Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Shooting myself in the carbon footprint

By Oscar A. Escobar
Gt - FL USA

Update 7/31/2013

Carbon footprint or cfp:

Recently we had to update our 68 year old house in Central Florida, the work included: new low-E glass windows, attic-insulation and a new AC system. Over the last 6 months we had a 48% reduction in our electric consumption compared to the same periods in previous years. Our driving has been reduced from the average 12,000 miles a year to about 6,000 miles/y  (after the calculations I divided this result in half since my wife and I share one vehicle)

Using  a few of the free web based carbon footprint calculators like the one from the EPA, I estimated my individual home and vehicle cfp to be about 3 1/4 tones of CO2 per year.

My air travel cfp for this year is 5,823 lbs of CO2 or slightly less than 3 tones of CO2. 

So my projected carbon footprint, is about 6 tones of CO2 for this year. Hopefully I won't do much flying in the near future since that alone nearly doubled my cfp, which was kind of self defeating.



Last Update Oct 10, 2014

Other interesting articles:


 The Meteorologist’s Meltdown: Eric Holthaus on Deciding to Quit Flyingquits flying
Oct, 1, 2013
 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/01/the-meteorologist-s-meltdown-eric-holthaus-on-deciding-to-quit-flying.html


Nov. 10, 2013

Who bears the cost of airline emissions?

Aviation is today responsible for some 2% of the planet’s man-made CO2 emissions. But when the effects of nitrogen oxide emissions, water vapour, soot and sulphates, contrails and enhanced cirrus cloud formations are also factored in, the best scientific estimates put aviation’s overall contribution to global warming at 4.9%.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has forecast that CO2 emissions from international aviation (about 60% of total aviation emissions) will grow from approximately 400 million tonnes in 2010 to 650 million tonnes by 2020. Unchecked, there may be a 274% increase in the fuel used by airlines by 2050, measured against 2006 levels.

Put plainly, the aviation industry bears a share of responsibility for the accelerated drought-flood cycle that climate change will bring to countries such as India.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/columnsothers/who-bears-the-cost-of-airline-emissions/article1-1147628.aspx


Aug. 9, 2013


The climate impact of travel behavior: A German case study with illustrative mitigation options
Borgar Aamaasa, Corresponding author contact information, E-mail the corresponding author, Jens Borken-Kleefeldb, Glen P. Petersa
a Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO), PB 1129 Blindern, 0318 Oslo, Norway

b IIASA – International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1, 2361 Laxenburg, Austria

Abstract

Global greenhouse gas mitigation should include the growing share of emissions from transportation. To help understand the mitigation potential of changing travel behavior requires disaggregating the climate impacts of transportation by transport mode, distance, and travel behavior. Here we use disaggregated data on travel behavior to calculate the climate impact of Germans traveling nationally and internationally in 2008 and develop some illustrative mitigation options. We include all relevant long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers and use global temperature change for 50 years of sustained emissions as the emission metric. The total climate impact is determined almost entirely by car (∼46%) and air travel (∼45%), with smaller contributions from public transportation. The climate impact from the highest income group is 250% larger than from the lowest income group. However, the middle classes account for more than two thirds of the total impact. The relatively few trips beyond 100 km contribute more than half of the total impact because of the trip distance and use of aircraft. Individual behavioral changes, like shifting transport modes or reducing distance and frequency, can lead to useful emission reductions. However, a comprehensive package of mitigation options is necessary for deep and sustained emission reductions.

Some links:

List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions per capita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita

EPA Household Carbon Footprint Calculator

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/ind-calculator.html 

CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita)

Report: Carbon markets offer 'cheap' aviation emissions cuts
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2285663/report-carbon-markets-offer-cheap-aviation-emissions-cuts


Image added 9/6/2013 from: 

ECO PRESERVATION SOCIETY
The Human Footprint from National Geographic.


Interesting articles added October 2, 2013

One meteorologist explains why he won’t fly again
SEP 30, 2013 BY LINDSAY ABRAMS

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/30/one_meteorologist_explains_why_he_wont_fly_again/


THE NEXT THING WE NEED TO DO ABOUT CARBON
OCTOBER 2, 2013 BY LAWRENCE KRAUSS 


http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/the-next-thing-we-need-to-do-about-carbon.html

Saturday, July 27, 2013

¿Están los gobiernos pensando en la geoingeniería para adaptarse al cambio climático?


Are Governments Thinking of Geoengineering Earth to Adjust to Climate Change?
by lenrosen4,  July 27, 2013 
(Traduccion libre)

Doug Saunders en la edición de hoy del Globe and Mail ha escrito "la idea de proyectos-planetarios de geoingeniería para revertir el cambio climático... recientemente ha ganado mucha más credibilidad en ambos círculos principales de la ciencia y la política." Él llega a hablar de un gran avance, la convocación de un panel destacado constado de científicos del Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones de Estados Unidos (NRC  por sus siglas en inglés), NASA, Sondeo Geológico U.S. (USGS) y la Administración Nacional Oceánica y Atmosférica (NOAA), para evaluar posibles proyectos de geoingeniería.

Si estos son proyectos destinados a mitigar el impacto del cambio climático o revertir  la cantidad de carbono destinado a la atmósfera, las ideas propuestas ya han demostrado estar cortas de ciencia. Es abordar el problema del calentamiento global con el enfoque de un “toro en una cristalería”. El panel investigara la idea de poner más productos químicos en la atmósfera para hacerla más reflexiva y que calor solar no sea atrapado tanto por el metano y el CO2 que estamos emitiendo actualmente debido a la industria, el transporte y creación de energía. Otra es sembrar el océano con hierro para aumentar la capacidad del agua para absorber el CO2. Y el tercero es el tratamiento de suelos con grandes cantidades de carbón o biochar para atrapar CO2. Y el tercero es el tratamiento de suelos con grandes cantidades de carbón o biochar para atrapar CO2. Los trillones de dólares que al final gastaremos en todas estas tecnologías de remediación representa un defecto humano distintivo. En lugar de estrategias preventivas, estos destacados científicos preferirían tratar con las consecuencias “después de los hechos” del aumento de las temperaturas atmosféricas y conducir un experimento de geoingeniería de todo el planeta.

No por señalar uno de los defectos evidentes en este panel destacado, pero dónde está la representación del resto del planeta? Todas las organizaciones que se reunieron en la discusión de este grupo eran estadounidenses. Un recurso global no es algo que una nación puede emprender sin involucrar al resto del planeta.

Y ¿por qué deberían las naciones hablar para toda la humanidad cuando se discute el tema del cambio climático? Desde el protocolo de Kioto han demostrado  ser lamentablemente incapaces de desarrollar estrategias colectivas para el cambio climático. En su lugar tenemos una oleada de activistas de la red social ambiental formando movimientos de guerrilla para revertir el cambio climático inducido por los humanos. Y de la misma forma municipios pequeños y grandes se han convertido en activistas en la lucha para revertir el calentamiento global. Mientras tanto los gobiernos nacionales más preocupados con el crecimiento del PIB fallan al no ver que la remediación del carbono representa una gran oportunidad económica. Hace unos días escribí sobre los primeros cuatro años del impuesto sobre el carbono en la provincia de British Columbia, y como el resultado final ha sido una reducción en las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero sin un impacto negativo en el crecimiento económico.

Pero no,  mejor deberíamos realizar un experimento en todo el planeta sembrando los océanos con hierro (que por cierto recientemente hemos descubierto que no funciona), o poner más productos químicos reflexivos en la atmósfera sin pensar en los impactos negativos de los químicos en la biología del planeta, o quemar biomasa para crear biochar y la carga de calor de la quema y su impacto en la atmósfera.


Hoy nuestros modelos climáticos son tan sofisticados como las súper computadoras que los ejecutan. Tenemos más de un siglo y medio de datos meteorológicos recogidos. Pero en verdad todavía no sabemos lo suficiente como para pronosticar con precisión lo que vamos a experimentar en las próximas décadas a medida que los niveles de CO2 suben lentamente por arriba de las 400 partes por millón hasta llegar a las 450 a mediados de siglo. Todo lo que sabemos es que tanto la atmósfera como el océano son más cálidos que lo eue han sido en la historia grabada y que las dos últimas décadas han visto un aumento alarmante en los datos de temperatura. La subida se correlaciona estrechamente con el aumento de CO2. Entonces la respuesta es muy simple. Dejar de crear más CO2. Desplazarse rápidamente hacia una huella menor de carbono. Crear conciencia junto con acción introduciendo políticas que nos alejen de la quema de carbono tan rápidamente como sea posible. Y hacerlo con la misma dedicación que hemos demostrado en librar guerras.

