It seems Tim Flannery’s comments on geoengineering have gotten a bit of a run in the Australian blogosphere, with people from Andrew Landeryou to Graham Young to Darryl Mason piling on to attack his comments.
Essentially, Flannery is saying that because the risks of climate change are so great, we should be considering the last-ditch options. The last-ditch option he mentions is one that’s been discussed before – dumping sulphur into the upper atmosphere to block some fraction of the sunlight getting to the surface. Frankly, anybody who’s been reading the science would conclude that the risks are pretty damn terrifying, and that we might have to seriously consider drastic action. I know I have. That said, this particular idea might not be a goer. The latest research on the sulphur proposal suggests that as well as ensuring we’d not see a blue sky again it will deplete the ozone layer – you know, the one we banned CFCs and halons to save back in the 1980s.
But Flannery is dead right that we seem to be heading straight towards a global disaster, one that is worth taking pretty drastic action to avoid, and one may have to involve artificial fixes. Whether it suits our particular philosophical agendas or not, that is what we face. The sooner people get their head around that concept, the better.
“..Flannery is dead right…”
That would be a first.
I find it amazing how people come up with decisions/policies and the like that they are wont to describe as ‘biting the bullet/making the hard decisions/last ditch resort” and so on yet managing to [deliberately?] evade, even as a momentary consideration, the options that would really involve some hard decisive action.
Tackle the oil companies head on.
Drastically compulsory permanently decrease irrigation tomorrow.
Fine the coal companies for pollution.
Tell the banks they have to cut their profits by a third.
Arrest the pope for collusion in covering up child sexual abuse.
Tell GM et al to build better [environmentally] vehicles in 2009 or face severe punishments, financial and personal.
Extend public transport facilities dramatically, inc. cost free public transport.
And several other populist, pie-in-the-sky, impossible, in-credible, fantastic not to be considered policies which would REALLY ‘bite the bullet” of confronting entrenched political power and perceptions.
Putting sulphur in the atmosphere, covering the Great Barrier Reef with shade cloth, bringing tropical river waters south, flooding the Murray lakes with sea water ….none of these are answers, they are part of the problem.
Flannery is dead wrong.
We do not need artificial fixes. They are what caused/cause the problem[s].
We need drastic political action….and that we ain’t gonna get.
Fill the atmosphere with sulphur, eh?
I like it, I like it.
I’ll have my people call Christo’s people right away.
hannah’s dad – don’t you think that sounds ever so slightly totalitarian?
Blocking the sun’s rays will not only kill the solar PV industry deader than scrapping the rebates but it will probably affect our ability to, you know, grow food. Blocking out the sun is a stupid idea and won’t do a single thing to stop us wrecking the planet even more. This is signalling that it’s okay to pollute because there’s always a technological fix which we can employ later. Perhaps the Brisbane City Council can do its part by abandoning the CNG and ultra-low sulfur diesel fuels in favour of sulfurous fuels.
I read one of Flannery’s books once.
When he was talking about things I didn’t know anything about, I was willing to believe he knew what he was on about.
However, whenever he strayed into an area of general knowledge or one where I had some technological understanding of the subject, I could immediately see major flaws in his arguments.
I decided that if that was happening when I did understand the subject, then it was likely to be happening in the cases where I didn’t.
So…it’s Flannery’s idea, it must be flawed.
Filling the sky with chemicals to block out the sun, eh?
If I recall, they tried exactly that strategy to save the world in “The Animatrix.”
And as a result, the human race got taken over by swarms of evil robots, everyone had to sleep in a glass pod with a bunch of wires stuck in their heads, and even if you managed to get free, your reward was you had to listen to Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. And you didn’t even get to sleep with Carrie Name-escapes-me, the hot chick in the skin-tight leather thingy.
Pass.
This wasn’t originally Tim Flannery’s idea, see P. J. Crutzen, Climatic Change 77, 211 (2006). It will reduce solar radiation by about 1.8 percent so it will only have a marginal impact on Solar PV, and food production (provided it causes nothing else to go wrong). The most serious risks seem to be loss of ozone.
Like climate change, geoengineering may be something with potentially unlimited downside exposure. The mitigation that we do may not be sufficient to stop something really bad happening like Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet melting, the Siberian permafrost releasing massive amounts of methane, the amazon going up in flames, or an anoxic ocean event.
I don’t like geoengineering one bit, but given the pathetic mitigation response that we have had so far from most of our politicians, we may have to consider it at some stage to prevent something even worse happening.
Another problem that can arise is the moral hazard issue – if people think that geoengineering by itself may work then we may avoid the mitigation work that is absolutely neccessary.
Un exemple s’il vous plaît ?
Someone in one of the letters pages called it a “global cane toad”. That seemed like an apt description.
So to solve a glowball warmenating problem so hideously obvious and horrifyingly immediate that there has only been a cooling trend for a decade and nobody can find any of the extra heat required, Flummery – who is not a climate scientist – wants us to fill the atmosphere with chemicals.
Ooookay, then!
I actually remember that. It was called ‘air pollution’. And according to plonkers like Flummery it was all caused by evil capitalists and was going to kill us all thru acid rain. Why, it was the end of the world as we knew it! SP we fixed it.
But that was obviously a huge mistake. Why, this same air pollution is a good thing now! Man’s an idiot.
Honestly, Robert, have you actually thought through what the fool is actually proposing, and questioned why he is proposing it? (Hint: look at his declining income from speaking fees)
You have not struck me as being at all credulous before, Robert.
Honestly, Flummery is now at the point of screaming hysterically that the sea level is rising 1.2 metres in six hours and this will kill us all by next Wednesday, while the rest of us say ‘erm… what you have just noticed is the tide coming in”.
How can he possibly be taken seriously?
MarkL
canberra
A quote from James Lovelock’s speech to the Royal Society in October 2007:
Climate change on the living earth http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=7250
MarkL, Sulfur, like Ozone, has different impacts on the atmosphere depending how high up it is. We want Ozone up the top where it gets rid of UV but not down the bottom where it is hazardous to life. Sulfur can’t form acid rain if it’s above the layer where rain clouds are formed. I don’t agree with the proposal but I agree less with bad science.
See: “The Climate Engineers: Playing God to Save the Planet,” Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2007): 46-60. The Climate Engineers
Full update coming soon.
I haven’t read Flannery’s article and I’m not likely to, but is this really the first time you’ve heard about geo-engineering solutions to climate change?
Go to http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/192 and download David Keith’s talk to the 2007 TED salon and invest 16 mins of your time to watch it. It’s concise, informative and thought-provoking. In short, geo-engineering is absurdly cheap, we could bring about an ice age for about 0.0001% of GDP. It’s also ridiculously fast, almost instant. This make is a very powerful and attractive tool for mitigating risk associated with rising temperatures.
Keith doesn’t particularly like geo-engineering, but scientific progress is only making it cheaper and easier so we need to start seriously talking about it. Like Stuart Brand said, ‘We’re already terraforming, so we should try to get good at it’. (or as Brice Sterling writes in Viridian Design Note 00479 ‘Okay, it beats drowning, maybe’)
d
PS the paper referenced by Peter Wood is authored by Paul Crutzen who shared the 1995 nobel prize in chemistry for his work on atmospheric ozone depletion. Not a kook, nor a crank but a real live expert whose expertise is in one of the negative side-efects
Carrie-Anne Moss!
Can someone please explain to those who haven’t been following this debate what exactly is meant by “we seem to be heading straight towards a global disaster”?
Serious question, request for information, is all. What is more disastrous that is thought to be happening than what the previous understanding was?
Kim -
Hansen’s paper has some useful information on why the consequences of global warming may be worse than expected. Carbon cycle feedbacks and albedo effects may been that a doubling of CO2 may lead to a temperature increase that is twice what was expected (6 degrees instead of 3 degrees). Also the arctic ice sheet melting will lead to less albedo which will also increase temperatures. Furthermore, palaeoclimatic data (from studying the recent history of the earth) suggest much higher sea level rises than would be expected from thermal expansion alone. This could mean that Greenland and West Antarctica are more likely to melt. Recent evidence also suggests that they are melting more quickly than expected. Because Greenland and West Antarctica are on land, if they melted then that would lead to very high sea level rises, something like 10 meters for them both melting.
I have watched this little episode with great interest, seeing as I have myself spruiked for technological solutions before (oceanic iron seeding and fresnel lenses at L3). The concept of putting particulates in the high atmosphere has been slowly growing in exposure for some time.
Previously when I have spoken about geo-scale technological approaches to ameliorating global warming, most of the enthusiastic nodding has come from RWDBs and the tut-tutting from lefties. Now that one of these solutions has been mentioned by Tim Flannery the RWDBs are beside themselves in the rush to make fun of it.
What nobody seems prepared to do, for any of these, is stump up money for research. We don’t know, we just don’t have any serious idea, about whether these things will work. About whether they will be a cure worse than the disease, or something so critical it will save trillions of dollars and potentially millions of lives.
It seems to me that rather than scoring points, we could, you know, fund a few experiments to find out more.
Yes, Jacques. Knee-jerk responses to honest proposals to avert disastrous climate change are a bit sad.
If critics can’t see that this earth has already been geo-engineered to the f*ck by 6.5 billion humans then it’s no wonder they are allergic to the term. They simply don’t know what it means.
Thanks, Peter.
Can I just say rather than engaging with denialist loonies, some of the communications effort from the science community might be better directed at informing the lay public of this?
Flannery, Hansen, Lovelock to name three – do this all the time – and to great effect.
I don’t think we can blame scientists for the difficulty the public has with comprehending/reading the science. I’d be blaming journos and politicians and big business types first.
Oh sure, wbb. I wasn’t being critical. I just meant that if as someone who’s here at this blog I don’t know this stuff, it’s not being communicated as well as it could be! Or maybe I’m not reading what I should be. But it does seem to me that in the general public arena things are suspiciously quiet.
Kim, I’ve been working on a post or two in my mind to summarise all this stuff for about 6 months now. It’s been a combination of being busy and then getting distracted by something else topical.
Soon it will happen.
Interesting observation, Jacques. The first I read of such approaches was in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald back in 1988-89 which summarised a range of such proposals, and quoted one of their proponents as saying that such an option would be preferable to reducing use of fossil fuels. It was also around the time that the nuclear industry first put in their spoke for a solution which would save the climate without shifting to a less energy-hungry economy. Shortly thereafter denialism became the response du jour of the Anglophone Right, and for a time less attention was paid to these options.
Sorry Kim, perhaps I’ve been neglectful in reporting developments in the science, as compared to developments on mitigation stuff.
Short answer – there ain’t no good news coming from the science.
“This could mean that Greenland and West Antarctica are more likely to melt. Recent evidence also suggests that they are melting more quickly than expected. Because Greenland and West Antarctica are on land, if they melted then that would lead to very high sea level rises, something like 10 meters for them both melting.”
Weird…I had a dream last night & told my wife about it this morning. We’d sold our place in QLD & were visiting some friends in melbourne (or was it QLD?…not really sure)…they lived on a hill which had a road that wound upwards to much higher ground. There had been warnings of a tsunami (many areas across the World were going under water) & as we watched from above the sea gradually started washing up the beaches & into the town…it was very warm for winter & i remember someone saying the sea levels were expected to rise 12-30 mtrs. It was quite a terrifying sight.
In all probability it it’s a dream based on things i’ve seen on the news lately…but to be honest I haven’t thought much about the climate lately…apart from hoping for more rain from the garden. Tho I guess the Burma disaster combined w/ the Chinese earthquake are in the back of my mind.
If my brain is throwing this stuff out…then maybe it’s happening to many others & perhaps more of us need to start thinking about DISASTER options. Thank goodness we have all that money in the future/infrastructure funds etc…
Humans have survived partially because of their IMAGINATION & some groups listening w/ at least half an ear to the Cassandra/Gore types…& preparing. Just in case.
Just a dream…but perhaps a genetic memory turned into a modern day context based on past events…perhaps the survival gene working overtime. Who knows? Hopefully, it’s just my imagination running away from me…:)
Interesting topic Robert.
The true irony in all this is that both China and the US are busy building coal fired power stations as fast as they can go. The really interesting thing is that these power stations release lots of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere already. The whole of China is and most of SE Asia is already covered with a gigantic plume of SO2 from power generation, steel making and other industrial processes. Fannery’s insane idea is just another example of a Prof in search of a trough.
Huggy.
Huggybunny: And it’s actually countering some of the effects of increased CO2, according to some studies I’ve read.
However, as Sam Clifford said, there’s a big difference between sulphur in the troposphere (the bit of the atmosphere near us) and the stratosphere (the next layer of the atmosphere, starting around 10 kilometres up depending on your latitude).
Thanks, folks.
Kim, here’s the longer version of the short story on sea level rise.
Greenland is worth 6-7 metres and West Antarctica 5. East Antarctica is worth 59 metres and all the other alpine regions are worth about half a metre. Then there’s thermal expansion, which I don’t have a real good handle on. I think it is relatively small in terms of the next century, but would keep on going for millennia.
125,000 years ago the sea was 4-6 metres higher when the temperature was 1-2C warmer and CO2 was less than 300ppm. gavin at RealClimate says it was 2m each from W Antarctica and Greenland. Probably all the other glaciers would be gone. Here’s another thing. If you get 2 metres each from Greenland and W Antarctica then East Antarctica is not going to sit there untouched. It’s going to contribute also.
About 3 million years ago the sea was 25 metres higher, plus or minus 10, when the CO2 was 360-400ppm and the temperature 2-3C warmer.
Hansen reckons if you go back 35 million years when glaciation of Antarctica started the temperature was 4-5C higher and the CO2 was 425, plus or minus 75. The sea level, depending on thermal expansion and things like the shape of ocean basins would be 70-80 metres higher if it happened now.
Hansen wants to get CO2 down below 350ppm, but that is clearly an interim stage. Caldeira says extra CO2 is all bad and there should be a law against it. I can’t read his latest piece because it is subscription only but I think he is telling the broad story that Hansen is also telling.
The cooling of the last 35 million years happened while the sun was getting slightly warmer. It’s a question of the balance of CO2. India chugging across the ocean, for example was releasing a plume of CO2 but when it slammed into Asia a lot of rock was exposed the weathering of which takes CO2 out of the air. Similarly there was uplift of the Andes.
There is a feedback cycle in that as more land gets exposed with lowering sea level, plant life increases taking CO2 out of the air.
From about 3m years the Milankovitch cycles have come into greater play, producing what we call ice ages.
Turning to Greenland and now, it is estimated that the ice sheet becomes seriously unstable when the temperature there reaches about 2.8C above preindustrial. But here’s the rub. The temperature there warms at about 2.2 times the global land/ocean average. So we are at 0.8C now with conservatively 0.6 in the pipeline and actually inevitable. 2.8 divided by 2.2 is 1.27.
So in terms of Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference, we are already there.
The Arctic ice sheet matters because of the boost it gives to the albedo flip (ice reflects about 80% of solar radiation and open sea only about 10%) so there is enhanced warming of the whole area.
A bloke called Ruddiman says that on the cooling side the global temperature needs to reduce by 2C before ice on Canada and North Asia lasts the summer and we start to ice up.
In general building ice sheets is dry, slow and continuous. Degrading ice sheets is wet, faster and at times discontinuous. New ice ages are not a problem.
Feeling better?
That’s off the top of my head without checking anything. There are some very well-read commenters out there. If I’ve got the story seriously wrong I’d appreciate it if they’d say so.
There is another story about failing sinks and acidic oceans which again is all bad news.
Thanks, Brian!
The kind of serious action that can be taken immediately is bailing up our new prime minister with a “please explain” on his zero concern budget!! Then turn Peter Garret around to see what his other face looks like. Only Harry Potter has seen it so far.
I think we need to be careful about distinguishing between the risk of global warming and the unintended consequences of the use of technology.
Geo-engineering solutions are clearly exercising both risks. Certainly the feasibility of a range of options is worth testing so we can better distinguish between those risks.
Though I do not discount the possibility that managing the transition between the energy system we have now and that which we might have in 2050, may present the greatest risk. Is there a chance that this transition can be managed without resource to geo-engineering, which may at best keep the patient alive while we look for a cure. Perhaps the cure is not out of reach, but if both paths are possible, then both should be examined.
Personally, I like the idea of the ozone layer where it is. Exposing marine and terrestrial life to higher UV to stop large-scale ice melt is a choice we should try to avoid.
Roger: I’m not a huge fan of any approach other than “put the atmosphere back the way it was”. I particularly don’t like sulphur-seeding. Aside from the risks to the ozone layer, I kind of prefer a blue sky every so often…
But if there’s a choice between a couple of decades of dirty skies while we make the transition to low-carbon energy (which we could have largely already done if we’d been a little bit more sensible about things) and sacrificing a significant fraction of the world’s biodiversity, I think we should real hard at the tradeoff.
I guess my difficulty with all those heroic engineering schemes is that they can have unintended consequences.
The safest thing to do would be to immediately implement all the low cost energy conservation measures and technologies that we already understand and that are already developed.
A massive global effort should not be beyond us.
Assisting this would be a major refocussing of food and fibre production where economic primacy is given to locally grown food and fibre that has low embodied energy and low fossil fuel inputs.
The scope for short term action is vast and varied and very effective but the best we can come up with is some half arsed scheme to install SO2 in the stratosphere?
An equally massive effort to develop artificial geothermal energy and other base load renewable sources should pay off in a very short time.
Finally do you gullible supporters of the yellow skies scenario really think you would ever get your blue skies back ? No not ever, Greed will see to that.
On the question of species extinction: the species that is really at risk is us. Life will go on, even if it means that giant intelligent cockroaches will inherit the earth.
Huggy.
After posting above at 30 I had to rush off to catch the bus to town where there’s a dentist who extracts large quantities of money from my bank account. When he’s talking about reconstructing a tooth only capped 8 years ago, I’m calculating how many times this may happen again before I don’t need teeth any more.
At my age, Robert, a couple of decades without blue sky is too long. I wouldn’t care to live in a world without blue sky.
Then again we’ve been getting too much of it lately by far. Some rain clouds would go well.
Huggy, for 98% of our existence as a species we’ve cooperated very nicely in small groups of about 30-40 adults, but at the same time been prepared to compete vigorously with the other mob over the hill. I’m afraid we are still doing the same thing, but on a national basis. So I’m not optimistic at all. But if a few dramatic bad things happen to one or more of the main power centres, then maybe. But Paul’s perfectly right. If things seem to stabilise in the next few years then we’re in trouble.
Sam C
It only fails to form acid rain if it STAYS up high. What price slow diffusion down into lower levls? How much CO2 emitted in the raising of he sulphur up to those levels?
Peter Wood [8]: P. Crutzen was one of the leading scientists warning in the mid-1980sof the dangers of a “nuclear winter” (sun blocked by smoke and dust in the aftermath of a nuclear war).
In those days he thought blocking the sun’s rays could be globally fatal. My, how he’s changed!
I enjoyed Jacques’s comment at #18. But there’s no mystery about why RWDBs liked his proposals while hating Flannery’s. The RWDB’s sole interest is, after all, in ridiculing lefties. So when a target leftie proposes an scheme to mitigate global warming he puts on his denialist hat and attacks it, whether it’s technological one (as in this case) or a regulatory one, on the basis that global warming is a leftie swindle. But when the issue is whether to regulate or find a technical fix, he puts on his anti-government hat, curses the meddling bureaucrats, and cheers the hard-working, straight-talking engineer types and their ‘practical’ solutions.
Looking forward to Brian’s promised post.
As I do, James. But I fear that Brian has been too modest. He has already put up a great number of very detailed posts over the last two or three years in this place.
