One of the odder parts of Australia 2020 is the only substantial opportunity for non-participants to have an input into the discussions; the 500-word submission process. But it’s not at all clear whether the volunteer participants will actually read any of them - if, indeed, most don’t end up being filtered out by anonymous staffers in the Prime Minister’s department.
Be that as it may, I figured an hour or two’s effort to throw an idea or two in the pot can’t hurt. If you want to do the same, you’ll have to hurry - submissions end close of business Wednesday.
My submission is on a topic that regular readers of LP will know I’ve an interest in - geoengineering, that is, taking active measures to control the climate to moderate some effects of global warming. The submission is over the fold.
By 2020, Australia’s emissions trading scheme will have been operating for over a decade. We can be confident that Australia’s emissions of greenhouse gases will be reduced over time. However, even if substantial, worldwide emissions reductions are made, it is not clear that such actions will be sufficient to avoid disastrous changes in the Earth’s climate.
Given this, a number of scientists have proposed the deliberate modification of the Earth’s climate, to counteract some of the undesirable effects of climate change. Some “geoengineering” proposals include:
- fertilization of the ocean to encourage photosynthetic algae growth, which would absorb CO2.
- release of gases such as sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight
- the placing mirrors into space between the Earth and Sun to reflect of sunlight
- artificially removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to be sequestered
Each such geoengineering scheme poses its own risks and costs. Any scheme maintaining CO2 in the atmosphere, while reducing solar insolation, will not return the climate to “normal”, but result in a new climactic balance which may present its own set of climatic “winners” and “losers”. Ocean fertilization, even if effective, presents obvious risks to fragile marine ecosystems. The costs and technical feasibility of direct CO2 removal are unclear at this point.
There has been a general reluctance to even seriously consider geoengineering as a response to climate change, partly because of fear that even researching the option may present a moral hazard. However, the risks posed by climate change appear to be so serious that we must at least consider this kind of drastic action. Even if Australia decides that the risks of various geoengineering approaches outweigh the potential benefits, it is likely that other nations may propose their use. Any such geoengineering will have global consequences; therefore, Australia will need to react intelligently to such proposals as they are discussed.
Therefore, I propose that a small fraction of the scientific and technological effort devoted to understanding and mitigating, and adapting to climate change be devoted to investigating geoengineering options. Such support could be offered by including the study of geoengineering in ARC research grants, the establishment of dedicated research centers within the government scientific bodies such as the CSIRO or in our universities, and through participation in international research projects. Such research projects, particularly if they involve experimental trials, may be politically controversial. I believe that we have to at least consider “least-bad” options, and carefully controlled experiments may be necessary to ascertain the risks and benefits of full-scale deployment.
The development of such expertise potentially offers a way to avoid at least some of the worst effects of climate change, and ensures that Australia will be able to participate in any decisions on its use from a position of knowledge, rather than ignorance.
What exactly is a “normal” climate? NASA Administrator Michael Griffin wondered the same thing:
Tony: that is an interesting question.
And that’s one the world is going to have to grapple with in the coming decades and centuries as we will, inevitably, gain the ability to explicitly control the climate.
However, our civilization has been set up on the basis of a quite stable climate over the past 10,000 years or so. Given that we’ve got a lot of sunk costs invested on the basis of the current climate, don’t you think it’s reasonable to take the current climate as a quite reasonable starting point before we start fiddling too much?
However, you seem to be assuming that the coming changes will be gradual, mild, and manageable. If the predictions of the climate modelers are accurate (and the evidence so far suggests they’ve been too conservative) the results of continuing on our current path will result in a climate that is radically different from anything experienced in the last few million years, and the change will occur in a blink of a geological eyeball. I don’t know what optimal is, but I recognize “pessimal” when I see it :/
The test of the climate modelers’ accuracy is their predictive success. Isn’t the lack of any warming in the last 10 years a sign of predictive failure?
