The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
Oliver Morton
Princeton University Press (U.S. November 3, 2015)
ISBN: 9780691148250
Publisher’s webpage: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10657.html
Table of contents at end of article.
Comments by Oscar A. Escobar below the excerpts.
Florida, USA – Gt. December 1, 2015
Excerpts:
Cutting tropospheric
aerosols is a pressing problem; stratospheric veilmaking is still just this
side of geopoetry, and hugely divisive to boot. Countries are willing to
endanger their citizens through poorly regulated air pollution because of the
economic importance they put on generating energy for industry and having cars
and vans to move people around. They may well also endanger them because of the
political muscle of the people who do the generating and who make use of the
cars. But they will not leave them suffering as they try to develop and agree
on some pie-in-the-sky alternative, the benefits of which are speculative and
global. Sulphur emissions will be cut regardless of whether their cooling can
be replaced.
The most striking
example of this, I think, comes not from one country but setting progressively
stricter standards for the amount of soot and sulphur they can emit when out in
the heart of the oceans. Taking on this task had given the IMO regulatory
influence over the albedo of more than half of the Earth’s surface – and thus a
far greater ability to play with the parameters of the climate than that currently
enjoyed by the UNFCCC.
The effects of sulphur
emissions at sea can be particularly strong because of the Twomey effect. Over
land, where everything from dust to dandruff is constantly being blown into the
air, clouds are rarely constrained by a lack of condensation nuclei. Over the
seas, where the air is cleaner, they are often limited in this way. Most of the
condensation nuclei that are available come from plankton-produced sulphur
compounds; in the 1980s Lovelock worked with the aerosol expert Robert Charlson
and others to show that sulphur emissions by plankton are probably keeping the
planet significantly cooler than it would otherwise be by encouraging cloud
formation in this way. Changes in ocean circulation or fertilization patterns
that discouraged them from this work could lead to bad effects on the climate,
a non-linearity to bear in mind.
But some of the
mid-ocean sulphur comes from ships, and thus so does some planetary cooling. It
has been calculated that the new emission standards the IMO is bringing into
force this decade will reduce the cooling effects of global pollution by
something like a third of a watt per square metre – a considerably greater
effect, models would suggest, than that of all the carbon dioxide emitted by
every generator and engine in the world over the same ten years. Those new
standards will also, according to a companion analysis, save something in the
region of 40,000 lives a year, because what is emitted over the mid-oceans does
not stay over the mid-oceans; it is blown to shore, where it increases the
damage done by pollution to susceptible lungs.
Do I think it
realistic to imagine that the IMO might, as the result of a far-reaching
envelope-stretching boundary-breaking debate, have come to a Crutzen-like grand
bargain in which it sought to make good the cooling it was taking away by
implementing a replacement brightening? Not really; but it remains striking –
no, shocking – that as far as I can ascertain no one even mentioned the matter,
even though the IMO’s own technical advisers used the term ‘geoengineering’ in
some of their analyses. Conversations have to start somewhere, and that would
have been a good place to start one.
Morton, Oliver (2015-11-03) The Planet Remade: How
Geoengineering Could Change the World (p. 293 – 296), Princeton University
Press. Google Play, U.S. Edition.
-
Unfortunately, when you start getting close to global
scales, brightening just a part of the world can have rather unfortunate
consequences. A veilmaking study by Jim Haywood, a modeller at Britain’s Met
Office, makes the point clearly. Ringing the changes on one of the GeoMIP
scenarios described in Chapter Four, Haywood and some colleagues compared a
Greenhouse Planet with a pair of Engineered Planets; in one of them all the
cooling took place in the northern hemisphere, and in the other it was all in
the southern hemisphere, a regionalization which would probably be achievable
if the cooling veil was emplaced only by aircraft in the appropriate hemisphere
and a fair way from the equator. He found that in the northern-cooling-only
scenario there were horrendous droughts in the Sahel, because the Intertropical
Convergence Zone, a rainbelt around the equator, moves away from the cooler
hemisphere, taking its rain with it. This effect does not just appear in
models. Of the Sahel’s four worst years of drought during the twentieth
century, three took place after volcanic eruptions sufficiently far north of
the equator to cool only the northern hemisphere – the year after the Katmai
eruption in the Aleutians (1913), and the year of and the year after the El
Chichón eruption in Mexico (1982 and 1983). There is also a substantial body of
evidence suggesting that the cooling effects of sulphate aerosols from the
industrial north played a role in the Sahel droughts of the 1970s and 1980s.