¿El lago en el Polo Norte, que tan malo es?

Recientemente salió un artículo[1] referente a unas fotos sobre el nivel de derretimiento del hielo marino en el Polo Norte. Y aunque es un tema muy crítico, hay que verlo desde la perspectiva propia . Así nos lo dice Andrew Fredman de Climate Central en su artículo titulado en inglés:

The Lake at the North Pole, How Bad Is It?

¿El lago en el Polo Norte, que tan malo es?
Por Andrew Freedman
 Climate Central 26 de Julio, 2013

(Traduccion libre) 

Las fotos son dramáticas — una cámara en el Observatorio ambiental del Polo Norte, localizada en medio de lo que parece ser un lago o mar abierto, en la cima de la temporada de mayor deshielo marino. Montado contra el telón de fondo de la estrepitosa caída en la capa de hielo marino en las últimas décadas, debido en gran parte al calentamiento global,  parecería ser otra alarma más seña de cambio climático en el Ártico.


Imagen desde una de las webcams del Observatorio Ambiental del Polo Norte, tomada el Jueves, Julio 25.
Crédito: NSF's North Pole Environmental Observatory.

Estas imágenes han atraído la atención de los medios, como esta entrada  del Atlantic Wire y este reporte del Daily Mail, que tratan las imágenes como posibles señales de una intensificación del deshielo Ártico. 
Pero antes de concluir que el cambio climático del Ártico ha entrado en una fase todavía más ominosa, es importante examinar el contexto detrás de estas imágenes. 

En primer lugar, las cámaras en cuestión, que están unidas a los instrumentos que los científicos han depositado sobre el hielo marino al inicio de cada primavera desde el 2002, pueden tener "Polo Norte" en su nombre, pero ya no se encuentran en el Polo Norte. De hecho, como este mapa siguiente muestra, han derivado bien hacia el sur del Polo Norte, ya que están puestas sobre témpanos de hielo que se mueven con las corrientes oceánicas. Actualmente, la cámara anegada está cerca del meridiano de Greenwich, a 85 grados latitud norte.

Annotated mapa muestra la ubicación del Polo Norte y la ubicación de las boyas con las webcams. Crédito: Observatorio ambiental de NSF Polo Norte.

"Se ha movido lejos de la región del Polo Norte y eventualmente saldrá del estrecho de Fram," dijo en una entrevista Mark Serreze, director del Centro Nacional de Datos de Nieve y Hielo (NSIDC por sus siglas en inglés) en Boulder, Colorado,. El Estrecho de Fram queda entre Groenlandia y Canadá y es una de las principales rutas de desagüe de hilo marino del Océano Ártico. 

La segunda cosa a tener en cuenta es que el derretimiento del hielo marino en o cerca del Polo Norte en realidad no es un acontecimiento raro. Observaciones de las webcams que se remontan al 2002 y de imágenes satelitales y submarinos de propulsión nuclear que han explorado la cubierta de hielo desde la época de la guerra fría que datan de varias décadas, muestra que el hielo marino alrededor del Polo Norte ha formado, varias veces en el pasado, lagunas de derretimiento y hasta áreas de aguas abiertas.

Lo que la webcam presenta como lo que parece ser agua abierta es pobremente  "una gran laguna de derretimiento" que se ha formado sobre la cubierta de hielo del mar, dijo Serreze. Esta laguna de derretimiento comenzó a formarse alrededor de 10 de Julio y esta probablemente cerca de su máxima profundidad y extensión. La ocurrencia de una laguna de derretimiento en o cerca del Polo Norte no es  “muy raro", dijo Serreze y es incluso menos raro en una ubicación más meridional como dónde está la cámara ahora.
 
"Toda la cubierta de hielo del mar Ártico muestra derretimiento durante el verano, incluso en el Polo Norte", dijo, hablando de una temporada típica de derretimiento. 
Serreze dijo que generalmente es posible atravesar estas lagunas caminando con vadeadores hasta la cintura, en lugar de tener que nadar, ya que hay hielo debajo del agua derretida.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lqCFFLbLDw
Video de imágenes tomadas por la webcam del Observatorio ambiental del Polo Norte durante el 2013  temporada de derretimiento. (La laguna comienza a aparecer en 1:25).

Aunque James Overland, investigador de la Administración Nacional del Océano y Atmosfera (NOAA por sus siglas en inglés), declaro en un correo electrónico a  Climate Central  que la laguna de derretimiento parece inusualmente grande en comparación con lo que se observa típicamente en una temporada de deshielo, "Tenemos extensas lagunas de derretimiento cada año, pero no recuerdo un lago tan extenso en años anteriores. "El lago es más un producto de cómo se configuró el hielo a principios de año, dijo.

La capa de hielo Ártico se ha ido encogiendo y adelgazando rápidamente desde el comienzo de las observaciones por satélite en 1979. El año pasado, el volumen y extensión del hielo del mar cayó a un mínimo histórico. Cuando la temporada de deshielo finalmente terminó a finales de septiembre, el océano Ártico logró quedarse con menos de la mitad de la extensión del hielo marino promedio visto durante el período 1979-a-2000.
 
Los últimos seis años han tenido los seis grados menores de hielo marino desde 1979, indicando que el hielo no se ha recuperado desde el récord bajo  anterior en el 2007.  Los investigadores atribuyen esto a la pérdida de hielo multianual más grueso, que ha sido sustituido por hielo más delgado que se forma en el otoño y se derrite en la primavera y el verano.

Serreze dijo que la delgadez de la capa de hielo lo ha hecho mucho más susceptible a los patrones climáticos que promueven el transporte de hielo y su derretimiento. Hasta ahora en este verano, la extensión del hielo del mar se ha mantenido por encima del 2012, con un ritmo lento de derretimiento en Junio que fue seguido por un derritiendo mucho más rápido durante las tres primeras tres semanas de Julio después de que los patrones del clima se volvieron más favorables para el derretimiento, dijo Serreze. 

"Estaría muy sorprendido si no estuviéramos" muy por debajo de la media llegado Septiembre, dijo Serreze, pero la perspectiva de establecer otro récord bajo "depende de los caprichos del clima, solo que eso no lo podemos predecir."

Seguir al autor en Twitter @afreedma o @ClimateCentral. También estan en Facebook otras redes sociales.

[1] El Polo Norte se deshiela transformándose en un lago
El inusual fenómeno fue captado por una cámara del Observatorio norteamericano Medioambiental del Polo Norte.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

El calentamiento global afecta el rendimiento de los cultivos, pero es (la falta de) agua, no el calor

Un estudio que salió el 04 de marzo de 2013 titulado:

 El calentamiento global afecta el rendimiento de los cultivos, pero es el agua, no el calor (Global warming affects crop yields, but it's the water not the heat)

Refuerza enormemente los argumentos en contra la geoingeniería del clima por medio de la Gestión de la Radiación Solar, (SRM induce sequías e inundaciones) (SRM por sus siglas en ingles).

 Pero no creo que importará mucho... ya que previamente se han hecho muchos estudios que objetivamente, éticamente y en términos científicos argumentan en contra de este tipo de geoingeniería imprudente; este comportamiento nos lleva a plantear la pregunta:

¿Son algunas de estas personas y corporaciones,  promotores de estos tipos de esquemas, cortadas de la misma tela que aquellos que por mucho tiempo han negado, ignorado y distorsionado los hechos sobre el cambio climático?

No tengo la respuesta, pero si creo que es muy importante hacer estudios para entender los efectos que nuestras actividades tienen sobre el clima, pero hay que tener mucho cuidado y tenemos que objetar y debatir fuertemente la implementación de este tipo de tecnologías.

Sin más aquí les dejo la traducción del artículo.

El calentamiento global afecta el rendimiento de los cultivos, pero es el agua, no el calor
04 de marzo de 2013

Global warming affects crop yields, but it's the water not the heat
(Traducción libre)

(Phys.org) - Ahora se entiende mejor el efecto que el calentamiento global tendrá sobre las plantas gracias a la modelización avanzada proporcionada por el profesor Graeme Hammer de la Universidad de Queensland (UQ), uno de los principales científicos de cultivos de Australia.
 
Durante más de una década, el profesor de Ciencias de cultivos en la Alianza de Queensland de la UQ para Agricultura e Innovación alimenticia (QAAFI por sus siglas en Inglés) ha estado desarrollando modelos de computadoras cada vez más sofisticados para predecir el crecimiento y el rendimiento de los cultivos agrícolas.