Yes. It’s the rate of anthropogenic climate change, as well as the magnitude, which is going to cause us, and non-human nature, some serious problems.
Tony: the latest round of “it’s not getting warmer” has been quite adequately dealt with at Deltoid and elsewhere, and I’m not interested in debating it any further here.
Fair enough Robert but, since you mentioned it, what exactly is the evidence that suggests the modelers have been too conservative?
Good submission. It is important that you mentioned the moral hazard issue. Background Briefing had a good discussion of the issue of geoengineering last weekend. I suspect you may have already seen it but David Keith’s talk is interesting.Section 11.2.2 of the IPCC’s FAR (Working Group 3 - Mitigation) is also worth reading.
One of the chief benefits of cutting carbon emissions here is that it would make energy much more expensive, and that would add to the cost of manufacturing.
This would create employment opportunities in manufacturing in the developing world - especially China and India - and otherwise accelerate the move of energy intensive manufacturing away from developed countries.
Where they don’t have carbon emission controls or treay obligations.
Oh, wait…
Tony, I’d suggest the rate at which glaciers are retreating and the polar and Greenland icecaps are disappearing would be an indication of the conservative predictions of the modellers.
David, the models predict gradual temperature rise over time and that is the only evidence which can prove them correct.
Any climate or weather event–or other naurally occurring phenomenon–is proof of nothing except that the event occurred.
Sorry, my imput’s a bit tangential, but after reading through your submission I was wondering if we’d be able to cross publish it to our Australia 2020 Online Summit, which is running in parallel to the actual summit.
If you’re interested you can find it at:
http://www.openforum.com.au/Australia_2020_Summit_Have_Your_Say
The Australia 2020 Online Summit is covering the same the ten key areas which will be discussed during the summit, and we’re attempting to open an opportunity for people who will not be directly involved in the summit to have their ideas heard.
Anyhow, if you’re interested just log on and post your comment, I think it would make a really interesting contribution to the general debate.
Jeanne, of course - though perhaps tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to do a few minor corrections.
Tony of South Yarra: “Any climate or weather event–or other naurally occurring phenomenon–is proof of nothing except that the event occurred.”
Do you say there is no current ability to predict weater events? Why then does the BoM put out 7-day forecasts, and other groups put out hurricane and tropical cyclone warnings? Are these based on random numbers or sheer guesswork?
Of course not. The debate was about climate models predicting global warming. The weather bureau has a certain degree of success predicting the weather, but that’s not the same thing, is it?
Tony of South Yarra, CO2 causes warming which then changes all manner of thermally driven climactic systems. The resultant changes in rainfall distribution; temperature maxima and minima etc etc reset a whole heap of weather systems down the line.
The resultant consequences for our ecology and physical environment are way beyond any modelling that we are capable of.
All we know is that quick change leaves slow adapting organisms struggling for suvival. Large urban human populations are a prime example of a slow adapting organism.
Don’t worry about the modelling. It will be wrong in the detail. The principle behind all the attempted modelling will screw us though.
wbb: “Large urban human populations are a prime example of a slow adapting organism”. Have to disagree with you on that point.
We humans can take a suitable environment with us wherever we go. This makes us the quickest adapting organism ever, and large urban populations make such artificial environments cost effective and easy to share.
You’re right about attempted modelling screwing us, although I suspect my reasons would differ from yours.
Robert Merkel,
The schemes you mention are on a huge scale. Have they been costed (guesstimated) in current $ or current CO2 or current methans costs?
Placing of mirrors: A rocket spews out lots of combustion gases. You’d want the net effect to be atmospheric cooling, and take into account embodied energy [embodied CO2] in the mirrors, as well as likely mirror lifetimes. Just sayin’
Algae: could we grow algae for human (and animal)food? - i.e. think of multi-purpose projects. Pumping CO2 into the sea seems gross and hazardous.
cheers
Ocean seeding and sulphur dioxide are projected to be orders of magnitude cheaper than cutting carbon emissions.
