For the first four years of this blog I published nearly every weekday, and as time went on occasionally struggled to find suitable topics. Lately, I've been running across more good blog topics than I could conceivably cover. I think more is at work in that than my having scaled back the blog's frequency; energy has become an integral part of so many crucial conversations in the meantime. So instead of my customary single topic, today's post includes three essentially unrelated ones, all of which I thought merited sharing with my readers.
The first item concerns compact fluorescent lighting, those "CFL" bulbs people seem to either love or hate, and upon which many base unrealistic expectations of energy and emissions reductions. According to the tracking of NEMA, the Association of Electrical and Medical Imaging Manufacturers, US demand for CFL bulbs has declined for four straight quarters, while demand for the incandescent bulbs that are being phased out by law has revived to 79% of the market. This shift begs for deeper analysis. Is it the result of consumers stocking up on 100 Watt incandescents before they disappear from store shelves next January 1 and become a new kind of black market commodity, or is it more along the lines of what happened to tire sales after steel belted radials were introduced? Like the latter, CFLs last a lot longer than the traditional product they're replacing, and at some point one would expect sales to plateau at a much lower level than incandescents previously held. Or is it the case, as in my household, that CFLs are simply not viewed as a satisfactory replacement in all the fixtures where they could be placed, because of a combination of lighting quality, cost effectiveness, and concern about potential mercury contamination?
Now let's turn to plastics. Two stories, both involving Dow Chemical, caught my eye. In the first, Dow is investing in a facility to make polyethylene, a very common plastic, from ethanol in Brazil. As the article in Technology Review notes, Brazil is one of the few places that would make sense. The process of producing ethanol from sugar cane is so energy-efficient and cost-competitive that ethanol can sensibly be substituted for the petroleum products from which it might otherwise be produced there. In the other story, Dow recently announced a process for extracting most of the available energy from non-recycled plastic waste. Taken together, these two items challenge our traditional view of the relationship between oil and plastics: not only does oil no longer have a lock on the feedstock market, but it could face competition from waste plastics in end-use energy applications, or possibly even as a potential source of synthetic oil, as I noted a couple of years ago.
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend an article from the May 28, 2011 issue of The Economist, which had been in my reading pile for weeks. It suggests that we are living in a new epoch of the earth called the Anthropocene, signifying humanity's having become the equivalent of a force of nature in our effect on the earth and its systems. I'm intrigued by this not just because it dovetails with my view that essentially everything we do on a civilization-wide scale, including energy production and consumption, agriculture, transportation and public works, has consequences for the entire planet, but also because of its implications for what sustainability is likely to mean going forward. If the cited scientists are correct, we influence the earth's systems as much as the climate does, with climate change only one example of our impact.
The corollary to that is that an earth restored to the conditions that prevailed in the Holocene epoch from which we emerged--before we started messing with the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, and other key processes--could not support the population expected by mid-century. There's just no going back to our bucolic roots, but neither is that a justification for the large-scale destruction of the environment needed to sustain humanity. The other interesting twist to this is that it's possible we will need the energy from the large-scale harnessing of solar power to conduct the intentional geoengineering that might be necessary to get the global climate back on an even keel. It's the sort of thing that gives environmentalists nightmares but makes believers in an approaching Technological Singularity nod sagely.
Showing posts with label geoengineering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geoengineering. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Monday, November 29, 2010
Cancun Climate Talks: Irrelevant?
The mood going into this week's global climate conference in Cancun, Mexico is decidedly different than that for last year's session in Copenhagen, which had been intended to culminate the process begun two years earlier in Bali. It's not just that expectations for a comprehensive and binding global climate treaty have been dramatically lowered; much of the debate since Copenhagen has moved away from the notion that it's even possible to reduce emissions sufficiently to avert many of the adverse consequences of a warming and less stable climate. It's no coincidence that the cover story of this week's Economist is dedicated to the increased need for adaptation to climate change, while the lead op-ed in the energy pull-out section in today's Wall St. Journal highlights an agenda for making clean energy the cheapest kind--not by subsidizing it even more than we already are, but by driving innovation.