The most obvious lesson from Haywood’s simulation is that no
one should try to cool the planet just by cooling the northern hemisphere. The
more general lesson is that cooling some parts of the planet can have large
effects in others. The climate system works in such a way that if you perturb
one bit of it you would expect to see responses in other bits a long way away;
there are patterns of atmospheric pressure and circulation that can shift from
one state to another on a global scale. It is due to just such
‘teleconnections’ that the effects of a warm body of water moving across the
Pacific – the essence of an El Niño event – can be reliably expected to produce
a broadly predictable pattern of change from Cape Town to California.
Stephen Salter imagines that it might be possible to use
such teleconnections to fine-tune a geoengineering scheme’s effects on the
climate, avoiding some areas and doubling down on others in order to get a
pre-selected pattern of beneficial effects across the planet. Few people with a
background in climate science believe this. Rather, they worry that by
concentrating cooling in particular places you could do damage to others
without fully understanding why – that teleconnections are a bug, not a feature.
Morton, Oliver (2015-11-03) The Planet Remade: How
Geoengineering Could Change the World (p. 306 – 308), Princeton University
Press. Google Play, U.S. Edition.
-
“With a few flights a day from each site, they
deliver a few tens of thousands of tonnes of aerosol to the stratosphere over
the first year. Sprayed out comfortably above the tropical and subtropical
tropopause in both hemispheres, this forms a tolerably even, remarkably tenuous
veil. There had at one time been a satellite devoted to measuring stratospheric
aerosol density which might have allowed researchers to notice the veil’s
creation, but after that satellite’s life was over no one replaced it – there’s
always some group with an even more interesting set of measurements to make,
and there are only so many missions you can launch.
After 18 months of
operations, the Concert announces what it has been up to at the UNFCCC climate
summit of 202–. The Concert presents its programme as an act of civil
disobedience. Not, the countries say, that they are actually breaking
international law. If their actions were hostile they would have been in breach
of the ENMOD convention; if they caused demonstrable harm, they might be liable
under customary international law. Neither is the case, says the Concert. But
the countries making the veil are happy to admit that they are breaking the
norms of international relations in a way that might inconvenience, discomfort,
even shock. Civil disobedience does that. When there is a just cause to be
fought for, the Concert argues, and when there is no forum in which the fight
for that cause shows any sign of making progress, then something like civil
disobedience is called for. To disobey the tenor of times, they say, is not a
crime. It is a duty.
The practical aim of
its action, the Concert explains, is straightforward and limited. It does not
intend to stop or reverse warming; it intends only to slow it. It plans to
thicken the veil at a pace that its climate modellers think will keep the rate
of warming at or below 0.1ºC a decade. A limit to the rate of change of the
temperature, the historically minded are reminded, had been a widely canvassed
objective when action on greenhouse gases was first mooted in the 1980s. The Concert’s
target, if it could deliver it, would mean that over the rest of the century
the temperature would rise about as much as it did over the twentieth century.
Cumulative change by the end of the century would remain below the 2ºC limit.
How thick the veil might have to be to achieve this would depend on future
emissions; even if they went unchecked, the veil would not reach Pinatubo
thicknesses for almost a century.
But the Concert makes
it clear that it doesn’t want emissions to go unchecked. It wants other nations
to commit, as its members have, to quite steep cuts in emissions. And it is happy to welcome to its ranks
nations that make such commitments, especially if they also commit to the
development and deployment, over time, of technologies for carbon-dioxide
removal. As new members of the Concert, those acceding nations get a say in
decisions about revisions to the veilmaking plan in view of new monitoring data
and new understanding of the earthsystem – the original Concert members are
aware that they started with inadequate monitoring and sketchy knowledge, and
are keen to reduce the risks that brought with it – as well as revisions that
might be required by new trends in the politics of emission. Other nations do
not.”