The space mirrors project assumes the development of launch technologies other than chemical rockets, such as electromagnetic catapaults. Another, more drastic option is something like Project Orion. Costs are in the trillions - but, then again, the US will end up spending something around 3 trillion dollars on the Iraq war.
The direct CO2 capture is figured at somewhere between $100 and $200 per tonne. Total costs are enormous, but, globally and over decades, manageable.
Hi Robert,
There is another option that could be tried for dealing with carbon dioxide, namely splitting the compound and finding other uses for the left over carbon monoxide. A quick google search gave this site:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/05/27/uc-san-diego-chemists-split-carbon-dioxide-with-sunlight/
There are many other options that could be usefully researched.
I very much doubt that productive uses could be found for more than a miniscule part of the carbon monoxide produced by fossil fuel combustion.
If you’re turning it into synfuel, you’ll need more energy, which if it comes from fossil fuel puts you back where you started…
While you are there Robert - if you don’t mind - does it take a lot of energy to get Hydrogen into the form required to fuel motor cars? If so is there any future in it?
I’ve always thought from an ethical point of view that we should put the climate back the way we found it before we started out on industrialisation. Hence my target would be CO2 at 280 ppm and let the climate sort itself out from there.
Hansen & co think that if you have a certain composition in the atmosphere the climate effects show up as follows:
Half in the first 25 years
A further quarter by the end of the first century
The final quarter thereafter.
Bear in mind that CO2 has not been above 300 ppm for the last million years, but 125K years ago we had sea temperatures 1-2C higher than now and the sea level was 4-6m higher.
3.5 My BP the CO2 was 300-400 ppm, the temperature was 2-3C higher and the sea was up 25m (plus or minus 10).
34 My BP the CO2 was 350-600 ppm (he’s now narrowed that down to 425 ppm, plus or minus 75), the temperature was about 4.5C higher and the sea was about 75m higher.
See his Iowa testimony (large pdf) slides 41 and 46.
Brian: “I’ve always thought from an ethical point of view that we should put the climate back the way we found it before we started out on industrialisation.”
That oughta put the global population back to the way it was in the pre-industrialized era too, quick smart. And not through contraception, either. Very ethical.
Here’s a sincere question. Why do leftists assume (quite rightly) that massive levels of incompetence, corruption and stupidity will attend large projects which they don’t like (such as, oh, invading Iraq for instance); but when it comes to massive projects that they DO like (such as rapidly re-engineering the climate and economy for the entire planet based on incomplete data, or changing the entire structure of human behavior with respect to economic and social relations on the basis of a zany theory), they just factor out these basic features of large-scale human activity and assume everything will be hunky-dory?
Seriously, has anybody asked this question: which thing will actually kill more millions of people (and it’s probably more like tens or hundreds of millions): climate change or rapid industrial change? Answers which assume that rapid eco-friendly industrial change will be peaceful, orderly, and intelligently planned will receive an automatic failing grade.
The history of the twentieth century was largely a history of demonstrating, again and again and again and again and again, that leftists cannot even run a lemonade stand without somehow turning it into a mountain of human skulls. Now you want to put these people in charge of the global climate, eh.
As SpongeBob would say, Good luck with that.
j_p_z, left or right has nothing to do with it, unless it be true that rightists have a propensity to put their heads in the sand and leftist to enunciate a principle and then examine the practicalities.
I’ll save the long answer for another day, but I’ve given you the paleoclimate evidence about sea levels in relation to atmospheric CO2. These are observations, not whatever the climate models spew out. Sure there are uncertainties and problems in measurement, but what I’ve given you is the best the scientists can do at present.
Hansen’s latest thinking is that if we move to zero emissions now we still are committed to a further 2C temperature rise. It won’t happen in our lifetime, but that would commit us to 25 metres sea level rise which would inundate 1 billion people (current population).
Even a metre or so will increase the probability of a New Orleans type event in New York from once a century to once every few years (that’s according to the climate models).
