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.

Joe,

When I am putting my name on a scientific paper, that means I agree with everything in the paper.

When I put my name on a document like this report, it means that on balance I think this document will do more good than harm and there is no recommendation in the report that I am unable to live with. I conceive of it more like voting for some omnibus legislation where there may be some particular things that do not make me happy, but overall I think the report makes a positive contribution.

I was arguing that we should not issue one report, but two: one on carbon dioxide removal and one on sunlight reflection methods. If I had my way, there would be no reason to coin any term to refer to this disparate collection of possible activities.

Most carbon dioxide removal proposals are either expensive or marginally effective (e.g., massive planting of trees), but most of these proposals do not pose new kinds of climate risk. In contrast, the sunlight reflection approaches introduce a range of new environmental and political risks, and therefore should be treated differently.

My perspective is nicely summarized in the attached figure. I see the climate problem as threatening enough that we need to explore every possible intervention point.

As I mentioned in my 2007 New York Times Op-Ed piece (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24caldiera.html), I think that 99% of our effort to avoid climate change should be put on emissions reduction, and 1% of our effort should be looking into these options. So, just because this report emphasizes “after the tailpipe” approaches to attempt to diminish climate risk, there is no question that the main thing we need to work on is making sure that greenhouse gases do not come out of the tailpipe in the first place.

We have been subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry by allowing it to use our atmosphere as a waste dump. It is time for us to reclaim our atmosphere, and refuse to provide this subsidy to the fossil-fuel industry. We need to develop energy and transportation systems that do not rely on using the sky as a sewer.

I see the term “climate remediation” as aspirational: the goal is to try to remedy some of the causes or consequences of climate change. The extent to which such efforts can be successful is an open question, but there is no doubt that the environmentally safest path is to avoid emitting greenhouse gases in the first place.

–

If by “geoengineering” or “climate remediation”, we mean to include things like planting trees, then I think we can see deployment absent a climate emergency. If, however, we are speaking about the sunlight reflection approaches, then I still think it unlikely that these would ever be deployed unless there is some kind of crisis.

Let’s imagine the sunlight reflection method worked as advertised. How could anybody ever tell whether a weather event was due to the stratospheric aerosols, excess greenhouse gases, or natural variability in the climate system? If some region has a major drought in the decade after the introduction of the stratospheric aerosol spray, aren’t they likely to attribute that change to the aerosol spray system? Isn’t that likely to generate political friction and possibly even military conflict?

So, even if the system worked as advertised, there is still great potential that socio-political risks could outweigh climate benefits.

Of course, the system will not work as advertised. The Earth system is much more complex than any model, and so we can expect surprises to occur if a system is deployed. This adds another layer of risk.

On the other hand, if continued heating of the planet results in massive crop failures throughout the tropics and threatens huge loss of life, then it is possible that such risks would seem like a good bargain. Outside of such extreme outcomes, I do not see deployment of a sunlight reflection system to be politically attractive, even if there was an expectation that such a deployment would diminish environmental risks.

–

I see research into these risky options as kind of an insurance policy. If you see a bunch of kids playing with matches on your wooden deck, your first impulse should be to get the kids to stop playing with matches. You might also want fire insurance, but our first responsibility is to try to prevent the fire.

So, there is a danger if people come to believe that carbon dioxide removal or sunlight reflection methods can substitute for emissions reduction. Outside of a few nutters, I don’t think anybody thinks that the prospect of deploying these approaches mean it is OK to relax and that we can continue dumping our waste CO2 into the atmosphere.

My experience is that people who think climate catastrophe is a real possibility want both to reduce emissions and to study options that might be deployed if those emissions reductions do not come fast enough or are not deep enough to avoid such a catastrophe. People who don’t worry about climate change don’t want to bother with emissions reductions or studying these proposals.

There are very few people who say: “I think the risk of climate catastrophe is real, and therefore we should study these options, but we should not undertake efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” From my perspective, the few people who do say things like that fall squarely in the nutter camp.

Best,

Ken Caldeira

I do agree that humanity will reorganize itself to stop hundreds of millions if not billions from starving from catastrophic climate change, possibly as early as the 2030s.  Exactly how that will play itself out is hard to imagine, especially given the staggering amount of denial continues in this country.  Humanity’s desperation will lead to all sorts of schemes, though I am skeptical that  solar radiation management such as  sulfate aerosols will be among them, since that also risks major crop damage (see Martin Bunzl on “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix”).

A year ago, Caldeira  e-mailed me his financial connection to geoengineering research:

1. Funds made available by Bill Gates support several post-doctoral researchers in my lab, as well as access to computational facilities. Some, but far from all, of this research was geoengineering-related. (I attach the most recent paper supported by these funds, showing that about 1/4 of Chinese CO2 emissions support consumption, primarily in the developed world.)

2. David Keith and I have used some of these funds to support meetings at which geoengineering was discussed. The flow of money was uniformly out and not in. All of the participants at these meetings were fully informed of their nature. No funds were ever raised in activities surrounding these meeting.

3. I am listed as an inventor on patents related to vertically pumping water in the ocean and related to storing carbon dioxide in the ocean by dissolving carbonate minerals. I have publicly stated that if any of these patents are used for climate modification purposes, I will donate my share of the proceeds to non-profit charities and NGOs.

I do think that the “Climate Remediation” Task Force  should have spelled out all such interests for all its participants.

Related Posts:

• Geoengineering “not a solution” to sea-level rise
• Science on the Risks of Climate Engineering: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”
• Nature: Ocean fertilization for geoengineering “should be abandoned”
• British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming. Is that why Lomborg supports such a smoke-and-mirrors approach?
• Nature Geoscience: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

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.”

I also interviewed a number of the leading experts on geoengineering for this post, including a panel member, Ken Caldeira.  I will publish his response in full in a subsequent post.

As science advisor John Holdren reasserted in 2009 of strategies such as aerosol injection or space mirrors — called solar radiation management (SRM) these days — “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.”

I appreciate that since a serious mitigation effort appears to be non-imminent, people are casting about for other ways to avoid multiple catastrophes (see “Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery“).  But geo-engineering without aggressive mitigation makes even less sense than adaptation without aggressive mitigation (see Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story”).  So I’m glad the panel stated upfront:

This task force strongly believes that climate remediation technologies are no substitute for controlling risk through climate mitigation (i.e., reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) and climate adaptation (i.e., enhancing the resilience ofhuman-made and natural systems to climate changes)

I don’t think it’s terribly surprising that a panel stacked with advocates of geoengineering research (and some actual researchers) ends up advocating for more research into geoengineering.  A number of people I talked to raised questions about the composition of the panel and the lack of disclosure that some of the panel members have a financial interest in geoengineering research (see below).

Many thought the effort of the “Task Force on Climate Remediation” to replace the term geoengineering was particularly misguided.

Here are the comments of journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the award-winning (!) book, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate:

The phrase “climate remediation” is almost as bad as the phrase “clean coal.”  In both cases, it’s a phrase that reeks of spin and marketing.  And while I can understand why Big Coal wants to push it, I think it was a mistake for this panel to choose this phrase.  The idea, of course, is to make geoengineering — or, if you must, climate engineering — sound gentle and comforting.  It is not gentle and comforting, it is a big, complex, morally-fraught, and dangerous idea, and attempts to disguise this with cuddly language are just going to backfire.  And let me add that this is nothing new.  Virtually every meeting and panel about geoengineering that I’ve attended in the last five years has started with a few hours of hang-wringing about what the “term of art” should be.  It’s just silly.  Geoengineering is not a fix, quick or otherwise.  It is not a remedy.  It is, at best, a way to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change and maybe a way to protect fragile ecosystems like the arctic while we solve the real problem, which is getting off fossil fuels and repowering our lives with clean energy.

Gardiner writes me:

As for ‘climate remediation’,  I agree that it has its own defects.  Nobody really thinks that SRM is a “remedy” for anything. And I’m also skeptical about whether large-scale and rapid CDR [carbon dioxide removal] would really be completely benign,  as many people seem to assume.

The term “climate remediation” is not merely defective and inaccurate spin and marketing.  It has zero chance of becoming the term of art because it is transparently defective and inaccurate spin and marketing.  The fact that this Task Force actually ended up choosing this for its name and embraced the term throughout the report seriously calls into question the entire process and its output. As we’ll see, one panel member actually went public in a major science journal with a discussion of just how dysfunctional the entire process was.

Let me make clear, though, that I know about a third of the members personally and another third or so professionally — and they are generally very high caliber individuals, which is what makes this all the more head-exploding.  This is really a cautionary tale.

Three of the panel members actually dissented on this point.  David Keith and Granger Morgan and David Victor have asterisks (**) next to their names indicating:

These members support the recommendations of this report, but they do not support the introduction of the new term “climate remediation.

Yes, three members of the “Task Force on Climate Remediation Research” reject the official name of their task force and the report they put their name on.   I wonder how many times that has ever happened.

Gardiner said he “can’t really understand what all the fuss is about when people argue vehemently against” the term geoengineering.  He directed me to “Dan Sarewitz’s comments in Nature” — “The voice of science: let’s agree to disagree.”

Substantively, Sarewitz’s piece itself has little to recommend itself, since he tries to use the bizarrely fierce debate over ” climate remediation” to help discredit consensus-based processes like the one used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which is like comparing an apple (and a not very good one at that) with, say, half the world’s orange fields.

What is noteworthy, however, is that Sarewitz opens the window to the inner dysfunctionality of the panel.  He notes the report title, Geoengineering: A National Strategic Plan for Research on Climate Remediation, and then writes:

The discussions that craft expert consensus, however, have more in common with politics than science. And I don’t think I give too much away by revealing that one of the battles in our panel was over the term geoengineering itself.

This struggle is obvious in the report’s title, which begins with ‘geoengineering’ and ends with the redundant term ‘climate remediation’. Why? Some of the committee felt that ‘geoengineering’ was too imprecise; some thought it too controversial; others argued that it was already commonly used, and that a new term would create confusion.

I didn’t have a problem with ‘geoengineering’, but for others it was a do-or-die issue. I yielded on that point (and several others) to gain political capital to secure issues that had a higher priority for me. Thus, disagreements between panellists are settled not with the ‘right’ answer, but by achieving a political balance across many of the issues discussed.

Well, that may be how this dysfunctional panel operated — and it would have to be dysfunctional to brand itself with such a transparently nonsensical greenwashing term that simply isn’t going to catch on and thankfully so, as Goodell makes clear.

But it is ludicrous for Sarewitz to write this kiss and tell in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world in order to help discredit that other famous “expert consensus” effort, the IPCC.

This isn’t the place for a full debunk of Sarewitz, but what he apparently misses is that the IPCC process is indeed dysfunctional, as I’ve said, but mostly because the way it deals with achieving consensus is to water things down to satisfy the least common denominator — not horse trading so that some small group gets to say something absurd so that another clique gets to say something absurd.  Indeed, this report explicitly doesn’t use the IPCC process, where any member nation can basically veto any word in  the final summary reports.

The IPCC ends up with generally reasonable science — but a serious underestimation of likely future impacts, a conclusion that the recent scientific literature has made all too clear (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

In fact, had this report given every member a veto, it would have avoided the ridiculous euphemism of “climate remediation” and probably come up with a superior product.  But I digress.

For the record, climatologist Ken Caldeira wrote me:

When I am putting my name on a scientific paper,  that means I agree with everything in the paper.

When I put my name on a document like this report,  it means that on balance I think this document will do more good than harm and there is no recommendation in the report that I am unable to live with. I conceive of it more like voting for some omnibus legislation where there may be some particular things that do not make me happy, but overall I think the report makes a positive contribution.

I was arguing that we should not issue one report,  but two:  one on carbon dioxide removal and one on sunlight reflection methods.  If I had my way,  there would be no reason to coin any term to refer to this disparate collection of possible activities….

I see the term “climate remediation” as aspirational:  the goal is to try to remedy some of the causes or consequences of climate change. The extent to which such efforts can be successful is an open question,  but there is no doubt that the environmentally safest path is to avoid emitting greenhouse gases in the first place.

I will publish Caldeira’s entire email to me this weekend.