En un artículo publicado esta semana en la  revista Nature, El profesor Hammer  y sus colegas han demostrado que el  aumento anticipado de la temperatura asociada con el calentamiento global no está directamente ligado a una esperada disminución en el rendimiento.

Previamente había sido aceptado como un hecho que las pérdidas de rendimiento que atraviesan los productores de maíz durante las temporadas de calor en el medio oeste americano eran atribuibles a los aumentos de temperatura.

El estudio modelado ha demostrado que es el aumento en la demanda valorativa de agua – que causa un uso mayor de agua en las plantas –  lo que en última instancia causara la disminución en el rendimiento del cultivo asociado.
   
No es un efecto directo del estrés por calor en los órganos de la planta debido al aumento de temperatura.
‘Estos dos factores a menudo se relacionan, pero hasta ahora estábamos atribuyendo los descensos de producción proyectados simplemente a los aumentos de temperatura y estrés por calor – y es más complicado que eso', dijo el profesor Hammer.

 ‘Nuestros modelos de computadora son capaces de separar los mecanismos y explicar lo que está pasando.'

‘El aumento de temperatura significa aumento en la demanda de agua y mayor uso de agua por la planta y en última instancia más estrés por agua durante el ciclo de vida del cultivo.'

‘Una buena analogía humana sería imaginar a alguien que está parado en un desierto.
Con el aumento de la temperatura usted empezaría a sudar más y a usar más rápidamente sus reservas de agua.
Es un concepto relativamente sencillo, pero que ha sido pasado por alto hasta ahora'.

Ser capaz de predecir con precisión los descensos en la cosecha de maíz y explicar su base fisiológica es una verificación tranquilizante de los modelos de cultivo del profesor Hammer.


Datos históricos utilizados en el estudio fueron extraídos de lugares en el centro-oeste americano abarcando casi 50 años.



Otros articulos:
.
  
Disminución de Cosechas - Un Efecto del Calentamiento Global
(Extracto)

"¿Cómo reaccionan las plantas a incrementos de temperaturas? Durante el proceso de transpiración, las plantas pierden agua a través de minúsculas perforaciones en sus hojas llamadas estomatas. Debido a que el agua se evapora de la superficie de la hoja, la transpiración ayuda a la planta a mantenerse fresca, de la misma manera que la transpiración ayuda a los humanos y animales a mantenerse frescos. Así, el proceso de pérdida de agua a través de sus estomatas ayuda a prevenir sobrecalentamiento de la planta. Se proyecta que el calentamiento global signifique menos precipitación o sequía en muchas partes del mundo. ¿Cómo reaccionan las plantas frente a la escases de agua? Cuando hay menos agua disponible en el suelo, las plantas cierran las estomatas para que el agua no escape por ellas. Desafortunadamente, las estomatas cerradas no dejan que entre el dióxido de carbono(CO2) necesario para la fotosíntesis, y el crecimiento de la planta se ve reducido – la planta debe ahora escoger entre mantener el agua (estomatas cerradas) o ganar alimentos (estomatas abiertas). Cuando la planta ya no puede vivir más sin alimentos, se ve forzada a abrir sus estomatas, dejando escapar el agua. La planta, que está luchando por sobrevivir, languidece o se seca."


La sequía en el Valle del Guadalentín es agravada por la demanda evaporativa de los cultivos
(Extracto)

“El grupo de Investigación ERODERME, que trabaja sobre la desertificación en el Mediterráneo, ha concluido en un estudio que la carencia pluviométrica e hídrica que sufre la Región de Murcia se halla agravada por una mayor demanda evaporativa durante los periodos de sequía. El trabajo se ha centrado en cuantificar esta demanda y analizar estos periodos en las últimas décadas.

Artículo: "Evaporative demand and water requirements of the principal crops of the Guadalentin valley (SE Spain) in drought periods."
Autores: Sánchez Toribio, Mª.I., García Marín, R., Conesa García, C. y López Bermúdez, F.
Publicado en: Spanish Journal of Agricultural Research, Vol. 8 (S2), pp. 66-75 (2010)

La Investigación llevada a cabo por los investigadores de la Universidad de Murcia en colaboración con el departamento de riego del CEBAS-CSIC, concluye que los periodos de sequía reducen la superficie cultivada sobre todo en cultivos hortícolas, por la gran demanda hídrica y el costo adicional que suponen, disminuyendo por tanto la producción.

Para ello, el grupo, determina las secuencias de sequía pluviométrica en el Valle del Guadalentín desde mediado el siglo XX a través del Índice Estandarizado de Sequía Pluviométrica (IESP), y  cuantifica la demanda evaporativa global y por sectores. El análisis de los periodos lluviosos y secos muestra que la demanda evaporativa tiende a aumentar en proporción inversa a la intensidad de la precipitación, representando un importante aumento del déficit hídrico en los años de mayor sequía tanto en verano como en invierno.”





Wednesday, July 17, 2013

La Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA) Apoya Estudio Científico de 630,000 dólares sobre Control del Clima Global


Que se alegren los teóricos de la conspiración!
By Dana Liebelson and Chris Mooney | Wed Jul. 17, 2013 – MotherJones
(Traducción libre)

“La Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA por sus siglas en inglés) subvenciona un estudio científico que investigará si es posible usar la geoingeniería  para cambiar el medioambiente de la Tierra y parar el cambio climático. La Academia Nacional de Ciencias (NAS) dirigirá el proyecto de 21 meses, que es el primer estudio de la NAS económicamente apoyado por una agencia de inteligencia. Con el dinero de la agencia, los científicos estudiarán como los humanos podrían influir en los patrones meteorológicos, evaluaran los peligros potenciales de intervenir en el clima, e investigaran las implicaciones de seguridad nacional sobre posibles  tentativas geoingenieriles.


El coste total del proyecto es de 630,000 dólares, que la NAS comparte con la Agencia Central de Inteligencia, la Administración Oceánica y Atmosférica Nacional, y la NASA. El sitio Web de la NAS dice que “la comunidad de inteligencia estadounidense” subvenciona el proyecto, y William Kearney, un portavoz de NAS, reveló a Mother Jones que la frase se refiere a la Agencia Central de Inteligencia. Edward Price, un portavoz de la Agencia Central de Inteligencia, no quiso confirmar el papel que juega la agencia en el estudio, pero dijo, “es natural que en un tema como el cambio climático la agencia quiera trabajar con los científicos para entender mejor el fenómeno y sus implicaciones en la seguridad nacional.” La Agencia Central de Inteligencia según se informa cerró su centro de investigación sobre el cambio climatico y seguridad nacional el año pasado, después de que congresistas miembros del partido republicano (GOP) argumentaron que la Agencia Central de Inteligencia no debería averiguar sobre el cambio climatico.”

El artículo completo en inglés:

CIA Backs $630,000 Scientific Study on Controlling Global Climate
Conspiracy theorists, rejoice!
—By Dana Liebelson and Chris Mooney | Wed Jul.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Black Carbon emission from international maritime shipping is widely understimated


The report titled:

GLOBAL EMISSIONS OF MARINE BLACK CARBON: CRITICAL REVIEW AND REVISED ASSESSMENT
Haifeng Wang, Ray Minjares
The International Council on Clean Transportation Submission Date: August 1, 2012
Full document here:  http://docs.trb.org/prp/13-1503.pdf

Tells us that Black Carbon emission from international maritime shipping is widely underestimated; with actual BC figures from shipping to be up to 90% higher than prevailing estimates.

