Some models suggest that, if we were really aggressive and everything worked out just right, shading could return us to 19th-century temperatures.
Nevertheless, shading is a last resort because it could have terrifying side effects, according to Damon Matthews, a climate scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. The shade might diminish or stop the monsoons that water South Asia’s crops. It would undermine the solar panels that help cut our fossil fuel use. And who knows how it would affect plants and the animals that rely on them, including us?
There might be geopolitical consequences as well. Some countries, such as Russia, stand to gain a relative advantage from a little global warming. They might not be happy if another country unilaterally dimmed the sun. (The United Nations has issued a moratorium on geo-engineering.)
Note: If we listen to the Washington Post and ignore all the strategies to reduce emissions, then there isn’t going to be a little global warming — and there is no evidence whatsoever that Russia stands to gain an advantage — see Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop.”
See also Martin Bunzl on “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix.”
There are also less drastic proposals to manage solar radiation. For example, some have suggested sending ships to the equatorial seas to continuously foam up the water. The white surface would absorb less sunlight than the great blue expanse. Such plans are in their infancy, though, says Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and no one knows how much they would affect the temperature.
Another option is to filter excess CO2 out of the atmosphere. Researchers have developed synthetic trees that might do the job. They’re capable of extracting carbon from the air 1,000 times as fast as regular trees, according to Columbia University’s Klaus Lackner, one of the scientists behind the technology. But it’ll be a while before we build a synthetic forest.
Removing carbon from the open air is far more challenging than just catching it from the business end of a smokestack, a process that could slow, but not reverse, climate change. It would be expensive as well. Right now, it would cost about $1 trillion to filter out 10 billion tons of carbon using the smokestack method; climate scientists are estimating about $100 per ton using current technology. To capture carbon from free air probably would cost two or three times that much. And scientists aren’t even certain how much the scheme would lower temperatures. It’s unlikely we could safely scrub out enough carbon to cool down the planet within the next century.
Huh. So it’s a really expensive, untested strategy that wouldn’t actually cool the planet down. Thanks for telling us about it. Hey, thanks for writing this whole article about how hopeless the problem is — or, I should say, how hopeless the problem you defined for the reader (reducing temperatures from current levels) is.
If only you had addressed the problem laid out in the opening paragraph — avoiding that possible 10°F warming by 2100. But I’m sure your editor said that story has been done to death. Still, it’s impressive that the WashPost published a whole article on reversing global warming without mentioning a single strategy to cut fossil fuel consumption. That might be a record.
And for the record, since the WashPost quoted Caldeira at the start of the piece, it would have been nice had they merely repeated the quote from a 2009 WashPost piece on the same subject, explaining how counterproductive it is to just focus on geo-engineering without aggressive mitigation, the way, say Bjorn Lomborg does (see Caldeira calls Lomborg’s vision “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story”):
Several scientists questioned whether focusing on geoengineered solutions at the expense of major carbon reductions would adequately address the effects of climate change. Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, a geoengineering expert, said such a strategy “misses the point.”
“Geoengineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions,” he said. “If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geoengineering as a way to deal with it, it’s pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly.”
Brad Warren, who directs the ocean health program at the advocacy group Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, noted that even if marine cloud whitening worked, it would fail to address the fact that human-generated carbon emissions are making the seas more acidic and threatening marine life.
“I haven’t seen anything in the area of geoengineering that protects the ocean from the chemical consequences of greenhouse gas emissions,” Warren said.
And folks wonder why the public is confused on this subject.
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This is truly depressing. The disconnect between readily available, factual information and the distortions and outright falsehoods being reported by much of the media – eagerly received by the public and politicians – just feels Orwellian. When I was at the Pricing Carbon Conference, Roger Shamel asked me if I ever felt like I was in a nightmare. “All the time” I exclaimed. I keep thinking this looming catastrophe is so absurd, and so unnecessary…surely somebody will pinch me and wake me up, and life will be pleasant – even joyful – again.
I felt the same eerie sense of unreality when my daughter was having cancer treatment. It can’t possibly be MY child that could die for no reason! Maybe that horrific experience has enabled me to see through the mendacity of professional disinformers, and even the baseless optimism of many scientists and activists who should know better.