The report itself says a new term is needed because, “Geoengineering is controversial—indeed, the term itself is controversial because it is both broad and imprecise.”  Uhh, not quite.   I’d say 99% of the reason the term is controversial is because the idea is controversial.  Giving it a new name doesn’t make it any less controversial — and in fact the new term is more controversial because it smacks of greenwashing.

In any case, I can’t believe the panel members are thrilled with Sarewitz for this embarrassing revelation of their dysfunctional process.  But now that he has done it, I do think the members ought to fess up as to whom it was a “do or die issue” to replace the relatively neutral and widely used term “geoengineering” with the inaccurate euphemism, “climate remediation.”

That’s particularly true because this is a lop-sided panel.  It struck me when I looked at the members that it was very thin on the well-known critics of geoengineering.   I first asked Prof. Martin Bunzl, who is Director of the Rutgers Initiative on Climate and Social Policy, for his comment on the panel membership.  Bunzl gave a presentation at the February 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, on what he calls “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix,” which I reposted here.

He coauthored a major analysis in Science by leading experts on volcanoes and/or climate — along with Alan Robock, Ben Kravitz, and Georgiy L. Stenchikov — “A Test for Geoengineering?” (online here), which concluded:

Stratospheric geoengineering cannot be tested in the atmosphere without full-scale implementation.

Indeed, they found “weather and climate variability preclude observation of the climate response without a large, decade-long forcing. Such full-scale implementation could disrupt food production on a large scale” — for two billion people!

Bunzl wrote me:

I noted the makeup of the panel with disappointment when it was announced.

He then noted that he thought Gardiner dropped off.  I asked Gardiner what he thought of the panel makeup.  He wrote me:

I was concerned about the diversity of the panel (and said so).  Primarily, I think that it is an issue that there has been a spate of reports over the past few years where the participants have been either strongly overlapping or drawn from a very small group, especially on the science side.  This creates an appearance of national and international consensus on these issues that may only be skin deep.  (And I was surprised that people like Alan Robock were not on the panel.)

I have emailed Robock to see if he was asked.   Of course there are many reasons why people say no to panels.  Still, this is a very controversial, emerging issue, and the Bipartisan Policy Center should have tried much harder for more balance.  And it should have used a process  that wouldn’t lead someone like Gardiner to withdraw (and someone like Sarewitz to tell tales out of school).

Goodell isn’t as worried about the panel makeup.  He notes that the recommendations are relatively tame.  He notes that David Keith and Ken Caldeira “are anything but wide-eyed geoengineering advocates.”  I agree on that point — see, for instance, Caldeira tells Yale e360: Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, “Now that Ive got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat. Its crazy…. If I had to wager, I would wager that we would never deploy any geoengineering system.”

Goodell then writes:

That said, as geoengineering moves into the mainstream, it’s more and more important to broaden the conversation, if for no other reason than if geoengineering is seen as some quick fix being pushed ahead by a clubby group of scientists and policy wonks, well, then it will (rightly) be seen as some taboo Frankenscience.  And that will not be a good thing for anyone.

And he agrees the panel should have tried for more transparency.  I asked, “Do you think the report should identify those members who have a financial interest in geoengineering research?”  He replied:

Yes.  Transparency and disclosure are vital, especially with an issue as dangerous, politically destabilizing, and ethically-fraught as geoengineering.

Finally, here is Gardiner’s overall assessment:

In general,  though I’m pleased that the BPC report follows the Royal Society in recognizing that the ethical issues are important, I’m disappointed by the lack of explicit treatment of ethics, by the neglect of the point that geoengineering only gets on the table amid a context of wider moral failure, and in particular by the endorsement of a very limited “coalition of the willing” approach to international cooperation.  The latter is especially problematic when a necessary condition for membership of the “willing” seems to be being well-resourced (scientifically and otherwise),  and when geoengineering is a genuinely global and intergenerational issue that potentially affects the lives of billions of people, many of them poor and/or residing in poor countries.

The bottom line is that this report lost much if not most of its credibility with its process, with its lopsided nature and lack of transparency, and with its inexplicably inane decision to embrace the greenwashing term, “climate remediation.”

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

In the end, I agree with Caldeira that I don’t think SRM geoengineering is going to be deployed on a large scale.  More on that this weekend.

Related Posts:

• Geoengineering “not a solution” to sea-level rise
• Science on the Risks of Climate Engineering: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”
• Nature: Ocean fertilization for geoengineering “should be abandoned”
• British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming. Is that why Lomborg supports such a smoke-and-mirrors approach?
• Nature Geoscience: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

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.

Some argue that these technological fixes can buy us time while the world plods toward an international political solution. Others, more fatalistically, believe geo-engineering solutions are inevitable and research should begin sooner rather than later.

Those against geo-engineering have a number of objections. First, they contend that such projects, even in their planning stages, are a distraction from the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Second, there are fears that such unilateral actions exist in a grey area of ethics and international law, which should be better clarified before moving forward, if at all. (Indeed, this is the basis for a United Nations moratorium on geo-engineering). And finally, there are serious and legitimate questions regarding the potential unintended consequences of such ‘solutions’ on climate systems, such as a concern that sulfate clouds might significantly alter weather patterns and cause droughts.

This final concern brings us to Thomas Midgley. Midgley accidentally became the father of geo-engineering, putting into motion changes that continue to influence our climate and our approach to problem-solving.

In 1921, Midgley helped stop engines from “knocking” by adding lead to gasoline. This was good for the engines, though highly toxic to humans and the environment.  Advocates called for regulation, but catalytic converters ultimately came to the rescue. The converters couldn’t handle the lead, and so the lead was dropped. But the story doesn’t end there.

In 1928, after recovering from lead poisoning, Midgley went on to help solve the refrigeration problem presented by the highly flammable and/or toxic refrigerants of the day – ammonia, sulfur dioxide, methyl chloride and butane. He worked his way through the periodic table to discover that CFCs (chloroflourocarbons) were neither flammable nor toxic; hence, the advent of Freon. Midgley did not live long enough to see Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland win a Nobel Prize for discovering that CFCs were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Fortunately, replacements for CFCs were in the pipeline and helped with the transition from CFCs to HCFCs (hydrochloroflourocarbons,) and finally, to the ozone-friendly HFCs (hydroflourocarbons).

Midgley’s story ends there, but his legacy continues. HFCs, like its predecessors, were a solution with a new problem embedded within.  It turns out that HFCs are what is called an extreme, short-lived climate forcer, or a “super greenhouse gas.” Today, more climate-friendly alternatives to HFCs are being developed, but HFC use continues to grow dramatically, and the political will to eliminate them has not yet fully materialized.

Thomas Midgley started a geo-engineering treadmill: a brilliant technological solution created unintended consequences; policies and regulations were developed to address the problem; and those policies were aided by a new technological fix that, over time, led to a set of its own unintended consequences.

So what does this mean for the geo-engineering solutions being offered to mitigate and adapt to climate change? Tread carefully. We simply don’t know what kind of problems these “solutions” will bring.

– Francesco Femia is Program Director at the Connect U.S. Fund, where he manages programs ranging from international climate and energy policy to genocide prevention. He is also Founder and Director of the Center for Climate and Security.

– Caitlin Werrell is Founder and Director of the Center for Climate and Security, where she focuses on climate change and international security, resiliency of governance systems, and the integration of the water, climate and development sectors. She is also Co-Founder of the MAP Institute for Water and Climate.

Related Posts:

• Science Sunday: “The economics (or lack thereof) of aerosol geoengineering”:  The Gist: Putting reflective aerosols high into the atmosphere to slow climate change is too risky and not cost effective.
• Caldeira calls Lomborgs vision a dystopic world out of a science fiction story

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:

Summary: Some have argued that if human society cannot sufficiently reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, than we could still avoid the worst consequences of global warming by putting highly reflective particles, known as aerosols, high into the atmosphere. These aerosols would reflect light back to space, thus counteracting warming from greenhouse gases.

The authors of this paper use an integrated assessment model to determine how costly such a method would be. The authors discuss the potential side effects of this so-called “geoengineering” strategy, since adding aerosols to the atmosphere could have unintended consequences, such as significantly altering weather patterns and damaging stratospheric ozone. Also, aerosols are short-lived, and would have to be continuously added to the atmosphere in order for this scheme to work. If society stopped injecting them, the result would be a rapid shift in the climate, something this paper argues would be highly damaging.

The authors calculate that if there is greater than a 15 percent chance that such a method will be shut down, or if the unintended consequences of aerosols are greater than half a percent of the world’s economy, then this method of geoengineering is not worth the effort.

And let’s not forget that the aerosol ‘solution’ does 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”).

Here is the conclusion to the study itself:

First, aerosol geoengineering hinges on counterbalancing the forcing effects of greenhouse gas emissions (which decay over centuries) with the forcing effects of aerosol emissions (which decay within years). Aerosol geoengineering can hence lead to abrupt climate change if the aerosol forcing is not sustained. The possibility of an intermittent aerosol geoengineering forcing as well as negative impacts of the aerosol forcing itself may cause economic damages that far exceed the benefits. Aerosol geoengineering may hence pose more than just “minimal climate risks,” contrary to the claim of Wigley (2006). Second, substituting aerosol geoengineering for CO2 abatement fails an economic cost-benefit test in our model for arguably reasonable assumptions. In contrast, (and as shown in numerous previous studies) fast and sizeable cuts in CO2 emissions (far in excess of the currently implemented measures) pass a costbenefit test. Third, aerosol geoengineering constitutes a conscious temporal risk transfer that arguably violates the ethical objectives of intergenerational justice.

Our analysis has barely scratched the surface and is silent on many important aspects. More than a decade ago, a Unites States National Academies of Science committee assessing geoengineering strategies concluded that “Engineering countermeasures need to be evaluated but should not be implemented without broad understanding of the direct effects and the potential side effects, the ethical issues, and the risks” (COSEPUP, 1992). Today, we are still lacking this broad understanding.

Caldeira made some similar points to me in a 2009 e-mail interview:

Nobody has written about this that I know of, but “¦.

If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main[tain] more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 / low sunlight conditions “” similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse “” maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.

We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.

And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth’s climate system that we depend on?

On top of all of these environmental considerations, there are socio-political considerations: We we have a cooperative world government deciding exactly how much geoengineering to deploy where? What if China were to go into decades of drought? Would they sit idly by as the Climate Intervention Bureau apparently ignores their plight? And what if political instability where to mean that for a few years, the intervention system were not maintained “¦ all of that accumulated pent-up climate change would be unleashed upon the Earth “¦ and perhaps make “The Day After” movie look less silly than it does.

Long-term risk reduction depends on greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Nevertheless, there is a chance that some of these options might be able to diminish short-term risk in the event of a climate crisis.

I would add the grave risk that that after injecting massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere for a decade or more, we might experience some unexpectedly bad side effect that just gets worse and worse.  After all, the top climate scientists underestimated the speed and scale of greenhouse gas impacts (and the magnitude of synergistic ones, like bark beetle infestations and forest fires).

We would be in incompletely unexplored territory “” what I call an experimental chemotherapy and radiation therapy combined.  There is no possible way of predicting the long-term effect of the thick stratospheric haze (which, unlike GHGs, has no recent or paleoclimate analog).  If it turned out to have unexpected catastrophic impacts of its own (other than drought), we’d be totally screwed (see “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix”).

Or, rather, our children and grand-children would be totally screwed, not that our actions today suggest we care about them very much (see Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?).  The study has this to say about the intergenerational ethics issue:

While there have been careful analyses of the significance of intergenerational justice in the wider context of climate change (Gardiner, 2009; Page, 2006; Wolf, 2009), our study is the first to quantitatively examine issues of intergenerational justice raised by aerosol geoengineering for the case that aerosol geoengineering can be intermittent and the aerosol forcing can cause harm. Our analysis shows, for example, that substituting aerosol geoengineering for CO2 emissions abatement is a risk transfer from current to future generations (Figures 4 to 7). In addition, the impacts of the abrupt warming due to a discontinuation of the aerosol forcing would place a heavy burden on human communities and ecosystem integrity (Alley et al., 2002) and thus threaten the conditions required to satisfy basic welfare rights of future generations. Substituting aerosol geoengineering for CO2 emissions abatement decreases the required abatement costs in the near term but imposes sizeable risks for more distant generations (Figure 4 a, b). Since Rawlsian intergenerational distributive justice requires that current generations avoid policies that create benefits for themselves but impose costs on future generations, substituting aerosol geoengineering for CO2 abatement fails on the grounds of this particular approach to ethics.

