As the risks of climate change and the difficulty of effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions become increasingly obvious, potential geoengineering solutions are widely discussed. For example, in a recent report, Blackstock et al. explore the feasibility, potential impact, and dangers of shortwave climate engineering, which aims to reduce the incoming solar radiation and thereby reduce climate warming. Proposed geoengineering solutions tend to be controversial among climate scientists and attract considerable media attention.  However, by focusing on limiting warming, the debate creates a false sense of certainty and downplays the impacts of geoengineering solutions.

So begins, “Risks of Climate Engineering” (subs. req’d), an important piece in Science this month by Gabriele Hegerl and Susan Solomon.  Hegerl was a coordinating lead author for the Fourth Assessment Report.  Solomon is an atmospheric chemist working for NOAA and “one of the first to propose CFCs as the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole.”

Solomon was lead author of the even more important February PNAS paper, “Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions,” which, as I noted at the time, gives the lie to the notion that it is a moral choice not to do everything humanly possible to prevent this tragedy, a lie to the notion that we can “adapt” to climate change, unless by “adapt” you mean “force the next 50 generations to endure endless misery because we were too damn greedy to give up 0.1% of our GDP each year” (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).  No surprise, then, that she co-authored a paper skeptical of geoengineering.

I remain dubious of geo-engineering (see Geo-engineering remains a bad idea” and “Geo-Engineering is NOT the Answer” and British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming, which includes an excellent analysis by Prof. Alan Robock).  Science advisor John Holdren told me in April that he stands by his critique:

“The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.”

The new analysis by Hegerl and Solomon is sufficiently significant — Science itself featured it early in Science Express — that I’ll excerpt it below:

Read more

I’m updating this post from August 29, 2007, along with pieces of the adaptation trap “” Part 1 and Part 2 from March 2008.

The L.A. Times has brought to prominence (and fallen for) what I call the “adaptation trap”:

The adaptation trap is the belief that 1) “it would be easier and cheaper to adapt than fight climate change” [as the Times puts it in the sub-head] and/or 2) “adaptation” to climate change is possible in any meaningful sense of the word absent an intense mitigation effort starting now to keep carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 ppm.

G. Gordon Liddy’s daughter repeated that standard denier/delayer line in our debate: Humans are very adaptable “” we’ve adapted to climate changes in the past and will do so in the future.

We know that fighting climate change — stabilizing below 450 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide — has a low cost, according to IEA, IPCC, McKinsey and every major independent economic analysis (see “Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar“).

What is the cost of “adaptation”?  It is almost incalculable.  The word is a virtually meaningless euphemism in the context of catastrophic global warming.  That is what the deniers and delayers simply don’t understand. On our current emissions path, the country and the world faces faces multiple catastrophes, including:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land “” some 10°F over much of the United States
• Sea level rise of 5 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Permanent Dust Bowls over the U.S. SW and many other heavily populated regions around the globe
• Massive species loss on land and sea “” 50% or more of all life
• Unexpected impacts “” the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• More severe hurricanes “” especially in the Gulf

I think Hurricane Katrina gives the lie to the adaptation myth. No, I’m not saying humans are not adaptable. Nor am I saying global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, although warming probably did make it a more intense. But on the four-year anniversary of Katrina “” and the three year anniversary of Climate Progress’s initial launch “” I’m saying Katrina showed the limitations of adaptation as a response to climate change, for several reasons.

Read more