(Emphasis mine)
Pg1
4 ABSTRACT:
5 Black carbon (BC) emissions from international shipping are significant and contribute to global
6 and regional climate change, particularly in the Arctic. This paper reviews global estimates of
7 international marine BC emissions, identifies differences in inventory methods, and proposes an
8 approach for improving upon existing estimates. A critical review of the literature reveals that
9 more refined, specific marine vessel BC emission factors (EFBC) are not generally accounted for
10 in most global inventories. We find that EFBC are the single most important source of
11 differences in inventories due to poor sensitivity to ship engine type, fuel quality, and engine
12 load, and we propose a weighting framework that better encapsulates such effects. Using fuel
13 consumption estimates from the International Maritime Organization (IMO) 2009 GHG report
14 and updated EFBC, we estimate that shipping was responsible for about 184 thousand tonnes of
15 BC in 2007. This estimate is 42 percent higher than the current IMO estimate, but comparable to
16 recent studies informed by measured EFBC. We estimate that shipping contributed about 2,300
17 tonnes of BC in the Arctic in 2004, which is 90% higher than prevailing estimates. Our findings
18 suggest that the international marine BC contribution is widely underestimated, and that
19 improve

Pg2
“27 BC is the third largest contributor (after carbon dioxide and ozone production over the
28 oceans) to the increase in global temperature caused by international maritime emissions [14,
29 15]. Shipping also causes significant cooling via emissions of sulphate aerosols and reduction of
30 methane caused by NOx emissions. International shipping may cause particularly acute impacts
31 in the Arctic due to the presence of significant ice and snow that are sensitive to the albedo effect
32 caused by BC [5]. Ships in the Arctic frequently operate at variable speeds in response to ice
33 conditions and safety concerns, generating additional emissions under less efficient loads [16].
34 Approximately 15,000 annual voyages of all ship types travel through the Arctic, depositing
35 potentially large amounts of BC on snow and ice [17].

Pg11
“2 CONCLUSIONS
3 This paper reviews existing literature on BC inventories from shipping, identifies key differences
4 among published estimates, explores areas of improvement, and provides refined emissions
5 estimates. We demonstrate how BC fuel consumption and EFBC are a large source of uncertainty
6 across BC inventory estimates and how the inventory estimate is sensitive to operational
7 conditions of ships. We also develop a framework for utilizing an entire set of EFBC to improve
8 upon existing estimates. Using updated global BC emissions factors, we calculate shipping BC
9 emissions of 184 kt in 2007, which is over a third higher than the most widely cited estimate. We
10 also estimate that shipping BC emissions in the Arctic were about 2,300 tonnes in 2004, 90%
11 higher than estimates in the literature.”

“35 The result also shows the potential magnitude of benefits from switching to low sulfur
36 fuel. In response to local health concerns, a number of ports have created incentives for ships to
37 voluntarily switch to low sulfur fuel. On a much larger scale, the IMO requires ships operating in
38 Emission Control Areas (ECAs) to use 0.1% sulfur fuel beginning in 2015. It also mandates that
39 international shipping outside of ECAs use 0.5% sulfur fuel from 2020, down from the current
40 average of 2.7% sulfur fuel, subject to a review in 2018. Along with these voluntary and binding
41 marine fuel requirements’ direct SOx-related health benefits, the related reduction of BC could
42 indirectly lead to additional improvements in air quality and climate.
43 The quality of the BC inventory and related decision making will be further strengthened
44 by more research on the EFBC. Unified measuring techniques and protocols will yield more
45 robust results, fill in data gaps, and facilitate improved BC inventory accuracy. More field
46 observations and experiments on the relationship between the EFBC that relate to changes in
Fuel
Pg. 12
1 type, engine load, and engine type would reduce uncertainties in modeling and could unify
2 differences in inventories. These efforts would lay the foundation for more reliable marine BC
3 inventory estimates and policy guidance on future emission reduction strategies.


References


Pg14
1 21. Corbett, J.J., et al., Arctic shipping emissions inventories and future scenarios.
2 Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2010. 10: p. 9689-9704.
3 22. Eyring, V., et al., Emissions from international shipping: 1. The last 50 years.JOURNAL
4 OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, 2005. 110.
5 23. Dalsøren, S.B., et al., Update on emissions and environmental impacts from the
6 international fleet of ships. The contribution from major ship types and ports.
7 Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, 2009. 8(5): p. 18323-18384.
8 24. Lack, D., et al., Light absorbing carbon emissions from commerical shipping.
9 Geophysical Research Letters, 2008. 38.
10 25. Fuglestvedt, J., et al., Climate forcing from the transport sectors. PNAS, 2008. 105(2): p.
11 454-458.
12 26. Dentener, E., et al., Emissions of primary aerosol and precursor gases in the years 2000
13 and 1750 prescribed data-sets for AeroCom. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics,
14 2006(6): p. 4321-4344.
15 27. Peters, G.P., et al., Future emissions from shipping and petroleum activities in the Arctic.
16 Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2011(11): p. 5305-5320.
17 28. Lauer, A., et al., Global model simulations of the impact of ocean-going ships on
18 aerosols, clouds, and the radiation budget. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2007(7):
19 p. 5061–5079.
20 29. Shiha, P., et al., Emission of trace gases and partices from two ships in the southern
21 Atlantic Ocean. Atmospheric Environment, 2003. 7(15): p. 2139-2148.
22 30. Bond, T., et al., A technology-based global inventory of black and organic carbon
23 emissions from combustion.Journal of Geophysical Research, 2004. 109.
24 31. Kasper, A., et al., Particulate emissions from a low-speed marine diesel engine. Aerosol
25 Science and Technology, 2007. 41(1): p. 24-32.
26 32. Ristimaki, J., G. Hellen, and M. Lappi, Chemical and physical characterization of
27 exhaust particulate matter from a marine medium speed diesel engine, in International
28 council on combustion engines2011: Bergen.
29 33. Petzold, A., et al., Phyical properties, chemical compostion, and cloud forming potential
30 of particulate emissions from a marine diesel engine at various load conditions.
31 Environment Science & Technology, 2010(44): p. 3800-3805.
32 34. Lack, D., et al., Particulate emissions from commerical shipping: chemical, physical, and
33 optical properties.Journal of Geophysical Research, 2009. 114.
34 35. Agrawal, H., et al., Emission from main propulsion engine on container ship at sea.
35 Journal of Geophysical Research, 2010. 115.
36 36. Lack, D., et al., Impact of fuel quality regulation and speed reduction on shipping
37 emissions: Implications for climate and air quality. Environment Science & Technology,
38 2011.
39 37. Petzold, A., et al., Experimental studies on particule emissions from cruising ship, their
40 characteristic properties, transformation and atmospheric lifetime in the marine
41 boundary layer. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2008. 8: p. 2387-2403.
42 38. Agrawal, H., et al., In-use gaseous and particulate matter emissions from a modern

43 ocean going container vessel. Atmospheric Environment, 2008. 42: p. 5504-5510.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

How do we stop messing with nature? and How do we know Climate Change wasn’t by design? Re: Earth Systems Engineering and Management

Earth Systems Engineering and Management
10/09/2007 5:00 PM 10"250 Brad Allenby, Arizona State University

Transcript.
Statements in bold letters are my emphasis, while italics mean I may have a comment which will be
referenced. [ ]
00:45
The question about geoengineering was interesting to me, because in some ways none of us would be here if in fact we weren’t already geoengineering this planet, that is the whole reason we are worried about it. The fact that we may have not intended to do it, the fact that we didn’t think about it rationally, ethically, nor was it part of our design[1]; that is relatively immaterial from the point of view of the systems involved in the planet. It’s a geoengineered planet.

 Beginning from that perspective I think we have to ask some questions about what our responsibility is.

I like to begin by suggesting that these approaches to earth systems are critical but they all tend to overlook perhaps the most fundamental earth system of all as we go forward and that is the human system.
1:30
I propose to talk about some of the aspects of the human in a couple of ways:
The first is… I think that raises the complexity of the issues that we are dealing with far more than we realize, one of the things that happens when you have meetings like this, is that we all tend to come from roughly similar backgrounds in terms of values and priorities. But there is a lot of people in the world that don’t share them, that becomes an important criteria.
2:00
The second is the we tend to assume that we have a reasonable handle going forward on what some of the possibilities are and therefore we can talk about it with some degree of rationality. I think that is at best an optimistic assumption.
2:22

 (Quotes on slide)
“We are as Gods, and we might as well get good at it.” Stewart Brand, 1968, Whole Earth Catalog
“The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” William Gibson
“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” Vishnu, Bhagavad Gita. Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity Test, 1945. White Sands, New Mexico

A couple of observations,
I picked up a couple of quotes that I like for a number of different reasons.

The first one is from Stewart Brand, 1968, Whole Earth Catalog:

We are as Gods, and we might as well get good at it.”

The reason this is interesting is that this goes back to a period when environment and technology were coupled. Stuart Brand was talking about developing technologies than integrated the social, the cultural and the environmental. He was talking about sustainability before it was hip. What it's happened since then is that we have de-coupled those activities; the sustainability discourse tends not to talk to much about technology.
The science discourse tends to talk about technology but not understand its most important dimensions which is that it is profoundly destabilizing of our basic assumptions
3:20
The second one is there because; first if you don’t know it, you really should, it’s a very useful quote to use in all occasions.