After describing the magnitude of the challenge involved in decarbonizing the global economy by enough, soon enough, to limit the increase in global average temperatures in this century to 2° C, The Economist concludes, "The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over." That doesn't mean that agreements to bend the trajectory of emissions growth below the status quo trendline aren't worth pursuing, but it suggests that we need to devote much greater attention and resources to adapting to a world that will likely include more droughts, floods, famines, and human migration than we've had to deal with thus far, and for which both the drivers and consequences are being amplified by economic development and population growth. The Economist sees climate adaptation focused on three main areas: infrastructure, migration and food, and their analysis is worth reading.
Another factor I believe the magazine should have highlighted is the difficulty of undertaking any of these efforts at a time when the developed world is hobbled by weak economic growth and related deficit and debt problems that threaten to render even the current level of subsidies for renewable energy sources unsustainable. As the EU grapples with the debts of Greece and Ireland, with Portugal and Spain waiting in the wings, it's no accident that Spain has just cut its feed-in tariff for solar power, which had already been reduced from previously lavish levels. The elephant in the room in Cancun, as it was in Copenhagen, is that binding agreements requiring severe emissions reductions by and large transfer payments from the developed countries might have looked attainable when the economy was booming, but they have become much less feasible in the wake of the worst recession and financial crisis since the Great Depression.
That same fundamental challenge makes the innovation arguments raised by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellengerger of the Breakthrough Institute more urgent than they would be otherwise. Because today's renewable energy technologies remain more expensive without subsidies than coal, oil and natural gas--even when the consumption subsidies the latter receive are stripped away--the cost of replacing our existing, high-emitting energy sources with entirely green ones looks unaffordable in today's world. I would add that reliance on experience curve effects--building out a subsidized green energy economy and depending on volume to drive down its cost to the point of competitiveness--is unlikely close that gap, and where it can, there is no guarantee that the country providing the incentives will receive the benefits it is entitled to expect. To cite the most obvious current example, Germany has invested tens of billions of Euros subsidizing solar energy and has indeed created a globally competitive solar industry--mainly in developing Asia.
What makes Nordhaus and Shellenberger's suggestion seem much more practical than global climate treaties and mountains of green subsidies is that the money currently being spent on renewable energy deployment incentives, which constitute a small fraction of the total annual investment in energy infrastructure, would go much farther buying R&D, rather than hardware. The US investment tax credit paid to a single 100 MW wind farm could fund an entire university energy innovation laboratory and graduate degree program.
Of course none of these strategies should be regarded as entirely either/or propositions. Adaptation doesn't let us off the hook for trying to address the causes of climate change, nor does shifting more of government's limited resources into clean energy R&D mean we don't need any of the real-world learnings that only come from deploying technology and seeing how it works under uncontrolled conditions. There's also a parallel role for research into geoengineering to provide a backstop--a potential Hail Mary pass--should all of these other efforts fall short and climate change move beyond a range we can live with. If nothing else, the COP 16 meeting in Cancun might shed more light on the degree to which the UN body is the right umbrella to cover all this work.
Tomorrow at 1:00 PM EST I'll be presenting in a webinar entitled, "Natural Gas: Sustainability Friend or Foe". To sign up follow this link.
After describing the magnitude of the challenge involved in decarbonizing the global economy by enough, soon enough, to limit the increase in global average temperatures in this century to 2° C, The Economist concludes, "The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over." That doesn't mean that agreements to bend the trajectory of emissions growth below the status quo trendline aren't worth pursuing, but it suggests that we need to devote much greater attention and resources to adapting to a world that will likely include more droughts, floods, famines, and human migration than we've had to deal with thus far, and for which both the drivers and consequences are being amplified by economic development and population growth. The Economist sees climate adaptation focused on three main areas: infrastructure, migration and food, and their analysis is worth reading.
Another factor I believe the magazine should have highlighted is the difficulty of undertaking any of these efforts at a time when the developed world is hobbled by weak economic growth and related deficit and debt problems that threaten to render even the current level of subsidies for renewable energy sources unsustainable. As the EU grapples with the debts of Greece and Ireland, with Portugal and Spain waiting in the wings, it's no accident that Spain has just cut its feed-in tariff for solar power, which had already been reduced from previously lavish levels. The elephant in the room in Cancun, as it was in Copenhagen, is that binding agreements requiring severe emissions reductions by and large transfer payments from the developed countries might have looked attainable when the economy was booming, but they have become much less feasible in the wake of the worst recession and financial crisis since the Great Depression.