It would appear that what science advisor John Holdren reasserted in 2009 remains true today, “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.”

Mitigate, mitigate, mitigate — or punish countless future generations.

Related Post:

• Key ‘geoengineering’ strategy — cloud whitening — may yield warming, not cooling

• Science on the Risks of Climate Engineering: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”

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.

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 — as even geo-engineering experts like climatologist Ken Caldeira have made clear (see Caldeira calls Lomborg’s vision “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story”).

Also, the nation and the world are not going to pursue an expensive and potentially risky strategy unless they have much higher confidence in climate science than many people seem to have today.  You’d have to know with near certainty that doing nothing would make things much worse.  Nobody undergoes chemotherapy unless the alternative is pretty darn grim and certain.

But if the entire U.S. political system ever gets that high confidence in the science, mitigation is inevitably going to be the cheaper and safer solution (Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost).

The other problem with geo-engineering is that by the time it might seriously be on the table, say, the 2030s, when humanity has become truly desperate to avert the multiple catastrophes scientists have been warning about for decades, the planet itself will probably be warming faster and extreme weather events will be increasingly commonplace.

Thus it will be very hard to tell if your geo-engineering strategy isn’t actually making things worse.  That causes real problems if there is any scientific reason to think that your geoengineering strategy might in fact make things worse — which is certainly the case for the most plausible of all the solar radiation management ideas proposed to date, aerosol injection (see “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix”).

Now, as the BBC reports, one of the few other SRM semi-plausible ideas, cloud spraying, may also suffer from the same exact problem.

Cloud whitening was originally proposed back in 1990 by John Latham, now of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, US.

It has since been developed by a number of other researchers including University of Edinburgh wave energy pioneer Stephen Salter, joining a number of other “geoengineering” techniques that would attempt either to reduce solar radiation reaching earth or absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

One version envisages specially designed ships, powered by wind, operating in areas of the ocean where reflective stratocumulus clouds are scarce.

The ships would continually spray fine jets of seawater droplets into the sky, where tiny salt crystals would act as nuclei around which water vapour would condense, producing clouds or thickening them where they already exist.

It has not yet been trialled in practice, although proponents say it ought to be.

But Kari Alterskjaer from the University of Oslo in Norway came to the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna with a cautionary tale.

Her study, using observations of clouds and a computer model of the global climate, confirmed earlier findings that if cloud whitening were to be done, the best areas would be just to the west of North and South America, and to the west of Africa.

But it concluded that about 70 times more salt would have to be carried aloft than proponents have calculated.

And using droplets of the wrong size, she found, could reduce cloud cover rather than enhancing it – leading to a net warming, not the desired cooling.

“If the particles are too small, they will not brighten the clouds – instead they will influence particles that are already there, and there will be competition between them,” she told BBC News.

“Obviously the particle size is of crucial importance, not only for whether you get a positive or negative effect, but also whether particles can actually reach the clouds — if they’re too large, they just fall to the sea.”

Yet even today, any given year can be considerably warmer or cooler than the fast-rising mean.  It will be difficult if not impossible to know by the 2030s whether some cloud whitening experiment is making things better or worse.

The possibility of this technique having a warming impact has been foreseen by cloud-whitening’s developers.

In a 2002 scientific paper, Dr Latham wrote: “… the overall result could be a reduction in cloud droplet concentration, with concomitant reductions in albedo and cloud longevity, ie a warming effect”.

But, he argued, this possibility could be eliminated by careful design of the spray system.

Contacted after the presentation in Vienna, Professor Salter took the same line.

“I agree that the drop size has to be correct and that the correct value may vary according to local conditions,” he said.

“However, I am confident that we can control drop size by adjusting the frequency of an ultrasonic pressure wave which ejects drop from micro-nozzles etched in silicon.

“We can test this at very small scale in the lab.”

You can test it at a very small scale, but it just wouldn’t mean bloody much given the vastly different scale and circumstances in the real world application to achieve a meaningful impact.

One scientist at Ms Alterskjaer’s presentation, having heard her outline why it might not work, commented that it was the most depressing thing he had heard in a long time.

And Piers Forster from the UK’s University of Leeds, who is leading a major UK project on geoengineering techniques, suggested more research would be needed before cloud whitening could be considered for “prime time” use.

“The trouble is that clouds are very complicated; as soon as you start manipulating them in one way, there are a lot of different interactions,” he said.

“We need real-world data and we need modelling that tries to simulate clouds on more appropriate scales, and that means less than 100m or so, because if you look at a deck of stratocumulus it’s not one big thing, it has pockets and cells and other features.

“Far more uncertain is the idea that you’d inject a particular drop size, because it won’t stay that size for long – it will spread out, and that would be uncertain.”

The more one looks into each individual geo-engineering strategy, the less plausible it appears.

And of course, the SRM ‘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”).

Even geoengineering advocate Tom Wigley is only defending “a complementary combined mitigation/geoengineering scenario, an overshoot concentration pathway where atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches 530 ppm before falling back to 450 ppm, coupled with low-intensity geoengineering,” with the goal of stabilizing global temperature rise at 2°C, in case we can’t stabilize at 450 ppm. You can see a good discussion of that at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists‘ expert roundtable response to Alan Robocks’ excellent piece, “20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.”

Well, stabilizing at 530 ppm requires doing a massive amount of mitigation starting now “” only 2 or 3 fewer wedges than what is needed for 450 (see “The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm“).

Very aggressive mitigation is the only thing that makes geo-engineering even semi-plausible (and adaptation anything other than a cruel euphemism).

Related Post:

• Science on the Risks of Climate Engineering: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”

“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.

First, 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.”

Second, 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”).

Third, a major analysis in Science this year by leading experts on volcanoes and/or climate “” Alan Robock, Martin Bunzl, Ben Kravitz, and Georgiy L. Stenchikov “” “A Test for Geoengineering?” (online here), concluded:

Stratospheric geoengineering cannot be tested in the atmosphere without full-scale implementation.

Indeed, they found “weather and climate variability preclude observation of the climate response without a large, decade-long forcing. Such full-scale implementation could disrupt food production on a large scale” “” for two billion people!  For Bunzl’s discussion of this, see “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix.”

So Lomborg has it exactly backwards in an extended piece of nonsense Time magazine lets him post, “Geoengineering: A Quick, Clean Fix?“:

This is where geoengineering comes in: it’s not a long-term solution but a way to keep the earth from overheating while we wait for truly efficient and affordable green-energy technologies to come on line.

Not.

I’ve seen many of the reviewers of the movie pick up this absurd myth that geo-engineering is a way to “buy time” while we wait for technology breakthroughs. With apologies to my long-time readers, if Lombardi is going to keep repeating his disinformation (and the media is going to pick it up and run with it), I am going to start excerpting some of the prior debunkings of Lomborg, starting with this 2009 Caldeira interview whose opening paragraph I quote at the top:

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 is getting a lot of media coverage for his do-nothing climate “consensus.”  The Washington Post Juliet Eilperin had a good piece, which included a response from real climate scientists:

The group, headed by statistician Bjorn Lomborg, issued a report by five economists that suggested it made more sense to spend money on marine cloud whitening research and green energy development than to protect forests, clean up diesel emissions or significantly raise the price of carbon”¦.

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.

The group’s inane results are here.  The comment of Ken Caldeira caught my eye.  I’ve known him for many years and I asked him if he could explain his remarks.  His response (boldface added):

Nobody has written about this that I know of, but “¦.

If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main[tain] more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 / low sunlight conditions “” similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse “” maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.

We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.

And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth’s climate system that we depend on?

On top of all of these environmental considerations, there are socio-political considerations: We we have a cooperative world government deciding exactly how much geoengineering to deploy where? What if China were to go into decades of drought? Would they sit idly by as the Climate Intervention Bureau apparently ignores their plight? And what if political instability where to mean that for a few years, the intervention system were not maintained “¦ all of that accumulated pent-up climate change would be unleashed upon the Earth “¦ and perhaps make “The Day After” movie look less silly than it does.

Long-term risk reduction depends on greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Nevertheless, there is a chance that some of these options might be able to diminish short-term risk in the event of a climate crisis.

I would add the grave risk that that after injecting massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere for a decade or more, we might discover some unexpected bad side effect that just gets worse and worse.  After all, the top climate scientists underestimated the speed and scale of greenhouse gas impacts (and the magnitude of synergistic ones, like bark beetle infestations and forest fires).

We would be in incompletely unexplored territory “” what I call an experimental chemotherapy and radiation therapy combined.  There is no possible way of predicting the long-term effect of the thick stratospheric haze (which, unlike GHGs, has no recent or paleoclimate analog).  If it turned out to have unexpected catastrophic impacts of its own (other than drought), we’d be totally screwed.

Even geoengineering advocate Tom Wigley is only defending “a complementary combined mitigation/geoengineering scenario, an overshoot concentration pathway where atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches 530 ppm before falling back to 450 ppm, coupled with low-intensity geoengineering,” with the goal of stabilizing global temperature rise at 2°C, in case we can’t stabilize at 450 ppm. You can see a good discussion of that at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists‘ expert roundtable response to Alan Robocks’ excellent piece, “20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.”

Well, stabilizing at 530 ppm requires doing a massive amount of mitigation starting now “” only 2 or 3 fewer wedges than what is needed for 450 (see “How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution“).

The Danish delayer makes for great (status quo) media.  But his Siren song of “don’t aggressively mitigate now but buy time for breakthroughs with geo-engineering” is as fatally flawed as ever.

Related Post:

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”).

I appreciate that since a serious mitigation effort appears to be non-imminent, people are casting about for other ways to avoid multiple catastrophes (see “Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery“).  But geo-engineering without aggressive mitigation makes even less sense than adaptation without aggressive mitigation (see The vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus is “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story”).

I tend to agree with climatologist and geo-engineering research advocate Ken Caldeira:

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.

Aerosol injection is, in many respects, the most plausible SRM geo-engineering strategy, since at least some sort of analog to it — large volcanic eruptions — has been observed, at least on a relatively small scale.  But in fact a major analysis in Science this year by leading experts on volcanoes and/or climate — Alan Robock, Martin Bunzl, Ben Kravitz, and Georgiy L. Stenchikov — “A Test for Geoengineering?” (online here), concluded:

Stratospheric geoengineering cannot be tested in the atmosphere without full-scale implementation.

Indeed, they found “weather and climate variability preclude observation of the climate response without a large, decade-long forcing. Such full-scale implementation could disrupt food production on a large scale” — for two billion people!

Prof. Bunzl, who is Director of the Rutgers Initiative on Climate and Social Policy, gave a presentation at the February American Association for the advancement of science meeting, on what he calls “the definitive killer objection to geoengineering as even a temporary fix,” which I reprint below:

My interest in these remarks is how to assess the risks inherent in geoengineering.

My argument is that geoengineering is deviant when it comes to the normal process by which science proceeds – perhaps deviant enough to undermine the whole enterprise.

Some proponents of geoengineering advocate limited experimentation to better the technology by which full scale geoengineering might be effectively implemented. But if there is no basis for full scale implementation whether or not the technology is available, the value of researching the technology is thrown into question.

In these remarks, my talk of  geoengineering is restricted to solar radiation management and does not include carbon capture. Moreover the kind of solar radiation management I have in mind is planetary wide and (for the purposes of discussion) sulfur insertion into the stratosphere. (This is not an arbitrary focus in that, with others, I take this to be the only currently plausible candidate to achieve a 2 degree centigrade cooling should there be a need to do so.)

Some people have worried that such insertion on a planetary wide  basis might produce unforeseen global consequences due to unexpected atmospheric non-linearities. I think these worries are over blown based our general knowledge of atmospheric systems and the record of volcanic eruptions which insert concentrations of SO2 many times greater than the concentration that would be needed to produce a 2 degree cooling.

