Follow the link for the complete article.
If link does not work... goggle it!
Latest additions will have published date highlighted.
SEPT/OCT
2013:
Geoengineering:
A Short History
How hacking
the climate came to be seen as our least worst option for averting a global
climate catastrophe.
BY TY
MCCORMICK - Foreign Policy
For most of
human history, weather control has been under the strict purview of sky gods
and science fiction. But today, as superstorms ravage coastal cities and
pollution blankets entire countries, averting climate catastrophe has become a
serious foreign-policy issue. Not that it appears that the world's major powers
are making much headway in their diplomatic efforts to stop global warming.
Instead, it is falling to so-called geoengineers to game out strategies for
deliberate, large-scale intervention -- everything from dumping iron slurry
into the ocean in order to create massive CO2-sucking algae blooms to
bombarding the stratosphere with sulfate-laced artillery to deflect sunlight.
With the world's fate potentially resting on the shoulders of these climate
hackers, it's worth recalling the dubious history of weather manipulation.
1841
American
meteorologist James Pollard Espy publishes The Philosophy of Storms, in which
he lays out his thermal theory of storm formation and details a method through
which "rain may be produced artificially in time of drought." By
setting "great fires" and creating heated columns of air -- something
Espy lobbies Congress to allow him to do -- he argues it would be possible to
generate precipitation on command. The scheme, which rests on shoddier science
than Espy's theory of storm formation, earns him the moniker "Storm
King."
1896
Swedish
chemist Svante Arrhenius investigates the impact of rising carbon dioxide
levels on global temperatures in Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science.
He is the first scientist to calculate how doubling the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere would affect the climate. His conclusion -- that
Earth's temperature would increase by roughly 9 degrees Fahrenheit -- leads him
to suggest in 1908 that by increasing the amount of "carbonic acid"
in the atmosphere, "we may hope to enjoy ages with more equitable and
better climates."
1932
The Soviet
Union establishes the Institute of Rainmaking in Leningrad, setting the stage
for decades of experimentation with cloud seeding as a means of altering the
weather. The United States follows suit in 1946, when researchers at the
General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, discover that
dry ice stimulates ice-crystal formation. In the Cold War's early years, both
superpowers carry out hundreds of experiments using solid carbon dioxide,
silver iodide, and other particulate matter to trigger precipitation. The
success of these experiments is greatly exaggerated, but scientists do manage
to alter weather patterns on a small scale.
May 14,
2012
THE CLIMATE
FIXERS
Is there a
technological solution to global warming?
BY MICHAEL
SPECTER – THE NEW YORKER
Late in the
afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of
Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that
typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four
centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more
than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two
months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel
molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a
two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred
thousand people.
Within
hours, the plume of gas and ash had penetrated the stratosphere, eventually
reaching an altitude of twenty-one miles. Three weeks later, an aerosol cloud
had encircled the earth, and it remained for nearly two years. Twenty million
metric tons of sulfur dioxide mixed with droplets of water, creating a kind of
gaseous mirror, which reflected solar rays back into the sky. Throughout 1992
and 1993, the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth was
reduced by more than ten per cent.
The heavy
industrial activity of the previous hundred years had caused the earth’s
climate to warm by roughly three-quarters of a degree Celsius, helping to make
the twentieth century the hottest in at least a thousand years. The eruption of
Mt. Pinatubo, however, reduced global temperatures by nearly that much in a
single year. It also disrupted patterns of precipitation throughout the planet.
It is believed to have influenced events as varied as floods along the
Mississippi River in 1993 and, later that year, the drought that devastated the
African Sahel. Most people considered the eruption a calamity.
For
geophysical scientists, though, Mt. Pinatubo provided the best model in at
least a century to help us understand what might happen if humans attempted to
ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth.
For years,
even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a
scale—geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris.
Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved
difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the
results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged
in the research. “There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are
going to have to take the facts seriously,’’ David Keith, a professor of
engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most
thoughtful supporters, told me. “Nonetheless,’’ he added, “it is hyperbolic to
say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the
planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on
earth.”
December 21,
2009
The Geoengineering
Gambit
For years,
radical thinkers have proposed risky technologies that they say could rapidly
cool the earth and offset global warming. Now a growing number of mainstream
climate scientists say we may have to consider extreme action despite the
dangers.
By Kevin
Bullis - MIT Technology Review
“Rivers fed
by melting snow and glaciers supply water to over one-sixth of the world’s
population–well over a billion people. But these sources of water are quickly
disappearing: the Himalayan glaciers that feed rivers in India, China, and
other Asian countries could be gone in 25 years (after this story appeared in
print this claim was retracted by scientists: see correction). Such effects of
climate change no longer surprise scientists. But the speed at which they’re
happening does. “The earth appears to be changing faster than the climate
models predicted,” says Daniel Schrag, a professor of earth and planetary
sciences at Harvard University, who advises President Obama on climate issues.
Atmospheric
levels of carbon dioxide have already climbed to 385 parts per million, well
over the 350 parts per million that many scientists say is the upper limit for
a relatively stable climate. And despite government-led efforts to limit carbon
emissions in many countries, annual emissions from fossil-fuel combustion are
going up, not down: over the last two decades, they have increased 41 percent.
In the last 10 years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has
increased by nearly two parts per million every year. At this rate, they’ll be
twice preindustrial levels by the end of the century. Meanwhile, researchers
are growing convinced that the climate might be more sensitive to greenhouse
gases at this level than once thought. “The likelihood that we’re going to
avoid serious damage seems quite low,” says Schrag. “The best we’re going to do
is probably not going to be good enough.”
This
shocking realization has caused many influential scientists, including Obama
advisors like Schrag, to fundamentally change their thinking about how to
respond to climate change. They have begun calling for the government to start
funding research into geoengineering–large-scale schemes for rapidly cooling
the earth.”
13 December
2009:
American
Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society position statement on geoengineering the Climate System:
Title: Geoengineering
Solutions to Climate Change Require Enhanced Research,
Consideration
of Societal Impacts, and Policy Development
“It is not
currently possible to assess the potential benefits or costs of Climate System
Geoengineering.
Therefore,
significant additional research, risk assessment, and consideration of
difficult policy questions
is required
before the potential of this tool to offset climate change can be fully
evaluated.
“Human
responsibility for most of the well-documented increase in global average
temperatures over the
last half
century is well established. Further greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of
carbon dioxide
from the
burning of fossil fuels, will almost certainly contribute to additional
widespread climate changes
that can be
expected to cause major negative consequences for most nations1.
Three
proactive strategies could reduce the risks of climate change: 1) mitigation:
reducing emissions; 2)
adaptation:
moderating climate impacts by increasing our capacity to cope with them; and 3)
geoengineering:
deliberately manipulating physical, chemical, or biological aspects of the
Earth system2.
This policy
statement focuses on large-scale efforts to geoengineer the climate system to
counteract the
consequences
of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Geoengineering
could lower greenhouse gas concentrations, provide options for reducing
specific climate
impacts, or
offer strategies of last resort if abrupt, catastrophic, or otherwise
unacceptable climate-change
impacts
become unavoidable by other means. However, research to date has not determined
whether there
are
large-scale geoengineering approaches that would produce significant benefits,
or whether those
benefits
would substantially outweigh the detriments. Indeed, geoengineering must be
viewed with
caution
because manipulating the Earth system has considerable potential to trigger
adverse and
unpredictable consequences.“
OCTOBER 20,
2009:
Superfreakonomics
author is baffled that Caldeira ‘doesnt believe geoengineering can work without
cutting emissions.’
