Time to lift the geoengineering taboo
September 1, 2009
Hot on the heels of the Royal Society's Geoengineering the Climate report, September's Physics World contains feature comment from UK experts stressing the need to start taking geoengineering - deliberate interventions in the climate system to counteract man-made global warming - more seriously.
Of increased importance, as policy makers and politicians prepare to negotiate binding carbon emission targets at December's United Nation's Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen (CoP15), many feel we need to come up with a plan B as climate mitigation appears to be too little too late.
Authors Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, and Hazel Jeffrey, head of strategic management at the UK's Natural Environment Research Council, who were both involved in the Royal Society's new report but writing independently for Physics World, examine the potentials of different geoengineering initiatives.
Different schemes for both direct carbon-dioxide removal, such as fertilising the ocean with a nutrient such as iron to enhance the oceanic carbon sink, and solar-radiation management through, for example, brightening the clouds have different benefits, costs and risks associated.
What sounds like sci-fi could be a crucial alternative to common mitigation, which, even if carbon emission should be cut by as much as 50% by 2050, is unlikely to keep global warming below two degrees this century.
While more research needs to be done to ascertain the risks and effectiveness associated with these large-scale interventions in the climate system, many geoengineering strategies have a better benefit-to-cost ratio than conventional mitigation methods.
Neither costs nor practicality might be the real reasons behind climate scientists' reluctance to embrace geoengineering, as Cox and Jeffrey highlight, "The primary reason there has been so little debate about geoengineering amongst climate scientists is concern that such a debate would imply an alternative to reducing the human carbon footprint."
Source: Institute of Physics (news : web)
Jun 05, 2007 |
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How do you know?
If the earth's climate is so fragile that some yet-to-be-determined tipping point could trigger and ice age, then how is the benefit to cost risk ratio determined and to what uncertainty?
Think of the ethical rammifications if their tinkering resulted in a more beneficial climate for their country of origin while other countries suffer.
The system holds too many unknowns for us to start advocating playing with the variables.
Surely developing our societies to take climate out of the equation isn't a better option. Nah.
Then we have legal and ethical issues. This kind of decision concerns every single human on the planet, and that's just being egotistic and not considering the other living creatures. They'll never pull it off, not legally. And if they do it anyway, the environment will become their least stringent issue. Lots of revolution songs lately...
Somewhere along the line, people seem to have forgotten that global warming is just a symptom, not the disease. It's times like these my misanthropy really starts acting up.
The way I see it, a nuclear holocaust would solve everybody's problems. Nukes won't target rainforests and oceans, they'll go for big cities and industrial complexes. The ensuing nuclear winter will cool things down nicely and as for the radiation, well, we've already effed up enough ecosystems, it won't make much of a difference. Most importantly, Earth will be, for at least a few centuries, freed from its greatest scourge, human governments.
Brian, if you're going to toss out downranks have the sack to tell us why.
Visions of Lenin (or perhaps an INGSOC rally) drift into mind, complete with fiery condemnations of other nations who maintain individual liberty and free commerce and how it is destroying mother Gaia, and how wicked the whole business of humanity is.
In my crystal ball I can almost see future audiences in the UK standing up in all fervor, squalid and wan, crossing their arms, crying and singing anthems to the "party" with all passion; ready to smother their own children for mother earth and carbon dioxide.
Instead of sensible civil government, we'll see the citizen-inmates of the UK chained to superprojects that would be incomprehensible to the rest of the world. With Greens in charge of the Island, massive diversion of funds and labor will be available for distilling rainbows into carbon free fuels, liberating sunbeams from cucumbers to heat homes and run photovoltaics, and training cats and dogs to pull vehicles once petrol is banned.
We need to be ready to catch our friends and family in the UK when they cast themselves over the climate change cliff, and they've already pushed past the lemmings who were already well underway.
But there's this other country with a propensity for self-righteous interventions in other countries on behalf of higher ideals. And they just might have the right combination of resources and idiocy to make it happen. If we won't like it, we'll have to complain to the Reapers.
Green communism...Now there's a colourful idea.
Your association of the non-political ideals of the "green" movement with the negative political ideals of socialism serves no purpose other than to stifle the extremely positive potential achievements of said non-political "green" movement ideal.