The locus of my worry is quite different: our current climate models become progressively weaker in their accuracy the more fine grained you go. At the local level, they are of limited value. As such, assessing the risk of sulfur insertion when it comes to local weather disruption (and attendant agricultural output) is very hard to do. And of these the most notable area of concern is  monsoon disruption. Indeed, both theory and modeling raise concerns about sulfur’s role in affecting precipitation as opposed to temperature. (See G. C. Hegerl, S. Solomon, Science 325, 955 (2009); published online 6 August 2009 (10.1126/science.1178530), and A. Robock, L. Oman, G. L. Stenchikov, J. Geophys. Res.113, D16101 (2008).) But even bracketing these considerations, my argument is more abstract: in its applications, most science proceeds from a model, to the laboratory, to field tests, and only finally to wide implementation. Nowhere is that more true than in medicine. At each stage, there is trade off between verisimilitude to the final implementation and the limitation of risk. (Think of the use of animals in experimentation.)   What makes that possible is that most of science deals with modular phenomena. You can test a vaccine on one person, putting that person at risk, without putting everyone else at risk. So, even though we have lot of planetary wide goals – like eradicating smallpox – we can test them for untoward effects before full scale implementation. Not so for geoengineering. You can’t build a scale model of the atmosphere or tent off part of the atmosphere. As such you are stuck going directly from a model to full scale planetary wide implementation.

It has been argued that sulfur insertion could be usefully implemented in polar regions without effects on the rest of the planet. But modeling to date as well as the volcanic record would seem to undermine this idea by demonstrating that polar insertion does not in fact remain restricted to those latitudes.

The idea that one could study the risk of planetary wide insertion with low concentrations might seem plausible. But it has been shown that doing so would require at least a decade to derive enough data to differentiate a signal from noise. (See Robock, Alan , Martin Bunzl, Ben Kravitz, and Georgiy Stenchikov, 2010:  A test for geoengineering?  Science, 327, 530-531, doi:10.1126/science.1186237.)

Geoengineering is not unique in forcing us to go  directly from a model to full scale planetary wide implementation  – but it is rare. The only other example I can think of is genetically altered crops. But a difference between the two is that in the case of genetically altered crops, we have rich theoretical knowledge of natural selection as well as  a long history of selective breeding.

One response to these concerns is to argue that risk is risk and all risk can always be assimilated into a standard cost-benefit (or expected utility maximization) analysis. On that basis, the risks of climate change may be greater than the risks of geoengineering, especially when understood as a temporary stop gap measure.

But such analyses become less and less coherent as our ignorance of both the likelihood and the magnitude of worst case scenarios goes up. That is as true of our understanding of potential untoward effects of  geoengineering interventions as it is for the effects climate change itself.

Now one response to such ignorance is to defend a variety of precautionary principles which come down (in philosophical terms) to adopting what is known as a maximin principle. That is, choose between alternative  courses of action so that the worst case outcome is the best of alternative worst case outcomes.

But to even apply such a maximin approach assumes we have some knowledge to characterize these alternatives. My claim is that we do not have such knowledge in hand for geoengineering and I don’t see how we can gain it to have a basis on which to make a prudent choice until and unless our climate models undergo considerable improvement. Nor do I think is it plausible to think that international agreement to implement geoengineeering would be likely without such improvement in our models.

As such, a focus on more benign forms of intervention that don’t need to be implemented on a planetary wide basis has much to recommend itself,  including, especially, ambient carbon capture.

This research was sponsored by  NSF grant ATM-0730452.

The only SRM geoengineering strategy that is worth pursuing a large-scale at this point — and aggressively so — is cool roofs, the trillion-dollar solution.

Related Posts:

• Geoengineering “not a solution” to sea-level rise
• Science on the Risks of Climate Engineering: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”
• Nature: Ocean fertilization for geoengineering “should be abandoned”
• British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming. Is that why Lomborg supports such a smoke-and-mirrors approach?
• Nature Geoscience: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

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.

The key phrase is “With his new book.”  Lomborg is shilling a new book, and he knows he can’t keep running the same tired old story that fears about global warming are overblown.  The contrarian needed to go reverse contrarian.

As the Guardian put it, “Lomborg is most vulnerable to allegations of a volte-face on the need to take action on climate change and the value of doing so.”  Instead of titling the book Smart Solutions to Climate Change, the Danish chameleon should have called it The Bjorn Identity.

Of course, Lomborg doesn’t really know anything about the solutions and most of the people he got to write essays for his book don’t either — and there’s no way of telling if in a few years Lomborg won’t just stick his finger in the wind and flip flop again if that seems like the way to get attention.  So I can’t imagine why someone would want to buy this book.

Lomborg is, after all, one of the most debunked writers on climate in the world — see “Lomborg’s main argument has collapsed” and buy The Lomborg Deception.

In the final paragraph of the book, Lomborg provides a seemingly strong call to action:

If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming.”

And in his Guardian interview:

… he raises the possibility of “something really bad lurking around the corner”: the small-chance, big-consequence outcome his previous work appeared to dismiss.

But the penultimate paragraph of the book tells you everything you need to know about Lomborg’s new “thinking” and this book:

It is unfortunate that so many policy makers and campaigners have become fixated on cutting carbon in the near term as the chief response to global warming.

Seriously.

As the Guardian notes:

… he is still deeply critical of the dominant, cutting-carbon approach, which four of the five economists who were asked to rank the options put at the bottom of their lists.

Yes, well, if you talk to the economists that Lomborg talks to, you’d end up befuddled, too.

That’s why it’s always better to listen to serious climate scientists about this sort of thing.  As Ken Caldeira put it (and he didn’t need a whole book):

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products.  I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible”¦.

Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastrophic consequences. There is no safe level of emission.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies “¦ It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

And that’s from one of the leading proponents of pursuing geo-engineering R&D.

Lomborg’s “solution” is to mostly skip the CO2 reductions and focus on geo-engineering and energy R&D and non-CO2 GHGs.  In 2009, Caldeira explained to me why the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus is “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.” As Caldeira told the WashPost:

“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.”

The easiest way to see that Lomborg hasn’t really changed his stripes is to go to his Copenhagen Consensus website and read an article he posted just this month, “New Project Syndicate article by Lomborg: ‘Who’s Afraid of Climate Change’.”  You’ll learn that:

More often than not, what sound like horrific changes in climate and geography actually turn out to be manageable – and in some cases even benign.

And he is talking about a “collapse of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet” that “would likely cause the oceans to rise by perhaps 20 feet over the next hundred years”!

But no worries, mate, because Lomborg says it wouldn’t be all that calamitous.  It would only cost “$600 billion a year, or less than 1% of global GDP.”    He asserts “only about 15 million people would have to be relocated. And that is over the course of a century.”

That’s utter nonsense, of course — and I debunk it at length in my post, The Lomborg Deception.

But utter nonsense is what we have come to expect from Lomborg.

Related Posts:

• The Bjorn Irrelevancy: Duke dean disses Danish delayer
• WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ.

So startup Calera, who seeks to turn CO2 exhaust into limestone for “carbon negative” cement, has struck a $15 million deal with coal giant Peabody. And Monday you reported on various issues facing the technology.

I thought I’d offer more:  Harvard geochemist Dan Schrag says its CEO is “pulling numbers out of his a##.” And other independent experts have their doubts as to various aspects.

I cover Calera closely in Hack the Planet, my new book on geoengineering. For a chapter on carbon called “The One-Ton-Sucking Challenge,” I spent a day at Calera’s offices in Los Gatos, California and met its business-saavy and brash CEO, Stanford geologist Brent Constanz.

Not only did Constanz disparage mainstream climate scientists (“A philosophy major in college,” he scoffed at one point, obliquely but clearly referring to rival Ken Caldeira). But he relentlessly attacked the idea of storing carbon underground, what he dismissed as “Russian roulette.” Better, he said, to turn the world’s carbon emissions into bricks and cement and buildings. “This isn’t just a niche solution,” he said. “We will be the primary solution.” Calera says it can sequester a ton of CO2 for a mind-bogglingly low $17 per ton.

That (incredible) price is not for making limestone, the firm says. Rather, using less energy, the company could make a solution of bicarbonate ion and inject that into the ground to sequester the carbon.

But regardless of what it makes with CO2, the main chemical challenge for Calera is its need for caustic chemicals known as alkaline solutions, I write in Hack the Planet:

Wrenching the ultrastable carbon dioxide molecule into carbonate takes ultra-strong sour solutions. One of the main reasons why Constantz set up shop at Moss Landing [California] is that a few hundred feet from Calera’s pilot facilities are giant white meadows of alkaline powder, industrial waste known to the locals as Moss Mag.

The problem is, as you wrote on ClimateProgress Monday [see "Does carbon-eating cement (still) deserve the hype?"] — not exactly everyone has that kind of (nasty) raw material handy. Caldeira’s right that fly ash represents a tiny portion of the required alkalinity.

Another problem with fly ash, hydrologist Rob Jackson from Duke tells me: it’s often full of nasty chemicals, so if the bicarbonate slurry were to reach groundwater it could contaminate them. For example, mercury can be found at a level of 1 part per million in it, he says. That’s well above the EPA standard.

Anyway, coal companies (like Peabody, presumably) may well have plenty of alkaline material to use. But elsewhere Calera wants to run electrochemistry facilities next to power plants to make alkalinity, sapping the plants’ energy. Constanz says that electricity can be obtained at night on the cheap. But as you pointed out in your Calera item yesterday, doing electrochemistry means creating huge amounts of hydrochloric acid waste.

A problem that hasn’t gotten much attention yet is that storing the bicarbonate solution – a  giant (and therefore expensive) hassle perhaps even a bigger one than storing CO2, I write in my book:

“¦Harvard geochemist Dan Schrag estimates that injecting a ton of pure CO2 carbon dioxide into the ground delivers more than 25 times more of the gas than injecting a ton of bicarbonate, which is only roughly 4% CO2. (Calera says that pumping bicarbonate solution as a partial solid can make up the difference””but geologists worry that injecting solids into the ground will seal up pores in the subsurface rock layers.)

“That’s a real concern,” USGS hydrologist Dave Parkhurst told me yesterday. “If they’re not careful they’ll plug up their wells.”

And there’s the real possibility, say geologists, that the bicarbonate will react with briny water underground, and out will bubble the carbon dioxide. “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” says Howard Herzog. As for the seventeen-dollar sucking-1-ton cost? “My initial reaction is he’s pulling numbers out of his ass,” says Schrag, who has met with Constanz and actually licensed a patent to him.

The scientists I’ve talked to think Constanz may well make some money with the technique. But they’re skeptical that CO2 into limestone is going to be “the solution” to the carbon challenge, or replace injecting CO2 into the ground as a way to deal with emissions from coal.

– Eli Kintisch

Related Post (which goes through some of the chemistry):

• Exclusive: Does carbon-eating cement deserve the hype?

CRF’s Board responded with a statement on Friday, specifically addressing these concerns:

… the Climate Response Fund exists to fund conferences, dialogues and discussions about climate intervention, and to assist in conveying the results of such deliberations to all parties interested in mitigating climate change.

To be absolutely clear, Climate Response Fund will not fund field experiments for any climate intervention technique now or in the future including, but not limited to, ocean fertilization, solar radiation management by stratospheric aerosols, tropospheric aerosols, adding alkalinity to the ocean or any other particular climate mitigation techniques.

That is the unequivocal statement many had been looking for, to eliminate the appearance that the nonprofit helping to shape the norms and guidelines for geo-engineering experiments had a potential financial interest in the outcome.

How important is this statement?

Eli Kintisch, reporter for Science magazine, has a forthcoming book on geo-engineering, Hack the Planet, which discusses CRF (run by Margaret Leinen) and its relationship to the firm Climos (run by her son, Dan Whaley, with her, formerly, as its chief scientific officer).  Climos had been pursuing a doubly dubious scheme to perform ocean iron fertilization experiments and sell carbon offsets for them (see “Rule Three of Offsets: No Geo-engineering“).

On page 147, Kintisch writes that after Climos decided to abandoned the idea of selling offsets for their geoengineering scheme:

Instead, Leinen founded a nonprofit organization, the Climate Response Fund (CRF), to raise money for geo-engineering, hiring a well-connected fund-raiser in California named Danielle Guttman-Klein to do so.  Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, the organization had an unclear connection to Climos.  Leinen said the two were completely separate, and that she had no financial stake in the company.  Whaley told me in the spring of 2009 that “appropriate conflict of interest controls were in place” but that the organization would financially support any iron fertilization experiments that Climos helped organize.  “CRF will fund the researchers directly,” he told me.  “Climos will handle the logistics.”