Now I call it Death by a Thousand Cuts
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2010/11/death-by-thousand-cuts.html
Mainstream media is truly a desert on the subject of climate change. I hope you can figure out a way to address this, Joe. A syndicated column, published in outlets like the Post, Times, and others? They clearly lack quality staff in this area.
If you make a good proposal to them, we’ll find out if they wake up and accept it, or continue to be terrified of their advertisers.
The topic of geoengineering is getting a lot of renewed attention lately. I suppose the recent UN Council on Biodiversity resolution calling for a moratorium brought the topic back into the headlines. Here in Canada, the CBC just aired an hour-long documentary on the issue, covering the pros and cons fairly well as TV goes. It’s entitled “Playing God with Planet Earth”; the full video is available for viewing online (at least in Canada – see if the video works from elsewhere):
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/2010/playinggod/index.html
For the third year in a row I’m leading a 3-week seminar on geoengineering for first year engineering students. There are many other schemes on the drawing board besides sulphate shading and the sea-spray ships. Other notions include placing huge numbers of mirrors in orbit or either mirrors or asteroid dust at the L1 Lagrange point (locked in line between Earth and the Sun); covering glaciers or open ocean with white coverings to reflect sunlight; reflective balloons in the stratosphere; adding key nutrients such as iron to the oceans to promote plankton blooms and more photosynthesis to absorb CO2; and so on.
A key question I pose at the start is whether any of these schemes deserve the name “engineering” – a term I take to imply knowledge of how a system can be expected to respond to a specific intervention; prior accounting for the foreseeable side-effects, and a hard look for any others we might be missing; reflection on whether the link between the intervention and the desired effect can be measured, and ultimately moderated by adjusting the intervention; and a means of discontinuing the intervention if it goes too far in one direction or if unforeseen consequences are detected.
Many of the “far out” plans don’t even meet half of these criteria. At least the robotic sea-spray ships or the continuous addition of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere could be turned off if needed. However, key experts are stressing that if we start to rely on ‘shading’ geoengineering, while letting CO2 keep rising, any future shutoff of that intervention (either deliberate or due to economic crisis, war, technology failure,etc.) would then leave us facing really extreme rapid “catch-up” warming. The rate of change could well be faster than anything we can find in records of past climate, either in ice cores (going back over 700,000 years) or from sediment cores and stratigraphy (going back millions of years).
A good starting point to read what scientists are saying on the downsides or trade-offs here is Alan Robock’s article “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea”:
http://www.thebulletin.org/files/064002006_0.pdf
More expert contributions to the discussion on geoengineering:
A book chapter by Stephen Schneider et al. entitled “Earth Systems: Engineering and Management” (ch. 20 of “Climate Change Policy: A Survey [Island Press, 2002]
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Ch20ClimatePolicy.pdf
An editorial by Ralph Cicerone in the journal Climatic Change in 2006:
“Geoengineering: Encouraging Research and Overseeing Implementation”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u516l844nwk75v30/
(Note also the “related documents” down the left sidebar for more links.)
Finally, a name that’s new to me but obviously not new to the subject is Dr. Claire Parkinson of NASA. She’s due to speak here on campus this afternoon and her abstract mentions geoengineering issues, so I’m looking forward to hearing her. She has a book out on the topic entitled “Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix,” which I’m hoping to find time to read soon.
This page discusses her book and speaking on the subject:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/parkinson-book.html
If any readers here have read the book, please let us know if you found it useful.
Is WaPo really so dense that they have never heard of “Use alternative energy, stop burning carbon?” Or is there another factor behind such articles? I don’t know, just asking.
This is the same “blame everyone and ANYONE OTHER than the god-beloved US OF A” bull that has been spewing more and more recently. Did they mention that CHINA has now gone ahead of the US in total emissions? (even though our rate of emissions is 4 times bigger) Blame it on those damn Russkies-if they weren’t so evil they’d let the completely totally noble americans do whatever they decide in their Jesus-Christ given wisdom. Ah, a Taste of Things to Come. Start wavin’ your flags.