The water supply of many of the major cities in the world will be compromised by the influx of saltwater.
Hansen says he will bet $1000 to a donut that we’ll get a couple of metres sea level rise in the next 100 years.
This is serious, for Chrissake!
(I’ll ignore that other shite in the paragraph.)
We are in charge. We are in the cockpit, our choice is whether we fly the plane or let it fly itself. It’s just that we have to learn to fly before can actually do it. Robert is suggesting we spend a bit of money learning. Good luck with your approach!
Except, of course, for the leftist social democrat nations, where that didn’t happen. Pesky nanny-statist Scandinavia seemed remarkably free of mountains of skulls the last time I was there.
The history of the twentieth century was largely a history of demonstrating, again and again and again and again, that dismantling democratic polities and putting dictators and juntas in charge ends up turning those nations into mountains of human skulls. Yet the US and other Western governments have connived at the installation of dictators and juntas in countries who freely elected leftist governments how many times now?
When you remove freely elected leftists and replace them with despots, the only place left for a disaffected populace to turn in their struggle for social justice is to the militant religious fundamentalists. How’s that been working out for the West lately?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: depends on what you’re starting with. There isn’t any elemental hydrogen lying about for us to use as fuel; we have to make it. The two most obvious sources are a) hydrocarbons - natural gas, oil, coal, or biomass - or water. The trouble with the hydrocarbon route is that the byproduct is, you guessed it, CO2. Have a look at Hydrogen production at Wikipedia.
Liquefying hydrogen, or even compressing it to the ridiculously high pressures necessary to store enough of the stuff for a decent range from your hydrogen-powered vehicle, also requires considerable energy, though I don’t have numbers immediately to hand.
Wasn’t there a pesky leftist called FDR with a pesky lefty economists called Galbraith who turned the US economy to a war effort to get rid of a pesky rightist who was rampant across the pond?
And if we are talking numbers of skulls, I went from this computer to open the morning paper to be confronted by an article that said 20,000 people die from hunger in the world every day. This is what Johan Galtung call structural violence. He says (footnote 16) that structural violence kills 100,000 people a day, that’s 36.5 million a year:
He’s talking about reversible policies on the part of the capitalist West towards the rest. I can’t verify his numbers, but I’ve been thinking about them for 6 years and they sound credible in terms of what you pick up in news items from time to time.
Robert might prefer us to get back to climate engineering, but we are increasingly being told that what we need now is akin to the war effort as in WW2.
I grew up on a peasant farm and the other night Mark asked me whether that was a preferable life-style to what we have now. The answer is a thousand times “no”. But we do have to internalise all the costs of the kind of society we have built and somehow pay for the externalised costs of the last 150 years.
The very serious Harvard economist Martin L Weitzman in a paper On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change has some interesting things to say about risk, especially the “Dismal Theorem”.
In Climate Code Red the authors point out that in air travel the acceptable level of risk is one in a million. Yet people like Stern were willing to accept a risk of 1 in 10 or so of the destruction of civilisation as we know it. Weitzman is a serious economist who is on the same page.
To pick up on the hydrogen thing, surely the advantage with hydrogen is that it can be prepared for use at times when the sun is shining and the wind blows, can it not?
Certainly Brian. The problem is that the round trip from energy -> hydrogen -> energy has a net efficiency of maybe 30%. That’s way worse than batteries.
Brian: “Good luck with your approach!”
Never said I actually *had* an actual positive approach, just doin’ some criticizin’. (A thing I note that leftists have historically not taken on board with much good humor!) As far as I can tell, we’re not making any policy here, just discussing the issue. At least, I know *I* ain’t making any policy.
Here’s the thing. I don’t dispute the science of climate change, but that’s because I’m not qualified to discuss it intelligently. My guess is that of writers here, only yourself, Robert Merkel, and a small handful of others have anything like the advanced scientific literacy needed to evaluate this stuff even on an intelligent layman’s (i.e. non-climatologist) level. Yet there’s an awful lot of Whole Earth Bible-thumpin’, down home in the Gaia Belt. The science of the matter is well beyond my ken; the policy implications, though, are not. All I’m doing is asking that good old leftist question, “Who? Whom?”