BY JOE ROMM - ThinkProgress
Bloomberg
interview of Dubner and Caldeira backs up my reporting on error-riddled
best-seeler
Caldeira,
like the vast majority of climate scientists, believes cutting carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse-gas emissions is our only real chance to avoid runaway
climate change.
“Carbon
dioxide is the right villain,” Caldeira wrote on his Web site in reply. He told
Joe Romm, the respected climate blogger who broke the story, that he had
objected to the “wrong villain” line but Dubner and Levitt didn’t correct it;
instead, they added the “incredibly foolish” quote, a half step in the right
direction. Caldeira gave the same account to me.
Levitt and
Dubner do say that the book “overstates” Caldeira’s position. That’s a weasel
word: The book claims the opposite of what Caldeira believes. Caldeira told me
the book contains “many errors” in addition to the “major error” of misstating
his scientific opinion on carbon dioxide’s role….
Caldeira,
who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can
succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering
can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing
off shellfish.
Levitt and
Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for
emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering
can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how
that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked
climate science.
January
2009:
ATTEMPTS AT
GEOENGINEERING
By Oliver
Morton - Edge
It is quite
likely that we will at some point see people starting to make deliberate
changes in the way the climate system works. When they do they will change the
world — though not necessarily, or only, in the way that they intend to.
"Geoengineering"
technologies for counteracting some aspects of anthropogenic climate change —
such as putting long-lived aerosols into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or
changing the lifetimes and reflective properties of clouds — have to date been
shunned by the majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the
moral hazard involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken
care of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide
emissions.
I expect to
see this unwillingness recede quite dramatically in the next few years, and not
only because of the post-Lehman-Brothers bashing given to the idea that moral
hazard is something to avoid at all costs. As people come to realise how little
has actually been achieved so far on the emissions-reduction front, quite a few
are going to start to freak out. Some of those who freak will have money to
spend, and with money and the participation of a larger cadre of researchers,
the science and engineering required for the serious assessment of various
geoengineering schemes might be developed fairly quickly.
Why do I
think those attempts will change the world? Geoengineering is not, after all, a
panacea. It cannot precisely cancel out the effects of greenhouse gases, and it
is likely to have knock on effects on the hydrological cycle which may well not
be welcome. Even if the benefits outweigh the costs, the best-case outcome is
unlikely to be more than a period of grace in which the most excessive
temperature changes are held at bay. Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions will
continue to be necessary. In part that is because of the problem of ocean
acidification, and in part because a lower carbon-dioxide climate is vastly
preferable to one that stays teetering on the brink of disaster for centuries,
requiring constant tinkering to avoid teetering over into greenhouse
hellishness.
So
geoengineering would not "solve" climate change. Nor would it be an
unprecedented human intervention into the earth system. It would be a massive
thing to undertake, but hardly more momentous in absolute terms than our
replacement of natural ecosystems with farmed ones; our commandeering of the
nitrogen cycle; the wholesale havoc we have wrought on marine food webs; or the
amplification of the greenhouse effect itself.
September 1, 2008:
Quote of
the Day: James Lovelock on Geoengineering & The "Practice of Planetary
Medicine"
Treehugger -
Kimberley Mok -Living / Culture
Whether
you love him or dismiss him, James Lovelock may be the staunchest pessimist
around for the future of humanity on a warming planet. But the iconic
environmentalist and originator of the Gaia hypothesis has a couple of
cautionary words about the hubris of artificially fiddling with nature:
"Before
we start geoengineering we have to raise the following question: are we
sufficiently talented to take on what might become the onerous permanent task
of keeping the Earth in homeostasis? Consider what might happen if we start by
using a stratospheric aerosol to ameliorate global heating; even if it
succeeds, it would not be long before we face the additional problem of ocean
acidification. This would need another medicine, and so on... Whatever we do is
likely to lead to death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and
disasters small… We have to consider seriously that as with nineteenth century
medicine, the best option is often kind words and pain killers but otherwise do
nothing and let Nature take its course.[..]”