Any discussion of geoengineering that doesn’t include the fact that ocean acidification ALL BY ITSELF will largely destroy life on earth is nothing but a red herring. That’s without mentioning that not a single geongineering proposal will do anything to mitigate the inexorably rising level of highly toxic tropospheric ozone, which is also ALL BY ITSELF enough to destroy life on earth to all intents and purposes, because its killing plants, which happen to be the base of the food chain. Mass starvation, anyone?
The ONLY way to protect any semblance of human civilization is to switch from burning dirty fuel to clean sources of energy, while rationing and conserving on an emergency basis until that transition is enough to replace dirty fuels, even if it takes a hundred years or more.
We owe it to our children.
It’s as if Rapa Nui’s leading priests said, “Yes, it will leave us stranded and starving. But we might starve anyway. So, keep building those heads!”
But energy efficiency and conservation just are not sexy, sci-fi solutions to the problem. No one wants to hear about caulking their windows and adding some insulation to the attic.
Foaming the seas? Dust at the L1 point? Orbiting mirrors? These are simply ridiculous ideas, but they would make a great movie.
“…..The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which released 20 million tons of sulfur and cooled the Earth by about a degree for a year, proved that shading can affect the temperature rather quickly. Some models suggest that, if we were really aggressive and everything worked out just right, shading could return us to 19th-century temperatures…..”
Ah. So now they’re referring to deliberate (and by necessity continuous if it comes to that) SO2 particulate loading of the lower stratosphere as “shading”. That certainly has an innocuous ring to it, eh? “Shading”. Sounds cool. No pun intended.
I also note the repeated subtle emphasis of the idea that it is now “too late” for any emissions reduction plan of significant scope to make much difference as regards warming already in the pipeline. Very interesting.
I’ve been watching and hard-copy archiving this stuff since fall 1999. I am going to say, flat out, that articles such as the above-posted have been ready to go for awhile now. It’s just been a matter of time in the roll-out department. There will be more of this downright patronizing garbage coming, and more frequently, going forward.
I cannot possibly articulate the depth and intensity of my utter disgust with this state of affairs. You know what I mean.
I personally do not think it’s yet too late. However, the time has come to begin acting as if we are in fact in trouble. We are. Let us begin to act appropriately and in the process give our children and grandchildren hope. We can each use a little less of everything so that all may at least have a little something, yes? We can learn to stop at “enough”. It could be a very interesting and engaging challenge.
We’ve finally devolved from a world of infotainment to no news all the time; just energetic chit-chat to make everyone feel like they belong to something. It’s as though the U.S. as we know it has already lost the will to live and is just coasting on inertia. Meanwhile, let’s hear it for those jabbering media jawbones. Without them there’d be no distractions while the pols fiddle.
The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo released ~ 20 million tons of SO2 and cooled the earth ~ one degree for a year. Earth science has been kind enough to give us those numbers and they are accepted without a whimper from the right.
The very same earth science tells us that mankind currently is adding ~ 7 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, (~ 350 times the SO2) which is cumulative I would add, and the GOBP steadfastly refuses to admit that there is any consequence what-so-ever!
Give me a break!
The truth is that we don’t know whether it it would be possible to return the Earth to its temperature in, say, 1970, because we haven’t cared to find out. There is no U.S. program of research on geoengineering; the small amount of research that has occurred is due to initiatives by individual scientists.
Given the limited progress we have made in controlling greenhouse gas emissions, and the disasters that are bound to occur under even the best global warming scenario, we should act quickly to find out whether geoengineering is a possibility or whether it is likely to have unacceptable adverse effects (as compared not with the current situation but with future conditions after our planet has experienced substantially more warming). This will require a well-funded, coordinated research program like the one recommended by the British Royal Society in 2009. The United States must be a leader in that program. Lawyers must also begin thinking hard about the kind of global legal regime that will be needed to make geoengineering a reality should it prove to be feasible.
The case for near-term action to explore the feasibility of geoengineering is set forth on my website, http://coolerearth.net. Comments would be most welcome.
Thomas B. Stoel Jr.