The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” William Gibson

One of the things that is fascinating is the way that technology rolls on and most of us are blithe-fully un-aware of the overall frontier of technology and the way it is changing.
I’ll make a couple of suggestions as some of the most profound. But a very simple example, is the fact that in the biotech community there is a reasonable probability that we will be able to extend human life to somewhere between one hundred to one hundred and twenty in the next decade or two.
My students are generally pretty excited about that, I am not so excited.
Pretty interesting to me is... you could go the conferences on industrial ecology in Stockholm last year and you could listen to a number of very educated, very deep analyses virtually every one of which is obsoleted if you assume that the life span in developing countries goes to a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty. There is a profound disconnect between the implications of technology that is happening today and the assumptions that we are so blithely building into our models.
4:50
The third of course, must of you are probably familiar with,

Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” Vishnu, Bhagavad Gita. Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity Test, 1945. White Sands, New Mexico

What is interesting to me is the original quote was by Vishnu, Bhagavad Gita, but when it was said by Robert Opnehamimer during the Trinity test 1945.
If you want to look at the single cusp where the human species went from the ability to just do interesting things to itself to the being able to do serious damage to the planet that was the cusp.
5:30
A lot of this is not new, if you look at Heidegger for example, which we will, I regret to say, he was writing in the fifties about the implications of a world where technology was beginning to dominate the structure. And this is Heidegger as promised

(slide)

So long as we do not, trough thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to what will be.


The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness to the historical moment.

There are two things that can be said about these. The first thing is that these are probably the only two sentences he wrote that can be understood without the use of powerful pharmaceuticals...
he was a german metaphysician.
The second in particular, is that last sentence:

“The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness to the historical moment.”

I would argue that not only do we deceive ourselves, not only are we blind to the world that we have created and are creating in an ongoing basis, but we have every incentive to remain so. To remain buried in our disciplinary boundaries because it enables us to posture in ways that don’t involve taking responsibility for the systems.
One of the ways you can see that is the way that we talk about energy. The patterns are very clear… right?
I mean you got India and China, they are developing rapidly, they are putting up cold power plants and we are arguing about Kyoto. There is serious disconnect.
7:15
So a couple of things we should care about. We mentioned the anthropocene .
Technology, the integrated impact of technology is staggering and it is not well understood

(slide)

·        Welcome to the Antropocene (Nature editorial in 2003) 
      -- Welcome to the human earth
·        Technology, especially the converging foundational streams of nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive science, robotics, and information and communication technology, is critical focus on accelerating evolutionary pressures.
·        The world is becoming much more complex and information dense, and information structures are growing at every level – and information is culture; accelerating ICT evolution is accelerating cultural evolution

Look at what the railroad did to things as diverse as the pattern of business in the United States. Small business was the dominant pattern before the rail road, why? It was a local economy.
Comes the railroad, what is the dominant pattern? Trust.
What did that change, it changed the entire financial structure of this country because in order to finance the railroad, you had to change the way in which finance was done across the country. It changed culture, it profoundly changed Americans view of their fundamental theology was, their view of themselves. Before the railroad we tended to view ourselves as Jeffersonian agrarianists, after the railroad that was impossible. The railroad destroyed, tore up, Jeffersonian agrarianism, we changed into a very different country.
8:16
Now we are facing not just the railroad, but an integrated change in Nano which accelerates our understanding of materials down to the lowest level; robotics, biotechnology, information and communication technology and cognitive science. It’s all changing at the same time. The idea that we understand this; that we can make projections out a hundred years on anything is laughable!  … With all due respect.
The world is becoming much more complicated and information dense. How much have we heard today about information structures, the impact of cyber space and the difference in systems operation that is implied by the information structures we are busy imposing on ourselves? Virtually nothing, why? Because the discourse we are involved in comes out of the environmental discourse which focuses on energy and materials… and environmental impact. That’s fine, but if we want to understand this world we have to understand the information dimensions of it and frankly that entire discourse is not plugged into any of the things we usually talk about.
9:30

(slide)

              Trends We Should Care About
·        Natural systems become integrated with human and built systems, and subject to their dynamics: (e.g., reflexivity, intentionality) – examples                                                              genetic engineering and IP: carbon cycle and sulfur cycle management. There is no “natural history,” only human history.
·        Professionals and firms are being charged by society with responsibility not just for their actions, but for their technology systems (ef: Monsanto and genetically modified organisms).
·        Sustainability is becoming a powerful mythology

Part of the way you can see this is… think about natural systems and the way they are now becoming integrated into human systems with results that are very profound.
 Perhaps the best example is biology; 50 years ago, biology was something you study out there, we were beginning to get a grip on ecology.. Odum… people like that, but we really were studying it like a subject out there.
Now if you think about what we are doing is as rapidly as we can and we are taking information structure biology, genomics, proteomics; we are taking through it the IP system, the intellectual property system, and we are turning it into various kinds of economic products.
10:20
Synthetic biology, what is the goal of synthetic biology in its design? Its goal is economic.

But what that does is, it takes a system that was previously outside the human domain and it puts it squarely in the human domain and it makes it subject to the constraints of the human domain and the behavior of the human domain which are much more complex that some of these natural systems.

“Professionals and firms are being charged by society with responsibility”

Not a bad thing you would think, except if we have to charge firms with responsibility for social issues what does it tell you about the failure of your governance system?
It tells you that the failure of your governance system is pretty much accomplished. That’s what it tells you.
Because if it weren’t you wouldn’t have to take firms and try to get them to do environmental and social responsibility because the government would have those in hand and then would impose it on firms as appropriate operating through the appropriate mechanisms trough regulation.
The fact that NGOs have to go to firms to try drive firms to do it indicates a failure in the governance system, moreover, it’s a dangerous failure. Why?
Because, firms don’t know that much about social responsibility. So what do they do?
They implement what gets them out of trouble. It works for the NGOs because they are the ones that can establish the agenda. It works for the firms because they can manage to stay out of trouble, whether it works for greater social good is a different question.
12:10
Sustainability is becoming a powerful mythology, this is important… by the way, by mythology I do not mean it in a disparaging sense, mythology as in a sense of a fundamental belief structure. The reason that it is important is because sustainability becomes more and more of the dialogue in for example engineering, and if engineers try to quantify sustainability it becomes very problematic. If they understand it as a general social goal to which they must be responsive but it may change in different ways depending on the system they are working on, then they can understand the system.

Ethical structures

(slide)

              Trends We Should Care About
·        Ethical structures (macroethics) appropriate for complex adaptive systems have not yet been developed.
·        Highly likely that technological evolution will become discontinuous in terms of cultural ability to adapt.
·        Foundational values and cultural constructs become contingent over much shorter time frames (swamp/wetlands, jungle/rainforest, wilderness evil to good; natural/supernatural to natural human).
·        End of Cold War destabilized global power relationships (fundamentalism vs. modernity – in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, environmentalism, Hinduism, and else ware).