I spoke to Kintisch over the weekend, and he stands by that reporting.  So CRF has clearly changed its mission dramatically, which is a good thing.

CRF has also made the decision to sever its relationship with William Kohrs, “who handled CRF’s fiscal administration on a part-time basis for the conference” and who is “also VP Finance and Administration of Climos, Inc.”

Geo-engineering expert David Keith, who was among those who raised concerns about the CRF-Climos connection, cc’d me on an email to Leinen Sunday:

The board statement clarifies the goals of CRF. These goals seem admirable and entirely appropriate for an organization sponsoring a meeting like Asilomar. For my part, they answer the questions central I raised in my correspondence with Joe Romm.

This relieves my concerns about attending the meeting.

Thank you very much for this.

Of course, it still looks “awful” the sole “Strategic Partner” of landmark geo-engineering conference is Australia’s “dirty coal” state of Victoria.

And the few plausible geo-engineering schemes remain very, very dubious, and offer no serious prospect of viability absent very aggressive mitigation (see Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story”) — and very possibly not even with aggressive mitigation, a point I’ll discuss shortly.

Related Posts:

• Science: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”
• British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming.

[UPDATE:  Sometimes blog posts have pretty immediate impacts -- see here.]

I am not comfortable with the the idea that a meeting set up to create guidelines governing geoengineering field tests might be used to help raise funds for geoengineering field tests, without the informed consent of meeting participants. I am also concerned with possible conflicts of interest related to the profit motive.

That’s from an e-mail that climatologist and geo-engineering expert Ken Caldeira sent me this week.

I had heard last week that Caldeira was not going to the star-studded “Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies” — the “Woodstock” of geo-engineering.  I asked him why.  I reprint his full email below, along with concerns raised to me by geo-engineering expert David Keith.

Frankly, I think all of the conference attendees (and they include some of the biggest names in climate, full list here) need to ask themselves whether they are helping to legitimize — and thereby ultimately helping to raise funds for — a nonprofit that will not unequivocally forswear funding geo-engineering experiments, a nonprofit that is closely tied to the financing efforts of a for-profit company that has already started pursuing dubious geo-engineering schemes.

This Asilomar conference, which begins next week, proclaims its lofty goal “to develop norms and guidelines for controlled experimentation on climate engineering or intervention techniques.”  That’s one reason why, as journalist Jeff Goodell put it to me, it “needs to be purer than pure.”

My Monday post pointed out that it appeared to fail that test because its  Sole “Strategic Partner” is Australia’s “dirty coal” state of Victoria.  Goodell, author of the forthcoming book, How to Cool the Planet, said of that sponsorship, “I think it looks awful.”

But a far bigger issue, according to many leading experts I spoke to, is that the “developer” of the entire conference is the Climate Response Fund, which has close ties to a very controversial geo-engineering firm, Climos.  As Science magazine’s Eli Kintisch reported in November:

Critics of the Response Fund and its conference worry about its ties to Climos, a geoengineering startup company started in 2005 by entrepreneur Dan Whaley, Leinen’s son. With Leinen as its chief scientific officer, Climos sought to perform ocean iron fertilization experiments and sell carbon credits it could show it earned.

Facing international opposition to the idea of selling credits for the controversial technique, the firm decided last year to morph into an ocean logistics company, with scientists doing the ocean experiments funded by charity, presumably through Leinen’s nonprofit, or other means. Whaley said he helped conceive of and launch the nonprofit, introducing Leinen to its fundraiser, Danielle Guttman. “Since then I’ve had no role,” he said of the Response Fund. Leinen said she no longer had “any financial interest” in the company, and Whaley agreed.

The situation is a tad more complicated than that.  Climos and the Climate Response Fund still have a very close financial relationship, as we will see.  Also, if Climos is no longer pursuing research into ocean fertilization, you’d never know that from its FAQ or the rest of its website, for that matter.  The Science story continues:

Since geoengineering involves techniques that could have global repercussions, say experts, it’s particularly important that any discussions about regulating the new technologies avoid the appearance of possible commercial interests or conflicts. These issues are particularly acute with commercial ocean fertilization.

“It would be better for people with less of an appearance of a conflict of interest [to] play this role,” said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, when discussing the Response Fund’s role. “There’s a perception that you’ve got a fox in the henhouse””for-profit companies or their nonprofit surrogates looking at governance of geoengineering.” Physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada  “welcomes” the effort but called Leinen’s nonprofit “nontransparent and appears to be closely tied to Climos, which was conceived to do ocean fertilization for profit.

Goodell told me that he thinks the meeting could be an important turning point in thrashing out key issues of governance.  But Goodell posed to me the key question:  “Is this conference about advancing the science and governance of geoengineering or about advancing and raising the profile of the Climate Response Fund?  That’s what a lot of the scientists I talked to are worried about.”

Goodell who interviewed many of the leading geo-engineering players for his book told me that Caldeira and Keith “have thought about the ethical issues of geo-engineering longer than most,” so their concerns “have to be taken seriously.”  I have new comments from both of them below, but first let’s look closer at Climos.

One of the few remaining non-aerosol strategies still taken seriously by some is ocean fertilization, yet a recent Nature article argued  that strategy for geoengineering “should be abandoned.”

The idea of selling carbon credits — i.e. offsets — to fund such projects was truly dreadful, as I discussed by in 2007 (see “Rule Three of Offsets: No Geo-engineering“).  It was such a dubious idea that 18 leading experts from 13 countries, who comprise the Scientific Steering Committee of the Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS)-a leadin group studying the ocean-atmosphere system-went to the trouble of issuing a “Position Statement on Large-Scale Ocean Fertilisation“:

Given our present lack of knowledge, the judgement of the SOLAS SSC is that ocean fertilisation will be ineffective and potentially deleterious, and should not be used as a strategy for offsetting CO2 emissions.

Ouch.

Indeed, a press release from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about a brand new study notes:

A design scheme to engineer microalgae blooms in the world’s oceans to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels could contaminate the oceans with a neurotoxin, according to a study. Charles Trick and colleagues report that fertilizing the ocean with iron, a strategy proposed to boost the number of CO2-consuming organisms living in the ocean’s surface waters, would likely favor the growth of Pseudo nitzschia, a genus of phytoplankton that produces a component of the neurotoxin that causes Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning. The naturally occurring toxin could potentially cause human health risks if fish that feed on the algae, such as anchovies and sardines, were consumed, and may harm marine mammals and seabirds that feed on these fishes.

This I suspect we’ll be the kind of thing will be reading more about — the unanticipated negative consequences of geo-engineering schemes.  Indeed, it’s easy to like geo-engineering when you don’t know anything about it.  Then it’s just a magic panacea.

Certainly no company should have been proposing to do large-scale iron fertilization experiments funded by selling carbon offsets before there was far more data about the safety of such an approach and before their were established norms and guidelines.  As Dr. Keith put it in an email to me:

“Driving iron fertilization by the carbon offset market combines two marginal ideas that are both subject to gaming, its among worst ways one could imagine to govern geoengineering.”

So having Climos set up and bankroll the Climate Response Fund, which in turn has set up and helped bankroll this landmark geo-engineering conference on governance is just a bad idea.  Keith emailed me:

Given the diversity of views around geoengineering, such as the sense that links to experimentation and commercialization with solar radiation management technologies set a very dangerous precedent, it’s important that the meeting set the right precedent by being as divorced from commercial interests as possible. As the sole sponsor for the meeting (as I understand it) I would like to see the Climate Response Fund make a formal and unequivocal statement that they will not fund experiments nor will they fund any for-profit organization with a substantial interest in geoengineering technologies.

I haven’t been able to get such an unequivocal statement.  But first, let me reprint Caldeira’s full email in response to my question about why he wasn’t going to this historic conference:

I have learned that the Asilomar geoengineering meeting is expected to play an important role in legitimizing and helping raise funds for Margaret Leinen’s Climate Response Fund.

I have not seen any statement from Margaret Leinen or her  Fund saying that the Fund will not support geoengineering field tests nor have I seen a statement saying that the Fund would not directly or indirectly transfer resources to for-profit companies like Climos.

I am not comfortable with the the idea that a meeting set up to create guidelines governing geoengineering field tests might be used to help raise funds for geoengineering field tests, without the informed consent of meeting participants. I am also concerned with possible conflicts of interest related to the profit motive.

Guidelines governing such tests should be developed as a product of an ongoing process involving established professional societies and organizations, established major non-profit institutions, intergovernmental institutions, or others who do not have an apparent stake in specific outcomes.

Margaret Leinen can obviate my concerns by stating clearly  (1) that the Fund will not support geoengineering field tests and (2)  that the Fund would not directly or indirectly transfer resources to for-profit geoengineering companies like Climos (or other for-profit companies with significant financial participation by members of Margaret Leinen’s family).

Without such statements, I cannot be confident that I am not being used without my consent for purposes of which I do not approve. Thus, I cannot attend the meeting.

I am also busy and have plenty of other things I need to do.

1. Funds made available by Bill Gates support several post-doctoral researchers in my lab, as well as access to computational facilities. Some, but far from all, of this research was geoengineering-related. (I attach the most recent paper supported by these funds, showing that about 1/4 of Chinese CO2 emissions support consumption, primarily in the developed world.)

2. David Keith and I have used some of these funds to support meetings at which geoengineering was discussed. The flow of money was uniformly out and not in. All of the participants at these meetings were fully informed of their nature. No funds were ever raised in activities surrounding these meeting.

3. I am listed as an inventor on patents related to vertically pumping water in the ocean and related to storing carbon dioxide in the ocean by dissolving carbonate minerals. I have publicly stated that if any of these patents are used for climate modification purposes, I will donate my share of the proceeds to non-profit charities and NGOs.

When some of these concerns were first brought to my attention late last week, I emailed Dr. Leinen.  Based on my interviews, there is some disagreement about whether a dinner immediately after the conference was ever going to be used for fundraising or not.  But Leinen assures me in an email that it “is not, nor was it ever intended to be a fundraising dinner.”

I also asked her the question that Caldeira had raised with me, “Will the Climate Response Fund assert that it will not fund geoengineering field tests?“  At the time, the CRF had basically a one-page website, but Sunday night they put in place a comprehensive website.  Dr. Leinen directed me to the “About Us” tab, which lists all of their goals and ends:

CRF is dedicated to this work and has no plans for funding field experiments.

As someone who lives in Washington DC and follows politics closely, the phrase “no plans” leaped out at me.  For instance, FoxNews reported in May 2002, “The United States has no plans to invade Iraq or any other country, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday.”  Doh!

Since CRF is based in Alexandria, VA (i.e. inside the DC beltway), I asked Dr. Leinen:

Many people have stressed to me the need to separate issues of governance from support/funding for actual tests.  The optics issue is, according to some, especially significant for CRF given your personal connection to Climos.

The phrase on the website:  CRF “has no plans for funding field experiments” is not a very definitive statement, at least in Washington DC, where politicians are constantly asserting they have “no plans” to do  things that they in fact end up doing.

Q:  Will the Climate Response Fund simply assert without hedges that it will not fund geoengineering field tests now or in the future?

Her full reply:

Dear Dr. Romm,

None of us has a crystal ball for the future.  But I think I understand the thrust of your question and want to respond fairly and not with wording that you would interpret as a “DC statement”.  This requires thinking about whether there were any future conditions under which CRF would consider changing out plans.

Geoengineering field experiments are not in our current strategic plan. Our focus is on the norms and guidelines for research.  Others are also focused on governance and see the norms and guidelines as an element of that
governance.  If in the future norms, guidelines and national/international governance were in place that made geoengineering field research acceptable and the scientific research community called on CRF to serve as a research funding entity, we might consider changing our plans.

Margaret Leinen

That is obviously not an unequivocal statement and disappointing to those who wanted a very bright line

Just yesterday, I was sent information that will be even more disappointing to those who wanted a bright line between nonprofit work to establish norms and guidelines for geo-engineering governance and for-profit work into geo-engineering strategies.  The November Science article leaves the distinct impression that there is no financial connection between CRF (run by Leinen) and Climos (founded by Leinen’s son, Dan Whaley, with Leinen as its chief scientific officer):

Whaley said he helped conceive of and launch the nonprofit, introducing Leinen to its fundraiser, Danielle Guttman. “Since then I’ve had no role,” he said of the Response Fund. Leinen said she no longer had “any financial interest” in the company, and Whaley agreed.