Morton, Oliver (2015-11-03) The Planet Remade: How
Geoengineering Could Change the World (p. 359 – 363), Princeton University
Press. Google Play, U.S. Edition.
-
“This stringing
together of speculations is obviously intended to make solar geoengineering
look like a somewhat attractive possibility. What, though, of the beads on this
string? Considered in isolation, independent of the way that they are strung
together, are they plausible? To a large extent, I think they are.”
Morton, Oliver (2015-11-03) The Planet Remade: How
Geoengineering Could Change the World (p. 365 – 367), Princeton University
Press. Google Play, U.S. Edition.
-
My comments:
I highly recommend this book as another essential read for
those, who like me, proclaim opposition to geoengineering. Oliver Morton willingly
provides plenty of targets… and ammunition for a rational and genuine debate, if
one is wished to be had. Great timing on
the books’ release to garner some discussions during the Paris Climate Change
Conference (COP21).
Morton’s evident political, economic, energy and technological
predilections leads me to wonder… is this what the American right would sound
like if their climate change and many other arguments were suddenly infused
with some logic and sensibility?
Although I don’t share Oliver Morton’s lack of enthusiasm for
renewables and I disagree with many premises for the implementation of
geoengineering, in my view, activism against it should be careful in that it does
not lead to an end of the public debate and openness about the study of the
technology. In fact it is quite clear to me that an end to such public debate and
study of geoengineering will not mean the end of the technologies’ development,
nor an end to the possibility of the dangerous use of concealed geoengineering-‘counter-geoengineering’
either for environmental, geopolitical or military purposes. In fact the lack
of public understanding and a truly binding governance of the science and
technology will continue to enhance the dangers of geoengineering via climate
change and science denialisms.
I feel that geoengineering and the continued reliance on
fossil fuels are touted here as the only path (or a nearly inevitable one) to a
prosperous, populous and more just future (a future that I personally find very
appealing) but I do not think they constitute neither the only nor the best
path or even the easiest. In fact,
recent projections by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has renewables
overtaking coal as early as 2030 as the largest source of electricity worldwide.
The book is lay-friendly enough to generate an understanding
and appreciation not only of the history, but also the science and
technological concepts even where I have found the sophisticated language and
exuberant wordsmithing (although very appealing) getting in the way of an
already highly complex subject. But that
is of course a reflection on my own lack of language and literary
sophistication. Even so, this does not happen nearly enough to prevent reading. Beware though, in the introduction of the
book, the subject titled “Two questions” is the only part I have found a bit ‘draggy’
and awkward. My favorite chapters on this book are Chapter 10 “Sulphur and
Soggy Mirrors” and Chapter 12 “The Deliberate Planet”.
I leave you with a couple of intriguing recent studies that
came out on anthropogenic aerosols and further comments I think are relevant to
this book:
Approaches to Observe
Anthropogenic Aerosol-Cloud Interactions
Johannes Quaas – Nov 11, 2015
DOI: 10.1007/s40641-015-0028-0
Retrieved online on November 30, 2015 from:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40641-015-0028-0/fulltext.html
“Hemispheric Contrast
Most anthropogenic
aerosol sources are located in the Northern Hemisphere. The short lifetime
of the aerosol confines their effects also mostly to the Northern Hemisphere,
in which aerosol-cloud interaction effects are expected to be much larger [78].
Anthropogenic SO2 is, to a dominating
extent, emitted in the Northern Hemisphere, with 98 vs. 6 Tg S year−1 [79].”
Impact of aerosol
emission controls on future Arctic sea ice cover
M.-È. Gagné, N. P. Gillett, J. C. Fyfe
22 October 2015
DOI: 10.1002/2015GL065504
Retrieved online on November 30, 2015 from:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065504/full
Aerosol reductions
could account for up to 40 percent of future Arctic sea ice loss
By Leigh Cooper - 21 OCTOBER 2015
AGU American Geophysical Union Blogosphere
Retrieved online on 30 November 2015 from:
http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2015/10/21/aerosol-reductions-could-account-for-up-to-40-percent-of-future-arctic-sea-ice-loss/
Mass gains of
Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses, NASA study reports
October 31, 2015 by Maria-José Viñas
Phys.Org
Retrieved online on November 30, 2015 from:
http://phys.org/news/2015-10-mass-gains-antarctic-ice-sheet.html
OE. Things of
interest and questions:
-
How large the difference between hemispheres on
annual SO2 emissions from anthropogenic sources is. And remember the Pinatubo
eruption expulsed ‘only’ about 20 Tg of SO2 in 1991 offsetting about ½ a degree
of global warming, studies say. Personally,
a large factor in the hiatus I think.