That same fundamental challenge makes the innovation arguments raised by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellengerger of the Breakthrough Institute more urgent than they would be otherwise. Because today's renewable energy technologies remain more expensive without subsidies than coal, oil and natural gas--even when the consumption subsidies the latter receive are stripped away--the cost of replacing our existing, high-emitting energy sources with entirely green ones looks unaffordable in today's world. I would add that reliance on experience curve effects--building out a subsidized green energy economy and depending on volume to drive down its cost to the point of competitiveness--is unlikely close that gap, and where it can, there is no guarantee that the country providing the incentives will receive the benefits it is entitled to expect. To cite the most obvious current example, Germany has invested tens of billions of Euros subsidizing solar energy and has indeed created a globally competitive solar industry--mainly in developing Asia.
What makes Nordhaus and Shellenberger's suggestion seem much more practical than global climate treaties and mountains of green subsidies is that the money currently being spent on renewable energy deployment incentives, which constitute a small fraction of the total annual investment in energy infrastructure, would go much farther buying R&D, rather than hardware. The US investment tax credit paid to a single 100 MW wind farm could fund an entire university energy innovation laboratory and graduate degree program.
Of course none of these strategies should be regarded as entirely either/or propositions. Adaptation doesn't let us off the hook for trying to address the causes of climate change, nor does shifting more of government's limited resources into clean energy R&D mean we don't need any of the real-world learnings that only come from deploying technology and seeing how it works under uncontrolled conditions. There's also a parallel role for research into geoengineering to provide a backstop--a potential Hail Mary pass--should all of these other efforts fall short and climate change move beyond a range we can live with. If nothing else, the COP 16 meeting in Cancun might shed more light on the degree to which the UN body is the right umbrella to cover all this work.
Tomorrow at 1:00 PM EST I'll be presenting in a webinar entitled, "Natural Gas: Sustainability Friend or Foe". To sign up follow this link.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Solar Warming and Our Sulfur Sunshield
Two unrelated stories concerning the science of climate change caught my attention yesterday. The first was the announcement of a new report on solar variability, published in Nature, which appeared to upend established thinking about the impact of solar cycles on the earth's climate. The other was a discussion on Shell's climate blog of the potential impact of regulations affecting the sulfur content of marine fuel oil on an effect that has been partly mitigating climate change for decades. Both are interesting in their own right, while together providing a useful reminder that climate change is much more complex than the soundbites we typically hear from the media and advocacy groups, especially after we've had a run of unusually hot or cold weather.
As a less-than-fully reformed science nerd, I loved the simple elegance of the first sentence of the abstract of the Haigh, et al paper in Nature: "The thermal structure and composition of the atmosphere is determined fundamentally by the incoming solar irradiance." Paragraphs of exposition boiled down to 16 words that neatly frame the importance of the researchers' finding that for the last several years, and contrary to what we'd have expected from being in the low part of the solar cycle, featuring few or no sunspots for several years, the earth has been receiving more energy from the sun where it really counts--in the lower part of the atmosphere, or troposphere. If their interpretation of the satellite data is correct, then it pretty well torpedoes the notion from two years ago that a weak sun was about to flip global warming into global cooling. Of course it would also defuse some of the determined attempts to attribute this year's record temperatures entirely to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.
While this finding isn't expected to alter the decade-to-decade view of climate change, it certainly suggests that we should be paying attention to a lot more than just CO2 and its sibling GHGs over shorter intervals, and in that respect it's a nice lead-in to the discussion of atmospheric cooling due to sulfur emissions from ships. That also applies to its implication that we still have a lot more to learn about the earth's atmosphere--where climate lives--and its dynamic interaction with the solar system.