But yesterday I was sent the “Conference Attendee Biographies” list and who is on the list under “CLIMATE RESPONSE FUND and CLIMATE INSTITUTE STAFF”:

Bill Kohrs
VP. Finance and Administration
Bio: Financial advisor to Climate Response Fund

Who is Bill Kohrs?

You’ll find his bio on the Climos website:

Bill Kohrs holds the position of VP Finance and Administration and Head of Operations for Climos, Inc.

So the VP for Finance at Climos is The financial advisor to CRF.  Again, here is what Climos does, according to its website:

We are in active collaboration on the scientific, technical and regulatory steps necessary to bring a next generation Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF) project to realization. Our focus is providing services to enable these larger more complex field trials to be conducted, including legal, regulatory, environmental impact work, communications, iron distribution and overall project management and logistics.

It’s bad enough that the “Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies” has as its sole “Strategic Partner” Australia’s “dirty coal” state of Victoria.

But I think it is just absurd that the landmark conference whose goal is “to develop norms and guidelines for controlled experimentation on climate engineering or intervention techniques” is so closely tied to a company that clearly wants regulatory freedom to pursue an extremely dubious geo-engineering scheme for profit.

I think CRF needs to make an unequivocal statement that they will not support geo-engineering field experiments — in order to remain a credible nonprofit in the arena of developing norms and guidelines for geo-engineering experiments.

I think all of the conference attendees need to ask themselves whether they are helping to legitimize — and thereby ultimately helping to raise funds for — a nonprofit that will not clearly forswear funding geo-engineering experiments, a nonprofit that is closely tied to the financing efforts of Climos, a for-profit company that has already started pursuing dubious geo-engineering schemes.

UPDATE:  The CRF board has issued a statement of new policy here that addresses many issues raised here.  Sometimes blog posts do have an impact.

Related Posts:

• Science: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”
• Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.”
• British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming.

Climate Progress is beginning a multipart series on what has been called the “Woodstock” of geo-engineering.   This historic but controversial event will take place March 22 – 26 in Asilomar, CA. Details can be found here on the website of the conference “developer,” Dr. Margaret Leinen of the Climate Response Fund.

I have been interviewing leading experts on geo-engineering about this conference, including journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the forthcoming book, How to Cool the Planet.

This conference proclaims its lofty goal “to develop norms and guidelines for controlled experimentation on climate engineering or intervention techniques.”  That’s one reason why, as Goodell put it to me, it “needs to be purer than pure.”  It appears to fail that test in a number of respects, as we will see.

Readers know I am not the biggest fan of the geoengineering to begin with (see articles here).

The more you know about geo-engineering, the less sense it makes (see Science: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”).  The most “plausible” approach, massive aerosol injection, has potentially catastrophic impacts of its own and can’t possibly substitute for the most aggressive mitigation “” see Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.” I will be publishing an analysis later this week on a central if not fatal flaw of aerosol injection.

For the anti-science disinformers and big fossil fuel polluters, geo-engineering is mostly just a ploy “” see British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming. For the many uninformed contrarians in the world, it’s a ticket to media controversy and publicity (see Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” and  “Superfreakonomics author Dubner is baffled that Caldeira ‘doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions.’ “)

Geo-engineering is, literally, a “smoke and mirrors solution,” though most people understand that the “mirrors” strategy is prohibitively expensive and impractical.

Let me state clearly that those participants I know personally are absolutely first rate scientists and academics, starting with the chair of the Scientific Organizing Committee [SOC], Dr. Michael MacCracken.  I have known him for a long time and have the greatest respect for him and his work (see “Video and PPTs of “The Science of Climate Change” with Dr. Christopher Field and Dr. Michael MacCracken“).

Here’s the conference’s ambitious goal:

The International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies aims to minimize the risks associated with scientific research on climate intervention or climate geoengineering, much as the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA successfully modeled safe and appropriate laboratory management methodologies. The Asilomar Conference will focus exclusively on the development of risk reduction guidelines for climate intervention experiments.

Goals of the Asilomar Conference:

1. Identify potential risks associated with climate intervention experiments
2. Propose a system to assess experiment design for potential categorical risks and suggest precautions to assure their safe conduct
3. Propose voluntary standards for climate intervention research for the international scientific community

Certainly these are laudable goals, assuming one has bought into geoengineering.  Some environmental groups around the world have questioned the whole point of this conference — see the ETC Group’s “open letter to the Climate Response Fund and the Scientific Organizing Committee,” with dozens of signatory groups, which argues:

The priority at this time is not to sort out the conditions under which this experimentation might take place but, rather, whether or not the community of nations and peoples believes that geoengineering is technically, legally, socially, environmentally and economically acceptable.

I will come back to issues surrounding the Climate Response Fund [CRF] (and perhaps the ETC’s issues) in a later post.

My focus here is on the choice of sole Strategic Partner, The State of Victoria, Australia.

On the one hand, Australia is the canary in the coal mine for human-caused climate change, since it is the most arid habited continent to start with — as I have discussed many times see “Absolute must read: Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040, if we don’t slash emissions soon and also Australian Scientists: Contrary to media reports, “our paper does not discount climate change as playing a role in this most recent drought, the ‘Big Dry’. In fact, there are indications that climate change has worsened this recent drought.” So one can greatly understand their desire to explore every option to diminish impacts from greenhouse gas emissions.

On the other hand, as Wikipedia reports:

Brown coal is Victoria’s leading mineral, with 66 million tonnes mined each year for electricity generation in the Latrobe Valley, Gippsland. The region is home to the world’s largest known reserves of brown coal

Brown coal, aka lignite, “is considered the lowest rank of coal“:

Carbon dioxide emissions from brown coal fired plants are generally much higher than for comparable black coal plants, with the world’s worst polluting being the brown coal fueled Hazelwood Power Station, Victoria. The operation of brown coal plants, particularly in combination with strip mining, can be politically contentious due to environmental concerns.

And here’s some more news:  “In 1992, the station was scheduled to be decommissioned by 2005 due to its excessive carbon dioxide emissions, however, a decision by the Victorian Government in 2005 allowed the power station to remain operational until 2031.”

For an environmentalist perspective on brown coal and Australia, see “Australia’s brown coal shame“:

Here in Australia, we export hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal each year and now the state of Victoria wants to export even more of it….

Australians have the highest carbon impact per capita and it’s no coincidence that Victoria has the highest power generation emissions in the nation; thanks to brown coal.

So maybe Victoria was not the best choice as the sole strategic partner for this landmark geo-engineering conference.

Indeed, Goodell framed this conference as “the moment geo-engineering comes out of the closet.”  He says it’s very easy to dismiss geo-engineering as “crackpot” science and if geo-engineering wants to get taken seriously, “everything needs to be purer than pure.”

Goodell’s book is a must-read if you want to understand the players in geo-engineering.  He told me this conference has been played up as a “historic event” the “Woodstock of geo-engineering,” and that “invites a high level of scrutiny.”  That’s what Climate Progress aims to deliver!

I asked him what he thought about having Victoria be the sole strategic partner for this conference.  He said

I think it looks awful on two levels.

First, there has always been the concern that fossil fuel interests (and others) are promoting what he calls a “fantasy version of geo-engineering” that suggests geoengineering can replace mitigation.  Thus, “To have a big coal state in Australia as a major sponsor is bad politics.”  Second, “this is being played as a historic event.  Why not have more strategic partners?”

He added, “This is a real test for the geo-engineering community and how seriously this is all taken.”

I asked MacCracken for his response to these concerns.  He wrote:

I was not aware that brown coal is the state of Victoria’s leading mineral, nor that it was home to the world’s largest known reserves of brown coal. I have been aware that virtually all of Australia is in severe drought due to the southward shift of the storm track that brings precipitation to most of settled Australia, and that the recent rains they have had were so heavy that they led to extensive flooding. As Dr. Mark Howden of CSIRO made clear in invited guest talks at a recent USGCRP impacts assessment meeting in Chicago, changes in the traditional climate of Australia are having very severe and surprisingly early impacts. Even were the world to go to zero emissions tomorrow, there would very likely be further worsening of the increasing water resource stresses, and so it has not seemed unusual that the State of Victoria is interested in the potential for geoengineering. In pursuing this interest, they have, very much to their credit chosen to be a part of major international consideration of this issue. In addition, were the amount of carbon emissions (total or per capita basis), or the amount of carbon emissions from coal, to be the criterion for deciding what entities could support research on approaches that could complement mitigation (so both adaptation and geoengineering), that would seem to rule out some rather significant entities.

First, the SOC has been set up independent of the CRF to handle the scientific program for and participation at the Conference. The SOC is an internationally distinguished group from a range of countries, types of institution, and interests-they are independent of each other, of the Climate Institute, and of the CRF. By our agreement (which she was instrumental in setting up to ensure independence), Dr. Leinen has not been involved in developing the program for the Conference or on decisions on to whom invitations were extended (invitations were the basis for providing first access to funds to support travel to and from the Conference and the cost of staying at Asilomar).

On the question of the sources of funding, the SOC has asked from the beginning about the funders of the Conference because it is indeed important that none have an interest in the particular outcome of the Conference. Dr. Leinen indicated to us that this was also a criterion that she had and was enforcing, including turning down an offer of funding from an entity that was specifically interested in possible carbon permit applications.

With respect to the Conference itself and the State of Victoria, there was an agreement that a number of their leading scientists would be invited to the Conference. The list of those to be invited was prepared by Dr. Graeme Pearman, an internationally leading climate change scientist fro, Australia. The scientists that he recommended to the SOC are all recognized experts in their field and come primarily from academic institutions in Australia, so meeting the SOC requirement.

Thus, we believe that the way in which the Conference has been set up is free of conflicts and biases relating to fossil fuel interests and the interests of particular sponsors. The SOC and CRF both have the view (and have expressed it in various ways) that geoengineering cannot be a substitute for very substantial mitigation (nor for adaptation) and that such interventions do not solve all aspects of the climate change problem (e.g., ocean acidification) and will not return the Earth to preindustrial conditions.

While it might be wished that more had been done in screening of funding, much was done, and the nexus of those interested in providing funds for moving forward with the meeting now (in that research is moving forward) and those without some potential fossil fuel interest is not necessarily large enough and accessible enough in a timely manner to avoid all possible perception problems (e.g., might not the US Government be viewed as suspect, or for that matter any government?). The scientific community has come round to thinking seriously about geoengineering only because the nations of the world have been so slow to limit greenhouse gas emissions and because the pace of climate change and associated impacts have been advancing at what appears to be faster than projected.

Many have yet to realize the limits of emissions reductions to limit climate change, especially if done as slowly and late as is being contemplated. Climate intervention is becoming recognized as possibly a way to counter-balance changes that could cause irreversible losses, initially in high latitudes and within several decades elsewhere. In my view, the key concern for the public should be the apparent failure of the international decision-making process to formally commit to the need for significant near-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The emerging impacts of climate change and the prospects that lie ahead are of enormous concern. Indeed, optics matter so that no one misinterprets the intentions of the scientific community’s focus on geoengineering–that concern is a direct product of understanding the serious trajectory of change to which society and the environment are currently committed. Ensuring that the optics surrounding geoengineering does not detract from the climate challenge before us is critically important. The Conference will discuss issues such as transparency and conflict of interest in an effort to reinforce professional norms and establish new ones where they might not exist. Our intent is to reduce the need for focusing on bad actors, or the appearance of, bad actors, so that societal effort and discourse can stay focused on the enormous challenge that individual nations and the international community are facing.

I also asked Dr. Leinen for her response:

I would reiterate his comments and elaborate.  While the State of Victoria produces substantial coal, many countries produce substantial fossil fuel for consumption and export, including some with very strong emissions reduction records. I do not believe that a key criterion for accepting government funds for climate or climate intervention research or research-related activities should be whether the nation produces fossil fuel.  If this were the case all US government funding for climate research would be considered tainted.  More appropriate considerations are whether the government has imposed constraints on the activity that would constrain freedom of inquiry.  State of Victoria has imposed no constraints at all on the organizing committee (nor did they have any input to its selection), the agenda, or the invitees.