Ethical Structures appropriate for these kinds of systems have not yet been adopted, this is a major problem. Part of the reason is… think about the ethics that we bring to things like, is this a good energy system? Is this a good regulation?
Those ethical  structures tend to be fairly utilitarian, that is to say I figure out what the effects of my actions are going to  be and then I implement them in such a way that I benefit the most people as much as I can.
13: 26
Oversimplified but that is the general idea of regulation.
The problem with that is that presupposes you know what that system is going to do. If we get to a point where we are involved in these complex adaptive systems and we don’t we should not be relaying on ethical systems that presuppose a knowledge that we can’t have. We should instead be developing ethical systems that enable us to interact with the system in ways that are rational, reasonable and ethical given that we know the system will evolve in ways that are unpredictable.
14:05
I don’t want to get too much into It, but I do want to make the point that there is a danger as we begin to go out pass the relative short term in assuming that we are competent to understand what the future will want and able to impose it on the future.
One of the things that you find if you begin to look back at the history of critical concepts; is that they change fairly dramatically over time.
The idea of wilderness when the Europeans first came to this country tended to be associated with the satanic; and it was not figurative, it was literal. Read Emerson, read some of the transcendentalist, read Whitman and the job of the European settler in North America is seen as overcoming the satanic wilderness and creating a garden.
But now of course wilderness is where you go when you died and have been good all your life.
 My point is not that one is right and the other is wrong. My point is that we are inadequately sensitive to the fact that our culture constructs are historically contingent, and we need to be sensitive to that.
Because if they begin changing more rapidly than our policies what we are going to be doing is embedding culturally contingent concepts into policies that then become imperialistic on future generations.
15:33
Case in point:
I was at the Smithsonian…  actually it was MIT ??? first conference and there was an environmental economist there. And he spoke before me and he put up a picture of New England factory with the smoke coming out of the…
The postcard saying how wonderful was because we all had jobs, and of course everybody spent 10 minutes laughing at it, and how stupid they were…
And then before I got up I had the sudden realization, struck on the way to Damascus, that I was probably going to be saying things that would sound just as stupid and just as out of place 20, 30, 40, years from now.
So I went up there trying to figure out what was about to say that was in fact stupid.
Because there is no guarantee that what we think now and what we are trying to impose through our policies is any less contingent than that picture of the factory and what’s even worse is… they may both had been right for their era. Which is truly frightening because it means that our understanding of what we think we are all about is more contingent than we think it is?
16:55
End of Cold War destabilized global power relationships… why is that in there?
It’s in there for a very good reason.
We tend to get caught up in whatever activity we are involved in, and I think that is important to go back at points and trying to figure out what the real issues are. So for example with sustainability, one of the issues that came up in a discussion that we had at ASU at the Global Institute for Sustainability is one of the real challenges to sustainability in the short term, and of course one of the real challenges is the democratization of weapons of mass destruction.
People talk a lot about democratizing technology as if it were a good thing and in some ways it is, but we have also democratize the dark side of technology.
The biotechnology, I am sure that now there are many, many laboratories around MIT where you can build the 1918 flu virus if you want. I don’t recommend it, I am sure homeland defense doesn’t recommend it, but, it’s doable.
The democratization of nuclear weapons is what scares a lot of the expert that look at potential 5,10, 15 year meltdown scenarios for the world. Why? Because if you set off a nuclear weapon in a mayor America city there is not city, including NY that we couldn’t survive having disappear, as difficult and ugly as that would be.
It’s the after effects of such an attack, the United States very emotional, very angry, heavily armed and undoubtedly very susceptible to demagoguery at that point.
That’s the thing that people worry about in the State Department and in the Pentagon.
That’s the kind of challenge we need to think about as we bring these other issues.
19:00

(slide)

            Trends We Should Care About
·        Terrorism and national security increasingly drive technological evolution (e.g., reversing cognitive enhancement to create cognitive de-enhancement weapons).
·        Role of nation-state changing profoundly, leading to multinational governance power structure.
·        The New Great Game continues horses are EU, US, Japan, China, Russia, others. This drives competitive technological explosion, especially of NBIRC.
·        Technological changes undermines our language and the disciplines we try to use to understand and model our world. Evolutionary biology segues into synthetic biology, and the biodiversity crisis becomes a cusp as biology changes to a design space.
·        Our Ignorance is profound, and hidden by ideology, fundamentalism and fear.

I think here the point of technological change, and this is something that Leon Cass points out and it does so very effectible from his perspective. His argument is that the difficulty with technological change is that it is extraordinarily destabilizing… and he is right. The problem is that this technological wave that is coming down on us is going to be very difficult to avoid. It will be destabilizing but in way we are not prepared for.
So for example, one of the arguments that one hears is that the biodiversity crisis is not a crisis, that is a cusp that what you are seeing is a shift in the information content in biological systems from evolved biodiversity to design biodiversity, and that the amount of information in the system is going to become even greater as we move towards a biology dominated by design systems.
I don’t know if that is true or not.
I don’t even know how you measure biodiversity because if you are doing traditional biodiversity you use species; if you are doing designed biodiversity it’s not clear that you use species as a meaningful grouping of information structures, because you can change them at will.
20:32
So there are those measurement problems, but more importantly, until we begin to think about those possibilities, you don’t begin to think about some of the implications, such as:
Natural biodiversity tends to evolve towards stability. Evolved (designed?) biodiversity tends to evolves because we want to accomplish something, usually economic. Those to drivers create very different kinds of systems and arguably an economic biodiversity structure is far more fragile. If that is the case, then we need to understand that before we get to the point where we start shifting biodiversity over from natural to design systems at significant scale.
What is liable to drive that? Look at some of the slides you saw earlier. Some of the slides about agriculture for example. What is one of the obvious responses to the challenges to agriculture? to develop different kinds of bio designed species. Before we do that we need to think about stability issues and you don’t think about that until you begin to understand the contingency that is now beginning to creep into virtually all of the aspects of our systems, human and otherwise.
21:49

(slide)

              Key Concepts
·        “Earth systems” include economic, technological, and cultural systems, not just physical systems. Moreover, the human natural built integrated systems of the Anthropocene cannot be understood through just one worldview, be it scientific, theological or postmodern.
·        Complexity and focus on systems
·        Mutually exclusive but equally valid ontologies
·        The world as design space (e.g., from withdrawn from using fossil fuels to designer atmosphere)
·        The human as design space
·        Result: radical contingency

What are some of the key concepts?
Earth systems includes not just the ones that we are used to thinking about but also include economic, technological, and cultural systems. They have a lot to do with what we end up with.
It’s very hard for example to talk about island biology without knowing that there was a large European migration which affected the biology of most islands that it came across one way or another.
The second one is the complexity and focus on systems.
Everybody says this, but we still don’t know how to do it, we like to think in terms of simple systems, we think in terms of disciplinary structures and we react badly when we are pushed beyond disciplinary structures at the edges of our community.
I like the answer that was given to the question about shouldn’t scientists be skeptical about geoengineering… absolutely they should!
But the point is not that the scientists are skeptical, the point is that what they are doing is preventing publication at all.
In law that is the difference between,  for example saying what you published about me is wrong and actionable, which you can do; and preventing publication at all which under American law, Constitutional law is very, very difficult; because the framers of the constitution basically say is: Hey look the way you get the truth is by dialogue and debate. We tried the other way and it doesn’t work so well.
Dialogue and debate
What is happening now is communities are cutting out dialogue and debate, that’s very problematic. It’s understandable but it’s very problematic
23:30
             Mutually exclusive but equally valid ontologies
This is really, really hard.  This is not just engineers sitting down with scientists, which is hard enough. This is engineers and scientists sitting down with postmodern English critics… and that is very, very hard! It’s hard on all sides. And the problem is you go to the scientists and say look, you need to understand the complexity of human systems far better than you do. So they say ok, and they go out and they pick up some book by some whacked out postmodernist and it gets into some neo-Marxist jargon and it falls apart completely you know; If I wanted to read about forwardism I’d read a science fiction novel.
It’s a problem! But it is not a problem that is solvable by retreating to our own disciplinary boundaries. It is a problem that is inherent in the complexities of the human world. If you don’t like it you should have been born 300 years ago. If you want to be responsible in this world you need to learn to talk across those boundaries, and not add to them which unfortunately happens to much of the time.
24:40
The World is designed space
This and the humanist designed space are what really is going to cause the most problems. We are talking in terms of some of this model about a hundred years, some even more than that. Well within that period there is lot of evidence that probable scenarios, and any time you start talking in the future as regards to technology you are talking scenarios, and the question should be: is it reasonably probable;  is it, no very probable Not, is this what is going to happen. Because nobody has a clue what’s going to happen. Well… no body knows the path, you can make fairly broad statements about boundaries but you don’t know the path between those boundaries.
The world is going to be a designed space; and the human is going to be a design space.
This is very, very difficult.
Now, talking about climate change for example. If you start talking about trying to change cultivars through genetic engineering, you are going to get a fair amount of push back. I can’t imagine what it’s going to happen down the line as we begin to talk about changing what it means to be human.
 If you think that is funny. Walk into a classroom and see how many kids have their computers up and are on google… what does that say?
That says that facts are irrelevant to an education… you can get the facts. What we need to be teaching you as educators is frameworks, and patterns and models and how to build meaning out of these different kinds of realities.
Why can we not do that?
Well, for the most part, we haven’t been trained to do it.
Look at the way we are sitting today… you could walk into a medieval university and they would understand this. I am here talking to you, you are there listening to me, everything is right with the world. The great chain of being is in place. But that’s wrong.
The way that students think these days is profoundly different that the way their professors think. Those kinds of changes are critical to understanding the world that we are in. The result is that those things that we base our policies on, our values, our structures, we know we are right; all of those are partial and contingent, and what’s happening is they are being undermined by technology and culture and evolution in ways that are very problematic more rapidly that they have been in the past
27:30
Ok, what’s one example?

