A commercial airline? Or a rogue geoengineering experiment?

The World Economic Forum has put out a new report on global risks for 2013, and the report’s chapter on “X factors” — concerns more remote than the report’s primary risks, but still worthy of note — includes a section on rogue “geoengineering” experiments.

Geoengineering involves large-scale efforts to either remove carbon from the atmosphere, or to remake the atmosphere’s chemical or physical make-up to offset the effects of climate change. The most plausible scenario mentioned by the report uses aircraft to inject particles into the atmosphere to mimic the way eruptions of volcanic ash block sunlight, and thus cool the climate. More far-fetched scenarios go so far as deploying mirrors into orbit to reflect sunlight.

Such projects involve a host of funding and deployment problems, as well as the serious risk of unintended consequences for both the climate and the billions of humans who rely on it. For instance, a project at the UK-based Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project, or “SPICE,” working on the idea to mimic volcanic ash, was delayed in October over environmental concerns. Unfortunately, this leaves an opening for smaller nations or even commercial interests to begin experimenting with geoengineering unilaterally, say researchers at the World Economic Forum:

Nobody envisions deployment of solar radiation management anytime soon, given the difficulties in resolving a suite of governance issues (evidenced by the fact that even the relatively simple SPICE experiment in the UK foundered in the midst of controversy). Beginning with Britain’s Royal Society, many academic and policy bodies have called for cautious research as well as broader conversation about the implications of such technologies.

But this has led some geoengineering analysts to begin thinking about a corollary scenario, in which a country or small group of countries precipitates an international crisis by moving ahead with deployment or large-scale research independent of the global community. The global climate could, in effect, be hijacked by a rogue country or even a wealthy individual, with unpredictable costs to agriculture, infrastructure and global stability. [...]

For example, an island state threatened with rising sea levels may decide they have nothing to lose, or a well funded individual with good intentions may take matters into their own hands. There are signs that this is already starting to occur. In July 2012 an American businessman sparked controversy when he dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Canada in a scheme to spawn an artificial plankton bloom. The plankton absorb carbon dioxide and may then sink to the ocean bed, removing the carbon – another type of geoengineering, known as ocean fertilisation. Satellite images confirm that his actions succeeded in produce an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres.

The July 2012 incident was first reported by The Guardian in October, noting the gambit may have violated two international agreements and possibly involved misleading the local indigenous population about the nature and risks of the experiment. Russ George, the American businessman who oversaw the iron sulphate dump, is the former chief executive of Planktos Inc., and has been involved in other failed efforts to pull off large commercial dumps near the Galapagos and Canary Islands. Those attempts led to a warning from the EPA and to his ships being barred from ports by the Spanish and Ecuadorean governments. George had apparently hoped to net lucrative carbon credits.

The basic problem with geoengineering is that portions of the climate cannot be walled off to perform small-scale tests. This means geoengineering projects essentially have to jump straight from the experimental and computer modeling phases to a full-on implementation phase — as Russ George recently attempted. This means, at best, that geoengineering is last-resort, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency response to climate change, to be attempted when all other efforts have failed.

At worst, geoengineering is a distraction jumped on by interest groups, who wish to delay far more technologically and economically feasible efforts to tackle climate change by simply reducing the amount of carbon human beings emit into the atmosphere.

Last week I wrote about the dysfunctional, lop-sided geoengineering panel that is trying to launch the greenwashing euphemism, “Climate Remediation.”  Many others joined in the criticism.

In particular, freelance science journalist James Hrynyshyn has a devastating critique of the report at ScienceBlogs, “The Task Force on Climate Remediation Research is wrong, and here’s why.”

I interviewed an ethicist who withdrew from the panel, Prof. Stephen Gardiner.  I also interviewed climatologist Ken Caldeira.  I asked him about the euphemism, “Climate Remediation.”  I also asked him if he stood behind his 2009 statement:

Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, “Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat. It’s crazy….  If I had to wager, I would wager that we would never deploy any geoengineering system.”