In addition, the State of Victoria has a strong policy on climate change and both the Premier and the Minister of Environment are committed to an aggressive program of emissions reductions.  As Dr. MacCracken indicated, Victoria is experiencing changes in climate that are substantial even with current levels of CO2.

Victoria is interested in whether climate intervention techniques work and what their impacts might be.  In order to answer those questions researchers will eventually have to do field experiments.  Victoria has expressed to us their strong interest for determining whether climate intervention research can take place responsibly and safely.  To determine whether that is possible, they provided funding in support of the conference.  Our agreement stipulates their support will only be used for the development and execution of the conference.  There are no funds for any other purpose.

Neither the Victorian government nor any of the scientists that they suggested be invited have been involved in the organization of the conference, the conference agenda or the selection of attendees.
The State Victoria will continue to work with the Climate Response Fund after the conference to urge other interested nations and organizations to consider the recommendations of the conference in their own deliberations about climate intervention/geoengineering research.

These are important points, but I think the conference could have and should have avoided any such entire issues entirely.  More in Part 2.

The consensus economic view, however, is profoundly different. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman inadvertently shows the sorry state of the understanding by economists of global warming in a recent blog post, in which he writes down a “toy model that hopefully clarifies the issues” of climate policy:

See! The problem can be boiled down to three straight lines, intersecting at the optimal balance of economic and environmental impacts. This level of understanding is about as developed as recognizing that burning fossil fuels could heat up the atmosphere, which physicists realized in 1896, 114 years ago.

Unfortunately, Krugman’s toy is actually better than most economic thinking.

Business-as-usual projections used by the federal government, such as the Energy Information Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, and the Congressional Budget Office, don’t take into account climate disruption, which comes in the form of temporary, regional catastrophes (a flood, storm, hurricane, heat wave, wildfire), widespread catastrophes (collapse of coral reefs and forests, decadal drought), and possibly global catastrophe (several feet of sea level rise, permanent El Nino, permafrost melt). The International Energy Agency has only begun to do so in its most recent world energy outlook.

Popular economic models for climate policy, such as Dr. William Nordhaus’s DICE model, use climate damage formulas that have no basis in reality, maxing out at 10% reductions in GDP under runaway global warming ten times what has already been experienced. Citing such models, Congressional Budget Office chief Doug Elmendorf testified that the U.S. economy would be “relatively insulated from climate effects” from 4-6°C warming — at least 500% more warming than present. His “pessimistic estimate” of the damages? Three percent of GDP.

Krugman also writes about the work of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman:

As for the welfare sensitivity: Marty Weitzman has managed to scare me, by pointing out that there’s a pretty plausible case that a rise of 5 degrees C – which is no longer an outlandish prediction – would be utterly catastrophic. You don’t have to be sure about this; just a significant probability is enough.

Climate scientists have come to the consensus that a rise of more than 2 degrees C — about three times present warming — would be utterly catastrophic, and repeatedly caution that even that threshold is not necessarily safe. It is frankly baffling that even the best economists studying climate policy have the fantasy that modern human civilization has a reasonable possibility of sustaining 5 degrees C of warming without suffering on an unprecedented scale.

There are beginning efforts by the federal government to at least include some assessment of the cost of carbon pollution in its analyses, using a “social cost of carbon” in new energy regulations. But even this crude mechanism isn’t factored into policy where it’s really needed, such as the Departments of Treasury and Defense.

That said, Paul Krugman is orders more brilliant than I can even fathom, and back-of-the-napkin calculations can be a powerful tool, if the scribbles are the result of a brilliant mind. For example, climate scientist Stephen Schneider praises the effectiveness of “simple simulations of complex models” in his excellent book “Science as a Contact Sport.” Schneider, by the way, has been considering the prospect of doomsday geoengineering since 1996.

The following is a guest post by Hillary Berkowitz of 4th Row Films about “Owning the Weather,” which is being screened in Copenhagen, tomorrow, Sunday the 13th.

The desire to modify the weather has been around forever; but with the threat of catastrophic climate change, water wars, and intensifying hurricanes, a new breed of weather control has emerged.

OWNING THE WEATHER tells the story of weather modification in the United States, from Charles Hatfield’s infamous rainmaking days to modern plans to engineer the climate.

There are more than fifty active weather modification programs in the United States alone. Through the eyes of key individuals on the front lines of a crucial but largely unknown debate, the film introduces the cloud seeders struggling for mainstream recognition, the “legitimate” scientists who doubt them, and the activists who decry any attempts to mess with Mother Nature.

Will the scientific renegades in the weather modification community ever shed the label of “snake-oil salesman”?  Will they succeed in securing government funding for the first time in decades?  What does it mean to our society if there are no more “Acts of God”?

The film premiered in April 2009 at the prestigious Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, had a length festival run and will now be available on cable Video-on-Demand, iTunes, Amazon VOD and a host of other places beginning on December 6th, 2009

Recently the film received the great honor of being asked to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP15) taking place this December in Copenhagen, Denmark.  COP15 will draw leaders and renowned scientists from all over the world to discuss the most pressing environmental issues of our time.

To coincide with this historic conference, the city of Copenhagen is organizing a series of cultural programs and events.  They have invited OWNING THE WEATHER to screen on Sunday, December 13, to an audience of hundreds near City Hall Square.  In addition, a panel discussion about climate change and geoengineering will follow the screening, featuring some of the more notable scientists and thinkers in the field. Being a part of the annual mega-meeting about global environmental issues will be a real highlight for the film, especially considering the fact that only seven films were invited.

Using this international forum, we hope to start a real debate about one of the most controversial scientific and ethical dilemmas of the new millennium.  We’ve always wanted to control the weather.  Now we might have to.

In the latest of many fawning interviews promoting SuperFreakonomics, author Stephen J. Dubner claimed the critics of his “global cooling” chapter have issued a “fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.” On Public Radio International’s morning program, “The Takeaway,” Dubner told hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee that he was right to call global warming a “religion.” In fact, he considers the criticism the book has received from economists, climate scientists, and energy experts to be “essentially a fatwa“:

In terms of the biggest result, I’d say is: We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion. I think if anything we should strengthen that sentence, because what’s been issued here is essentially a fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.

Listen here:

A fatwa is an Islamic clerical legal ruling. Dubner is evidently alluding to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s twenty-year-old fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie, whose novel Satanic Verses was considered blasphemous by hardline Muslims. Rushdie has suffered assassination attempts and decades in seclusion. Translators of the book were stabbed, shot, and killed, and bookstores were firebombed.

Despite this supposed global warming “fatwa,” however, Dubner is heroically appearing all week on the Takeaway to flack his book, co-written with University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. The SuperFreakonomics authors have now enjoyed softball interviews from Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart, 20/20, the Guardian, the UK Telegraph, and others. The Diane Rehm Show did a much better job, bringing in IPCC lead author Peter Frumhoff to debunk their nonsense.

SuperFreakonomics has been edged out on the bestseller list by Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots.

[JR:  For the record, while Dubner claims "We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion," what he wrote in the book was "Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception."   And what Levitt keeps asking on their website -- and answering affirmatively -- is not about the movement to stop global warming, but "Is Climate-Change Belief a Religion?"  The bottom line is that Levitt and Dubner have abandoned science and embraced victimhood.  Yet as one contrarian explains, "Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don't whine. That is all."

Finally I'd love to know which critics Dubner is talking about.  Personally, I'm just looking for more apologies and retractions -- One error retracted, 99 to go. Superfreaknomics authors will, in future editions, correct their claim that Caldeira believes "carbon dioxide is not the right villain."]

Update from Brad:  Dubner actually trotted out the “fatwa” claim last month on a different WNYC program, saying on the Leonard Lopate show on October 21st:

The movement to stop global warming has some of the components of a religion and I’ll tell you we’ve certainly experienced that in the past few days. It feels very much like a fatwa has been levied. As with fatwas there’s obviously a bizarre twisting and omission of facts.

[JR:  Finally, in a perverse coincidence, I'm posting this while on the train up to NYC, and the person sitting next to me is reading ... yes, Superfreakonomics! These victims of religious persecution are laughing all the way to the bank!]

In terms of the biggest result, I’d say is: We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion. I think if anything we should strengthen that sentence, because what’s been issued here is essentially a fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.

Listen here:

A fatwa is an Islamic clerical legal ruling. Dubner is evidently alluding to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s twenty-year-old fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie, whose novel Satanic Verses was considered blasphemous by hardline Muslims. Rushdie has suffered assassination attempts and decades in seclusion. Translators of the book were stabbed, shot, and killed, and bookstores were firebombed.

Despite this supposed global warming “fatwa,” however, Dubner is heroically appearing all week on the Takeaway to flack his book, co-written with University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. The SuperFreakonomics authors have now enjoyed softball interviews from Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart, 20/20, the Guardian, the UK Telegraph, and others. The Diane Rehm Show did a much better job, bringing in IPCC lead author Peter Frumhoff to debunk their nonsense.

SuperFreakonomics has been edged out on the bestseller list by Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots.

The authors of SuperFreakonomics simultaneously insist they accept the science — “Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon” — while at the same time labeling global warming a “religion” (see here).  And we’ve seen one award-winning journalist explain “Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change.”  But now, as this stunning Charlie Rose video shows, we have the clearest demonstration that both Levitt and Dubner don’t accept and don’t understand the science.  This is a Wonk Room repost.

Appearing on PBS’s influential Charlie Rose Show last week, SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner expanded upon their destructively uninformed portrayal of climate science, even throwing into question man’s influence on global warming. When Rose asked him about the controversial “global cooling” chapter, Levitt fatuously claimed that “what we actually said is not even very controversial.” Levitt said that SuperFreakonomics is “not denying that the Earth has gotten warmer.” After Rose interjected, “And it’s man created,” Levitt said, “It’s harder to know whether it’s man created”:

It’s harder to know whether it’s man created. It’s always harder to know whether it’s some “” you know, why something happened than whether it did. That’s not even our question.

Later during the interview Dubner attempted to justify the book’s claim that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain,” arguing that it was the decrease in sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that has caused global warming, rather than the accumulation of carbon dioxide.

This is of course utter nonsense “” aerosols like sulfur dioxide certainly masked the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases, but global warming is caused by the greenhouse gases. If a methamphetamine addict is using alcohol to blunt the side effects of his meth habit, his hyperactivity isn’t due to a lack of binge drinking.

[JR:  I don't know what is more jaw-dropping -- Levitt's response backpedaling on basic climate science or Dubner's "explanation."  For the record, Dubner has the science exactly backwards: Removing the aerosols didn't show carbon dioxide was less important to warming -- it showed it was more important!  Indeed, one of the authors' few scientific sources, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, said after a 2003 workshop on the subject, "It looks like the warming today may be only about a quarter of what we would have got without aerosols." Crutzen noted that aerosols "are giving us a false sense of security right now." A 2005 study led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [subs. req'd] concluded, “Natural and anthropogenic aerosols have substantially delayed and lessened the total amount of global ocean warming-and therefore of sea level rise-that would have arisen purely in response to increasing greenhouse gases.”  Indeed, wasn’t the point of their “Global Cooling” chapter that aerosols would offset the warming we’d otherwise see from CO2?!  What exactly do these guys believe?]

Dubner and Levitt’s quest to deny the reality of climate change and promote radical geoengineering to block the sun as a “sensible” alternative to reducing greenhouse gases is, as the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “horseshit.” Their strategy is like counseling the meth addict to become a full-blown alcoholic instead of reducing his drug use.