-
How much SO2 is reaching the stratosphere?
-
Why is the Artic
loosing ice while the Antarctic is
reportedly gaining while the northern hemisphere is emitting about 16 times
more aerosols, which means more regional cooling? (Think hiatus and climate
change denial).
-
Could the Arctic ice loss be a side effect of the high levels of tropospheric
SO2 and regional cooling in the northern hemisphere?
-
Would lower levels of SO2 from the reduction of anthropogenic
sources in the northern hemisphere lead to
more Artic cooling as in the Antarctic or ice melt acceleration as the second
study suggests?
Other readings:
The Atmospheric
Impact of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo Eruption
Stephen Self,1 Jing-Xia Zhao,2 Rick E. Holasek,1 3 Ronnie C.
Torres,1 4 and Alan J. King1
Retrieved online on December 1, 2015 from:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self
“Effects on climate were an observed surface cooling in the
Northern Hemisphere of up to 0.5 to 0.6°C, equivalent to a hemispheric-wide
reduction in net radiation of 4 watts per square meter and a cooling of perhaps
as large as -0.4°C over large parts of the Earth in 1992-93”
WORLD ENERGY OUTLOOK
2015 FACTSHEET
Global energy trends
to 2040
International Energy Agency [PDF]
Retrieved online on December 1, 2015 from:
https://www.iea.org/media/news/2015/press/151110_WEO_Factsheet_GlobalEnergyTrends.pdf
The Planet Remade:
How Geoengineering
Could Change the World
Oliver Morton
Princeton University
Press ISBN: 9780691148250 (U.S. November 3, 2015):
Amazon:
Google Play Books (Read chapter and search contents): https://books.google.com/books?id=428uCgAAQBAJ&pg=PP2&dq=the+planet+remade&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwic5O_BgLvJAhXFJCYKHfbhBcIQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=the%20planet%20remade&f=false
Contents:
Introduction: Two Questions 1
Climate Risks and Responsibilities 5
The Second Fossil-Fuel Century 8
Altering the Earth System 22
Deliberate Planets, Imagined Worlds 26
Part One: Energies
1 The Top of the World 35
Discovering the Stratosphere 38
Fallout 43
The Ozone Layer 47
The Veilmakers 54
2 A Planet Called Weather 57
The Worldfalls 62
The Trenberth Diagram and Climate Science 66
Steam Engines and Spaceship Earth 71
3 Pinatubo 83
Volcanoes and Climate 86
Predictions and Surprises 93
4 Dimming the Noontime Sun 100
Rough Magic 107
Promethean Science 112
5 Coming to Think This Way 124
Martians and Moral Equivalents 129
The Day Before Yesterday 135
The Rise of Carbon Dioxide Politics 139
6 Moving the Goalposts 148
From Plan B to Breathing Space 156
Expanding the Boundaries 165
Part Two: Substances
7 Nitrogen 175
The Making of the Population Bomb 184
Defusing the Population Bomb 189
Far from Fixed 195
How to Spot a Geoengineer 201
8 Carbon Past, Carbon Present 209
The Anthropocene 219
The Greening Planet 229
9 Carbon Present, Carbon Future 243
Ocean Anaemia 251
Cultivating One's Garden 259
10 Sulphur and Soggy Mirrors 268
Global Cooling 274
Cloudships 283
Bright Patchwork Planet 288
What the Thunder Didn't Say 298
Part Three:
Possibilities
11 The Ends of the World 305
Control and Catastrophe 312
Doom and Denial 317
The Traditions of Titans 323
A Tale of Two Cliques 332
After Such Knowledge 338
12 The Deliberate Planet 344
The Concert 347
Small Effects, and Bad Ones 359
And Straight on 'til Morning 369
Envoi 375
Acknowledgements 379
References, Notes and Further Reading 383
Bibliography 393
Index 415
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