Think of it. Lots and lots of people who, like me, don’t have enough scientific literacy to make a realistic judgment call, are saying very loudly that it’s all a done deal and we must embrace “fact”. But from a political, preferential and temperamental point of view, these are essentially the same ‘types’ of people who, in generations past, spoke of ‘infallible Marxist-Leninist thought’ and the ’science’ of ‘inevitable’ historical ‘progression,’ and so on. People marching around, using very silly and questionable symbols, demanding the abrupt and radical re-thinking of the entire economic fabric of present reality, with the changes to be designed and enforced by –guess who?– an intellectual vanguard of True Believers which consists of –guess who?– their own good selves. Just where exactly have I heard all this before? Hmm…
If it doesn’t worry you, too, well, it oughta. And a good defense against mass stupidity is detached, thoughtful criticism. Doesn’t mean ya gotta turn around and march in the exact opposite direction. There are very, very serious consequences that will result from mass re-structuring of industrial output, and people better be really sure they’re right before they dip a toe in them waters.
“We are in charge. We are in the cockpit… It’s just that we have to learn to fly before can actually do it.”
So what you’re saying here is, you’ve demanded to be the pilot without yet knowing how to fly the plane. Imagine what that does for my confidence! One could have an awful lot of fun with this, but… well, you get the idea.
Sorry for the snark in my earlier comment, but I do think there’s a good, serious conversation to be had about the serious repercussions of steep CO2 emissions reductions, and what that world would really look like. The Earth Hour people shouldn’t have shut off the lights; they should have proposed shutting off the water-processing plants and the respirators in hospitals, for a better view of their brave new world. Maybe you’re right and we don’t have any choice; but people had better be sure, because I guarantee the new society won’t be candle-lit dinners and soulful meetings by night in public parks.
tigtog: “Except, of course, for the leftist social democrat nations, where that didn’t happen. Pesky nanny-statist Scandinavia seemed remarkably free of mountains of skulls the last time I was there”
Are you talking about the same Scandinavian countries whose nanny-state policies were predicated on the free ride of a military, strategic and security umbrella underwritten for fifty years largely by the US, countries with an already-established and functioning industrial order, and a formerly-homogeneous population formerly accustomed to high levels of trust and cooperation? Those countries?
You can do an awful lot within the right parameters. Do you know the old Chinese fable about the farmer, the rabbit, and the tree stump?
jpz, I have to go out to work now for a nice capitalist who, here in Brisbane, makes mining weigh-bridges and exports them pretty well all over the world (22 countries, he told me). I’ll get back to your very reasonable response to my salvo where I guess you pushed some of my sensitive buttons tonight.
Robert, with my limited knowledge I’m a bit keen on plug-in electrical which morphs into a quality diesel hybrid if needed (Peugeot have one). There was a CSIRO report on some new battery technology wherein you can charge a battery in less time than it takes to fill up the traditional way (sorry no time to look for a link).
Re #18, while the direct costs of ocean seeding and placing sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere are low, costs from unwanted consequences of these actions may be high, and are subject to considerable uncertainty. I see an important role for research in better understanding these costs and risks.
I recall someone saying on the “Background briefing” report on geoengineering that injecting SO2 into the stratosphere may mean that we no longer have a blue sky. I’m not sure you would place a cost on something like that.
Lord Robert of Merkel @ 11.29am, 9th April: thank you
Blue sky due to scattering of sunlight by thin air. Red scatters away, leaves blue (longer wavelengths). Not dependent on chemical composition? Red skies as at sunset also sopmewhat due to dust, e.g. after big bush fire, volcanic eruption, city dust….. ?
j_p_z, you’ve clearly misunderstood my pilot analogy. You said:
When I said “We are in charge. We are in the cockpit…” I meant the human race and it’s not what we choose now it’s where we find ourselves.