In his blog on Shell's corporate website, Shell climate advisor David Hone shared his observations from a recent meeting exploring the impact of sulfur emissions on climate change. This apparently led to discussions of sulfur-based strategies for geoengineering the climate, but even without going that far it seems clear that this issue deserves a lot more attention that it has received. I was aware that such emissions tend to offset at least part of our greenhouse gas emissions, and that previous reductions in sulfur for onshore fuels--necessary for local air quality and modern vehicle anti-pollution equipment--might have given an unintended boost to warming. However, I think this is the first time I've seen the estimated climate forcing associated with marine fuels of -0.6 W/m2, which as Mr. Hone notes is not small relative to the total greenhouse gas forcing of around 2 W/m2. This situation surely justifies a serious re-think of the International Maritime Organization's decision to slash the sulfur content of all marine fuel burned globally, particularly since it is hardly the only alternative available to address the negative effects of these emissions on most human populations. It's also a much more expensive option for shippers--and thus anyone who benefits from international trade--than confining the low-sulfur rules to coastal waters. According to the analysis cited by Mr. Hone, the latter scenario would preserve nearly 80% of our sulfur sunshade, while the global low-sulfur rule would more than halve it.
When I was involved in marine fuel supply and distribution on the West Coast early in my career, it was already clear that the emissions from burning high-sulfur bunker fuel were a major source of pollution in port cities and coastal areas, and that the importance of addressing them would grow once most onshore emission sources, from power plants, trains and other mobile sources had been dealt with. Some of the sulfur was eliminated as large marine diesel engines replaced the old steam turbines, and much of the rest was addressed with restrictions on the quality of fuel that could be burned in port and along the coast. For now, vessel owners can comply with these rules by carrying two different fuels: enough of the more expensive low-sulfur fuel for use in US and other regulated coastal waters, and the rest consisting of much cheaper high-sulfur fuel for use on the high seas. That approach, which would no longer be an option after 2020 under the IMO rules, cleans up the air where it matters most but still puts enough SO2 into the atmosphere to scatter some of the incoming solar energy and offset part of the warming from CO2.
Using one form of pollution to offset another is hardly a perfect solution, but just as many scientists and environmentalists urge caution about introducing new geoengineering measures before we understand their consequences well enough, we should think long and hard about tampering with this long-standing, if inadvertent geoengineering process until we have something better in mind to replace it, or until we no longer need it.
As a less-than-fully reformed science nerd, I loved the simple elegance of the first sentence of the abstract of the Haigh, et al paper in Nature: "The thermal structure and composition of the atmosphere is determined fundamentally by the incoming solar irradiance." Paragraphs of exposition boiled down to 16 words that neatly frame the importance of the researchers' finding that for the last several years, and contrary to what we'd have expected from being in the low part of the solar cycle, featuring few or no sunspots for several years, the earth has been receiving more energy from the sun where it really counts--in the lower part of the atmosphere, or troposphere. If their interpretation of the satellite data is correct, then it pretty well torpedoes the notion from two years ago that a weak sun was about to flip global warming into global cooling. Of course it would also defuse some of the determined attempts to attribute this year's record temperatures entirely to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.
While this finding isn't expected to alter the decade-to-decade view of climate change, it certainly suggests that we should be paying attention to a lot more than just CO2 and its sibling GHGs over shorter intervals, and in that respect it's a nice lead-in to the discussion of atmospheric cooling due to sulfur emissions from ships. That also applies to its implication that we still have a lot more to learn about the earth's atmosphere--where climate lives--and its dynamic interaction with the solar system.
In his blog on Shell's corporate website, Shell climate advisor David Hone shared his observations from a recent meeting exploring the impact of sulfur emissions on climate change. This apparently led to discussions of sulfur-based strategies for geoengineering the climate, but even without going that far it seems clear that this issue deserves a lot more attention that it has received. I was aware that such emissions tend to offset at least part of our greenhouse gas emissions, and that previous reductions in sulfur for onshore fuels--necessary for local air quality and modern vehicle anti-pollution equipment--might have given an unintended boost to warming. However, I think this is the first time I've seen the estimated climate forcing associated with marine fuels of -0.6 W/m2, which as Mr. Hone notes is not small relative to the total greenhouse gas forcing of around 2 W/m2. This situation surely justifies a serious re-think of the International Maritime Organization's decision to slash the sulfur content of all marine fuel burned globally, particularly since it is hardly the only alternative available to address the negative effects of these emissions on most human populations. It's also a much more expensive option for shippers--and thus anyone who benefits from international trade--than confining the low-sulfur rules to coastal waters. According to the analysis cited by Mr. Hone, the latter scenario would preserve nearly 80% of our sulfur sunshade, while the global low-sulfur rule would more than halve it.