Objective investigation of the principles should allow you to separate the "green" movement from political confines. Indeed, those same principles will ultimately lead you to a less political life. Doesn't that sound nice?
Then again, for such a non-political movement, the greens are definitely trying to change policies lately, as the above article indicates. The principles of leaving no trace and minimum intervention, to which I personally adhere, should be applied in regards to people's opinions, too. OK, you want to save the planet, you explained to me why I should want it too, I'll think about it, but get off my bloody lawn now! And stop messing with things you don't fully understand.
Environmentalists should learn from the church that making people feel guilty and preaching apocalyptic prophesies stopped working a century or two ago. The best you can do is be the change you want to be in the world. Anything else is superfluous and may damage your cause more than help.
I'm no expert, but I do believe a lot of environmentalist 'facts' so far are just opinions, or discussable research at best. There is no definite scientific consensus and I don't believe it has anything to do with evil corporations or anything. There's a fortune to be made on green products.
One thing that bugs me is the whole CO2 emissions thing. Correct me if I'm wrong(really), but isn't there a lot more oxygen breathing biomass on the planet than cars and furnaces and whatnot? I mean, an animal or insect breathes continuously and there are a lot more of them than cars and factories, aren't there? If you add up the CO2 expelling capacity of all the organisms on the planet, is it really equal or smaller than that of industrial processes? I'm talking about CO2 only, I'm aware there's worse stuff industry can dump.
I never said there aren't those people that try to politicize it, but that's how you know who not to trust (what?! don't trust politicians! *gasp*).
Unfortunately the policies the "Green Party" type people push for is psuedo-environmentalism and are just attempts to gain greater control over people's lives. Which sadly a lot of lay environmentalists don't even realize this, that they've been had.
As any AGW proponent of this site will tell you, it's not about the amount released, it's about the RATE at which this formerly fossil bound carbon is being released that is unnatural and potentially detrimental towards how humans have come to depend on the climate.
It's indisputable that man's activities are going to have some effect on the climate, how much is the dispute. I'm of the mind that it doesn't matter, because society has bigger fish to fry, such as ensuring it's persistence into the indefinite future. Which achieving that (sustainable development), will achieve the surest "fix" to global warming, i.e. getting off of fossil fuels, as well as any other environmental problem you can think of.
Plus it will reduce the People's need of government, obviously the government doesn't like this, which is why they distract people with pseudo-environmentalism.
We've got to buffer the radicals with lots of sanity and rational disinterest. Greenism has converged with Marxism due to the political ideologies of many of the academics behind it. I can't count the number of times I hear terms like "redistribution of wealth" combined with climatology and ecology.
Many of the more radical greens have for decades been clamoring for forced birth control and actual *deconstruction* of western societies. Obama's chief science advisor, Holdren, is one of the most rabidly anti-human doomsayers out there, and his appointment to such a prominent position truly concerns me.
There are so many interests seeking to gain from green politics that the legitimate civil concern of conservation and ecology has been corrupted into a subversive incursion of both science and governments. To allow these apparatiks to gain positions of power is extremely dangerous.
It really is the gateway to totalitarianism in the west, with would-be tyrants using mass manipulation to grant themselves power, justified by a permanent, irrefutable "climate emergency". Fabricated shortages, arranged blackouts, and contrived scarcity will be the methods of control. We've already seen it with Enron, so let's not be naive about the nature of men seeking power.
The choices are not between several mature technologies with well-known consequences, but between either improvised technlogical solutions or the option with the worst consequences: doing nothing at all.
Human governments are indistinguishable from human beings in any grouping of more than 100.
So basically you said you just hate humans.
Ethelred
I think this is the first time I can say I'm in full disagreement with you.
I hope to learn something from the exchange.
Ready....
Go!
Are there any specific studies related to the RATE of change? How can we conclusively say that the RATE matters and the RATE is quicker today then it was in the past and that RATE is harmful to us as a species?
(The long term well being of the planet is not the concern here, the survival of our species is. I am a couple of million years will see a completely different planet, geography wise, climate wise and dominant species wise.)