It’s been said before. There is simply no precedent in the history of the planet for CO2 forcing of the magnitude of the industrial era. We are putting the stuff up there 30 times faster than happened in the PETM event of 55Mya where the temperature went up by 6C but slowly - over at least 10,000 years.
So all I’m saying is that human activity is by far the dominant force in climate forcing at present, so we have a choice. Either we can continue business as usual and ignore the effects or we can introduce some intelligence into what we are doing.
You ask:
Yes, some have, but it’s not an either/or question unfortunately. We need to take action to mitigate climate change, but some climate change will be inevitable (has in fact already begun), so we need to adapt as best we can.
You’ve got the scale about right. Even one metre sea level rise will inundate about 150 million people. That will almost certainly happen no matter what we do. Within a few decades we are likely to lose all the coral reefs. About 100 million are said to use reef ecologies as their main source of protein. Once gone they don’t come back for millions of years. I could go on.
Mitigation is a problem of the global commons and requires a scale of cooperation that may well be beyond us. The Climate ‘code red’ authors included a section Can “politics as usual” solve the problem?
On page 70 they give a table indicating the percentage of GDP devoted to the war effort by some of the leading powers. They then point out that the sums required for climate change mitigation are pretty trivial by comparison.
Hansen tells us that you can take 50 ppm out of the atmosphere for $10 trillion at $100 per tonne.
There may need to be some regulation, but most people thinking of solutions are thinking of market-based strategies. Personally I don’t regard existing forms of political economy as ideal, but I’ve thought about Leninism just enough to understand that it won’t work.
Look, I don’t think everything is going to be easy or hunky dory, but I do think the main dangers politically/socially will come from the effects of climate change rather than the effort to fix it.
But my own priority is in trying to understand the nature and scope of the physical problem, which is hard enough given my minimal formal science education.
One other reason why I see geoengineering as being something that we may have to do as well as emissions reductions if things turn out worse than we hoped, rather than an alternative to emissions reductions, is there is also the issue of acidification of the oceans. Delivering sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere may reduce temperature by increasing dimming, but it wont change carbon dioxide levels. When some of the carbon dioxide is absorbed by oceans, it increases their acidity, which makes it more difficult for molluscs and crustaceans to form shells, affects coral growth, and probably has other effects as well.
Very good point Peter.
Interestingly, you never hear a word about ocean acidifcation from the denialists.
Peter, I think you’re right about acidification. My understanding is that about half the carbon up there comes out in quick time, no matter how much we put up, largely into the oceans through mixing so that the result is a chemical equilibrium between the lower atmosphere and the upper ocean. But with more severe ’storms’ in the Southern Ocean we are getting more mixing which ironically stirs up more carbon lower down and could reduce absorption. But in spite of a pessimistic study last year, there is no long term trend of an increase in the “airborne fraction”.
About a half of the remaining airborne fraction lasts in the air, virtually forever in net terms, but the mixing at the surface level will cause the ocean acidity to reflect the carbon in the air. So leaving it up there for a long time is not a good idea, as it will negatively affect the shell-forming organisms in the water.
In the coral reef link I made above Charlie Veron ends up saying that acidification is the elephant in the room and a greater threat than loss of corals.
BTW I meant to point out that spending $10 trillion to reduce CO2 by 50ppm amounts to 1.5% of world GDP over 10 years. It’s not a big price to preserve the world as we have come to know it for the last 8,000 years for us and the plants and animals, and shouldn’t threaten democracy provided (a) we, the human race, see the need and (b) can agree on what’s to be done.
While we have talk of zany theories it’s unlikely to happen. Maybe as large slabs of ice drop off the ice sheets at increasing rates or a major city like New York is drowned in a storm surge we will find the will. But my guess is that by the time we do the future we have committed ourselves to will be difficult. My guess is that when we decide to act it will take 3-500 years to get our house in a stable and sustainable order.