When I was involved in marine fuel supply and distribution on the West Coast early in my career, it was already clear that the emissions from burning high-sulfur bunker fuel were a major source of pollution in port cities and coastal areas, and that the importance of addressing them would grow once most onshore emission sources, from power plants, trains and other mobile sources had been dealt with. Some of the sulfur was eliminated as large marine diesel engines replaced the old steam turbines, and much of the rest was addressed with restrictions on the quality of fuel that could be burned in port and along the coast. For now, vessel owners can comply with these rules by carrying two different fuels: enough of the more expensive low-sulfur fuel for use in US and other regulated coastal waters, and the rest consisting of much cheaper high-sulfur fuel for use on the high seas. That approach, which would no longer be an option after 2020 under the IMO rules, cleans up the air where it matters most but still puts enough SO2 into the atmosphere to scatter some of the incoming solar energy and offset part of the warming from CO2.
Using one form of pollution to offset another is hardly a perfect solution, but just as many scientists and environmentalists urge caution about introducing new geoengineering measures before we understand their consequences well enough, we should think long and hard about tampering with this long-standing, if inadvertent geoengineering process until we have something better in mind to replace it, or until we no longer need it.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
A Framework for Geoengineering
This week's Economist includes coverage of a recent meeting of scientists at Asilomar, in California, to discuss the ground rules for pursuing "geoengineering", the deliberate, large-scale modification of the earth's environment. The purpose of the geoengineering now under consideration is to limit or reverse the effects of climate change, presumably whether man-made or otherwise. This is a notion that provokes great anxiety or outright revulsion on the part of many who feel our only acceptable response to global warming is to return the planet to something approximating its pre-industrial state by eliminating the emissions and land-use changes that have accumulated over the last century or more. However, for those of us who doubt either the efficacy or achievability of such drastic changes in the economy and our lifestyles, geoengineering is at least a legitimate, complementary option along with mitigation, and potentially our last hope of averting a worst-case climate scenario, should one arise.
Anyone who is convinced of the dangers of global warming or climate change, whichever you prefer, implicitly accepts the potential of geoengineering, because anthropogenic climate change (AGW) ultimately amounts to an uncontrolled experiment in geoengineering on a global scale. The kinds of experiments proposed by researchers meeting at Asilomar--the site of other notable, long-view discussions in the past--would operate on a much smaller scale, at least initially, with the goal of either undoing or holding temporarily in abeyance the changes resulting from humanity's emissions of heat-trapping gases in excess of the capacity of the earth's massive natural GHG-recycling facilities to absorb. For that matter, geoengineering might even be useful if it turned out that AGW was only one of several factors combining to shift conditions away from the benevolent state that has supported humanity's rise as the dominant species on the planet.
This is an issue that I've been following for a long time, though I haven't written about it very often here. My interest in geoengineering was piqued in the 1990s by proposals to sequester large quantities of CO2 in the oceans by stimulating plankton growth where there naturally wasn't much. That's only one of many possible approaches that fall into a broad family of carbon-removal strategies constituting one of the two main geoengineering categories The Economist considered. "Solar Radiation Management", the other category, includes strategies for reducing the amount of solar energy the earth receives or retains. That could run to putting large numbers of small particles in the upper atmosphere or orbiting giant mirrors to deflect sunlight off into space. It might even be as simple as painting all rooftops white--a bit of a problem if they're all covered with dark solar panels.
The basic problem seems to be convincing everyone potentially affected--which of course might include everyone on earth, or at least their representatives--to trust researchers to keep the impact of their experiments strictly limited and under tight control. The session at Asilomar apparently endorsed a set of steps called the "Oxford Principles", which describe five key elements for gaining concurrence:
1. Geoengineering to be regulated as a public good.
2. Public participation in geoengineering decision-making.
3. Disclosure of geoengineering research and open publication of results.
4. Independent assessment of impacts.
5. Governance before deployment.
Now, these sound pretty good as a set of basic principles, particularly if your goal as a researcher, or as the institution or nation funding the research, is to get everyone onboard before you start. Among other things that might avoid having someone turn up later to accuse you of making things worse, at least locally. Geoengineering liability is a serious concern at the individual and institutional level, and it could extend to being considered an act of war at the national level, if things turned out really badly. Unfortunately, when I consider how these principles might actually work--including stifling the involvement of for-profit companies in either the funding or actual R&D role--I believe they describe a likely path to doing nothing. Imagine having tried to get the delegates at Copenhagen to agree to let someone put finely-divided salt particles into the atmosphere over, say, the Arctic, to make clouds more reflective. Might as well have tried to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time.