I actually said that clearly, just above that paragraph. I am a misanthrope. If I see someone beating a little kid, my immediate reaction is actually duller than if I see someone beating an animal. It's not the acts of violence exhibited by humans that bother me, it's all the excuses they make to justify their basically animal needs. We're halfway between animals and computers, part reason, part instinct. That combination can lead to great things, yes, but it has more often lead to senseless destruction of unparalleled scale.
My thoughts exactly. I'm not sure if our current best practices for sustainable food and power are enough to support the current population, though. Someone should really calculate just how much land and what conditions are necessary to sustain one human indefinitely.
As for CO2 emissions, I'm not sure it's so much about the rate, as for the density of emitters. Metropolises and industrial complexes aren't spread all over the globe, they tend to be focused in spots. So there may be sufficient trees to counteract the industrial CO2 emission, but they're simply spread too thin.
It's a matter of pressure. A needle pierces materials because a certain force is concentrated in a very small area. I believe the same can be said of human society and the environment in general. Completely opposed to nature's entropic distribution of system elements, humans tend to form gravity wells, in the shape of settlements. The bigger the settlement, the less entropy in its configuration, the more distance(in time or space) between the system's elements. That means stuff like taking care of waste products or supplying food takes more and more energy, or time, to maintain. And people would rather waste energy, than time, in this hectic day and age.
The same model can be applied to the sociological level. They say we no longer have a class system, but society will always have a power gradient. The deeper a gravity well, the less people can be accommodated at its centre of power. And, of course, when the centre of power becomes a singularity, that's when the really bad, unpredictable stuff happens. Fortunately, it's impossible for that to occur on a global scale. I think you could prove it mathematically.
Granted, I'm all for "climate engineering" just not HERE on Earth. Things may not be perfect, but they're certainly stable and predictable enough to enjoy.
If they're so frothy and gun-ho about this, feel free to solve some of the large problems in physics first and then go engineer climates on the moon and/or Mars and Venus.
Mars = Difficult and financially unfeasible for the foreseeable future. Dropping icy comets on it might be a nice start unless there really is a lot of underground water.
Venus = Even harder than Mars, it has too much atmosphere by about two orders of magnitude.
Now if we had a cheap way to ship excess CO2 from Venus to Mars...
Ethelred
Not really, the density can certainly be a concern for actual pollutants like oxides of nitrogen or particulates, but since CO2 is not an actual pollutant and it's the diffuse overall atmospheric concentration that would presumably have any potential effect on the global climate, density is not applicable to CO2.
Rate is a concern because the earth has natural mechanisms that will fix carbon, i.e. plants primarily, as well as decay and top soil aggregation. But these natural mechanisms do not increase their rate of fixation as rapidly as the carbon is being released, i.e. plants take time to grow and top soil lots of time to aggregate.
Please note I'm not making any claims as to the importance of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, I'm just trying to explain the mechanisms and why rate is the concern.
I never claim to be an expert on everything, but I am willing to discuss nearly anything with nearly anyone. If you find that I know more than you on everything well that is your problem and not mine.
Do you want to show an error on my part or is ad homonym attacks all you can muster? I have seen you do better. Are you having a bad day?.
Ethelred
I am very interested in the kind of reasoning you used to arrive at your last post. Comparing social systems to cosmic orders using physical laws is intriguing and insightful.
I guess you could model a government this way; it accumulates power as a mass accretes in space, until its mass is so ponderously huge that it collapses under its own weight and cuts itself off from the rest of the universe. Attempts to communicate to this mass are lost and nothing is communicated from it, only darkness and destruction lie at its core.
Fascinating.
An extension of this idea is related to my idea of how humans form gods, they begin with a single intelligence that draws others to itself. If the intelligence is great enough, it attracts a large enough collection of other intelligences and perpetuates itself through time. We can see this phenomenon by surveying the proto-deities of previous cultures, they formed very much like the worlds of our solar system, conflicting and colliding with each other over the ages until only a few giants are left. These giants are stable enough to maintain their existence for great lengths of time and entire civilizations can form around them.
However, back to your idea - you seem to give a singularity a negative connotation. I don't know if this is justified, considering the cosmic nature of the singularity at the center of our galaxy. That singularity is directly responsible for star and planet formation and allows galaxies to maintain their shape.
I see many symmetries between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and even though the processes may be different, the orders they form are remarkably congruent.