Despite Levitt’s argumenter that “it’s harder to know” whether global warming is “man created,” in reality the scientific evidence is clear and has been for years, according to the scientific organizations of the world:

American Association for the Advancement of Science: The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. [10/9/06]

U.S. Global Change Research Program: Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. [June 2009]

American Physical Society: Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now. [11/18/07]

American Meteorological Society: Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond. [2/1/07]

American Geophysical Union: The Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system””including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons””are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century. . . . Evidence from most oceans and all continents except Antarctica shows warming attributable to human activities. [December 2007]

American Quaternary Association: Few credible scientists now doubt that humans have influenced the documented rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. [10/24/06]

The national science academies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa: It is essential that world leaders agree on the emission reductions needed to combat negative consequences of anthropogenic climate change at the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009. [May 2009]

JR:  You can find a longer transcript of the Charlie Rose interview at Wonk Room.  Here’s another excerpt:

DUBNER: It’s a big may, it’s a big may “” I mean look, Myhrvold, I think, describes it very well in the book. The idea of the garden hose to the sky and sulfur dioxide in the air and geoengineering. It’s like this. When you build a house you do everything you can to not have a fire in the house. You don’t give your kids matches, you don’t run around with a lighter and doing like this. But, if you have it, do you want a sprinkler system? Yeah. So the idea is: If the problem gets to be that bad, do you want to have something that could work beyond this kind of long-term, expensive, uncertain carbon mitigation idea?

I-i-i-i-it’s harder to know whether it’s man created. It’s always harder to know whether it’s some — you know, why something happened than whether it did. That’s not even our question.

Watch it:

Later during the interview Dubner attempted to justify the book’s claim that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain,” arguing that it was the decrease in sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that has caused global warming, rather than the accumulation of carbon dioxide.

This is of course utter nonsense — aerosols like sulfur dioxide certainly masked the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases, but global warming is caused by the greenhouse gases. If a methamphetamine addict is using alcohol to blunt the side effects of his meth habit, his hyperactivity isn’t due to a lack of binge drinking.

Dubner and Levitt’s quest to deny the reality of climate change and promote radical geoengineering to block the sun as a “sensible” alternative to reducing greenhouse gases is, as the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “horseshit.” Their strategy is like counseling the meth addict to become a full-blown alcoholic instead of reducing his drug use.

Despite Levitt’s argument that “it’s harder to know” whether global warming is “man created,” in reality the scientific evidence is clear and has been for years, according to the scientific organizations of the world:

American Association for the Advancement of Science: The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. [10/9/06]

U.S. Global Change Research Program: Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. [June 2009]

American Physical Society: Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now. [11/18/07]

American Meteorological Society: Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond. [2/1/07]

American Geophysical Union: The Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system—including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons—are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century. . . . Evidence from most oceans and all continents except Antarctica shows warming attributable to human activities. [December 2007]

American Quaternary Association: Few credible scientists now doubt that humans have influenced the documented rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. [10/24/06]

The national science academies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa: It is essential that world leaders agree on the emission reductions needed to combat negative consequences of anthropogenic climate change at the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009. [May 2009]

Transcript:

DUBNER: We address topics in this book that are less trivial than the first book. We don’t write about sumo wrestlers we don’t write about baby names so much, even though it was fun. We’re writing about things like terrorism and like global warming and we try to bring to those topics a different way of looking at them, an economic approach. In other words, instead of looking at them on an emotional level or someone involved in those arenas might look at them — if you’re in the global warming industry you have interests to protect and you have an argument you want to make. And we try to look at it from the outside.

ROSE: And not everybody is thrilled at what you say about global warming.

LEVITT: Most of the people who aren’t thrilled about what we said about global warming aren’t talking about what we actually said. I mean what we said is not even very controversial. We’re not denying the earth has gotten warmer. It has gotten a lot warmer over the last one hundred years . . .

ROSE: And it’s man created.

LEVITT: I-i-i-i-it’s harder to know whether it’s man created. It’s always harder to know whether it’s some — you know, why something happened than whether it did. But that’s not our question. We say if the earth gets too hot or is too hot, what’s the best way to cool it down. And the conventional wisdom is to reduce carbon emissions drastically. That’s a reasonable solution, it could work, it has three problems. One, it’s incredibly expensive. I mean there’s a reason we produce and use a lot of fossil fuels, they’re cheap and they drive the economy. Trillions of dollars it will cost to switch the economy over. Number two, you need seven billion people to get together to coordinate if you want a solution to cut fossil fuels. Number three, even if we could do that, because carbon dioxide stays in the air so long, we’re looking at 50 years, 100 years before you start start to feel the full effects of it.

So, it seems like if you really think global warming is a terrible problem, you need a solution that’s faster, and that’s more certain, or easier to do. So, turns out geoengineering, extremely controversial but so sensible.

I mean, there are ideas out there that are cheap, they’re totally versible, totally reversible, which is incredibly important. You wouldn’t want to do anything that’s irreversible, because the science isn’t that certain. And they don’t require massive behavior change. We’re not saying we should go out tomorrow and build one of these machines say, to put sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, but what we are saying is, “How can that not that be part of the debate?” We’re just trying to give geoengineering a seat at the table, but the interests that are out there don’t want . . .

ROSE: So you put sulfur dioxide in the air, through hoses. This is Nathan Myhrvold, isn’t it?

LEVITT: Absolutely. Nathan Myhrvold is, has . . . it’s an old idea. A Nobel prize-winning environmentalist put it out a while ago. Nathan has the engineering solution that allows us to quickly and reliably do that for something like 20 million, 50 million dollars. Now compare that to the trillions of dollars we’re talking about on the old solution. Now, now, why not at least have that kind of solution ready in case, as an insurance policy, in case some kind of global catastrophe involving the Greenland ice shelf or something happens and we need to cool the earth down quickly.

ROSE: Explain how it would work.

LEVITT: It’s pretty straightforward.

ROSE: You pour sulfur dioxide in the air and it puts a shield.

LEVITT: Exactly. It puts a shield. Really, the science is based on what Mother Nature has been doing for eons, which is when there are big volcanic eruptions, among the other things that are spewed out is sulfur dioxide. And it sprays it so high it gets into the stratosphere. The key is that getting the sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere where it forms into this haze which reflects something like one to two percent of the sunlight. And that’s enough to cool the earth. And all you need to do is just have a steady flow of it. And if you can figure out a way to get it up there, Nathan’s idea and his compatriots is to just essentially build a glorified garden hose. They put one at the north pole and south pole. It sounds like scientific fiction, but they have the engineering solution. It wouldn’t be that hard. And if you don’t like it, you just turn the spigot off . . .

ROSE: And what did Paul Krugman say about this?

DUBNER: I don’t think Paul Krugman thought of that. he went off a paper Marty Weitzman wrote and Paul Krugman thought he caught us in a mistake, and I hate to say it, but he’s wrong. And at some point, you know, there’s so much fervor about this topic, part of the problem is . . .

ROSE: It’s like theology.

DUBNER: Well, it’s interesting you say that, Charlie, because, you know, it’s one of the many things a very small portion of kind of climate activists have objected to, is that we said, there’s a sentence, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something along the lines of, “The efforts to stop global warming have the characteristics of a religion.” There really are these kind of dogmatic principles, there are believers, there are heretics and so on. And we’ve seen that.

You know, um, the interesting thing is geo-engineering is a pretty broad subject, actually. The garden hose to the sky is probably the most frightening to the average person. Any of us would think, “You want to intentionally pollute?” Even though it is replicating a volcano.

But there are other solutions within that portfolio, some of which are as green as you could possibly hope to be — which is essentially creating higher reflectivity oceanic clouds by creating more cloud condensation nuclei. So, clouds cool the earth. They do a great job. They’re nature’s way of cooling the earth. Over the oceans there often aren’t as many because there aren’t enough nuclei.

So, one of Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures’ plans is to create an incredibly low-friction boats. They don’t even have an engine. And they just go around kicking up sea spray, salt spray that wafts into the air and forms more densely reflective clouds. That too is geo-engineering.

So the idea is this. That would cost — the three of us could chip in and buy one of those boats. I don’t know what you’re worth, more than us but it wouldn’t be that hard to do. But the point is that, like Levitt said, to get a seat at the table for these kind of ideas as opposed to this one route which we’re barrelling down as carbon mitigation as the only route doesn’t seem to be — seems we should be entertaining other possibilities.

. . .

DUBNER: Can I give one more example of the law of unintended consequences? The efforts to clean up the air in general and get heavy particulate pollution out of the air. All the sulfur, all the acid rain from coal plants and so on, in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

It’s now thought — there are new studies, NASA, a bunch of scientists have been doing this — it’s now thought that removing the particles from the atmosphere is what’s led to the warming, in large part.

In other words, carbon dioxide may not be remotely as large a villain as many people fear, because what’s happened is that by being good environmental stewards and trying to clear up the air — we did clear up the air a lot, but all that junk in the air was blocking a degree of sun. And now with the removal of it, we’ve seen more warming. And so that will be a line of research we’ll be hearing of a lot more.

ROSE: The idea is you can take the junk back but you have to put something else back up there that will block the sun.

DUBNER: It’s a big may, it’s a big may — I mean look, Myhrvold, I think, describes it very well in the book. The idea of the garden hose to the sky and sulfur dioxide in the air and geoengineering. It’s like this. When you build a house you do everything you can to not have a fire in the house. You don’t give your kids matches, you don’t run around with a lighter and doing like this. But, if you have it, do you want a sprinkler system? Yeah. So the idea is: If the problem gets to be that bad, do you want to have something that could work beyond this kind of long-term, expensive, uncertain carbon mitigation idea?

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.  Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

On Friday, coauthor Stephen Dubner replied in a post titled, “With Geoengineering Outlawed, Will Only Outlaws Have Geoengineering?“  Notwithstanding the title, the piece is clearly meant to be serious.  Here is what they have to say about Kolbert’s review:

And for a great illustration of just how repugnant some environmentalists find the very thought of geoengineering, consider this scathing review of our book in The New Yorker. The author, Elizabeth Kolbert, seems to disdain everything we’ve ever written on any topic, and claims we utterly fail to understand climate science (unless of course we don’t). She is a feeling and passionate environmentalist who, seemingly so disturbed by geongineering, is compelled to cast our own horse-dung story right back at us with a splat. Here is my favorite line from the review: “Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science “” or, for that matter, in science of any kind.”

The time has probably come to admit that neither of us were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way. Kolbert, meanwhile, has written widely about the perils of global warming, both in The New Yorker and in book form (see Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change), and seems to be extremely well-regarded in the field of environmental journalism. And yet, if her Wikipedia page is correct, she somehow accomplished all this with a degree from Yale in “¦ literature.

Snap.  Or not.

Note how Kolbert is pigeonholed as an “environmentalist,” albeit a “feeling and passionate” one, since that allows her to be lumped in with all the other environmentalists who supposedly find geo-engineering repugnant — as opposed to, say, climatologist Ken Caldeira who merely finds the geo-engineering-only solution that the authors propose in their book unworkable and “pretty ugly” and “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story” and “crazy.“  Kolbert herself notes:

There are eminent scientists””among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen””who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.  “By far the preferred way” to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, “is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases.”

You can read the interview she gave and decide if that makes here “a feeling and passionate environmentalist” — not that there’s anything wrong with that — or simply a journalist who has talked to dozens of the leading climate scientists and visited many of the places where the climate is changing the most and reported on what she heard, saw, and learned.

Indeed, Kolbert’s point about credentials is almost exactly the opposite of what Dubner implies in his dismissal of her:

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science””or, for that matter, in science of any kind. It’s their contention that they don’t need it. The whole conceit behind “SuperFreakonomics” and, before that, “Freakonomics,” which sold some four million copies, is that a dispassionate, statistically minded thinker can find patterns and answers in the data that those who are emotionally invested in the material will have missed….

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming.  Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong.

Their credentials aren’t the issue for her.  They simply didn’t do their homework, and so they got the science all wrong (as many, many others have pointed out).  Hence her quote of Pierrehumbert.

Their dismissive reply to her substantive critique is another attempted aerosol smokescreen, just as Levitt’s reply to Pierrehumbert on RealClimate was:

Raymond,

I enjoyed your intentional misreading of my chapter on global warming! I think it has really contributed to moving towards a solution to these important problems….

As Pierrehumbert replied:

Steve, glad to see you’re reading this.

Something I have found rather bizarre about your responses to the criticisms of your climate chapter is the way you continually try to change history about what you actually wrote, which is plainly there for anybody to see. I found it so unbelievable that you included the “black solar cell” meme when I first heard it that I actually went over to Borders and stood there and intentionally read (not misread) the chapter to see if it was true.

Go figure.

Kolbert ended the review:

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness.  All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

You don’t need to be a climatologist to know that.