That's the core of the problem as I see it: If we do end up needing to deploy geoengineering, it's likely to be precisely because we were unable to get every country on earth--or even just the small subset of large emitters--on the same page with regard to climate change, let alone establish a universally-trusted body to oversee their mitigation efforts. If we yoke geoengineering to the same UNFCCC/IPCC process that brought us the Copenhagen Climate Conference and the Kyoto Protocol, then we might as well forget it and try to figure out where to invest in the likely new beachfront property of the 2050s. In any case, as appealing as the Oxford Principles might seem from a stakeholder-engagement perspective for implementing large-scale geoengineering someday in the future, they look too unwieldy to guide the small-scale R&D efforts that would be needed to determine which, if any, of these schemes actually have merit.
One possible alternative would start with the same concept of climate forcing that underpins today's climate models. (And by the way, any serious geoengineering effort is going to require really good, trustworthy global and regional climate models, the inherent limitations of which are one of the main complaints of climate skeptics.) The observed increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gases equate to roughly an extra 2 watts per square meter of heat radiation retained by the earth, out of a total average influx of around 240 w/m2 at the earth's surface. So if 1% more radiation/retention is enough to cause the global warming we have observed, then what is the maximum equivalent level of geoengineering testing we'd be willing to tolerate to see whether any of these techniques might help? 0.01%, or 1/100th of the scale of the problem itself? And what would be the most any one experiment should be allowed to fiddle with? 0.0001%, or one part per million, allowing at least 100 small experiments under the overall limit? (For experiments dealing with carbon-removal, rather than radiation management, this forcing threshold could easily be converted to its tons-per-year of CO2 equivalent.) Whatever the level, the idea would be to keep any individual experiment, and all of them together, below the level at which they could make things noticeably worse by accident--with a healthy margin for error--without preventing any work from being done on this at all.
Some regard geoengineering as yet another outgrowth of our technological hubris and thus unworthy of further research. While I respect anyone's right to that view, I would also question their commitment to the survival of the human race. That's because I'm deeply skeptical that our current approach to climate change can work fast enough and on the necessary scale to avert the worst outcomes scientists suggest we face. We already live in a geoengineered world that couldn't support a fraction of its current population if we returned it all to its natural, pre-industrial state. That's not a license for unlimited tinkering with our environment, and perhaps that's the underlying concern: that the same techniques that might be applied to reduce the impact of climate change might eventually be employed in risky attempts to fine-tune an even more optimal climate than the one we inherited. Science is like that, as demonstrated by nuclear proliferation and questionable medical practices. But while I share those misgivings with respect to the potential misuse of geoengineering, I sure want us to have some of these options in our hip pocket if we ever really need them.
Anyone who is convinced of the dangers of global warming or climate change, whichever you prefer, implicitly accepts the potential of geoengineering, because anthropogenic climate change (AGW) ultimately amounts to an uncontrolled experiment in geoengineering on a global scale. The kinds of experiments proposed by researchers meeting at Asilomar--the site of other notable, long-view discussions in the past--would operate on a much smaller scale, at least initially, with the goal of either undoing or holding temporarily in abeyance the changes resulting from humanity's emissions of heat-trapping gases in excess of the capacity of the earth's massive natural GHG-recycling facilities to absorb. For that matter, geoengineering might even be useful if it turned out that AGW was only one of several factors combining to shift conditions away from the benevolent state that has supported humanity's rise as the dominant species on the planet.