(slide)

              Case Study: The Autonomic City
·        Trend 1: increasing integration of ICT at all scales in urban systems: smart materials, smart buildings, smart infrastructure, regional sensor systems of all kinds – an all interconnected.               – And increasingly virtual: highly complex Net-based systems (e.g., Google Earth) are being mashed up against these evolving “smart urban components” to create far more complex information topographies.
·        Trend 2: ICT itself evolving to be qualitatively more complex                                                           -- automatic ICT at all scales, from chip, to PC/assembly, to global communications networks.                                                                                                                                                  -- Piggybacked on Net, an auto-catalytic, self-designing system.
·        Result: The Automatic City, already here, profoundly different from anything we know, but essentially invisible to us.  
                                               
One of my favorites is sort of the autonomic city.
There is a couple of things that come together in ways that we don’t understand which means I don’t have to try to explain it which is all to the best.
We are building information structures in the cities at all levels. We are building smart material so that we know when they are going to fail, we are trying to build smart buildings, we are trying to put sensors in, so we can keep track of things like water systems; we are trying to create information structures that override the electric systems. We are building information in every way that we can think of.
Now some of this is problematic. The idea of putting new information kiosks along roads that pick up the transmission from your car so that we know where cars are at all times… you know… it depends on how much you trust the government if you like that one. But it’s getting built in.
Now that would be difficult enough.
What’s really interesting is that at the same time we are changing what ICT systems do, so that information communication technology systems, ICT systems, are now floating virtually on a series of different kinds of infrastructures.
The result is, we can make these floating systems that are called autonomic. That is, they can detect problems, they can design themselves in real-time, they can re-design in real-time, they can heal themselves in real-time and we are building learning processes into them.
Why? 
Because the consciousness of both organizations and individuals is the most limited aspect of most of these systems, so we need to build in the ability for these systems to manipulate themselves to get them to work in these complex structures. It’s called augmented cognition, augcog.
29:29
Now, the result is that we are building a profoundly different information infrastructure at the same time that information infrastructure is getting built in the cities at virtually every scale of the build environment.
Do we have any idea what that is going to do?
No!
Remember black Monday.
This is turbulent example what happen, pretty easy to tell.
People started to put in computer trading into their systems. The computer trading programs were design to begin selling at a certain point. When you started losing enough money you told the system, just start selling, get me out the market and I’ll go back in tomorrow.
 So what happens, well, the market starts to drop, some of these computerized trading systems kick in; the negative feedback is obvious right? Boom! Bottom falls out of the market. Um.. Positive feedback falls out of the market.
What that did, in the absence of any mayor economic change or phenomena it crashed the market. Now notice that was a place where: 
A, people where paying a lot of attention, because it’s money, right? So they cared;
and b, it’s pretty simple. If you have a bunch of sell programs and they all click in they are going to be in deep yogurt! And it happened!
Now if we couldn’t get that right, what on Earth makes us think we understand what we are doing with our cities as we pile all this information in?
31:09
Another case study

(slide)

              THE HUMAN AS DESIGN SPACE: IMPLICATIONS
·        Given economic, national security, cultural competitiveness, psychological and other drivers, it is highly unlikely redesign of human and nature will be stopped
·        “Meaning” will become clearly contingent, deliberately construed phenomenon (by the elite? By democratic choice?). Think Fox News.
·        “Truth” will be replaced by contingency and constructed behaviors and networks at perceivable timescale: “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx).

The human as design space
Leon Kass starts out saying:
“Victory over mortality is the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science.”
Whether you like that or not depends on whether you think is going to happen in your life time.
 He is probably wrong, that is probably the unstated goal of most technological evolution in the west since about 1200, but leave that be.
The important thing is, that these kinds of, for example, life extensions are beginning to involve very different communities in very different  ways of thinking about these systems that heavily depend on information; so the IEEE Spectrum is writing articles in how to engineer the human to live to a hundred and twenty. The  IEEE Spectrum… C’mon, they build chips!
But what they are doing is, they are extending that engineering to a different domain. Those kinds of jumps could be very productive, but they are very, very dangerous in terms of ethics and social responsibility because no one is keeping track of them.
32:30

(slide)

THE HUMAN AS DESIGN SPACE:  IMPLICATIONS
·        Given economic, national security, cultural competitiveness, psychological and other drivers, it is highly unlikely redesign of human and nature will be stopped
·        “Meaning” will become clearly contingent, deliberately constructed phenomenon (by the elite? By democratic choice?) Think Fox News.
·        “Truth” will be replaced by contingency and constructed behaviors and networks at perceivable timescales: “All is that is solid melts into air” (Marx).
The important thing on this slide is that there is a lot of talk about slowing down technology and trying to regain social control over these technologies; I think this is very unlikely for two reasons. The first is the military and the second is Scostsdale
32:50

The military is obviously very interested in these programs which mean we are very unlikely to see these technologies before they are already being rolled out. Augmented cognition is already a mayor, as some people here I’m sure probably know but won’t talk about, is already a mayor investment area for the US military. And what it reflects is the fact that now we have the ability to feed more into a soldier, than what that person can possibly integrate in real time in a combat situation, so we are building information structures that enable him or her to do that.
We are not going to find out about those kinds of technologies until they are already in place and that makes it hard to control.
The second one is Scottsdale, there is an argument that the “aug” factor is going to control these technologies and that people won’t want to change what is human. I would say that Scottsdale core competency is plastic surgery. If you give those folks an opportunity that is biologically based to enhance their capabilities… its over! Look at professional sports.
34:00

(slide)

Case Study 3: Ambient Air Capture of CO2
Technology for ambient air capture of CO2 being commercialized (approx. $200 -$150 per ton    CO2)
Global climate change is not inevitable, but a price point issue.
Focus on fossil fuels use is obsolete as is existing regulatory/treaty process (strong institutional and individual opposition as a result)
Undermines use of global climate change as lever for social engineering
Relevant question becomes much more fundamental: What kind of world do you want – 280 ppm equivalent? 360? 550? – and who gets to choose?  Distributional effects are potentially significant.

I want to point out something else in the details that  we were talking about , I want to point out that last fact, there is a huge difference between the Kyoto approach that basically says; let’s just draw back, let’s just not impact, let’s cut back 90% whatever it takes. Which arguably… this may be a little controversial…  it’s arguably un-ethical because it presupposes that we are going to be able to control India and China emissions, it pre-supposes that, that approach actually has a chance of working. It might.
But I would argue the chance that it won’t, which means that the fact that we don’t have a good back up for Kyoto becomes a mayor gap in our ability to manage climate over the longer term.
But the second question is…
There are profound differences between saying… let’s just draw back and not impact the world and the kinds of technologies that are coming down the pipe, assume this is a scenario for now, there is a firm in Tucson that is commercializing this… yeah... I can’t talk about any of it! Because I am under an NDA and I don’t know if it’s going to work, so let’s assume this is a hypothetical  still, think what would happen if we are able to capture carbon… who gets to decide what atmosphere we get? Dow we go back to 280, 360?
Do we give Canada and Russia more growing time?
Who gets to decide?
The assumption here would be any rational person would decide to put it back; but that’s because we all tend to think along the same lines. It’s not clear to me if you open that up to a real global dialog that is the answer you would get. I don’t know what answer you would get. I do know that it’s a profoundly different question than simply saying let’s stop impacting.
**36:10

(slide un-readable)