Below is the email he sent me (and above is a figure he created that the Task Force embraced).

Note:  Caldeira is heavily involved in geo-engineering research and at the end I’ll include an earlier statement he sent me laying out his involvement with that research and Bill Gates.

Read more

Revealing Interview with Ethicist Who Withdrew from Panel, Equally Revealing Article by Panel Member on Report’s Dysfunctional Process

Earlier this week a panel of experts released a report calling for more research into geoengineering — directly manipulating the Earth’s climate to minimize the harm from global warming.  This panel, put together by the Bipartisan Policy Center, inanely — and pointlessly — tried to rename “geoengineering” as “climate remediation.”

Geoengineering is not a remedy.  No one should try to leave the public with any such impression.

Frankly, it would be more literally accurate to rename geo-engineering “smoke and mirrors,” as those are two of the most widely discussed measures for managing incoming solar radiation.

Climate Progress has an exclusive interview with Prof. Stephen Gardiner, an ethicist who has written extensively on climate change and geoengineering — and who withdrew from the panel earlier this year.   I contacted him when I learned he had originally been on the panel.  He confirmed “I was indeed originally on the panel.”  He “withdrew in March of this year when it became clear to me that there wasn’t going to be movement on some of the report’s recommendations, and I wouldn’t be able to endorse them.”

Read more

NY Times:  At the influential blog Climate Progress, Joe Romm, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, has made a similar point, likening geo-engineering to a dangerous course of chemotherapy and radiation to treat a condition curable through diet and exercise — or, in this case, emissions reduction.

JR:  For those here because of the NY Times piece on geo-engineering, here is an “Introduction to Climate Progress.”  You can find my previous writings on geo-engineering here.  See in particular Martin Bunzl on “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix.”

by Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell

A few days ago, the UK-based Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project, or “SPICE,” a project aimed at cooling the earth’s climate, was delayed due to environmental concerns.

SPICE is designed to mimic the effects of volcanic eruptions through the large-scale spraying of climate-cooling sulphate particles into the stratosphere. The first step in deploying the project is to spray water particles from a balloon. But that will have to wait.

The project is part of a much larger debate around the merits and demerits of using geo-engineering solutions to combat climate change. Those in favor are of two minds.

Read more

Is the aerosol strategy intergenerationally unethical?

The Gist: Putting reflective aerosols high into the atmosphere to slow climate change is too risky and not cost effective.

That’s Climate Central describing the core conclusions of the Climatic Change paper “The economics (or lack thereof) of aerosol geoengineering,” (full paper online here).

This study would seem to support the view that if you don’t do aggressive greenhouse mitigation starting now, you pretty much take aerosol geo-engineering off the table as a very limited (but still dubious) add-on strategy “” as even geo-engineering experts like climatologist Ken Caldeira have made clear.

What’s nice about this study is that it doesn’t just do an economic analysis, but also discusses intergenerational ethics.  I’ll excerpt the study itself at length — after the full Climate Central summary:

Read more

Whitening clouds by spraying them with seawater, proposed as a “technical fix” for climate change, could do more harm than good, according to research.

Whiter clouds reflect more solar energy back into space, cooling the Earth.

But a study presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting found that using water droplets of the wrong size would lead to warming, not cooling.

Doh!

As science advisor John Holdren resasserted in 2009 of strategies such as space mirrors or aerosol injection, “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.”

Two major problems for most of the ‘hard’ geoengineering strategies — aka solar radiation management aka smoke and mirrors — are that they still require aggressive mitigation, and they must meet a very strong test of science.