This is an issue that I've been following for a long time, though I haven't written about it very often here. My interest in geoengineering was piqued in the 1990s by proposals to sequester large quantities of CO2 in the oceans by stimulating plankton growth where there naturally wasn't much. That's only one of many possible approaches that fall into a broad family of carbon-removal strategies constituting one of the two main geoengineering categories The Economist considered. "Solar Radiation Management", the other category, includes strategies for reducing the amount of solar energy the earth receives or retains. That could run to putting large numbers of small particles in the upper atmosphere or orbiting giant mirrors to deflect sunlight off into space. It might even be as simple as painting all rooftops white--a bit of a problem if they're all covered with dark solar panels.
The basic problem seems to be convincing everyone potentially affected--which of course might include everyone on earth, or at least their representatives--to trust researchers to keep the impact of their experiments strictly limited and under tight control. The session at Asilomar apparently endorsed a set of steps called the "Oxford Principles", which describe five key elements for gaining concurrence:
1. Geoengineering to be regulated as a public good.
2. Public participation in geoengineering decision-making.
3. Disclosure of geoengineering research and open publication of results.
4. Independent assessment of impacts.
5. Governance before deployment.
Now, these sound pretty good as a set of basic principles, particularly if your goal as a researcher, or as the institution or nation funding the research, is to get everyone onboard before you start. Among other things that might avoid having someone turn up later to accuse you of making things worse, at least locally. Geoengineering liability is a serious concern at the individual and institutional level, and it could extend to being considered an act of war at the national level, if things turned out really badly. Unfortunately, when I consider how these principles might actually work--including stifling the involvement of for-profit companies in either the funding or actual R&D role--I believe they describe a likely path to doing nothing. Imagine having tried to get the delegates at Copenhagen to agree to let someone put finely-divided salt particles into the atmosphere over, say, the Arctic, to make clouds more reflective. Might as well have tried to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time.
That's the core of the problem as I see it: If we do end up needing to deploy geoengineering, it's likely to be precisely because we were unable to get every country on earth--or even just the small subset of large emitters--on the same page with regard to climate change, let alone establish a universally-trusted body to oversee their mitigation efforts. If we yoke geoengineering to the same UNFCCC/IPCC process that brought us the Copenhagen Climate Conference and the Kyoto Protocol, then we might as well forget it and try to figure out where to invest in the likely new beachfront property of the 2050s. In any case, as appealing as the Oxford Principles might seem from a stakeholder-engagement perspective for implementing large-scale geoengineering someday in the future, they look too unwieldy to guide the small-scale R&D efforts that would be needed to determine which, if any, of these schemes actually have merit.
One possible alternative would start with the same concept of climate forcing that underpins today's climate models. (And by the way, any serious geoengineering effort is going to require really good, trustworthy global and regional climate models, the inherent limitations of which are one of the main complaints of climate skeptics.) The observed increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gases equate to roughly an extra 2 watts per square meter of heat radiation retained by the earth, out of a total average influx of around 240 w/m2 at the earth's surface. So if 1% more radiation/retention is enough to cause the global warming we have observed, then what is the maximum equivalent level of geoengineering testing we'd be willing to tolerate to see whether any of these techniques might help? 0.01%, or 1/100th of the scale of the problem itself? And what would be the most any one experiment should be allowed to fiddle with? 0.0001%, or one part per million, allowing at least 100 small experiments under the overall limit? (For experiments dealing with carbon-removal, rather than radiation management, this forcing threshold could easily be converted to its tons-per-year of CO2 equivalent.) Whatever the level, the idea would be to keep any individual experiment, and all of them together, below the level at which they could make things noticeably worse by accident--with a healthy margin for error--without preventing any work from being done on this at all.
Some regard geoengineering as yet another outgrowth of our technological hubris and thus unworthy of further research. While I respect anyone's right to that view, I would also question their commitment to the survival of the human race. That's because I'm deeply skeptical that our current approach to climate change can work fast enough and on the necessary scale to avert the worst outcomes scientists suggest we face. We already live in a geoengineered world that couldn't support a fraction of its current population if we returned it all to its natural, pre-industrial state. That's not a license for unlimited tinkering with our environment, and perhaps that's the underlying concern: that the same techniques that might be applied to reduce the impact of climate change might eventually be employed in risky attempts to fine-tune an even more optimal climate than the one we inherited. Science is like that, as demonstrated by nuclear proliferation and questionable medical practices. But while I share those misgivings with respect to the potential misuse of geoengineering, I sure want us to have some of these options in our hip pocket if we ever really need them.
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