So to tie this line of reasoning with the subject of this article, I can only say that the boffins who attempt any sort of Laputian climate megaproject should be made to demonstrate a complete understanding of the climate before tinkering with our planetary life support systems.
For any nation to initiate such a project without a high level of certainty and consent from the rest of the planet would be irresponsible and may trigger conflicts and war, not to mention the damage they can cause to the ecosystem because they really didn't understand the system they were tinkering with.
This is why greenism needs to be strongly contained and prevented from running away with public opinion - Convincing people of your theory is not the same as truly mastering the subject. To act based on perception is not the same as an action based on certainty. Greens have abused the scientific method to create the impression of certainty, but a truthful examination of our understanding of climate would reveal we have a long way to go.
I do like the idea of gods having this 'mass' as well. In fact, between gods, leaders, dictators, the best term would be meme, wouldn't it? As soon as I get a decent grasp of topology, I'm going to work on the idea of a mathematical, multi-dimensional memespace.
I know what you're talking about. It's important to remember, though, that complete knowledge entails seeing the differences, as well as the resemblances. It's so easy to get lost in the poetry and forget about the science...
"God as a super-meme" I think we're onto something here. We might be reaching a level of awareness that enables us to finally get a perspective on the larger patterns governing human awareness.
Atheists claim god is imaginary, and I would agree with them (though I say god is intelligence, not 'nonexistent'), but the irony is that our imaginations are the only reality we can know. I see god as an amazingly useful meme-construct for human intellectual evolution. It allows us to move beyond physical limitations and form intelligent structures that survive the death of our bodies.
The movie "Zeitgeist" is one of the first successful attempts to explain the god phenomenon, at least for the western solar deity archetype.
My addendum to Zeitgeist's conclusion is that the next permutation of god (for mankind) will necessarily move beyond a solar archetype and into a cosmic form, encompassing principals that apply to the greater cosmos rather than a single world and single species. That sort of god-meme will allow our species to develop the traits necessary for an emerging interstellar species to understand the nature of other intelligences in the universe.
I don't know how fast CO2 diffuses, I would guess pretty rapidly, enough so that a higher plant/source ratio would gain minimal ground. Not to mention most of the biggest sources of CO2 (coal power plants) are going to have stacks hundreds of feet high so the CO2 is going to be less available to start for the most part, and you don't want those stacks low.
Plus I think the other environmental negatives associated with spread out industry (thermal pollution, soil pollution, higher transport energy costs, etc.) would far outweigh any positives associated with emissions.
Yes, well, you're talking to the guy who suggested Hammurabi's conscience is embedded in the legal system...
I think you're overestimating the reach of Christianity. I prefer to think of God as the idea of oneness, unity and such, the stuff that's common in all mystical traditions and in most Oriental religious and philosophical thought. As I stated in another thread, all religions are basically about ego suppression. Which would play an essential part in the emergence of a collective intelligence of sort, but that's highly speculative.
In accord with the singularity analogy, like you pointed out, information can't leave it. So if something like that ever happens, we won't see it coming unless we can observe from another planet.
Yes it is your mistake. Starting a flamewar with me is always a mistake.
You are such blithering sexist ignorant pig that you slipped in your own drool. I made a very reasonable post that did not attack in any way. You went over the top at the drop of a hat.
You failed to show any error on my part thus confirming that ad homonyms were your limit.
I thank you for that clear and obvious surrender.
Next time you might want to do it without looking so remarkably bad mannered and just plain foolish.
Of course trolls rarely learn from from getting their ass handed to them on a platter. They usually just get more toxic. Try to be different. Try learning just a tiny bit more. At least act as if you were capable of thought.
Ethelred
The most interesting commonality between our thoughts is the perspective one can gain by observing from another world, or simply from a vantage away from our solar system. So much of our organic perception is based on this very tiny environment that we must realize how stunted our senses truly are.
The notion of a god that has never heard of another solar system to us is absurd, and this is possible only because of our recent expansion of awareness.
Other profound insights we may gain by viewing the cosmos from a different place in the universe should be complimentary to our adolescence as a sentient species.
And nothing will grow on the land that could absorb CO2.
Ethelred
It Animal Farm all over again!!!!!