Read more

USA Today’s excellent science reporter Dan Vergano wrote an extensive overview of geoengineering, but failed to clearly explain the risk of intentionally poisoning our atmosphere to mitigate the effects of global warming pollution. Geoengineering describes a wide array of concepts to alter how planetary systems deal with greenhouse gas pollution, but Vergano fails to clearly distinguish reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations from radical experiments to transform the planet. He cites several interviewees who depict extreme geoengineering in colorless, amoral economic policy language:

“We’re moving into a different kind of world,” says environmental economist Scott Barrett of Columbia University. “Better we turn to asking if ‘geoengineering’ could work, than waiting until it becomes a necessity.”

“That’s where geoengineering comes in,” says international relations expert David Victor of the University of California-San Diego. “Research into geoengineering creates another option for the public.”

“Geoengineering is no longer a taboo topic at scientific meetings. They are looking at it as one more policy prescription,” says Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch, author of Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope — Or Worst Nightmare — For Averting Climate Catastrophe. “But it is yet to become a household word.”

Although Vergano attempts to describe the risks of, say, pumping millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere (“consigning hundreds of millions of the poorest people on the planet in Africa and Asia to recurring drought”), he has failed to accurately interpret the scientific literature. The only risks he has depicted — ones that involve the potential deaths of millions if not billions of people — are the “known” ones, the ones easily modeled by imperfect simulations of experiments never conducted before by humanity. The risks of geoengineering, particularly the ones that emulate the effects of a nuclear winter to dim the amount of sun reaching the earth, are practically unbounded. Depicting the known risks, as Vergano did, as the only risks of geoengineering, is astoundingly optimistic.

The only reason that serious climate scientists (other than Dr. Strangelovian extremists) are discussing geoengineering is that they fear the possibility of humanity’s extinction — or merely the utter collapse of human civilization — from unchecked fossil fuel pollution is significant enough to consider doomsday survival scenarios. “We should avoid geoengineering if possible,” Dr. Ken Caldeira, one of the climate scientists who has explored geoengineering scenarios, “but we need it in our toolbox in case of catastrophe.”

If you don’t do aggressive greenhouse mitigation starting now, you pretty much take geo-engineering off the table as a very limited (but still dubious) add-on strategy.

Bjorn Lomborg has one thing right about messaging — if you just keep repeating your disinformation and long-debunked arguments over and over and over again, you can break through to the media and general public.  This is doubly true because the debunkers usually get tired of repeating themselves first.

Now the discredited Dane has a documentary film out, “Cool It” pushing his favorite ‘solutions’ to global warming — R&D plus the (false) hope of geo-engineering — while repeating his fatally-wrong core message that under no circumstances should humanity start aggressive mitigation of carbon dioxide.

Few people have been as thoroughly debunked as Bjorn Lomborg (see “The Bjorn Irrelevancy: Duke dean disses Danish delayer” and “Lomborg’s main argument has collapsed“).  Heck not only has the trailer for his film been debunked, there’s a whole book, The Lomborg Deception, eviscerates his writing and even his footnotes.

Lomborg’s view of geo-engineering in particular is almost completely backwards from what the science suggests.

Read more

Solar radiation management (SRM) –  aka ‘hard’ geo-engineering — is, literally, a smoke and mirrors solution to the dangers posed by unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases,.

As science advisor John Holdren resasserted in 2009 of strategies such as space mirrors or aerosol injection, “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.”

And, of course, those ‘solutions’ do nothing to stop the consequences of ocean acidification, which recent studies suggest will be devastating all by itself (see Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).

Read more

The one-time “Skeptical Environmentalist” now says, “man-made global warming exists” and “we have long moved on from any mainstream disagreements about the science of climate change.”

Climate ‘sceptic’ Bj¸rn Lomborg now believes global warming is one of world’s greatest threats

One of the world’s most prominent climate change sceptics has called for a $100bn fund to fight the effects of global warning, after rethinking his views on the severity of the threat.

That’s the UK Telegraph’s headline.

Bj¸rn Lomborg: the dissenting climate change voice who changed his tune

With his new book, Danish scientist Bj¸rn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming….

That’s from the Guardian’s headline.

Read more