Some principles that help us understand these systems
The first is: Only intervene when necessary and only to the extent required.
The second is: Model and dialogue with them before we jump into them… why are we doing the hydrogen economy before we have some kind of road map that tells us where maybe problems with our hydrogen economy
The third is:
 We need to be much more sensitive to the boundaries of our analysis in term of where their validity lies and doesn’t lie, a scientific analysis is absolutely great but it does not resolve values questions.
We try to do that all the time, particularly in the climate change and environmental communities, and it is dangerous because if we get caught doing it, then we are not only liable to lose the argument about values but we are liable to undercut the validity of our science, because people are going to think that that also is nothing but our effort to get across our own values.
The actors and designers are also part of the system they are purporting to re-design.
37:20
Think this isn’t a problem? If the IPCCC is right they are wrong.
Let’s say the IPCCC is right and all this bad things are going to happen and everybody reacts and we stop them from happening then everybody goes back to the IPCCC and ask where the hell did you get those ideas from?
It’s a major problem! If you get your model right you are going to disprove your model what are you going to do about that, how are you going to explain that to the public?
37:55
Implicit social engineering agendas
One of the interesting things about the climate change debate is that it always phrased in terms of scientific values. Very few people are willing to say… and by the way we got to get those Americans to change their consumption patterns.
Where this comes out is if you work with one of these technologies, like the ambient air capture technology and you go to different environmental groups, the environmental groups that are interested in a particular species, the preservationists, they tend to like the technology because it will stop climate change if its rolled out at scale.
The activist environmental groups hate it because it doesn’t force people to change.
So there is a question you need to answer… are you in this to force people to change or are you in this to try to change the system itself or if you think it has to be both are you really willing to try to take the chance, again, that you’d get caught doing it.
39:05
*Transparent governance, yes, how do you make that happen? That is the question.
39:10
*We must learn to engineer and manage complex systems not just artifacts
This a very critical thing that none of us do well. We don’t know what this systems are going to do, what we net to do is to get much better at dialoguing with them and much less concern about specific short term actions
*Insure continues learning, great we should try that.
*whenever possible engineer changes should be incremental and reversible
Look at the geoengineering approaches across the board and apply this single metric and it will kick some of them out.
You do not want to do something mayor that you can’t reverse.
I don’t like putting sulfur in the air primarily because it doesn’t solve the problem of acidifying oceans it’s a partial fix and not a very good fix at that.
On the other hand do I like it better than trying to put something in space that I can’t get at? Yes, because sulfur runs out eventually, so it has a limited time frame, it’s reversible. [2]
So I think we know how to do some things we don’t give ourselves enough credit about it, we just have to get more explicit about it.
40:30
*we need to work on resiliency not just redundancy. And the difference is
With resiliency you look at the entire system including the social and the human dimensions.
New Orleans failed and still fails not because the levies broke, because a huge number of things, some of which are very subtle, like the absence of the MPs that could have restored order had not all been sent to Iraq. That created a huge vulnerability which was completely unrecognized until after the fact… when it was too late.
If we focus on resiliency of these systems and in developing option spaces which enhance our ability to create resiliency then I think we are beginning to get at the kinds of behaviors that are going to be critical as we begin to move into a world that is essentially uncharted.
Thank You.

                                                    -------------------------


One of my questions is:
[1] How do we know it wasn’t by design? 

The fossil fuel industry aided by the transportation, maritime shipping and air, has denied the effects of fossil fuel emissions on climate, even now. While cheerfully preparing for the “Coming Arctic Boom”
After all the melting of the Arctic has been proposed before:

P.M. Borisov's Proposed Method of Melting the Arctic Ice Cap
“This material presents the plan of Petr Mikhailovich Borisov for melting the Arctic ice cap. If the Arctic ice is once melted much less of the sun's radiation will be reflected out into space and therefore the arctic ice cap will not re-form. An ice-free Arctic Ocean would be a great boon to oceanic shipping, especially between Europe and East Asia. Much land in northern Canada and Siberia would be freed of permafrost and made suitable for agriculture. Borisov believed that an ice-free Arctic Ocean would lead to increased evaporation of water and hence increased rainfall worldwide, including the region of Sahara Desert leading to grass growing there. Borisov considers all of the impacts of the melting of the Arctic ice cap to be beneficial. He asserts that the melting of the Greenland ice cap would raise sea levels at a rate of only 1.5 to 2 mm per year.”


“The idea of melting the Arctic ice cap goes back at to 1877 when Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler proposed channeling more of the warm Kuroshio Current through the Bering Strait. Carroll Livingston Riker in 1912 proposed using a 200 mile jetty off Newfoundland to divert more of the Gulf Stream to the Arctic Basin. Julian Huxley while he was head of UNESCO proposed, in 1946, to use nuclear weapons to break up the Arctic ice cap. Borisov in his article lists the more recently suggested methods for melting the Arctic ice cap.

The Soviet Scientist Who Dreamed of Melting the Arctic with a 55 Mile Dam  
By Derek Mead
“As much as we worry about climate change today, a warm, melted Arctic was actually a dream of geoengineers since at least the 19th century. But at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet scientist named Petr Mikhailovich Borisov proposed what may be the most ambitious Arctic melting project ever conceived: a dam spanning the 55 mile Bering Strait that would be big enough to redirect the currents of the world's oceans and force warming water to melt the Arctic Ocean forever.”

As the warm Gulf Stream turns into the North Atlantic Current on its path towards the Arctic Circle, it gradually loses heat as it's bombarded by cold flows heading south from the ice. Eventually, it cools down completely, and powered by cold Pacific streams heading through the Bering Strait, turns back around, as shown in the offset figure below.”
Source: P.M. Borisov, "Can we Control the Arctic Climate?", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March, 1969, pp. 43-48.

The Coming Arctic Boom As the Ice Melts, the Region Heats Up
By Scott G. Borgerson
July/August 2013
“Of course, while Arctic warming is a fait accompli, it should not be taken as a license to recklessly plunder a sensitive environment. If developed responsibly, however, the Arctic’s bounty could be of enormous benefit to the region’s inhabitants and to the economies that surround it. That’s why all the Arctic countries need to continue their cooperation and get to work establishing a shared vision of sustainable development, and why the United States in particular needs to start treating the region as an economic and foreign policy priority, as China is. Like it or not, the Arctic is open for business, and governments and investors have every reason to get in on the ground floor.”
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139456/scott-g-borgerson/the-coming-arctic-boom


Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks
Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science


How Donors Trust distributed millions to anti-climate groups
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday 14 February 2013 




Earth Systems Engineering and Management
10/09/2007 5:00 PM 10"250 Brad Allenby, Arizona State University
MIT description:
If you take as a given that humans now live on a geoengineered planet, then what is our responsibility for the future? Before discussing how to deal with Earth systems, Brad Allenby asks that we think carefully about the complexity of human systems, especially our tendency to generate far more complexity than we realize, and to assume "that we have a reasonable handle going  forward and can therefore talk about (the future) with some degree of rationality."

In a talk that kicks off with quotes from Stewart Brand, William Gibson and Vishnu, Allenby pulls together some trends "we should care about" when discussing solutions for global issues. He notes that just as railroads changed American culture and “self" perception in unexpected ways, so will the integrated impact of technology. Nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, information and communication technology are all changing at the same time, "so the idea that we can make projections out 100 years is laughable." Allenby also notes that, to our peril, we're integrating natural systems into human systems, handing off what had been public concerns to commercial interests, failing to develop a governing ethical structure for "complex adaptive systems," all at a time when the end of the Cold War has destabilized global power relationships.

Allenby worries that we are dabbling in systems management well over our heads, building information structures into our cities' infrastructure, for instance, and utilizing humans as "design spaces." Don't forget how the global stock market crashed, in spite of carefully designed computer trading systems, he reminds us. How can we approach earth systems engineering in a way so as to do no harm, much less leave things better off? Some principles Allenby recommends: "Only intervene when necessary and to the extent required;" model complicated systems before implementing them, and whenever possible, make incremental and reversible change; acknowledge the social engineering agendas that underlie the climate debate, and the interplay between scientific analysis and values; and bring all parties to the discussion, "not just engineers sitting with scientists, but with post" modern English critics."
About the Speaker(s): Brad Allenby spent more than 20 years working for AT&T as counsel, senior environmental counsel, research vice president for technology and environment, and environment, health and safety vice president. During that period he also served for two years as Director of Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and as the J. Herbert Holloman Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering.

He also taught as an adjunct professor at Yale University School of Forestry, Columbia University 's School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Virginia 's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

His publications include Reconstructing Earth (2005) and with T.E. Graedel, Industrial Ecology. He is the president of the International Society for Industrial Ecology.
Host(s): School of Science, Center for Global Change Science

CREDIT
MIT World -- special events and lectures
LICENSE

MIT TechTV

Other links:
Updated July , 2013


Messing with nature? Exploring public perceptions of geoengineering in the UK
Open Access Article
Adam Cornera, c, Karen Parkhilla, c, Nick Pidgeona, c, Naomi E. Vaughanb, c

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378013001015#

Our effect on the earth is real: how we’re geo-engineering the planet
By: Mike Sandiford Director, Melbourne Energy Institute at University of Melbourne

16 June 2011


Earth Systems Engineering: The World As Human Artifact
Author: Brad R. Allenby

Managing the Earth’s complex systems and their dynamics is the next great challenge for the engineering profession.


How are humans going to become extinct?
By Sean Coughlan BBC
24 April 2013

""the advance of technology has overtaken our capacity to control the possible consequences"

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A #Geoengineering #Climate Issues blog - Geoingeniería by Oscar and Jocelyn Escobar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Licencia Creative Commons
A #Geoengineering #Climate Issues blog por Oscar y Jocelyn Escobar se distribuye bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional.