Tag Archive for 'geoengineering'

Who’s interested in geoengineering?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 days, 9 hours ago
in Climate change, Environment and Victoria
. 67 Comments

Via Joe Romm, a fascinating snippet: a scientific conference on geoengineering is to be held in California, with the goals of:

  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

For what it’s worth, (and unlike Romm), I think geoengineering may be a marginally less awful option than the others we are leaving ourselves, and have argued for carefully controlled scientific trials of geoengineering technologies. So, in that sense I believe a conference like this is a great idea.

But what makes it particularly interesting is that the sole strategic partner of this conference is none other than the “State of Victoria, Australia”:

Continue reading ‘Who’s interested in geoengineering?’

More methane

Published
by
Brian
8 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change and Environment
. 135 Comments

Recently my notice has been captured by a couple of interesting reports about methane. First, it seems that there is twice as much carbon in the form of methane in permafrost than we previously thought. In fact about 1.5 trillion tonnes. To be sure I’d already read that in Ch 3 of the UNEP Year Book 2009 (large pdf). (It does in fact appear to be the same study, published in 2008 in Bioscience.) Big numbers can be confusing and downright misleading, so I’ve made an attempt to get some perspective.

My chemistry didn’t go very far at school so forgive and correct if I get this wrong. The problem is that no-one seems to bother to work out the relativities when this information is handed out.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 3,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide which converts to 817 gigatonnes of carbon. That’s equivalent to 54% of the 1,500gt of carbon in the permafrost methane. So in permafrost we are looking at is roughly double the carbon presently in the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

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Millennia of drought

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 year, 1 month ago
in Climate change, Environment and Science
. 68 Comments

More cheery news from climate scientists!

A new study published in Proceedings of the (US) National Academy of Sciences conducts a little thought experiment. What happens if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gas emissions stop tomorrow? You’d hope that it might be a bit warm for a few decades, and gradually settle down. No such luck, according to this NOAA press release

A new scientific study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reaches a powerful conclusion about the climate change caused by future increases of carbon dioxide: to a large extent, there’s no going back.

The pioneering study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped. The findings appear during the week of January 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Geoengineering from the Royal Society

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 year, 6 months ago
in Climate change and Science
. 8 Comments

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences is not a journal I’d imagine too many of you read on a regular basis – I certainly don’t. But their recent special issue is on a topic of rather broader interest than usual – geoengineering.

Perhaps the most accessible read might be the introductory overview, which notes some interesting historical precedents for the idea – and, incidentally, sheds light on the Russian perspective on the prospects of a warmer globe:

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Carbon counting conundrums, difficult choices

Published
by
Brian
1 year, 7 months ago
in Climate change, Environment, Nuclear and Trade
. 77 Comments

If a recent article from the BBC is anything to go by, countries that think they are reducing their carbon emissions may in fact be increasing them. It seems that under UN rules no-one owns emissions from aviation and shipping.

Furthermore, no-one counts the increase that comes from imported goods. So moving manufacturing offshore is one way of reducing your GHG emissions score. And any increase in the consumption of material goods doesn’t count when they are imported.

Continue reading ‘Carbon counting conundrums, difficult choices’

Another geoengineering proposal

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 year, 7 months ago
in Climate change, Environment and Science
. 89 Comments

Geoengineering – that is, deliberately doing things to modify the Earth’s climate – is something that’s come up a couple of times on LP. There’s a (sort-of) new proposal doing the rounds in a very preliminary form – dumping lime into the ocean, increasing the capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2. The idea is not actually new, but a guy called Tim Kruger has received some funding from Shell to investigate it further. Interestingly, he’s conducting the investigation in an open source manner, keeping all the information gained in the public domain.

To get the lime, you need to heat limestone, which releases a molecule of CO2 in the process. However, the lime, when added to the ocean, will increase the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 by two molecules, so the process appears to be a net win even without directly sequestering the process CO2. But they’re also looking at sequestering that too. The heat source for heating the limestone is also under investigation – Shell’s interest is in using stranded natural gas, but Kruger is also examining alternatives like solar furnaces. As you might gather, this is all very preliminary; the discussions on the project website haven’t – to my knowledge – revealed any showstoppers yet.

It’s of course impossible to predict at this stage whether this proposal is technically, environmentally, or economically feasible. You have to wonder about the consequences of dumping billions of tonnes of lime into the world’s oceans. But, like all of these proposals, I also know that the alternative of not geoengineering isn’t looking great either.