I understand where Kim is coming from but I just think it is very hard to sell bad news. People tune out very quickly. Plus it’s all hard science and to most of us very boring and technical.
We are headed for a very rocky road where only the actual crashes will get people’s attention. Unfortunately with CC it’s all about lead times. Our usual just in time approach will fail us on this one.
wbb, I’ve been working 7/7 until a couple of weeks ago. But last year I was on one occasion virtually accused of being an alarmist by a very respected and knowledgeable commenter around the place. It kinda made me cautious, but the evidence keeps mounting and has an internal coherence, I think, that makes it hard to escape.
Anyway, braver now.
Mr(s) Nameless wuz wrong, then!
Mr Nameless never is, you see, but maybe just once.
If we are going to completely ignore the real things that can be done and skive off into the ridiculous then allow me to suggest that organising a medium sized meteor to collide with the earth in some problem causing zone (not Australia) would solve many problems. The dust cloud would bring global temperatures down immediately and hold them there for some significant time. Depending upon where it landed (and the us would have more to say about that than anyone) the poppy crop could be eliminated, or terrorism supporting people could be substatially eliminated, or the Japanese whaling fleet could be wiped out, or… Of course up to 2 billion people would be disappeared in the process, but global warming is going to do that anyway. It would create a ripple on Wall Street, but the markets have shown great resiliance in the face of many disasters, no biggey. And as long as the landing was kept away from major oil stocks then things could be back to normal in as little as a decade.
Oh! and here is another good idea. If we stop all irrigation then the resultant reduction of water vapour in the atmosphere would to some extent reduce the trapping of heat.
FACT – A 1% change in soil organic matter across 5 billion hectares could sequester 500 billion tonnes of physical CO2 – this means that each 1% increase could remove 64 ppm of carbon dioxide from atmospheric circulation.
Visit http://www.soilcarbon.com.au/case_studies/index.html and look at the presentations.
Boosting soil organic matter levels is one of the only real ways to deal with the existing excess legacy load of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere.
It also increases farm production, helps rural rebuilding, reduces the impact of drought and incidence of flooding, builds biodiversity and genuinely starts the healing of the World’s river systems. It may sound too good to be true, but it works.
On the engineering of small solutions writ large, I endorse Thursday night’s Catalyst on Microgeneration in the UK. Inspiring.
Story here
I think Flannery’s point is to shock us into action. Its a fair bet he regards putting sulphur is the atmosphere as completely horrible. The fact that he contemplates doing that is obviously intended to communicate strongly to us that inaction is far far worse. That purpose seems to largely be missed by the Flannery haters above. Whatever you think about Flannery, one thing is for sure, the guy has courage.
Another approach to atmospheric carbon extraction is to log trees and bury them a metre below ground (where they can remain stable for thousands of years) and then plant new trees and keep cycling. I saw somewhere this could increase the sequestration potential of current forests by 100 times. Its a variant in the theme of soil carbon’s comments above.
My comment here is that with the EXTREME urgency required for URGENT ACTION on global warming, we here, in Australia, are waiting for yet another report from yet another economist, despite the fact that the pre-releases of the awaited report are all indicating EXTREME urgency and a need for URGENT ACTION. I am not impressed with Rudd’s performance here at all, and I am completely floored with the lack of comment at the Environment free budget. I think that Garret should be put back out on the street to sing for his supper, because he has become a pathetic excuse for an Environmental spokesman. I know full well here that the string puller is Anthony Albanesie, and he should be chucked out on his ear as well, with a razor wire fence put around Bob Debus to ensure that he does not move into the role. Perhaps our only hope is that Tim Flannery becomes an RBA style independent commissioner for environmental restitution. Are you up for it Tim?
Lovelock’s recent endorsement of nuclear energy is also about a drastic short term fix while long term strategies are put into place. He believes it’s ‘business as usual’ that is winning the day and advocates for a drastic slowing down.
I propose an Easter Island Heritage Award for John Howard and his business as usual cronies.
Civilisations rise and fall.
Species come and go.
So they do, Mug Punter. So they do.
No…leave Albanese